2002 Interview: Excerpt from the book ‘Amazing Grace’ by Open Sky Press

An immediate friend, a beautiful young man, a talented musician, and a lover of Truth, Papaji and India. Ram Charan is mature and wise beyond his years. Meeting at Arunachala eight years after our original interview, opened up the second phase of interviews for this book and told the story of Papaji’s death.

‘It was like Papaji without veils when we burned his body. Ultimately, beyond the body, there was such a love. Beyond anything that might have gone on or might have appeared, there was such a love. It was worth every painful grinding of the ego to be open to such a love.’

I was born in Panama, but my parents were from Brooklyn, United States. My father was in the army during the Vietnam era of the 60s. He was assigned to the Canal Zone and that is where I was born. Later on we moved to New York City. I grew up in a typical, suburbanAmerican, dysfunctional family.

My father was a shrink, a psychoanalyst. My mother was a housewife and a folk musician. She is still a good folk musician, and I got my early interest in music from her. My interest in music has stayed with me my whole life. Some of my earliest memories are of big parties of people singing folk songs together.

I loved the time I grew up and my earliest memories are very happy. However, at the age of about four or five I started to be something of a rebel. Looking back, I can see that I intuited that nobody really knew what they were talking about, so I never bought the authority thing. There was always the feeling from a young age that other people really didn’t know better. I turned into a bad kid.

My parents got divorced and I lived with my mother and sisters. My elder sister was a big influence on me. At around ten years of age I was running around with her and her hippie friends, smoking pot and riding my skateboard. I was always attracted to kids a couple of years older than myself. It was as if I was striving toward some greater maturity.

There are a couple of other interests that I remember from my childhood, and looking back, it seems unusual that I had such interests. I liked to listen to Bach and Ravi Shankar. I thought it was great stuff. I played some of it to my eight year old friends, and they thought, ‘What’s this?’ and ‘we want to listen to Saturday Night Fever!’

When I was around ten I discovered a book in our house about the yogic way of stress relief. There was a section on pranayama (breathing) exercises. So I started doing these exercises for about an hour a day. I didn’t know what led me to practise them, but later on I thought that it must have been because of some past-life samskaras (tendencies).

Around the same time I also found a copy of the Dhammapada, which is thought to be the original teaching of the Buddha and probably written by his first generation of disciples. I didn’t know anything about meditation, but I used to sit and read a few of the couplets early in the morning and sit with my eyes closed. I was ten years old and doing spiritual work without knowing it.

Was your mother interested in spiritual matters?

She had no interest at all. It just happened that these spiritual books were there. None of the family was interested in spiritual things. Their version of spirituality was to send me to Hebrew school on Sundays, which I thought was fun because I got to learn a new language.

I always had a longing inside me, and when I was going through my early teen years that longing inspired me to become a hippie. I started taking a lot of acid, putting on wild clothes and going to see bands like the Grateful Dead. I had the desire to be a super hippie and to be completely unattached.

Was that your version of teenage rebellion?

Absolutely, no question.

In those years I started to find that sometimes when I was taking acid or mushrooms I would want to go off and be quiet. An inner beauty started opening up into an incredible understanding. I always came to a point where I would want to be alone and explore consciousness.

I moved to New York City and went to high school. During those school years, from the age of fourteen to eighteen, I was stoned the whole day. I found that it was the only way I could get through high school.

When I was eighteen I started to feel that I wanted something more. So I cleared my head, stopped taking drugs, went away to college and started reading spiritual books. I visited a friend from high school who had a copy of Miracle of Love by Ram Dass about Neem Karoli Baba. I remember looking through the book, thinking, ‘This man is really special and whoever meets him is blessed.’ But I thought I would never meet a guru, that that kind of thing only happens once in many lifetimes. But still, it was nice to see that it existed.

About a year later I had a very far-out dream that this same friend and I were travelling in a car. We went to an incredibly beautiful place. I got out and was alone in a garden that had a fountain, peacocks and incredible unearthly colours. It was a surreal vision of beauty. Many years later when I met Papaji I once went to such a place with him. I started to meditate.

It was the mid 80s, and I got into the New Age movement. I was in school outside the city and I started getting into crystals. My friends and I collected hundreds of crystals. One of us would lie on the floor and the others would place about two hundred crystals around the body and put on some new age music.

Then I went to live at Cape Cod on the coast of Massachusetts with many of my hippie friends. I wanted to become more involved with a spiritual healing community.

At that time AIDS was making a huge impact on the gay population in America, but nobody knew what it was. There were no drugs to treat it and many people in that community were in such desperation that they started to look within. The town where I was living had a sizable gay community, and I got involved with a weekly healing group where we shared a lot of love.

When I was about twenty a major change happened in my life. The leader of this group was a man who was HIV positive. He had done deep work on himself, and I wound up having an affair with him. Very quickly we went to a place of deep love for each other, just as if he was my soul mate. Unexpectedly, within the space of a few weeks while I was away, his HIV flared up and he died. I did not come back to town until forty-five minutes after he’d left the body. His death had a deep impact on me because the relationship was just in the phase where you both are so happy together and have the whole world ahead of you.

His death ripped me apart and opened me up in a tremendous way. I had learned enough from my work with the healing group that I was able to work with the grief. I started to do really deep meditation, letting the grief guide me into a place deep in my heart. It was as if I went to the root of duality, to the root of separation — again, not knowing of this language at the time. I would come out of these meditations with wonderful feelings of bliss and love. I didn’t understand it, it seemed strange to me.

That you lost your soul mate and yet you were feeling so blissful?

Yes, exactly. Everybody I asked told me to give myself more time and not to isolate myself, but for me the isolation was fantastic.

I realised that everybody I had ever met was afraid of death and that I had never met anyone who didn’t have this fear. My realisation made me question the point of living. If everybody is afraid of death and not dealing with that fear, then when death happens it is just like sheep going to the slaughterhouse. Anything else we do is just a temporary distraction. Without consciously putting it into words I made a decision: ‘If there is anybody on the planet who is not afraid of death, I will find him or her.’

What you are saying is beautiful because it is a great example that although things might appear negative, they may end up having great impact and being very positive.

I cannot imagine a stronger teaching. Nothing could have made me more earnest in my search.

I first met Ram Dass around that time. He was giving a speech in Boston. I went to see him and had a brief interchange with him. At this point I was leading the healing group together with a woman, and I was doing a lot of Metta.

You were doing a lot of what?

Metta — loving kindness meditations, that sort of thing. We were working with Steven Levine’s books and the group was becoming pretty powerful. I didn’t realise it at the time, but what the group offered people was actually the same kind of thing that I was getting in solitude.

It sounds like in your solitude and grief you were having an early meeting with the Self?

