Neem Karoli Baba Quotes

IT’S BETTER TO SEE GOD IN EVERYTHING THAN TO TRY TO FIGURE IT OUT.

Feed Everyone

At times Maharajji’s behavior reminds me of a story Ramakrishna tells of a saint who asked a snake not to bite but to love everyone. The snake agreed. But then many people threw things at the snake. The saint found the snake all battered. “I didn’t say not to hiss,” said the saint.

Once a sadhu offered me some land that he had, so that I could have an ashram for fellow Westerners. I asked Maharajji about it. He said, “He wants to give you his attachment. It’s not a pure gift. If it were pure he’d just give it to you instead of talking about it.” (R.D.)

SEE GOD IN EVERYONE. IT IS DECEPTION TO TEACH BY INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES AND KARMA.3

The true devotees of God never wear saffron, carry malas (prayer beads), or put on sandalwood. You can’t know them unless they want it, and then you can only know them as much as they allow.

Maharajji would quote Kabir: “It is easy to dye your cloth, but it is hard to dye your heart.

Often one goes for one thing and finds another.

Whose presence reveals how subtle is the path of Love.

I take the dust from the lotus feet of the guru to cleanse the mirror of my mind.” So begins a sacred ode to Hanuman.

The eyes of a saint are always concentrated on the Supreme Self. The minute he is aware of himself, sainthood is lost. – Neem Karoli Baba

Once I was chastising Maharajji for giving photos to people who were worldly and didn’t care about him. He said, “You don’t understand me. If I tell a man he is a great bhakta (devotee). I am planting a seed. If a person already has the seed planted and growing, why should I plant another?” I said, “You are telling these drunkards, liars, and dacoits that they are real bhaktas. They will just go home and carry on their old behaviors.” Maharajji said, “Some of them will remember what I said of them, and it will make them want to develop this quality in themselves. If ten out of a hundred are inspired in this way, it is a very good thing.

When Maharajji came out you never knew what to expect. He could do the same thing a week in a row until you’d think, “Well, he’ll come out at 8:00.” Then he might not come out all day, or he might just go into another room and close the door and be in there for two days. You had to learn to expect the unexpected. One day he came out and all he said all day long was “Thul-Thul, Nan-Nan,” repeating these words to himself like a mantra. Days went by like this and somebody finally said, “Maharajji, what are you saying?” And it turned out to be an old Behari dialect, and all it meant was “Too big, too big, too little, too little.” When he was finally asked why he was saying this, he said, “Oh, all you people, you all live in Thul-Thul, Nan-Nan; you live in the world of judgement. It’s always too big or too little.

For many years before I met Maharajji I was searching, going here and there, studying this and that. I began following strict yogic codes—brahmacharya, 3:00 A.M. risings, cold baths, asanas, and dhyan. It was during a period when I had given up coffee and tea that I met Maharajji. Tea was being offered to all of us, and I didn’t know what to do. I said nothing but did not accept a cup of tea, and Maharajji leaned over to me, saying, “Won’t you take tea? Take tea! You should drink the tea. It’s good for you in this weather! Take tea!” So I drank the tea. With that one cup of tea, all those strict disciplines and schedules were washed away! They seemed meaningless and unnecessary; the true work seemed beyond these things. Now I do whatever comes of itself.

LOVE IS THE STRONGEST MEDICINE. IT IS MORE POWERFUL THAN ELECTRICITY.

We are all God, and to love everyone is to remember that. This now is my only prayer: Let me remember.

We’re all just walking each other home. —RAM DASS

Sub Ishwar hai

Dina Bandhu, Dina Nath, Mere dore tere hath

Maharajji invited a famous pundit to come to Kainchi and recite the Shrimad Bhagavatam. This man was used to reciting before large and very receptive crowds, and he complained to Maharajji that on this occasion he had to recite to only a few illiterate villagers. Maharajji gently rebuked him and said, “Don’t worry. Hanumanji is listening.

Once I asked Maharajji how it is possible for a man to remember God all the time. He told me the story of Narada (the celestial sage) and the butcher: Vishnu (one of the aspects of God) was always praising the butcher and Narada wondered why, since the butcher was always occupied and Narada spent twenty-four hours a day praising Vishnu. Vishnu gave Narada the task of carrying a bowl of oil, full to the brim, up to the top of a mountain, without spilling a drop. The task completed, Vishnu asked how many times Narada remembered Vishnu. Narada asked how that would be possible, since he had to concentrate on carrying the bowl and climbing the mountain. Vishnu sent Narada to the butcher and the butcher said that as he works he is always remembering God. Maharajji said then, “Whatever outer work you must do, do it; but train your mind in such a way that in your subconscious mind you remember God.

