All methods are traps. In my relation to my guru, at first my love was so strong, all I wanted to do was rub his feet and look at his form and just be around him. Then, as time went on, not that the love grew less, the love grew different, until I was very fulfilled just being at a distance in relation to him. It kept growing deeper and deeper until I really didn’t care whether I was with his form anymore. I started to relate to him in a way where it wasn’t that man in India anymore, it was the essence of love, and I began to experience it in myself in relation to him. The whole quality of the dynamics of the situation was changing as I was growing in wisdom and as my heart was opening and my surrender was greater.

When I have kidded about it I said, I worshipped his form until I realized that that was just the doorpost and I was just rubbing the doorpost- I had to look through the keyhole and each surrender led me in and in and in. It was a method that took me right back to myself and to beyond form. In the presence of love a lot of the qualities of renunciation or intellectual discriminations that are really difficult when you are trying to do them in a rajasic, “I can do it!” way, are indescribably easy in the presence of that unconditional love.

Those of you who have had a really powerful love relationship will recognize what it is like to care more about your beloved than about yourself. Your favorite food comes on the table and your main concern is that the other person has enough of it, not that you get enough of it. You are fulfilled that they should eat it. When you have a child, that’s the kind of experience you have. People say, “aren’t you self-effacing, aren’t you sacrificing your child,” but it isn’t sacrifice, it’s joy. All austerities with a dry heart are heavy, but with love they become, “Oh, I’ll do this for my beloved. I’ll give this up, it will get me closer!” When you really want to get close to your beloved, you can’t give things up fast enough.

Ram Dass, 1973

Original Article

Talking about Maharaji, I get speechless. On the physical plane he is a jungle sadhu who in recent years has started to spend more time in temples around northern India that devotees have built in order to try to capture him, or hold onto a little bit of that light. And he appears in one, and stays for a little while, and then just when they get all their rituals in order to hang onto him forever, he’s hone. In the middle of the night he just disappears again – I mean, not in any astral sense, he just gets someone with a car to take him off somewhere, and nobody knows where he’s gone, and then he turns up somewhere else. And he floats around in that way, so that nobody can really control that kind of light in him.

When you’re with him, when I’m with him, I experience many levels. At the personality social level, he’s often infuriating and frustrating and Mickey Mouse and repetitive and childlike and stubborn and willful and playful and funny and an old man and a little child and very concerned and very indifferent, and that’s one level.

At another level, when I’m in his presence, I experience ecstasy and bliss from the depth of the love that our relationship has for me. And that’s the drunken kind of love where I often find myself just dissolved into tears because I’ve just never experienced such profound love from any being. And often just when I’m going into that he will interrupt it with some question like “How much money does Stephen make?” or something like that just to bring me back to the plane. He keeps me very firmly down on the physical plane until my work is done. He doesn’t allow me to just float around in bliss very much when I’m around him.

[caption id=”attachment_1100” align=”alignleft” width=”350” caption=”image from http://alchemicalarchives.blogspot.com”][/caption]

Then there’s a deeper level, like when I first met him he asked me why I’d come back and I told him it was to purify myself more. He said “I am always in communion with you.” And I have more and more deeply understood that to be the case, and in fact that’s now who he is for me. He is a being who is with me always, and sometimes he’s with me so closely that I am him - I’m saying things to people or I’m acting a certain way towards people and I look at their reaction and I see that they’re not reacting to me, they’re reacting to him. That is him just coming through me completely. And at that point I don’t feel his presence because in some sense I am his presence. And then the rest of the time I just feel like I am constantly hanging out with him at a very subtle plane. And at this plane I just feel him as this gentle, firm guide, who’s slowly drawing me towards himself, just pulling me ever so gently. And there’s no rest, it’s a continuous process. And I take almost everything that happens to me as a part of his teachings to me, I take everything if I can remember. If I get uptight about wanting to do good about something, I see him saying to me “Well, you’re still caught, aren’t you? You really still care, don’t you?” And I can just constantly talk with him all the time at that level.

~Ram Dass, 1973

Original Article

Just a few weeks before the construction of the house started, Baba arrived. Since the old lady had gone away, the atmosphere was peaceful. Ma and Maushi Ma had already become very close to him. For them, Babaji was a very wise and dear member of their household. His talks with them would always be intimate and affectionate.

Ma and Maushi Ma and Didi were deeply religious and became close with Baba from the first day he came. He actually began asking about each and every detail of the family and advising them. My mother and auntie would discuss even the minor things of the household with him and he would solve all their problems, family or financial or material. He could be so very affectionate, behaving just like a son to his mother. “Ma, bring me food … I am feeling hungry. Kamala, please scratch my back.”

Babaji at first called me by my name, Sudhir, or just “Profes­sor.” It was in 1961 that one day he started calling meDada [elder brother]. Others followed, but not my Ma and Maushi Ma. He asked them why they called me by name and not Dada. When they said that a son is not addressed so, he said, “When he is my Dada, he is your Dada also.”

