This is a book summary of Be Here Now by Ram Dass (formerly Dr. Richard Alpert, Ph.D) (Amazon):
Premium members have access to the companion post: đ How to Practice Witnessing with “Be Here Now” by Ram Dass (+ Infographic)
Quick Housekeeping:
- All content in âquotation marksâ is from the author (otherwise itâs paraphrased).
- All content is organized into my own themes (not the authorâs chapters).
- Emphasis has been added in bold for readability/skimmability.
Book Summary Contents:
- Life Journey (3 Stages)
- Rational Mind & Attachment
- Awakening & Enlightenment
- Here & Now
- Ego, Roles, & God’s Will
- “Paradoxes”

The Spiritual Journey: Be Here Now by Ram Dass (Book Summary)
Life Journey (3 Stages)
“There are three stages in this journey that I have been on! The first, the social science stage; the second, the psychedelic stage; and the third, the yogi stage. They are summatingâthat is, each is contributing to the next. Itâs like the unfolding of a lotus flower. Now, as I look back, I realize that many of the experiences that made little sense to me at the time they occurred were prerequisites for what was to come later.”
Stage 1: Social Science
“I was really driven. Until you know a good, Jewish middleclass, upwardly mobile, anxiety-ridden neurotic, you havenât met a real achiever! … Everytime I went to a family gathering, I was the boy who made it. I was a Professor at Harvard and everybody stood around in awe and listened to my every word, and all I felt was that horror that I knew inside that I didnât know.”
- “In 1961, the beginning of March, I was at perhaps the highest point of my academic career. I had just returned from being a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley: I had been assured of a permanent post that was being held for me at Harvard, if I got my publications in order. I held appointments in four departments at Harvardâthe Social Relations Department, the Psychology Department, the Graduate School of Education, and the Health Service (where I was a therapist); I had research contracts with Yale and Stanford. In a worldly sense, I was making a great income and I was a collector of possessions. I had an apartment in Cambridge that was filled with antiques and I gave very charming dinner parties. I had a Mercedes-Benz sedan and a Triumph 500 CC motorcycle and a Cessna 172 airplane and an MG sports car and a sailboat and a bicycle. I vacationed in the Caribbean where I did scuba-diving. I was living the way a successful bachelor professor is supposed to live in the American world of ‘he who makes it.’ I wasnât a genuine scholar, but I had gone through the whole academic trip. I had gotten my Ph.D.; I was writing books. I had research contracts. I taught courses in Human Motivation, Freudian Theory, Child Development. But what all this boils down to is that I was really a very good game player.”
- “Before March 6th, which was the day I took Psylocybin, one of the psychedelics, I felt something was wrong in my world, but I couldnât label it in any way so as to get hold of it. I felt that the theories I was teaching in psychology didnât make it, that the psychologists didnât really have a grasp of the human condition, and that the theories I was teaching, which were theories of achievement and anxiety and defense mechanisms and so on, werenât getting to the crux of the matter.”
- “Something was wrong. And the something wrong was that I just didnât know, though I kept feeling all along the way that somebody else must know even though I didnât. The nature of life was a mystery to me. All the stuff I was teaching was just like little molecular bits of stuff but they didnât add up to a feeling anything like wisdom. I was just getting more and more knowledgeable.”
- “I could study 10 hours and prepare a really good lecture on Freud or Human Motivation, but it was all as if it were behind a wall. It was theoretical. I theorized this or that. I espoused these ideas, these intellectual concepts, quite apart from my own experiential base. Although I could bring all kinds of emotional zeal to bear on my presentation, there was a lack of validity in my guts about what I was doing.”
- “The whole thing was too empty. It was not honest enough … Not enough was happening that matteredâthat was real.”
Stage 2: Psychedelics
“Weâd sit around on Saturday night and say, ‘What should we do?’ and we all knew what we were going to do, and we would ‘turn on.’ We were exploring this inner realm of consciousness that we had been theorizing about all these years and suddenly we were traveling in and through and around it … These experiences quickly became indescribable. Iâd get to a point with my colleagues when I couldnât explain any further, because it came down to ‘To him who has had the experience no explanation is necessary, to him who has not, none is possible.'”
His personal experience:
- “I realized that although everything by which I knew myself, even my body and this life itself, was gone, still I was fully aware! Not only that, but this aware ‘I’ was watching the entire drama, including the panic, with calm compassion.”
