Miracle of Love: Stories about Neem Karoli Baba

India

… the Bees Come

When the flower blooms, the bees come uninvited.

—RAMAKRISHNA

WE CAME TO Maharajji’s feet, impelled by our yearning for the living spirit and drawn by his light. We came from Europe and Great Britain, the United States and Canada, Australia and South America. As Herman Hesse said of the fellow travelers in his Journey to the East, each had his or her own special reason for making the journey but all also shared a common goal. We came with our varying hues of cynicism and faith, open or closed heartedness, sensuality or asceticism, intellectual arrogance or humility. To each, Maharajji responded uniquely: now fiercely, now tenderly; now through ignoring us or sending us away, now through making much over us; now through reading the mind and heart; now through playing dumb. He did what was necessary to quiet the mind and open the heart so that the thirst that had drawn us all to him could be slaked.

I was traveling with a young Western fellow in India. We had come to the mountains in a Land Rover I had borrowed from a friend, in order to find this fellow’s guru to get some help with his visa problem. I was in a bad mood, having smoked too much hashish, been in India too long, and not particularly wanting to visit a guru anyway.

[The following is adapted from the book, Be Here Now.]

We stopped at this temple and he asked where the guru was. The Indians who had gathered around the car pointed to a nearby hill. In a moment he was out of the car and running up the hill. They were following him and appeared delighted to be able to see the guru. I got out of the car. Now I was additionally upset because everybody was ignoring me. I ran after them, barefoot, up this rocky path, stumbling all the way. I didn’t want to see the guru anyway and what the hell was this all about?

Around a bend of the path I came to a field overlooking a valley, and in the field under a tree sat a man in his sixties or seventies with a blanket around him. Surrounding him were eight or nine Indians. I was aware of the beautiful tableau—the group, the clouds, the green valley, the visual purity of the foothills of the Himalayas.

My traveling companion ran to this man and threw himself on the ground, doing dunda pranam (full-length prostration). He was crying and the man was patting him on the head. I was more and more confused.

I stood to the side, thinking, I’m not going to touch his feet. I don’t have to. I’m not required to do that. Every now and then this man looked up at me and twinkled a little. His glances just made me more uncomfortable.

Then he looked at me and started speaking in Hindi, of which I understood very little. Another man, however, was translating. I heard him ask my friend, You have a picture of Maharajji?

My friend nodded, Yes.

Give it to him, said the man in the blanket, pointing at me.

That’s very nice, I thought, giving me a picture of himself, and I smiled and nodded appreciatively. But I was still not going to touch his feet.

Then he said, You came in a big car?

Yes. (I hadn’t wanted to borrow the car in the first place, not wanting the responsibility, so the car was a source of irritation for me.)

He looked at me, smiling, and said, You will give it to me?

I started to say, Wha … but my friend looked up from the ground where he was still lying and said, Maharajji, if you want it, you can have it. It’s yours.

And I said, No, now wait a minute. You can’t give away David’s car like that. The old man was laughing.

In fact, everyone was laughing—except me.

Then he said, You made much money in America?

I reviewed all my years as a professor and smuggler and very proudly said, Yes.

How much did you make?

Well, I said, at one time—and I sort of upped the figure a bit further to inflate my ego—twenty-five thousand dollars.

The group converted that into rupees, and everybody was awed by this figure. All of this was of course bragging on my part. I had never made twenty-five thousand dollars. And he laughed again and said, You’ll buy a car like that for me?

I remember what went through my mind at that moment. Although I had come from a family of Jewish fund-raisers, I had never seen such hustling as this. He doesn’t even know my name and already he wants a seven-thousand dollar vehicle, I thought.

Well, maybe … I said. The whole thing was by now upsetting me very much.

And he said, Take them away and give them food. And so we were given magnificent food, and then we were told to rest. Sometime later we were back with Maharajji and he said to me, Come here. Sit. So I sat down facing him and he looked at me and said, You were out under the stars last night. (This, of course, was the English translation of what he said.)

Um-hum.

You were thinking about your mother.

Yes. (The previous night a few hundred miles away I had gone outside during the night to go to the bathroom. The stars had been very bright and I had remained outside, feeling very close to the cosmos. At that time I had suddenly experienced the presence of my mother, who had died nine months previously of a spleen condition. It was a very powerful moment, and I had told no one about it.)

She died last year."

Um-hum.

She got very big in the stomach before she died.