One day I was alone with him and he asked me, “Your friends are not coming now. They must be warning you about the danger of coming under the influence of a baba and being close with him. They love you and therefore they warn you for your own good. Am I wrong?” I had no reply to give. He was right.

I was rather an outsider at the beginning, and I was not psychologically or mentally prepared for the difficulties and disturbances his coming created. I was quite interested in social and cultural life, going to the pictures, making friends, addressing various kinds of cultural gatherings, meetings, debates, and I had a very large circle of friends. They would come and gather together just like members of the family. Now when Babaji began coming, there was no place for them to come and sit. Also, many of my friends did not like the idea. “Oh, you have become the victim of some baba!” When his visits contin­ued, they would say I was wasting my time. In spite of all their solicitations, I could not change my new way of living. I was losing my interest in my old life, but I could not think that Babaji had anything to do with it. For me it was just like dry leaves falling from the tree, without anybody’s hand behind it.

Excerpt from By His Grace

by Dada Mukerjee

Original Article

Babaji could be so very affectionate, behaving just like a son to the Mothers. His great power, the miracles and such, no doubt were there, but the very soft, delicate, sweet and innocent impressions left by him provided a perennial source of joy—that human aspect.

At night in Allahabad, Baba would take his food in his small room and the Mothers would sit with him. Didi would be busy prepar­ing the chapatis and my duty was to carry them one by one to him. After he finished his food he would go on talking to those Mothers in a very relaxed mood. Sometimes he would take two spoons and begin to play on the head of one of the Mothers. Once Didi made some curd and gave quite a large tumbler of it to Babaji. He took a whole spoon­ful and put it on the head of one of the Mothers. Fortunately, her sari was over her head. Such kinds of things would go on.

One time when Babaji was at our house, he went for his toilet and gave me his blanket, “Here, you hold it.” I put it on the cot and was standing near him because he was talking. He began abusing me, “What have you done with my blanket? You have left it there. Look what they are doing!”

I turned and saw that Didi, my mother, my auntie, and Siddhi Didi had picked up that blanket and were actually smelling it. When I came to them they said, “Look here. It has the odor that comes from the body of a newborn child.”

Babaji shouted, “Where is my blanket!”

One day in the house, Baba stopped before a picture of himself as a younger man. “Whose photo is this?” he said. Since it was a photo of himself, of course, I did not reply. Then he whispered, “How did you recognize?” I suddenly realized that this photo was of Maharajji as I had first seen him so many years ago in Dakshineshwar.

One day when Maharajji was not in Allahabad, my mother prepared khir, a delicacy that is often offered to the gods or god­desses. My mother put it in a big bowl and said, “If Babaji comes today, it will be very good. I will have this khir to serve him.” Of course, she was not really expecting him.

Much later in the day after we had taken our food, Babaji suddenly came. “You have prepared khir? I have come for it.” Ma was so happy to see him eating it. When he was finished, he said, as if suddenly remembering, “Oh, what a mistake I have made! Today is ekadasi [a day of fasting], and here I am eating khir!” Now this was Babaji’s way, the sweetness that we remember.

Excerpt from The Near and the Dear

by Dada Mukerjee

Original Article

Babaji was known as a great saint — a highly realized soul with all the spiritual powers. Writing about Baba, Swami Vijayananda, a disciple of Anandamayi Ma, called him “a yogi whose name radi­ates an aura of mystery and miracle.” We saw many of his miracles coming one after another; they continue even now. They are excit­ing, often entertaining, but sometimes disturbing. Once at Kainchi, after what had been for me a very painful experience, I had to tell him that I was not interested in his miracles; he was Baba, and that was enough for me. His acceptance came in the form of one of his ineffable smiles. So far as the mysteries are concerned, not only have I not been able to solve any of them, but they have become more mysterious day-by-day.

One morning Babaji was in his small room in Kainchi. A sadhu with a half-dozen of his disciples came for Baba’s darshan. I took them to his room. After they had taken their seat, Babaji said, “This is Mahant Digvijaynath, a great saint. Bow at his feet.” When another person came, Babaji made him bow as well. Babaji smiled and asked people to bow low to the saint instead of touching his own feet. But when the third one came and Babaji repeated his words, the Mahant stood up and clasping Babaji’s feet, with tears in his eyes, said, “Baba, you are the saint of saints sitting before us, and you are making people touch my feet, taking me to be a saint.”

“A saint can be known only by one who himself is a saint.” That is what has been said by the wise. So we cannot have — at least speaking for myself — any pretension of knowing Babaji, the great saint. In the Bhagavat Gita we learn that a saint is a person with a dual personality — the divine and the human. Many of us have seen the human person in Babaji, but that doesn’t mean that we can claim to have seen the divine person in him.

In a saint, the divine person is encased in the human frame but is not entirely identical. The bottom of the human and the top of the divine stand far apart from each other. There is a co-mingling in the inner space, and in noble human beings, some of the divine qualities merge entirely with their human qualities, destroying all distinction between human and divine. I am saying this about Baba from my own experience of him. I have never seeing him wearing his divine crown, but I have always seen his divine qualities of love and compassion. He was always ready and alert to mitigate the sufferings of the helpless by taking their pains upon himself. His body became a honeycomb of diseases. This was the price he had to pay for his compassion and his readiness to help.