There is no question about it. Simply outrageous things were happening. I remember one time waking up from sleep as pure being. I didn’t wake up in the sense that I was in the waking state, but I certainly was not in the sleep state. After a while this thought — ‘Oh, I am now returning to the state of duality.’ Then I was functional again. I had no idea of what that state was, but it was very profound.

Emotionally this period in my life was very difficult because two or three months after my partner passed away I had to work. I had to get back into the nittygritty. My friends hadn’t been through the death of a lover. They still liked to smoke a lot of pot and go on a Grateful Dead tour, which is not necessarily the most conscious way to be with one’s self. My exploration of grief had shown me the distinction between the bliss of deep spiritual contentment and emotional happiness. I saw all this very clearly and recognised the difference.

That is an enormous thing ­— to have that clearly defined in such a way. When you were alone in your grief, you came into the Self, into that blissful state.

I was in a very high state without recognising it. And that state was not just subjective. I mean, I walked around and my thoughts would manifest.

I did my first Vipassana (Buddhist meditation of watching the breath) retreat during that time, which was very helpful, and I continued that practice. I was at a point where I was feeling I wanted to go where nobody I knew had gone. I began to plan my journey to the East.

I went back to New York City. It was autumn. I was living with my mother and I was depressed. I was twenty-one years old and I was working to make money for my trip. Ram Dass started giving a series of lectures at the Cathedral of St John the Divine which was ten blocks from where I was staying. I went to his classes and was amazed at his celebrity, his aura of spirituality and that he was so accomplished and had written all those books. I went to him after the first lecture and talked briefly with him. I felt very special when he said to me, ‘I think that we have a connection.’ I mean, he sees a twenty-one year old, cute, starry-eyed guy coming up to him and ‘we have a connection (laughs).’

While I was looking at The New York Times of all things, I saw an article about India reporting that the Kumba Mela happens every twelve years. The article said that the Kumba Mela was going to happen that year. I thought, ‘I’m going to Nepal. I’ll will be near the Kumba Mela and I can go there for two weeks.’ I planned to go to India first, then to Nepal and afterwards to Bali to learn surfing. I mentioned this to Ram Dass and he said, ‘You have to go to the Kumba Mela because so many great ones go to that.’ Ram Dass and I got together and drove across the country.

When you say you got together, do you mean that you became lovers?

Yes. This was about January 1989. We stopped at the Hanuman (monkey god) temple in New Mexico, and just to show you the state of my mind at the time, when I saw people dancing and singing to a statue of a monkey, I thought that they were lunatics (laughs). Although I was open to new things, I thought, ‘Wait a minute, people are singing Hari Krishna to a monkey and dancing. Wow!’

I went to California and spent a few days there with Ram Dass and then got onto a plane. I was terrified of going to India. I went as far as Bangkok. An American girl I’d met on the plane had to shove me into a taxi when it was time for me to leave for India because I was terrified to go. I woke up the next morning in New Delhi, thinking, ‘My God, what the hell am I doing here?’ The energy in India was so different that I started to freakout.

Ram Dass had given me letters of introduction to people in the Neem Karoli Baba scene and had given me a couple of photos of Neem Karoli Baba. I was thinking, ‘Okay, I’ll take your protection because I’m going to need it.’

I caught a train to Allahabad for the Kumba Mela. It was the night before the biggest bathing day and the train was packed full of people. I actually had a lot of fun because I was young and had never been in anything like a second-class sleeper packed full of pilgrims who had never seen a foreigner. It was all new and exiting for me.

I arrived in Allahabad and the energy was incredible. It took me a while to find the house of an old Neem Karoli Baba devotee, a man named Dada. I took a rickshaw to his house and gave him the letter from Ram Dass introducing me. I remember the relief I felt as he read the letter and said, ‘Well the first thing to do is put your bags in your room.’ I just felt, ‘Thank God.’

I had been doing a lot of work with dreams, and I noticed that at Dada’s house I was going into all sorts of transcendental states. I would wake up thinking I didn’t have a body — that sort of thing. People kept coming over from the Mela ground, and because I was so young they would say, ‘Oh, you have come to India at such a young age. You have come alone. This is the Grace of Maharaj. You must have good tendencies from your previous births.’

I was not enjoying myself in India; it was just too heavy. There was a room in Dada’s house that Maharaj used to stay in. When I say Maharaj, I mean Neem Karoli Baba. In the room there was his bed and a big picture of him. One evening I sat in front of his picture and said, ‘People are telling me that it is all your will that I am here, so tell me what the hell is going on.’ I was intense with him and nothing happened. I thought, ‘All right, so much for that.’

The next day I went to the Kumba Mela and I was looking for his camp. I was wandering around, not speaking Hindi, and people were being very nice, but as they could not communicate with me, it was getting frustrating. I met a group of Westerners and we said to one another at the same time, ‘Do you know where the Neem Karoli Baba camp is?’ Then it felt like some wind picked us up and blew us into the camp.

A few people were there. They smiled and greeted us. They pointed us to a tent. I went into the tent and prostrated. There was a puja (ceremonial worship) that had been set up for Maharaj, who had left his body, and I got the answer to why I was there. I felt an incredible feeling of love coming from my heart and firing my whole being.

Siddhi Ma, who has become a well-known Saint in recent years, was also staying at the camp. I had a letter of introduction for her, and she took me under her wing. I stayed at the camp for two weeks, and then went to Nepal for trekking. I thought that there was something very special about India and I wanted to return.

I came back to India, thinking it would be just for a few weeks, but I ended up spending four to five months in Neem Karoli Baba’s ashrams. After a few months I never wanted to leave. In the West it was not cool to love God, and I was discovering that loving God is what my heart really wanted to do. I was reading books about Ramakrishna, and I was staying near Siddhi Ma. Everything was opening up in an incredible way. Neem Karoli Baba started to come into my dreams every night for about three years after that.

Six months later I was back in America, and America was hell. The defence mechanisms I’d built up over the years had been removed in India, so being back in America was harsh. I kept thinking, ‘This is just culture shock, so I will get over it.’

I stayed six months but it just became worse and worse. I had gone back to university to finish my degree. I was getting up at five in the morning to do my puja and trying to be a good Brahmin bramachari (celibate student) boy. My roommates were partying until four a.m. and smoking. We used to get into horrible fights. I used to call them ‘stupid fucking Americans.’ One of them said to me, ‘If you hate America so much, go back to India.’ We were in the middle of a fight and I stopped and said, ‘You’re right.’ So I withdrew from school and went to Taiwan.

There I stayed with a Taiwanese family. The mother in the family had had a dream before she met me of Neem Karoli Baba in which he introduced her to me. When we met she said that I was supposed to stay with them.

How did you meet Papaji?

I was still in contact with Ram Dass, and he planned to come to India that October. This was now the spring of 1990 and he had heard of a man, Papaji. Ram Dass said that many of his friends were having strong experiences with this man and he suggested that if I went to India I should check him out. I found out Papaji’s address and wrote him a letter.

