Interview with John David, Feb 2014

The following interview was conducted in Tiruvannamalai, India in February of 2014. It was published in the book, Meetings with Remarkable People, published by Open Sky Press.

Ram Charan has had a spiritual life pulsating in his blood since I met him some twenty years ago. He had a very intimate friendship with Papaji, whom he came to very early, before many people were there. He was very much drawn to Neem Karoli Baba (Maharaj), who is the guru of Ram Dass that I talk to you about from the book Miracle of Love. In the last years he has had a close connection to Siddhi Ma, who we could see as Maharaji’s successor. Would you ike to start by talking about Neem Karoli Baba?

Although I didn’t meet him when he was physically alive, I have no sense of having not met him. He was the guru of Ram Dass, the American teacher. Most of you, I’m sure, are familiar with Neem Karoli Baba’s name. He entered my life at a moment of great crisis, through a photograph in a book. A year later I met Ram Dass, and six months later I was in India. This was in 1989. Neem Karoli Baba at first became such a living presence for me that every time I’d fall asleep, I would dream of him all night and I’d wake up in the morning and I’d think of him. This went on for years.

I used to pray to him that I wanted to meet a master in the body because I thought I had missed the only true one, who was him. After about a year of intense prayer to him I met Papaji. So I’ve been very blessed to meet all these great faces of the one reality we call the ‘Satguru’. But Neem Karoli Baba was my first...he was the one, that form, that reached out to me and pulled me from America to a country on the other side of the planet that I didn’t want to go to. He started a big shift in my life.

Neem Karoli Baba belonged to a category of saints called siddhas (entities with mystic powers), similar to Nithyananda. Papaji once said about him that nobody knows what a siddha is, they’re not even from this galaxy. He had full mastery of all the siddhis (mystic powers). When people speak of the guru as the embodiment of the absolute, they mean through contact with the form of someone like that. If you’re lucky enough to physically observe or be near or even hear about or see a picture or read about this person – there’s something alchemical. Their body and their being are not human; they are just a portal for us. I experienced this very strongly in my life.

Can you give us some examples of what a siddhi is?

Powers of being able to be in many places at once or to know what somebody is thinking or was thinking yesterday or being able to see somebody’s past or to manifest things. With Neem Karoli Baba people are very big on talking about how he was in two places at once or how he went to a devotee’s house with twenty-five people and said, ‘Feed everybody!’ and of course the devotee freaked out because he only had ten chapatis, but they just kept feeding people and magically there was enough for everybody. There are a lot of these stories. I think they help us to loosen our belief that we know what’s real. It’s often said that in a way the siddhis are a distraction. But when we see these things, it helps crack our notion that the reality that we perceive and that we believe in, is really reality. Neem Karoli Baba seemed to just emanate these strange happenings and events. In my experience, he’s still very much a living presence, just like Ramana Maharshi, emanating from that which does not die. So when the body dropped, there was no change.

As I remember, he was a big man who lived under a blanket. I don’t know what else was under the blanket, probably not much.

He had a blanket and a dhoti (cotton trousers), that was his outfit. Some times in the cold weather he’d put on a sweater. He was very simple. He didn’t look like a sadhu (person who gives his life to God). He didn’t have orange clothes or beads or a long beard or anything. I was once with Ganga – Papaji’s Belgian wife – and Ram Dass. Ram Dass asked Ganga, ‘Well, what did your guru teach?’ and talking about Papaji she said, ‘My guru was such that he made it clear that there’s no teaching.’ And she said to Ram Dass, ‘What did your guru teach?’ and Ram Dass said, ‘He would ask how much does squash cost in America.’ This is the level of the saint like Neem Karoli Baba. He would ask you some ridiculous question that made no sense whatsoever. What is spiritual about the question, ‘How much does squash cost in America?’ But you would crack open. And the way I find he communicates, since dropping his body, is still very much through dreams. It’s his presence really, in the sense of sometimes a very strong guidance.

What comes up for me is whether you’re talking about yourself or about Neem Karoli Baba. You were quite young when you met him and there’s a sense of tremendous love. Maybe what you’re talking about is this tremendous love.

In a way it’s difficult to talk about because there’s no borderline for me. Okay, Neem Karoli Baba...you have this name and form and you have this presence, which is not name and form but has a particular flavour. It’s fused with this love and there’s no place where one starts and the other stops. So yes, of course, the guru points us to our own nature. Having glimpsed that through meeting the guru, I won’t say one becomes that, but gets cleared of the notion that you are other than that. There’s a line by Tulsidas in the Ramayana where he says, ‘The one that you choose knows you, and having known you, he becomes you.’

I’m curious...how is it for the people who are with you? They’re on a search?

Anybody searching here? (everybody laughs)

Is this a finding? Is it more through a devotional line or more through studying the teachings of these saints; or is it let’s just see what resonates, what works?

I think you’ll have to ask them. Turiya, what do you have to say about that?

Yes. I would say it’s both. It’s for sure about the teachings because on some level the mind has to join into the game, otherwise it probably doesn’t work. And I would also say through devotion for sure. We live together as a group; it’s not the devotion to the teacher only, it’s also the devotion to the whole situation.

John David has interviewed a lot of teachers and has introduced them to the community. Is that to see what resonates and how this touches you? Is that what the experiment is here? I’m curious.

Well, they all resonate to the same thing, just in different appearances. We can also be touched by daily life situations. It doesn’t need to be very special actually.

Yes. Neem Karoli Baba was very much present in people’s day-to- day lives. He would come into their houses and be a part of their family and they’d come to him about their decisions, the most basic, mundane things. There are quite a lot of Indian saints who behave that way. It’s not just about giving teachings about so-called spirituality because, at their level, there’s not a distinction.

He was such a being that he would see whatever level somebody was at and he would match that level and begin to work with them from there. He wouldn’t give Vedanta teachings to a school boy or to a house-holder, for example.

Would somebody else like to answer Ram’s question? An interesting question.

I’m just curious about people’s experiences. As you are with John David you have so much exposure to different saints and different teachings. What does that touch and awaken in you?

I’m not sure if the teachings of each teacher are so different. In my Indian Masters, Blueprints for Awakening book, for example, there’s a prevailing thread that runs through the book but the flavour of each master’s communication is different. When you read this book, it gives you one teaching.

