Be here now: where the phrase came from and what it asks

“Be here now.” Three words, printed on a million posters, and one of the few pieces of mindfulness advice that survives being reduced to a slogan. It is worth knowing where it came from, because the story explains what it is asking for.

The book

Be Here Now was published in 1971 by Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert. Before that he had been a psychology professor at Harvard, researching psychedelics alongside Timothy Leary until the university dismissed them both in 1963.

In 1967 he travelled to India, where he met the teacher he would spend the rest of his life talking about: Neem Karoli Baba, known to his students as Maharaj-ji. It was Maharaj-ji who gave him the name Ram Dass, meaning servant of God.

The book that came out of that trip did not look like other books. Square, printed on brown paper, hand-lettered, more object than paperback. It has never been out of print, has sold well over two million copies, and Steve Jobs named it among the books that shaped him.

But the phrase was not his

This is the part most people miss, and Ram Dass was always straightforward about it.

The teaching came from Bhagavan Das, the young American yogi who guided him around India before he ever met Maharaj-ji. As Ram Dass told it, whenever his mind wandered to what had happened or what was coming, Bhagavan Das would cut him off with the same instruction. Don’t think about the past. Don’t think about the future. Be here now.

Not a philosophy. A correction, repeated as often as it was needed, which was constantly.

That origin matters because it tells you the phrase was never meant as a poster. It was meant as something you say to somebody who has drifted off again, for the hundredth time that day.

What it actually asks

The instruction sounds simple to the point of being useless. Where else could you be?

Physically, nowhere. Attention is another matter. Most of the day your attention is somewhere your body is not: rerunning a conversation from Tuesday, rehearsing one that may never happen, drafting a reply to an email you have not opened yet. Your body is in the kitchen. You are in next week.

Be here now is the instruction to bring those two back into the same room.

It does not ask you to stop remembering or stop planning. Both are useful, and a person who could not do either would be a disaster to employ or to love. What it targets is the involuntary version. The drift. The background noise of somewhere else that runs whether you asked for it or not.

Why it is harder than it sounds

Because it is not a thing you achieve. It is a thing you do again.

People approach presence as a skill to be acquired, get frustrated within a week when their mind still wanders, and conclude they are bad at it. But the wandering is not the failure. Noticing the wandering and coming back is the whole practice, and you are meant to do it constantly. Bhagavan Das did not tell Ram Dass once.

This is also why the advice resists improvement. There is no advanced version. A person forty years into a practice is doing the same thing a beginner does on their first afternoon: noticing they have drifted, and returning. They just notice sooner.

Why we put it on a clock

A clock is an odd object to make this point with, which is exactly why it works.

Look at any other clock and it answers a question about time that has passed or time that remains. It is a machine for measuring the two places you are not. That is useful, and we are not against it, but it means the most-glanced-at object in most homes spends all day pointing away from the present.

Our clock says one word. Whatever is going on, whatever you looked up to check, the answer is now. It is the only time it could honestly be.

The word never changes. The colours are yours, and the clock is printed to order in whatever combination you pick. Have a look at the collection, or go straight to the clock itself.