Be Here Now
Ram Dass · 1971
Be Here Now (1971) is a book by Ram Dass on mindfulness & inner peace. Ram Dass, once Harvard psychologist Richard Alpert, tells how psychedelics, a trip to India, and a guru named Neem Karoli Baba led him past the drug high to a lasting practice of living fully in the present moment.
The 1971 counterculture landmark that turned a fired Harvard psychologist's pilgrimage into the West's most beloved on-ramp to Eastern spirituality, a hand-lettered map from getting high to waking up.
Two of the ideas you’ll keep
The Clif summary of Be Here Now pulls out 7 insights. Here are the first two.
- Psychedelics gave Ram Dass genuine glimpses of a vast, unified consciousness, but he always came down, his hard-won conclusion is that **you can't stay high**. A chemical can open a door, but it cannot make you live on the other side of it; only sustained inner work does that.
- The book's title is its whole teaching: the past is memory and the future is fantasy, so the only place life, love, and God can actually be met is the present moment. **"Be here now"** is not a slogan but a discipline of continually returning attention out of thought and into what is.
The other 5 — and the full 11-minute summary — are in the app.
What’s inside: 9 chapters
The whole summary runs about 11 minutes, read or listened to.
- The Man Who Had Everything and Nothing
- The Psychedelic Doorway and Its Limit
- India and the Guru Who Already Knew
- Be Here Now: The Only Moment There Is
- You Are Not Who You Think You Are
- Many Paths Up the Same Mountain
- A Cookbook for a Sacred Life
- Devotion, the Guru, and Serving God in Everyone
- The Journey Is the Destination
Finish Be Here Now tonight.
Read or listen to the full summary in about 11 minutes, then keep the ideas with a minute of review a day. Start with the 2-minute quiz — no card required.
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