10/09/2025
Hi Friends,
Will you have a glance at my latest Seeking newsletter? It's called The Dead Guru Who Won't Leave Me Alone. This week’s Seeking is about Neem Karoli Baba—the dead Indian saint who keeps showing up in my life—and about the strange intelligence we call love. Not romantic love, but the kind that seems to hold the whole universe together, the one that slips in when reason runs out of words. I’ve spent years trying to understand who or what this being is, and I still don’t know. Maybe that’s the point. What remains, whenever I stop trying to explain it, is a felt sense of presence—warm, electric, and vast—reminding me that love isn’t an emotion we manufacture, but the atmosphere we’re already breathing.
The Dead Guru Who Won’t Leave Me Alone
I think a lot of us are just looking for a place to set our doubt down—so the part of us that believes and the part that questions can stop arguing long enough for us to take a deep breath.
I’ve spent half a lifetime caught in that fight, trying to square the sacred with the rational so that my mind and my heart could finally belong to this one body.
Is this true for you? Do you hear or feel the low hum of something real but unspeakable beneath the noise of ordinary life? Do you, like me, sense that something intelligent and tender is moving through our world just beyond the field of proof and certainty?
For years I tried to ignore the hum. As a magazine journalist, I built a life on facts and clever language. I trusted what could be verified, mapped, or measured. I trusted evidence and proof, and I mistrusted anything that couldn’t be placed in a category or given a definition.
And yet, throughout the years, something wild and barely imaginable kept slipping through the cracks.
Did this happen for you too? Does the universe keep reminding you that proof is only part of the story?
For me, this pull toward—let’s call it—a wild god began in the late 1990s in the form of a dead Indian saint named Neem Karoli Baba. Famous as the guru to Ram Dass, the American psychology-professor-turned-spiritual teacher, Maharaj-ji, as he was known, left his body in 1973 when I was six years old. But somehow this dead guru keeps showing up in my life, in my mind, and especially in my heart.
Yes, I know how strange this sounds to most people today. We are all so conditioned by society to be materialists. We’ve sadly come to believe that “stuff” is all there is.
I guess I never completely fell for it.
And trust me, I’m not the guru type. I’ve been allergic to blind faith and the cult of personality. But somehow this presence feels different.
Neem Karoli Baba didn’t teach. He wasn’t about hierarchy or method. He was a being.
People who sat with him say he loved you from the inside out.
And me? I never met him. But even after his death, his intelligent, mischievous love has rearranged me from the inside out.
I’m not the only person who’s experienced this.
My journey with Neem Karoli Baba began one night in the late nineties on the floor of the Unitarian church in Santa Fe. Thirty or forty of us, mostly women and men who practiced yoga, sat cross-legged as Krishna Das played his harmonium and sang Indian religious chants. His voice was both rough and tender, and he linked them with stories told in a New York accent and laced with profanity.
Within minutes of the first chant, my chest was vibrating like a cello.
A few months later, I spotted a sign on a bulletin board for an in-person talk by Ram Dass at a retreat center in the New Mexico desert. His post-stroke voice was halting but soaked with grace—which happened to be the topic of his talk.
A few years later, my friend Claudine handed me her old copy of Ram Dass’s Be Here Now. I’d never read—nor seen—a book like that. Soon I was buying CDs of his talks and listening to them over the hum of my tires on long desert drives.
I felt the truth of his words, a different type of truth than mere fact.
I didn’t know it then, but I was already feeling the mysterious pull of Neem Karoli Baba. A pull to Mystery. A pull to Love with a capital L.
And then I began fixating on returning to India, where I’d traveled as a journalist years before. I didn’t have a choice. I needed to spend time at his temple in the village of Kainchi, in the jungle-covered Himalayan foothills.
And so I bought a plane ticket, and I went in search of the feeling that was growing inside me.
Today I understand better. This draw toward the dead guru wasn’t happenstance. It wasn’t mere obsession. It was spiritual transmission—though not in the formal sense. It was the world itself speaking in his shape, asking to be noticed. It was love. The kind that underlies everything.
Still, despite all the spiritual “evidence” I was accruing, I kept clinging to reason and to my thinking brain like a railing on a balcony twenty stories up.
And yet something truer, more ancient, and simultaneously more correct to me, kept tugging at me, asking to be trusted.
Eventually I did trust.
