Be Here Now
The Teaching
At that time I was at a very high point — Harvard professor, published researcher, exploring the edges of human consciousness. And I was desperately, painfully unhappy. I had done everything right and it hadn't worked.
And then I met my guru, Neem Karoli Baba — Maharaji — and he said to me, not with words but with his very being: there is a place in you that is already free. Already still. Already complete. You have been looking for it out there. It is in here. Be. Here. Now.
Those three words are not a technique. They are not something you do. They are a description of what is true. You cannot be anywhere but here. There is no time but now. The only question is whether you know it.
The practices, the sadhanas, the meditations — all of them are just ways of removing the clouds from a sun that was never absent. You are not trying to get to God. You are trying to remember you were never separate from God.
Commentary
Ram Dass was the first Western spiritual teacher to make this recognition fully public in real time, sharing not just the teaching but the journey: the Harvard professor, the psychedelic research, the meeting with the guru in India, the humbling of the ego, the transformation. His transparency created a permission structure for an entire generation to take their own inner lives seriously.
Be Here Now is the Zen teaching that ordinary mind is the Tao, expressed in three English words. It is Luke's 'the Kingdom of God is within you' stripped of theology. It is the Gita's instruction, act fully in THIS action, not in the anxiety of the last or the anticipation of the next. It is Epictetus made intimate: what is in our power is always only now.
Ram Dass identified with what he called the path of relationship, beyond pure philosophy (Watts) and beyond traditional devotion, as the embodied experiencer who made it undeniable that the journey was real and possible. His later work, after his stroke, teaching from the wheelchair about 'fierce grace,' was the teaching lived at its most complete depth: the man who taught presence discovering that loss and limitation could deepen presence rather than destroy it.