Baba Ram Dass, who was born Richard Alpert, a counterculture spiritual leader died at age 88 in Hawaii, late night on Monday.
The 1960s spiritual leader who experimented with LSD and travelled to India to find enlightenment founded the Love Serve Remember Foundation. Cause of his death wasn't stated.
Dass was known for his book 'Be Here Now', which he wrote in 1971 after his trip to India. He mostly associated with renowned psychologist Timothy Leary and writer Adam Ginsberg.
In 1997, Dass suffered from a severe stroke that left him paralysed on the right side and unable to speak for a while. And in 2008, he underwent hip surgery after a fall.
He wrote about his experiences with drugs and worked to help prisoners and those facing terminal illness.
"I want to share with you the parts of the internal journey that never get written up in the mass media ...," he wrote on his journey to India.
Born in Boston, Ram Dass, the son of an attorney, he entered the public sphere as a young Harvard psychology professor.
He and Leary, a Harvard colleague, began a series of experiments with hallucinogenic mushrooms and LSD, giving the drugs to prisoners, philosophers and students to study their effects.
Dass, who for many years has lived a quiet life in San Anselmo, California, helped create the Seva Foundation, which works to prevent blindness and helps community groups in developing countries.
More recently, he was based in Maui.
Here are his tope five quotes:
- "Unconditional love really exists in each of us. It is part of our deep inner being. It is not so much an active emotion as a state of being. It's not 'I love you' for this or that reason, not 'I love you if you love me.' It's love for no reason, love without an object."
- "When I look at relationships, my own and others, I see a wide range of reasons for people to be together and ways in which they are together. I see ways in which a relationship—which means something that exists between two or more people—for the most part reinforces people's separateness as individual entities."
- "In working with those who are dying, I offer another human being a spacious environment with my mind in which they can die as they need to die. I have no right to define how another person should die. I'm just there to help them transition, however they need to do it."
- "Compassion refers to the arising in the heart of the desire to relieve the suffering of all beings."
- "The most exquisite paradox...as soon as you give it all up, you can have it all. As long as you want power, you can't have it. The minute you don't want power, you'll have more than you ever dreamed possible."