Pause … Yes.

He leaned back and closed his eyes and said (in English), Spleen, she died of spleen.

What happened to me at that moment I can’t really put into words. He looked at me in a certain way and two things happened. They do not seem like cause and effect, but rather appeared to be simultaneous.

My mind began to race faster and faster to try to get leverage—to get a hold on what he had just done. I went through every super-CIA paranoia I’d ever had: Who is he? Who does he represent? Where’s the button he pushes to make the file appear? Why have they brought me here? None of it would jell.

It was just too impossible that this could have happened this way. My traveling companion didn’t know about any of the things Maharajji was saying, and I was a tourist in a car. The whole thing was just inexplicable. My mind went faster and faster.

Until then I had had two models for psychic experiences. One was: Well it happened to somebody else, and it’s very interesting and we certainly must keep an open mind about these things. That was my social-science approach. The other one was: Well, I’m high on LSD. Who knows how it really is? After all, I had had experiences under the influence of chemicals in which I had created whole environments.

But neither of these categories applied to this situation, and as my mind went faster I felt like a computer that has been fed an insoluble problem—the bell rings and the red light goes on and the machine stops. My mind just gave up. It burned out its circuitry, its zeal to have an explanation. I needed something to get closure at the rational level and there wasn’t anything.

At the same moment I felt this extremely violent pain in my chest and a tremendous wrenching feeling, and I started to cry. I cried and cried and cried, but I was neither happy nor sad. It was a kind of crying I had not experienced before. The only thing I could say about it was it felt as if I had finished something. The journey was over. I had come home. (R.D.)¹

In the words of Dada, We all think we are chasing the guru, but really, you see, he is chasing us.

All I knew about the hardships of India made me sure I didn’t want to go there, yet in October of 1971 I found myself at JFK Airport with two friends, waiting to board a plane for Bombay. A large crowd of our New York spiritual group had come to see us off, or, as I suspected, to make sure we actually got on the plane. We were all three in varying states of panic, wondering what we were doing. Both the panic and the confusion were to intensify a hundredfold when we actually arrived in India.

We three, like nearly all the group of Westerners we eventually joined around Maharajji, first heard of him through Ram Dass. Yet, though my life totally changed after the night I first heard Ram Dass lecture, I did not feel drawn to go to India. Partially, the mystique of what going to India represented in those days made it seem presumptuous for me to even consider the trip. Nor was it clear to me that the power of the awakening I had experienced was, in fact, a connection with Maharajji—that he could possibly be my guru. We had all heard how difficult it was to find him. And what if he sent me away as he had others?

Now, three years later, I was going to India, but I still hadn’t the temerity to chance rejection—I was going to see some south Indian saints and perhaps later visit up north, if there seemed any hope of being received.

Coming off the plane in Bombay, we were met by an airline representative (in India, a feat in itself), who advised us that we had reservations on an afternoon flight to New Delhi and that tickets were waiting for us at the counter. This was a stunner, but after a twenty-six or twenty-eight-hour fight we were too dazed to feel more than mild wonder. After all, we were in India—anything could happen here. (This mystery of tickets and reservations to Delhi was never solved in any reasonable way.) In Delhi, we thought of going to the American Express office to ask for messages, as we had planned to do in Bombay. After all, since we were here, there must be a message. There was: Go to Jaipuria Bhavan in Vrindaban. Maharajji expected soon. It was signed, Balaram Das. We didn’t know who that was.

We learned that Vrindaban was not far from Delhi and that we could get there by an afternoon train. Somehow we never thought of pausing in the relative Westernness of Delhi. The message said go and go we did. We thereby learned the first great lesson of India: Never travel by third-class unreserved coach! It was the equivalent of a three-hour ride on a New York City subway at rush hour, with the addition of sunshine, dust, and engine smoke pouring in the open windows.

Eventually, we battled our way off the train at Mathura, and in the glowing dusk of the Indian plain, whose beauty we could not then appreciate, we found a bus to take us to nearby Vrindaban. There we were put down in the large bazaar of what to all appearances was a thirteenth-century village of winding alleys full of people, rickshaws, dogs, pigs, and cows. By now it was dark and most of the illumination came from lanterns in the shops lining the streets. We asked for directions to Jaipuria Bhavan in our nonexistent Hindi and were directed first up one alley and then down another. It grew later and the shops were beginning to close. Our panic grew with our exhaustion and hunger, for even if we came upon the hostel we would not recognize it, for every sign was in Hindi. We began to envision ourselves huddling for the night among the cows in some doorway.

