Ram Dass · 1971 · Two million copies, still in print
Be Here Now
“Don’t think about the past. Don’t think about the future. Just be here now.”
Richard Alpert was a Harvard psychologist with five degrees, a Mercedes and an aeroplane. He had taken psychedelics more than three hundred times and could reliably reach a place where the anxious, calculating self simply stopped. Then, six hours later, it came back.
Everything in this book follows from that. It is one third memoir, one third hand-lettered scripture, one third practical manual — and the reason the phrase is in the language at all.
Section one · Journey
How a Harvard professor
lost everything he had
1961
Alpert takes psilocybin with Timothy Leary and watches every role he owns fall away in sequence — professor, son, the body itself — and finds that something is still there afterwards, watching. It is the most important thing that has ever happened to him and he cannot make it last.
1963
Harvard fires them both. Over the next four years he takes psychedelics hundreds of times, with better chemistry and better preparation, and arrives at the same wall every single time. He can get there. He cannot stay. A door he has no key to.
1967
India. He meets a barefoot young American who refuses to discuss anything that has already happened or has not happened yet, and who answers every question about the plan with the same six words. Alpert finds it maddening for about three weeks, and then he doesn't.
The test
He gives his teacher, Neem Karoli Baba, a dose of LSD large enough to flatten anybody, partly out of devotion and partly to see what would happen. Nothing happened. The old man spent the afternoon exactly as he had spent the morning. Whatever the chemistry had been showing Alpert, somebody was already living there without it.
Section two · From Bindu to Ojas
The middle of the book is not written so much as lettered — square brown pages of drawings and one-line sayings, no argument and no paragraphs. What follows is the part of it that survives being carried out of the incense and into an ordinary Tuesday.
You are not your thoughts.
You are the thing
noticing them.
The ego is a costume, not a person.
The trouble starts when you forget
that you put it on.
Treat the person in front of you
as though something holy
is wearing them.
None of it requires believing the cosmology. The instruction underneath is small and testable: when you notice you are thinking, notice when the thought is set.
The exercise
Sort the stream
Twelve ordinary thoughts, one at a time — the sort that go through anybody in a quiet ten minutes. For each one, say only where it is set. Then, and only then, you get to see what the deck was actually made of.
Then · already happened · Here · this room, this body, right now · Ahead · has not happened
Section three · Cookbook for a Sacred Life
The unromantic part
The last working section of the book is a manual, and it is startlingly plain after two hundred pages of mandalas. Diet, posture, breath, a room, a phrase, and a warning that the whole thing fails on switching rather than on difficulty.
Somewhere to sit
The same corner every time, with nothing on the walls. Not because the corner is holy, but because a fixed spot removes the daily negotiation about where — and the negotiation is what actually ends the practice.
One phrase, kept
Any short repeated phrase will do the work. The book is blunt that shopping for a better one is the commonest failure — the power is in the repetition, and a mantra you changed twice has been repeated no times.
The breath as a handle
Not to be controlled into a state, but used as the one thing that is always happening in the present tense. When you find it, you are by definition not in 2019 or in Thursday.
The dead time is the practice
Queues, lifts, red lights, the walk to the car. The cushion is training; these are the match. Most people have ninety minutes a day of it and spend all ninety rehearsing a conversation.
“If you think you're enlightened, go spend a week with your family.”
His most-quoted line, and a real test. Calm assembled in a silent room is untested calm. The people who knew you at nineteen are the exam.
Community insights
What people carried out of it
Distilled from the book in our own words. Vote for the ones that read true.
"The ego is a costume, not a person. The trouble starts when you forget you put it on."
Action steps
Be here, and then keep being here
The setup steps make room for it. The daily ones are what the book is actually asking for, and they are all unglamorous.
Write one word where you will see it
The original cover says “Remember” four times, because that is the whole instruction. Put the word on a card by the kettle, on the back of your phone, on the bathroom mirror. It is not decoration — it is the trigger.
Clear one small square of the house
The Cookbook section is unromantic about this: a corner, a cushion, nothing on the walls, the same spot every time. Not because the spot is sacred, but because you will not negotiate with yourself about where to sit.
Name the costume you are wearing
Write down the roles you use to answer “who are you” — job title, parent, the competent one, the funny one. Ram Dass lost his in a week. Knowing which are costumes now is cheaper than finding out that way.
Pick one mantra and stop shopping
Any short repeated phrase will do, and the book is explicit that switching is the failure mode. Choose one, write it in the front of a notebook, and refuse to reconsider it for thirty days.
Set the phone to ask you one question a day
A single alarm labelled “where is your mind right now?” at an unpredictable time. The point is not the answer. It is that something interrupts the trance from outside, because from inside you will not notice it is running.
Catch the tense of one thought an hour
When you notice you are thinking, ask only this: is it about then, ahead, or here? No judgement, no fixing. Most people are startled by how rarely the honest answer is “here”.
Land in one sense before you start anything
Before the meeting, the call, the doorway — take one breath and find one physical fact: the floor, the weight of the mug, the sound behind the sound. It takes four seconds and it is the shortest route back.
Say the mantra in the dead time
Queues, lifts, red lights, the walk to the car. These are the hours the book is aiming at — not the meditation session, which is training, but the ninety minutes a day you currently spend scrolling through a rehearsal.
Watch one difficult person as though they were in costume too
Once a day, with someone who irritates you. Not forgiveness, not a conversation — just the private act of assuming there is somebody in there who did not choose the outfit either.
End the day by asking what the day was trying to tell you
Two lines before sleep. Ram Dass's claim is that the message is always in what actually happened, not in the version you would have preferred. Write what happened, then what it was pointing at.
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Frequently asked
What is Be Here Now about?
A Harvard psychologist who could reach enlightenment for six hours at a time and never keep it, and what happened when he stopped taking the drug and went to India instead. Part memoir, part hand-lettered scripture, part manual — and the book that put the phrase “be here now” into English.
What are the key takeaways from Be Here Now?
Readers on HourLife most often highlight ideas such as: “The problem was never getting high. The problem was that he always came down.” “Don't think about the past. Don't think about the future. Just be here now.” “You are not your thoughts. You are the thing noticing them.”
Who should read Be Here Now?
It's a strong pick for readers exploring Mindfulness, Spiritual Growth, and The Inner Peace Shelf. HourLife distills its core idea into community-voted insights and one practical action worth trying.
What's one thing I can do after reading Be Here Now?
Write one word where you will see it — The original cover says “Remember” four times, because that is the whole instruction. Put the word on a card by the kettle, on the back of your phone, on the bathroom mirror. It is not decoration — it is the trigger.
How long does it take to read the Be Here Now summary?
About five minutes. The HourLife summary distills Be Here Now into its core idea, 8 community insights, and 10 practical actions you can apply right away.
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