Every individual suffers from some kind of physical and men­tal pain. But with many, hunger or disease of body or mind become acute. One of Babaji’s visible methods of helping people was by feeding the hungry, arranging medical treatment for the sick, and giving money and materials to the helpless. The brief interlude of his life in the ashrams was spent in caring for the hungry and curing the sick, like the head of a household busy with his large family. Those who visited his ashrams, especially Kainchi, saw how prasad was being served throughout the day to all and sundry without any dis­crimination. For some it was prasad, an auspicious token of spiritual elevation, but for many more it was a whole meal for the stomach.

Seeing that food was being given in such large amounts, some persons complained that the food was being wasted. Babaji was un­relenting and continued to ask us to give in plenty. “Give more, give more, Dada.” No doubt Babaji would never allow food to be wasted or abused, but his idea of abuse and waste was different from ours, so the bhandara continued, giving food to the needy.

Some persons have suggested that one of the reasons for his - choice of Kainchi and Bhumiadhar for ashrams was to be in direct contact with the helpless — particularly the shilpakars, the forsaken ones. They fell easy victim to the allurements of the preachers who approached them with loaves of white bread, biscuits, etc. After sev­eral bhandaras at Bhumiadhar, he said one day, “Dada, the preachers do not come anymore because they have seen that their ‘double rotf (white bread) and biscuits cannot fight with your puri and halwa.”

There were also other methods of mitigating the sufferings and hardships of the people coming to him. They were seldom done in the public gaze, but they were going on every day. Some poor farmer would come and say, “Out of my one pair of bullocks, which is my only source of living, one has died and I have no money to purchase another.” An old woman would come and say, “My daugh­ter has reached marriageable age, but I have no money to pay for her marriage.” Another comes with his tale, “My brother is suffering from tuberculosis and I have no money for his treatment.” Such things would go on all the time. Few would leave disappointed. It was never publicized, but help was always coming from him in some form or other.

Excerpt from The Near and the Dear

by Dada Mukerjee

Original Article

I first met Ram Dass about thirty-five years ago at the Hilda Charlton Thursday night teaching and kirtan. A hundred seekers at St. Luke-In-The-Fields Episcopal Church on Hudson Street in Manhattan. Ram Dass had taken my friend and neighbor, Danny Goldberg, to the meeting a week or two before, and Danny had so immediately fallen in love with it that he strongly exhorted me to go. Despite my lingering British bloody-mind skepticism, I went.

It simply changed and rearranged my whole life, no hyperbole. Out of the visions and wisdom of Hilda, the Masters came through that meeting in a line, from Maharajji to Yogananda, from Ramana Maharshi to Shirdi Sai Baba, from Anandamayi Ma to St. Francis of Assisi, and all the other saints in between. It put me on the path. I was swept up in the Maharajji satsang very soon after that, and instantaneously, felicitously, became a happy part of their amazing multi-dimensional, multi-talented, multi-devotional family. And, kinda crucially for me, they were the most fun, wisest, and wittiest spiritual types around.

I was so so FORTUNATE to have this happen to me. I wasn’t there, in India with Maharajji. But I was present at countless meditations and kirtans where it felt like the guru was there. And Ram Dass’s experience became ours for free, and his very presence elevated my mood and left me with an altered, richer awareness. Krishna Das’s killer chanting was the cream in the coffee.

When Ram Dass returned to Hilda’s, after Maharajji’s mahasamadhi in 1973, his words were precious and moving. Nothing sentimental, just solid sentiments. How do you go on when your guru is gone? The loss was inestimable, but Ram Dass effortlessly assured us of His continuing presence that night and has ever since.

In May of 1976, I went to a Bob Marley concert at the Beacon in New York City. Ram Dass and other friends were there, and by the end of an astonishingly riveting and healing show, we all literally fell out on to Broadway. Ram Dass was so completely elated and inspired by Marley’s music that he just took off on to the street divider and danced and leaped around like Nijinsky. We followed him, equally stunned by Bob’s brilliant high chakra reggae music. Then, in that moment, that being there then, still in the magnetic trance of The Wailers’ music, Ram Dass became yet again the light-filled Pied Piper, leading us out of our conditioned rodent-like repressions, like he often did and does as a friend, as an unparalleled orator, as a seminal author, as a blessed and eloquently communicative witness of the guru.

Ram Dass was just totally taken by Bob’s music that warm night and was so innocent yet grown-up about the way he danced on the street. There was nothing remotely hippie dippie about it. It was the dance of the human carbon-based upright biped totally in the present, being here now big time, and the whole tableau of all of us high as kites stays with me to this day, this second.

