Author Guide · Spirituality & Meditation
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In May 1963 Harvard announced that it had dismissed Richard Alpert, an assistant professor of clinical psychology, for giving hallucinogenic drugs to undergraduates. Four years later, in India, he met Neem Karoli Baba, who gave him the name Ram Dass, “servant of God”. The book he made from that journey first went out as 300 copies on brown paper, bound with rope, from a community in New Mexico; as Be Here Now it has sold more than two million copies. He kept publishing through a stroke in 1997 that took away much of his speech, and books made from his talks have continued to appear since his death on Maui in December 2019. This guide covers every book in order, where to start, and how his talks became books.
By Lisanne Swart · 15 key books · 1964–2025 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Ram Dass has 15 key books to his name, from The Psychedelic Experience (1964, as Richard Alpert) and Be Here Now (1971) to There Is No Other (October 2025), plus 5 more: two academic books from his years as a psychologist and three compilations from his archive. Many of them began as talks, and most were made with a co-writer or editor. Which one to start with depends on whether you want the 1970s classic, a meditation manual, or a book to read beside someone who is dying.
Where to Start with Ram Dass
If you want the book that made his name
→ Be Here Now (1971).
If you want to start meditating
→ Journey of Awakening (1978).
If you are growing older, or caring for someone who is
→ Still Here (2000).
If you are sitting with someone who is dying
→ Walking Each Other Home (2018).
If you want his own life story
→ Being Ram Dass (2021).
15 Key Ram Dass Books, in Order
The Psychedelic Experience
Published in August 1964 under his birth name, Richard Alpert, with Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner. It reads the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a Buddhist text about the passage through death and rebirth, as a map of the loss of self that people report on psychedelics, and includes passages meant to be read aloud during group sessions. The work began in 1962 in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, and the book is dedicated to Aldous Huxley. Lines from it found their way into the Beatles’ 1966 song “Tomorrow Never Knows”.
Be Here Now
Its core first went out in 1970 as From Bindu to Ojas: 300 copies on brown paper, bound with rope, with a colour mandala on the cover, from the Lama Foundation in San Cristobal, New Mexico. The 1971 book has four parts: “Journey: The Transformation”, his account of going from Harvard professor to disciple; the illustrated core book; a “Cookbook for a Sacred Life” of practices; and a last section called “Painted Cakes (Do Not Satisfy Hunger)”. Members of the Lama community made the drawings. It has sold more than two million copies.
The Only Dance There Is
Talks he gave at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas, in 1970 and at Spring Grove Hospital in Spring Grove, Maryland, in 1972, published by Anchor Press in New York in 1974. The book keeps the questions and exchanges with the people in the room, and was aimed at spiritual seekers and trained psychologists alike. It sets Western psychology beside Eastern practice, and the title comes from his description of life as “the only dance there is”.
Grist for the Mill
Put together with Stephen Levine, who later directed the Hanuman Foundation’s Dying Project, and published by Unity Press in Santa Cruz, California, in 1977. It is built from edited transcripts of lectures, articles and retreats. It opens with the word namaste, warns against becoming “phony holy”, gives his guru’s instruction to love, serve and remember, answers questions about dreams, sexual desire and the judging mind, and closes with chapters on dying. HarperOne issued a revised edition in 2014.
Journey of Awakening
A practical manual published by Bantam in 1978, edited by Daniel Goleman, later the author of Emotional Intelligence, with Dwarkanath Bonner and Dale Borglum. It walks through mantra, prayer, singing, visualisation and “just sitting”, as well as moving meditations such as tai chi, describes the stages of practice and gives advice for when it goes wrong. Bantam reissued it in paperback in May 2025, at 384 pages.
Miracle of Love
Neem Karoli Baba, called Maharajji by his followers, gave no formal discourses: visitors came away with food, a few words or a gesture. This book collects anecdotes of those encounters, and through them the atmosphere of his ashram. The text carries a 1979 copyright from the Hanuman Foundation, the non-profit Ram Dass set up in 1974, which still publishes it; the third edition runs to 424 pages.
