Neem Karoli Baba

Neem Karoli Baba (c. 1900 – 11 September 1973), known to his devotees simply as Maharaj-ji, was a Hindu guru and lifelong devotee of the deity Hanuman.

Born Lakshman Narayan Sharma into a Brahmin family in the village of Akbarpur, Uttar Pradesh, he was married young by his parents and then left home to live for years as a wandering sadhu before re-emerging as a revered teacher.

He established ashrams in northern India, most famously Kainchi Dham near Nainital (built in 1964, with a Hanuman temple) and another at Vrindavan, and he taught not through systematic doctrine or formal initiation but through presence, blunt affection, apparently uncanny knowledge of those around him, and an insistence on simple devotion.

His core counsel was extraordinarily plain: love everyone, serve everyone, remember God. He died in the early hours of 11 September 1973 in Vrindavan. Neem Karoli Baba’s importance to the mind-power lineage is largely indirect but substantial.

He became the guru of a wave of Westerners who travelled to India in the 1960s and 1970s, most famously the former Harvard psychologist Richard Alpert, whom he renamed Ram Dass and whose 1971 book Be Here Now carried Maharaj-ji’s bhakti-centred message of love, service, and present-moment awareness to a vast Western audience.

Other disciples, including Bhagavan Das and the kirtan musicians Krishna Das and Jai Uttal, helped seed the Western devotional-chanting and “heart-centred” spirituality that flows alongside the more mentalist manifestation tradition.

The miracle stories that surround him are devotional testimony rather than documented fact; the Atlas records his real, traceable influence as a transmitter of the path of love and service into Western consciousness culture.