Summary of Ram Dass's Being Ram Dass

By IRB Media

Get the Summary of Ram Dass's Being Ram Dass in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. Original book introduction: Perhaps no other teacher has sparked the fires of as many spiritual seekers in the West as Ram Dass. If you've ever embraced the phrase "be here now," practiced meditation or yoga, tried psychedelics, or supported anyone in a hospice, prison, or homeless center―then the story of Ram Dass is also part of your story.

From his birth in 1931 to his luminous later years, Ram Dass saw his life as just one incarnation of many. This memoir puts us in the passenger seat with the one time Harvard psychologist and lifelong risk-taker Richard Alpert, who loved to take friends on wild rides on his Harley and test nearly every boundary―inner or outer―that came his way.

Here, Ram Dass shares his life's odyssey in intimate detail: how he struggled with issues of self-identity and sexuality in his youth, pioneered psychedelic research, and opened the doorways to Eastern spiritual practices. In 1967 he trekked to India and met his guru, Neem Karoli Baba. He returned as a yogi and psychologist whose perspective changed millions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Apr 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781638154488

IRB Media

With IRB books, you can get the key takeaways and analysis of a book in 15 minutes. We read every chapter, identify the key takeaways and analyze them for your convenience.

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Insights from Part 1

#1

In his youth, Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert, embarked on a series of experiments to explore the creative and therapeutic potential of psychedelics. He is one of the people credited with pioneering and popularizing psychedelics in the ’60s and ’70s.

#2

A media hoopla surrounded him and his work. All the attention focused more on its shock value than on the reason for his experiments and advocacy of psychedelics, which was a serious effort to develop conceptual models for consciousness itself.

#3

Dass believed that psychedelics were tools for psychologists to use to uncover more of human psychology than ever known before. He and his colleagues saw themselves as pioneers, as explorers on a quest to chart the unmapped worlds of human