Be Here Now
Considered a “countercultural Bible” and “seminal” to the hippie era, Be Here Now (1971) has been hugely influential in helping popularize Eastern spirituality and yoga with the baby boomer generation in the West. Indeed, my baby boomer mother had a copy of the book when I was a kid, and I must have looked at its hand-drawn illustrations more than I can recall because upon seeing them again, some 30-plus years later, many of them were strikingly familiar. Before reading the book for the first time in 2020, I listened to the Be Here Now Tapes, at first on a lark, thinking they might be too much hippy and not enough wisdom, but I quickly realized that Ram Dass was famous for a reason—for good reason. All that LSD he took with Timothy Leary didn’t seem to affect his intelligence a bit—or at least he was still plenty intelligent. I guess we’ll never know if he would’ve been more intelligent without having done all the drugs. And he was funny! I’m glad I listened to the tapes—twice, actually—before reading the book because then I had his voice and fabulous Boston accent in my head while reading. In listening to the tapes before reading the book, I could also see that the core section of Be Here Now appears to be a verbatim transcription of much of those talks.
Ram Dass was born Richard Alpert, in 1931, in Boston, Massachusetts. He was raised Jewish but never felt connected to the religion and once said in an interview that he was “inured” to religion in general. “I didn't have one whiff of God until I took psychedelics.” Alpert studied Psychology at Tufts University, graduating in 1952, and went on to get his Master’s in the subject from Wesleyan College in 1954, and then his PhD from Stanford in 1957. After teaching Psychology at Stanford for one year, he took a tenure-track position at Harvard, where he also worked as a therapist in the Health Services department of the university, and conducted research at the Center for Research and Personality. That’s where he met fellow researcher Timothy Leary, who introduced him to psychedelics—namely psilocybin and LSD. Together they conducted the Harvard Psilocybin Project, which began some time in 1960 and lasted until March 1962. Leary and Alpert’s Harvard colleagues and higher-ups were skeptical of the project’s legitimacy and safety and concerned that Leary and Alpert were abusing their power over students. It was also problematic that the researchers sometimes took hallucinogens along with the subjects they were supposed to be studying. The project was forced to end and Alpert was fired from Harvard a couple months later for distributing psilocybin to an undergraduate student. Leary was fired around the same time for failing to keep his classroom appointments—in other words, not showing up to class.
In 1963, Alpert and Leary and some of their followers moved to an old estate in Millbrook, New York, where they experimented with psychedelics and often participated in group LSD sessions, looking for a permanent route to higher consciousness. (Somehow they’d managed to get funding for this.) They also hosted weekend retreats on the estate where people paid to undergo the psychedelic experience without drugs, through meditation, yoga, and group therapy sessions. In 1967, Alpert traveled to India and randomly met American spiritual seeker Bhagavan Das, whom he decided to follow around India and who eventually led him to the Kainchi ashram, where Alpert met the enlightened being who would become his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, or Maharaj-ji, who renamed Alpert Baba Ram Dass, which means “servant of God.”
Ram Dass wrote Be Here Now upon returning to the States. It was originally published in pamphlet form under the title From Bindu to Ojas, and illustrated by community residents of the Lama Foundation in Taos, New Mexico, where Ram Dass stayed for awhile. It was eventually renamed Be Here Now and expanded to include a new opening section about Ram Dass’s spiritual journey (starting with his Harvard days and ending with his experiences in India), a third section called “Cookbook for a Sacred Life: A Manual for Conscious Being,” and a fourth section of recommended spiritual readings called “Painted Cakes (Do Not Satisfy Hunger)” (referring to a Zen commentary on liturgy). Since its initial publication in 1971, Be Here Now has never gone out of print and has sold over two million copies.
During the 1970s, Ram Dass taught, wrote, and worked with foundations. In 1974 he founded the Hanuman Foundation, a nonprofit educational and service organization. In 1978 he co-founded the Seva Foundation by joining with health-care workers to treat the blind in India, Nepal and developing countries. (It has since become an international health organization.) Ram Dass also taught workshops around the United States on conscious aging and dying. He helped create the Dying Project and later, in 1986, the Living/Dying Project. Initially located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and named the Dying Center, it was the first residential facility in the U.S. where people came to die “consciously.” Ram Dass also served on the faculty of the Metta Institute where he provided training on mindful and compassionate care of the dying. Over the course of his life since the inception of his Hanuman Foundation, Ram Dass gave all of his book royalties and profits from teaching to his foundation and other charitable causes. The estimated amount of earnings he gave away annually ranges from $100,000 to $800,000.
