"Ram Dass was the master of the one-liner, the two-liner, the ocean-liner."

Said Wavy Gravy, quoted in "Baba Ram Dass, Proponent of LSD and New Age Enlightenment, Dies at 88/Born Richard Alpert, he returned from a trip to India as a bushy-bearded, barefoot, white-robed guru and wrote more than a dozen inspirational books" (NYT).

Baba Ram Dass, who epitomized the 1960s of legend by popularizing psychedelic drugs with Timothy Leary, a fellow Harvard academic, before finding spiritual inspiration in India, died on Sunday at his home on Maui. He was 88....

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.

When Mr. Leary was dying in 1996 — and wishing to do it “actively and creatively,” as he put it — he called for Ram Dass. Over the years, Ram Dass had alternately been Mr. Leary’s disciple, enemy and, at the end, friend. In a film clip of the two men preparing for Mr. Leary’s death, Ram Dass turns to Leary, hugs him and says, “It’s been a hell of a dance, hasn’t it?”...

[At one point he held] appointments, in psychology and education, at Harvard. He was ... riding high, with an apartment full of exquisite antiques, a Mercedes sedan, an MG spots car, a Triumph motorcycle and his own Cessna airplane. It was at Harvard where he crossed paths with Mr. Leary, who was lecturing there in clinical psychology. They became drinking buddies. Mr. Alpert admired Mr. Leary’s iconoclasm, telling Tufts University Magazine in 2006 that Mr. Leary was “the only person on the faculty who wasn’t impressed with Harvard.”...

The 2 men were kicked out of Harvard together  — "Mr. Alpert for giving drugs to an undergraduate, and Mr. Leary for abandoning his classes." Later, "Mr. Leary accused Mr. Alpert of trying to seduce his 15-year-old son, Jack," and Jack told his father that "Uncle Dick may be a jerk, but he’s not evil."

Mr. Alpert went to India in 1967 more as a tourist than as a pilgrim. Events led him to a twinkly, old man wrapped in a blanket: Neem Karoli Baba, who was called Maharajji, or great king, by his followers.... It was Maharajji who gave Mr. Alpert the name Ram Dass, or servant of God, and added the prefix, Baba, a term of respect meaning father.

Ram Dass gave Maharajji some LSD, but it had no effect. Ram Dass surmised that the guru’s consciousness had already been so awakened that drugs were powerless to alter it...

Ram Dass hit the lecture circuit, his presentation a mix of pithy wisdom and humor, often joined in the same sentence. “Treat everyone you meet like God in drag,” he said in one talk. Wavy Gravy, the eccentric poet and peace activist, once said, “Ram Dass was the master of the one-liner, the two-liner, the ocean-liner.”...

By the 1980s, Ram Dass had a change of mind and image. He shaved off the beard but left a neatly trimmed mustache. He tried to drop his Indian name — he no longer wanted to be a cult figure — but his publisher vetoed the idea. He said that he had never intended to be a guru and that Harvard had been right to throw him out....

He said he realized that his 400 LSD trips had not been nearly as enlightening as his drugless spiritual epiphanies.... He said other religions, including the Judaism that he had rejected as a young man, were as valid as Eastern religions.

In a 1997 interview with the website “Gay Today,” Ram Dass said he had always been primarily homosexual, despite earlier statements that he was bisexual. “I always had a front to go to faculty dinners and things like that,” he said. He said he had had thousands of clandestine homosexual encounters.