Why this book
Before he was Ram Dass, he was Richard Alpert: a Harvard psychology professor with the conventional markers of success, who spent the early 1960s alongside colleague Timothy Leary running clinical research into LSD and psilocybin until Harvard dismissed them both in 1963. Be Here Now opens with that story told against himself — accumulating credentials, therapy, and thousands of psychedelic trips, all while a specific anxiety kept resurfacing: the highs never lasted, and no chemical experience, however profound in the moment, seemed to leave him permanently changed once it wore off. That specific failure sends him to India in 1967, where he meets a guru, Neem Karoli Baba, whose apparent imperviousness to a massive dose of LSD becomes, for Alpert, proof that what he'd been chasing chemically was actually a stable, permanently available state some people had simply learned to live inside all the time.
The book that resulted is formally unusual by design: an opening memoir of that transformation, then a free-verse, hand-lettered section of spiritual aphorism printed on brown paper, then a detailed practical manual — titled, with self-aware humor, a "cookbook" — for building an actual daily spiritual practice out of meditation, breathwork, mantra, service, and study. The throughline connecting all three sections is Ram Dass's central argument against the psychedelic culture he'd helped create: drugs can offer a preview of expanded awareness, a glimpse through a door, but only sustained discipline — sadhana — lets a person actually live there permanently rather than visiting and returning, disappointed, to ordinary consciousness each time the chemical wears off.
Who should read it
Anyone drawn to the countercultural moment where psychedelics, Eastern spirituality, and Western psychology collided will find an unusually candid insider's account of that collision and its limits, especially readers looking for a concrete starting menu of contemplative practices rather than abstract inspiration. It will frustrate readers allergic to 1970s countercultural aesthetics, guru devotion, or unverifiable claims about a teacher's supernatural composure; the book asks for a kind of credulous openness that skeptical readers may find themselves resisting throughout.
About the author
Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert in 1931, was a clinical psychologist and Harvard faculty member before his 1963 dismissal alongside Timothy Leary over their psychedelic research. After his 1967 journey to India and transformation under his guru Neem Karoli Baba, he spent the rest of his life teaching meditation and devotional practice in the West. A severe stroke in 1997 left him partially paralyzed, an experience he later described as "fierce grace" and wrote about in subsequent books; he continued teaching from Maui, Hawaii, until his death in December 2019 at age 88.