I remember the day the answer came. I used to get my mail at a teachers’ hostel in the city. The lady at the desk handed me the letter. Then I went outside, and sitting alone, I opened it. I knew nothing about Papaji or his teachings. I opened the letter and before I had a chance to read it, it was as if there was something in it that for a splitsecond gave me a vast feeling of emptiness. Tears came to my eyes. I thought, ‘What was that?’ I read his letter, which was simple, like, ‘You are most welcome to come. I am not exactly sure where I will be, but here is my phone number in Lucknow, yours affectionately...’

I wrote back that I would be coming in June. In June I went straight up to Neem Karoli Baba’s Ashram in Kanchi, feeling very happy to be back in India. I stayed a week with people I had just met who were in Kanchi and were going to meet Papaji.

As I’ve said, I didn’t know anything about the teachings of Papaji. However, three days before I left India the previous year, I came across a book about the spiritual teachings of Ramana Maharshi. I opened the book and it said something about sadhana (spiritual practice) which blew my mind. Ramana said that “you yourself put limitations on your true nature of infinite being and then weep that you are just a finite creature. You then pick up this or that sadhana to overcome the non-existent limitations, but if the sadhana assumes the existence of the limitations in the first place how can it help you overcome them?” I had no model for that. I thought, ‘Okay, this is where all this bhakti (devotion) stuff has been leading me.’

So you went to Lucknow?

I got on a bus for Lucknow with a friend. I arrived and went to stay at the Hanuman temple. The next day I called Papaji’s house and he gave me directions. He sent Patrick to meet me on Hazrat Ganj. I think it was a Sunday morning. I remember it was very quiet and empty.

I didn’t talk to Papaji, as there were others with him, but he was very welcoming. He was full of love and light. The next day there was just my friend and me, and Papaji worked mostly with him. We talked a bit, and Papaji asked me about what I was doing. I told him about the Hanuman devotion that I was into and he said, ‘I have many stories of Hanuman to tell you.’ I said I longed to hear them. My impression of him was that there was so much love.

The next day my friend left and I went to see Papaji. Papaji, Patrick, Kevan and myself were there that day. We used to go in the morning to Papaji’s house around nine a.m. and have Satsang (meeting in Truth) until lunchtime, then go back to take rest. Kevan and I would meet Papaji around four thirty in the park, sit on the bench and have Satsang. We would take walks and he would feed us corn or something like dahi vadai (deep-fried snacks). There were usually three or four of us with him. Sometimes I was alone with him. Swamiji was in and out during the course of the summer.

My first times with Papaji are hard to describe because the change was so vast and so much more than I could absorb. And when I started to notice what was happening, he would just stop my mind. I did not even know that the mind was supposed to be stopped. When the mind stopped there was an experience of Grace erupting, but at the time it was totally new to me. My whole background had been chanting Ram and praying for the Guru’s Grace. Like that, I’d had some experiences with Neem Karoli Baba. Though he wasn’t in the body and the experiences would come out of the blue, still I accepted them as Maharaji’s Grace.

Papaji challenged all of my ideas, every assumption I had about myself and spirituality. None of my previous experience stood a chance once I met Papaji.

The people around Neem Karoli Baba were always talking about Guru Kripa. It seemed to be the case that when praying to a statue or singing to Maharaji’s picture, some sort of force would be activated and one would receive his Grace and that Grace would do exactly what was needed.

It was my uncertainty, which inspired my first question to Papaji: ‘What is Kripa?’ I had already asked other people, and they had given some intellectual reply like: ‘It is the force through which the guru works on the disciple.’ Papaji just looked at me and said, ‘This is Kripa.’ My mind stopped cold. He said, ‘That which made you ask the question is Kripa ‘. I was left speechless and amazed. He kept on doing that to me everyday. I would ask him some question and he kept putting me into stunned amazement. I was powerless (both laugh).

I still felt that Neem Karoli Baba was my Guru, and after about a week I went to stay with Dada in Allahabad. That was a powerful time because I found, after having been with Papaji for those few days, that around the same time every morning that I had been seeing him, suddenly this mind-stopping, amazing force would take over. I had some very nice talks with Dada at that time too. Dada was a rare one. He had a very sharp mind.

Then I went back to Lucknow, and for me that whole summer was incredible because I would come and go from Lucknow and spend time in Papaji’s presence. He quickly proved to be a very great, ruthless Master. If I challenged him with my mind, he was very hard on me.

When you say that he was hard, do you mean that he would send you away or yell at you?

He did not send me away or shout at me. He just had a way of burning up the ego. It’s hard to describe but it was as if an energy pulse would come out over me.

You mean that the process of actually facing your ego was hard?

It was difficult. I had so much conditioning that it was not easy to realise the Self. I thought that realisation was something you got only after lifetimes, and also that as Neem Karoli Baba was my guru, I could disagree with Papaji. I had all these defenses and excuses in place, but he would just not buy them.

One afternoon I was sitting with Papaji in the park and I was in complete ecstasy. There was a fountain in the park, the same as in the dream I told you about before. I was sitting on the edge of the fountain with Papaji and some others and I was just flying in his Grace. A young Thai student used to come and meet us in the park. He knew Papaji was a teacher. But I don’t think he really knew who Papaji was. He looked at me and asked Papaji, ‘Why is he so happy?’ Papaji answered, ‘Because he is remembering the name of Ram. He is twenty-four hours remembering the name of God. Therefore he is happy.’ I thought, ‘Okay, that’s fine with me’; not that I had been remembering the name of Ram, but I thought, ‘okay, whatever.’

The next day we were in the same place and Papaji told someone who had just come from the United States, ‘Now you’ve got it. You are free.’ I had been with Papaji for ten days and, because he hadn’t said that to me, I became jealous and angry. I thought, ‘I will just grab it from him.’ So as Papaji was going back to his house I clung on and followed him. We were at the edge of the road, and I tried to get answers out of him. I said, ‘What is it I have to remember — What I am?’ And he said, ‘Not to remember! What do you have to remember when you say ‘‘I Am”?’ And then he told me to go.

I felt he was leaving me in great confusion. All this suppressed anger came out of me, and from that moment on I was in the worst hell. When he got inside you, that was it. He just took over.

The next day we were in the park, and I was in the worst misery. We were sitting on the edge of the fountain. The Thai student came up and asked, ‘Why does he look so sad?’ Papaji answered, ‘‘He is in ecstasy. He is remembering the name of Ram.’ (Laughs) It was as if he was rubbing my face in the dust.

How did you spend your time with Papaji?