- “I felt a new kind of calmnessâone of a profundity never experienced before. I had just found that ‘I’, that scanning deviceâthat pointâthat essenceâthat place beyond. A place where ‘I’ existed independent of social and physical identity. That which was I was beyond Life and Death. And something elseâthat ‘I’ Knewâit really Knew. It was wise, rather than just knowledgeable. It was a voice inside that spoke truth. I recognized it, was one with it, and felt as if my entire life of looking to the outside world for reassurance was over. Now I need only look within to that place where I Knew.”
Step ladder of psychedelic experience (“a kind of probabilistic hierarchy of experience”):
- “The most likely experience everybody had was a heightened sensitivity to all of their five senses and speeding up of the thought process.”
- “The next type of experience that people would frequently report was an interpersonal shift of figure and ground, where they would look at another person and see the way in which the other person was similar, rather than different from themselves. And it was as if the whole western mind-training of individual differences had been made background instead of figure, so that youâd look at another human being and say, ‘Here we are.’ Youâd see differences more as clothing, rather than as core stuff. This was a profound perceptual experience for many people.”
- “Then there was a still less frequent type of experience reported: a oneness, in which subjects would say, ‘ . . . I remember being in a dark room with another person and one of us spoke and one of us said, ‘Who spoke, you or me?’ It wasnât clear from whoâs mouth the words came.”
- “And then there was a still less frequent experience where one looked at somebody and he started to see the other person as cellular structure or patterns of energy rather than as a person.”
- “And finally, a few subjects (maybe 3% or something like that) transcended all form and saw just pure energyâa homogeneous field. It has been called the White Light.”
Coming down from psychedelics:
- “In these few years we had gotten over the feeling that one experience was going to make you enlightened forever. We saw that it wasnât going to be that simple. And for five years I dealt with the matter of ‘coming down.'”
- “The coming down matter is what led me to the next chapter of this drama. Because after six years, I realized that no matter how ingenious my experimental designs were, and how high I got, I came down.”
- “It was a terribly frustrating experience, as if you came into the kingdom of heaven and you saw how it all was and you felt these new states of awareness, and then you got cast out again.”
- “After 2 or 300 times of this, began to feel an extraordinary kind of depression set inâa very gentle depression that whatever I knew still wasnât enough!”
- “If you see yourself as God and then you come back from this state and somebody says, ‘Hey, Sam, empty the garbage!’ it catches you back into the model of ‘Iâm Sam who empties the garbage.’ You canât maintain these new kinds of structures. It takes a while to realize that God can empty garbage.”
Stage 3: Yogi
“I left to go to India, and I took a bottle of LSD with me, with the idea that Iâd meet holy men along the way, and Iâd give them LSD and theyâd tell me what LSD is. Maybe Iâd learn the missing clue … I donât know how to describe this to you, except that I was deep in my despair; I had gone through game, after game, after game, first being a professor at Harvard, then being a psychedelic spokesman, and still people were constantly looking into my eyes, like ‘Do you know?’ Just that subtle little look, and I was constantly looking into their eyesâ’Do you know?’ And there we were, ‘Do you?’ ‘Do you?’ ‘Maybe he . . .’ ‘Do you . . . ?’ And there was always that feeling that everybody was very close and we all knew we knew, but nobody quite knew. I donât know how to describe it, other than that.”
Following Bhagwan Dass (Wikipedia):
- “I thought. ‘Well, look, I came to India to find something and I still think this guy knowsâIâm going to follow him.’ But there was also the counter thought, ‘How absurdâwhoâs writing this bizarre script. Here I amâIâve come half-way around the world and Iâm going to follow, through India, a 23 year old guy from Laguna Beach, California.'”
- “During these travels heâs starting to train me in a most interesting way. Weâd be sitting somewhere and Iâd say, ‘Did I ever tell you about the time that Tim (Leary) and I . . .’ And heâd say, ‘Donât think about the past. Just be here now.’ Silence. And Iâd say, ‘How long do you think weâre going to be on this trip?’ And heâd say, ‘Donât think about the future. Just be here now.'”
- “He had just sort of wiped out my whole game. That was itâthat was my whole tripâemotions, and past experiences, and future plans.”
