At one point in my life, all I could do was read books on spirituality. I couldn’t find any other reason to get out of bed every day. So for seven months straight, all I did was go to work and come home and read.
I pored through book after book — all the big name authors and many lesser known ones. Be Here Now was one of those books. I actually gave it away at some point and then bought it again later, because I missed it.
It was probably 20 years ago, but I still remember finding it. I was sitting on the floor in the spirituality section at my local Borders bookstore, skimming through anything and everything that looked interesting. The purple spine caught my eye, and as soon as I flipped the pages, I knew I had to take it home.
I love it for the purple wraparound cover and the many pages of trippy drawings, and because Ram Dass shared his real-life story of awakening.
He starts out in the 1960s as Richard Alpert, a successful but disillusioned Harvard psychology professor, meets Timothy Leary, starts taking mushrooms and LSD, discovers his God self, heads to India, meets his guru, and returns to the U.S. as Baba Ram Dass. And he graciously shares all of his self-perceived flaws and failings throughout the journey. It reminds me of Autobiography of a Yogi in that way.
Ram Dass was a beloved spiritual teacher for the next 50 years.
“We’re talking about metamorphosis
We’re talking about going from a caterpillar to butterfly
We’re talking about
How to become a butterfly.
I mean: the caterpillar isn’t walking around
Saying: Man I’ll soon be a butterfly
Because: As long as he’s busy
Being a caterpillar
He can’t be a butterfly.
It’s only when caterpillarness is done that one starts to be a butterfly”
~ Ram Dass, Be Here Now
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