Treat every being that you come across as if it were me—it may well be.

About the miracle babas Maharajji would say, “What is this? This is all foolishness.” He could do miracles, but the greatest miracle was that he could turn one’s heart and mind toward God, as he did for me.

The saints are actually the teachings and scriptures personified. They do not teach by quoting or reciting the scriptures, but by living and practicing them, and sometimes through a little acting.

It is impossible for one who is lodged in mundane consciousness to evaluate definitively the competence of any guide to transformation and transcendence, without having already attained to an equal degree of transcendence. No number of “objective” criteria for assessment can remove this “Catch-22” dilemma. Therefore the choice of a guide, path, or group will remain in some sense a subjective matter. Subjectivity, however, has many modes, from self-deluding emotionality to penetrating, illuminative intuition. Perhaps the first job of the seeker would best be to refine that primary guide, one’s own subjectivity.10 Ram Dass (Richard Alpert), who has functioned on both sides of the fence (as a devotee of Neem Karoli Baba and as a teacher in his own right), has made the following complementary observation: Some people fear becoming involved with a teacher. They fear the possible impurities in the teacher, fear being exploited, used, or entrapped. In truth we are only ever entrapped by our own desires and clingings. If you want only liberation, then all teachers will be useful vehicles for you. They cannot hurt you at all.11 This is true only ideally. In practice, the problem is that in many cases students do not know themselves sufficiently to be conscious of their deeper motivations. Therefore they may feel attracted precisely to the kind of teacher who shares their own “impurities”—such as hunger for power—and hence have every reason to fear him or her. It seems that only the truly innocent are protected. Although they too are by no means immune to painful experiences with teachers, at least they will emerge hale and whole, having been sustained by their own purity of intention. Accepting the fact that our appraisal of a teacher is always subjective so long as we have not ourselves attained his or her level of spiritual accomplishment, there is at least one important criterion that we can look for in a guru: Does he or she genuinely promote disciples’ personal and spiritual growth, or does he or she obviously or ever so subtly undermine their maturation? Would-be disciples should take a careful, levelheaded look at the community of students around their prospective guru. They should especially scrutinize those who are closer to the guru than most. Are they merely sorry imitations or clones of their teacher, or do they come across as mature men and women? The Bulgarian spiritual teacher Omraam Mikhaёl Aїvanhov, who died in 1986, made this to-the-point observation: Everybody has his own path, his mission, and even if you take your Master as a model, you must always develop in the way that suits your own nature. You have to sing the part which has been given to you, aware of the notes, the beat and the rhythm; you have to sing it with your voice which is certainly not that of your Master, but that is not important. The one really important thing is to sing your part perfectly.

The whole universe is our home and all residing in it belong to our family...instead of trying to see God in a particular appearance, it is better to see him in everything.

When Babaji has drawn you to him, everything is given to you in his own shadow. One must learn this and drive away worries from the mind.

A man said to Maharajji, “You’ve promised for years to visit my home and you have never come. I’m not going to come to see you anymore, because you won’t visit my home.” Maharajji said, “Oh, I didn’t understand! It’s your home. I had thought it was my home and so I didn’t need to visit.

Silicon Valley is a culture, a people, a point of view. But if the place had to be represented by just one person, it would have to be Steve Jobs. He was a native son who twice plunged into the wilderness. The first foray was in 1974, to India. The nineteen-year-old Jobs did not find the holy man he was seeking, Neem Karoli Baba, a living saint known to his followers as Maharaj-ji, but the trip stirred something within him. On his return to the Valley Jobs kick-started the personal computer industry. The Apple II and the Macintosh were breakthrough products, but the Mac, at least initially, did not sell. Exiled from the company he cofounded, Jobs was a wash-up at the age of thirty. A dozen years later he was asked to come back and save the company from near-certain oblivion. Astonishingly, he did save the company—by moving beyond the computer-on-every-desk paradigm that he had established some three decades before with the Apple II. The iPhone ushered in an age of anywhere-anytime mobile computing. Thus the man who started the personal computer era also ended it. Jobs’s premature death three years later permanently enshrined him in the Valley’s firmament. His life was the stuff of myth—myths that Jobs often encouraged. But Jobs had no magical powers, no superhuman ability to see the future. The truth is both mundane and extraordinary: By sheer determination and cleverness, Jobs became the very man that he went looking for as a lad—the guru, the seer, the wizard. He died at home, in Palo Alto, on October 5, 2011.

Neem Karoli Baba

Neem Karoli Baba, or Maharaj-ji.