- “There was no conversation. I didnât know anything about his life. He didnât know anything about my life. He wasnât the least bit interested in all of the extraordinary dramas that I had collected . . . He was the first person I couldnât seduce into being interested in all this. He just didnât care. And yet, I never felt so profound an intimacy with another being. It was as if he were inside of my heart. And what started to blow my mind was that everywhere we went, he was at home.”
Following Maharaji / Neem Karoli Baba (Wikipedia):
- “Some time later we were back with the Maharaji and he said to me, ‘Come here. Sit.’ So I sat down and he looked at me and he said, ‘You were out under the stars last night.’ ‘Um-hum.’ ‘You were thinking about your mother.’ ‘Yes.’ (âWow,â I thought, âthatâs pretty good. I never mentioned that to anybodyâ.) ‘She died last year.’ ‘Um-hum.’ ‘She got very big in the stomach before she died.’ . . . Pause . . . ‘Yes.’ He leaned back and closed his eyes and said, ‘Spleen. She died of spleen.'”
- “Well, what happened to me at that moment, I canât really put into words. He looked at me in a certain way at that moment, and two things happenedâit seemed simultaneous. They do not seem like cause and effect. The first thing that happened was that my mind raced faster and faster to try to get leverageâto get a hold on what he had just done. I went through every super CIA paranoia Iâve ever had: ‘Who is he?’ ‘Who does he represent?’ ‘Whereâs the button he pushes where the file appears?’ and ‘Why have they brought me here?’ None of it would jell. It was just too impossible that this could have happened this way. The guy I was with didnât know all that stuff, and I was a tourist in a car, and the whole thing was just too far out. My mind went faster and faster and faster.”
- “My mind went faster and faster and then I felt like what happens when a computer is fed an insoluble problem; the bell rings and the red light goes on and the machine stops. And my mind just gave up. It burned out its circuitry . . . its zeal to have an explanation. I needed something to get closure at the rational level and there wasnât anything. There just wasnât a place I could hide in my head about this. And at the same moment, I felt this extremely violent pain in my chest and a tremendous wrenching feeling and I started to cry. And I cried and I cried and I cried. And I wasnât happy and I wasnât sad. It was not that kind of crying. The only thing I could say was it felt like I was home. Like the journey was over. Like I had finished.”
- “As they say in the Sikh religionâOnce you realize God knows everything, youâre free … I realized that he knew everything that was going on in my head, all the time, and that he still loved me. Because who we are is behind all that.”
- “He looked at me and extended his hand. So I put into his hand whatâs called a ‘White Lightning.’ This is an LSD pill and this one was from a special batch that had been made specially for me for traveling. And each pill was 305 micrograms, and very pure. Very good acid. Usually you start a man over 60, maybe with 50 to 75 micrograms, very gently, so you wonât upset him. 300 of pure acid is a very solid dose. He looks at the pill and extends his hand further. So I put a second pillâthatâs 610 microgramsâthen a third pillâthatâs 915 microgramsâinto his palm. That is sizeable for a first dose for anyone! ‘Ah-cha.’ And he swallows them! I see them go down. Thereâs no doubt. And that little scientist in me says, ‘This is going to be very interesting!’ All day long Iâm there, and every now and then he twinkles at me and nothingânothing happens! That was his answer to my question. Now you have the data I have.”
Rational Mind & Attachment
“Man is presently caught in a plane of consciousness which is nourished by the workings of his rational mind. That is, the plane of polarities . . . of good and evil . . . and left and right . . . of old and young . . . of us and them . . . and of man and woman.”
Rational mind:
“What you may not understand is: the whole game you have been playing is also based on faith you have hadâfaith in the rational mind. We are living in a society which is a temple dedicated to the rational man.”
- “In an evolutionary perspective, the rational mind takes us a certain distance and no further, and we must be able to transcend it, to go on to other ways, other vehicles, if we are to cross the great ocean.”
- “If you sense the limitations of a specific tool you do not necessarily throw the tool away. You first explore whether there is a way of using this very powerful tool in such a way as to develop a better tool or vehicle. That is, can you use the rational mind to transcend itself? The answer is yes. And the technique is known as jnana yoga, or the path of knowledge arrived at through reasoning and discrimination.”
- “Using the rational mind is making use of great powers which can lead to freedom or to greater enslavement. To understand the risk involved in jnana yoga you need to reflect upon the precise limit of the rational mind. The rational mind functions by separating subject from object, that is, the knower from the known.”
