The key ideas

Be Here Now

Ram Dass, 1971

A Harvard professor had everything except the one thing that mattered. Ram Dass tells how he went from a psychedelics lab to an Indian guru and came home with a new name. You will learn what he brought back from India: the witness beneath all your roles, service in ordinary tasks and love without attachment, along with simple practices you can start today.

Who it is for

For anyone who has achieved a lot and still feels that the most important thing keeps slipping away. And for anyone curious about how yoga and meditation came to the West, and why this book became the symbol of a whole era.

If a pickpocket meets a saint, he sees only his pockets.

The professor who had everything but the one thing

Spring 1961. Richard Alpert is twenty-nine, and from the outside his life looks like a ready answer to the question of what is worth working for. He is a psychologist with a Stanford doctorate who teaches at Harvard in four departments at once. He has a Mercedes, a sports car, a sailing boat and his own single-engine Cessna aeroplane. And for all that, he cannot shake the feeling that something essential is missing from his life.

Ten years later this man will publish a book under another name: Ram Dass. Be Here Now came out in 1971, sold more than two million copies, and was called the bible of the era when the counterculture flourished. It is unusually put together. First comes the story of a journey, of how a Harvard professor became the disciple of an Indian guru. Then the main part: thoughts set out like free verse and surrounded by drawings. Then a practical guide, and at the end a reading list. We will go through the book in the same order: first the journey, then the thoughts, then the practices.

The book's main idea fits into its title. Ram Dass is convinced that everything a person chases in the future or the past sooner or later slips away. What does not slip away he found in the present minute, and in the one who is living that minute.

There will be psychedelics in this story. Alpert studied them at Harvard, and his path cannot be understood without them. Here they remain part of a biography, not advice, and the book itself tells why they let him down. You will travel with him to India, and then learn what he brought back: the witness inside yourself, a new way of seeing roles, service, love and simple practices for every day.

Who's minding the store when you're gone

In March 1961 Alpert's Harvard colleague Timothy Leary gave him a psilocybin pill, a substance from so-called magic mushrooms. At that time such experiments were legal, and both psychologists were studying them as scientists. In the book Alpert describes what happened that evening.

One after another, figures appeared before him and vanished: the professor, the psychotherapist, the son, the lover, the friend. Each was a role he played, and each one left. Then his body began to disappear too. Alpert was seized by panic: if there are no roles and no body, what is left of him? And then a question sounded inside: but who's minding the store?

The answer astonished him. Someone was still there. What remained was the one who calmly watched all of this from the side: an awareness that was neither the professor nor the son nor the body. Alpert writes that he felt he was simply an inner self that only had to look within to know what to do.

The point here is not the substance but the discovery. Beneath all the roles there is someone who sees them. This discovery will become the axis of the whole book, and the remaining chapters tell how to come back to this witness without pills and stay with it for a long time.

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About the author

Ram Dass (Richard Alpert, 1931–2019) was an American psychologist who taught at Harvard. After meeting the Indian guru Neem Karoli Baba, he became one of the best-known spiritual teachers in the West.

All books by this author: Ram Dass

Terms from the book

  • Stanford
  • Guru
  • Harvard
  • Mantra
  • Brown
  • Ashram
  • Ahimsa
  • Tao Te Ching
  • Cessna: An American company that makes light aircraft. Its single-engine planes are popular with private pilots.
  • counterculture: A youth movement of the 1960s and 1970s in the West that rejected society's usual values: career, consumption, war. Many of its members were drawn to Eastern teachings.
  • Leary: Timothy Leary (1920–1996), an American psychologist and Alpert's colleague at Harvard. Together they studied the effects of psilocybin and LSD, and in 1963 both lost their university posts.
  • psilocybin: A substance found in certain mushrooms that strongly alters perception. In the early 1960s it was not yet banned in the United States, and scientists studied it in laboratories.
  • LSD: A powerful substance that alters perception and states of consciousness. It was banned in the United States in 1968.
  • Millbrook: A village in New York State. After leaving Harvard, Leary and Alpert lived on a large estate there and continued their experiments.
  • Kathmandu: The capital of Nepal, a mountainous country between India and China. In the 1960s Western travellers seeking spiritual experience flocked there.
  • Bhagavan: Bhagavan Das, a young American who lived in India and Nepal as a wandering yogi. He became Alpert's guide and led him to his own teacher.
  • Neem Karoli Baba: An Indian spiritual teacher (died 1973), revered as a saint. His disciples called him Maharaj-ji. He became Alpert's guru and gave him the name Ram Dass.
  • Maharaj-ji: What disciples called Neem Karoli Baba. It is a respectful form of address, literally “great king”.
  • Sikh: A follower of Sikhism, a religion that arose in the Punjab in northern India in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
  • Hari Dass: Baba Hari Dass (1923–2018), an Indian monk. From 1952 he never spoke a word and communicated by writing his answers in chalk on a small slate. He taught Alpert yoga in India.
  • raja yoga: “Royal yoga”, a path that leads to a calm mind through discipline, breathing and meditation.
  • tapasya: In the Indian tradition, austerity, a voluntary discipline you impose on yourself that “heats” and purifies a person.
  • karma yoga: The yoga of action: ordinary tasks become practice when you do them without attachment to the result.
  • bhakti: In the Indian tradition, the path of love and devotion, one of the main paths of yoga.
  • maya: In Indian philosophy, illusion, a veil behind which the true nature of things is hidden.

All terms

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