Ramana Interview

Summary:

• Ramana Maharshi’s Teachings: Emphasis on self-inquiry (“Who am I?”) as the direct path to realizing one’s true nature.
• Spiritual Practices: Discussion on meditation, mindfulness, and other practices to aid in spiritual awakening.
• Personal Experiences: Accounts of Ramana Maharshi’s own experiences and realizations.
• Advice for Seekers: Practical advice for individuals on their spiritual journeys, including handling doubts and obstacles.
• Universal Truths: Exploration of universal truths and the nature of reality as understood through spiritual practice.

Full transcript:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week is Ramana. I guess sometimes you go by C.Y. Ramana, right?

Ramana: That’s kind of like a pen name that I picked up, but no one really calls me that.

Rick: Uh-huh. Like E.M. Forrester or something. [Laughter] Ramana, I must say that of all the people I’ve met and interviewed, I don’t think I’ve run into anybody who’s actually been into as many things as you have in your history, going back to the ’60s. And somebody might brush you off as a dilettante, which means a superficial dabbler, but you weren’t superficial and you weren’t dabbling. You dove hook, line, and sinker into so many different things and actually became the teacher of many of these things. I found it quite fascinating. And there was a time when still I would have brushed that off as a sort of a confusion or a drifting or something, but these days I would see it as just the perfect preparation for who you are now. Absolutely, we’re all on different paths and you did exactly what was right for you and here you are.

Ramana: Sometimes people ask me, “How did you do as much as you did?” And they say, “It’s kind of easy if you’ve never had a job.”

Rick: Right. Your job was doing spiritual stuff.

Ramana: Exactly. And the things that I was teaching brought me the income. I think one time in my life for about eight months I had a job and I realized it really wasn’t for me.

Rick: Oh right, you were working for a cable TV.

Ramana: Exactly.

Rick: I read that thing. Yeah, well it’s great. And maybe we’ll be talking about how you feel that all of that varied exploration has kind of gifted you in your teaching capacity today. Maybe you feel it has, maybe it hasn’t, maybe some of it was a waste of time, but maybe not. You certainly must be able to relate to people who are on just about any trip imaginable because you’ve also been on it at some point. So maybe since we’ve tantalized people with that little vision of all the stuff you’ve done, maybe it might be good to give us a history in as much detail or brevity as you feel is appropriate of what your path has been.

Ramana: I think that probably the beginning of it really happened in my teen years where I was exposed to, I had a teacher named Steven Gaskin.

Rick: I remember reading his thing, Monday Night Class.

Ramana: Exactly, right. Very good. Very few people know about that.

Rick: I read his stuff way back in the day.

Ramana: Right, so he did have a Monday Night Class. It was at a concert hall that they usually had to move from the Family Dog Ballroom to a bigger venue for the weekends and they call it Playland at the Beach. So on Monday mornings, I mean Monday evenings it was empty. So there were probably 2,000, 2,500 people coming to that.

Rick: Amazing. We’re talking about San Francisco here for those who don’t know.

Ramana: Right, exactly.

Rick: In its heyday.

Ramana: Totally. He pointed me to a teacher, Suzuki Roshi. You’ve probably heard of him before. He was the first Zen master to come to the United States. I didn’t have a close relationship with him, but I did really, from Steven’s teachings and from Suzuki Roshi’s teachings, one of the things that was brought forward to me and I was young at the time, 16, 17 years old, was that kind of what we want to get to is the natural state, right? And I guess the big question I had, and I did give this to Suzuki Roshi at the time, I asked him, “If it’s the natural state, then why is it that everybody is not just in it all the time?”, right? When I got exposed to Hinduism, they even went as far as saying, “Well, it’s not only your natural state, it is actually who you are.” So this really underlined this question for me, which started a quest back in the ’60s for me.

Rick: What did he say when you asked him why people weren’t in it all the time?

Ramana: He said, “Keep practicing and you’ll find out.”

Rick: That’s an interesting little… Go ahead, continue.

Ramana: Well, actually that kind of comes full circle because everything kind of changed when I met my teacher Papaji. I actually felt like when I saw him, he was singing my tune. He said that his quest was going from temple to temple to temple all throughout India and asking this question about how is it that I see God, to see the God-like state every moment.

Rick: How can I do that, you mean?

Ramana: Right, exactly. And he said every single ashram, minus none, every single ashram I went to gave him some version of, “Come into the ashram, study with me, do the practices and you’ll get what you want.” And he said that he would look in some of these ashrams with these men with these grey beards coming down to the floor who’ve been studying their whole lives. He didn’t find anybody awake. So he said it wasn’t until he met his master, Ramana Maharshi, that he was the first one that actually did not give him that answer.

Rick: Good. I should ask you what answer he gave him. Might as well and then we’ll loop back and continue the story.

Ramana: It was really the moment of Papaji’s awakening. It was all about discovering who or what is perceiving. So what Ramana Maharshi asked him was, he said, “What’s it like when you see God?” And he said, “It’s just a feeling of peace, peace of unity.” And since he was a Krishna devotee, he said sometimes in that feeling this vision of Krishna would appear. So Ramana asked him, “Do you see Him right now?” And he looked around and he said, “No, sir, I do not see Him now.” And he said, “Well, that which comes and goes…” He said, “Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t.” So Ramana Maharshi gave him the feedback, “That which comes and goes isn’t it. So therefore you’ve been looking for the wrong thing all this time.” So he instructed him, “For the one who’s looking out at God and looking out at that world, to let that one turn 180 degrees to look back. Not inward, but back.” Because there’s so much of go within, right? He said, “Look back and find out who or what is perceiving.”

Rick: What’s the difference between in and back?

Ramana: Back is directional. This is one of the things that I kind of figured out. This is an aside in this work that I do called Radical Awakening. It all has to do with perception, how it is that consciousness is perceiving through the sense organs. Seeing is directional. So that means we’re not like lizards, where we can go around and see the sides and behind. It really is looking forward. So to have that, which is looking forward and out, to turn 180 degrees back, to look back to see what is actually perceiving. So that’s back. My sense of when people say go within, oftentimes, and I see this all the time, you ask them to go within, what’s the first thing they do? They close their eyes, right? They go into this kind of sensorial world of what they’re perceiving in their sensations in their inner world. And that is very different than actually getting a sense of who is looking through this, who or what is looking through these eyes, who or what is listening through these ears. So what Ramana Maharshi’s — and this is a seminal piece of the Radical Awakening work, because I really based the whole thing, and it’s perfect we’re talking about this in the very beginning, because it was Papaji’s awakening and Ramana Maharshi’s instruction to him, which was so seminal to my own, that I based the most seminal piece of the Radical Awakening work on this. Which is when he said he looked back, he saw that there was no thing there, but a presence of something that was infinite and tied in and connected.

Rick: My wife just sneezed. Ramana says, “Bless you.”

Ramana: So that’s back, and that was the instruction. He said the seer, the one that the true seer, or what is called in Hinduism the true perceiver, was revealed, that the self was looking directly at the self. And that is, by the way, kind of classically in Indian literature, that is one of the definitions of an awakening, where they say an awakening takes place when the true perceiver becomes aware of its existence through its direct perception of itself.

Rick: Yeah, this is all very reminiscent of the Gita. There’s verses about withdrawing the senses from their objects like a tortoise, withdrawing its legs into its shell, so that’s kind of like the turning inward or turning back. The self realizes the self by the self, and so on.

Ramana: Very classical.

Rick: Yeah, it’s age-old stuff, but has often been misconstrued and forgotten, and just not practically available.

Ramana: One of the opportunities that I got to have during the time period as with Papaji was, we had a lot of time because there was only one satsang in the morning, and usually we would have lunch or something or dinner with him in his house, but there was a lot of free time, so I really took it upon myself to study the Indian classics at that time. And then when I moved to Tiruvannamalai with the Ramana Ashram, I was made available to all of Ramana’s teachings at that time, which is, they have a library there that has over 200 books on Ramana Maharshi. So I just kind of spent many years just poring over everything. I figure since my name is Ramana, I should know something about Ramana.

Rick: Yeah, you better. So you live in Tiruvannamalai? You live there more or less these days anyway, don’t you now?

Ramana: I have a house there, and I’m there probably maybe a quarter to a third of the year sometimes, depending on the year. Most of the time I am on the road living out of two suitcases, and it’s been like that since ’98.

Rick: It’s an enjoyable lifestyle if you’re cut out for it.

Ramana: Recently I’ve been feeling like I’m getting kind of old for this. The energy is starting to run down. A few years ago I got to see my wife, maybe I think I counted the weeks, about seven weeks out of the whole year.

Rick: Wow, she must be a very patient person.

Ramana: It’s wearing thin, but yeah.

Rick: So there’s so much we could talk about here. We could keep delving into the whole Papaji meeting Ramana Maharshi thing, or we could go back and keep tracing your story and then come back to the thing. How would you like to proceed?

Ramana: I feel like that interaction with Papaji, the most important piece, was that meeting of his awakening. It was the thing that turned everything around for him.

Rick: Now, pretty much anyone who’s read about Papaji or Ramana Maharshi has heard about that interchange, but obviously probably only a small fraction of those people have had a similar experience when they read about it. So there’s some missing ingredient for most people in terms of just hearing the words that transpired versus actually clicking into the experience that took place, and perhaps that experience was by virtue of Ramana’s presence. There was some transmission or something that took place which you’re not going to get out of a book. What would you have to say about that?