Then suddenly approaching us appeared a Westerner—someone whom I’d met the year before in California. In hysterical relief, I threw my arms around him, but he, an old-timer in India, was totally calm in the face of our emotion. Oh, yes, Jaipuria Bhavan was just there, around the next bend.

During the next few days, the small Western satsang (community of spiritual seekers) began gathering at Jaipuria Bhavan, awaiting Maharajji’s arrival at his Vrindaban ashram (monastery). Many of them we knew from America, including the mysterious Balaram Das whom we’d known as Peter. We heard their stories of Maharajji with relief and anticipation. He didn’t sound so fierce and terrifying after all. Then word came that he was here! The next morning we could go to have his darshan.

I arrived at the ashram a little late with Radha, nervously clutching my borrowed sari and the offering of flowers and fruit. We circumambulated the temple and pranammed (bowed) to Hanumanji², then approached the gate in the wall between the temple garden and the ashram. How well I remember that green wooden door! When we knocked, the old chaukidar (gate-keeper) opened it a crack and peered out at us. Then, as each time afterward for as long as I was in India, I wondered if he would let us in. But he stepped back, pulling the door open for us. I looked through, down the vista of the long verandah along the front of the ashram building. At the far end, Maharajji was sitting alone on his wooden bed. When I saw his great form, my heart jumped so that I staggered against the gate. That first sight of him is still piercingly clear in my memory.

Radha had already rushed through and I ran after her, losing my sandals along the way. It was all so simple and familiar—bowing at his feet, giving the fruit and flowers (which he immediately threw back in my lap), weeping and laughing. Maharajji was bouncing, smiling, and crowing in English, Mother from America! Mother from America! During that first darshan, though Maharajji spoke mainly in Hindi, I understood everything without the interpreter who stood nearby. And I recognized the love that had poured through Ram Dass, that had irresistibly drawn me to India: Here was the source.

Everybody else was all excited, but I was pretty skeptical about the whole thing. Still, I was the first one off the bus and found myself running immediately into the temple. Even though I’d never been there, I somehow knew all the turns to make in order to get to where Maharajji was. As I came around the corner he started bouncing up and down and exclaiming all these things in Hindi that totally confused me. I came to him and bowed down at his feet.

He began to hit me really very hard. I had both a sense of great confusion and a feeling of the most incredible at-oneness that I’ve ever felt in my life. He was so totally different from what I had expected yet so familiar at the same time. At that moment I felt all the suffering, all the pain from the last several years dissolve completely. And though the pain was to come back again in the future, the love I felt at that moment made it all a lot less painful later.

I had heard of Maharajji while wandering in India, and I finally found him in Allahabad. My first meeting was in the early morning. Maharajji was in a room on the bed, with a Ma (Indian woman devotee) sitting before him on the floor. There was fruit on the bed. Then out from under the big blanket came this hand. He took some big apples and kept bouncing them off the Ma’s chest, but she was totally absorbed in meditation. I sat watching, then suddenly Maharajji looked directly at me. He was like a tree, so grounded, so organic. He flipped me a banana and it landed right in my hand. I wondered what I should do with the banana, a sacred object. I figured it would be best to eat it.

I had come to India from the United States as a devotee in a very intense religious sect—the guru was the guru, the final and great savior. After only two weeks in his presence, I was dearly disillusioned about him and began to wander about India on my own, still hoping to find the one true and pure guru somewhere. Several times in my wanderings someone would tell me of Maharajji and that he was nearby. But I would not go, as I felt no particular pull. Finally I was down near Bombay, still seeking the true guru, when an old friend showed up. He looked so clear and light that before we even spoke I determined to go to wherever it was he had just come from. He had just left Maharajji in Vrindaban. I packed my bags and was gone that afternoon. Twenty-four hours later I was before Maharajji. There were a number of Westerners there. Maharajji did not speak to me but he kept looking very intently at my heart chakra (psychic energy center in the heart area of the body), and what I kept hearing, as a voice within me, was that my search was over. I had come home.

I was sitting for several months in Buddhist meditation in Bodh Gaya. About two-thirds of the way through the second month, this funny-looking little man started to appear in the upper-right-hand corner of my awareness. Every so often he’d smile. I wondered who he was and just watched him come and go. Later I began to suspect that it was Maharajji, whom I’d heard about the year before.

