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It's Here Now (Are You?): A Spiritual Memoir

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I was very interested in reading this book especially after
reading "Be Here Now" by Ram Dass. I had wondered after reading that book what became of Bhagavan Das.

First I will say that Bhagavan Das deserves credit for his honest account of his journey. He certainly paints a picture of himself that I personally did not find too admirable and I give him credit for his honesty.

This book has tremendous energy and is very hard to put down. The different experiences he has are described vividly and with focus and emotion. You feel like you are living each sentence with him as he goes through his ever changing situations.

Bhagavan Das is constantly caught in a battle between the spirit and the flesh. He's almost analogous to a manic depressive who experiences extreme highs and lows, except in his
case he goes between extreme devotion and extreme narcissism.

I did get very disturbed by his self indulgent behavior, not just in his narcissistic drug, sex and spiritual phases but in the way he abandoned his wives and children so that he could indulge in his spiritual quest. This seemed to be a major cop-out to me. He seemed to run away from his responsibilities in the name of spirituality.

Also from a spiritual standpoint he seemed too obsessed with finding spiritual experiences of "bliss" which seemed also a form of escapism. True spirituality (in my opinion and experience)has very little to do with "states" of bliss but rather are found with finding the beauty in life itself in the present moment. All the "spiritual fireworks" he speaks of seem to be no more than a lot of spiritual masturbation.

One thing in particular I found particularly disturbing is that after his first wife Bhavani dies from an overdose he doesn't let the reader know what happens to his daughter Soma. He says that his new wife doesn't want to take her in but he doesn't seem to say anything about what he does to take care of her. Not that I need to know his personal business, but he tells you all this stuff and then never explains what happens to this poor child. Rather, he goes off on some Peyote trip and gets into his own selfish headtrip.

Anyway, in spite of my personal disgust about much of his behavior, I do think this book is very worthwhile to read. I think he lays it all out there for the reader to make his own decisions about things.

While I certainly wouldn't take any spiritual advice from Bhagavan Das because he still seems to be anywhere but "here now", I truly wish him well.

This book should be called "I'm Escaping The Present Moment And All Responsibility For My Actions Now, Are You?"

This book is hard to review without judging the man who wrote it. In terms of literary merit, it is not well written. It reads more like an outline of a vast array of psychedelic events that never goes into any one event very deeply. That being said, it is a fascinating tale of an extraordinarily conflicted man who constantly contradicts himself and loves to swing between extremes. A great, if tragic character.

The value in this book is not found in any wisdom Bhag. Das may (or may not) have gleaned, but in the colorful picture it paints of the spiritual scene in late 60s India and early 70s America. The book is an intriguing portrait of what it was like to be right in the middle of it. The real gurus, the fake gurus, the zealous devotees, the drugs, the sex, the confusion. In India he studied with several famous teachers and when he gets back to America, Allen Ginsberg, Alan Watts (who was apparently a notorious drunk!) and Ram Dass, among others are constantly floating in and out of his life. It is also an interesting to see how he dealt with his unwanted fame.

Bhagavan Das says that in America he was living like a "spiritual rock star." Spiritual hypocrite is more like it. The book is rampant with examples of how he uses his spiritual quest as a way to escape from his own present reality. For example, in a chapter in which he claims to have been learning about devotion from his Native American "grandfather", he also describes how he had a stream of girls going in and out of his teepee while his wife and child were "in the background" in Santa Fe. He describes how he prays for hours, upon days, upon years to the great mother, the goddess Kali Ma, and yet he was utterly unable to remain faithful to his own wife. He even gets another woman pregnant while he was still married. While he was surrendering his soul to the Great Mother in the sky, he was womanizing and boozing his way through the females here on earth. Actually, he even blames Kali Ma for destroying his relationships with women out of jealousy. It isn't the fact that he was incapable of taking responsibility for her personal relationship - Kali Ma just becomes one more woman who screwed things up for him. While he was busy seeing everyone as god, he forgot that they were human beings who were affected by his actions. Even after the years of austerities and meditation he practiced, he was still unable to conquer his enormous ego.