We talked a lot. As to my repeating the name of Ram, Papaji didn’t stop me from doing my practices. He made me see what was doing them, the Self, and he made me see what being awake in the Self for twenty-four hours a day could be like. He didn’t tell me to stop doing anything, but rather showed me that, as I had the idea I was entering into some meditation, that was the reason why I would seem to come out of it. One has to get rid of the idea of entering into a state and of the idea that there is something outside one’s self. With those sorts of teachings he was pointing me back into the space of speechless amazement. In this way I spent a couple of weeks with him.

I felt pretty blown away, so I set off travelling. That’s when I came to Tiruvannamalai for the first time, in August 1990. In fact, he told me that I should come to Tiruvannamalai. Then, on my birthday, I flew back to Delhi. I was going to catch a train to Mathura for Vrindavan and visit the Neem Karoli Baba ashram. I went to New Delhi station and, not quite realising what I was doing, bought a ticket to Lucknow and got in a train. Halfway, quite spontaneously, I said, ‘Wait, I’m going to Vrindavan (both laugh)!’

I arrived in Lucknow but didn’t see Papaji until the next morning. I told him what had happened, and he said, ‘You still think that things are in your hands,’ and he laughed at me.

I stayed a couple of days on that short visit. That was when he gave me one of those one-line answers that were so dear to me. During that time we were going out to Indira Nagar with Papaji to see the new house he was planning to move to. He kept saying, ‘Many people will come, so I need a bigger house.’ Anyhow, Papaji, Gopal and I were in the tempo (motor rickshaw) coming back from the new house. I still had the idea that I had to ask him the perfect question and he would answer it and I would have the perfect Awakening. I felt I was holding on by a couple of fingers to the edge of the cliff. So the perfect question I thought up to ask Papaji during the ride in the tempo was: ‘How can I surrender fully to Ram?’

He answered, ‘It depends what you are calling Ram. If you say that he is something separate from yourself that you have to surrender to...’

I interrupted him, saying, ‘No, if I am saying Ram is the Supreme Self.’

He paused, looked at me and said, ‘Well you are surrendered to Ram. Everybody is surrendered to Ram, just accept it.’ It was a classic answer from Papaji. He took away the belief that anything had to change at all. I felt I was going to fly through the roof of the tempo.

We got out in front of the park, and Papaji started to go into the post office. He liked people to have wild experiences in his house and be bouncing off the walls, but he didn’t like that sort of thing happening in public. He grabbed hold of my wrist. I felt I would have flown off into the sky if he hadn’t held me down. That was a good one.

Another time we were sitting in the park and he said, ‘All your seeking is like a wave seeking for the ocean. When he said that, it was so ridiculous it made me see that all my seeking was so ridiculous. I was sitting on a bench with my arms holding my stomach because I was laughing so much. He sat there and chuckled along with me. Then we stood up and walked across the park.

There used to be a Satsang where these two swamis from the Ramakrishna Mission would come and sit in the park. About thirty to forty Indians would sit and sing bhajans (devotional songs), and the two swamis would look serious and very proud. I remember Papaji walking me by them. I was seeing the ridiculousness of spiritual search manifest in that group. I started laughing, and Papaji was holding on to my arm. He used to pretend he was leaning on my arm for support but it was more he was keeping me from flying away. Although he could be ruthless with my ego, Papaji was the kind, loving, spiritual father.

When you talk about Papaji being ruthless with your ego, are you saying that he wouldn’t let you get away with anything? And he would do something that made it clear to you?

He would do it with great love and humour, and if that did not work, he would become Rudra. Rudra is the purest aspect of Siva. So he would open his third eye and burn me up (both laugh).

I had no one around to compare notes with. Later on, there were many people. You could talk about Papaji, and others would agree that he could be very difficult at times. I didn’t know that he could be difficult, and I thought he singled me out. He might say something to me and I wouldn’t understand what he meant. And then he would say that I blew my chance, that the chance would not come again. That was one of his big ones — the chance will not come again.

The first time he did that to me, after half an hour of deep torment, I finally said to him, ‘Master, what can I do? I am struggling with all this stuff.’ And he said, ‘Don’t struggle, keep quiet.’ And then at other times he would make you smaller than a grain of dust. But somehow you would always bounce back and the next day you would be ready for the next lesson.

Were there times when you didn’t feel ready for him?

It seems to me that I didn’t have a personal choice in the matter. More and more I had the experience of this force taking me over. It was like speechless amazement. The first experience with him was the mind stopping, and that would allow Grace to just fill the space and then submerge the ‘I’. So like it or not, that was happening.

Looking back, moments come to my mind. One such time was when I was sitting on the park bench with Papaji. It was the time of the monsoon and we went out and met at the park after a rain. There were just the two of us sitting there and watching. An Indian man, a friend of Papaji, came up to me and started telling me that he had had darshan (being in the presence of a Saint) of the baby Krishna — ‘I was doing puja, and a small blue boy appeared. I was amazed.’ Papaji shouted at the man not to waste my time, and the man walked away.

We carried on sitting on the bench. I looked over to a rose bush. There were drops of water on the rose petals from the rain, and I felt so in love with the universe, which I saw manifested on the rose petals. I just kept staring at the rose. After a few minutes I looked up, and Papaji was staring at the same thing. He met my eyes and I said to him, ‘It’s so beautiful.’ and he said, ‘yes.’ That moment was a whole incarnation of Grace.

Another special moment with Papaji was when a man called Steven, who was filming him, came to Mrs. Ganga Singh’s house. Mrs. Ganga Singh was somebody who Papaji always said had gotten it very quickly and was fully Awakened. He’d ask us why weren’t we more like her. Anyhow, Steven was interviewing her, and then he handed me the video camera and I started to film. Papaji said anybody could ask Mrs. Ganga Singh a question. So I said, ‘If you don’t exist, who am I talking to now?’ She had been answering everyone else’s questions nicely, but as soon as I asked my question, Papaji said that it was a stupid question and started to roar at me. This whole episode is actually on video somewhere. So there I was videotaping and he is yelling and roaring at me, and I am shaking and the camera is shaking (laughs).

I found out from meeting some of Papaji’s older students that he often worked with people in that way. But at that time I didn’t know anything about it. For me Papaji held the key to my salvation and if he was angry, well, there was nothing I could do.

All you could do was surrender.

Exactly. Not only surrender, but total surrender. Short of complete, one hundred percent surrender, you will never become realised. Papaji was not in it to make me feel good. Maybe some people came who wanted to feel good and leave. He would say, ‘You are enlightened,’ and then they would leave. With me I think he saw some purity and grabbed me, thinking, ‘You are not getting off so easy.’

How old where you at that time?

I was twenty-two when I met him.

In September 1990 I had to decide whether to go back to America to finish my last year of university. I had to decide within a couple of days. During Satsang a German woman asked Papaji, ‘What is intuition?’ Papaji replied, ‘What is tuition?’ She said, ‘It means teaching.’ And then he said, ‘Intuition is that which is teaching you from within. It is your inner tutor.’ Her face became flushed and she said, ‘That’s very beautiful.’

