Table Of ContentJVLiraďe
Love
A l s o b y R a m D a s s
Be Here Now
The Only Dance There Is
Grist for the Mill
Journey of Awakening
CVWiracfe
ove
S T O R I E S A B O U T N E E M K A R O L I B A B A
b y R
a m
D
a s s
A Dutton Paperback
E. P. D U T T O N
N E W Y O R K
Text copyright © 1979 by Ram Dass
Stories copyright © 1979 by Hanuman Foundation
Photographs copyright © 1971 by Rameshwar Das
copyright © 1979 by Krishna Dass and Hanuman Foundation
All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording
or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be in
vented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a re
viewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review
written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper or broadcast.
For ihformation contact:
E. P. Dutton, 2 Park Avenue,
New York, N.Y. 10016
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Ram Dass.
Miracle of love.
1. Neem Karoli Baba. 2. Hindus in India—
Biography.
I. Title.
BL1175.N43R35
1979
294.5*6'10924
79-10745
ISBN: 0-525-47611-3
Published simultaneously in Canada by
Clarke, Irwin & Company Limited, Toronto and Vancouver
Production Manager: Stuart Horowitz
Designed by Jos. Trautwein
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
For
Maharajji
whose presence reveals
how subtle is the path of love.
H I M
A L A V A S
onieni$
Introduction: “When the Flower Blooms . . .
ix
Acknowledgments
xv
. . the Bees Come”
I
Darshan: A Meeting of the Spirit
17
Take Chai
37
Under Maharajji’s Blanket
55
Subtle Is the Path of Love
79
Faith . . . No Fear
89
Key to the Mind
101
God Does Everything
121
The Stick That Heals
145
Embodied Spirit
171
Maharajji’s Teachings: About Attachment
187
v i i i
C O N T E N T S
About Truth
199
About Money
207
About Drugs
225
About Meditation and Service
239
About Anger and Love
251
Like the Wind
263
The Family Man
273
The Touch of Grace
283
Krishna Play
289
Take It to Delhi
301
Sadhana
325
Hanuman
357
Jao!
373
The Great Escape
379
Afterward
399
Glossary
413
\niro6uci\on
“When the Flower Blooms . .
I n 1967 I met my guru. That meeting changed the course of my life, for
through him I came to perceive my life in spiritual terms. In.him I found
new depths of compassion, love, wisdom, humor, and power, and his
actions stretched my understanding of the human possibility. I recog
nized in him an alliance of the human and the divine.
After our initial meeting I remained in India, as close to him as I was
allowed to be, for five more months before returning to America. Be
fore leaving India I had received his ashirbad (blessing) for a book, which
until that moment I had had no thought of writing. Back in the West, I
found many kindred souls open and ready to share what I had received;
and his blessing and their thirst gave rise to Be Here Now.
In 1970 I returned to India and remained with him, off and on, from
February 1971 until March 1972, when my visa expired and I was
evicted from the country. However, with him or away from him, he
remained the source and impetus for my spiritual awakening.
X
I N T R O D U C T I O N
From the beginning, I had wanted to share him with others, but ini
tially he forbade me bringing people directly to him. A relatively few
(several hundred) Westerners nevertheless found their way to him and
were touched at the core of their beings as I had been. On September 11,
1973, he died, or, as the Indians would say, he left his body.
In the succeeding years, I have found that the absence of his body has
not diminished his influence upon my life. To the contrary, with each
passing year I have increasingly experienced his presence, his guidance,
his love, and, each time I have taken myself too seriously, his cosmic
giggle. This suggested the possibility that others who had never “ met”
him in the body could similarly be touched by him. This suspicion has
been confirmed by a surprisingly large number of people who have re
ported that through books, lectures, tapes, and personal contact with
devotees, they have experienced him in a way that has graced their lives.
I speak of him as “my guru,” but in fact I never think of him or our
relationship in such a formal way. For me, he is very simply Maharajji,
a nickname (which means “great king”) so commonplace in India that
one can often hear a tea vendor addressed thus.
Those of us who were with Maharajji meet again frequently in India
or in the West. The conversation invariably turns to recollections of
him. Story after story pours forth, and each story is punctuated with
silence, laughter, or expostulations as we savor its depth and elegance. In
those moments the space becomes rich with the living spirit and we
know that he is among us.
In my travels I have now met thousands of awakening beings whose
open-hearted receptivity makes me want to share the intimacy with
Maharajji to which stories about him give rise. And yet thus far only a
very few stories about him, primarily concerning my personal experi
ences with him, have appeared in print. It was in order to rectify this sit
uation that the present book was undertaken.