I didn’t abandon my need for facts. But I opened to something more true.
Back home in Colorado, I built an altar. I began to sit in the pre-dawn and light candles and incense. The smoke coiled upward like a nervous system searching for sky. I began to talk to Maharaj-ji’s photograph, to his grinning, trickster face, and asked him to fix things I couldn’t. I asked him to make me less resentful, less self-centered, less delusional…more loving.
The past few weeks in Santa Fe had been sweet ones. I was teaching my Writing the Soul classes, working one-on-one with memoir clients, and spending long mornings with Hasita in the garden by the koi pond. The light fell through the cottonwoods in long gold threads; the sound of water and wind mixed like breath. Tommy, my six-year-old cattle dog, had been sick most of the summer but was finally wagging his tail again. Hasita is funny, stubborn, and full of grace; her compassion stretches wide. She teaches me softness just by being herself. Maharaj-ji teaches me to stay there—to hold the softness even when it feels like too much. Maybe that’s why, when the pull toward Taos came, I didn’t resist it. I wanted to feel closer to the source of that tenderness I’m still learning to trust.
And so last Sunday I drove north from Santa Fe to Taos to visit the Neem Karoli Baba Ashram and Hanuman Temple. I needed a spiritual check-in with my dead guru.
Ahead of time I set an intention. I would ask him for a word.
The sky was rinsed clean, the air crisp with September clarity. Past Tesuque, the aspens flashed yellow against dark firs. North of Española, pueblos stood quiet, adobe walls the color of bread crust. The road tightened into a steep canyon. The Rio Grande flashed below to the left. Black volcanic cliffs rose on both sides. Wire mesh glittered over the rock as if it were the desert’s nervous system. My pulse kept time with the curves, and that question returned: Was I losing my mind, or finally finding my heart?
By the time I reached the Neem Karoli Baba Ashram, the light had softened to gold. The smell of roasting chiles drifted through town. I parked beside the low adobe wall and sat with the engine ticking. Every pilgrimage begins with hesitation—the wish to be seen by the divine and the wish to hide from it. I could almost hear my old journalist friends teasing, Wetzler’s gone mystical. He’s bonkers.
Maybe I had.
But this: a world that mocks love is the real insane asylum.
Inside the courtyard the air smelled of marigolds and ghee. A bearded devotee sat cross-legged on the mandir floor with a harmonium on his lap. Behind him, a large Hanuman murti rose from the altar, orange and gold, his face both fierce and tender, his tail curling upward toward the rafters. Around him hung framed photographs of Maharaj-ji—smiling, eyes half-shut in laughter, wrapped in his plaid blanket. The walls were lined with candles in brass holders; the air shimmered with incense, sandalwood and smoke. The devotee began to sing Om Namah Shivaya, his voice carrying through the room like a bell struck underwater. Then he moved into the Hanuman Chalisa—forty verses of praise to the monkey god of courage and service.
I sat a few feet away and joined him. The harmonium’s reeds breathed and trembled. Each syllable vibrated behind my ribs. The sound climbed my spine. The air felt thick, fragrant, and alive. The candles flickered as though the sound itself was breath.
Do you know that feeling? The moment when a sound or utter silence cracks your shell and you realize you’re not separate from anything after all.
When the music stopped, silence poured in like water. I stayed seated. Outside, cottonwoods shimmered. A few wanderers crossed the courtyard—scruffy, sun-creased faces. They seemed like people who no longer fit our culture’s narrow idea of worth.
Nobody here seemed to belong, which somehow made the belonging deeper. I felt the loving presence of Maharaj-ji in the courtyard.
I sat on a bench drinking chai. My jeans were tight at the knees. Sweat cooled along my spine. I whispered Ram Ram Ram Sita Ram. Tommy had been sick all summer. And my body and mind were exhausted from the stress and fear that he’d die.
And then, as I was about to stand up and head back to my car, a single word arrived: mercy.
I could almost hear Maharaj-ji laugh and Ram Dass’s voice saying, Your mind is tired? Good. Stay in your heart.
As the word echoed, the high desert blurred and Kainchi came into focus. Suddenly, it was seven years ago, and I was back in that narrow Himalayan valley, the jungle rising steep and green on both sides, the air heavy with pine and woodsmoke. The Kosi River ran fast and silver below the road, cutting through smooth stones, its sound carrying like breath through the trees.