In February of 1997, Ram Dass had a stroke—or as he said, “got stroked” (by God)—which left him with expressive aphasia, or partial loss of the ability to produce language. One of the best talkers this world has ever known was now forced into a new, quieter role. He interpreted it as an act of grace. And he was still able to regain his language skills enough to lecture at small venues, hold retreats in Maui (where he lived), and teach through live webcasts. In 2013, Ram Dass released a memoir and summary of his teaching, Polishing the Mirror: How to Live from Your Spiritual Heart. In 2017 Derek Peck made a short documentary (about 30 minutes) called Ram Dass, Going Home that you can find on Netflix, and I highly recommend you check it out. It is profoundly beautiful. In June of 2018 the musician known as East Forest was invited to visit Ram Dass in Maui to join in conversation and record brand new teachings, which he then edited and set to music. The resulting album, titled Ram Dass, was released the following summer, about 4 months before the man himself died, which happened on December 22, 2019. Baba Ram Dass was 88 years old.
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It was his friend and fellow seeker, Bhagwan Das, whom he met in India and who said in the midst of their travels there, when Ram Dass—then still Richard Alpert—would start telling stories about the past, “Don’t think about the past. Just be here now.” Of course we wouldn’t know the origins of that phrase if Ram Dass hadn’t gone on to write about it in Be Here Now, the first section of which—titled “Journey: The Transformation: Dr. Richard Alpert, Ph.D., into Baba Ram Dass”—is a record of him not only thinking about the past, but writing about it. Perhaps Ram Dass would say that by the time he sat down to write that section of the book, he was able to think about the past in a more detached way. And of course a major theme of the book is detachment. I say “of course” because that’s a major theme of most—if not all—spiritual texts that I have any interest in reading or talking about. But it does occur to me now, in the process of writing this, that it’s terribly ironic that the first section of Be Here Now is about the author’s past! To his credit, though, the original pamphlet version only contained what is now considered “the core book,” which is still printed on brown paper and laid out in such a way that you must hold the book vertically instead of horizontally. And this is the section of the book —along with the section that follows, “Cook Book for a Sacred Life”—that I’ll focus on in this blog post, not going in any particular order but letting them interweave and overlap according to which ideas excite me the most.
I’ll start with the idea that’s at the top of that list. The one that stands out in starkest relief against all the others that come to mind when I think about Be Here Now. Which, funnily, enough, is not the idea contained in its title, although that’s a big one. It’s the notion of viewing life as a drama. A drama that’s always unfolding. And the notion that you can just watch the drama unfold. But you don’t just watch it; you watch it with “unbearable compassion,” which is a phrase that Ram Dass attributes to the Buddha. He talks about the hridayam, or spiritual heart, which he compares to a cave that you can go into, and in that place or from that place you can feel that “all the energy passes through you / you are all the energy / & it all resides in your heart.” And from that place in your heart, “you watch the entire drama / that is your life / you watch the illusion / with / unbearable compassion.” Ram Dass’s primary method for entering his hridayam was through mantra. He was especially partial to the mantra “aum mani padme hum.” The most ubiquitous mantra in Tibetan Buddhism, “aum mani padme hum” is Sanskrit for “the jewel is in the lotus,” or “praise to the jewel in the lotus." According to the Dalai Lama, this mantra has the power to “transform your impure body, speech and mind into the pure body, speech and mind of a Buddha.” It’s important to say it or think it in Sanskrit instead of English because Sanskrit “is a language that was evolved consciously, i.e., each sound syllable resonates in a specific chakra. Thus use of a Sanskrit mantra not only affects the user through the rational medium—the meaning of the mantra—but through the sound of the mantra as well.” This blew me away when I first learned it during my yoga teacher training in 2018, taught by Kristine Kaoverii Weber. Each sound in Sanskrit has a particular vibration that is believed to have a particular effect on the subtle body. So cool. Another well-known Sanskrit mantra is “Om Namah Shivaya,” meaning "O salutations to the auspicious one!", or “adoration to Lord Shiva.”