I had to make the decision whether to go back to America or not. So that night I figured I would listen to my inner tutor. I got a very clear answer. I went early to Satsang the next day and told Papaji, ‘I had to make a decision whether to go back to university or not. I asked my inner tutor and it said to stay, so I am staying.’ I could see he was happy, then I started to tell him more about what I was going through. And he started reading the paper. He was making the point ­— case closed. He didn’t even want to talk with me. But I could see he was happy, so I thought, ‘All right.’

Let’s go back a bit. Before you were underlining the point about surrender and stressing that realisation can’t happen unless you are totally surrendered. So would you say, looking back at that early work, that it was all about him grinding you into this total surrender?

Yes, that’s all it was about.

Did you ever leave because it became too hard? And would you come back when you realised the depth of the love? How did it work?

I left, and I would always come back. But it had nothing to do with him and it had nothing to do with me. It was not him grinding my ego. It was the Self. It was all the Self. It might have appeared differently to me at the time. It certainly appears differently to each one of us, as we are all inside these perception boxes, but it is all the Self.

Obviously all the things I am talking about here are just stories in my mind. But without these stories how do we experience the love?

So go back to your decision not to leave.

It was September 1990. I had just turned twenty-three and was in Lucknow feeling I couldn’t leave, and that there was something tremendously important keeping me there. Tremendous Grace. I have to say that it wasn’t easy on the emotional level, but there were fantastic dreams, visions and feelings. It was like dying and being reborn every day. There was incredible Grace at the time.

Gangaji had come for a second visit. Satsangs were incredible in those days. Again, Papaji wasn’t encouraging me to talk; he wanted me to be quiet.

One day a man said to Papaji, ‘I feel like my whole life I’ve been putting my finger in the hole in the dam out of fear that it’s going to burst and flood me.’ And Papaji said, ‘Turn the finger around to the one who feels the fear.’ Something happened for this man. I just had to speak these words: I said to Papaji, ‘Should doubt be worked out in the same way?’ He looked at me and gave me a little nod. I said, ‘Master, everything I’ve ever done in my life has had doubt in it.’ It was amazing. I saw the presence of doubt in everything in my life. I was not begging for any answer; I just had to say it. Swamiji was there, and Papaji looked at me and gave me a big smile. Swamiji gave me a big smile and they looked at each other. They said something in Hindi, exchanged a few words, and then both looked back at me and gave me a big smile that lasted about thirty seconds.

At that Satsang he told someone, ‘It’s like you are going around with a two hundred pound rock on your head and you’re asking how to get rid of your headache. You go to one centre and they tell you how to meditate, another place will tell you to do yoga, then another place will advise japa (repetition of the Lord’s name). Finally you meet someone who tells you to just shake your head.’ Papaji had quite a sense of humour.

After Satsang I went back to where I was staying in the Hanuman Temple. I noticed that after I had said that to Papaji I became quiet and peaceful and very much at ease. The next day I went to see Papaji. His old devotee Dr. Ganga Singh had passed away, and Papaji had sent Gopal to tell everybody in the Sangha (the community around Papaji) not to come because Papaji had to attend to the burning of this man’s body. Gopal couldn’t find me because he didn’t know where I was staying, so I wound up alone in Papaji’s house.

I was in the living room with Papaji and Gopal. Papaji said, ‘I sent Gopal to find you to tell you not to come to Satsang because we are not having one.’

I said, ‘Master, I don’t need it. Since yesterday I am completely quiet. I don’t need Satsang anymore.’ He gave me an indescribable look, not like some intense Guru’s Grace thing, more a look of appraisal. I said to him that I no longer had a need to come to him with all of these up-in-the-air spiritual experiences. I could just say, ‘I’m right here and this is what I feel.’ And I hit the ground with my hand.

He said, ‘What did you see?’

I started to describe it then I was completely overtaken by laughter and said, ‘You know how you said to turn the finger around?’ and I became convulsed with laughter, and the three of us were bouncing off the walls of the living room for half an hour. It was like a lunatic asylum. At one point I managed to say to him, ‘I don’t know if I am laughing or crying.’ And Papaji said, ‘This is an experience of the Self,’ and he hit me on the head. We went on with our lunatic asylum behaviour some more, and then we calmed down.

After maybe half an hour we got up and Papaji was about to go off. I said, ‘Master, Mohammed said, “Give up the things in which you’re in doubt for the things for which there is no doubt.” But there is only one thing that has no doubt.’

Papaji said, ‘What is that?’

I tried to speak, but I opened my mouth and nothing came out. I made a gesture with my hands, and he hugged me. It was the only time in my life that I hugged someone and there was no boundary or barrier. There was no holding back. There was nothing. Just for a second he looked into my eyes, and then he hugged me and I was dazed. I started wondering what was going on and he walked me outside. He got into a rickshaw with Gopal and pushed me out onto the street. He said, ‘Come tomorrow.’

I was completely smithereened. I got into a tempo to go to Hazraganj and was in the clouds for the whole ride. I reached the place where I had to get off the tempo and it literally felt like a raindrop going into an ocean. It was like everything I have ever known in the universe — my whole life — spread out as ripples in concentric circles, and then dissolved into an immense ocean. I saw that the idea of an individual was completely gone and in its place the question ‘Who am I?’ would bring the incredible darshan of the source of all Universes. I saw that in each instant, time and space is creating and destroying itself. It’s just a giant dance, and everything that Papaji was saying to me made complete, utter sense at that moment. Suddenly I understood everything.

There is no way to describe the beauty of that moment. It was so clear to me that every form in life, everything in the universe, is just a game. The only thing is this vastness. When they talk of the brightness of a thousand suns, that is how strong that experience was. It was not like ‘I think I get it.’

I saw I had never existed. The only thing that ever existed, the only fact, was Papaji. Papaji was myself, and this again was not an idea. It was a knowing. I knew that more than I have ever known anything. The only thing of utter certitude.

That experience has passed but it’s a lesson I go on learning. Papaji revealed himself as the basis of the entire leela (play of the Divine), the foundation and substance of the entire leela. Once you enter into that you can never leave. Whatever else goes on, whatever is experienced, whatever is felt, you know that ‘I know it now’. And whatever is going on, for me that underlying beingness is always Papaji.

Which is the Self.

Which is the Self, but it is Papaji. And that I can’t explain because, of course, it’s just the Self and it has no name or form.

That intense experience lasted about twelve hours. By the next morning I was convinced that if I did not show him, and he did not say that this is It, it was not really It. But of course he was not going to say this is It. So I went through a few days of the worst hell imaginable as my ego realised, ‘No, there is no way to ever claim this.’ That was a hard one.