Bhagavan Das uses his spiritual quest the way he uses drugs - as a way to get high and to escape. It is ironic that he was the hero of Ram Dass' "Be Here Now" because he is always looking for the next guru, the next vision, the next party, the next woman, the next high, the next narcotic. I never knew that bliss could be so depressing.


I have seen Bhaghavan Das perform live and I love the "Now" CD. His singing has brought me a lot of joy. Listen to the music, not the man. That's my advice.

Bhagavan Das has led a fascinating life: going to India as a very young man & becoming a full-fledged Yogi, returning to America as an icon of the spiritual counter-culture & encountering others icons such as Ram Dass & Allen Ginsburg, & ceaseless bouncing between Hinduism, Buddhism, Native American peyote ritual, hedonism, capitalism, AA, born-again Christianity, & probably a few other isms I've forgotten.

His tale is worth reading for those of us interested in spiritual seeking & how it relates to India, psychedelic drugs, & "the 60s." Seeing how the author continues this seeking with great energy through difficult circumstances can be inspiring to our own efforts. It's also interesting to see how the author, who was presented as a Great Holy Man in Ram Dass' "Be Here Now," was in fact a confused kid bumbling his way along like the rest of us.

The downside of the book is that the author, in spite of the numerous zigs & zags of his life & path, in spite of the obvious suffering he's brought to others along the way (such as the woman he impregnated, married, & cheated on), still considers himself a teacher. That is, the tone of the book isn't just that of a fellow seeker sharing his experience, but of someone with Great Insight to impart to the rest of us.

These Insights, sprinkled throughout his tale, come off as flaky. Bhagavan Das often doesn't clearly distinguish what's happening objectively from what's going on in his mind. Whereas Ram Dass was able to write about Indian spirituality without abandoning "Western" rationality, Bhagavan Das *doesn't* have a background in rationality, & comes off as a spaced-out hippie. He makes profound-sounding proclamations that seem too naive by 30 years. For instance, he visits a certain temple & suggests that everyone who goes there gets their prayers answered by God. Were such magic really available, I imagine India would be in much better shape than it is.

Many of us begin our spiritual search feeling like we'll find Truths to make us holier & more special than ordinary people. After years of efforts, we hopefully gain the humility to see that, while our chosen path may be wonderfully helpful to us, it doesn't make us holier than others, or give us the standing to preach to anyone else. I was fascinated by Bhagavan Das' tales, & disappointed that he still doesn't seem to have found this humility.

This is an interesting story and a page-turner. It definitely rambles and becomes incoherent, especially towards the end. I was left wondering about all the contradictions between the professed spirituality of Bhagavan Das, especially his 'deep' spiritual experiences in India, and then the full-blown hedonism and ego-centered pleasure that he pursued later. But in the end they were really the same pursuit.

It seems that his Guru never taught him that Yoga includes moral precepts, called the yamas and niyamas. These include practices such as celibacy, purity, and contentment. BD goes hog-wild for the drugs, booze, and women without a thought to these principles. The story seems to become more of a memoir to the anything-goes 'if it feels good do it' mentality/morality of the 60's. He's definitely looking for the ultimate high for himself and NOT spiritual contentment or service to others, especially his wives or children.

I think if the spiritual experiences he describes were really authentic, he would have behaved with some self-control and concern for others. Real practice cultivates peace within and compassion for others without. It's not always these dramatic fireworks and orgasms of merging into Infinity. What good is that? Also, you can't behave like a sex-and-drug-crazed-psycho and think you are a holy man. The constant changing of gurus, deities, mantras, wives, practices, etc. is classic 'monkey-mind' behavior. There is nothing holy or balanced about it.

The huge consumption of drugs throughout the story makes me wonder if BD wasn't delusional and after reading it I felt like I had taken a bad acid trip with him for 15 hours. I was glad it was over. I seriously doubted whether many of the experiences described here were in fact 'real' or just psychedelic-inspired hallucinations.

His wives and children are pretty much forgotten by the end of the story. They seem inconsequential. The story is about him and his bliss. It's just BD and his nada yoga.

