Be Here Now ( I AM GOOD ENOUGH Book Excerpt)

(An excerpt from I AM GOOD ENOUGH)

I’m sharing my path to spiritual awakening one book, one guru at-a-time. In the next three books I discovered on my journey—Be Here Now, Be Love Now: The Path of the Heart and Polishing the Mirror: How to Live from Your Spiritual Heart—I met the most amazing guru, Ram Dass.

Ram Dass, formerly known as Dr. Richard Alpert, earned his PhD from Stanford and taught social sciences at Harvard, ascending to the top of his career field. In 1961, while at Harvard, he met fellow professor Timothy Leary, who was given an office down the hall from him.

Leary had been using Mexico’s Magic Mushrooms along with their synthetic equivalents Psylocybin and LSD, and he introduced Ram Dass to the wild highs the mushrooms and their chemical cousins generated, highs far beyond their career highs.

For their controversial experimentation with psychedelics, both Leary and Ram Dass were eventually fired from Harvard. For Dr. Alpert, the end of his professional success as a professor was the beginning of his career as spiritual leader Baba Ram Dass, a name given to him in India by one of the great yogi masters he studied with Maharaji.

In the beginning of his classic book Be Here Now, Ram Dass says that in his Harvard days he felt like he was hustling his way through his life and career. “I could sit in a doctoral exam, ask very sophisticated questions and look terribly wise. It was a hustle,” he said.

He knew there was more to life and that someone knew what that more was. But it wasn’t him. He also knew that none of the information he was getting paid huge sums of money to teach at Harvard was authentic to the human experience.

When I read this part of Ram Dass’s story, I felt a deep stirring in my heart and soul. I so related to what he was feeling. I too had worked hard and earned my way to the top of my career field.

At just 26-years-old, I was the Human Resources Manager for a large company with 800 employees in 7 locations. I was the youngest person on the Executive Board and reported only to the President and two Vice-Presidents. And I was making great money, although all of the men under me made more. Go figure.

Despite my success and power, I was still restless, knowing that something was missing, something that could perhaps finally heal my soul from the pains of my past.

Interestingly enough, fifteen years later, I found myself hitting the top once again in a totally different career field. After struggling hard, one so-very-close, thanks-but-no-thanks publishing deal after another, I’d not only been published but I also sold crazy-well, hitting bestseller lists around the world, including the much sought after Amazon and Barnes & Noble Top 100 Bestselling Books Lists. Almost one million copies of my books had been downloaded (when including my free title), and I’d sold over 300,000 copies. I was writing in five genres and working on my thirty-fifth book. And I was making a ton more money than I did as a Human Resources Manager.

I should have been on cloud nine, but I wasn’t.

So what was I doing instead of enjoying the ride?

I was obsessively checking sales figures, sometimes several times a day, trying everything I knew how to do to not only hold onto my success but to make it to even higher levels.

I continued writing the next book and the next and the next one after that, but I wasn’t enjoying the process like I used to in the pre-published days. I kept cranking out the books to keep the money flowing in to pay the bills and to make my readers happy.

Making readers happy and connecting with them was and still is the incredibly heart-warming, soul-satisfying part of my success. It’s the reason I chose to move on to finding ways that I could connect with them even deeper, far away from the rat race of the publishing industry.

Like Ram Dass, nothing I was doing, no matter how wise or sophisticated or trend-setting it was, felt authentic. There had to more to life. Someone knew what that more was. But it sure wasn’t me. And I was getting close to the point where I was too tired and in too much pain to find out.

Unlike Ram Dass, I didn’t need psychedelics to find my way. Books are my drugs of choice. And I can rely on them appearing in my life exactly when I need them, books like his classic Be Here Now.

Ram Dass taught me that I needed to step away from life as I knew it and as I was currently living it and instead be a witness of that life, a concept I’d never heard of till reading his book.

Basically, what being a witness to your life means is realizing that you exist outside of your earthly body. It sounds kind of weird, I know. But bear with me. Even though this seems a little tricky at first, you’ll be so glad you took time to figure it out. It will change your life in a wonderfully positive and profound way.

In other words, imagine that you’re outside of yourself, watching what you’re doing and experiencing. So, in effect, there are two of you—one watching and simply being and one doing all of the doing. You’re one spiritual being and one physical being. You are placing yourself outside of your physical body and looking in at yourself instead of always being focused on what’s happening outside and around you.

Taking this another step, it means that there’s no reason to look outside of yourself for the answers, they’re all already inside of you, waiting to be witnessed and remembered.

What if I could simply stop doing and doing and doing, checking off one item at-a-time from my To-Do Lists? What if I could just be? Just be with myself, witnessing what I’m thinking and feeling, getting to know me and who I am and what my divine purpose is.

“Where are you?

Answer: Here

What time is it?

Answer: Now---Ram Dass

Hugs Love Namaste and Be Here Now --- DD