I had been writing all this in my journal but I couldn’t speak it to him. It was so uncomfortable for me. I was very scared of him after that. It was really weird, like suddenly I was shy. The entry in my journal for that day was: ‘When identity goes into who is observing, it goes into an endless ocean of beauty, an endless ocean of “I am Hanuman, I am Ram. I alone has become I and all things.” Om.’

The progression is mind surrendered to the Self. Ram is the Self. ‘I am Ram’ is the Self. ‘I alone has become I in all things’ is really the Self-stratum, the formless layer, and Om is the formless vibration. So during that whole experience there remained nowhere that had a barrier. It was quite clear to me, from the most gross to the most subtle, that it was one unbroken, liquid vibration of Om.

A few days later I showed Papaji the diary entry. I was shy. I presented it to him like, ‘Oh, here is my book.’ He was so sweet with me and said, ‘Oh, why didn’t you tell me? Now I am very happy; you’ve done what you came here to do. You’ve made me very happy.’

From that point on I began to feel that he was myself in his form. For instance, when he was happy, I was happy. It was not that I was happy and he was happy. It was his happiness was my happiness. This particular aspect was very strong for the next couple of months. I remember one time watching him write a letter. I knew what he was going to write before he wrote it. I would get a blissful vibration in my heart, the word would come and he would write that same word.

I said to him, ‘How do I know what you’re going to write before you write it?’

He answered as if I’d just asked some silly question about the weather, ‘Because there is no separation.’ Then went on writing.

Sometimes I would be out in the street and suddenly feel, ‘Papaji needs this.’ I’d buy it and bring it to him. He would say, ‘How did you know I needed this?’ He was very sweet with me after that.

Then I went to Kanchi to meet Ram Dass and bring him and a few others to meet Papaji.

You brought Ram Dass to meet Papaji?

Ram Dass had sent me to check Papaji out (laughs), to see if he was worth meeting.

I had written him a couple of letters telling him, ‘It is all gone, everything is gone.’ I had written him one particularly beautiful letter, and when I went up to meet him he told me that the letter was very honest. He told me that he hadn’t reacted the first time he’d read it, but later on the letter felt honest. My letter did not lie. I was writing from the space of: ‘This is all my formless manifestation; now I understand.’

I walked into Kanchi ashram and I remember Ram Dass was eating. I went to the hall. He looked at me and he pranamed (bowed). Ram Dass is such a joker. We had a good time and then I brought him to Lucknow with a few people. That was the time when two or three people took LSD. Papaji used to tell that story.

They took LSD in Papaji’s place?

Yes. I did too with them. That was interesting because what I experienced with Papaji was that LSD could only affect the layers, it could not affect the Self.

I have beautiful little stories from around that time. One day I was again seeing the whole vastness of ego. Papaji would not let me have a theoretical surrender. I was seeing the ego which would come up in the face of it’s own death. One night I was really unhappy and I prayed to him before I went to sleep. Then I had a dream and in the dream I was running around in a lot of confusion. I was at a train station, and suddenly he appeared before me and spoke one word. Then all the pain and confusion disappeared and I felt total peace. I prostrated to him and woke up in transcendental peace. This state encompassed the dream and waking state, completely enveloping everything. I sat for a couple of hours and then went to see him just before Satsang. I went in and he was sitting alone in his living room.

As soon as I walked in he looked at me and said, ‘Did you have a dream?’

I said, ‘Yes, with you in it. I don’t remember what you said, but I felt tremendous peace.’

He said, ‘I said “Peace.”’

That really surprised me because I always assumed that everything in a dream is myself. So if I was in his dream and he was in my dream, then which one was I? Every time I thought, ‘Well this is it,’ he showed me deeper and deeper layers.

How did it go with Ram Dass?

From the moment Ram Dass arrived Papaji made him sit on the tucket (platform of the teacher) alongside him. Ram Dass was sitting on the floor and said, ‘I can’t.’ Then Papaji said, ‘If you can’t, then I can.’ Papaji was big and strong and he grabbed Ram Dass by the collar and lifted him up.

Papaji and Ram Dass would talk a lot. It was very bhakti. I remember somebody talked about Hanuman. It was very, very sweet. It wasn’t Papaji being the non-dual teacher. He did not do that so much when Ram Dass was around.

Ram Dass told me of how one night he was sitting the whole night meditating. He said that he was sinking, sinking, sinking. He was feeling that Papaji was sitting with him in meditation and taking him deeper. Papaji really loved him and Ram Dass loved Papaji. He’d written a couple of letters to Papaji, and Ram Dass said that he felt ‘Maharaj pouring out of him.’

Papaji used to quote from the Bhagavad Gita. One of the stanzas from the Bhagavad Gita says, ‘Far beyond the unmanifest, there is yet another supreme manifest existence, which neither sun nor moon nor stars nor fire illumine. That is my supreme abode.’ He asked Ram Dass about this and Ram Dass didn’t say anything. But later Ram Dass told me, ‘That’s Maharaj (Neem Karoli Baba).’

What were you beginning to understand from your time with Papaji?

That he was clearly showing me what was at the root of my existence. It goes back to when we talked of my leaving and returning. I couldn’t run away. I realised, ‘Well okay, I’ve asked for this. Grace is showing me this. If I run away, all that I will run into will be mental distraction.’

There was an intense love that kept you there.

What kept me there was an impersonal, deep need to get to the root of it all. It had nothing to do with what I thought about it. It was all completely impersonal. At the same time, there was this dance, this love affair going on between the personal and the impersonal. The more one dissolves into impersonal consciousness, the more one can love the personal. They are not two.

This is an important leela — of the ego being ground.

You can’t know the leela with your ego. Ego is not necessarily a bad thing if it is playing it’s part in the leela. It is negative when you hold on to it and say, ‘This is me.’ That is the arrogance that Papaji used to talk about. Surrendered ego is quite beautiful. Surrendered ego is Hanuman.

Papaji said Krishna leela means to dance around emptiness. Everything going around your mind is a dance around emptiness. Even doubt is a Gopi. It’s all the rasa (dance) in that sense. Spirituality would have stayed theoretical for me had it not been for Papaji.

What you are saying is not really true. In fact, you had been meditating since you were ten years old.

But I didn’t know it.

Papaji would often say that he just shows us what we already know. Many people have these kinds of experiences but they don’t meet a Master. He told me on my second meeting with him, ‘Don’t take a diamond to a fish monger. You have to take it to a jeweller because he will be able to recognise the value of it.’

What I meant is that meeting him showed me the value of consciousness, and in that sense I would have never known.

