Be. Here. Now.

From Menletter March 2008

By Tim Baehr

I have to confess that I've never read the supposedly ground-breaking Be Here Now, the 1971 book by Baba Ram Dass. It apparently changed a lot of lives, and made Richard Alpert (his name before he became Ram Dass) a famous and respected guru.

But the title has always been evocative to me. Maybe it's the only thing I needed to know about the book and its author - not his fantastic journey into psychiatry, drugs, and India. Be. Here. Now. Wow - let's see: All I have to do to achieve some kind of bliss or enlightenment is to Be. Right Here. Right Now. Well, that's probably true, but what does it all mean, and how does it play out in a life that by 1971 (as a grad school dropout, if there is any such thing) consisted of marriage, young fatherhood, and working for way too little money in textbook publishing in a down economy? As a nice, hyper-conventional suburban lad of the Midwest, I'd even missed the hippie movement of the earlier 60s.

Be. Here. Now. I sort of carried it in front of my mind's eye as some kind of unattainable ideal. Maybe someday. Would I have the cojones to abandon wife and kid and join an ashram? Yeah, right. Cold day in Hell and all that. It's all too easy for lots of aspects of one's inner life to get put aside in favor of just getting through the daily grind. You can fill in your own imagined details of struggling to get along, a failed marriage, long depression, changing jobs, remarriage, and the start of a new family. Since the general outline is so banal, any scenario you can create will probably come close to the truth.

Positano

Jump forward about 30 years. My second wife and I on a trip to Italy, visiting some of her relatives in Rome and then taking the train south to a coastal resort. Positano sits on a steep hillside; one one-way road winds through part of it along the hillside. Access to most places is on foot up and down steep walkways - steps cut into the hill. It's a storybook village, destination of both the glitterati and ordinary folks, with great food, post-card views, and the scent of jasmine in the air.

As lovely as Positano is, there was a cost to getting there. We took the train from Rome, changing in Naples (gorgeous, rough, dangerous city - gypsy cab drivers, pickpockets, and all) to a little trolley-like affair with standing room only. We then caught a bus to Positano, sitting in the back in the heat of the afternoon and getting carsick as the driver deftly negotiated dozens of switchback turns on the coastal road. In Positano we switched to a tiny local bus with a nasty-tempered bus driver who snapped at my wife, claiming not to know where our inn was. Each transfer had involved horsing about our heavy and over-packed suitcases.

Dumped somewhere near the top of a precipitous path to our chosen inn, we got someone to watch our luggage while we went down to beg for a porter. The porter damn near busted a gut carrying all our stuff. When we arrived, sweating and exhausted, at the check-in desk, Ann burst into tears, a perfectly appropriate response to a long day of physical and emotional challenges. I was a little more stoic, but the day's tension was surely written on my face. The young woman at the desk looked up quizzically. We began to explain our arduous day.

At this point it would have been quite reasonable for the trials of our immediate past to ruin the present and future - the rest of the day, and perhaps the rest of the visit.

The late afternoon light glowed through a huge round-top window framing the intensely blue Mediterranean. The desk clerk smiled. "Everything will be fine. You're here now."

You're. Here. Now. Our day's tensions began to drain away. Had this twenty-something woman been reading Ram Dass? Or did she just know somehow the healing magic of natural beauty, finishing a journey, and the promise of repose? She may have been wise beyond her years. She may have seen many travelers like us, shredded and frayed by an impossible day that somehow had to be gotten through. Whatever.

Be. Here. Now. The three words had been transformed from an unattainable ideal to a more tangible image I could carry with me. I could occasionally invoke it as a way to deal with life when past events seemed about to overwhelm the present.

Vasilisa and the Firebird

About a dozen years before the Positano incident, I had begun to go to men's weekends and longer men's retreats. This was the heyday of the mythopoetic movement, in which we men listened raptly at the feet of the movement's gurus (typically poet Robert Bly, mythologist Michael Meade, and/or Jungian analyst James Hillman) as they read or recited myths and poems aimed at the male psyche. Later retreats and men's gatherings I've attended have been more action-oriented and participatory. Although the poetry had a profound effect on me, the ancient myths didn't somehow resonate much with me - except for the story of Princess Vasilisa and the Firebird.

In the version of the Firebird I heard, a prince is given a series of seemingly impossible tasks. Each time the king imposes one of these tasks, with death the price of failure, the prince is reduced to weeping and wailing. His horse has some good advice, which for me was a principal motif of the story: "Stop your weeping. The problem is not now. The problem lies ahead of us. Now here's what I want you to do. . . ."

The problem is not now.

Now is really all we have, and most of the time what we're experiencing right now - without considering the future or the past - is pretty much OK, or even better. How often do we ruin this experience merely by obsessing about the future, eating bitter fruit that hasn't even been planted yet and may not ever ripen?

The horse brought our hapless prince back into the present moment. This didn't make the prospect of death disappear, but it did release the prince from paralyzing fear of the uncertain to allow him to make effective plans right now to address his next challenge.

The problem is not now.

That had the potential to become a powerful antidote for constant worry and rumination, and I could occasionally call on it in times of turmoil when an uncertain future seemed about to overwhelm the present.

Continuing Education

One problem with reading poetry, listening to myths, and attending retreats is that they can capture our imagination strongly but temporarily. There has to be a way to get beyond the "stop and smell the roses" moments. They don't serve very well for getting through the everyday crap we deal with, and it's easy to become disillusioned. Another danger is that, having gotten a lot of theoretical learning into our heads, we retreat into some nice, philosophical inner space and ignore the chaos swirling about us - chaos that we may have a hand in creating, or have a duty to help resolve.