This is a "spiritual memior" which describes Michael Riggs' (Bhagavan Das) spiritual search. His journey reads like a who's who of eastern religion. His Indian Guru was Neem Karoli Baba and his Buddhist guru was Kalu Rinpoche. In his travels he also has met "The Mother" from Sri Aurobindo's lineage, Dilgo Khyentse, Tarthang Tulku, Anandamayi Ma, Suzuki Roshi, Muktananda, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Sai Baba, Swami Prabhupada, Chogyam Trungpa, Alan Watts, Richard Alpert, Alan Ginsberg and many others.

It may not be the best writing but it is a great tale. How wonderful to find such an open and honest work. For the seeker it is a tell-all from someone who has followed an extremely devoted path.

The book also functions as a glossary of terms. Every time Das uses a new hindu or buddhist term he explains it instead of assuming the reader knows them all.

Das also gives a good contrast between the Hindu and the Buddhist practices since he bounced back and forth between the two.

This is a surprisingly charming, engaging and articulate book. I was surprised because I always thought of Bhagavan Das as a "spaced-out" hippie/yogi who probably could not punctuate a sentence or remember his zip code. I was taken in by his wild Rastafarian-gone-to-seed looks. He is out-there, make no mistake about it. But he is also thoughtful, insightful, and mostly guileless. The few follies in the book are self-deceptions, as when he acts out his sexual obsessiveness in ways that are profoundly harmful to the people in his life, while seeing it all as just so much spiritual melodrama. No doubt it is that, but some of it is also boorish sexual misbehavior, and no amount of "up-leveling" the conversation makes any of that go away. But even his foolishness is instructive.

He has some amazing stories to tell of life on the spiritual trek. He lived the life of a serious Hindu sadhu in India, and some other, in some ways even more exotic, forms of life in America. This book is mostly story-telling--the most fascinating stories imaginable. These are challenging stories, stories that inspire and that remind us that authentic spirituality has nothing to do with conventional belief systems or other similar mundane matters. Real spirituality is about transcendence, and Bhagavan Das' book gives us a first-person account of what transcendence really looks like. Such books are rare and precious. Even his preachments are few, far between, and usually descriptive of some important truth. This passage captures the spirit of both the story-telling and the sermonizing:

"I have done it all. I have done the deepest, most intense spiritual practices. When I was doing my one hundred thousand prostrations at Bodh Gaya, I had my board and I was out there at four in the morning for three hours, one hundred thousand prostrations. . . sixty to seventy thousand prostrations into doing this, I did a prostration, and I completely slide off the board into infinity. I went into this complete realm of golden light and bliss, I saw nothing but golden Buddhas shining a light upon me. And I opened into a whole realm. And then I got up and did the next prostration. . . In a way, that's what life is. Life is like doing prostrations. . .The point I'm getting to is that it takes one hundred thousand prostrations to get one good one."

If you need some fuel to start you on your next thousand prostrations, this is a good place to start.

Look at us through the lens of Bhagavan Das and his spiritual journey. He comes along initiating much of the West into, new to us, Spiritual and Metaphysical systems. No stone goes unturned in his mad rush to get higher, to be "more" here now, as if that is possible. And he would have us believe this to be the case. We begin with the angst, the restlessness. With him we leave suburbia behind, only to find it coloring our journey every step of the way. We become lost again and again in forms, in rituals, in escapism, fleeing our own shallowness. Our ideals drive us through the sixties, we become hedonists with Bhagavan in the seventies, power-mongering materialists in the eighties, and Prodigal Children Here and Now in the waning of the nineties. I half imagine our real families await our return, do they not Bhagavan? Children and women left behind, for the sake of my soul, my journey, my enlightenment, my latest fad. So, the irony becomes one where we imagine we can leave behind what is given to us, for us to care for and nurture, so we can "finally get it". Your a long way from Home Bhagavan. May we all learn from your tale of seeking, that is in fact, Our Tale as a Whole, as well. Bhagavan Das, is Freedom found by running away from It Here Now?