Ramana: I’m writing a book right now on Radical Awakening. Of course it’s 18 years in the making, but I’m actually in the final edit of it right now. But I address that directly. In the book I start off by saying, “Radical Awakening works, but I don’t really know why.” It’s a mystery why people wake up in a Radical Awakening session. There must be something, I mean there could be something about the transmission.

Rick: You feel that. I mean if you’re in the presence of somebody like Papaji or Ramana Maharshi or some great saint, you feel like you’re sitting in front of a blast furnace. There’s a Darshan effect and the air gets saturated, the atmosphere is saturated with this sort of divinity and it kind of soaks into you. So it’s conducive, perhaps, that kind of proximity is conducive to a spiritual awakening.

Ramana: Right, I do agree. If I could say something, I don’t want to go all over the map,

Rick: that’s alright

Ramana: but I know where we’re going with this. There is something I want to say about that moment, and that people not getting that experience, because I really do want to talk about that because that is the focus of the Radical Awakening work, is that interchange. But to kind of make a side step about the transmission, first of all, one of the things that Papaji said often was, he had a big picture of Ramana Maharshi and Satsang Bhavan behind him. He would say that if there’s anything that you’re getting from me, it’s not from me. It’s from my teacher, and he pointed to the big picture of Ramana Maharshi behind him. Ramana Maharshi said pretty much the same thing. He said, “Don’t look at this aging old man’s body. You’re not getting anything from this. If there’s anything you’re getting from me, you’re getting it from my master. You’re getting it from my teacher.” And he would point to the mountain Arunachala. So if we understand classically now, let’s go back into classically what Arunachala, how it’s viewed by the southern Indians. They say that it is the actual body of Shiva himself. They say that his abode is in Kailash, his house is there. And they have a whole story about how it is that he came to this place,

Ramana: which is kind of interesting too. One of the archaeologists took a lot of interest in the idea when he was told that the granite around Arunachala is some of the oldest found on the planet. Because that’s how it’s spoken about. This is an original place and was called in India the first yuga, the first age. So when you look at, well, what is Shiva then? What are they talking about? It’s not some blue guy that’s got a bunch of arms carrying stuff. If you go back to the Vedas, they use the word Shiva, but not as a god. They talk about Shiva as a principle, the principle of this infinite consciousness that is in meditation, that is reflecting on the infiniteness of itself, infinite consciousness. So when we talk about, and Ramana Maharshi used to say that Arunachala is the source of the silent transmission. So here’s this thing, you look at it, it looks like a big pile of rocks and dirt. But when you’re actually there, and I’ve heard about it for so long, all the time that I was with Papaji, he always pointed to Arunachala, but I never really wanted to leave him. I didn’t have another interest in it, but when, the year he died in ’97, he had his Mahasamadhi. I had my ticket booked to India already, so I figured, well, what’s the use of going to Lucknow where he is? I’ll go to his teacher’s teacher, go to the source of the silent transmission. It’s kind of interesting, that year most of Lucknow, I noticed the whole community around Papaji was there. That was my surprise.

Rick: Inter-Vamana, I can’t say it.

Ramana: Actually, the Indians call it Tiruvannamalai. Annamalai is Shiva, that’s another name for Shiva. And Tiru means the great, or the revered, so it’s Tiruvannamalai, the great Shiva. So the town is named after the mountain, Shiva. So if you look at that Shiva being this infinite consciousness, if we could look at, for a moment, classically again, the function of a guru. Because when people ask me, this is kind of interesting, when I went to go see Amma, she asked me, “Who’s your guru?” And I said, “Arunachala.” And this huge smile came over her face, and she kind of shook her head like this, and she said, “Very good.”

Rick: Nice.

Ramana: So the function of a guru is, as long as there is an identification with the body and the mind, even if there’s a trace of identification, it’s classically said that it’s useful to have some shape or some form that one can reflect back who that true self is. So Arunachala has that function. And there is clearly, anybody who’s been there can tell you this, that there is a transmission that comes from it. I do find that it is the source of the silent transmission, and most of the people who live there agree with that. Most people who’ve been there, who’ve kind of tuned into it, have a sense of that anyway. So it is something on the physical plane. It is a thing that reflects it back. It’s just like I always kind of smile sometimes, because when I say that, my guru never really is up to any mischief. As so so many of them are.

Rick: Yeah, it’s true. Arunachala would have a hard time sleeping with the young ladies in the area. Well, it’s interesting. If you reduce the earth to the size of a billiard ball, it’s actually smoother than a billiard ball, despite the Himalayas and the Marianas Trench and all that, it’s very smooth. So in a way it’s ridiculous to think of this teeny, teeny little bump on a little speck of dust in a vast cosmos being somehow the embodiment of a universal principle, Shiva, which is completely unbounded and cosmic. And yet I’m completely in tune with what you’re saying in terms of mountains or individuals or whatever being portals, you could say, or conduits through which that universal consciousness can somehow be radiated more powerfully than in other places.

Ramana: Absolutely.

Rick: And so being in the proximity of that mountain or that person or so on can be highly conducive to one’s awakening.

Ramana: Yeah, the way Annamalai Swami said it was, he says consciousness is like water. It’s everywhere, even in the desert, it’s like 13, 12% or something, there’s water there around the planet. He said there are places and people and situations where there are concentrations of this water. And then he points to Arunachala and he says Arunachala is the biggest waterfall that you could find on the planet.

Rick: Very cool. I remember I went to Sedona one time with my wife, we were camping, and we went to the Chamber of Commerce and we got a map of the power spots. And then we went hiking out and you kept running into all these people and very sheepishly asking one another, “Have you seen the power spot? Are we on the right track?”

Ramana: Yeah, right.

Rick: So that’s an interesting point we’ve just covered. There’s a certain belittling of gurus that takes place in today’s spiritual culture and there’s a lot of confusion and controversy about it and people might be skeptical about the Arunachala thing, but it’s interesting to ponder that human beings, if they’re properly equipped, or even a mountain, could be a place that radiates consciousness, which of course is everywhere. The electrical field is everywhere, but this light bulb over me radiates it in a certain way.

Ramana: Beautiful. One of the ways to look at it, I think that anybody who’s been to what you might call a power spot, if you’ve been to Lourdes or Machu Picchu or that kind of thing, kind of tuned into that energy, they’ll have no problem understanding what a power spot is. And it’s been an interest in my life. And what I look at is that every one of these power spots, Sedona being one of them, I spent a lot of time in Sedona, I used to spend two months of the year there on a regular basis doing trainings there, that each one has its own energy signature, is kind of how I would turn it, an energy signature. Sedona is considered to be the energy signature for me, it’s kind of like a portal to everywhere. Boynton Canyon, I ran into some guy in Boynton Canyon one time and he says, “I used to travel all over the world, but now I just do it from here.”

Rick: Oh, interesting.

Ramana: There’s some out there people there. I actually thought about living there for a while and ended up in Boulder instead. So the energy signature of what I see of Arunachala is that it quiets the mind and opens the heart. That’s the energy signature of Arunachala. And one of the things that I find is that I do a lot of traveling, as we talked about, but once a year I see kind of the epoch of what I do yearly, is I take a very small group, only 21 people, to a pilgrimage to Arunachala and have them sit there and receive the transmission. Everything about the pilgrimage that I do is tuning in to that energy at a more and more refined and deeper level. What I have to say about that is that the people who actually come to Arunachala, to this pilgrimage, are called. It’s not like you’re telling them something and they go, “Oh, that sounds like a cool thing. I think I’ll check that out.” If you read the Arunachala Puranas, which is a classic piece of literature about Arunachala itself, where it says that Arunachala calls people. You are invited to it. It doesn’t mean that you respond because not everybody responds to it. You’re called and you don’t have to go, but if you go there, they say that everything just opens up for everything to happen for you to be there. If we look back at the history of Arunachala, a lot of reasons why we could say, “What makes a power spot a power spot? What is it about this particular mountain?” Well the Hindus say that it’s the embodiment of Lord Shiva himself, this concentration of pure consciousness. Because of that, you look at the history, and they say this all the way through the Yugas, the ages, that it has been a magnet for fully realized beings. Ramana Maharshi is only one of how many hundreds of thousands over the Yugas, the ages, coming to this mountain. What happens is that they drop their bodies and they stay there. I remember the first year when I was there in ’97 with my friends from Lucknow, we called it a Buddha field. It was just this strong field. And maybe we could say it was because we’re walking through all of the energy of these fully realized beings. Most of the people who remember Ramana, they’re older now of course, but they remember him being there, most of them will say that when they go to Ramana’s Mahasamadhi, the place where he’s buried, and go to the place where he gave satsang, that they’ll say it’s as if he never left. So and Ramana Maharshi, is only one small example of I don’t know how many fully realized beings whose energy is there. So what I do is that Ramana Maharshi has a series of verses called the Marital Garland of Verses. And this all are verses about his love and his relationship with Arunachala. The first one by the way is “Thou dost root out the ego of all who meditate on me in the heart of Arunachala.” Another one of his verses talks about how you’re like caught in the net of grace if you’re invited. So I feel like even though I’m giving satsangs really all over the world right now, that there’s a level in the background that I’m beating this drum to find out, like casting the net, to see who is getting caught in this net of grace. It’s kind of funny, I was doing the satsang in Encinitas, which is a little town north of San Diego, a number of years back. And I started telling the story about how Papaji did not send me out as a teacher. I noticed a small group of people when I said that walked out.