Towards the end of the Seventies, I went through an extraordinarily painful decline-of-marriage and then divorce. My head was on fire with anger; my body was feeling the effects of depression, despair, Debbie Downer par excellence. One night in our Upper West Side apartment, I just was having a time of it with crowds of tamasic, unpleasant thoughts rolling around in my mind, got freaked out and nervous, and felt like I needed to talk to someone. I called The Hanuman Foundation (had never done this before), twenty blocks uptown, and Ram Dass answered the phone. He knew my basic situation but when he heard the sadness and low energy in my voice, he unhesitatingly suggested we talk immediately at the Foundation. I cabbed up there and Ram Dass spent a potent two hours with me, going through my shit and cleaning up a lot of it. It helped me immeasurably. There are millions of others who have been helped, need I add.

I have never gotten over how G-R-E-A-T a public speaker Ram Dass is. His chock-full-of-anecdotes talks were sometimes a rollicking, verbally genius journey down something that was going on with him back then and sometimes they were pure teachings of bhakti realization, the balm-like directness of the effects of guru and kirtan, the ineffable but tangible power of darshan. So Ram Dass’ lectures were as exquisite as Proust, as smart as Lenny Bruce, as gentle and healing as Yogananda. Even though I hung out with Ram Dass, when he spoke in front of lots of people, his insights penetrated my psyche and cleared up the emotional statics of guilt, remorse, disappointment, confusion, on and on.

So what you got was the mix of high plane consciousness articulation and absolutely down-to-Earth exegesis of daily, erring human life. Ram Dass’s honesty was always like a flash of lightning for me—it cut through the confusion and allowed you to release yourself from unnecessary anxiety. The two streams of Ram Dass’s speeches at that time created a unique whole, holy guide diary for us all. It amounted to a medicine man transformative effect. A shaman with the verbal skills of Spalding Gray, the flashing, incisive humor of Richard Pryor. No kiddin’. You left the place clearer and lighter than when you came in.

That frighteningly gifted side of Ram Dass was one side of the coin. Talking about Maharajji was the other, lovely and thought-provoking side—putting you right there in India during the days of the guru and the Westerners. Replete with Maharajji epiphanies. And always the interlaced funny side, just to keep things in perspective…

In recent years, I have been extensively filming Ram Dass in Maui and what a pleasure! What a total pleasure! Still learning and laughing with him, still here with his guru and mine.

Excerpt from Remarkable Encounters with Ram Dass Enhanced Ebook - now available on iBooks, Kindle and Nook.

Original Article

Once Maharajji had gone from Allahabad to Jagganath Puri with some of the devotees. I could not go because I had to run the household. At about four o’clock one afternoon I was relaxing, my mother and auntie were resting in their room, when I heard some noise from behind the house. Some children were shouting, “Baba, Baba, let us have the flute!”

A man’s voice came, saying, “I am hungry, give me some food.”

I looked out and saw that many children were surrounding a tall fellow with long hair, wearing a long coat. He had a brass flute in his hand. Seeing me, he said, “I am hungry.”

He came and sat just before the door and I went to get some chapatis and dal. I brought them and said, “These are not fresh, they were cooked at noon, but eat them and after that you can have some sweets.”

He would not lift his head, just looked down and said, “Araharki dal, araharki dal. I have not eaten araharki dal for so many years.”

I remembered that Maharajji had brought some sweets from Vrindaban, saying, “This is Biharaji [Krishna] prasad.” I brought some to the man. When he had finished and was getting up, I said, “Wash your mouth, wash your mouth,” as there was dal on his beard. But he would not, and when I insisted he only washed his flute. When he was leaving I said, “Baba, you can come whenever you like. If I am not at home, my mother and auntie will welcome you.”

He said, “I have been searching long for the house where bhakti [devotion] and Lakshmi live.”

During all this, Ashoka had been standing nearby. Just like a statue. Later she related that while recently in Delhi, she and a friend had gone out in a car with Maharajji. They had stopped at the house of a very wealthy man and Maharajji had gone inside, telling them to wait at the gate. While they were waiting, a man came who looked exactly like this man, except instead of a flute he carried a big stick. He said he was very hungry and asked for food, but the gatekeeper would not let him in. He said, “I have come to the house of the richest man in the city and I must return disappointed.”

Two days after that, Maharajji returned. He said to me, “Biharaji gave you darshan.” When the story was narrated, Jivanti Ma asked me, “Dada, on what day did that person come who ate the araharki dal?” I said it was Thursday. Then she said, “We were in Jagganath Puri then and Maharajji had already taken his food. Suddenly at about four o’clock he said, ‘I shall eat chapati and araharki dal.’ He does not eat araharki dal, you know that, he always eats mung dal. So we were rather surprised. Didi said, ‘This is not the time for your food, you have eaten already. Besides, you do not eat araharki dal.’ But Babaji kept saying, ‘I am hungry and you do not give me food.’ So we had to go and get araharki dal to cook for him. That was the same time you were feeding araharki dal to that man with the flute in Allahabad.”

Excerpt from By His Grace: A Devotee’s Story

by Dada Mukerjee

Original Article

“If there is one day in a life that was the end of one thing and the beginning of another thing that was the day I met Ram Dass. Before that I was running around to every yogi who came to America. I remember doing asanas with some guy, some crazy yogi, on the floor of this lower East Village apartment with cockroaches running over my body and mice scampering around with some guy, some crazy yogi. But nothing ever really touched me.

