How the book came to exist
Richard Alpert was, until 1963, a tenure-track Harvard psychology professor and Timothy Leary's principal collaborator on the early academic-psychedelic research that the university would eventually fire them both for. The five-year arc from his dismissal to Be Here Now runs through the residential psilocybin programme at the Millbrook estate in upstate New York, an exhausted recognition that the psychedelic ingredients alone were not delivering what they had seemed to promise, and a 1967 trip to India undertaken with a younger American expatriate (Bhagavan Das) that became the encounter the book centres on. At the foot of the Kainchi-Dham temple complex in the Kumaon hills, in late 1967, Alpert met the elderly Hanuman-devotional teacher Neem Karoli Baba — referred to throughout the book as Maharaji — and the encounter dissolved the framework Alpert had until then been operating inside. He was given the name Ram Dass (servant of God), spent the next eighteen months in north Indian devotional and yogic practice under Maharaji's loose direction, and returned to the United States in 1969 with the body of teaching the book preserves. The volume itself was assembled in 1969–70 at the Lama Foundation — the New Mexico spiritual commune founded by Steve Durkee — as a collective production: Alpert provided the text and the teachings, the Lama community supplied the hand-lettering, the artwork, the layout, and the physical printing of the first edition. The 1971 trade edition published by the Lama Foundation through Crown Publishing has remained in continuous print across five decades.
Structure of the volume
Be Here Now is structurally three books bound as one. The opening section — Journey: The Transformation: Dr Richard Alpert, Ph.D., into Baba Ram Dass — is a thirty-page conventionally-typeset autobiography of the Harvard-and-Millbrook years and the India encounter, written in the first-person academic voice Alpert had spent twenty years developing and was about to step out of. The central section — From Bindu to Ojas: The Core Book — is the volume that has carried the book's reception: about a hundred unpaginated brown-paper pages, hand-lettered in three or four mixed scripts by the Lama Foundation collective, illustrated in pen-and-ink line drawings, and arranged as a non-linear meditation on the relation between psychology, perception, devotion, and the practice the title names. The closing section — Cookbook for a Sacred Life — is a practical-instruction appendix covering postural yoga, breath, diet, mantra, devotional reading lists, and the daily structure of a contemplative householder life. The three-section design reflects the editorial intention that the volume function as both confession, transmission, and manual; a reader can enter at any of the three doors and the structure absorbs the entry.
Where it sits in the corpus
The book is indexed as item 121, the single most-cited item in the Ram Dass entry and one of the densest cross-referenced items in the lexicon — quoted by name in the entries on bhakti-yoga, karma-yoga, guru, Neem Karoli Baba, presence and several others. The compressed pedagogical centrepiece of the book is the Maharaji *only God* story — Ram Dass's recounting of the moment Maharaji ate, undamaged, the medical-grade LSD dose Alpert had brought with him from the West — and the only God line the master delivered as gloss; the anecdote is indexed separately because it has been re-told and re-circulated so widely across podcast, lecture and excerpt formats that it functions independently of the book it originated in. The earlier American Indian-spiritual text the Be Here Now generation was reading alongside their copy was Paramahansa Yogananda's *Autobiography of a Yogi*, published in 1946 and the volume that had carried the previous generation's encounter with a north-Indian guru into English-language print; the comparison is the working illustration of how the same encounter was differently mediated by two American generations. The contemporary non-dual literature Be Here Now sits alongside, and that the book's only God anecdote anticipates in compressed form, runs through Nisargadatta Maharaj's *I Am That* — the late-1970s Bombay dialogues — and the late-twentieth-century direct-path teaching it inaugurated. The contemporary Buddhist popular literature that the book opened the American counter-cultural readership for runs through Pema Chödrön's *When Things Fall Apart*, among many others; Be Here Now is part of why an English-language reader of the late twentieth century was willing to pick a Pema Chödrön volume off a shelf at all.
What the book actually teaches
The operative teaching across the three sections is recognisable as the bhakti register of the broader north-Indian Vaiṣṇava tradition Maharaji belonged to, translated into the working English-language idiom of the late 1960s American counter-culture. Be here now itself — the title and the central instruction — is the presence recognition the contemporary non-dual literature has since developed at much greater length, presented in the book as a single imperative the reader is expected to recognise rather than to argue with. The framing inside which the imperative is given is devotional rather than analytical: love and serve everyone, feed everyone, remember God, work on yourself, the longer the better. The instruction set the Cookbook extends — japa (mantra recitation), darśan (sitting in the teacher's presence), karma-yoga (action offered as service rather than as accumulation) — is the operative discipline of the bhakti path the book is, more than anything else, a recruitment document for. The book does not present itself as the doctrinal completion of that path; it presents itself as the testimony of an American academic who has walked far enough into it to be able to point at where the doors are.
What it isn't
Be Here Now is not, despite its substantial reach, a careful or systematic exposition of bhakti doctrine — the doctrinal architecture of the Caitanya-and-Vallabha Vaiṣṇava tradition that Maharaji's Hanuman-and-Krishna devotion stands inside is largely absent from the volume, and a reader who comes to the book expecting the technical equipment of bhakti-rasa theory will need to reach for the academic literature instead. The book is also not a transcript of an actual oral teaching — the hand-lettered central section was composed at the Lama Foundation in 1969–70 from notes, recollection, and the collective editorial work of the commune, and the Maharaji-says registers the book intersperses are reconstructions rather than verbatim transmissions. And the volume is not, despite the period décor and the artwork, a counter-cultural curiosity that has aged out of working use; the 1971 edition remains in print, sells through several hundred thousand copies a year, and continues to function as the entry-door volume for the contemporary American reader meeting Indian devotional material for the first time.
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