I say again what I said before — which is very much the way I am these days — somehow his remembrance comes. I don’t know if it comes from my memory or if it is just Grace arising. There is a strong feeling of Papaji that permeates everything, and there is that recognition of the basis of the leela. I value that more and more. When I was with him in the body it was taken for granted that eventually individuality would disappear. Now that I am out in the world and not in Papaji’s Satsang I see how everyone is so mixed up in their identity and in their lives. What an incredible thing it is to feel the Guru’s Grace and to be able to rest in that.

One of the things that attracts me to you as a character is the real sense of leela going on. There is a sense of freedom, innocence and youth about you that is beautiful. Are you about thirty-five years old now?

I am thirty-four, and I don’t know if I am always innocent. But yes, I don’t like to get heavy. If I start to feel heavy in what I am doing, well, then I just stop. I have been lucky enough to manage to avoid a professional career and the kind of lifestyle where I have to do things I don’t want.

Everything is coming naturally to you because you see life as a play.

Yes, and it’s my choice too.

Can you say something about vasanas (tendencies)? Did you find at some point you would experience a lot of the old issues coming back?

Oh you mean, ‘I got it, but I lost it’ syndrome? Well, one thing is that you make it an experience. In fact, your mind makes it an experience. Papaji said again and again — what comes and goes is not real. So vasanas are the way in which your ego is trying to control experience. One of the easiest ways is to take non-dual Truth, turn it into an experience, and then say it happened to me ­— ‘I did it and I am responsible for it.’

When you have dissolution into non-duality, and then there is a feeling ‘I have lost it and have come out of it,’ it is important to look at the first mechanism which gives rise to the feeling of separation. What is it that you believed about your mind? What is it that your mind told you that you lost? Because that is exactly the place where you can look. That is where the foundation of your whole game is.

For me that’s the ongoing work. The body is here, vasanas do not cease to arise. It’s not really that I have a choice in the matter but it certainly appears that if I live a lazy, unconscious life then I will identify and suffer. That is not a particularly fun way to live. Life itself is the guru. Life is ruthlessly grinding the ego into dust until total surrender and Awakening comes. Awakening and surrendering are synonymous in the way I am talking. So, having sat with Life itself in the form of Papaji, who spoke with me directly, has given me a tremendous edge in life.

Your original question is about vasanas coming up, right? Okay, I think there are very few people who have an experience of the Self and then don’t have another vasana arise. That’s kind of ridiculous. It’s so rare. There is no point in even comparing yourself to people like that. That’s another way of feeling bad about yourself.

Could it be said that Ramana Maharshi himself went off to his cave for sixteen years to let all the vasanas rise up and disappear?

No, I don’t think it was a case of ‘I am going to sit and allow my vasanas to arise’ or anything like that. It was a case of his total and complete love of Self. He had no interest in anything else. I meet people who were with Papaji who also claim that and it does seem they have very few difficulties arise, if any. There are people who claim that there has been an unbroken sense of being. In my case that wasn’t true.

You can’t push it with the ego. Papaji used to talk about it not taking time, and that’s true; but if you want it not to take time because your ego is sick of its own suffering, that’s just another trick and doesn’t work. Nowadays, how it comes to me — I can’t call it remembering — it’s more a stilling, and recognising that no experience is reality, and that allows the feeling of Papaji, which is the Self.

So when a vasana grabs you for a few hours or a few days, do you have a way of dealing with it?

I know the more I feed it, only means more trouble. Sometimes I think, ‘Well let’s see if I can play with this and get away with it.’ That happens less and less now. The more I try and see if one is worth getting away with, the more I come to the same conclusion — it’s just not worth it.

Okay, an old habit arises that you have had many times before. It has a certain familiarity and you recognise it. Do you have any way of watching it and letting it go?

It only grabs you if you grab it. For most people the grabbing is unconscious. You don’t realise that you have even done it; it just feels like something came along and threw you. But that’s not really true. It cannot survive without your awareness and your identifying with it. Stillness helps a lot, taking the time to be still. Reading Papaji’s words is often incredibly magical. He speaks to me and to my very Self.

The vasana is not real. Reading Papaji is a reminder. It reminds that you have the power in yourself not to be controlled by this. Also more honesty comes into play. Everyone wants to feel okay, and even if they are not fine, still they want to project an image to others that they are okay. That can be a cover-up for an insecurity. When you identify with vasanas there is always going to be an insecurity that comes along with that. What I do is go inside myself with humility and honesty. That’s part of surrender.

Since that Awakening of about ten years ago, would you say you experience less attachment to the vasanas than you would have done say six years ago?

Are you asking me whether this is an ongoing process?

Yes, that you recognise that the Self has become more radiant and that you are less attached to old bad habits.

It’s not like it’s a steady, slow progression. Ups and downs appear. What it comes down to is: What one loves most is the Beloved. I can go on dancing around it for as long as I want, but the fact is, what Papaji showed me is the most Beloved Form; so that is of primary importance.

I find Satsang beneficial. When you have a full darshan within, you realise that the Self has nothing to do with anything at all. There is no place where the mind is connected with the Self; yet it does seem that associations make a difference. And associations are always mental. So when I say association with certain persons in Satsang, I mean keeping the mind at a level where it is more ‘accident-prone.’ Awakening is an accident; it is not something you can do. When I say Satsang, I don’t necessarily mean going and sitting with a teacher. I mean wherever that feeling happens. Sometimes someone is asking me questions, sometimes it’s a case of sitting and talking; like right now, sitting here and talking with you. Sometimes I am sitting with a teacher and I start asking questions.

When I am in the West and working and involved in the mind, I can be very identified with such things. But I find Papaji has made me more sensitive to the Truth. I may go to Satsang and feel, ‘I need to get something,’ and it becomes clear to me that’s just not true. Often it happens before Satsang even starts. I go and it’s: ‘I’m already there.’ Papaji also continues to work with me through dreams.

Would you say all your searching is finished? Are you complete in that sense? Are you still looking for something?

No, I am not looking outside myself. However, I think that many people make a mistake that the search is over. They may be selling themselves short.

What do you mean by that?

There is always more. For me it’s like Papaji showed me the whole onion with all its layers, and he cut it open. Life as an embodied being takes place in one or two layers of that onion. Papaji showed me that everything I am going to experience is within. But why stop? It’s actually a much more beautiful search now. And it’s not a search with the belief that I am incomplete and have to get something. That’s the main difference.

Later, did you have any other strong experiences with Papaji, because you continued to come back for another five years?

I stayed on and off till he left his body. The second year that I came to him I remember leaving for a couple of months and having a lot of doubts resurface. So I thought, ‘Since I know he is my Sadguru (the Guru who liberates) and Spiritual Master, I can say anything to him; and if I put out all my doubts to him, then they won’t surface when I am away.’ What followed was one of my nicest times with him. I was very upfront, and when he told me to be quiet and I didn’t feel like being quiet, well, then I would be right in his face. We had fights and he would start yelling at me. I would stay up all night burning in his Shakti (primordial energy). There were big dramas and it was all quite incredible.

