Collected works of Baba Ram Dass, aka Richard Alpert

Uploading all the text, audio and video I could find on Richard Alpert, aka Ram Dass. There are other works out there but they just didn't come up in my search. Help me to complete the collection and share any files you have that are not here. Note that not all the text are by him, some are more about him but I included them here for completeness. Enigmas are like that: sometimes the best you can do is to be direct by being indirect.

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Born Richard Alpert, he first gained notice as a colleague of Timothy Leary and later became even better known as Ram Dass (means "servant of the lord") and the author of “Be Here Now.”

Prior to 1967 he was a prominent Harvard psychologist working alongside Timothy Leary. Explorations of human consciousness led him, in collaboration with Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, Aldous Huxley, and Allen Ginsberg, to pursue intensive research with psilocybin, LSD-25, and other psychedelic chemicals. Out of this research came two books: The Psychedelic Experience (co-authored with Leary and Metzner, and based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, published by University Books); and LSD (with Sidney Cohen and Lawrence Schiller, published by New American Library). Because of the highly controversial nature of their research, Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary became personae non-grata and were dismissed from Harvard in 1963. Tim Leary and Alpert then went to Mexico, ate mushrooms, and went from being academics to counter-culture icons, legends in their own time, and young at that. For Ram Dass psychedelic work turned out to be a prelude to the mystical country of the spirit and the source of consciousness itself. Mind expansion via chemical substances became a catalyst for the spiritual seeking. This naturally led him eastward to the traditional headwater of mystical rivers, India. Once there, a series of seeming coincidences led him to Neem Karoli Baba and the transformation from Richard Alpert to Ram Dass.

From about 1968 on, he pursued a panoramic array of spiritual methods and practices from potent ancient wisdom traditions, including bhakti or devotional yoga focused on the Hindu deity Hanuman; Buddhist meditation in the Theravadin, Mahayana Tibetan, and Zen Buddhist schools, and Sufi and Jewish mystical studies. Perhaps most significantly, his practice of karma yoga or spiritual service has opened up millions of other souls to their deep, yet individuated spiritual practice and path.

He was particularly interested in the dying. He started a foundation to help people use death as a journey of spiritual awakening and spoke of establishing a self-help line, “Dial-a-Death,” for this purpose.

I thought this was interesting: While at Harvard and after only recently obtaining his pilot's license, Alpert flew his private plane to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where Leary first introduced him to teonanácatl, the Magic Mushrooms of Mexico. By the time Alpert made it back to America, Leary had already consulted with Aldous Huxley, who was visiting at M.I.T. Through Huxley and a number of graduate students they were able to get in touch with Sandoz, which had produced a synthetic component of the magic mushrooms called psilocybin. Alpert and Leary brought a test batch back to Harvard, where they conducted the Harvard Psilocybin Project.