Neem Karoli Baba

Neem Karoli Baba — known simply to his devotees as Maharaj-ji — was a twentieth-century Indian saint of the Bhakti and Hanuman traditions whose impact on spiritual seekers from both East and West was extraordinary and often inexplicable. Little is known of his early life; he appeared in various parts of north India associated with miraculous events from the 1930s onward, eventually settling in the Himalayan foothills and establishing a series of ashrams.

His method, if it can be called that, was love. He sat wrapped in a plaid blanket, receiving everyone who came — high-caste Brahmins, untouchables, government officials, Western hippies, beggars — with the same open gaze. Reports of his capacity to know what was in people’s minds and hearts before they spoke are abundant and consistent across cultural and religious backgrounds. He made no effort to produce these effects; they seemed to arise naturally from his state of being.

What catapulted him to global awareness was the arrival of Richard Alpert (later Ram Dass) in India in 1967. Alpert, a Harvard psychologist who had been dismissed along with Timothy Leary for his LSD research, arrived in India with a photograph of his deceased mother and found Neem Karoli Baba correctly describing her condition before he had said anything. The encounter transformed Alpert utterly. He returned to the West as Ram Dass and wrote Be Here Now, which introduced Neem Karoli Baba to an entire generation of Western seekers.

His devotees included Steve Jobs, who made a pilgrimage to India seeking him in 1974 — too late, as Maharaj-ji had died in September 1973. His chief Western devotee Ram Dass described him as the most important encounter of his life. His teaching — ‘Love everyone, serve everyone, remember God, tell the truth’ — remains, for those who received it, the whole of the spiritual path.