Attachment:
“To be ‘not caught’ means to be unattached. To be unattached does not mean to be uninvolved, it means to be involved ‘without attachment.'”
- “A conscious being is capable of making as many discriminations among components of the Universe as anyone else (perhaps even more). However, he is not caught in them. Just because you are seeing divine light, experiencing waves of bliss, or conversing with Gods and Goddesses is no reason to not know your zip code. Keeping it together means keeping conscious at all levelsâall planesâwith no attachment to any of them.”
- “You do your thing. Live your life in the world. The water goes on down the stream. You chop the wood and carry the water. You do your thing, your mind does its thing. Your senses their thing, but you are not attached.”
- “As you extricate yourself from your attachments and become quiet, you will be able to know more and more clearly how it all is . . . The Way.”
Awakening & Enlightenment
“This is what man’s journey into Consciousness is all about. This is Om (home). It’s going Om. This is the Place! Becoming one with God. Itâs the return to the roots that the tao talks about.”
Awakening:
“Everyoneâs needs are different and everyone is at a different stage along the path ⊠If you listen to your own inner voice, it will tell you where you are now, and which method will work best for you in your evolution towards the light … Youâve got to go at the rate you can go. You wake up at the rate you wake up. Youâre finished with your desires at the rate you finish with your desires.”
- “I saw that my whole game didnât work. It gave me all the rewards that seemed to be offered but it didnât work. There was a place in me that knew it wasnât working. I knew there was something else but I couldnât get to it. At that point I gave up. And then I was ready for the next message … The next message is where you are when you hear the next message. Whenever you’re ready, you’ll hear the next message. The interesting thing is theres always a next message and its always available to you.”
- “The journey across the great ocean of existence is a journey inward ever in deeper and deeperâand the deeper you get in the more you meet truth.”
- “When your center is firm, when your faith is strong and unwavering, then it will not matter what company you keep. Then you will see that all beings are on the evolutionary journey of consciousness. They differ only to the degree that the veil of illusion clouds their vision. But for you . . . you will see behind the veil to the place where we are all ONE.”
Enlightenment:
“We are all on the journey towards enlightenment and at each stage must share what has been discovered with those who will listen. The sharing is part of the work. The listening is part of the work. We are all on the path.”
- “Your understanding of what the universe is all about changes as you proceed further along the path towards enlightenment. As your vantage point or perspective changes, you begin to understand more and more of ‘how it is.’ With this greater understanding comes greater compassion . . . an acceptance of ‘how it is’ . . . an ability to see the divine plan in everything . . . even in your failings and the failings of others.”
- “The major obstacle at every stage of the path of enlightenment is our own thoughts. Thoughts keep us separate. Even the thought of Unity is far different from Unity. And the thoughts keep coming; each one making its bid for our attention and identification.”
- “You become aware of the inevitable process of the evolution of consciousness . . . that daily, slowly, the cloud of illusion becomes thinner and thinner . . . until, at last, there is light.”
Here & Now
“If weâre not in the here & now, no matter how much food we put in our bellies, itâs never going to be enoughâthatâs the feeling of western man. Itâs not enough. Heâs got it all going in as fast as he can shovel it. Heâs got every sensual gratification he can possibly desire. Itâs not enough because thereâs no Here & Nowness about it.”
Here:
“The message is that you donât need to go to anywhere else to find what you are seeking.”
- “Where do we begin? The answer is simple: you begin just where you are.”
- “When you know how to listen, everybody is the guru speaking to you. Itâs right here . . . always.”
- “What blows your mind is you were here all the time, and itâs such a cosmic jokeâitâs so funny you’re struggling so to get here.”
Now:
“What are you doing? Planning for the future? Well itâs all right now.”
- “But later?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . forget it baby. Thatâs later. Now is Now.”
- “Your thoughts are still in time and space, and you canât get out of time through them.”
- “Are you going to be here? Or not? Itâs as simple as that!”
Ego, Roles, & God’s Will
“If you could stand back far enough and watch the whole process you would see You Are A Totally Determined Being. The very moment you will wake up Is Totally Determined. How long you will sleep Is Totally Determined. What you will hear of what I say Is Totally Determined. There are no accidents in this business at all. Accidents are just from where youâre looking. To the ego, it looks like itâs miracles and accidents. No miracles. No accidents. Itâs just your vantage point that youâre sort of. . . . .stuck in.”