Ironically, retreating into inner space is exactly what many psychological, philosophical, and religious traditions prescribe. Most of them call it meditation. One difference is that mediation, unlike theoretical learning, is supposed to be an ongoing practice. Another is that the practice mostly doesn't have much cognitive content, such as when we read a book. The result of a lot of kinds of meditation is an ability, when not actually meditating, to live at least somewhat more in the present, enjoying what's enjoyable, dealing with crap as it arises, and avoiding constant obsession with the future or regrets about the past.

Meditation practice involves paying special attention to something we all do anyway: breathe. Two kinds in particular resonated with me: holotropic breathwork and sitting meditation.

In holotropic breathwork, participants lie down in a dark room and breathe deeply and continuously for up to two hours to the accompaniment of extremely loud music. Sounds like fun, huh? In breathwork, physiological and psychological changes take place that, for many people, expand the narrow limits of "self" in time and space and give them a powerful sense of timelessness and oneness with the universe. The experience can be intense and can involve visions. Each "breather" has a "sitter" to watch over him and keep him safe, since the visions can sometimes be acted out physically. Because no drugs are involved, there are no lasting side-effects except perhaps a somewhat better perspective on what's important in life. I've had the good fortune to be able to do breathwork at an annual men's retreat for the past ten years.

Sitting meditation appealed to me because it involved minimal or no book-learning or esoteric knowledge and its specialized vocabulary. The basic activity was just sitting still for a spell and paying attention to the breath. Over time, a sitting practice can lead to insights and a kind of serenity. A sense of timelessness, the eternal present, creeps in from time to time. It's a blissful feeling, but the main point is the practice itself, done for its own sake.

Both breathing practices seem to have the potential, at least, to change how a person interacts with his world, focusing on what's going on right at the moment. The practices do not address living in the present in any direct or intellectual way. I like to think of the practices as sneaking into the eternal present. Or maybe it's more like sneaking up on myself and saying "Boo!" so that I can wake up and see where I've always been: right here, right now. Be. Here. Now.

The Easy Life

I have no idea what these kinds of experiences and practices would do for someone leading a life of poverty, chronic pain, ill health, physical or psychological abuse, and so on. How could anyone begin and sustain any kind of philosophy or practice?

Uh . . . wait a minute. Maybe I do. I was diagnosed with prostate cancer in the late autumn of 2003 and had my prostate removed the following January. From diagnosis to surgery (successful) to recovery to aftereffects there have been some anxiety, pain, and discouragement. I didn't go through all this with some cheerily philosophical grin, knowing that everything would be fine if only I could live in the moment. I also didn't plunge into panic and despair. There did, however, seem to be a balance between acknowledging and suffering through the pain, being annoyed by various inconveniences, and knowing that, from moment to moment, things were basically OK. There were things I could do something about, and things outside my control. I didn't keep up any kind of regular meditation practice through most of the early months, but it did seem that my practices had built a residue of calm that helped.

Checking In

Remember Ed Koch's catch-phrase when he was mayor of New York City? Walking around the city, he would greet passers-by with "How'm I doing?"

I'm still not a completely faithful practitioner of sitting meditation. But I have found myself lately asking myself the Ed Koch question, often several times a day. Sure, I still have worries about the future and regrets about and nostalgia for the past. Most of the time, however, "How'm I doing?" gets an enthusiastic, "Here? Now? I'm just fine." And when things aren't fine, I try to remember that even the crappy parts of my life mean that I'm an active participant in some huge mystery, and that crap is just crap and not Armageddon. (I admit I forget this at least as often as I remember. Armageddon is more interesting and engaging than mere crap.)

I'll continue to try to find more time for sitting meditation, but for right now the checking-in exercise gives me several moments a day of quiet repose and a reminder to be here now. Not a bad way to get through the day.

Boo!

I don't recommend that anyone follow the path I've taken; in fact, I actively discourage it.

For one thing, I'll never be finished with this. I don't expect to find any sort of final answer, and the next turn of fate may require a new path, both internally and in the external expression of my life. I still lead a pretty easy life, and it may not always be that way.

For another thing, it's my path, not yours. Not that I feel some sort of proprietorship about it, but if you try to walk someone else's path - mine or that prescribed by some guru - you'll just get lost.

For yet another thing, you're already on a path, and it's not mine. You may take branches and detours that look like someone else's, but your path will forever be only your path.

And finally, I've described my path in retrospect, using human language that captures, on a good day, probably less than one percent of the reality of a person's experiences and far less than a trillionth of a percent of true, ultimate reality. Trying to see reality through another person's eyes, or even through your own eyes, is like driving a car with a one-inch-round windshield. In the dark. Without wipers. In a rainstorm. I'm OK with my car, wherever and however it takes me. You'll need to get your own.

So, why did I write this? Well, I thought it was an at least somewhat interesting story. But I also wanted to show you a couple of things: (1) You may recognize after reading this that you're already on a path - we all are. And there is no schedule or final station. (2) It might be worth having a look at this path - how things are going, where they're likely to go, what relationship you have between your inner and outer lives, and whatever resonance there may be between your little self and a larger Self that is part of an infinite and timeless universe. It didn't take me any particularly hard work or deep insight to come up with this little retrospective on my own path, and I think you're probably up to doing the same. (3) To the extent that you think that the eternal present might be a good place to hang out, you might want to come up with a way (reading, retreats, meditation, whatever) to sneak up on it, or to sneak up on yourself and say "Boo!"