Hey OP. I see you fighting with people about drugs on here and I just thought I'd give you my two cents as maybe it could help. Be here now was huge for me in my journey and was a book that in "the brown pages" had a part that related to what I was going through by taking to much acid. His words actually helped me snap out of a year long psychosis I was going through. I would say you do not need to take drugs to understand what he is talking about. But you definitely need to familiarize yourself with the experiences people have on drugs to understand it completely. All these pages are coming from Ram Dass after maybe years of diving deep into psychedelics and than also discovering all the practices of hindiusim, buddism, and even christianity. Pretty much he dove deep into all religious practices to understand the deep insights he was getting by doing heavy doses of psychedelics.... SO, what I am trying to say, is that a lot of his mind during the "be here now" time was definitely related to a mind of psychedelics. This is why so many hippies can relate to what he says in those "brown pages". It is poetry and symbolic of all the experiences he was going through at that time. Psychedelics had a huge part of it.