I was living in upstate New York with these maniac Jungian acid-head mountain climbers. And they were saying they were going to see Richard Alpert who had just come back from India and did I want to come? Now they call him Ram Dass. American yogis? Come on, give me a break. I said I’d stay and take care of the goats. So they left. I can still see their car. They had this old beat-up Jaguar sedan. English racing green.

They were supposed to be gone two days and they were gone like three or four days. They returned and drove their car across the dirt road through the field just as I came out of the goat shed. We had two goats: Alice Bailey and Madame Blavatsky. I had just milked them. The car pulls up and stops and the guy whose place it was comes out of the car and he’s like totally insane. There was light shooting out of him. I just said, “Write down the directions. I’m leaving now.” I ran out to my cabin, got back into my old Volvo, and I hit the road through the coldest snowstorm night of the year. It was freezing. I had to drink hot mocha coffee all night long just to stay up. It took me like 14 hours to get there. It was a five-hour drive.

I pulled up. It was a beautiful snow-covered scene. I pulled up in the driveway, turned the engine off and it was like silence. Total silence. My heart went blump. It just leapt, you know. I thought, that was weird. What was that?

Then I went up to the door and knocked. This guy opens the door and he just smiles and points upstairs and I thought I’m getting the fuck outta here. This is too weird. Anyway I went upstairs and Ram Dass was there and we spent the whole day together.

The minute I walked into that room, I felt something that I had never felt before. It was an inner knowing. Without a word being spoken, I knew that whatever it was I was looking for, and I didn’t know what to call it at that time…EXISTED. It was real and was in the world. I didn’t know if I would find it or not, but just knowing that it was real changed my life.

And then it was late afternoon and he said, “You can stay for the evening if you want or you can leave, but whichever it is now is the time to do it.”

I said, “Well I have to drive my school bus in the morning so I have to drive home.”

He had given me a mantra at one point during the day and he says, “Whatever you do, your mantra will protect you.” I thought that’s a weird thing to say. I had to go.

I get in the car and I hadn’t slept the whole night before. I started driving and I got really tired. I drove for maybe an hour or so, then I pulled off the road and I set the alarm clock and put it on the dashboard. I set it for an hour and I went to sleep. The next thing I know I am driving along the road and I dont know where I am. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know where I came from. I don’t know where I’m going. I woke up driving!!! I had woken up in my sleep, turned the alarm off, and hit the road, all the time totally ssleep. Finally I realized I was driving and I remembered him saying, “Your mantra will protect you.” I screamed that mantra all the way from New Hampshire to New York.

But the thing was my whole life changed that day because everything I had dreamed of and hoped was true. Everything that I longed for and wanted but couldn’t really believe was real I realized was real when I met Ram Dass. I didn’t know if I would ever really get a piece of it or not, but I just knew it existed in the world, you could find it, that it really was there. And that made such a difference … It was completely different after that.”

Excerpt from Remarkable Encounters with Ram Dass Enhanced Ebook - now available on iBooks, Kindle and Nook.

Original Article

As I have said before, when I first met Babaji I was not at all interested in sadhus or saints. It was out of sheer grace that he visited our house. Although many unusual things were happening, we failed to realize their importance or to see his hand in them. His visits meant some thrill and excitement and we looked forward to them, but I still looked at him as a kind and affec­tionate guest. A new process started, however, when we moved onto the larger stage of the new house. Many miracles occurred, acting as shock treatments on me. But no less important was the association with some of his oldest and most trusted devotees, whose love and devotion for Babaji were really my eye opener.

The devotees who started coming to our house when it was built included Siddhi Didi and her husband, Tularam Dada, Hubbaji (Hira Lai Shah), and Umadatt Sukla. They were the earlier ones. We had already met Kehar Singh. Then came Mr. Sang, Inder, Thakur Jaidev Singh, and later Kishan Tewari, Jiban, Ram Narayan Singh, and Gurudat Sharma. When these persons started coming, we were un­known to each other. We were in different stations of life, with different professions and interests, but we were like different streams which come together, reach the ocean and become one.

The devotees would be in our house, not bothered by physical comforts or conveniences, but only interested in being close to Babaji, seeing him and hearing him. This did not mean that we were always trying to hang onto him. He might be in one room and we would be in another, talking about him. Whenever an opportunity came, we would sit together and compare notes—what everyone felt about him or whatever new experience anyone had attained.

After eleven o’clock at night we would be free. We would have finished our food and the whole floor would be covered with beds. Sometimes Maharajji would come out and take his seat on a bed. He would ask, “Are you having tea?” We would say no. “Why are you sitting here with no tea?” Then he would see the blankets on Sukla’s bed, and start counting how many were there. “You have got so many layers on your bed!”

Then Sukla would say, with tears in his eyes, “Baba, this is my Didi’s house, and she has given them to me.”

