5-Minute Book Summary: Be Here Now, by Ram Dass

Way before The Power of Now, there was Be Here Now, by Ram Dass, formerly known in Harvard circles as Richard Alpert, Ph.D.

He and the notorious Timothy Leary were colleagues, in fact, and you could say that the two of them went in separate directions; whereas Leary ended up as sort of a cautionary tale of excess and the target of defamatory campaigns by the U.S. government and others, Ram Dass became one of the most influential spiritual teachers of all time.

Be Here Now has sold about 2 million copies worldwide, having influenced everyone from Wayne Dyer, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and George Harrison to Steve Jobs, and if you’re into spirituality, religious studies, psychology and all that good stuff, it should definitely make it onto your reading list sooner rather than later.

Divided into four sections, you can think of it as like a manual for conscious being; in other words, being here now, immediately, where all the action is.

There’s really no other place you could be, when you think about it, because everything that has ever happened in either your life or the history of the universe has happened now.

The first section is autobiographical, following Richard Alpert’s personal transformation in the mountains of India after which he would return to the…