Rick: Really?

Ramana: Yeah.

Rick: You didn’t have the stamp of approval.

Ramana: Well, I didn’t get to the punchline for them yet.

Rick: Impatient crowd.

Ramana: The punchline about that was he said, “I sent no teachers out.” I don’t know if you’ve seen the video of him that’s made for the interview, is when they’re asking him, Papaji, if you could summarize in just a few words what it is that you’re offering. He said, “No teacher, no teaching, no student.” One of the things he talked about in this work, Ramana Maharishi’s work, is that there’s a god there, there’s Shiva, has a thousand and one different manifestations, as you may know, each one of its own name. One of them is Dakshinamurti. Dakshinamurti is the Shiva that transmits the silent transmission. In that, Ramana Maharshi talks about how the teaching is not only in silence, but the teaching itself is silence. So how is it that one could make a teaching out of that? And Papaji, we talked earlier about gurus and there’s a lot of controversy about them. He was very suspicious about most gurus. He one time said that, “In all my travels all over the world, the number of fully realized beings that I’ve actually encountered, I can count on one hand.”

Rick: That’s an interesting comment. Did he travel around a lot?

Ramana: Oh yes.

Rick: I didn’t realize that. I thought he just sat in Lucknow.

Ramana: No, there’s actually a great three volume set, about 1200 pages, that David Godman did. I don’t know if you know about David.

Rick: Sure, yeah.

Ramana: He’s quite a historian.

Rick: I should read it.

Ramana: Yes, but what’s so funny is that here it’s 1200 pages of his life, right? The name of the book is called “Nothing Ever Happened.”

Rick: There are so many rich nuggets in what you’re talking about. Let’s try to delve into them all. First of all, when you were talking about Arunachala, it was so reminiscent of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” which I watched again recently, where Richard Dreyfuss is called and he doesn’t know why. He’s playing with the mashed potatoes and he’s saying, “This means something.” He’s yearning to get to Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. He finally gets there and there’s a group of other people who are also called and they don’t know why.

Ramana: Oh my God, that’s perfect. Thank you for that.

Rick: Then they’re scrambling up the mountain and the government is trying to gas them and everything. Then he finally gets there and the little aliens congratulate him and put their arms around him like, “You’re the one who made it.” It was such a beautiful metaphor, that movie.

Ramana: Thank you for that. That is perfect. It speaks well to it.

Rick: God there’s so much in what you just said. The whole thing about silence and a 1200-page book entitled “Nothing Ever Happened,” to me that speaks of the paradox of the multidimensionality of life, where you could write a 1200-page book full of all kinds of interesting anecdotes and teachings and wisdom. But if you boil it down to its fundamental essence, nothing ever happened. But if you just start with that and we all just sit there and say, “Nothing ever happened,” then you don’t have the pathless path to lead you to that genuine realization. All you have is a concept.

Ramana: One way you can look at it is like a dream. You have a dream and when you wake up in the morning, did what happened really happen? Well it certainly seemed like it at the time. Especially those dreams seem realer than reality? Those kinds of dreams? And yet in the moment that you wake up, you realize, “Wow, none of that really happened.” It was all in my imagination. And this is how this life, classically, in Hinduism is looked at. My favorite piece is “The Followers of Brahma.” As you probably know, in Hinduism, there’s a trilogy of gods. This is the way that it’s presented by the Aryans, the Hindu Aryans that moved from the South. They brought this pantheon of gods. Previous to that, there was only the Vedas, which was in Sanskrit and very kind of esoteric. Most people couldn’t even read it because it was a dead language. It was free. So they came up with what’s called the Puranas which is the teachings of the Vedas in story form. This is where the pantheon of all these Indian gods came. There’s some level that I think Indians understand that they’re not, that they’re just principles being spoken about, not like Jesus, who was really seen as this person who walked the earth. They understand it’s the story, the principles that were important. So I love this piece about the dream.

Rick: Shankara incidentally called the whole life prior to enlightenment “The Long Dream.”

Ramana: Yeah, perfect. What I wanted to say is I really love the way the followers of Brahma talk about it. Brahma, the trilogy of gods is Brahma, who they say that he fell asleep and had a dream. That was the beginning of this yuga, of the first yuga. We’re in the last yuga, by the way, as you probably know, the Kali Yuga. And they said, “We are in Brahma’s dream now. We’re a character in Brahma’s dream.” Then there’s Vishnu, who is continuing through the dream. He keeps coming back and what’s called an avatar, which is a man that is a god that’s taking a man’s form. For instance, Krishna was one of his avatar forms. Lord Rama was one of his avatar forms. But he’s always chasing after these demons. At every one of the stories, there’s been nine of his incarnations so far, they always get away. They say that there’s a tenth one that’s coming, he’s called Kalki, his last incarnation. That’s when he’s going to capture these demons. Then comes Shiva, which is the third form. There’s Brahma, then there’s Vishnu coming down, continuing the dream, chasing down this evil, which is so classic. You could just get the, “What is that evil really?” That’s the study. It’s ignorance. And then Shiva comes and destroys the dream. Everyone sees through it and there’s this waking up process. Everybody wakes up from the dream. So I love this whole thing about it’s not just a dream, but it’s God’s dream. We’re a character in God’s dream. There’s that chanting that people do, “I am Brahma.” We are the God, we are the dreamers.

Rick: Incidentally, in case people listening at this point are thinking, “What is all this Hindu mumbo-jumbo?” I just want to remind them that all of this is metaphorical. Mythologies are all metaphorical. They’re meant to illustrate, in a comprehensible way, deep, subtle cosmic principles. Mechanics of nature, we could say. So it’s not like I don’t know maybe on some level there is some blue guy with four arms and a river coming out of his head. But really what that represents, and all this is meant to imbue in us, is an understanding of the mechanics of nature, of cosmic principles. I think physics is great, as a layman, even if you dabble a little bit in quantum physics, because all these principles of the world being a dream and so on are beautifully illustrated by modern understanding. You get down to the quantum level and there is no physical universe. That level is very real. Ultimately there is no other level.

Ramana: Like I said before, the Puranas, the whole story form of the Vedas, is a way of illustrating these principles. It’s all about the principles. I just got a little kick out of this whole thing about we’re in Brahma’s dream. I love that.

Rick: Yeah. Let’s play with that for a minute. If God is really omnipresent and it really completely is the warp and woof of everything, is the source and substance of everything, then what is actually happening here? Are you and I really having a conversation? Are we really hundreds of miles apart? Or is this just a holographic projection of all-pervasive intelligence creating forms within itself? It’s like we do when we dream at night. We have all these entertainments. We wake up and we think, “Well, that was amusing,” or “That was scary,” or whatever, but it was only a dream. We are kind of like the microcosms of the macrocosm. We’re the embodiments within our human form, so to speak, of cosmic principles. We kind of recapitulate in our own experience that which is taking place on a cosmic level, namely that the whole thing ultimately is amorphous. It’s a dream.

Ramana: Right. If I could kind of jump on the tails of that.

Rick: Go for it. I’ll shut up for a while and let you go.

Ramana: It’s really about the shift that happened for me at my time with Papaji. I realized at one point it was really that moment that you’re talking about when there is the moment of waking up, of realizing every morning we wake up after a dream and we have this experience, “Oh, that was just a dream.” It’s like whatever happened in there lost its significance. So, I would classify myself as, over the decades before I met Papaji, being a practitioner of

Rick: Everything under the sun.

Ramana: A spiritual practitioner that was actually involved in practices to get to a certain experience. One of the things that was very clear about that is that every one of those spiritual experiences had a beginning, and had a middle, and had an end. At the end of that experience, I was always left with, “Here I am. I’m just me again.” Maybe a little bit more informed me, someone that can… As Trungpa talks about, after a while you start getting a lot of In spiritual materialism, you’ve got a lot of stories and experiences to go back to and talk about. But essentially, it was continuing to be the same me. It was a fundamental me with a primary identification with that, that had a kind of foray for a while into a spiritual experience, where that dropped away. So, in reflection of the experience that I had with Papaji, which I feel like what really happened, was that whole model flipped upside down. So that I had a sense that there’s this fundamental place of who I am. And then it would go into, I call it now, foray into the mind. I had a foray into the mind, which had this experience that I am this individual separate person. That had a beginning, and a middle, and an end. At the end of that experience of that foray into the mind, without any kind of practices, and without any kind of having to remember something, it’s kind of like that had its own energy, and that energy kind of ran out at one point. When that energy ran out, I felt like I dropped back into this place, where, to kind of reference what you were talking about before, that it was almost like waking up from a dream and realizing none of that was real. So, at first I could honestly say that probably there wasn’t any more residual time that I had in a sense of being in the true self, but the important thing, and the thing I really realized when this thing flipped around, that it was where I returned to that was what was most important. It’s something that happened that I actually had to reflect upon later, but I realized that was the moment of my shift. It wasn’t like all of a sudden I’m enlightened anymore. It was like the return place shifted, flipped upside down for me.

