On Be Here Now

Be Here Now is a better, more hippie version of The Power of Now. It falls into three large sections, with a reading list at the very end. The first is Ram Dass’s autobiographical account of his struggle with meaning, culminating in the moment he began following his guru somewhere in northern India. The second is a sequence of images with handwritten text illustrating his central points — the unity of all religions, the necessity of living in the present, the recognition that all is One. The third is a “cookbook” of techniques for meditation, sleep, the managing of thought and emotion, and much else.

His main point seems right to me: there is only the eternal present, and by remembering to be here now we live more meaningful lives. His disillusionment with academic research is something I relate to entirely — as, I think, does Eckhart Tolle, who touches on it in his own books. What is it about us academics finding ourselves on spiritual journeys? I’m less convinced by what he says about gurus and chakras. I can take the chakras as symbolically true, but I get the sense Ram Dass means them literally. Maybe so, but my own experience hasn’t pointed that way yet, and there’s still little by way of objective, empirical examination of it.

And writing this puts me in a bind, because I’m falling into exactly the trap Ram Dass warns against. We can’t reason our way through every part of our lives. Reason is a powerful tool, but only one of many, and at some point we have to have faith in something — otherwise we deconstruct ourselves into the void (which, then again, is also the One). It seems there are two ways to arrive there, and this may be how academics end up there too, but you can only see it once you’re ready.

Nothing here is especially deep, but it’s a good place to start. I read it on the recommendation of a friend, a historian of Southeast Asia, who called it a fine introduction to Buddhism even if it was written by a white guy from Boston. There wasn’t much in it I didn’t already know — but that’s the funny thing about these traditions: we already know all of it, we just aren’t ready to believe it.