As co-director of the Harvard Psilocybin Project with Timothy Leary, he gave psilocybin to an undergraduate off campus, breaking the research agreement. Harvard fired him in 1963. He was thirty-two, with no plan for what came next.

In India in 1967 he met a teacher, Neem Karoli Baba, at an ashram in the Himalayan foothills. The guru gave him a new name, Ram Dass — servant of God — and reoriented him away from drugs as the point, toward meditation and daily devotion.

Published in 1971, Be Here Now mixed memoir, teaching, and hand-drawn pages into one unconventional book. It introduced many Western readers to meditation and presence in plain language, and became a bestseller that never went out of print.

A severe stroke in 1997 left him partly paralyzed and unable to speak — expressive aphasia. He relearned to talk, slowly, and kept teaching for another two decades, describing the stroke itself, without softening it, as part of what he had to teach.

He died in Maui on December 22, 2019, at eighty-eight. He had spent decades teaching on aging, service and dying; the Hanuman Foundation he co-founded in the 1970s supported people who were dying and people in prison.