Rick: So, elaborate on that a little bit more. So, in other words, rather than kind of being oriented with, anchored in your individuality looking for some deeper universal reality, it flipped so that you were that universal deeper reality, living life through an individuality. Would that be fair to say?

Ramana: Yeah, one way of looking at it is we could say that it was like the primary identification shifted because…

Rick: Yeah, that’s a good way of putting it. The primary identification shifted.

Ramana: Yes.

Rick: There’s a T.S. Eliot line. He says, “We should not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

Ramana: What happened at that point was I took actual pride before the point I met Papaji of being a good spiritual seeker.

Rick: You were major league. You did everything.

Ramana: Well, I dedicated my life to it. I didn’t have a family. I didn’t have a home. I was just, this is all I did. It’s the only thing that rang my bell. Nothing else seemed to do that. So, to have the spiritual seeker die, understand that when I came to Papaji, I had a bag full of practices and I was just going to Papaji to get the next one.

Rick: I see.

Ramana: And then he had these big hands and he would shake his fingers sometimes and he’d say, “No practices.” It’s like, wait a minute. What do you mean no practices? I mean, I’m a spiritual seeker. This practice is what it’s all about. And he said, “Doing a practice and being a serious seeker, practitioner, there’s a premise that I’m not it and if I do these practices, then I could become it.” And he said, “Look down at your genitals right now.” He says, “You could see if you’re a man or a woman. You don’t have to practice that. You are that no matter what you, how you act or how you believe yourself to be. You are either a man or a woman.” So he gave the example, you’ve probably heard before, it’s kind of like being in San Francisco and you want to get to San Francisco so you take a plane to Chicago and then New York, back to Chicago, back to San Francisco again. This is the whole, and in a way what we look at is that it is this seeking, it is this practicing. The practice is the very seat of this journey from New York back to San Francisco when you’re already in San Francisco.

Rick: So would you brush off, or would he have brushed off, all the traditions, Zen and all the Hindu practices and all the shamanic practices and the indigenous cultures and their practices? I mean, would he all say that was a big crock, a waste of time?

Ramana: Well, it’s kind of interesting because people who are Hindus, Who grew up with this, the Brahmins, started from childhood with this stuff. I’ve seen him in interaction with them and he would actually confront them directly. They were asking the same question, the great, the teachings that say it’s important to meditate, important to study, important to get a teacher, all of those things, are you saying that those have no value? And his answer oftentimes was the same. He’d say, no, you’re taking it way too far. I’m really not saying that at all. It was important to the place to bring you into satsang. But he said, once you’re here now, it’s like those things are actually the practitioner itself, is what’s going to get in the way.

Rick: I think that’s an important distinction because a lot of times Papaji’s words are taken, perhaps out of context, and used as a sort of an alibi for just not doing anything. He was speaking to a room full of people who were in his presence and for whom practices at that point might have been superfluous and even an obstacle. He was addressing them, but there is the old Zen saying that practice, enlightenment may be an accident, but spiritual practice makes you accident prone. So everything has to be put in the proper context.

Ramana: Yeah, there were many people like myself.

Rick: Practice junkies.

Ramana: The majority of them were actually Osho devotees. After Osho passed, there was a lot of people coming to see Papaji. And they had the same kind of history that went all the way back into the 60s with their spiritual practice. I was wondering if we could steer the conversation a little bit to the work of Radical Awakening.

Rick: Absolutely. We have all the time in the world. This has been interesting, but we can steer it right now if you’d like, into Radical Awakening.

Ramana: Or if you’d like to take it somewhere else, because I don’t know how much more you wanted to know about me. I have stories I could tell about me.

Rick: I’d say that I’ll go by your lead. Whatever you feel you’d like to say, I’m good with that. We could spend the whole two hours talking about all the stuff you did back in the 70s and 80s and 90s. That would be a waste of time. Let’s go right into Radical Awakening and see where it takes us.

Ramana: Let’s start with my name, Ramana. Because oftentimes people will say, “You’ve kind of taken on a big name there. How did you come up with that?” The story behind my name is that I used to work with Eli Jackson there.

Rick: Whom I’m interviewing next week, by the way.

Ramana: Yes, exactly. We kind of go back a long ways. Actually, it was Eli that introduced me to Andrew Cohen. This is before any of us went to India. I used to assist him in his trainings at Esalen Institute, which were on NLP and hypnosis and the Enneagram piece that we did. They were month-long trainings, so I was there with them. At the time, it was Tony, which is now Gangaji. He first introduced me to Andrew Cohen, who I credit just like he gives credit to Andrew, pointing me to Papaji. My name, by the way, is Kerry Hasegawa. My middle name is Yukio. With Eli, I went through one of his hypnosis regression works. I picked up my Japanese roots and took on the name Yukio. I was kind of happy with that. People would sometimes call me Kerry Yukio. When I went to Papaji, I was not really interested. Everyone was getting a new name. Papaji would always ride me about my name. He would ride me about everything, by the way. One of the people in the community said, because that’s kind of a Johnny-come-later in the community. Most people had been there earlier than me, like ’92, ’91, 1990, like Eli did. One time he called me by my name, Yukio. He said, “What does Yukio mean?” I said, “It’s actually a Japanese character for snow.” He said, “Snot?” Your parents named you Snot?

Rick: That’s great.

Ramana: When I was teaching in a preschool for a while, the kids used to make fun of me and used to call me Kerry-Yaki. One time Papaji called me Kerry-Yaki. I was thinking, “Oh, my God. How did he even know?” There was a lot of phenomena happening around him, just like around Arunachala. He definitely was a carrier in the transmission. So at one point, there was a woman who lived with him, Shanti Devi, who was kind of a messenger back and forth to Papaji. I said, “Can you ask Papaji?” I wrote him a little note and give this to him. “Why are you giving me such a hard time about not only everything, but my name?” She told me, “Haven’t you gotten it? Everybody else knows Papaji wants to give you a new name.” So I said, “If it’s his desire, then I will do that.” There was a procedure for doing that, of going to Satsang and saying, “Papaji, I’d like to get a new name from you.” Then he says, “Come back tomorrow and come see me in front of the group, and I’ll give you a new name.” I thought, “Fine, I’ll go ahead.” I surrendered.

Rick: What is the significance, by the way, of getting a new name? You can weave that into the story. You don’t have to answer it immediately. Why do all these people end up with Hindu names?

Ramana: There’s a principle in Hinduism called invocation. If you call, going back to even Sanskrit itself, there are sacred vowels and syllables. If you put them together in a particular way, they actually have the power to shift and change and influence the actual physical environment. It’s called mantra. Every one of these names that are given have a certain kind of power to them, in a way. Because they’re using the sacred syllables and vowels, that you put them together in such a way, you don’t even have to understand what it is. You don’t have to understand the mantra, not even understand what the translation is. It is still going to have that effect. To have a god name, because oftentimes these names are gods, are figures in the classic stories, figures and their names, so that when you hear that name, it calls that energy. What more do you hear than your own name? It’s kind of a gift to be bringing that energy, to have that energy invoked around you all of the time. That’s the principle of changing the names, as far as I understand. In India, they are given those names anyway. We’re given Christian names. Maybe the same kind of principle applies. I don’t really know. But I know clearly that in Hinduism, that because of the sounds that are put together and the energy that is surrounding that, and the archetypal energy that is constellating in a particular way, that it is having that effect. So when I went to get my name, I actually looked over, and I saw on a small piece of paper that he had written the name Ram, which is Lord Rama. So I thought, OK, now I’m going to get the name Rama. Because in India, sometimes you do leave off the A on many words. So I recited this poem of Muruganar, who was one of Ramana Maharshi’s closest devotees. It was a poem that he wrote that when he first saw Ramana Maharshi, his heart opened up. It was a beautiful poem, and I had memorized a section of that poem. I read it to him, and there was a small tear that came to his eye. His eye’s got a little tear, I should say. Then he said, “Your name is Ramana.” Now, I was kind of shocked by that. I, like most people in the West, kind of mispronounce Hindu names wrong. Because it sounds more natural, I guess, is the way that our vocabulary is set up. Usually, almost always, there are exceptions, but almost always the emphasis on these Hindu words are on the first syllable. But we give it second syllable instead. So many people still call me Ramana. So many words I can go through like that that are mispronounced wrong. Up to that point, I was saying Ramana. So he says, “Your name is Ramana.” I said, “Ramana?” like that. Like, “Do you mean that guy, or do you mean am I mispronouncing something?” So he pointed up to the big picture behind him, and he says, “Yes, maybe you’ve heard of this man.” I remember there was a group of my friends that– because as far as I know, he hadn’t given anybody else the name Ramana. So the room was kind of quiet at that time. I don’t know if they arranged this ahead of time, but after lunch, when I came out of Satsang Bhavan, because we had lunch on the rooftop when we came down, there were about four or five of my friends that, when I walked out of Satsang Bhavan, they started bowing to me. “Oh, Ramana, oh, Ramana, oh, Ramana.” “Oh, boy, what am I getting myself into here?” So it was too big of a name for me to take. So I just said–when people ask me what my name is, and I had this name for a while, you might have noticed that Anatta, who was interviewed a while back, a couple of weeks ago, called me Yukio Ramana. That’s how it was going by the time, was Yukio Ramana. But then when I went to Tiruvannamalai, there was a great saint there. His name was Yogi Ramsuratkumar. He was the last kind of big saint in the body that left Tiru. And he was giving private appointments for people who said, “Children of Papaji” So I wrote down my name. By the way, this is a beautiful story, though. There’s a woman named Hemuna, who was Papaji’s doctor, and a beautiful woman, too. No one loved him more than she did. She was around him all the time. Actually, this was from David. David Godman told me this story about when Hemuna went to see Yogi Ramsuratkumar, that she was telling him she felt incomplete with him because even though she feels that he’s still in her heart, she had so much physical contact with him that she was really missing that. And as David told the story, Yogi Ramsuratkumar just put his hand right in front of her face like this. She kind of didn’t know what to do with that. She thought, “Maybe I’m supposed to kiss it.” So she takes his hand and she started breaking down and crying and saying, “This was Papaji’s hand. I know the feel of this.” And she just started breaking down and crying as soon as she touched his hand that way. And the blessing that Yogi Ramsuratkumar gave her was, he said, “Every hand that reaches out to you now will be this hand.”