Would somebody else like to answer his question? It’s a difficult one for me to answer

Well, I didn’t even know that there were spiritual teachers before I met John David. From the first meeting, where I didn’t even know that I was in a meeting with a spiritual teacher, something deep happened. I followed this something. But I still can’t name what it is. I often ask myself what it is. Of course I can say it’s his presence.

Coming back to Neem Karoli Baba, the word they used most often in a devotional Indian scene is ‘grace’. Kripa is the Sanskrit word. And they’ll say, ‘It’s guru’s grace.’ When I first came across this it’s very much like you’re describing: ‘What is this? It’s something, but I don’t know what it is.’ When I asked Papaji what is kripa or what is grace, he gave me a great answer. We were sitting together in his living room. He said, ‘This is kripa.’ So at that moment my mind stopped. Because there was nowhere else to go. The entire unfolding for me in almost twenty-four years since I had that question and answer with him, it’s only this. Papaji cleared everything away. He said, ‘Before you have guru kripa, you have atma kripa.’ And atma kripa is your Self. So this presence, this grace, is the Self. The revelation and the surrender to that and the familiarisation may take time. But from my experience that unknown presence you’re talking about is so strong that after a while this becomes the familiar place to live. Do you find this?

Yes. So then the searching becomes not searching for this, but to just clear away stuff that obscures, that’s all. And the obscurations, as he points out, are just misconceptions. Then the whole thing is very simple.

When Indira came to that first meeting, what I was saying was just nonsense for her. But it didn’t make any difference, she kept coming. She had to keep coming, and I remember when I first landed in Germany and started travelling around I was amazed because I kept meeting people like her who hadn’t been with other teachers. Germany is full of teachers. I was even wondering why I was there because there were so many teachers, what was the point of my being there. But somehow people were meant to meet me...I don’t know, it just happens. It was the same when I went to Kiev, Ukraine. On the first night I met Arjuna and on the second night I met Nirvano and it was like absolutely meant to be. It was miraculous really.

I see it like it’s all sort of set up.

Yes, but do you know how it works?

Do I know how it works? (everybody laughs) Interesting question. I don’t really ask how it works and the more that I surrender needing to know how it works, the more I have a knowledge of how it works. It’s an intuitive knowledge and it’s not intellectual or rational at all. It just is; it’s very natural. The way I see it, everybody is actually in the natural state all the time; it’s just that people think they have problems. So it’s kind of funny when you look at it because there’s nothing really different in an awakened state from a so called ignorant state.

Yes, it’s a big joke really.

It’s a complete joke! You can say there’s no difference, in a sense. But there’s a huge difference. The difference is that you’re no longer seeking for that which can’t be found in the conditional state. I’d say that’s the only difference, but that allows a huge spontaneous flowering of insight and changes the relationship to life. Are you following me here? Is this your experience?

Sometimes.

And you want it to be all the time. Great hook. Because it will never be all the time. So here’s the thing. What people look for and what I find – I’m just speaking about my own experience of having been through this for years and giving myself headaches from all this trying – is that there’s no such thing as an enlightened person. It’s not something that happens to a person. I was actually thinking about this today, driving over. What happens when you really don’t try to change anything at all? When you completely accept everything exactly the way it is? Whatever’s on your mind, if you completely accept it one hundred percent, in that moment it loses its power to make you suffer. You want more enjoyment than that?

Yes, that level of enjoyment that I had when I had the glimpse. It was incredible. So maybe it was like a vision of what it can be.

This is an experience.

Yes, I’ve had a lot of experiences. Everybody is laughing at me already.

And it’s fun, enjoy! But the nature of the experience is that it doesn’t last. So there’s a resting that starts to happen when you’re not seeking for the experience to be permanent and that resting becomes very delicious. Because the experience can become a part of an ego-personality on a subtle level, ‘Now I’m a spiritual seeker, I’m going to perfect myself so that this experience always lasts.’

You’re really in deep shit when you’re trying to do this.

But you know, it happened to me when I was not a seeker at all. So actually, I didn’t even know what it was. It just happened spontaneously.

And now your question is how to have that all the time?

Well, it’s not a question; I’m just waiting. I’m expecting that it will come. It’s not like I wake up in the morning and say, ‘Today not. Maybe in the afternoon.’ It’s not like this but I think maybe if I start to meditate. I think when I had that first glimpse I saw the whole picture and what would give me the right results. Then everything that started to happen was taking me in the right direction.

Yes, slowly – some people more quickly than others – but the idea that you’re waiting for something in the future ceases to have so much of a hold on you. Because that glimpse into your True Nature is already true. It’s already there, and the whole idea of seeking is happening within that. Just the habit of separating yourself from that old habit can take some time to play itself out, but it sounds to me like you’re in a very good place.

Yes. I lost some of my bad habits already.

You don’t have to lose them. (laughs)

No? Wow! Maybe I will start to drink champagne again.

Yes, very good! Who said it’s a bad habit? (Laughs) It brings up an interesting point though. So many spiritual seekers get this idea that we have to purify ourselves and be perfect. And there’s a phase where automatically we want to energetically prepare ourselves for a shift. This will happen without much effort.

You find yourself naturally taking steps. You may stop eating meat or stop smoking or be celibate or whatever it is, but at that point it’s not a struggle because the body needs to shift energetically to really start to accommodate what is already your reality. So in your case, the energetic shift already happened. The energetic awakening already happened. But to then go and say, ‘Okay, now I am a person and I have to do all these things to be good,’ this is actually not necessary.

But it’s happening pretty naturally; I didn’t push myself. It just happened like this and also I feel very often small energetic shifts, in my body. So I think it’s exactly like you say – we’re preparing the body – because I feel some energy inside.

This is all grace working on your body. Grace in the form of shakti (energy).

It’s interesting because again she met me just after this spontaneous opening happened. I showed up in Kiev and she came to a meeting and kept coming back.

Yes, sure. I went to a retreat weekend.

This is often the case.

We all think we’re doing things and we all think we’re making this decision, but actually we’re not. I didn’t choose to find the master. I didn’t choose to have some teachings. It just happened. Even the following is just happening. I love the quote from Ramana Maharshi where he says, ‘Your job is not to be this or that. Your job is just to be.’

