Be Here Now

Be Here Now is Ram Dass's account of the journey from Harvard psychologist to devotee of the Indian guru Neem Karoli Baba, and its central teaching is that present-moment awareness is the gateway to a transformed experience of reality. Consciousness is malleable, and ordinary life a kind of constructed tunnel from which presence, service, and love offer release.

Distinctive in form as well as content, the book translates altered-state realization into accessible, devotionally inflected teaching, fusing Hindu bhakti with the vocabulary of the Western seeker. Its pivotal move is to route the psychedelic discovery toward a sustainable, drug-optional path: chemistry, Ram Dass concluded, could show the room but not let one stay there, so meditation and devotion must carry the work forward.

A defining text of its era, it shaped the mindfulness, presence, and devotional currents that run through later New Age spirituality.