Be Here Now

How I discovered Ram Dass and his book that changed my life

The way I remember it probably wasn't exactly the way it happened, but here's what I know for sure.

It was 1989, I was 17, and it happened in Dallas, in the big Half-Price Books - the one that was shaped like a giant ship. I may or may not have been skipping school.

I was a junior at the high school for performing arts, where I had thought I'd be comfortable. I'd thought, not for the first time and certainly not for the last, that there'd be people there who were like me, people who would like me. I was crushed (again, not for the first time, and certainly not for the last) to discover that, though I was in a group of people who were, at least on paper, more like me than the people I'd been around before, I was still different. I was still met with hesitation and a confused, reluctant politeness rather than being treated like one of the group. I was forever walking into conversations that stopped the moment I was present, or finding out that the other kids were making plans for things I was never invited to. Even if they weren’t rude to me, I knew they didn't consider me one of them, though I had no idea why.

I didn't know then - and wouldn't know for a long time - that I was autistic. So I skipped school a lot. Later that year I'd quit high school and start going to community college, which suited me much better, but for the moment I was smoking a lot of weed and gathering scraps of what seemed like acceptance from boys in bands who I thought really liked me.

And skipping school to go to libraries and museums and bookstores.

But I'm not sure if on this particular day I was skipping school.

Nonetheless, here's how I remember it.

I walked up the wooden stairs to the second story where the display of used spiritual books was kept. Through the skylight positioned directly above the display, a strong, clear shaft of sunlight streamed down on a single book. It was a funny little book, oddly shaped, with a drawing of a chair in the center of its cover. At the top, bottom, and each side of the cover, near the edge, was the word REMEMBER. And in a circle around the chair were the repeating words of the book's title: BE HERE NOW.

It seemed to be a magnet to some metal in my soul, pulling me to it.

In my memory, the rest of the store slipped away and it was just me and that book - just like in romantic comedies where the love interests spot each other across a crowded room and suddenly it's just them, in love at first sight.

My hands would have been sweating, so I would have wiped them self-consciously, impatiently, on my jeans before I picked up the precious tome.

It was like nothing I'd ever seen before.

Nowhere on its cover was the author's name - Ram Dass - but there he was inside, a smiling, mischievous looking white man with long hair and a beard.

The first part of the book was sort of traditional. It told the story of the "transformation of Dr. Richard Alpert, Ph.D into Baba Ram Dass." From that part I learned that, prior to becoming Ram Dass, he had been Dr. Richard Alpert, a very successful professor of psychology at Harvard in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The book starts like this:

"There are three stages in this journey that I have been on! The first, the social science stage; the second, the psychedelic stage; the the third, the yogi stage. They are summating - that is, each is contributing to the next. It's like the unfolding of a lotus flower." He goes on to write, in a very down-to-earth way, about his material and academic success. At the end of a long, impressive list of his achievements and possessions, he writes, "But what all this boils down to is that I was really a very good game player."

I think it was the first time I’d heard it put that way, the first time I’d heard the whole of life and conventional success referred to as “a game.” It resonated like a gong being hit at my core. I knew that game, and I felt like everyone was in on it but me. It would be decades before I was diagnosed as autistic and began to unravel that feeling.

He goes on to relate the story of how he began, with his colleague Timothy Leary, to experiment with psychedelics, and how that eventually led to his dismissal from Harvard and his journey to India to seek out a teacher who could help him understand what was happening in his mind when he took LSD. (Several years after my discovery of Be Here Now, I spent the weekend at a house party with Timothy Leary and was struck by how very...shall I say "unholy" he was in contrast to his old pal, Ram Dass).

And that's where the real story begins - and that's where the "core book" of Be Here Now, the part that really altered my own perception of reality, begins.

Each page of the "core book" is printed on pulpy paper and features a wild illustration accompanied by words taken from those early talks Ram Dass made about what he'd learned in India, and how what he'd learned had changed his life.

(Last year I made videos of me reading every page of the core book of Be Here Now. Here’s one.)

In a lot of ways, it was a continuation of what I'd been learning at the Hare Krishna temple, but it was both bigger and more relatable to my adolescent mind.

His work, while steeped in Eastern philosophy, wasn't necessarily Hindu or Buddhist. He’d been raised in the Jewish faith, yet he had deep respect for Christ, and for humanity generally.

Unlike what I was learning at the Hare Krishna temple, he didn't offer a lot of rules or stern pronouncements. He offered nothing in the way of dogma, but rather a lot of questions posed in a rather light-hearted, sometimes even silly way. He offered a clear-eyed assessment of the way he'd been living prior to his "awakening" (and I don't think he used that word, but that's how it seemed to me), and how that hadn't worked for him. He never, to my mind, claimed to have it all figured out, and he never stopped questioning. His teaching all came down to some variation of the simple directives of "be here now" or "love, serve, remember."

Ram Dass died on December 22nd, 2019, and he never stopped teaching and writing and talking about living a good life. I never stopped learning from him.

35 years after that fateful discovery of his book, I still consider Ram Dass to be the primary spiritual teacher of my life. And after reading thousands of books (and loving hundreds of books deeply), Be Here Now is still my favorite.