I showed up in the lives of quite a few people here just when they were ready for somebody to show up. I don’t know how it works. Nobody knows how it works.

And you don’t need to know how it works.

You just surrender to it and it’s very beautiful.

It operates on a need-to-know basis. When the information is needed, it’s there. You can’t store this stuff in your brain, not if it’s real.

I’m curious what your experiences are and happy to have an open sharing about my own experiences as well. Does anybody have any questions for me?

In my case I was not looking for a master. My life changed totally when I was fifty and I was looking for a community. But then, I met John David. I could always feel this tremendous connection to my internal navigation system because when there is a doubt or fear about what is right, this is always my truth. And there’s no knowledge needed. The body gives better guidance than the thinking.

It’s not even the body. It’s more a sense, which doesn’t need knowledge.

It’s beyond knowledge. I also can’t explain it. I just go with it.

And the community gives you support?

Yes, but I also can’t explain this.

No need to explain.

It just happens. In the last days the retreat often brought something up and I had a lot of doubts about myself. I also had to weigh up the thought that ‘I’m right’, and ‘Okay! If I’m stupid forever, I’m stupid. I’m just a stupid person.’ And it was really the feeling, ‘I surrender to that’, and not to need to be something else or different. There was still pain in it. But I also had this thought, it is not so deep, ‘What is stupid actually?’

Because that thing which is stupid or smart or ‘Now I know it’ and ‘Now I don’t know it’, is not the Self. It’s just better to accept this feeling that ‘I’m a fool.’ Because then there is an awareness that’s not limited to any self-definition, and it can come to the forefront when we stop trying to change who we think we are. That’s all.

When Ramana Maharshi said, ‘Be as you are’, he wasn’t saying ‘Now I have to be as I am.’ People try so hard to be as they are because Ramana said so and they can never reach it. It just means to be normal. But there’s that difference – which is in the not trying to change it once the grace is pushing you from within and once the grace is knocking on your life to let it in. Actually you don’t have a choice in that either. It doesn’t ask your permission.

So has everyone here had this experience – seen that they’re not limited?

It sounds wonderful but a lot of Indian masters said that before enlightenment you have to remove your vasanas (structures of the mind).

Ah! Remove your vasanas.

Be as you are, but remove your vasanas.

You can be as you are on the condition that you get rid of your vasanas. So how to get free of the vasana? A very powerful way that my master Papaji showed me to be free of vasanas is to be quiet. And to be deeply quiet, you first accept that you are as you are. Very lovingly, be willing to be as you are. Very simple. In that state of silence, the vasanas cease to be active. Now they may, of course, start to act up later but as you stay more in the silence, as you become more in love with the silence, the silence itself is going to remove the vasanas, because the vasanas don’t really exist.

How to remove an illusion? I don’t believe in the path of hard work. Up to a point, yes. But at some point the silence and the surrender is going to prove much more powerful because the grace can remove the vasanas. The hard work makes you tired, so you surrender, basically.

I do cranio-sacral work and somatic therapy. Where there’s a deep seated identification we sometimes need to address this vasana that’s forming this sense of identity, this ‘I-person’, related to this body and this story. That can be addressed. But what Ramana Maharshi and Neem Karoli Baba and Papaji and such saints were showing is that there’s no connection between who you are and the conditioned self. The mind wants to find a connection. But it can’t. There’s no way. It has nothing to do with who you think you are. So that person thinks, ‘I have to become perfect’ and then, through this notion of imperfection, is seeking to perfect itself by getting rid of itself. This is impossible. (Laughs) You have to laugh at it. The mind will try to do this. This is what we do. We watch this monkey play around. A monkey will be a monkey. At some point the grace, especially coming to a place like this, insists, ‘Let me take some rest.’ Resting in that Self, we then see this higher power of the true Self that clears away the illusion.

You were asking about Neem Karoli Baba. He was such a saint that he would say to Ram Dass, ‘How much does squash cost in America?’ and chuck something at him! Such stories about the man and the way he would teach – he wasn’t speaking about Vedanta. He would quote Kabir. He would quote the Ramayana. What did he teach? He embodied unconditional, limitless love and so everything that came from him was a teaching of unconditional limitless love for everybody that came in front of him. Him being in a state of transcendent non-duality meant that there was no picking and choosing who he would give his love to, whom he would give the grace to, because there was no differentiation. Then again, there were people whom he would refuse to meet. We cannot really understand the ways of such a being.

There’s this surrender that happens spontaneously when you see the beloved. That is, in my view, actually what we’re longing for, and for everybody it is different. But I see too much Vedanta teaching; it gets too much going on in the mind. We sit and we think about it. The nectar we’re searching for is extremely rich and that moment of surrender can do what no amount of personal effort can ever do.

So at some point you came to Papaji, who was a little bit different from Neem Karoli Baba.

Yes and no. His style was different.

At least he stayed in one place. (everybody laughs)

He stayed in one place. When I met him he was having trouble with his feet, so he didn’t want to travel. He had this neuropathy because he had a diabetic problem and he said, ‘I’m dying from the feet up.’ He also really didn’t look like a saint. His neighbours treated him like an Indian man and he lived in a nondescript part of old Lucknow in those days. But he had a presence that I couldn’t deny.

I was very stuck on Neem Karoli Baba’s form and at one point, almost a year after I met him, Papaji told me a story. Even though Papaji had shown me clearly what I had come for, still I had this longing for Neem Karoli Baba’s darshan (being in the presence of a saint). One day I was sitting in front of Papaji and I could see him counting some mantras on his fingers; his eyes were open a little bit and he was kind of looking at me. He used to do this when he really wanted to bless someone, and I was getting a tornado of shakti blasted at me and I just kind of wound up on the floor, splattered in front of him.