In Be Here Now, Ram Dass encourages fellow spiritual seekers to “get in the habit of having every strong emotion—positive or negative—serve as a reminder to bring you back to your mantra.” Strong emotions indicate that we’ve stopped watching the drama and have gotten swept up in it. I love the idea of having a verbal reminder to detach and resume simply watching. There’s been some drama happening in my family this week, and I’ve found it helpful to use the phrase “I live here” as a mantra, with the “here” referring to my own body. I learned this technique from my favorite Zen priest and chef, Edward Espe Brown, whose dharma talks I attend via Zoom two or three times a week. He teaches people to place their hands on their body when they say it: “I live here.” It’s been really useful this week in helping me remember where I end and everything else begins—which sounds really dualistic and therefore not an avenue toward enlightenment…
But it touches on another key concept from Be Here Now, which is the idea that we must work on own selves, first and foremost and always, if we are to be of any real use in this world. The drama that’s been happening in my family has been totally out of my control, and so there was no point in me sending a bunch of anxious energy out there, worrying about a person I could do absolutely nothing to help and whose business it wasn’t mine to help, anyway. I didn’t live out there. I lived here. And in contacting that place—my hridayam, essentially—I was able to feel more compassion for the person I couldn’t help, as opposed to anxiety, fear, impatience, etc. Ram Dass says, “The rule of the game that everyone works on himself in order to find the center where ‘we all are’—within himself—in order that he can meet with other human beings in that place…is the sine qua non (without which nothing) of social responsibility.” He says this in the context of a broader discussion about conscious protest, which is another of the book’s concepts that I love. There’s a page in the Core Book of Be Here Now that says at the top in big bold letters, “Hippies create police / Police create hippies.” Ram Dass then explains the notion by saying, "If you’re in polarity, you’re creating polar opposites.” When we think and act in terms of “us vs. them,” then we create “them.” “Them” didn’t exist until we decided that they existed, and we set ourselves in opposition to them. I’m reminded of the 2020 protests about defunding the police, and the whole “all cops are bastards” thing, which is a perfect example of how such polarized thinking can devolve into making generalizations about huge swaths of people with whom we probably share more similarities than differences. Ram Dass says “you can only protest effectively / when you love the person whose ideas you are protesting against / as much as you love yourself.”
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According to Ram Dass, there is never a “them.” There is only ever an “us.” That includes “black and white, young and old, man and woman, American and Russian, rich and poor, saint and rogue,” and I’ll add Republican and Democrat, and pro-life and pro-choice. All of these different ways of thinking, feeling, and acting are how we as a society, as a species, think and feel and act. When responding to social issues from this place, we can hear one another’s concerns more clearly because there is less fear and anxiety. And I think what often looks like hatred or intolerance is essentially fear and anxiety. And in some cases that fear and anxiety are unconscious, which makes them even more dangerous.
So this brings us back to how important it is to work on oneself, to bring unconscious material into awareness, to understand how are psyches operate and how our emotions control us. As Ram Dass says, “You want to change your environment? Change your head!” He says, “I can do nothing for you but work on myself… You can do nothing for me but work on yourself!” He also says that “to do anything with attachment…with desire…with anger … greed … lust … fear…is only creating more karma.” I love this idea. By “creating more karma” he means that we’re just keeping ourselves in samsara, or what he calls “the game” or “the dance,” referring to the wheel of birth of death. According to Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, we’ll have to keep being reborn—and therefore keep suffering—until we master the art of detachment. And this means that everything we do, we do with detachment. This includes how we protest and the other ways we go about trying to improve the world or help people. Regarding the latter, this means we are not attached to our role as the giver of help, which in turn would cast the other person as the receiver of help. Ram Dass says "a conscious being knows that there is neither giver nor receiver…there are only empty bellies, storehouses of wheat…”
Another angle he considers when it comes to working on oneself is that of parenting. He calls “baloney” on any parent or future parent who says “Oh! I’m going to do good things for my child.” Ram Dass says that’s all ego talking, and if you just keep working on yourself then you’ll be better at staying calm, at listening, and at basically being more present, and the best thing you can offer a child is “here and now-ness…the treasure of awareness.” If you’re not able to “cut through the illusion,” you can’t help others do the same, including your own kids. If you can’t see God in yourself, you can’t see God in them. Which means you’re ultimately just teaching them to do more of “the dance within the dance.”
