Bhagavan Das
b. 1945
“It is all one. Be here now.”
Before he was Bhagavan Das, he was Kermit Michael Riggs, a Californian who left for India in the 1960s and spent years walking the subcontinent as a sadhu — six and a half feet tall, barefoot, hair to his waist, singing the names of God.
In 1967 he met a lost, searching Harvard professor named Richard Alpert and took him under his wing. It was Bhagavan Das who walked Alpert up into the Kumaon hills and into the presence of Neem Karoli Baba — the meeting that would turn Alpert into Ram Dass. The phrase that became the title of a generation’s spiritual handbook, Be Here Now, came from Bhagavan Das’s lips on those roads.
He later returned to the West, recorded kirtan, and continued to teach — but his place in this story is singular: he is the doorway through which Maharaj-ji’s love first reached so many.