After a while, I came to and sat up. There were about ten people there, and he didn’t really look at me but he told this story. After Lord Ram died, Hanuman was waiting in a cave in the Himalayas, meditating on Ram day and night. He was waiting for Ram’s darshan, but it was Krishna who appeared before him. Hanuman says to Krishna, ‘How can I serve you?’ And Krishna says, ‘I’m your Lord, I’ve come to give you darshan like you’ve been asking.’ And Hanuman says, ‘No, my Lord is Lord Ram’, and Krishna says, ‘No, no; we’re the same one. I have the flute and Ram has the bow and arrow but we’re the same one.’ And Hanuman says, ‘It’s okay that you’re telling me this but I only recognise the form of my beloved Ram with the bow and arrow.’ And as Hanuman is insisting and insisting, Krishna turns into Ram – and Hanuman falls at his feet. And as Papaji said this to me, he turned into Neem Karoli Baba. All my hair stood on end and I hit the deck and fell on my face. When I saw Papaji turn into Neem Karoli Baba, the next thing he said to me was, ‘Go to America!’ And I said, ‘Forget it! Now that I know who you are...’ For three days, every time I showed up for Satsang, he’d say, ‘When are you going to New York?’ And I’d say, ‘I’m not going anywhere.’ After three days, I said, ‘Is there some work for me to do in New York? Is this why you keep saying this?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ And then he said, ‘Go to New York and then tell me if there’s any difference between Lucknow and New York.’

And you know, I fell for it. I got my ticket for a couple of days after that and took the train to Delhi. Interestingly, when the train pulled up at one of the stations there was an old devotee of Neem Karoli Baba’s that I knew standing outside my window. He said, ‘Don’t go to America! Come with me to the mountains.’ I said, ‘No I have to go to America.’ But at that point, my fusion with guru’s grace was so deep that to watch all these changes – getting on a train, being in New Delhi, taking an airplane and being in New York – was just like watching a movie change. There was absolutely no difference in the state of connectedness with the Self. When I got to New York, of course, I went back to my family, to my parents. I was twenty-two or twenty-three. That’s the situation that is going to trigger all your crap.

That’s how parents are.

I sat down to write Papaji a letter and my intention was, ‘Yes,there’s no difference, but...’ I literally put the pen on the paper and there was this explosion of light and bliss and all I could write was, ‘Thank you from the bottom of my heart! There has only ever been This!’ and this incredible divine poetry flowed out. And I sent it off to him.

Much later I returned to India and was in Lucknow when Papaji died. After the cremation it’s customary in India to go back and wash and shower and change all your clothes. I went back to Papaji’s house and was offered food before I had washed and changed. I felt very uncomfortable. Papaji used to be very strong about that. I went to Jyoti, his assistant, and I said, ‘I can’t do this. I have to take a bath,’ and she said, ‘Well, you can take it in Papaji’s bathroom.’ So I find myself using Papaji’s stuff and I was getting really like, full Papaji immersion. Jyoti handed me his lungi and his t-shirt and she said, ‘Now these belong to everybody.’ I don’t know how to describe the sense of an intimate embrace from the beloved in putting his clothes on. The feeling of absolute intimacy with him was…indescribable!

There was a period where you were mostly focused with Papaji.

Oh yes, fully. These days I sometimes find myself with all these pictures of Papaji and I’m remembering him all the time, and sometimes I find myself with a big picture of Neem Karoli Baba or Ajja or Siddhi Ma. I don’t concern myself about why I do these things any more.

You mentioned about guru’s grace. Maybe you could expand that subject a bit, because it’s not so common for the Western mind to understand what you mean by guru’s grace.

The way people usually relate to guru’s grace and the guru bhakti (devotion) tradition is that in the beginning there is a duality: I’m a devotee and I’m praying to the divine, and the divine somehow works on the devotee, somehow awakens something through this mysterious force called grace. But what the grace reveals is that there’s only the divine. As Bhagwan said so beautifully, ‘Grace is the Self.’ So it’s not even a process.

There’s a line from Tulsidas, who wrote the Hanuman Chalisa and a version of the Ramayana. In Hindi it’s, ‘Soi janai jehi dehu janai, janata tumahi tumahi hoi jaye.’ This is from the Ramayana. The Ramayana is thousands and thousands of verses of sacred poetry. That line is addressing Ram, the divinity, and it’s saying, ‘The one that you choose knows you. And having known you, becomes you.’ That is probably the clearest way to say what grace is. This is addressing the guru or God. It’s hard to talk about these things, because from the point of view of the awakening, there’s no separation, there never was. But from the point of view of the imagined sense of separation there’s a lot of process, there’s a lot of help that appears to be needed. But the grace comes and says, ‘You were ever that.’

This is what I feel more and more in life, having known the absolute merger, the oneness, the diving into emptiness, the being of emptiness, that beautifully embodies itself in duality and multiplicity. So there’s no preference. You understand? So if there’s the situation of ‘I and the guru,’ what a precious illusion! What an extraordinarily precious illusion! Ramana said something I think many people don’t understand. He said, ‘Never use the sense of non-duality towards the form of the guru.’ Now what does it mean? Why do you think he would say that?

In a sense, the ego likes to use that place of non-duality as a very subtle place to hide or hangout. And it can be a sense of non- duality but there’s still a volition or a will: I’m gonna go to that place. One thing the form of the guru loves to do – you know, the guru is all the gods, so as a rudra, a destroyer, it’s destroying your ego, destroying the ignorance, destroying the sense of being a doer, of being somebody. And if you just go and say, ‘Well, he is my own Self, it’s all empty,’ your arrogance doesn’t necessarily get challenged.

I used to see Papaji, when people first came and had an experience of emptiness, he would say, ‘Very good, very good, you’re the Buddha, nobody has ever spoken like this, you’re the next Ramana Maharshi.’ Just so they would recognise and have faith in this recognition. But after some time almost inevitably he would start to, I don’t say test, but he would behave in ways that if there was anything hiding in there, it would come up. He was ruthless, absolutely ruthless. You could say what you wanted, ‘Oh, you’re my own Self, Baba,’ it didn’t work, he had the keys. It was forcing a level of surrender that your ego doesn’t want to do. It really doesn’t. Everybody says they want it; your ego never wants it.

Tell us something about Siddhi Ma. I don’t know much about her. How old would she be now, in 2014?

I’m guessing ninety-five. (She left her body in 2017 Aged 96.) In India, when there’s been a male saint who gets enlightened, often times they have a close female companion who embodies their shakti after they leave their form. With Papa Ramdas, Mother Krishnabai was the one. With Aurobindo it was the Mother. Siddhi Ma was Neem Karoli Baba’s close female attendant. He had said, ‘After I leave the body, Siddhi Ma will become radiant with my love.’ That was the way he put it.

