What Happened to Ram Dass: How Did He Die?

Ram Dass was an American spiritual teacher and novelist who died in 2019 with a net worth of $100,000. Dass died much “poorer” than he could have been due to decades of tremendous charity.

Every year, Dass gave up all of his book royalties to charity. It is anticipated that his royalties earn up to $1 million for various charities each year. Ram apparently lived in a house in Maui worth several million dollars in his final years, but it was reportedly owned by a friend rather than Mr. Dass personally.

How did Ram Dass die?

Dass Dass died quietly at home, according to his foundation, but he had been battling illness in recent years. He had a stroke in 1997, which left him paralyzed on the right side of his body and restricted his ability to talk.

Meanwhile, Dass was born Richard Alpert in Boston, Massachusetts on April 6, 1931. He was the son of George and Gertrude Alpert, both of whom were lawyers. Dass considered himself an atheist in his early years, telling “Tufts Magazine” in 2006, “I didn’t have one whiff of God until I took psychedelics.”

His family was Jewish, and he told Arthur J. Magida of the Omega Institute in New York, “What I mostly remember about my bar mitzvah was that it was an empty ritual.” It was completely flat. Completely flat. The moment had a disappointing hollowness about it. There was absolutely nothing in it for my heart.”

Ram graduated from Williston Northampton School with honors in 1948, and four years later, he obtained a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Tufts University. He received his master’s degree in psychology from Wesleyan University in 1954. Later, Dass enrolled at Stanford University, where he prepared a thesis on “achievement anxiety” and received his PhD in Psychology in 1957. After a year of teaching at Stanford, he began psychoanalysis.

McClelland relocated to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to teach at Harvard University, where he assisted Alpert in obtaining a tenure-track post as an assistant clinical psychology professor in 1958. Alpert served as a therapist for the Social Relations Department, the Psychology Department, the Graduate School of Education, and the Health Service. In his first work, Identification, and Child Rearing, he specialized in human motivation and personality development.

McClelland collaborated with his close friend and associate Timothy Leary, a clinical psychology lecturer at the institution. Alpert and Leary met through McClelland, who was the director of the Center for Study in Personality, where both Alpert and Leary conducted a study. In the lab, Alpert was McClelland’s deputy.