“Oh, your Didi is very generous to you, she gives you so much. But come and look at my bed and see how hard it is!” This was his way of talking. It used to be the most enjoyable time of the whole day—like the members of a family sitting around the loving and indulgent elder, talking and chatting freely, without any restrictions.

As far as these devotees were concerned, they had been with Babaji a long time and all their doubts, all their questions, had been completely answered. They were convinced and intoxicated. But I would not be intoxicated so soon. I was hearing them talking of Babaji as a saint and as God, but still I could not accept it in my heart of hearts. I would only say, “Yes, of course, it must be so,” but I was not believing that. He could not convince and convert me easily. I did not fall headlong like your Kishan Tewari or your Jiban Baba, saying that he is all in all, the divinity incarnate.

In January 1960, the Ardha Mela was taking place in Allahabad. The celebration spread over two months. Hundreds of thousands of sadhus came and set up camp in the area of the confluence of the Ganges and Jamuna Rivers. Babaji had arrived in the beginning of December. Some devotees, including Tularam Dada and Siddhi Didi came in December, but many more arrived in January.

One day in January he went out in the afternoon and got into a car, along with Tularam, Sukla, and a few more of us. We did not know where we were going. We crossed the bridge on the Ganges and reached the ashram of Prabhudatt Brahmachari, a celebrated saint. Babaji got down and I followed him; he asked the others to stay in the car.

Seeing Baba, Brahmachari came rushing over. “Baba, you are so kind to me. You have come!” He took Baba around and introduced him to many sadhus. Then he sat Baba down and brought various kinds of prasad from Vrindaban and Mathura and offered them to Babaji, who accepted them. “Baba, the Ras Lila party from Vrindaban has come, please do stay the night and enjoy the celebration.” Baba readily agreed, but Prabhudattji, who knew Babaji well, said, “Baba, I cannot accept your words so easily.” When he had to leave for a few minutes to take care of

something, he asked the people in the room not to allow Babaji to go. He warned them, “Be vigilant. He escapes very easily.” I did not understand fully what he meant.

Babaji sat talking to the people for some time and then told me that we would go out to urinate. I stood up with him. He told the people he knew where to go. Then he caught hold of my hand and began moving fast. Coming near the gate he asked me to run and get the car started.

When Baba got into it, Prabhudattji noticed and cried out, “He is running away, run after him!” The car started and we drove away.

It was a full moon night and the moonlight was reflected in the Ganges. The motor road was completely empty at the time and we stopped the car, got out and sat there. Babaji was sitting on the road with us around him. He said, “Look at this Ganga, this is not water, but milk. This is pure amrit [nectar].” None of us could actually believe that. After all, the saints and sages talk like that, a language we do not understand. The understanding was to come only after six years.

Babaji had a camp at the Kumbha Mela in 1966, feeding thou­sands of people every day. He stayed at our house and in the afternoon, after taking his food, would go to the camp. Many devotees were staying there.

One day in the afternoon, Babaji, Sukla, a sadhu named Omkar Baba, and I went to the mela and came to the bank of the Ganges near the sangam. There was a very big barge which was empty except for the boatman’s wife, who was preparing food. Babaji got in the boat and I spread the blanket we had brought for him. Sukla had a lota and Baba told him to fill it with water and keep it there. We sat for some time until it was getting dark and Babaji said, “Chalo! When you people sit somewhere you forget everything. It is getting late, let us return.”

I took up the blanket and Sukla took his lota. We got down from the boat and Maharajji, pointing at the lota, told Sukla to offer us a drink. When we looked in the lota we saw that it was fresh milk! Sukla wanted to bring some of the milk home for Didi and the others, but Maharajji said, “No! Throw it away! You want to bring disgrace to me? Throw it!” Then he had Sukla wash the lota out. I then remembered the 1960 mela when Babaji had said, “This Ganga is not water, it is milk.”

Excerpt from By His Grace: A Devotee’s Story

by Dada Mukerjee

Original Article

One morning, Babaji began talking about pujas and prayers and going on pilgrimages. “Prayer and worship should be done by everyone, every day, as the highest obligatory duty to God; visiting temples and pilgrimages should be undertaken only under favorable conditions and suitable times. They are not essential for your worship and religious duties, whereas prayers and pujas are, and must be done in some form or other.” When everyone was hearing him with full attention, he looked at me and said curiously, “Dada, you stay at home.” I did not understand what he meant by that, so I could only reply simply, “Thikhai, Baba.” (All right, Baba.)

While we were sitting that night and talking, Tularam said that what Babaji said was not random, but had something to do with my sadhana, my spiritual endeavor. Staying at home meant avoiding pilgrimages to temples and religious centers. He said that they were not necessary for us, since we had secured shelter at Babaji’s feet; there was nothing rare or extraordinary we could get from pilgrim­ages that we could not get by staying with him.

However, most of the time in pilgrimage was spent in Babaji’s company, and that would not be possible for me if I were staying at home. Tularam had become so intoxicated in his love and devotion to Baba that there was no sense in trying to place before him my own differences and disagreements with his judgment. My silence was taken by him to be full concurrence with his opinion.