How Can I Help?
Written with Paul Gorman and published by Knopf in 1985. Reflections on helping are set beside first-hand accounts: a housewife who brings zoo animals to cheer up nursing-home residents, a nun tending the wounded on the first night of the Nicaraguan revolution, a police officer who talks a desperate father with his child down from a roof, a nurse who lets a dying infant spend its last moments in her arms rather than on a machine. It asks how much help is enough and how a helper copes with the suffering they meet.
Compassion in Action
Written with Mirabai Bush, a founding board member of the Seva Foundation who later succeeded him as its chair, and published by Bell Tower in New York in 1992. It is a guide to taking up service work and finding fulfilment in it. The first edition runs to 299 pages, with twelve pages of references at the back.
Still Here
He already had a draft of a book on growing old when, on 19 February 1997, a stroke paralysed his right side and took away much of his speech. He returned to the manuscript afterwards, turned down the revisions of a writer brought in by his Riverhead editor, Amy Hertz, and found the words with the help of his assistant. He linked the subject to his own age and to the baby boomers approaching fifty. The introduction looks back at Be Here Now and quotes Mahatma Gandhi: “My life is my message.”
Paths to God
In the summer of 1974 he taught a course of several weeks, “The Yogas of the Bhagavad Gita”, at the newly founded Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Thirty years later those talks, edited by Marlene Roeder, became this book, published by Harmony in October 2004. He reads the Gita as a guide to daily life, “a way of making one’s entire life a vehicle for becoming conscious”.
Be Love Now
Written with Rameshwar Das and published by HarperOne in 2010, as the third book in a line that runs from Be Here Now through Still Here. It mixes stories of Neem Karoli Baba with an account of his own missteps on the spiritual path and of the 1997 stroke. Its subject is unconditional love. The first edition has 304 pages and illustrations.
Polishing the Mirror
A short summing-up of some fifty years of teaching, published by Sounds True in August 2013. It moves through meditation, bhakti yoga (chanting, mantra, mystical poetry), karma yoga, and living with change and aging, and touches on his later encounters with Judaism, his bisexuality and life after the stroke. He describes the aim of karma yoga as “giving up being the central character of your own melodrama”.
Walking Each Other Home
Conversations at his bedside on Maui, where his old friend Mirabai Bush sat with him, then 87, to talk about his own approaching death. They go back over the deaths of friends and family, tell stories of Timothy Leary and Aldous Huxley, and include practices for being present with someone who is dying. Published by Sounds True in September 2018.
Being Ram Dass
His memoir, 488 pages, published by Sounds True on 12 January 2021, just over a year after his death. His editor said it had been in progress for at least a decade, and he reviewed the manuscript in November 2019. It runs from his childhood outside Boston in an ambitious Jewish family through the Harvard drug experiments, the commune at Millbrook, the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park and India, with Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey and the Grateful Dead passing through.
There Is No Other
Published by HarperOne on 21 October 2025 from previously unpublished teachings, gathered with Parvati Markus. Its three sections are about dropping the idea of an “other”, within oneself and between people, and about caring for the Earth as a shared home. Anne Lamott wrote the foreword, and each section is followed by a short reflection from Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield or Mirabai Bush, and by guided meditations. 265 pages.
How Many Books Has Ram Dass Written?
Fifteen key books and five more, twenty in all on this page. Counts elsewhere vary because so many of his books are transcribed talks, because some carry his birth name, Richard Alpert, and because the foundation that holds his archive keeps issuing new compilations.