Rick: Beautiful. It’s interesting that you bring in a devotional theme here in the conversation. I don’t mean to sidetrack you, but we’ll get back to Radical Awakening in a minute. There was a beautiful point toward the end of this interview that you sent me. You said, “People think of Papaji as a strict non-dual teacher, but Papaji was one of the greatest forces of devotional love that ever walked this earth. His love had literally consumed him. It leaked out of every pore, every gesture. And if he ever actually talked of the matter, well, he couldn’t. It just overwhelmed him and he would be reduced to choking. He hid his devotion, actually.” Papaji’s non-dual teaching is just the beginning. People think that when he talks of awakening, that is the end of things. But if you read carefully his words, he makes clear that awakening is only the beginning. “When one awakes, the real affair of love begins and it goes on forever. It is as if one is finally qualified for the depth of love.” I totally love that little passage. I bring up that theme a lot in interviews, so I’m glad you mentioned it. Continue with your story, but if you feel like reflecting on that as you go along, please do.

Ramana: Beautiful. That’s going to be included in my upcoming book, by the way. I heard that story and I was like, “Okay, I want in on this guy.”

Rick: Yogi Ramsuratkumar, you wanted in on that?

Ramana: Right. So I put my name, Yukio Ramana, in the book. When I saw him, he had the book in his hand and his eyes were really bad and he had glasses on. He’s looking at the book and he’s going, “What? What is this name? Kerry Yoki?”

Rick: There you go again.

Ramana: I actually had developed the Radical Awakening work between 1996 and 1997. I was very anxious to bring him what I had to get his feedback on it, because in Boulder at the time, what was happening was it was really taking off. I had been giving private sessions and doing workshops, and the workshops were filled up three months in advance. So I wanted to run by him, and now I have a chance to do that with Yogi Ramsuratkumar. I had a whole list of questions. When he asked me, “Who’s this Kerry Yoki?” I said, “Actually, it’s Yukio Ramana.” I had put down “Kerry Yukio,” and he said, “But I don’t feel like I could own this name, Ramana.” “Well, I just haven’t been using it.” He dropped the book on the floor and he goes like nose to nose. He’s a beady smoker, so I’m getting… Those are Indian cigarettes, so you don’t want this. He’s breathing his beady breath on me, nose to nose with me, going like this. I didn’t feel like I should pull back, so I just kind of stayed with him like that. And he was silent until he finally said, in very close measured words, “You used the name your teacher gave you.” He took it back like that. It kind of shocked me. I thought, “Ah, this seems like this wasn’t on the agenda.” Then he goes back, he sees my arm going back like this, and he grabs an orange and he gives it to me. His attendant tells me, “The interview is over.” But these questions. The interviews over, right? It actually was almost like what happened after that. We could talk about the killing the goose that laid the golden egg. At that point, there was a woman who was part of Interdirections. She was on the board of directors of Interdirections, who were handling and preserving a lot of Ramana’s teaching. She was introducing me to all of her important people in Beverly Hills. I came back and I said, “I’m using the name Ramana.” She said, “You can’t do that. That’s just wrong.” I said, “I have a very clear directive. I need to use this name.” She dropped me. She said, “I can’t support you for doing that.” But it’s been Ramana since. I feel like it’s been both a blessing and a curse. There was a private meeting that I had with Papaji after he gave me the name. He was encouraging me to continue what I was doing in Lucknow. Now what I did in Lucknow was I was asked, because I’d been a long, long time student. In ’97, I had already been a student of the Enneagram for about 15 years, studying with some of the core group of people that came out of the origin of the Western teaching of the Enneagram of personality. There was a woman that asked me to do a workshop on the Enneagram when I was there in ’95. Papaji, as kind of the tradition, you ask your teacher if it’s okay. He says, “Oh, yes, yes.” He says, “And I want you to do it in Satsang Bhavan. I want you to sit on my Satsang seat and I want you to do the workshop there.” It was like, “Papa, I’m sorry, I really can’t do that.”

Rick: What do you think he was doing? Messing with you? Go ahead, you continue.

Ramana: Later on, he said, “In the Enneagram workshop, make sure you talk about the handkerchief. Make the handkerchief a very important piece in that.” Well, I knew what he was talking about because he talked about, he sometimes would use the handkerchief as an analogy for not looking at the form of the handkerchief, but what it’s made out of, which is cotton. Then if you start looking at cotton, you start noticing cotton everywhere, the basic substance, which is consciousness. So I started the Enneagram workshop talking about, like he requested, the handkerchief, and it turned into a Satsang. Then there was a follow-up one, and he started telling all of these people, “You need to go to Ramana’s workshop.” He actually pointed to people and said, “You go, you go, you go.” What he was really up to was, I realize in retrospect now, that somebody asked me, it was actually Shanti Devi that asked me a number of years ago, in Tiruvannamalai where she lives, she said, “Did Papaji actually ask you to go out and be a teacher?” I said, “It was very clear that he told me that he’s not sending me out as a teacher. He sent no teachers out, that you’re a messenger.” I want to speak to that just very briefly, but to complete this, he never asked me, he never said, “You go do Satsang.” What he did was he kind of took a boot, and took his boot and pushed me out the door. He got this whole thing started with me being in front of a group doing Satsangs. What he actually said was, “I want you to continue what you did here, back in the West.” Technically, he never said, “Now you go out and teach, and be a Satsang teacher.” He worked in very, very subtle and not direct ways. Many people would say that he was like a trickster.

Rick: So do you think there’s any misrepresentation taking place among people who represent themselves as lineage holders for Papaji’s lineage? Is there some kind of subtle emphasis on them as teachers sent by Papaji, or representing Papaji, that you feel is inappropriate?

Ramana: You know this whole thing about a lineage is something that really doesn’t exist with Papaji. He was very clear about it. He used these very words, “There is no lineage.” “There’s no mantle that I’m passing on.” Because traditionally, that’s oftentimes how it happens. Somebody dies, and that’s passed on. He was very clear that there is no mantle being passed on, and that there is no lineage.

Rick: Okay. Well, I guess that’s your…

Ramana: He couldn’t be clearer on that.

Rick: Yeah

Ramana: He couldn’t be, really.

Rick: It’s a subtle distinction, but I guess I think I see what you’re saying. Those who try to convey the impression that there is a lineage, that they are a representative of it, have perhaps not quite grasped the spirit of Papaji’s teaching, in some respect, anyway.

Ramana: I don’t know. I just know my own experience. In terms of being a messenger, at first I thought it was the message of his teaching. But really, if there really is no teaching, it couldn’t be that, either. At one point, I realized that messenger for me, and maybe different for everybody, I think it is, but messenger for me was like Mercury. He delivered people from one place to another. And I feel like my function, really, as a messenger, is to bring people to my teacher’s teacher’s teacher, which is Arunachala, which is the silent transmission, which is consciousness itself, but also represented as this mountain, which Ramana Maharishi called the source of the silent transmission.

Rick: So you feel like that’s your ultimate function?

Ramana: It seems that way.

Rick: And so the complete fruition of your efforts only comes in the form of 21 people who end up going to that mountain once a year.

Ramana: Right, something like that. But in a larger context, Arunachala is everywhere.

Rick: And certainly people who have never gone to Arunachala are waking up. It’s not a necessity that you go there.

Ramana: Right. In India, and what Ramana Maharishi said himself, it is the last place. I had a friend who had been traveling in India for 18 years, living there full time right now. And he said, “Ramana, it just kind of blows my mind that it took me 18 years of traveling all over India.” And he found it by mistake, by the way. There was actually a goddess temple that he was a goddess devotee in. Tiruvannamalai didn’t have any accommodations for Westerners, so Tiruvannamalai was a place that actually could house him, because it houses Westerners, that he could make travel to the temple. And then he saw Arunachala and it was all over. And he says, “It just blows my mind”, he says that “I understand that” And as it’s said in the Arunachala Puranas, that Arunachala is like the last place. So he said, “Here I spent 18 years traveling all over the world, and you are bringing first-timers here right to the last place.”

Rick: Well, I’ve heard it’s a bit of a scene there in Tiruvannamalai. There’s just everybody flocking there, and there’s all these wannabes and people setting up satsangs. And I guess you have to sort of separate the wheat from the chaff a bit if you go there.