A wonderful spiritual memoir that ranks with Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi, with a dash of sixties' psychedelia flavor.

It details Bhagavan's journeys through India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, his meeting many Indian and Tibetan saints and teachers, and being embraced by the people who later popularised the Eastern spiritual movement in America; namely Allen Ginsberg, Alan Watts, and Ram Dass.

Bhagavan Das was there first - he watched as India and Nepal became overrun with hippies looking for Eastern wisdom after LSD gave them their first hunger for another reality.

After Ram Dass published Be Here Now, it set off another influx of Americans going over to India, and helped inspire Bhagavan's rise to fame in the states after coming home from seven years in the East.

Now, twenty-six years later, Bhagavan Das puts pen to paper to tell his own story, one that is infinitely deeper and more compelling than the one that was originally told in Be Here Now.

It also accurately portrays the hardships and internal divisions one goes through on the path to enlightenment. A worthwhile book, the kind of book I wait years for.

Books of this quality, conveying this range and depth of experience, and also being so enjoyable to read, are simply too few and far between. Cherish this one while it's here now. It's one I plan to read over and over, as I have done with W. Somerset Maugham's book about the original Dharma Bum, The Razor's Edge.

I remember picking up _It's Still Here (Are You?)_ and paging through it a few times before finally purchasing it. The book simply haunted me; I came back to it again and again. Finally, I bought it, read it, and read it to my wife. We both reacted in the same way: completely captivated by this man who was so balls-to-the-wall about everything that he did. If he did anything, he did it all the way. And he spoke with this uncommon honesty: no effort to look good or spare his reputation. His words and example shone with total sincerity.

When Bhagavan Das' latest recording, _Now_ (produced by Beastie Boy, Mike D.), came out, I was totally hooked. I searched out an opportunity to be with him, and was delighted to find that he was to be only a two-hour drive from our home in a few weeks timevotio.

It was. Bhagavan Das is the same in print, on disk, or in person: all-out devotion to the Divine Mother, yet completely down-to-earth in his practical advice. You scratch him anywhere and love shows through.

Bhagavan Das' story and music comes from a deep well, hollowed out in his heart through incessant, ecstatic singing to the Divine Mother, his Idyll and Muse. She is everything and everyone, life and death, joy and suffering. She is immediately accessible in worship, the active cultivation of what Bhagavan Das calls one's "feeling tone."

Singing with him offers one an opportunity to be swept up into Bhagavan Das' own bhava, an attitude of spontaneous, passionate identification with the Deity. When the energy of complete affectionate attention occupies the center of one's awareness, one's obsessive preoccupation with oneself relaxes, and there's just the feeling of intimate, yet infinite, openness. Like one long, uninterrupted "Yes!" shooting out in all directions from the still-point at the heart.

Bhagavan Das is a genuinely radiant being. Read his stories, listen to his music, chant with him in person if you can. You'll then experience his depth and genuineness for yourself. And, very likely, you'll find your own spiritual practice enlivened as a result. This is the best of all possible outcomes in any encounter.

"Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good!"

This is probably not a book that will make much sense to hard-headed "thinking types". But for anyone with a nuanced understanding of religious devotion and yogic experience, it is a great story. It is, in a way, a myth in the un-making. Bhagavan Das, for all his obvious faults, has a most sincere, humorous and profound sense of life. The "holy man" he was once imagined to be (and perhaps, imagined himself to be) is laid to rest in this reminiscence of a life lived intensely, unconventionally and sometimes, in some ways, badly. The subtext of this strange hagiography -- or perhaps, anti-hagiography -- is that sometimes, in order to know God, we have to err extensively in ways that are most human. Such was the case with many great saints-- such as Augustine, or even the Buddha, who was once a hedonistic prince with a harem. This is not to imply that Bhagavan Das is necessarily a saint. However the book contains an implicit message, one that I take to be a very positive: in the midst of life's complications, uncertainties and moral ambiguities, enlightenment sometimes shines through. As Leonard Cohen sang, "There is a crack in everything...that's how the light gets in."