- The psychedelic years — The Psychedelic Experience, Be Here Now Read the entries →
- Talks, stories and a meditation manual — The Only Dance There Is, Grist for the Mill, Journey of Awakening, Miracle of Love Read the entries →
- Service, aging and dying — How Can I Help?, Compassion in Action, Still Here, Walking Each Other Home Read the entries →
- Later books with co-writers — Be Love Now, Polishing the Mirror, Being Ram Dass, There Is No Other Read the entries →
- Academic work and compilations — Identification and Child Rearing, LSD and three archive collections See the list →
In What Order to Read Ram Dass
None of the books depends on another, but three of them form a line: Be Here Now (1971), Still Here (2000) and Be Love Now (2010), the last presented as the third in that sequence. Read in order, they follow him from the young convert to the man writing after his stroke.
The two service books, How Can I Help? (1985) and Compassion in Action (1992), belong together, and Walking Each Other Home (2018) is best kept for a time when death is close, your own or someone else’s. Being Ram Dass (2021) works as a companion to all of them, since it tells the life the other books draw on.
A reading path
1. Be Here Now (1971), for the drawings and the story of the journey
2. Journey of Awakening (1978), if you want a practice to go with it
3. Still Here (2000)
4. Be Love Now (2010), the third in the line from Be Here Now
5. Being Ram Dass (2021), the whole life, in his own words
Everything Else Ram Dass Published: The Full List
Beyond the 15 key books: 5 more titles, grouped by form.
Open a form with the + to see every book in it.
Academic work as Richard Alpert
2
2 books · 1965–1966
- 1965Identification and Child Rearinga 383-page research study with Robert R. Sears and Lucy Rau, from Stanford University Press
- 1966LSDa 128-page book with Sidney Cohen, with a foreword and photographs by Lawrence Schiller
Compilations from the archive
3
3 books · 2017–2021
- 2017Cookbook for Awakeninga scrapbook of core teachings on living awake in the present
- 2018Changing Lensesan anthology of classic and rare teaching stories
- 2021Words of Wisdomfive decades of quotations drawn from his core teachings
Quick facts about Ram Dass
- Born
- 6 April 1931, Boston, Massachusetts, as Richard Alpert
- Died
- 22 December 2019, at his home on Maui, Hawaii, aged 88
- Studied
- Psychology: Tufts (BA, 1952), Wesleyan (MA, 1954), Stanford (PhD, 1957)
- Harvard
- Dismissed in 1963 for giving hallucinogenic drugs to undergraduates
- Teacher
- Neem Karoli Baba, called Maharajji, whom he met in India in 1967
- Known for
- He carried Eastern meditation and devotion to a generation of Western readers through Be Here Now, and later turned the same plain language to service, aging and dying.
- Founded
- The Hanuman Foundation (1974); co-founded the Seva Foundation (1978)
- Stroke
- 19 February 1997; it paralysed his right side and limited his speech
How Ram Dass Taught: Talks Turned into Books
Few of his books were written alone at a desk. The Only Dance There Is is talks from Topeka in 1970 and Maryland in 1972; Grist for the Mill is edited lecture and retreat transcripts, shaped with Stephen Levine; Paths to God is a 1974 course at Naropa, edited by Marlene Roeder thirty years later. From 2010 on, Rameshwar Das was his regular co-writer, and since his death Parvati Markus has gathered unpublished talks into new books. Be Here Now itself was assembled at the Lama Foundation, with drawings by members of the community. After the 1997 stroke he finished Still Here with an assistant helping him find words, and kept his own voice over an outside writer’s revisions.
The same few ideas run through all of it: his guru’s instruction to love, serve and remember; service as a spiritual practice, which he put into the Hanuman Foundation’s Prison-Ashram Project and Dying Project and into the Seva Foundation; and aging and dying as things to meet awake rather than avoid. He explained Hindu practice through teaching stories and accounts of his own missteps rather than through doctrine.
