Love Everyone (Wisdom of Neem Karoli Baba Told Through the Stories of the Westerners Whose Lives He Transformed)

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Neem Karoli Baba didn’t come bodily to America. Instead, he sent his emissary - Ram Dass. Many of us found our way to Maharajji because of Ram Dass - either after hearing him lecture (the Indians said he had the "gift of Saraswati," the goddess of speech and poetry) or from reading his book Be Here Now, published in 1971. Others, who had embarked on the tantalizing journey to the East looking for adventure, good drugs, or spiritual wisdom, also found Maharajji.

This ragged band of skeptical Westerners came from a culture where it is anathema to bow down before another person and the idea of touching or, God forbid, kissing someone’s feet is unthinkable. But that changed quickly in Maharajji’s presence. We had come halfway around the world to experience the ancient Vedantic sat-chit-ananda-truth, consciousness, and bliss- as it manifested in a toothless old man wrapped in a plaid woollen blanket.

When we met Maharajji, we knew nothing about him or his history; some stories suggested that he was hundreds of years old. It wasn’t until he died in September 1973 that we learned more. We discovered that, after emerging from his underground cave at Neem Karoli, he still honoured his Brahminical duties to his wife, whom he’d been married to as a young boy of nine or ten, to his children and grandchildren, and to his village. His yogic and spiritual powers were vast, but, like the wind, no one could catch him; he was a wanderer who usually spent no more than a few days in a place, which, to the amazement of his Indian devotees, changed when the Westerners arrived. But who he had been and where he had come from were irrelevant when we sat in front of him.

The Indians describe a being like Maharajji as antaryamin - a knower of hearts. Imagine sitting in front of someone who knows absolutely everything about you and still loves you unconditionally. Our thinking, rational, linear minds were quieted by the overwhelming experience of our hearts. We were home. We had made it to the home that’s completely safe, a home built of pure love. And we were transformed.

The Path of Bhakti
For Maharajji’s devotees, love is the heart of the matter. Maharajji gave no lectures, nothing for the mind to hold on to, no formal teachings other than his oft-repeated injunction: Love everyone, feed everyone, and remember God. And its corollary: Tell the truth. The only practices he encouraged were repeating the name of God (mantra or japa), singing the names of God (kirtan), and chanting the forty verses of the Hanuman Chalisa - a prayer to the monkey god, Hanuman, the aspect of God most closely associated with Maharajji. He didn’t teach meditation; often people meditating in his presence were brought back to the here and now with a well-aimed piece of fruit.

We read the books and poetry of the great lovers of God, like Rumi. We sang all sorts of songs to Maharajji, not only kirtan. When Linda Bush was given the name Mirabai (a Fifteenth-century devotional poet), she bought a tamboura (a stringed instrument made from a gourd) and sang bhajans (songs) to Mirabai?s beloved deity, Krishna, the god of love. Rukmini, who had been involved in the Hare Krishna movement, sang such a beautiful Hare Krishna Hare Ram that it brought tears to Maharajji’s eyes. And because Maharajji talked often about Jesus, we sang old gospel songs. Sometimes on bus rides back to Nainital at the end of the day from the temple in Kainchi, we would change the words to rock’n roll songs and Christmas carols and sing to Maharajji that way. Singing opens the heart, and the path of devotion, or bhakti, is all about opening the heart.

Bhakti yoga is a method of learning to live in love, much like medi-tation is a method of quieting the mind and expanding awareness. Ram Dass, these days, looks at everyone and everything in the universe, including the wheelchair that has become part of his life since his stroke, through the lens of "I am loving awareness."

Satsang
For Hindus, satsang means the community of people seeking higher truth, similar to "fellowship? or "brotherhood? in Western religious traditions and the sanga in Buddhism. Some of us spent no more than a few days -with Maharajji, while others stayed for years, but together we formed a satsang, a family of devotees. Then he died, and we were left to deal with the rest of our lives. In the decades since his passing, we have followed and forged many different paths and studied with many teachers in various spiritual traditions, but we all hold our experience with Maharajji in the center of our hearts. And we have each other as companions, best friends, supporters, and gadflies, as we seek to merge what we learned in the East with the realities of our lives in the West.

When we left for India, there were only a few spiritual books or bookstores (such as Weiser’s in New York and the Bodhi Tree in LA); there were no yoga studios on every corner, no meditation centers or teachers in every town, no one singing kirtan, no bhakti or shakti (devotional or spiritual energy) festivals. In the four decades since we came back from India, yoga and Eastern spirituality have become not only part of our lives, but also a large part of the changed landscape of America.

Some of us, like KRISHNA DAS, JAI UTTAL, BHAGAVAN DAS, and the late SHYAM DAS, brought the devotional practice of chanting (kirtan) from India to the West, while others have manifested their experience with Maharajji in ways that have little to do with religious tradition and more to do with service and changing consciousness.

DANIEL GOLEMAN wrote about the behavioural sciences for the New York Times, authored the revolutionary book Emotional intelligence, and works with the Dalai Lama’s Mind and Life Institute to explore consciousness and the brain. MIRABAI BUSH established the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, which encourages the use of contemplative practices in college courses, the legal profession, and _even high-tech environments like Google. DR. LARRY BRILLIANT has gone from helping to eradicate smallpox with the World Health Organization to directing Google’s philanthropy to overseeing the Skoll Global Threats Fund. GIRIJA BRILLIANT helped found Seva Foundation with Larry, Ram Dass, Wavy Gravy, and others to use skillful means to reduce cur- able and preventable blindness around the world.

TOM FORRAY works with the criminally insane; SITA THOMPSON does hospice work and was a prison chaplain; ANASUYA WEIL practices Tibetan medicine; RADHA BAUM combines East and West as a nurse practitioner and acupuncturist. BALARAM DAS GOETSCH is an anesthesiologist and lawyer. RAM DEV BORGLUM directs the Living/ Dying Project, helping those with life - threatening illnesses to find emotional and spiritual support. STEVEN SCHWARTZ founded the Center for Public Representation, providing mental-health law and disability law services. LAMA SURYA DAS is the founder of the Dzogchen Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, author of many books, and a teacher of Tibetan Buddhism. KRISHNA BUSH is the producer of acclaimed documentaries, including the journey into Buddhism trilogy. RALPH ABRAHAM is a mathematician and chaos theorist. RAVI DAS JEFFERY is now retired after three decades as a Superior Court judge in Barrow, Alaska.

Others are psychologists, artists, musicians, teachers, caretakers, entrepreneurs, realtors, and web designers. These are, of course, our professional roles; in addition, we have our family and societal roles. Beneath what we do, however, is who we are as souls. No matter how large or small our individual sphere of influence, we try to bring loving awareness and greater compassion to what we do and those we serve.

However, as a group We hold no single vision of who we are, who Maharajji is, and what we mean to each other. Maharajji gathers different ingredients for his satsang "stew"-all of us pungent with our array of "stuff"- and he occasionally picks up his long wooden spoon, throws in a new spice or another potato, and stirs the pot. Ram Dass used to call it the "sandpaper effect." Our conflicts, our coming together and breaking apart, our positive and negative interactions help smooth out the rough edges of our consciousness. As a group we are often as dysfunctional as many of our families of origin. But there’s a difference: we are related to our family members by blood, but our satsang is a family of the heart.