Immediately after his death, I encouraged several Westerners in their
plan to travel throughout India collecting stories. They were able to ob
tain some four hundred anecdotes, but, at the time, they found many of
the Indian devotees reticent to speak about him. He had always frowned
upon their talking much about him, and they were still feeling that re
striction. In 1976 two of us were again in India and found, to our de
light, that many of the Indian devotees—who, of course, had known
him far more extensively and over the course of many more years than
we had—were now willing to freely share their treasure of stories. At
that time we collected twelve hundred stories. Since then, with the help
I N T R O D U C T I O N
xi
of another Westerner, we have added an additional four hundred stories
gathered from East and West, thus bringing the total number of stories,
anecdotes, and quotations based on interviews with over a hundred
devotees to over two thousand.
O f course, even a hundred devotees are altogether but a fraction of
the thousands who were touched by Maharajji in the course of his ljfe,
each of whom holds some precious memory and piece of the puzzle. But
lest we would drown in such an ocean of recollection, at a certain point I
made an arbitrary decision to stop gathering and begin to organize what
we already had.
The devotees whose stories are included are from a wide range of
social and cultural positions. Interviews were gathered from important
officials in their offices and from sweepers on the streets. We taped dis
cussions of women from the Himalayan hill villages as they squatted
warming their hands around a coal brazier in the late afternoon. We lis
tened to reminiscences in living rooms, streets, temple compounds,
while sitting around fires under the stars, in cars, hot tubs, airplanes, and
on long walks. Stories were offered by Hindu priests as they puffed on
their chillums (hashish pipes), by professors, police officials, farmers, in
dustrialists, by children and their mothers, who spoke while stirring
their bubbling pots over wood and charcoal fires. Always there was the
same feeling of shy joy at sharing such a private, precious memory with
another. These gatherings to speak about him were indescribably grace-
full.
Having gathered these stories, our next question was how to present
this formidable body of material. For three years I had been working
with this problem, writing and rewriting. My initial effort was more in
the way of a personal chronology, but I found that such a structure did
not easily include all the material, and, additionally, it demanded the
inclusion of much that seemed irrelevant. So I started again, this time in
corporating my personal experiences as merely additional stories and
grouping selected stories around various topical headings. The result is
the present compilation.
These stories, anecdotes, and quotations create a mosaic through
which Maharajji can be met. To hold the components of this mosaic
together I have used the absolute minimum of structural cement, pre
ferring to keep out my personal interpretations and perspective as much
as possible.
But this strategy of sharing with you the material in its purest form
makes precious little compromise for your motivation, for I have ex
xii
I N T R O D U C T I O N
eluded the usual seductive story lines that would make you want to read
further. I did not want to manipulate your desire to want to read about
Maharajji; rather, I merely wanted to make whatever was available to
me, available to you. As you will see, Maharajji demanded that all of us
make some considerable effort to have his darshan (the experience of his
presence). I feel that it is in the spirit of his teachings to demand that
those readers who would have his darshan through this book make a
similar “right” or “real” effort (in the sense spoken of by Buddha in the
eightfold path and by George Gurdjieff).
So if you approach this book with the desire to meet him and have his
darshan in a way that could profoundly alter your life, as it has ours,
then you will want to work with this book slowly and deeply. I can only
assure you that in my opinion each story carries some teaching and is
worthy of reflection. You will neither want to nor be able to read this
book through from cover to cover in one or even a few sittings. Rather,
like fine brandy, these recollections must be sipped slowly and the taste
and aroma allowed to permeate deeply into your mind and heart. And
remember to listen to the silence into which the stories are set, for the
true meeting with Maharajji lies between the lines and behind the words.
For this effort, you will be amply rewarded through meeting a being of
a spiritual stature rarely known on this earth.
It is difficult to separate Maharajji and his teachings from the environ
ment in which I knew him. His form, in its larger sense, is for me India
and the beautiful Kumoan Hills and the Ganges—it is his devotees and
all their tenderness and bickering; it is his temples and the photographs
of him. His teachings were the love of the Earth Mother that I first expe
rienced in the Indian villages—and my dysentery and visa hassles, and
the sacred cows and the rickshaw rides, the teeming markets and misty
jungle walks. And yet, while the drama of being with him was played
out on the rich stage of India, the value of the setting seemed merely as a
reservoir of experiences through which the teachings could occur. He
himself did not seem particularly Indian, no more Eastern than Western.
Although we met him in Hindu temples, he did not seem any more
Hindu than Buddhist or Christian.
He used all the stuff of our lives—clothing, food, sleep; fears, doubts,
aspirations; families, marriages; sicknesses, births, and deaths—to teach
us about living in the spirit. By doing this, he initiated a process through
which we could continue to learn from the experiences of our lives even
when we were not with him. This accounts at least in part for the conti
nuity in his teachings that we have all experienced since his death.
I N T R O D U C T I O N
xni
I hope that through working with these stories, you can tune your
perceptions in such a way as to meet and begin a dialogue with Maharajyi
through the vehicle of your own daily life events. Such a moment-to-
moment dialogue, carried on in one’s heart, is a remarkable form of
alchemy for transforming matter into spirit through love.
I have been hanging out with Maharajji in just this way. And I can’t
begin to tell you . . .
Soquel, California
March igyg