He used to have a diary. Every day he would open the diary and he would write Ram in Hindi. Two pages of Ram, Ram, Ram. He left his body on the 11th of September, 1973. On the 9th he wrote his two pages. Then he dated the 10th and he wrote his two pages. And he turned over and dated the 11th and he handed the book to Siddhi Ma and he said, ‘You write from here.’ She didn’t know what that was. He left his body on the 11th. I’ve actually seen the diary. As her attendant said, ‘You can imagine the state Mother must have been in!’ It’s like crazy writing. Apparently, she was at the cremation and she was ripping pages out of his diaries and giving them to people as prasad (a guru’s gift). And she’s continued that practice through the rest of her life.

One day in Brindavan she was sitting in her garden, drying her hair after taking her bath – she was a very, very beautiful older Indian woman. She always wore a white sari, very radiant – and she said to me, ‘Since 11th of September, 1973, this world looks like a dream to me.’ That’s the only thing she’s ever told me about her state. So she’s my spiritual mother in a sense. She’s still in her body. She very rarely speaks now. She does darshan occasionally, sits in a chair. Now she does a lot of gazing. You don’t feel she’s doing anything; you come in front of her and she’s in some state. She has a presence that I call guru’s grace. She embodies that in an extraordinary way. You step into a room, you get anywhere near her, THAT becomes so obviously the predominant experience.

Twenty years ago Tiwari took us to the Hanuman temple in Lucknow, when Siddhi Ma was there. We all came in and sat down. And after some time, these two ladies came in, in saris with the top of the sari over their heads, you couldn’t see them so well. Anyway, they’re sitting at the front and I’m looking at them. Then a terrible thought passed through my mind, about Siddhi Ma, something like ‘She doesn’t seem like very much to me, nothing seems to be happening; she’s a bit fat.’

‘She’s a bit fat.’ (Laughs)

I’ll never forget this; in the next moment (sighs) she shone like a diamond, pure white light. I was looking at the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. I always felt that she exactly knew me thinking that; she gave me this experience. It just knocked me out of the temple, she’s just knocked my socks off. You can see I’m crying. It’s so deeply touching. You can never forget something like that.

One other time, in recent years, she literally blew my socks off. My socks were already off. She stays in her Rishikesh ashram sometimes in the winter and I was there; it was December. It was cold, there were a lot of people in the ashram and I was just sitting in the back. I saw her coming down the back stairs and sneaking around into the kitchen with one of her attendants. I just ran back there and I dive-bombed her feet. She was walking like someone in a dream, like she was floating. And as I pranaamed (bowed down) and stood up, she very slowly turned and looked at me. I was barefoot, and she looked down at my feet and she said in Hindi, ‘Where are your socks?’ And I said, ‘They are back there with my shoes.’ And she said, ‘You should always wear socks when it’s this cold.’ Then she turned back and floated away. I went back and sat in the chair I had been sitting in and felt explosion of love so powerful that I literally felt that if she had come to me and handed me a knife and had said, ‘Cut your throat,’ I would have done it. (Laughs) As Westerners, a lot of times we think we need a teaching. A saint does not need to teach you. (Laughs) There’s something else.

My first time in India I didn’t know anything about what I was doing there. I didn’t know what a saint is, I didn’t know how to\ behave; I was very child-like around her. I would leave the ashram to go to Nainital to get a certain kind of sweet that I liked. And she’d say, ‘Why are you leaving the ashram?’ and I’d say, ‘Because the food is boring.’ I remember the day after I said that, I came from the morning prayers and somebody had put inside my window a plate of the kinds of sweets that I would go to Nainital for. I started to eat them and as I looked up she was standing outside my window, laughing. She’s like my mother. She’s incredible. She has always been magnificent. She used to talk more chit chat. It was easy in the old days because she wasn’t so popular. You could sit in the room with her as long as you wanted, wander out and wander back in. It was very informal. Now, like a lot of saints, she’s got a few uptight people around her who try to keep other people away. So you just have to learn to gate crash and get around them.

Most recently, I was with her in Rishikesh and she just sits out on her balcony and she doesn’t talk much now. She’s quite old, I guess she’s about ninety-five. She just sits in her chair and she might say, ‘Where are you coming from?’ The first four days I was with her, every five minutes she turned to me and said, ‘Where are you coming from now?’ and I’d say, ‘I’m coming from Lakshman Jhula’, and finally, I realised she wasn’t talking about that. I said, ‘I’m just here’, and then she didn’t ask me anymore.

The number of times she’s said things that made obvious she knows exactly what’s going on in my mind or in my situation. I don’t even question it anymore. She has the ability – this is her siddhi – to grant anything you ask. She always used to say, ‘Maharaji will take care of it’, and she’d send you to sing a Hanuman Chalisa. But now she doesn’t even say that. You say what you need, she says, ‘Okay’ and it’s done. And she inspires one to want God, actually, more than anything else. I see that as a great gift of these beings, who we come around, that they make us want the truth more than our ego is going to want it on its own.

I think that’s an interesting point. Earlier you were asking about the effect of my meeting different masters. The film that I gave you, my first – Blueprints for Awakening, Wisdom of the Masters – when people watch this film I think the thing that comes through most strongly is exactly this. That they’re completely touched and that through watching the film they want God.

They’re not so much following what the different people say – that’s not so important – but basically the whole atmosphere of the film brings you into deep silence and brings you to want God.

You asked me some time ago about my story, and when I look at it, it seems that it’s just an unfolding of grace. From the beginning up to now. Also, on another level, it never happened. From this vantage point, now, the Self never went through anything. But the appearance has become quite beautiful. You were asking before about this: we have to get rid of vasanas, but actually...do we? Once we really come in contact with that essence, which is not touched, then things are unfolding; there’s no problem with them. Even if there’s an appearance of suffering, there’s something there that finds it quite beautiful.

It’s very, very mysterious. Recently, I had the chance to interview

Krishna Das. I met him in Amsterdam and we drove to a hotel in

the countryside. When we went to the room he sat on the bed while

we set up the camera and I got out my questions. So it was all very

ordinary, and before I could open my mouth he said, ‘I think I’ll

just play something.’