His early career is part of the record. Harvard dismissed him in 1963 for giving hallucinogenic drugs to undergraduates, in disregard of a university ruling, after his research with Timothy Leary; the two then lived at the Millbrook estate in upstate New York, which drew writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. In the mid-1970s, while Leary was in prison on drug charges, Ram Dass took part in a news conference accusing Leary of agreeing to testify against others; the two later reconciled before Leary’s death in 1996. In 2010 he learned that he had a son, born in the 1950s while he was at Stanford.
Frequently asked questions about Ram Dass’s books
How many books did Ram Dass write?
Fifteen key books, from The Psychedelic Experience (1964, as Richard Alpert, with Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner) to There Is No Other (2025), plus two academic books from his years as a psychologist and three compilations from his archive. Many are transcribed talks or were written with co-authors such as Stephen Levine, Paul Gorman, Mirabai Bush and Rameshwar Das.
Which Ram Dass book should I read first?
Be Here Now (1971), the illustrated book that made his name and has sold more than two million copies. For a practical start, Journey of Awakening (1978) is a meditation manual; for his life story, Being Ram Dass (2021).
What is the newest Ram Dass book?
There Is No Other: The Way to Harmony and Wholeness, published by HarperOne on 21 October 2025. It gathers previously unpublished teachings, edited with Parvati Markus, with a foreword by Anne Lamott and reflections from Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield and Mirabai Bush.
What is Be Here Now about?
Be Here Now (Lama Foundation, 1971) tells how Richard Alpert, a Harvard psychologist, went to India in 1967, met his guru Neem Karoli Baba and became Ram Dass, and then offers an illustrated core text and a section of practices called “Cookbook for a Sacred Life”. Its core first appeared in 1970 as From Bindu to Ojas, 300 copies on brown paper bound with rope.
In what order should I read Be Here Now, Still Here and Be Love Now?
In order of publication: Be Here Now (1971), Still Here (2000) and Be Love Now (2010). Be Love Now, written with Rameshwar Das, is presented as the third book in that line, and covers his guru and his 1997 stroke.
Did Ram Dass write a memoir?
Yes. Being Ram Dass, written with Rameshwar Das and published by Sounds True on 12 January 2021, covers his childhood near Boston, the Harvard psychedelic research, Millbrook, India and his later life. He reviewed the manuscript in November 2019, a month before he died.
Why was Ram Dass dismissed from Harvard?
In 1963 Harvard dismissed Richard Alpert, then an assistant professor of clinical psychology, for giving hallucinogenic drugs to undergraduates. President Nathan Pusey said the university was not against research with the drugs but objected to Alpert’s disregard of a university ruling.
Who was Ram Dass?
Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert in Boston on 6 April 1931, was an American psychologist and spiritual teacher. After his dismissal from Harvard in 1963 he travelled to India in 1967, where Neem Karoli Baba named him Ram Dass, “servant of God”. He wrote Be Here Now (1971), founded the Hanuman Foundation and co-founded the Seva Foundation, survived a stroke in 1997 and died at his home on Maui on 22 December 2019.
Footnotes
- About Ram Dass — Love Serve Remember Foundation
- Ram Dass Books Timeline — Love Serve Remember Foundation
- Ram Dass on the Mystical Wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita — Love Serve Remember Foundation
- Walking Each Other Home — Love Serve Remember Foundation
- Undergraduates Protest Decision to Fire Alpert (1963) — The Harvard Crimson
- Ram Dass — Wikipedia
- Be Here Now (book) — Wikipedia
- From Bindu to Ojas, first edition — Lopez Books
- The Only Dance There Is — WorldCat
- Ram Dass: The Survival of the Soul — Publishers Weekly (2000)
- Remembering Ram Dass — Publishers Weekly (2019)
- Being Ram Dass — Kirkus Reviews
- There Is No Other — NetGalley (HarperOne)
- Baba Ram Dass, Counterculture Hero, Dies at 88 — Courthouse News (AP)
- Spiritual Guru Who Popularized Psychedelics — Stanford Magazine
- Still Here, excerpt — BookBrowse
Bibliography last verified 7 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
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