I love Neem Karoli Baba. One of my favorite stories is about him getting a shave. The barber starts to tell him about his son who's run away and disappeared. Baba suddenly jumps up from the barber chair and runs out. Several weeks later, the son returns. He was several hundred miles away, when suddenly a fat guy with a half lathered face told him he better get home.

Neem Karoli Baba is not a "higher being." That's pure crap and a misunderstanding of what Bodhidharma calls "The Emptiness." Likewise, there are nice people, some of whom were mentioned in this article, who are certainly nice and well meaning, but who really know nothing about all this Emptiness stuff.

Neem Karoli Baba actually did, and does. You can't speak about authentically Enlightened people in the past tense. Time has stopped for them, and where can they then go?