When Ram Dass talks about working on oneself, he’s referring to having a spiritual practice, or sadhana. Which leads me to another of my main take-aways from Be Here Now: the idea that everything we do can be our sadhana. If we take this stance, then when people ask us what we do, we can say, “I do sadhana.” I’ve approached the making of this radio show as sadhana since its inception. And I’ve found it immensely helpful to view my work as a psychotherapist in that way, too. More recently, I even took this tack when it came to attending a big concert I didn’t really want to attend, but I did it because it meant I would share an experience with some dear friends I don’t see very often. I’m really not into the concert scene—too many people, too much standing around, alcohol makes me sleepy, I’m not really into dancing—but I told myself that all I had to do was be present, and enjoy my friends’ company. In the end, I had to leave the concert early due to feeling simultaneously overwhelmed and bored, and profoundly exhausted. But leaving early was my sadhana, too. In going to the concert—in giving it a shot even though I knew I probably wouldn’t enjoy it—I honored my value of friendship. In leaving it, I honored the needs of my body and nervous system. Despite perhaps disappointing my friends. But their disappointment is their responsibility, not mine. I live here.
To say that everything we do is sadhana, or a spiritual practice or exercise, means that it’s “all done as consecrated action… It’s all dedicated… It’s all sacred.” This is what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin talks about in The Divine Milieu, when he discusses the divinisation of our activities. It’s what Krishna talks about in the Bhagavad Gita, when he says, “do whatever you do, but consecrate the fruit of your actions to me.” Ram Dass says, “If we recall that Krishna is synonymous with Love, with Highest Consciousness, with the Eternal Witness, with the Spirit…and that He is actually our innermost Self, then we can understand that by consecrating an act, we are indeed offering our every action into the service of higher consciousness. Our every act becomes an act of waking up.” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin would say that our every act helps create Christ.
I like to think that my experience of the concert was an example of my seeking what Ram Dass calls “pure environments.” For me, a pure environment is not one filled with hundreds of people drinking beer and talking through the music they paid fifty bucks or more to hear. For others, that kind of experience is fun, and perhaps therefore pure. But my idea of fun is something much more quiet and solitary. In Be Here Now, Ram Dass says that the more you “let your inner pull towards enlightenment lead you,” the more you will seek what feels like pure environments for you. And not because you ought to, but because you have to, because it’s the only thing you can do. Which is what leaving that concert felt like, for sure.
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In the third section of the book, called “Cook Book for a Sacred Life,” Ram Dass talks about death, saying, “To be with a person who is dying, to share consciousness with him, and to help him die consciously is one of the most exquisite manifestations of the Bodhisattva role. It should be sought out.” I myself tried to seek out this experience last summer, when I took an end-of-life doula training. Along with thinking I might start to work as a death doula, I also did the training as a way to prepare myself—both spiritually and practically for death—my own and those of the people I love. In the end I realized I didn’t really want to be a death doula—didn’t feel ready to work with strangers in that way. But I definitely want to be involved in the dying processes of loved ones, and do what I can to make their experience feel more sacred and even, as Ram Dass says, upbeat. And I may go back to seeking out that “most exquisite manifestations of the Bodhisattva role” at some point. The reason I chose the current sangha I’m in is because one of its head lay ministers is the founder of the Carolina Memorial Sanctuary, which provides eco-friendly natural burials, and she’s the Director for the Center of End of Life Transitions, which offers end-of-life educational opportunities through workshops and retreats. I might one day try to work with her in some sort of death doula capacity, and meanwhile I can continue learning about death and dying through her teachings in the Anattasati Magga sangha.
The other way that Ram Dass talks about death in Be Here Now is more metaphorical, referring to the death of the ego. Early on in the Core Book he says that YOU must die in order to reach the desired destination of your spiritual journey. The person who completes that journey will not be the same person who started it. If you ever have the thought “I am enlightened,” then you are not enlightened, because there is still a knower and a known, which means you’re still caught in duality, and the ultimate goal is totally non-dualistic. That knower part—the ego—which Ram Dass also defines as a “web of desire” and “your cognitive framework of the universe”—has got to go. When that happens, he says, there is no knowing. There is only being.
He offers an exercise in the third section of the book that was developed by the Indian Hindu sage Ramana Maharshi, who died in 1950 at the age of 70. This method is called Vichara Atma, or Who Am I?, and I talked about it briefly in the blog post I did a few weeks ago about the book How To Be Sick. To practice it, you start by asking yourself, “Who am I?” You first respond by saying, “I am not my torso or body.” Then you get more specific, saying, “I am not the five organs of motion,” referring to the arms, legs, tongue, sphincter, and genitals. Your next response is, “I am not the five internal organs,” referring to those of respiration, digestion, excretion, circulation, and perspiration.” And as you’re responding in these ways you’re trying to experience yourself as separate from all these body parts and functions. Then you move on to say, “I am not these thoughts,” meaning, I guess, that you are not the one doing this exercise! Ram Dass says, “If you have sufficient discipline of mind to carry this exercise through to completion, you have entered into the realm of SAT CHIT ANANDA (Reality-Consciousness) …Your True Self…where there is only ONE.”