Ramana: I know. I never do a public satsang in Tiruvannamalai. I work with the groups that I have, with the guy on the walls of the ashram at the stand. I just feel like there’s too much out there that I’d rather just not get involved. So is it okay if we talk about radical awakening?

Rick: Yeah, keep going. It’s always okay. We keep going off on diversions, but just plunge right ahead.

Ramana: There was one point where, this was in 1995, that Papaji asked me, He says “There are people that are having problems with self-inquiry” “So I was wondering if you could help those people.” This whole approach of asking, “Who am I?” over and over again. So I said, “Sure, I could do that.” At one point what I looked at in terms of self-inquiry is that there’s a… I looked at it as kind of a top-down method. In other words, you start with your mind and you use the mind to inquire into who you really are and you continue to deepen that until some sense of the true self is actually found through this investigation of deeper and deeper layers of who am I. And I think partly he asked me because that top-down method never really worked for me. Then I read something in Ramana Maharshi’s work where it was a description of self-inquiry, this sort of different approach that I read in other things that he wrote about. If we go back a little bit, first of all, to the origin of the method of self-inquiry as presented by Ramana Maharshi, this “Who am I?” He actually said that it came out of a request of his devotees, “How is it that we can find the true self?” One of the things he talked about was how this method of self-inquiry that he’s imparting is for people who have not received the silent transmission of Arunachala.

Rick: So it was like a second stage teaching or something?

Ramana: Good way of putting it, yeah. So my interest at that point was, what if it was we started with the silent transmission? What if people had a glimpse or this direct experience of who I really am? Starting from there, moving up and finding out then who is the personality in the context of that? What is the mind in relationship to that? What is the body in relationship to that? What is this world in relationship to that? So that was the approach I started working with. Of course, the big question is, how does one get into that space? How do you start at the bottom? Papaji had a reputation at that time, and people came from all over India. Because of this reputation, he was the one that was waking people up. That was his reputation. In the background that I was coming from, and this is really in my work with helping to assist Eli Jaxon-Bear, with NLP. NLP for people who don’t know what that is, it’s really a study of state. And it’s states and experience.

Rick: Neuro-linguistic programming it stands for, right?

Ramana: Exactly.

Rick: Is that the thing that involves tapping?

Ramana: No, that’s something different.

Rick: Okay, sorry.

Ramana: Linguistics, it’s all about linguistics. How is it that you can use words to influence a state? It was really based on a study of Virginia Satir and Milton Erickson, who are considered to be masters of moving people into different states. So what I looked at was, so the principle of NLP, and this is what at that time what I was teaching, and my life was part of this investigation of how is it that an experience is broken down into small enough pieces that the principle of it is if you can break it down into small enough pieces, they call it chunks, and lead a person one piece at a time into it that a person can actually experience, which you’re experiencing, you take your own experience, break it down in pieces and chunks, and lead a person directly into that. In fact, Richard Bandler, one of his first experiments in NLP was at the time, I don’t know about now, but at the time Richard Bandler was a pot smoker. So his first experiment was taking somebody who had never smoked marijuana before and give them the experience of totally being stoned. And he led them through the process. The woman was like stoned. Later on, she smoked a joint and said, “This is the same thing.” Okay, so that was the first successful experiment. So taking that approach, I looked at what it is that is, what accompanied this primary shift of identification of who I was really came out of, it was a perceptual sense that had shifted in me that I was actually looking out with a different, it wasn’t metaphorical. Literally how I sensed my body, how I sensed the environment had taken a perceptual shift. I was seeing, hearing, and sensing myself differently. So I took it upon myself then to study that and to find out, could I lead somebody to the perceptual sense of how I’m perceiving myself in the world. And theoretically then, if I did that, then that should then be accompanied by a primary shift in identification. That was my working premise that I started working with in 1995. And I remember just being in my room in Lucknow where Papaji was, and I just had a pad of paper. I wrote, “This word came to me, radical awakening.” And I thought, “That’s got a ring to it.” As far as I know, and I’ve kind of looked at it going in the past, those two words, it’s kind of like people doing radical awakening right now. There’s books that are, there’s one book, there’s a couple of books about radical awakening. I do radical awakening work. I’m clear that those people must have run into my website that I started in 1998, which came out with “Radical Awakening.” If you Google “radical awakening,” if I was going to figure out what do I call my work, I’d Google it. Is anybody else doing it? Well, I was always the number one spot. And sometimes I took up, there wasn’t anybody using this. So I was the first five pages.

Rick: Sort of like Buddha at the gas pump. Nobody else has tried to use that yet. I’m all over the place.

Ramana: Actually, people were saying at the time, “No, that’s terrible.” Radical, people were thinking like, you know, “You’re political radical. It’s not ever going to work. It’ll never catch on.”

Rick: Yeah, it means root.

Ramana: Exactly, and actually not only root, but the radix, the root word radix, actually means humming through source. So to me it was perfect. But it did take a decade or a couple of decades before it really started catching on and people actually started using it. I think there’s one person about in 2000, 2001, came out with a book about his own awakening he called “Radical Awakening.” I just noticed a person that you interviewed a number of weeks ago, Jeevan or something.

Rick: Amoda, yeah, she’s writing a book and that’s her working title. I thought of that.

Ramana: Oh my God, is the working title of her new book?

Rick: Apparently, yeah.

Ramana: Oh wow, it’s going to be a race to see who’s going to come out first.

Rick: She’s not attached to that title, but she mentioned that it might be in the title.

Ramana: Yeah, and there was another person who has that in his title, that came out with the book last year.

Rick: Anyway, what is it in terms of the way you present it?

Ramana: So I took these people who said that they had, as Papaji’s request, who were having a hard time with doing what I’m calling the top-down method. And a lot of the work in the beginning was just finding out. I remember when I later used to do trainers’ training programs in NLP and their graduation to be able to graduate from the course I was doing was to put together a designer program that you pick a state and you bring a person into it. Well, I was kind of in my own, you know, I was working in my own graduation of that. It was this state that I was, the components of how I was perceiving the state. Could I bring a person in, step at a time, into that? And there was a point where I was successful most of the time. So that was kind of the launch of the Radical Awakening work, which was kind of piece by piece, perceptually shifting how they’re perceiving through the senses until the picture was big enough so that the perception was large enough that it was a context that we could actually do an exploration of who are you, what is this personality, what is this world, what is this body. And this is one-on-one work, is it? I was doing at the time, back in ’96, what I was doing was I was doing it in private, but also I found out that it was actually quite easy to teach people. I took a weekend workshop that I call a Radical Awakening workshop, and I took them through how to take another person to the seven steps of Radical Awakening. And there’s, just to kind of tag on to the end of that, the whole of my work is called Radical Awakening and the opening to the, or the deepening to the heart of consciousness. One of the things that I found early on was that what I was really doing was giving people a glimpse of what reality was. And the glimpse is powerful enough that it kind of reshaped their approach of who they are in their life, but it was not something, I would say, that was stable, right? It just came and went. So when I started studying Ramana’s teachings of, where he says everything arises out of the heart, what he calls sometimes the cave of the heart, all things arise in the cave of the heart, I really didn’t know what that meant when I first read it. And then what you read from that piece that I wrote, that really opened it up. It’s like, we could say that devotion is all heart. It’s all about love. So what I found was that when a person had a Radical Awakening, they were not enlightened. There was not like this stable place of, you know, classically, they wouldn’t be one of the five people that Papaji counted on his hands, right? But something did happen though, that when the mind was silent for a long enough time, that the natural state of heart naturally arises because it’s no longer, the interference of the mind is cleared up enough so that that feeling of, what I consider to be like essential. I was a student of Hameeed Ali for a while, who did some Diamond Heart work, and he has this beautiful piece called Essential Aspects of Being, where he said that in being or in the natural state, that there are a natural expression that comes out of that, which is love, which is compassion, which is goodness, which is generosity, which is purity, and it kind of goes on and on, and it’s like, these are the essential aspects of who we are that begin to just rise up because they’re no longer being masked over by mind.

Rick: There’s a foundation for them to blossom.

Ramana: Exactly. Very good.

Rick: And another way of putting it is that if you don’t know who you are, how are you going to appreciate anything else? Once you know who you are, then there can begin to dawn an appreciation of what other things are. There’s a sort of depth of appreciation that can begin to unfold.