He got out his harmonium and played a bit, just sitting there on the

bed. I don’t know when it started exactly but it was about that time

when the room became flooded with energy. Like literally flooded

with energy. We all felt that Neem Karoli Baba was there. But

what exactly was there and how this feeling of flooding happened,

whether it was happening here inside or, as everybody felt, it was

happening in the room, I don’t know. As he said, ‘I don’t know.’ I

also don’t know. Maybe you do know.

I can talk about it, but honestly I don’t know. I can describe my

experience, but I can’t say what it is.

Quite a few times I’ve experienced people from Lucknow who knew

Papaji turning up in one of my meetings. We’d start talking about

Papaji and then Papaji would be just there in the room. I never

really know what’s going on but it’s happened too many times for it

to be just going on inside me.

Again, the rules of separation and duality do not apply in that field

of guru’s grace. You know the Rumi poem:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field.

I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

I’m leaving out one line but then it says, ‘...even the phrase “each

other” doesn’t make any sense.’ I think the point is that’s always

present. We overlook it. Because our attention is somewhere

else. So the guru takes your attention and says, ‘Stop with this

obsessive imagination of an external world and turn it inside.’

So that is your own consciousness, ready to shed the illusion of

an external world. It doesn’t make sense to ask how. The reality

doesn’t have a question. It’s only that which can never understand

the reality that asks questions about reality. (Laughs) This is why

I say I honestly don’t know.

I met Papaji in 1990, and at that time the Satsang (meeting in Truth)

world was not known in the West. People’s idea of spirituality was

crystals and getting a hug from Ammachi. It’s good but I couldn’t

really find anything that addressed my experience. Someone gave

me a book of Rumi’s poetry. Immediately I opened it I said, ‘This

is it.’ I love the mystic poets. It’s also why I learned to sing kirtan

and bhajan; it’s why I learned Hindi. You can sing this stuff. You

can’t speak it so much. Singing the name of God or singing these

incredible mystic verses...

When I turned forty, I was in Turkey, and I thought for my

birthday I could go to Istanbul and party with my friends or I could

go to Konya, alone, to Rumi’s tomb. And I said, ‘No; no contest.

I’m going to Konya.’ And here’s more grace. I said to my friend,

‘Do you know anything about Konya?’ It turned out he was a Sufi

who guided tours to Konya. So he arranged everything. Boom! The

door is open. So I travelled to Konya. Have you been there?

Yes, I still connect to the energy of the fountain in the temple.

There are tombs you go to in succession, the last one being Rumi’s.

So I have this man as my guide...I’m getting tears just remembering

it...and as I step into the building it’s like bshhhh! I can never

describe it. I’ve never felt anything like this. I couldn’t even stand

up. My guide recognised what was happening and he took me and

put me in a corner. I was a mess. Old women were coming up to me

and putting coins in my hand. I had a mystic satsang with Rumi. I

went there every day for four days and I had hours of mystic satsang

with this living incredible presence, that is in no way dead.

At the beginning of Ram Charan’s chapter, in my book, Papaji

Amazing Grace, I put a quote. ‘Beyond anything that might have

gone on or might have appeared, there was such a love.’ So this is

Ram talking about Papaji, ‘...there was such a love.’ And then he

says, ‘It was worth every painful grinding of the ego to be open to

such a love.’ I think this fits quite well in this moment, because it’s

not all nice. Grace is not just the...

...spiritual path. The real one is a war. It’s the Mahabharata.

Would you like to talk about this: ‘It was worth every painful

grinding of the ego’? We are talking about twenty-two years ago.

By now you’ve been ground and you’re probably even beyond the

polishing.

I don’t know. Papaji was one of the most impossible people I’ve ever

met. He would drive you insane. He might let you rest in some

beautiful blissful experience of Self for some hours or days but then

he would test you. He would be obnoxious, he would be mean,

he would break the rules, he would fill you with an unbearable

longing to see him and then slam the door in your face. And faced

with that stuff, what do you do? You demand and demand and

demand and you see how it’s driving you nuts and you can’t stop

demanding and you’re trapped.

Then at some point you give up, and even giving up doesn’t

work. He was ruthless like that. So what to say. This is the grace

of a great master who doesn’t want you to feel better; he wants to

kill you. Really. His reason for being is to free you of the idea of

who you are as a survival mechanism, this person, this ‘I’. Different

masters have different flavours. Papaji could be incredibly playful,

incredibly wonderful, and, if that didn’t work, he would get

absolutely ruthless. I saw him do it with almost everybody around

him at some point. Ajja was another one who I met who was

utterly ruthless. Ajja, if anything, was more difficult than Papaji to

be around.

Ajja is the guy whose ashram we visit during my Indian retreat. He’s

also in the Blueprints for Awakening book.

To be ruthless, is it not a vasana?

Papaji was in a category of his own. I never doubted for a second

that he was completely free. I definitely saw what appeared to be

tendencies working through him; he still had preferences of course.

He liked chocolate. But nothing in his behaviour ever gave me a

second of doubt about him being absolutely and utterly free and

that the power that was working through him was not him.

It wasn’t his personality that was choosing ‘Hey, now I’m

going to mess with this person.’ It was the power of the Self that

was coming through him. Ajja even more so. Ajja, I have to say, is

the only being I met whom I would say was like a classical avadhoot

(lost in God). He was hardly even aware of having a body. I would

go to his ashram and look around for him. I’d find him sitting

behind a bush, in just his lungi, and he’d be starring into space or

he’d be playing with a kitten or something. He’d go and talk with

people, one minute like a little baby and the next minute like a lion

and then a strong teacher, a small child again.

Papaji behaved differently. To realise the Self does not destroy

the vasanas, but when we’re talking about a master who has sat

many years in tapas (penance) of being in the truth, the personal

vasanas don’t hold any more power to grab. So it seems like there’s a

development in freedom. Even though freedom itself is freedom –

once it’s realised it’s realised – there seems to be a development, as

that becomes more one’s ground of being.

I would like to know more about acceptance. I can accept moments of

grace, but it’s not like I’m deciding to.

The very fact that you’re aware something exists means that you’ve

already accepted it. So even if you’re aware of resistance, it doesn’t

matter. Give me an example of something that you have difficulty

accepting.

There’s a lot. For example, my body. It’s quite small.

