What is Be Here Now?
Be Here Now is a 1971 book by Ram Dass (born Richard Alpert), assembled with the Lama Foundation commune in New Mexico. Ram Dass wrote it after spending time in India with the devotional teacher Neem Karoli Baba. The book brought devotional Hinduism, the practice of present-moment awareness, and the teachings of Neem Karoli Baba to an American counter-cultural audience that existing Indian-spiritual texts had not yet reached. It has sold over two million copies and remains in print.
How the book came to exist
Richard Alpert was a tenure-track Harvard psychology professor until 1963 and Timothy Leary's collaborator on early academic-psychedelic research. The university fired them both. Over the next several years, Alpert worked within the residential psilocybin programme at the Millbrook estate in upstate New York. He eventually concluded that the psychedelic ingredients alone were not delivering what they had seemed to promise. In 1967, he travelled to India with a younger American expatriate named Bhagavan Das. At the Kainchi Dham temple complex in the Kumaon hills, he met the elderly Hanuman-devotional teacher Neem Karoli Baba, referred to throughout the book as Maharaji. That encounter dissolved the framework Alpert had been working inside. Maharaji gave him the name Ram Dass, meaning servant of God. He spent the next eighteen months in north Indian devotional and yogic practice under Maharaji's direction, then returned to the United States in 1969. The book was assembled in 1969–70 at the Lama Foundation in New Mexico, a spiritual commune founded by Steve Durkee. It was a collective production: Alpert provided the text and teachings; the Lama community hand-lettered the artwork, laid out the pages, and printed the first edition. The 1971 trade edition, published through Crown Publishing, has remained in print for five decades.
Structure of the volume
Be Here Now is three books in one binding. The opening section, Journey: The Transformation: Dr Richard Alpert, Ph.D., into Baba Ram Dass, is a thirty-page conventionally typeset autobiography. It covers the Harvard and Millbrook years and the India encounter, written in the academic first-person voice Alpert was about to leave behind. The central section, From Bindu to Ojas: The Core Book, is the part that has shaped the book's reception. About a hundred unpaginated brown-paper pages, hand-lettered by the Lama Foundation collective and illustrated with pen-and-ink drawings, it moves non-linearly through psychology, perception, devotion, and the practice named in the title. The closing section, Cookbook for a Sacred Life, is a practical appendix covering postural yoga, breathwork, diet, mantra, devotional reading, and the daily structure of a contemplative householder life. The three-section design reflects the editorial intent to make the volume work as confession, transmission, and manual at once. A reader can enter at any of the three sections.
Where it sits in the corpus
The book is indexed as item 121 and is one of the most cross-referenced items in the lexicon. It is named in the entries on bhakti-yoga, karma-yoga, guru, Neem Karoli Baba, and presence, among others. The compressed centrepiece is the Maharaji *only God* story. Ram Dass recounts the moment Maharaji ate, apparently undamaged, the medical-grade LSD dose Alpert had brought from the West. The master's gloss was only God. The story has been retold so widely across podcasts, lectures, and excerpt formats that it is indexed separately from the book it came from. The American Indian-spiritual text that Be Here Now readers often read alongside it was Paramahansa Yogananda's *Autobiography of a Yogi*, published in 1946. That volume brought the previous generation's encounter with a north Indian guru into English print. The two books show how the same encounter was mediated differently across two American generations. The contemporary non-dual literature this book sits alongside runs through Nisargadatta Maharaj's *I Am That*, the Bombay dialogues of the late 1970s. Be Here Now also opened the counter-cultural readership for Buddhist popular literature; it is part of why an American reader of the late twentieth century might pick up Pema Chödrön's When Things Fall Apart at all.
What the book teaches
The teaching across all three sections draws from the bhakti register of the north Indian Vaiṣṇava tradition that Maharaji's devotional practice belonged to, translated into the working English idiom of the American counter-culture of the late 1960s. Be here now, the title and the central instruction, is the presence recognition that the non-dual literature has since developed at much greater length. The book presents it as a single imperative, not an argument. The framing is devotional: love and serve everyone, feed everyone, remember God, work on yourself. The instruction set the Cookbook extends covers japa (mantra recitation), darśan (sitting with the teacher), and karma-yoga (action offered as service, not accumulation). These are the practical disciplines of the bhakti path. The book presents itself not as doctrinal completion, but as testimony from an American academic who has walked far enough into the path to point at where the doors are.
Be Here Now versus comparable texts
Be Here Now is not a systematic exposition of bhakti doctrine. The doctrinal architecture of the Caitanya-Vallabha Vaiṣṇava tradition that Maharaji's Hanuman-and-Krishna devotion belongs to is largely absent from the volume. A reader wanting the technical equipment of bhakti-rasa theory will need the academic literature. The book is also not a transcript of actual oral teaching. The hand-lettered central section was composed at the Lama Foundation from notes, recollection, and collective editorial work. The Maharaji-says passages in that section are reconstructions, not verbatim transmissions. This distinguishes it from a text like Nisargadatta's *I Am That*, which presents dialogue from recorded sessions. The book is also often compared to Yogananda's *Autobiography of a Yogi* as an entry-door Indian-spiritual text; the difference is that Yogananda's book is a structured memoir with a clear doctrinal system, while Be Here Now is a more impressionistic transmission, heavy on devotion and light on doctrine. Despite the period décor and counter-cultural artwork, the book has not aged out of use. The 1971 edition continues to sell and remains the standard entry-door volume for American readers meeting Indian devotional material for the first time.