So there is a great paradox in this journey to awaken, in that we, as we know ourselves to be prior to awakening, will never awaken. We will simply fall away, or die. And the paradox becomes even more exquisite (that’s how Ram Dass describes it) when you realize that you cannot make yourself die in this way. It can’t be you doing anything. There’s nothing to do and there’s nowhere to go, he says. “Nothing is really happening at all / nothing ever happens / nothing is going to happen / there’s nothing you’ve got to do / there’s no doer to do it anyway.” But he doesn’t mean you should literally do nothing—that would just be more drama. He simply means that there’s nothing to do to make yourself wake up or become enlightened. You just keep on doing your thing. Keep on chopping wood and carrying water, so to speak. “Your mind does its thing / your senses do their thing but you are not attached.” It all comes back to detachment, to not identifying with anything, not taking a single thing personally—including yourself, and your own emotions. It recently occurred to me that maybe we have nothing to do with the emotions we experience, and we can look at them as their own entities, which for whatever reason we’ve been tasked to take care of, to respond to and work with. You might even say we’ve been trusted with this work, chosen as the caretaker for this particular type of sadness, grief, anger, fear, what-have-you, and we are the only person for the job, and no one can take our place. So often we blame ourselves for feeling how we feel, but how is it our fault at all? We did not choose this sensitivity. It was given to us. And in that sense, maybe we can see it as a gift. As something to treasure instead of scorn, avoid, or run away from.
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Back to the idea that we as we know ourselves must die in order for a new, enlightened “we” to emerge—or as Ram Dass says, “As soon as you give it all up / you can have it all.” I want to revisit the notion that this process can’t be forced. In Be Here Now, Ram Dass uses a caterpillar metaphor and a snake metaphor to explain how we cannot transcend our egos with our egos. “The caterpillar doesn’t say: ‘Well now. I’m going to climb / into this cocoon and come out / a butterfly.’ It’s just an inevitable process / it’s just happening / it’s got to happen that way.” The caterpillar is too busy being a caterpillar to entertain any thoughts about becoming a butterfly. He can’t become a butterfly until he’s done being a caterpillar. And the same goes for you, my fellow human. As Ram Dass says, “The whole trip occurs in an unfolding process under which you have no control.” He also compares this process to a snake shedding its skin. “You can’t rip the skin off the snake. The snake must moult the skin.” And that moulting happens at its own pace, which is in accordance with the laws of the universe. And we as people trying to awaken are not exempt from the laws of the universe. Indeed Ram Dass says we are the laws of the universe. We wake up in accordance with those laws.
But this makes me wonder why we should bother with sadhana or spiritual practice at all. Surely Ram Dass isn’t saying that it doesn’t make a lick of difference in the rate at which we’ll awaken. Maybe sadhana can be likened to a lottery ticket. If you want to win the lottery, you have to buy that ticket. Or a surf board: if you want to ride the wave, you’ve got to get on the board. I think the ultimate answer is that we do sadhana because we genuinely want to; it is our way of doing our thing, and if we can just do our thing, and keep coming back to the present moment, doing our best to be here now, then we’re on the right path. Only the universe knows how long that path is or how many lifetimes we’ll need to reach the end of it. Meanwhile, we’re doing what we can do, living with as much ease and openness as possible because, to paraphrase Bernard Bassett, “God is not at his best when we are tense and stressed.” And God—Divine Consciousness, the Absolute, the Ground of Being, whatever you want to call it—exists in the present moment and nowhere else. Of that much I am sure. And if you want to unite with God, you must meet It where It lives. And in doing so, you meet yourself, because, as Ram Dass says, “You are God / you are the idea that lies behind the universe / you are literally it / you’re not making believe you’re it / you are it.”