Ego:
“Manâs rational mind, the instrument with which he can think about things, has given him great power. This power he has used primarily to increase his potential for survival, to increase his pleasure or sensual gratification, and to enhance his ego through mastery or control of his environment.”
- “The psychosis business is an interesting business if you go through the doorway too fast and youâre not ready for it. Youâre bound hand and foot and thrown into outer darkness. You may land anywhere, and lots of people end up in mental hospitals. The reason they do is: they went through the door with their ego on and: ‘Wow! Iâve been invited to the wedding feast. I mean dig me! Sam Jones! Sam Jones in Heaven! Sam Jones standing on the right side of the Lord. Thereâs the Lord, and thereâs Gabriel, and thereâs Sam Jones.’ They donât understand that you gotta die to be born. That only when you have been born again do you enter the kingdom of heaven. So, theyâve gone in on the first round, and what happens is they go on a huge ego trip. Itâs called: The Messianic Complex. Itâs called: Paranoia. Delusions of grandeur.”
- “Many of the greatest minds in history have gotten caught in this trap of wanting to be God and at the same time to retain their separate identity. They are caught because they still have energy attached to the third chakra, the desire for ego power. And to be God is obviously the ultimate power trip.”
- “If you understand the essence of the fundamental truth that it is attachment that keeps man caught in the illusion of separateness, you begin to understand more and more of the way in which the universe functions. And with such study comes further discrimination, a further understanding and transcending of your own desires and thus a deeper and broader understanding of ‘how it all is.'”
- “You come to a point where you almost know it all. You are very wise. You are very pure . . . except for the fact that you may well have gotten caught in the last trap . . . the desire to know it all and still be you, ‘the knower.’ This is an impossibility. For all of the finite knowledge does not add up to the infinite. In order to take the final step, the knower must go. That is, you can only BE it all, but you canât know it all. The goal is non-dualisticâas long as there is a ‘knower’ and ‘known’ you are in dualism.”
- “Each time we can ‘let go’âof goals, of our ego-image compulsions, of controlling, of driving ourselvesâand BE instead of DO, we die (as ego) and are reborn (as Self, as Buddha).”
Roles:
“Play your role in the Divine Dance, but know it to be such and worship its divinity.”
- “The method of gaining your livelihood must not, by its very nature, increase the paranoia and separateness in the world. A dishonest or exploitive venture would be a case in point. Most means of gaining livelihood do not, in and of themselves, increase the illusion of separateness. However, the beings who do the work do itâbecause of their own level of involvementâin such a way as to increase the illusion. When you are involved in such vocations, then it is your work on yourself which makes the particular vocation a vehicle for bringing man out of illusion and into yoga.”
- “Suitable right livelihood for any specific individual is determined by the totality of forces acting upon him. These forces (vectors) include social, cultural, economic, hereditary, and experiential factors. To hear the way in which the interplay of all these forces determines your right livelihood requires much calming of the mind. The quieter you become the more you can hear. As you progress with your sadhana you may find it necessary to change your occupation. Or you may find that it is only necessary to change the way in which you perform your current occupation in order to bring it into line with your new understanding of how it all is. The more conscious that a being becomes, the more he can use any occupation as a vehicle for spreading light. The next true being of Buddha-nature that you meet may appear as a bus driver, a doctor, a weaver, an insurance salesman, a musician, a chef, a teacher, or any of the thousands of roles that are required in a complex societyâthe many parts of Christâs body. You will know him because the simple dance that may transpire between youâsuch as handing him change as you board the busâwill strengthen in you the faith in the divinity of man. Itâs as simple as that.”
- “What about helping suffering people … Sure. Do it. Itâs karma yoga. But do it without attachment. To be attached means that you identify with your role as the GIVER of help. This in turn casts the other person in the role of the RECEIVER of help. Such identification with roles may fill bellies, but it increases human distance. A conscious being knows that there is neither giver nor receiver . . . there are only empty bellies, storehouses of wheat . . . and effort required to move the wheat from the storehouses to the belly. It is OUR wheat, OUR belly, OUR effort. And when all this energy has been transferred, a conscious being realizes that nothing has happened. Thanks are absurd . . . does your left hand thank your right hand?”
- “Each of us finds his unique vehicle for sharing with others his bit of wisdom. For me, this story is but a vehicle for sharing with you the true message . . . the living faith in what is possible.”