Ramana: Right, exactly. So that was kind of the finishing piece for me, and it really came out of just having not only a quieting going on, but a real kind of shaking up and disassembly of everything that I held dear to me in a way. It’s interesting, this is another Papaji interaction, one of the really important ones. I went to Papaji and I asked him, this was 1994, I had been reading the galleys that David was writing about, this book we talked about, “Nothing Ever Happened”, and he talked about in the ’60s Papaji having this, it was a French priest, that he asked, “You tell me that enlightenment or this awakening can happen in a moment, not right now, not next week, not next year, not some undefined time.” So he says, “What do I need to do to have that happen?” And he had all these accoutrements of the Mass in a black bag, and he says, “Take that bag and throw it in the Ganga,” meaning just throwing all your concepts out and you’ll have what you want. Well, as the story goes, this priest never did that. But after reading that, I went to him and I said, and admittedly I was full of pride at the time, spiritual pride. At the time I had an institute that was one of the top institutes in the country in transversal psychology. I was looked up to, I was revered, I had creative work, I had anything, any idea I wanted to develop, I had students that I could work with, it was just like, I felt like I kind of had it together, right? Making six figures a year, and I had 5,000 square foot home in the Colorado Rockies. It just felt like I was it, right? So I said, “Papaji, I’m almost there.” So, that tells you how much hubris there was, right? And I said, “What’s the black bag that I need to throw into the Ganga? What’s my black bag?” So he said, “Okay, we’ll do a little inventory.” He said, “It all is about attachment, right?” I said, “Okay.” And he says, “Let’s find out what you’re attached to.” He said, “Are you attached to money?” Well, to me, kind of money was easy, you know? So I figured, “No, not money.” “What about work?” Well, the work was totally creative. I’m not attached to work. I have no desires around work. Everything is just fine. And then he says, “What about a woman?” And I had just gotten out of a nine-year relationship, and I was just feeling free as a bird, right? I have no attachment to that. And then he said, “What about freedom?” And I remember Ram Dass, you know, reading him in 1970, where he called the last desire, which is the good desire, the desire with the golden chain. I wanted to give him the right answer, right? So I said, “Yes, I’m attached to freedom.” So he said, “That’s your black bag to throw in.”

Rick: In fact, you were probably attached to all those other things, too, but you had plenty of them, and so it didn’t seem like you were attached to them. It was only when they were taken away that you would have noticed the attachment.

Ramana: This is in my book, where I talk about you don’t find out whether you’re really attached to something until what you have is taken away, which, as the story goes on, that is actually what happened. So the next morning I woke up, and the benchmark of what I thought enlightenment was, was happening. It was an elevated conscious state that was unbroken, not even for one moment. Even I was conscious, even through my sleep and deep sleep state. It was this, this is the benchmark. I felt like I did it. I didn’t even know how I threw the black bag away, but I must have done it. So I was just sailing, and that went on for about a week, ten days or so, unbroken. I decided my love for Papaji was so strong, I just camped out on his driveway. I just took a blanket, and I was there 24/7. Every once in a while he would ask me to come in and have a meal with him, but I was just hanging there. I was happy living in the driveway. I would pick up a book, like the Ribhu Gita, and it would feel like my soul was flying just reading it. The day before it came time for me to leave, the whole thing fell away, as if it never happened. I picked up the Ribhu Gita, and it was like it felt heady to me. All of a sudden it was like, “What is going on here?” So I wrote this bad letter to Papaji, and I said, “I’m leaving tomorrow. I had it, and I lost it, so you have to give it back to me.” I gave it to Shanti Devi. She took it to Papaji. In about an hour, a message came back to me, written on the back of my letter, which is about three pages going on and on. He wrote down on it, “Bad luck.” He said, “Probably not this lifetime, or any lifetime soon. Maybe a cockroach in the next lifetime.” I was just devastated. He really liked to mess with people, didn’t he? He was something. I was actually crying when I went to my friend Premnath, who I have so much respect for. He was a person who was with Papaji from the early days. And we became friends. I showed him the letter. He looked it over and said, “I want you to come back just before dinner tomorrow here to this room. I want to talk to you.” I said, “Fine.” In tears, “Fine.” And when I came back to the room, there was a group of people. There was kind of some old-time devotees. I was surprised they were all there. They said, “We feel like we really need to talk to you about what’s going on and what this letter is about.” I said, “Okay. What is it?” He said, “This is an invitation for Papaji for you not to leave.” “What was one of the things he first told you when you first got here?” I said, “Something about not leaving.” He said, “The words were, ‘Do not leave here until you’re well cooked.'” “And you’re just leaving. In the middle of you, you feel like you lost all your awakening. What did he tell you?” He said, “Throw away your attachment to freedom.” Here is four pages of a letter crying about losing it. He says, “Haven’t you learned that Papaji is very impatient with people that do not listen to him?” At the time, Papaji used to call me “Coconut Head.” In Puja, they put coconuts out, they use coconuts on the lingam and bang it really hard to open it up.

Rick: Sriphalam.

Ramana: So he says, “You are a coconut head. You have to stay here.” And then another friend said, “We took notice of you as soon as you were here.” He said, “Papaji used to mess with everyone a lot.” He said, “But he has done it a lot.” He said, “We have been noticing you because Papaji has been working you over in a way that he hasn’t worked anyone over in a long time.” I was just thinking, “Lucky me.” I was just through. I was so angry about the whole thing. I didn’t hear anything he said. I said, “Screw this. Screw Lucknow. Screw you guys.” It was very juvenile, I felt like somebody just gave me the ice cream that I always wanted my whole life. And what he did was he took it from me and threw it on the ground. So I left Lucknow in a huff. When I came back, there’s a long story. I don’t have to tell it, but basically the bottom line is I lost everything. Even my own self-respect, everything fell down around me. And I was brought down to my knees. And this is where I really found out that I was very attached to all of the things that I told him I wasn’t attached to. There was a dream that I had one time where there was this giant Nataraja, which is this dancing Shiva. This big bronze figure that was 50 feet high. And I was in a room, and it was coming after me. I was looking for a place to get away, and there were no doors and windows. It was dancing to a drum, this dancing, coming out and dancing. I looked over in the corner, and Papaji was playing the drum. So I call my friend, really upset about everything. My life was in pieces at that point. I didn’t have any money. Long story, I didn’t have anything. A true fall from whatever. My friend, who’s a long-time practitioner of Adi Da, said, “Aren’t you getting the message here?” That dream was, “You need to get back to your teacher.” As soon as he said that, the light went back on. So I went back to Lucknow, kind of on my knees. Very different than the first time that I went.

Rick: In fact, you had to borrow money to get back this time, even though you’d been a six-figure salary guy before.

Ramana: I was giving futures on my transpersonal sessions. So when I got back, that was when I really found out what Papaji meant when he said, “It’s not an experience. Awakening is not. It’s in the deep realms of what you know to be truth, that is a reference point that you always return to.” I’m going back full circle to my story about how it is that I felt like it was that returning point that made it so clear that the dream disappeared. I got to see reality continuing and deepening into the full self-realization. It is continuing to have that dream being revealed over and over again. And in the space of that, this heart of consciousness opening up. It wasn’t until that happened that I realized that it was nothing to do with me at all. That there was a bigger picture that was going on that I was only a very small member of, minuscule, that is orchestrated in something much larger.

Rick: That last little thought, are you talking about your awakening there, or are you talking about the whole dance of what happened to you, India, back to the States, back to India? What do you mean by you’re a small character in something much larger?

Ramana: It really goes back to what I was talking about before, about the thing flipping around. That is what happened to me, because one thing that became very clear to me is what I thought it was, clearly was not it. And that was so big for me, too, because I felt like that was the spiritual seekers experience that I was looking for and practicing for my whole life. I felt like I had it and I lost it. It became very clear that if you had it and lost it, that’s not it. So then it’s a question of, well, what is it then, if it isn’t that? That was the beginning of my investigation of it’s beyond the realm of experience.

Rick: So it’s beyond the realm of experience, and yet somehow it involves experience and it also involves knowledge. How would you compare your day-to-day or moment-to-moment experience, if I may use that word, now, with that lovely thing that happened in Lucknow before you left that lasted for ten days? If you had to compare them side by side, how does it stack up?

Ramana: I always feel like now, when one has an experience like that, it’s kind of like a good hair day. It’s something that maybe does not even come out of what you’re doing, but grace descending in the moment. When those experiences happen, they are no longer like the benchmark of here I am, now I’m here. When I’m not experiencing, that means that I must be doing something wrong and maybe I need to get with something. I just look at it as that’s a moment of grace that happens where everything becomes very clear. Ramana Maharshi himself said that that sense of self, the true sense of self, comes in waves. It has a rhythm of its own where it gets strong, like receding and then drawing in. There are some early pictures of him. This is one of the things I found out in my research of Ramana Maharshi. He said one time that the stick, oftentimes, as an old man, he’s carrying a walking stick. He said that as a young man, sometimes he would have that stick because there was this influx of this strong sense of self running through. Where he would actually lose his balance and the stick helped him keep his balance.

Rick: The same thing would happen to Amma. She would go to the bathroom and fall into the backwaters because she’d go into samadhi or she’d be walking along carrying something and just fall to the ground into a trance.

Ramana: I got to see that those experiences are something that is just part of the unfolding that has a life of its own, that it moves forward into foreground of experience. Yet, the real deepening of the work is to find out that when it moves into the backdrop of experience and your mind is in the forefront, that… One way of saying it, my feeling about or my picture before I met Papaji and before I had this shift with him, that my experience always was enlightenment meant you’re kind of above it all. You’re not influenced by any of those kind of things around you because you’re always in this high state that is undisturbed. But when I read about Ramana Maharshi’s life, you found out that there are many experiences. There’s this very revealing book that Annamalai Swami wrote. It actually got nixed by the ashram. There was a redo of his book that kind of met more of how the ashram wanted to present Ramana. But Dave Georgi, who does the photography for the ashram I knew him from, he’s a friend from Lucknow, he gave me a copy of the original book before it was done over. It really presented Ramana Maharshi as a man who had a full range of emotions and feelings. He himself said that you would never really be able to tell a fully realized being because on the surface it looks like he’s going through what everybody else is going through. The full range of emotions, not above it, but what I got was that if there is this sense of way in the background, when it’s kind of like, this is the best way of saying it, that instead of feeling like enlightenment was this being above it all and not being touched by anything, it is kind of the opposite of that. It’s like being fully engaged in having the life stream of your identity of the dream playing fully out, but having this, maybe Ramana Maharshi was like one half of one percent, that he was resting in, in the midst of 99% of just being in the personality. He was resting all the time and did not look away. In his own report he said, not looking away from that place, even for one second.