Two days later, our morning sitting with Babaji was interrupted by the visit of an old devotee. He wanted to say something in the presence of all of us, but Babaji prevented this, and took him alone to his room. After some time, Babaji asked me to give him prasad and arrange for a rickshaw. While I was going with him to the rickshaw, the man said he was from Madhya Pradesh. When he was young and working under a forest contractor, he had known Baba. Many miracles happened there at that time. He had been cut off from Babaji for all these years until some people said Babaji visited this place in winter, so he had come in search of him. He had wanted to talk before us all, but Babaji took him to his room and told him that he should not talk about those things. Babaji said that when people who had known him for so many years did not believe these legendary miracles, how could these people believe? It would be better if he did not talk at all.

We had been standing before the rickshaw talking for some time when Babaji shouted for me. He had shifted to the study room and was lying silently on the mat laid on the floor. There were several others with him — Tularam, Siddhi, Girish, and a few more of the house. Babaji asked Tularam to hand over his packet of cigarettes to a young man standing nearby. When that had been done, he said smoking was kharabhar (bad); Tularam must not smoke anymore. He asked the boy to destroy the cigarettes and throw them in the nearby basket. Then he pointed to Ram Prakash to bring his packet of cigarettes from the pocket of his silk kurta and to throw it in the basket. Then the boy came with my packet of cigarettes. Holding it in his hand, he said that this was Dada’s packet and he should destroy that also. Babaji stopped him saying, “Give Dada his cigarettes back. Let Dada smoke.”

No one could understand what he meant by allowing me to continue smoking. It was a mystery. Was it because smoking was not harmful for me? We were all left guessing. But when I was sitting with Tularam he said, “Did you understand what this meant? Smoking is not bad for you — at least not now. Babaji knows this, and there must be something deeper behind it.” He went on, saying that he knew that smoking was not good for him; everyone in his family also knew it, but they had not been able to stop him. Babaji knew how much we enjoyed our smoke when we were sitting together — it was actually the lubrication in our unceasing talks, and he would not stop that. But now because he (Tularam) was to go away, his smoking could be stopped. It was grace coming all the time, but in different forms. I did not understand him fully then, but after going over it for all these years, now I do.

Excerpt from The Near and the Dear: Stories of Neem Karoli Baba and His Devotees

by Dada Mukerjee

Original Article

Now, when you get into this place where your thoughts have given up, you are then in a strange state which for us is very very scary. Because you’re not thinking anything. I remember the first time this happened when I went for a period of time not thinking anything and I suddenly got panicked. I thought “oh, I’ve taken too many drugs, look, I’ve blown my mind! I’m not thinking anything!” Because thoughts were money, thoughts were power, thoughts were the game. I’d drive across the country usually with a tape recorder and a pad of paper attached to my thigh and as I’d go I’d have ideas, I’d research ideas and I’d write them down. I’d create designs and proposals and theories and think it all up and dictate letters and suddenly I’m empty. Nothing at all. And then I started to find out this very far out thing: that the emptier my mind was, the more optimal my response was to every situation.

I don’t have any plan for what I’m going to say to you. What I wrote down were the things that said in the catalog about what I was supposed to talk about.  But I had no idea about what to say, but what I say I say. What I say is the result of this situation. If you were a group of Catholic priests sitting here, out would come something entirely different. But what I had to develop was a trust in the fact that when I was not thinking, it was still possible to act, and the Buddha says “as long as you think there is a doer you are still attached”. You only get to the point where you begin to watch from this place where you calm your mind down, this center you get into, what I call “the witness.” You develop a place from which you watch your entire drama go by. Including your own thoughts. It’s like you’re standing on a bridge watching your life go under the water.

Now you’ve noticed that much of the time this morning I’ve been working with these beads.  This is called a ‘mala’ and this looks like ‘well, he’s into a religious mushy trip’, that kind of thing. This is a very exquisite heuristic device for cognitive centering, if it’s not too profane to put it that way. What, in effect, I am doing is I am keeping a mantra going inside which part of the morning has been “ram ram ram ram” and part of it has been a Tibetan mantra, Aum Mani Pedme Hung, keeping all of this going all of the time I’ve been talking to you. In other words, most of the time you’ve been in this room you’ve been busy listening and identifying with yourself as a listener. At no time that I have been in this room have I been identifying myself as a speaker. It’s a hard one. That is there is a place inside where I am sitting where I am watching him speak, just as I am watching him listen. And this is all happening, I don’t think “who I am is what’s speaking.” Speaking IS. It’s going on at the same level you all do, when you drive cars, most of you, when you do it on automatic, you can drive a car and sit and talk to somebody else and make these fantastically complex responses, make all kinds of judgments and you never think about it at all. And your mind is somewhere else, now where is your mind? It’s usually on something else. And that something else can become secondary and you’d be on something else. You can be scratching yourself and driving and talking. Then you can be scratching and smoking and driving and talking and you can get to where you’re doing a dozen things, none of which are conscious.  Well the idea is that you find a place, you start to localize in on a place inside you where the flame never flickers. A candle place inside where the flame never flickers and you sit in that place, absolute calm, content and centered- from which your drama goes by. There’s that thought, there’s that fear. Personality becomes like clothing- body becomes like clothing. And behind it all here I am, and I can make the statement to you that if you were centered in that inner place in you and I in me, the far out thing is that we would be one because there’s only one inner place. And sometimes in a room you can experience a psychic space that we’re all sharing independent of a little drama that we’re playing and talking. I can look into someone’s eyes and continue to talk to them while looking into their eyes and in effect say “here we are, we have this contact, and then there is this contact of talking, you’re listening, I’m speaking and we’re both watching that.” It’s like when Englishmen play tennis, and they’re right at the set point and it’s add in or add out, it’s at a very critical point and it’s a fierce tennis match and just as the serve is about to start they look at each other and they are so conscious that at that point they say “wow, isn’t this great.” That here we are fighting fiercely under this beautiful sun playing this exquisite game. In other words, they are simultaneously living the two levels, a level which is meta to the game role which they’re involved in. Well, finally you live in a place that is meta to all the roles you live in. You live meta to your body, meta to your desires, meta to your feelings, and you start to center in a place. And once you live in that more and more and more, attachments keep falling away. That doesn’t mean actions fall away, but attachments to actions fall away.