At the end of the retreat I opened a copy of The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa and a picture of Maharajji fell out. When we finally got to Vrindaban where he was supposed to be, we found the gates of the temple locked. Feeling very sad that I had come all this way only to find the gates locked, I went across the street and sat on the culvert.

All of a sudden I felt as if Maharajji had come leaping over the wall, for I was completely surrounded and filled with the greatest love I had ever experienced. I burst into tears. People passing by saw this crazy, long-haired Westerner sobbing his guts out. They just looked at me and smiled and continued on.

I didn’t know what was going on, but I had the clear sense of being home. There was absolutely no question that I was exactly where I wanted to be. A month before I couldn’t have imagined such an experience, but here I was, so relieved, so happy. My heart seemed to have burst open.

Shortly afterward we were allowed into the temple. Maharajji asked me all the usual questions, like who I was and where I was from and what I did. And then suddenly I found myself bowing, with my head at his feet—and feeling totally right about it. And he was patting me on the head, saying something like, Welcome, glad to see you made it. Welcome aboard. All I wanted to do was to hang onto his feet, and I didn’t care at all that this wasn’t in any way consistent with my self-image.

My wife had met Maharajji and had come to get me in America and bring me back to meet him. When we first went to see Maharajji I was put off by what I saw. All these crazy Westerners wearing white clothes and hanging around this fat old man in a blanket! More than anything else I hated seeing Westerners touch his feet. On my first day there he totally ignored me. But after the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh day, during which he also ignored me, I began to grow very upset. I felt no love for him; in fact, I felt nothing. I decided that my wife had been captured by some crazy cult. By the end of the week I was ready to leave.

We were staying at the hotel up in Nainital, and on the eighth day I told my wife that I wasn’t feeling well. I spent the day walking around the lake thinking that if my wife was so involved in something that was clearly not for me, it must mean that our marriage was at an end. I looked at the flowers, the mountains, and the reflections in the lake, but nothing could dispel my depression. And then I did something that I had really never done in my adult life. I prayed.

I asked God, What am I doing here? Who is this man? These people are all crazy. I don’t belong here.

Just then I remembered the phrase, "Had ye but faith ye would not need miracles.

Okay, God, I don’t have any faith. Send me a miracle.

I kept looking for a rainbow but nothing happened, so I decided to leave the next day.

The next morning we took a taxi down to Kainchi to the temple, to say good-bye. Although I didn’t like Maharajji, I thought I’d just be very honest and have it out with him. We got to Kainchi before anyone else was there and we sat in front of his tucket (wooden bed) on the porch. Maharajji had not yet come out from inside the room. There was some fruit on the tucket and one of the apples had fallen on the ground, so I bent over to pick it up. Just then Maharajji came out of his room and stepped on my hand, pinning me to the ground. So there I was on my knees touching his foot, in that position I detested. How ludicrous!

He looked down at me and asked, Where were you yesterday? Then he asked, Were you at the lake? (He said lake in English.)

When he said the word lake to me I began to get this strange feeling at the base of my spine, and my whole body tingled. It felt very strange.

He asked me, What were you doing at the lake?

I began to feel very tight.

Then he asked, Were you horseback riding?

No.

Were you boating?

No.

Did you go swimming?

No.

Then he leaned over and spoke quietly, Were you talking to God? Did you ask for something?

When he did that I fell apart and started to cry like a baby. He pulled me over and started pulling my beard and repeating, Did you ask for something?

That really felt like my initiation. By then others had arrived and they were around me, caressing me, and I realized then that almost everyone there had gone through some experience like that. A trivial question, such as, Were you at the lake yesterday? which had no meaning to anyone else, shattered my perception of reality. It was clear to me that Maharajji saw right through all the illusions; he knew everything. By the way, the next thing he said to me was, Will you write a book?

That was my welcome. After that I just wanted to rub his feet.

It was in London. I was on a bus with many empty seats. Then an old man carrying a blanket got on the bus and chose to sit on the window seat beside me, so that I had to stand up to let him in. This annoyed me somewhat, but as he sat down he gave me such a sweet, gentle smile that I forgot my annoyance and sat thinking to myself, What a sweet old man. Before the bus came to the next stop on its route I turned to look at him again—but he was gone!

The bus had not stopped again since he had gotten on. How could he have gotten off without my standing to let him pass?