Another way to conceptualize pure presence is as a childlike state. Ram Dass quotes the Book of Matthew when saying that there are no secrets in mysticism. “They’re telling you,” he says. “They’re yelling it. They’re saying: ‘Except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven.’” Shortly after rereading this part of Be Here Now, I listened to a dharma talk wherein Edward Espe Brown also talked about secrets, in this case the secrets of Buddhism. There are only two: The first is to begin, the second is to continue. Brown then distilled it down to essentially one secret: to begin and to begin again. He’s referring to spiritual practice, and it’s the whole notion of beginner’s mind, which is actually, come to think of it, a way of “becoming as little children.” Some Bible scholars interpret the “become as little children part" of that Gospels passage as laying down self-importance and trusting the Father with everything, but I’m not so sure. I think children are pretty self-important creatures, first of all. And I guess they’re trusting in some ways but they can also be quite skeptical, asking why to everything their parents say, on some level thinking they know better. And in many cases they do know—or at least sense—more than their parents realize. But I like to think that Jesus was saying we should be more in the present moment like little children are, thinking not of the past nor of the future, and therefore always in the here and now, where God is, which is the kingdom of heaven.
But if we’re all supposed to be like little children in this way, why do we become adults in the first place? Adults who do dwell on the past and worry about the future? Why do our brains develop to have the capacity for abstractions? And when does that happen, I wonder? At what point in our development do we stop being “little children” in the way that Jesus was talking about? Maybe it’s different for everyone. And I guess the reason it happens is because we need to be able to plan, and to learn from past mistakes, if we’re going to keep ourselves alive so our parents no longer have to. And the mind just proceeds to get carried away. So it seems like society should be set up so that adults are learning as much from children as children are learning from adults. Instead it’s mostly the latter that we enforce, leading us all, young and old alike, farther and farther away from that heavenly kingdom we so wish to enter.
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Another part of Be Here Now that made an impression on me was the following notion: “You only read to yourself / you only talk to yourself / you only ever know yourself / that’s all there is! / strangely enough!” This is a fascinating concept. It reminds me of the Zen notion of Magnanimous Mind, which says that we each create the universe, each contain it in our minds. It says we weren’t born into the world, but that a new world is born with each of us, and when we die, that entire world dies, too. The Buddhists assert that everything we see and otherwise experience is a projection of our own minds. We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are, to quote Anaïs Nin and the various other people that statement’s been attributed to. And I think this is at least partly what Ram Dass is getting at when he says that you only talk to yourself and only ever know yourself, when he says that yourself is all there is. And bringing it back to love, we can also say that we only ever love ourselves. If what we’re loving whenever we love is only ever love itself, and we are made of that exact same love, then we’re only ever loving ourselves. That might sound narcissistic or something, but it’s actually the opposite. Narcissists don’t love themselves at all. Rather, they are overly attached to their egos, and that kind of attachment is not the same as love—not even close—and the ego is not made of love, but of fear.
Lastly, a word on talking. In the "Cook Book for a Sacred Life” section of Be Here Now, Ram Dass—one of the greatest talkers this world has known—talks about talking, and the spiritual importance of talking less. He quotes Seng-ts’an, the Third Chinese Patriarch of Chán Buddhism, the tradition from whence Zen originated. Seng-ts’an said, “The more you talk about it, the more you think about it, the further from it you go; STOP TALKING, STOP THINKING, AND THERE IS NOTHING YOU WILL NOT UNDERSTAND.” Echoing this sentiment, Ram Dass also quotes the Tao Te Ching, which says that “those who know / do not talk / and talkers do not know.” And Argentinian poet Antonio Porchia: “He who tells the truth says almost nothing.” All of this makes me think that if I really want to attain true understanding and wisdom, then I should stop writing this blog. And all the other seeker-types out there who channel their passion for awakening into words both written and spoken should stop doing whatever their equivalent of a blog is. Thing is: I don’t want to stop, and I don’t want the others to stop, either, at least not the ones I respect, like Tara Brach and Edward Espe Brown. I intend to keep blog posts for as long making them feels like I’m doing my thing and feels like a meaningful contribution, and for as long as I can come up with no answer to the question, “What else am I going to do?” All of that could change in six weeks, six months, six years, or longer. I don’t know. I just know that I like writing this blog, and that it’s crucial for me to have something to do that I like doing, and so I’ll keep doing it even if it means I’m “talking” too much. I actually don’t talk that much in the rest of my life—I’ve even made a career out of listening—so maybe it balances out.
Still, in the name of sacred silence, I invite you now to join me in three deep breaths of saying absolutely nothing. Here we go.
[Take 3 deep breaths.]
As you may have just experienced, connecting with your breath is a great way to be here now, which is where we always are, anyway, and so any attempt to be elsewhere is only going to create stress, anxiety, loneliness, and overall discontent. And any struggle to be here now is totally unnecessary. To quote Ram Dass one more time: “You’re right here again…& what blows your mind is you were right here all the time & it’s such a cosmic joke / it’s so funny / you’re struggling to get HERE.”