I would get to a space, a week or so before I left, of absolute doubtlessness. Of being in a place that even if I wanted to, I couldn’t make a doubt. It was quite beautiful. At night, instead of sleeping, I would sink into a river of bliss. In the morning consciousness of the world would arise, and there wouldn’t be much difference between Papaji’s form and mine. Usually about that time he would tell me to go away.

Do you think he sent you away to establish that state as your own?

Yes. In later years I didn’t have so much close personal contact because there were many people around him. I used to sing. That was always a good ploy — to get up in front in Satsang and get a good darshan of Papaji. I would walk up and sing a bhajan. I learned that singing was a good way to get close to the Self. It takes me right out of my mind. Having learned Hindi, I can ponder the meanings of these bhajans. They can be quite beautiful.

This ties back to the beginning of our talk, when you mentioned your mother and songs and singing with groups. Now they’re not folksongs but bhajans.

That’s right. It’s all one.

The last real experience I had with Papaji’s form is when he left the form. It was very strong. The feeling that I was telling you about, when I would get to a point that I would sink into a river of bliss at night, came back strongly when Papaji left the form. It really took me over.

About two weeks before he left the body I was in Rajasthan. I had a dream of him putting a beautiful mala (prayer beads) made of gold on both our necks. Our foreheads touched and we merged.

I went to Lucknow, and he was getting sick. He was sick a lot in those days. It was my birthday on August 29th. I was turning thirty. That morning he was really strong. He came out and was talking to people and having a conversation with me. I hadn’t talked with him like that in three or four years. The thought crossed my mind: ‘He is doing this because he is going to leave. How many times I have thought that and he hasn’t left the body?’

On the 29th and 30th of August 1997 he was really clear and lucid. Within a couple of days he was in the hospital. I thought, ‘I am going to stay out of the way. There are going to be a lot of people there and I don’t want to bother him.’

One night, two or three days before he left the body, Indian Om Prakash came over and told me that he had been to see Papaji in his room. Suddenly, I had the strong feeling that I had to go there.

I went to Papaji’s house, and some people in a jeep said they were going to the hospital and asked whether I wanted to come. I thought that was an unusual thing for them to say to me. I took it as a sign and went with them. There was a head nurse who didn’t like anyone going into the ward. She wasn’t there that night; so a few of us, in ones and twos, went in to see him. Maybe between twenty and thirty people got in to see him that evening.

I went into the intensive care unit with Prabhavati. We stood looking at Papaji hooked up to the machines, unconscious. She prostrated at his feet and went out weeping. An interesting and beautiful thing was, that as she placed her head at his feet, she began sobbing and his heart skipped a beat. I was watching the monitor and listening to the beeping sound, and it definitely skipped a beat. I stood looking at his body for a while. It was really strange. I put my head on his feet and then stood up. I kept looking at his body and didn’t know what was strange about it. I couldn’t put my finger on it. Then I went out to Prabhavati because she was a weeping mess.

As I was getting into the jeep to go back to Indira Nagar, I became very uncomfortable and thought that I was supposed to stay at the hospital. As the jeep was about to go off, I said, ‘Let me out.’ I spent the night sleeping on the floor in the intensive care unit. I had a dream in which I saw Papaji’s lungs. They had spots on them. The next morning he developed pneumonia. I left the hospital the next morning. At 2.30 P.M. the next day I was talking to a friend, and suddenly my heart felt like it was ripping open in my chest. An incredible meltdown happened, and suddenly everything was Papaji. I thought that he had left the body because it was such a strong hit from Papaji. Later on, I walked on the street and asked someone I met, ‘Did you feel that shakti about an hour ago? I think maybe Papaji has left the form.’ I called Bharatmitra on the mobile phone at the hospital and Bharatmitra said, ‘No, nothing has happened.’

That night around ten o’clock I was in my room. Someone had given me a big laminated photo of Papaji for my birthday, and suddenly I felt that Papaji had a fever and needed to cool down. So I got some sandalwood paste and applied it to his forehead on the photo. I put the photo on the wall. I wasn’t facing it. I was singing and accompanying myself with my tambura — a sloka from Guru Gita — and suddenly I felt Papaji tell me to turn around and face him. So I turned around to his picture, and I was in ecstasy and oneness with him and singing. Then I put down the tambura and lay down to sleep. A few minutes later the bell rang. A friend said, ‘Papaji left the body twenty minutes ago.’ I thought, ‘Isn’t that far out, because twenty minutes ago I put the sandalwood paste on his forehead?’

The body was brought to Satsang House, and we all went there. It was an incredible time. It was like the veil was removed.

After the cremation I stayed on till late at the burning ghats (cremation ground). It was raining, and I came back covered with mud and ashes. I was with Sharad, an old Indian devotee of Papaji, and we rode back together to Papaji’s house. Papaji used to get angry with people if they had come from the cremation grounds, and he was very strict on them having a bath before they ate. I was shown to Papaji’s bathroom. I took a bath and came out. But all my clothes were dirty. Jyothi gave me one of Papaji’s lungis (Indian type of loincloth), and a Tshirt, and she said, ‘Now these belong to everyone.’ Suddenly I had the feeling: ‘No more closed doors, no one is closer to him now, no more distance.’

I went into the living room and took prasad (offering of food from Papaji). Jyothi said, ‘Sharad is upstairs, why don’t you sleep in the living room?’ I lay down to sleep in the spot where we had put Papaji’s body during the day and the sense of being in a river of bliss came up so strong. It was like, ‘All perception is Papaji, awareness is Papaji.’

We had been singing around his body ‘Papaji ki jai ho, Papaji ki jai ho’ I had never had auditory hallucinations before, but I started to hear thousands of voices singing in this incredible bliss. This went on for hours. It was complete immersion in Papaji.

A few days after that I was talking with someone. I said how strange it was when I went into the hospital to see Papaji because it was just his body. I realised that He as Grace had led me to see that body. And I realised that in all the years I had known him, that was the first time I had looked at his body and just seen his body. Every other time I had been near him, whether he was awake or asleep, I saw Papaji. This time I looked and saw an Indian man’s body, and that was really important for me to see. It was part of His leela for me to be around that body. I know for many people Papaji was more impersonal and more at a distance, but he kept me quite close. Even in later years when there wasn’t intimate contact or so much talking, he kept me close. Seeing the body was to allow me to release my attachment to his body.

It’s very beautiful that you have told that story. It’s so incredibly ‘now.’ Papaji seems right here. Thank you.

It’s such nectar. It was like Papaji without veils when we burned his body. Ultimately, beyond the body, there was such a love. Beyond anything that might have gone on or might have appeared, there was such a love. It was worth every painful grinding of the ego to be open to such a love.