- “There is writing happening. Maybe thats hard for you to understand. I am here but ‘I’ am not here. I am writing but ‘I’ am not writing.”
God’s will:
“The simple rule of the game, repeated in the most profound mystical texts, reminds us that it is not my but THY will, O Lord . . . not my trip but THY Trip.”
- “The more clearly you hear, the more your actions will be in harmony with the Way . . . with His Will. Then you will truly understand: Not my but Thy will, O Lord.”
- “Some of us do go on this journey. We didnât stand up and say we volunteer (it didnât work that way at all; itâs not like you had a choice of volunteering or not volunteering); that isnât the way it works. Itâs as if youâre propelled into it like the moth into the flame.”
- “Once the seed has been planted, once you have been born again, you donât have any choice!”
- “The final place that the game leads to is: where you live consciously in all of it, which is in nothing, you are eternal, you have finished perishing, there is no fear of death because there is no death. Itâs just a transformation, an illusion, and yet, seeing all that, you still chop wood and carry water. You still do your thing. You flow in harmony with the universe. You are beyond morality and yet your actions are totally moral because thatâs the harmony of the universe.”
- “You do what you do because thatâs what the harmony of the universe requires. If I am a potter, I make pots. But who is making the pots? I am not under the illusion that I am making the pots. Pots are. The potter is.”
- “You do what you do, but you do not identify with the doing of it. All ‘doing’ is happening as part of the dance of nature . . . and though your body and mind speed about their business, you remain in your calm center . . . HERE . . . ‘where we all are.'”
- “Nothing is really happening at all, nothing ever happens, nothing is going to happen. Thereâs nothing youâve got to do; thereâs no doer to do it anyway.”
- “Do you think that when Christ is lying there and theyâre nailing the nails in, Heâs saying, ‘Oh man, does that hurt!’? Heâs probably looking at the guy whoâs nailing him with absolute compassion. He digs why the catâs doing it. What heâs stuck in. How much dust covers his eyes. Why heâs got to be doing it. Thatâs the way it is.”
“Paradoxes”
“(The rational mind’s) limitations are that it cannot handle paradoxical or illogical information (e.g., that points at the opposite ends of a continuum are the same point, or that something can be ‘a’ and ‘not a’ at the same time) and that it cannot know that which can only be experienced subjectively.”
- “The most exquisite paradox: as soon as you give it all up, you can have it all.”
- “Funny thing about all the secrets of the east or the secrets of mysticism. . . Theyâre not secret! Nobodyâs saying ‘donât tell him.’ Theyâre telling you. Theyâre yelling it.”
- “The secret is a secret to you because of where your head is at. Your receiving mechanism isnât tuned for that particular frequency.”
- “To think that working on oneself requires ‘dropping-out’ of society is to miss the point. Certainly you must drop out . . . but the drop-out is internal, not external. One drops out of oneâs attachments; one drops out of oneâs identification with the illusion of separateness.”
- “I can do nothing for you but work on myself. You can do nothing for me but work on yourself.”
- “The rule of the game: that everyone work on himself in order to find the center where ‘we all are’âwithin himselfâin order that he can meet with other human beings in that place . . . is the sine qua non (without which nothing) of social responsibility.”
- “If you don’t help other beings cut through the illusion because youâre through the illusion … What else??? What else is there? What are you doing?”
- “As you find the light in you, you begin to see the light in everyone else. As you find God in yourself, there is God everywhere.”
- “You must live before you can die. But you must die before you can live. Live consciously! Die consciously!”
- “Itâs a little more like the image of a caterpillarâenclosing itself in a cocoon in order to go through the metamorphosis to emerge as a butterfly. The caterpillar doesnât say: ‘well, now Iâm going to climb into this cocoon and come out a butterfly.’ Itâs just an inevitable process. Itâs inevitable. Itâs just happening. Itâs got to happen that way. Weâre talking about a metamorphosis, weâre talking about going from a caterpillar to butterfly, weâre talking about how to become a butterfly. I mean the caterpillar isnât walking around saying: ‘man, Iâll soon be a butterfly.’ Because as long as heâs busy being a caterpillar, he canât be a butterfly. Itâs only when caterpillarness is done that one starts to be a butterfly. And, that again is part of this paradox: you cannot rip away caterpillarness. The whole trip occurs in an unfolding process under which you have no control.”
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