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44.
From Bindu to Ojas.
San Cristobal, New Mexico: Lama Foundation, c. early 1970. First edition. Lge. sq. 4to. Wrappers, printed on brown paper, with colour mandala paper label affixed to upper cover. Handbound with twine. The first edition of this enormously influential guidebook to enlightenment, a countercultural landmark that subsequently became a bestseller in a reformatted form under the title 'Be Here Now'.
The book's origins, which feature words from a series of lectures given by Ram Dass in New York City, lay in his first trip to India in 1967, where the transformation from Richard Alpert to Ram Dass occurred. It began to take shape in 1969 during a visit to Esalen in Big Sur, and developed further when Ram Dass drove to the Lama Foundation near Taos in New Mexico where Steve Durkee (a former member of USCO who had collaborated with Alpert and Timothy Leary in the mid-'60s), began a collaboration illustrating his teachings, together with several artists resident at the commune.
Ram Dass described the production process in a lecture soon after its completion: "They start with these four-foot pieces of cardboard and this book is 108 pages and each day they meditate from five to eight in the morning - there's a group of five of them - and then all in silence… they hand rubber-stamp each page, all the letters of the page, and then the artists do all the sketching around the thing. Then the whole thing is photo-reduced and shipped to Japan where it's printed on rice paper and hand stitched because it's an experiential-type document."
The book, originally part of a box that also included booklets and an LP record, was first mailed out in early 1970, though few of the boxes have survived intact. Copies of the book are often missing the cover mandala, present on this one; minor marking to the front cover and showing a few signs of use, but overall a Very Good copy of a seminal work that introduced many in the west to Eastern mysticism (not least, Steve Jobs), and paved the way for the New Age movement.