Later I went to India on the advice of a friend who had been there, and I saw a picture of Maharajji—it was the same man! I located Maharajji and found out that on the day I had seen him on the bus in London carrying a specific plaid blanket, a woman in India had given Maharajji just such a blanket, which he was wearing that same day.

THE INDIANS ALSO came to Maharajji with varying degrees of desire and readiness. But for them it was different. They had grown up in a culture in which holy beings abounded, and the parents of most of them had had gurus. For the family, the guru was a combination of grandfather, worldly and spiritual guide, and reflection or manifestation of God. They often treated Maharajji more as a man and less as a God, and yet at the same time they could surrender more easily to him. For them, surrender was not a personal matter of ego as it was for us. In the group of stories about initial meetings described by some of Maharajji’s closest Indian devotees, both the differences of culture and the similarity of opening and love are apparent.

I have known Maharajji since I came into this world. My father and mother were both devotees—my father since 1940 and my mother since 1947. Because our parents were devotees and because he was always being discussed in our family, we were all born devotees of him.

I first met Maharajji in Bhowali many years ago. Maharajji frequently visited a certain Ma’s home there. I told her that I had heard about him but had never met him, and I asked her to tell me the next time he came. After a week or so Maharajji came at night. In the morning a message came for me and I went at once. I found him lying on a cot. He looked at me, then closed his eyes for a moment. He knew at once who I was, who I had been before, and what I was going to do in this world. In a few seconds, he said, I am very pleased to see you, which he repeated many times. Maharajji had walked from Nainital to Bhowali during the night. He said, You have brought me here! I shall see you again in Haldwani. Then Maharajji boarded a bus for Almora. (In those days he traveled mostly by bus, not by car.) People warned me not to take him seriously: Neem Karoli is a big liar. He very seldom tells the truth. You can’t depend on him.

In any case, I went to Haldwani. After a few days someone came to my room and told me that Maharajji had come to Haldwani and gave me his address. I saw him then and have been with him ever since.

I first met Maharajji in 1950 when I rode with my boss and Maharajji from Nainital to Haldwani. My boss, a government minister, was already a devotee of Maharajji’s and had offered him this lift. But I was smoking and acting as if Maharajji was just another person. In 1958, after the death of my mother, I was in Bhowali with my father, on vacation. We spent a night in the government rest house there and my father became ill in the night, in much pain. They called the Bhowali doctor who gave him an injection but to no avail. The next day, doctors from Nainital came and said that he needed an emergency gall bladder operation. That same day I went to consult doctors at the nearby TB sanatorium. Preparations were then underway for a puja (ritual of prayer) to celebrate the opening of a small Hanuman temple built by the doctor there who was a devotee of Maharajji. I stayed on to watch. Maharajji arrived but stayed hidden. I grew curious to meet him. I heard that Maharajji had put someone in a trance, so I watched a while from a distance before leaving.

That evening a messenger from the Nainital bus station came to me and told me to visit a certain Baba Neem Karoli. Since there are so many babas, I dismissed the message. But at night I went to the bus station and inquired as to who had sent this message, but no one knew. This aroused my curiosity even more. I asked where I could find this Baba Neem Karoli and went there. Maharajji said to me, Your name is so-and-so and your father is very ill.

Yes.

You thought he might die, but God has cured him. Doctors have told you that he should be operated on. But he shouldn’t be. He’ll be all right.

Maharajji gave me two or three mangos for my father, which I fed to him and he began to improve. After a few days Maharajji again called me. I went but didn’t touch his feet. I was planning to return to Delhi and Maharajji said, You’re going to Delhi. You drive too fast. Take your father carefully and he’ll be all right. This touched my heart and I touched Maharajji’s feet. My father never had the operation and became very healthy, with no relapse.

Since I wasn’t married, I was living with my brother and his wife. When Maharajji came to them I went into the farthest room so I wouldn’t have to be involved with such people, for I thought, "Sadhus (renunciates) are no good. After some time Maharajji came into the room where I was. He walked in, sat down, and said, Sadhus are no good." After that I just became a devotee.

ONE OF Maharajji’s closest devotees for the last twenty years gives the following account:

In 1935 I was on vacation from school and went to Dakshineshwar on a religious pilgrimage. When I reached the place where there were many Shiva temples, a man appeared before me whom I had not noticed to be there before.

My son, the man said, you are a Brahmin? I shall give you a mantra.

I will not take it, I said, I do not believe in it.