I was crossing the narrow bridge over the stream again, monkeys darting around me, their babies clinging to their backs. On the far side the orange temple roofs caught the sun and glowed like embers. I turned left, down the steps, into the courtyard where men sang and bells rang. The sound of the kirtan spilled from the halls like light, voices layered with drum and harmonium. I sat near the cot where Baba had once rested, the woven rope pressed into the earth, and emptied myself, asking the divine to pour in.
A few days later, I climbed the steep path through the pines to the cave of a hundred-year-old yogi, one of Baba’s disciples who had lived there for decades. Inside, the light was dim, blue smoke curling from a brass lamp. We sat cross-legged in silence until he began to chant, low and rhythmic, the syllables rising and falling like the pulse of the mountain itself. I joined him, the chant threading us together. When the sound faded, I asked him questions—not clever ones, just the simple things that rise from a heart wanting to understand: What is real? How do we serve? How do we love when the world wounds us? He answered mostly in gestures and smiles, a wave of the hand, a widening of the eyes. And then he leaned forward, placed his palm on the crown of my head, and something in me broke open. When I left the cave, the world tilted; for twelve hours everything breathed—trees, rocks, air—alive and awake.
What I experienced that day wasn’t an escape from reality—it was discovering what reality was going to be for me. I experienced the opening of an inner eye, a way of seeing that changed how I moved through the world. Love was no longer an emotion or a virtue; it was the structure of being itself, the connective tissue of creation. This isn’t what we’re taught in school or in church or in the markets of achievement. You learn it only when something cracks you open—when beauty, grief, or devotion rearranges your sense of what is real.
Even now, I resist it. The rational mind tries to shut the door, to label it heatstroke or projection. But I know better. The universe is stranger, more intelligent, than we allow. Reason is a fine tool but a terrible god. What could be saner than love?
Sometimes I see it this way: Neem Karoli Baba has given me, a former depressed journalist, a whole new nervous system. He speaks through laughter. He doesn’t need my religious guilt; he wants my joy and presence. He doesn’t inspire guilt. He says, You’re already forgiven—now get on with loving.
Sometimes I think Baba has been translating the language of love back into a tongue I can understand. He once told Ram Dass that Jesus and Hanuman were the same—that both were born only to serve, that both loved love itself.
Hearing that the first time unsettled me. What Neem Karoli Baba and Jesus share isn’t devotion, but an open-hearted willingness to suffer with and for the world. Maybe that’s what salvation really is: a loving presence so deep it turns into mercy.
It’s taken most of a lifetime to unlearn a punishing God. Each day I still feel the tug of those old voices, the ones that mistook shame for devotion. But love keeps finding a way in.
Slowly I returned to Taos. I lingered in the courtyard for a few more minutes. The air had changed—the colors seemed fuller, even the gravel under my shoes seemed to vibrate. People were talking softly near the temple steps. The bearded man folded his harmonium like a bird’s wings. I felt emptied and filled at once. The word mercy was still moving through me, low and steady, like water under ice.
When I left the ashram that afternoon, clouds were gathering over the mountains. I thought of all my outer journeys—the ice of Greenland, the Himalayan passes, the deserts of the Middle East—and realized they’d all been rehearsals for this one: learning to travel inward without getting lost.
The drive home was a descent through thunder, rain, and light. The highway rode the top of the mesa before plunging into canyon. The Rio Grande’s silver water shimmered below, cutting through black basalt. Lightning flashed across the clouds; rain hammered the windshield. Each flash illuminated the wet rock walls, and for a heartbeat the whole world felt self-aware.
By the time I reached Santa Fe, the storm had thinned to mist.
The streets glistened, mountains veiled. I sat at a red light, flannel damp, beard whiter now, glasses slipping down my nose. I realized Maharaj-ji wasn’t somewhere else. He has become the circuitry of my being, as real as stone, as real as storm, as real as mercy.
Each morning when I sit by my altar and look at his photograph, his grin loosens something in me. I’m almost sixty now, still stubborn, still learning to give myself the mercy he keeps offering. Outside, the streetlights glowed in the rain. Inside, mercy hummed low and steady, like thunder still rolling somewhere just beyond the mountains.
And you—if you’d been there beside me in that mandir, or later on the canyon road with thunder laughing overhead—what presence would you admit is already walking beside you? What word would rise if you asked for one, and what might it make of you if you let it stay?