This has been an adventure for me to share these experiences because when I came back from India I was told I had to come back because I still had attachments back in the West, and I had to come back and live out my karma until I was ready to come back to India. When I asked what I was to do in America, they said “do your spiritual work” and I asked “what does that include?” and they said “everything you do.” I was told that I just would “do” and everything would take care of itself. So when I am asked, I speak, when I’m not I sit in the cabin. When people come, I teach. And what is awesome to me is that as I come back there are literally, as I go around the country, hundreds of thousands of people who are ready to hear just exactly the thing that I’m involved in. Not because it’s me, but because there is a simultaneity of opening in thousands of people in Vancouver, San Francisco, Chicago, New Mexico, New York. And the thing that is further awesome to me is that all my categories of who we are and who they are break down. Miles of generation gaps and good guys and bad guys, it all turns out to be crap because behind it all here we are. Carl Jung said in his eulogy of Richard Wilhelm who translated the I Ching, he said “it takes somebody who is willing to give up the Western predisposing perceptual framework sufficiently to experience another orientation toward the universe to be able to know what needs to be known outside of one’s own system.” You have to give it up first. And what I felt is that there has been a surrender of my Western model of who I am and how it all works, and at the moment I don’t have the desire yet to bring it back into science or to know I know. I am a student, I am a beginning student in this whole process. And as I understand it, finally, one teaches by one’s being- it isn’t what you say or what you understand, it’s the state of your own existence and what gets communicated to another being. In other words it’s not what you say, but what you are.

Original Article

My mother and aunt were deeply religious and accepted Babaji as the head of the family. Ma would often tell us that the family and the household belonged to Baba and we were all his children. Her whole treatment of him was based on the fact that Babaji knew what was in the minds of everyone and behaved accordingly. He treated them as his Ma and Maushi Ma, giving them all the freedom and indulgence and grace. They reported to him everything going on in the house and sought his advice and guidance for running it. The most important duty assigned to them was to prepare the food and feed everyone coming to him. “Ma khana khilao” [Ma, make food] was his pet method of asking them to feed the people. Often emphasizing the importance of their work, he would say, “Maushi Ma, this is the home of the deity. Here everyone gets his food, so I also get mine.”

My mother was from a very orthodox brahmin family and formerly she could not imagine that a lower caste person would enter the kitchen. None of the servants were allowed to dust or sweep there or bring in the drinking water from outside. Ma was like that and I could not have thought of changing her attitude. But with Maharajji around all those things eventually changed. West­erners came and were entering the kitchen. Ma also became recon­ciled to Muslims entering the house. Maharajji was not forcing her to do this; her whole outlook had changed. She began feeling that all were her sons and daughters. If she is not keeping me away from her kitchen, how could she go on keeping others away? Now, from where had this wider outlook come? Of course, Maharajji had done that, but all he had said was, “Ma, give food to all.”

Ma and Maushi Ma had become accustomed to treating Babaji as their near and dear one, and would talk to him without any formal­ity. Babaji enjoyed that. Whenever he left for any place, they would invariably ask him where he was going, when he would come again, and sometimes they asked him to extend his stay in the house.

Once Babaji came and left two days later. Ma asked him to stay for a few days more. He said, “Ma, let me go now. I have some important work to attend to. I shall return soon.”

Ma said, “You have no work as such—the only work that you have is to run away.”

He laughed and said again that he would return soon. Three months passed and he had not come back. Ma said, “Look, so much time has passed. This is low. He goes on bluffing us.” Babaji arrived a few days later. When they came to see him in his room, the first thing they said was, “Baba, you speak so many lies. You promised you would return soon. Now you have come after three months!”

Babaji replied in his inimitable way, “Ma, where do I go? I am always here. Believe me, Ma, I never speak lies to you. I am always here.”

By Dada Mukerjee from By His Grace

Original Article