Rick: That’s interesting. Let’s play with that for a bit. I would, just to play devil’s advocate, I would suggest that maybe somebody like Ramana Maharshi is 99% resting in that place, not 1%, but 99% resting in that place. On the surface level we see him screaming in pain because of his cancer, and getting mad at the cook, or whatever he went through in terms of personal experiences.

Ramana: Right. This person is kind of a taskmaster in a way in this book.

Rick: Yeah. In terms of his subjective experience, and I’m just speculating here, but the predominant thing would be that resting in being, or whatever you want to call it. Others would see, or let’s say Christ on the cross, others are seeing him going through this horrible suffering.

Ramana: Like, why me God?

Rick: Yeah, but what was predominant for him? Was it actually the suffering of the body? Perhaps that was just the faint remains of human experience on the rock solid foundation of presence, which wasn’t perturbed no matter how horrific the circumstances.

Ramana: Thank you for that. That is a very good clarification. It is what is being appearing, what is appearing on the outside. Yeah, now for the average person, it’s 99%, the circumstances. Maybe in the back there’s this faint little glimmer of a spark of being, or presence, or self-awareness, and so the whole game seems to be to shift the ratio. Yes, or to realize that it’s not really a matter of shifting the ratio, it is noticing what is present in terms of what Ramana Maharshi’s experience was, is your experience as well.

Rick: Yeah, but that to which you give your attention grows stronger in your life, so that spark of a presence can become more and more of a flame, and conflagration, and eventually the predominant thing regardless of the external circumstances. Yes?

Ramana: Yes, absolutely. I was just realizing that we’re kind of talking about one of the pieces that I’ve been working with pretty deeply in the last three years. It was a piece that was presented by Nisargadatta Maharaj, of course you know who he is. He had a master, a Siddha master named Siddha Master Rameshwar Maharaj, and his writings came to the surface a number of years ago. It was a piece of that that he was presenting called the Four Bodies of Consciousness, and to me it really put in perspective a lot of the things that I felt like were almost not acknowledged in a pure Vedanta orientation, which is there’s nothing you could do in this world, like Ramesh’s teaching. He kind of took Nisargadatta’s teachings and kind of took it to an extreme really about you might as well do absolutely nothing because it’s all destiny, so why even bother with thinking about things spiritual or anything, which isn’t what my understanding and definitely not what Nisargadatta’s master was saying. He said that things all are occurring in four bodies or four levels of consciousness at the same time, even though they seem totally contrary to what’s happening in the second body, it’s totally contrary to what’s happening in the fourth. You could say something would be totally not true that becomes totally true, and yet it all becomes true.

Rick: I love that.

Ramana: To me it just opened up so much because it invites everything, it invites all the things that the non-dualists, the pure Vedanta people I should say, because there is kind of this pure Vedanta teaching, that all the things that they’re poo-pooing is like embraced as if you’re going to do something in second body consciousness. The second body consciousness by the way is the first body is the gross body, the second body is the gross body when consciousness is introduced into the gross body, and there’s all these levels of refinement until it jumps into kind of over the line where the separate sense of self, it’s not a concept, it’s a living reality. That is happening in this moment. The fourth body of consciousness where there is this element of love, an integration of this world, the feminine aspect, baby Baba blowing breath into the universe and everything is Shakti, that’s kind of like the fourth body of consciousness. Just the acknowledgement of all that’s going on has been making it really easy for me to address in good conscience so to speak, where a person is at and when a person, just like Ramana Maharshi, I just realized this, that if somebody was really into yoga, he would say keep doing your yoga. It was a real acknowledgement that everything is happening at the same time, even while they’re doing their yoga, the second body consciousness, there is something opening up and something is totally present in the third and fourth.

Rick: That’s great. This really speaks to a theme that comes up again and again in these interviews and you’ve said it very well. Just that life is multidimensional and all dimensions have their relevance and enlightenment doesn’t mean locking into one dimension to the exclusion of the others. Brahman means totality and there’s a saying in the Vedas some place that Brahman is the eater of everything. It completely engulfs all the diversities and all the levels and all the strata and a person who is really there so to speak can play about at all those levels comfortably because he contains them. He hasn’t sort of fixated on one level to the exclusion of the others.

Ramana: I just love that, I really do.

Rick: That’s great. And physics comes to the fore again too. You have all these laws of nature that pertain to different levels of creation and they’re paradoxically unlike one another as you move from level to level, but each has its relevance at its level. The quantum physicist who understands a level of reality at which gravity hasn’t even arisen can’t go jumping off buildings by virtue of that understanding. He has to respect that level as well.

Ramana: I wanted to ask you because we’ve been going on for quite a while now. Just if there’s anything that comes to you about anything that we’ve talked about that you want to address specifically.

Rick: I could throw the question back at you. I just want to make sure that you feel that we’ve done justice to what is dear to your heart and what it is you like to say because very often I feel like I’ve failed to ask the question that would bring out the nugget that is precious to the person. I just want to make sure we haven’t overlooked anything.

Ramana: Ramana Maharshi wrote this piece which he considered to be the most seminal of all his teachings. It came in 40 verses. It’s called 40 Verses on Truth. The invocation to those 40 verses, he talks about the heart. And he said the heart is always in meditation. It’s meditating on itself every moment. I feel like everything that we’ve talked about in the interview up to this point has been interesting conversation. Hopefully people can find some value out of some of the things we’ve talked about. I hope we at least entertained people somewhat. I don’t want to miss something that is really something of what in the background was happening during this whole interview. What has made this interview precious is the heart that you present in all, I haven’t seen a lot of them, but you really do bring heart into these interviews. I really deeply felt this love that what you set up was a field of love and heart. In a way, in that it didn’t matter what we talked about, that if people could watch this from this place of just the feeling level of what is going on beyond the words and the heart and the love that is present. Because it was so precious to me and I felt it most of the time. It reflected this piece, this invocation to the 40 Verses on Truth that Ramana Maharshi wrote. That throughout this whole interview and throughout all of life, there is this deep heart meditation going on. When we look back and notice that and realize that it’s been happening all throughout, not only during this interview, but through all of our life, that this really is the message. To me, that said it all even before he got into the 40 Verses. That there is this, who we are is this love that is manifesting and showing itself up in relationship. And out of that, these essential qualities of I can feel your caring and I can feel your presence and I can feel your compassion and goodness and purity. Hopefully, if anybody can really tune into that level of what’s happening, that’s what I’d really like people to walk away from with this interview.

Rick: That’s very beautiful and very touching and perhaps to some extent undeserved. I do feel I kind of settle into this thing while I’m having these conversations with people and form a bond. A couple of weeks ago somebody asked me, “What are your favorite interviews?” On the spot, he was interviewing me and he wanted me to go down my list. I thought, “It’s hard to do that because these people all become my friends.” Maybe some are more articulate than others and all, but there’s just this family that’s growing of people that I’ve formed this bond with. It’s very much a heart thing, as you say. Sometimes I talk too much and sometimes I use the same stupid analogies over and over again. I get all heady and intellectual, but fundamentally there is this feeling level thing that is resonating to whatever extent I’m capable. I really appreciate your giving voice to that.

Ramana: Yes, it feels very, very real to me and precious. Thank you.

Rick: Great. Well, that’s a very sweet note to end on, so perhaps we should wrap it up. So I’ve been having a heart session with Ramana. This is one in an ongoing series of interviews, which hopefully I’ll be doing as long as I’m capable of seeing and speaking, because I really love it. Good for the next 20 years, at least I’d say. If you’d like to watch more of them, go to bathgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, which is an acronym for Buddha at the Gas Pump. There you’ll see them all archived. There’s a list of them along the side in alphabetical order, and then there’s also a menu item under “Other Stuff,” which is a chronological list of all the interviews starting from the very beginning. You can explore it either way. You’ll also see a discussion group there, which gets quite lively sometimes. Anatta Campbell’s interview evoked about 900 comments.

Ramana: Oh, great.

Rick: Although they didn’t all stay on topic. It meandered off into different things, but sometimes those discussions are very substantive and interesting. There is a link there to an audio podcast. I know a lot of people don’t have time to sit in front of their computers and watch these things, but you can get it on your iPod. You can also download the MP3 file if you don’t want to mess with iTunes and just put it on any kind of audio device. There’s a “Donate” button, which I really appreciate people clicking on. If they have the inclination and the capacity, it helps to make this whole thing possible. There’s also a little link that you can click on to sign up to be notified by e-mail each time a new interview is posted. You can also subscribe to the YouTube channel. You can do that and YouTube will notify you every time a new one is posted. There’s all sorts of possibilities and it continues to grow. That’s about it. Thanks, Rama.

Ramana: Namaste.

Rick: Namaste. Thanks to those who have been listening or watching. Next week, as I mentioned, it will be Eli Jackson Bear for his second interview. See you next time.