Ram Dass was born Richard Alpert in 1931. His parents were Gertrude (Levin) and George Alpert, a lawyer in
Boston. He considered himself an
atheist during his early life. Speaking at
Berkeley Community Theater in 1973 he said, "My Jewish trip was primarily political Judaism, I mean I was never Bar Mitzvahed, confirmed, and so on." In a 2006 article in
Tufts Magazine he was quoted by Sara Davidson, describing himself as "inured to religion. I didn't have one whiff of God until I took
psychedelics." He was also interviewed by
Arthur J. Magida at the
Omega Institute in
Rhinebeck, New York, who published the interview in 2008, quoting Ram Dass as saying "What I mostly remember about my bar mitzvah was that it was an empty ritual. It was flat. Absolutely flat. There was a disappointing hollowness to the moment. There was nothing, nothing, nothing in it for my heart."
Education Alpert attended the
Williston Northampton School, graduating
cum laude in 1948. He earned a
Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology from
Tufts University in 1952. His father had wanted him to go to medical school, but while at Tufts he decided to study psychology instead.
Harvard professorship McClelland moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to teach at Harvard University, and helped Alpert accept a
tenure-track position there in 1958 as an assistant clinical psychology professor. Alpert worked with the Social Relations Department, the Psychology Department, the Graduate School of Education, and the Health Service, where he was a therapist. He specialized in human motivation and personality development, and published his first book
Identification and Child Rearing. Alpert and Leary co-founded the non-profit International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF) in 1962 in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, in order to carry out studies in the religious use of psychedelic drugs, and were both on the board of directors. Alpert assisted
Harvard Divinity School graduate student
Walter Pahnke in his 1962 "
Good Friday Experiment" with theology students, the first controlled, double-blind study of drugs and the mystical experience.
Millbrook and psychedelic counterculture (1963–1967) In 1963 Alpert, Leary, and their followers moved to the
Hitchcock Estate in
Millbrook, New York, after IFIF's
New York City branch director and
Mellon fortune heiress Peggy Hitchcock arranged for her brother Billy to rent the estate to IFIF. Alpert and Leary immediately set up a communal group with former
Harvard Psilocybin Project members at the estate (commonly known as "Millbrook"), and the IFIF was subsequently disbanded and renamed the Castalia Foundation (after the intellectual colony in
Hermann Hesse's novel
The Glass Bead Game). The core group at Millbrook, whose journal was the
Psychedelic Review, sought to cultivate the divinity within each person. Alpert co-authored
LSD with
Sidney Cohen and
Lawrence Schiller in 1966. In 1967 Alpert gave talks at the
League for Spiritual Discovery's center in
Greenwich Village. ==Spiritual search and name change==