Yes. This must be a big part of your movie, your psychological sense

of self. First of all, it’s very brave that someone with your physical

condition has come to question yourself about your reality, and

perhaps it’s been a great benefit for you also. ‘Am I really this body?

And the way people relate to me, is that me?’ So the acceptance

may look like an attitude that you have to try to cultivate.

But the acceptance I’m referring to is the very fact that

recognising something exists means you’ve already accepted it. It’s a

very immediate acceptance. It’s faster than a mental attitude. There

is a glass of water there. Whatever I may think about it afterwards,

it doesn’t matter. I’ve accepted it because there it is, I perceive it.

And I’m not even talking about the thought that there’s a glass of

water there. I’m just saying that the Self doesn’t accept and doesn’t

reject. It’s an awareness that simply says yes to what is.

It has no choice?

Yes. Choiceless awareness. Nicely said by Krishnamurti. What

does it mean? It’s not that I become choiceless, because the ego is

never going to become choiceless. If you say I am choiceless, this is

bullshit. If you take chocolate and vanilla and strawberry ice cream,

there’s some taste you’re going to like more than another. This is a

choice. There are some people who you’re going to want to talk to

and other people you’re going to want to run away from. It’s the

way we are. ‘Impersonal’ awareness sounds like something very far

away and cold, but just the fact of being, prior to your ideas...this

is a choiceless acceptance of what is.

Take the example of sunlight that shines on everything. The

sunlight sees a person with a very nice body, the sunlight sees a

person with a small body, the sunlight sees a person with a fat

body...it doesn’t care. The sunlight sees an emotion about a thought

about ‘how I look’ and it doesn’t care. You’re allowed to have these

emotions. You’re allowed to have anything, actually. But you start

to fall more into that which is prior to your acceptance and your

rejection of things. That’s where you are already. Are you following?

The last bit is not so easy.

Not so easy? So acceptance is not easy? Don’t expect that you’ll

grasp it. What I’m saying is that it’s already happening. It’s so

close that it’s already happening. And this saying that it’s not to be

attained, in my understanding, this is very much an aspect of what

is meant. What’s already there before you have a preference or an

acceptance or a rejection? These things come after. These are mental

processes. So presence doesn’t need these things. It’s not bothered

by these things.

That’s why it doesn’t care whether you’re enlightened or not.

(laughs) It doesn’t care how tall you are, I guarantee you that.

Who you are really doesn’t care. And this is not to belittle the

psychological; I’m sure, psychologically, that there’s an issue, but

the True Self we’re talking about here, it’s just enjoying. It even

enjoys this drama of ‘If only my life was like this then I’d really be

happy and I’m suffering because it’s not different.’ Something is

enjoying this.

Give it some time and trust what brought you here. I don’t

mean this meeting. There’s this quest, there’s this urge that wants to

be known to you, of something is wanting; it’s grace knocking on

your door. So trust that, surrender to that. I have a body.

I have HIV. This is not an easy thing for my mind to accept.

But my Self, as I live with this more and more, it’s beautiful because

I can’t fool myself. Any place that I’m identified with my body as

a personality, this doesn’t like that fact. It just doesn’t like that. Of

course, I’m never going to accept that as a personality. But there’s

something closer to my being, it’s more intimate than myself, it’s

more intimate than my sense of self. It accepts what is simply

because it is. And it seems insane, I can laugh about this. But in

a way, on a spiritual path, we get quite insane compared to the

conventional societal standards.

But it’s beautiful.

Yes! It’s a beautiful insanity. Around Papaji it was a madhouse, the

laughter, and he would say sometimes, ‘If you laugh like this in

your country, they’re going to lock you up.’ Especially to Germans

he would say this! (Everyone laughs) On a personality level,

everybody’s got some shit. Maybe they have the most beautiful

body, still they have something they don’t like about themselves. So

don’t try to be perfect.

Can you say something about silence?

If I say it, it’s not silence. (Everyone laughs) But there’s something

that talking doesn’t disturb. There’s another silence, no? And this is

very much what I was saying. Presence, it doesn’t care whether you

accept or reject, it doesn’t care what appears. There’s a silence that

doesn’t care about whether it’s noisy. This isn’t a personal thing

though. It’s not like, ‘I’m going to be silent and have an attitude

that blah blah...’ it’s just there. It’s just here. And yes, it’s that

simple.

Ajja was very, very fierce with me about one thing. He said,

‘Be quiet.’ He was impossible! For one thing, I had spent years

mastering Hindi and he spoke Kannada. So I couldn’t just go up to

him and ask a question, I had to get a translator. And I had to get

him in a mood where he’d even stick around for me to finish the

question, let alone have it translated, and he wouldn’t put up with

my questions. He would just say, ‘Be quiet! You’ve asked enough,

you’ve had enough answers, you’ve read enough, just be quiet.’ This

drove me completely bananas. (Laughs) So I asked him a question.

On one of those rare occasions, when he was gracious enough to

be answering my questions, I said, ‘You say “Be quiet” so does that

mean there’s no thought or there’s no involvement in thought?’

And he gave a very interesting answer. He said, ‘Who’s there to be

involved in thought?’

Wonderful answer.

Because all of this arises in, stays in and returns to silence. As Papaji

used to say, ‘That silence is your home.’ He said, ‘How long can

you stay in the supermarket?’

Did you ever do some meditation or some practice?

Yes. I did many vipassana (insight) courses for some time which I

particularly enjoyed after I met Papaji because the silence was very

easy. Siddhi Ma had me singing the Hanuman Chalisa which is

a forty-line hymn to Hanuman by Tulidas, a six-minute mantra.

She’s had me singing it since I first came to India, twenty-five

years ago. I was very into some Vaishnava (one of the major Hindu

denominations; also called Vishnuism) practices, if that means

anything to you. Particularly I’ve been attracted more to Vishnu

than to Shiva. What gets clear to me – Papaji showed me, and

what I get very much here, around Arunachala – is that the essence

of practice is this keeping quiet. When Papaji said, ‘No practice’,

actually what he was talking about was the essence of practice. So

the other practices...actually I don’t throw them away. I see a lot of

people out there, saying, ‘Don’t do your practices because you are

That.’ But I don’t see very good results from that attitude.

Do you still continue?

You know, they come and they go. There’s times when it’s so obvious

that the idea of a practice seems ridiculous. And there’s nothing

that’s not practice. I’ve become the practice, life has become the

practice. There’s nothing but what I would call practice, but it’s not

practice because there’s nothing else. I still do my Hanuman Chalisa

every day because Siddhi Ma said so. I trust her. And I feel there’s

an energetic level, even for my body’s health, of protection that

that gives me – to chant that everyday. But it’s not like I’m doing

it to attain something. I do mantra, still. Because I love it; it’s just

delicious. Again, it’s like eating chocolate: ‘Ram, Ram,’ it’s yummy.

But I’m not needing to get something that’s not there immediately.

It’s like saying eating chocolate is a practice. In a way, you can say

it’s a bhakti practice – I do it because I love it. It’s an expression of

love, it’s not an expression of an effort to change something.

Did you do self-enquiry?

I can’t call it anything. You can call it Self-enquiry, but I don’t

because if you’re asking these words ‘Who am I’ with your mind,

you’ll get a headache. That will be the result. Or nothing. If you get

into the felt sense of I am and you go deeper than the feeling, then

it’s not a practice. It’s simply abiding as that. And you’re giving up

all practice because you’re giving up time. Because the Self doesn’t

need time. It doesn’t have time. There’s no past for the Self. So

there’s no question of practice, there’s no practitioner; that’s what I

mean to say. As long as there’s a practitioner, I’d say practice is very

good. I remember Nannagaru saying, ‘As long as there’s a seeker,

they should do practice.’

At a certain point, the idea of the seeker actually goes away,

so there’s no need for practice – but there’s nothing that’s not

seeking. There’s not a duality there. So the misconception of ‘I am

somebody in time who has to do something to get somewhere’,

this stops being the functional belief. It’s just witnessed. Sometimes

it’s huge and open and wonderful and other times, it’s like, ‘I’m a

robot’ or ‘I’m closed down.’

In a way this is the work. If there is a work, then it’s the work of

it not closing. My advice to people is to be aware, to watch. By

watching there’s some chance that when you feel something in the

body or there’s an emotion, things starting to close, you can catch

this. So my advice is to be very self-aware and to be always looking.

Rather than at the changing phenomena in the body or mind?

No, to look at that, at what’s going on. And that gives you a clue that

something is being touched to close things.

Papaji used to talk about how self-enquiry is actually a very

compassionate and loving way to be with yourself. There’s no

judgement in self-enquiry. So in the light of a loving presence

with yourself, when something arises which is painful, there’s this

compassionate sense of ‘Oh! There’s no blaming, there’s no self

judgement.’ It’s just being present from your heart with these things

and with that healing can start to occur. I don’t want to conceptualise

it too much, because again it’s a very somatic-emotional work. It

is a variation on a question which all of us have gone through. It’s

universal mind. Sometimes I feel the Self, sometimes I’m separate.

There’s no way that the limited, time-bound idea of who you are

will ever have a permanent experience.

My work so far tends to be more somatic. I see the body, the

appearance of the body, the soma, the experience of the body, is

an effect of identification with karma. So it’s all encoded in the

body. I work with people to free their body of the armouring

of a self-belief. Everyone is torturing themselves – ‘You need to

change this, you need to do this’ – and I assist them to come to

a neutral place of non-identification and releasing the body from

the ceaseless demands of the ego. I give people permission to not

torture themselves. As strange as it sounds, in the unwinding on

the energetic level, the mental and emotional unwinding happens

organically from within. So in that way I support people. They

come to me for sessions. I have groups and that’s growing.

When I work with people on the level of their physical form,

I drop into presence. What the body is, from the point of view

of presence, is something very different from the point of view of

mind. So when you can be as presence with the body, in a neutral

presence with no clinging or aversion, you can see everything. It all

unwinds, it all opens up.

It’s this incredible unfolding of consciousness. The wounds

that may be causing the emotional scarring can be from this lifetime

or past karma. In learning to be compassionately present with every

sensation, there’s a moving through, a detaching, which generally

people don’t do on their own.

Don’t you find that in a Satsang energy field?

You feel it. The body changes. Papaji used to say, ‘The cells dance.’

The body starts to shine. There’s a subtle thing happening.

Maybe you can talk about sex and spirituality. Can sex help on the

spiritual path?

There is only one energy in the universe. And your body started

with an orgasm. I was told sex was a hindrance to awakening. What

I see is actually that’s not true but there are certain phases in the

unfoldment – particularly if you are having experiences of a lot of

very strong energy of what they call kundalini – that the energy

becomes so powerful that this is actually dangerous. So at that time

you need a master and as I see in my experience, it’s helpful to be

celibate in these phases.

I would say something about that. Because in a way, it’s the same

story happening again. I had this powerful moment with Papaji and

my penis didn’t work for one and a half years. It wasn’t like I said,

‘I’ll be celibate now.’ It just didn’t respond. It wasn’t a question about

choosing to be celibate. It was the question of my energy, a lot of

energy but not in that area. It simply wouldn’t work, so I was celibate.

So it’s not a question of deciding to be celibate. Then you’re

probably in some kind of a religious organisation and part of your

vows is to be celibate. Papaji was asked if sex should be avoided and

he said, ‘In that case, all the eunuchs would be enlightened.’

Kabir wrote that. If being celibate earned you freedom, all the

eunuchs would be the first ones to get it. I just think it’s different

for different people. So in many cases it’s as you described: the

energy just doesn’t go there.

You were talking about kundalini. If there’s a lot of energy rushing

up your spine I don’t think that you’re going to think about sex.

It’s not necessarily my experience. (Both laugh) I’m working on

people’s bodies and a lot of times they’re naked – there’s sexual

energy present. As a body worker, as a therapist, you don’t even go

near the sexual energy, let alone have sex. But in the last couple of

years I’ve started to accept the sexual charge, the erotic charge, in

the context of presence. So the question is not what you’re doing,

the question is the quality of presence. So fully accepting the sexual

charge or impulse with presence – I call it a somatic-eros work, the

life force. Sexual energy is life force, it fills in the body. There is

nothing wrong with this. This is a very natural expression of prana

(life-force).

So have you done your Hanuman Chalisa verses today?

I have but I knew you were going to ask me to do them. So for that,

I’ll go to the harmonium that just happens to be here. (everybody

laughs)