Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done hundreds of them now and if this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to the past interviews menu on batgap.com where you’ll see all the previous ones archived in various ways. This program is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers and so if you appreciate it and feel like supporting it in any amount, that makes it possible for us to do this full-time, which is pretty much what it is. There’s PayPal button on every page of the site. I just discovered this morning that there’s some kind of electronic music group that has just put out an album called Buddha at the Gas Pump. I wonder where they got that idea. Anyway, my guest today is Kosi. Kosi is a direct path Advaita Vedanta satsang teacher in the Shiva Kashyapa lineage. This teaching is a powerful support for a dynamic shift in your consciousness from the fear, sadness, anger, anxiety and frustration of your mind to the indescribable peace and happiness of your heart. Satsang with Kosi is an extremely potent initiation and transmission of the non-dual teaching of Sri Bhagavan Ramana Maharshi and Her Holiness Sri Amma Karunamayi. I have interviewed Amma Karunamayi, which people can find on on Batgap if they wish, and I’ve seen her a number of times myself. I’ve also interviewed Kosi before about five years ago and I just listened to that interview this week and I thought it was a pretty good conversation. So if people enjoyed this one and haven’t heard that one, they might want to listen to it, might even want to listen to it first. And in that interview we go a lot more into Kosi’s whole biographical background and all the stuff she’s been through and all which we’re not going to, we’re going to try not to repeat ourselves in this interview, we have some fresh territory to cover. So Kosi, what have you been up to for the last five years?
Kosi: Well I’ve been traveling mostly in Europe where Satsang really took off in Switzerland, Ireland and Prague, and I want to thank you for inviting me to this interview and connecting with you again because we really did have a wonderful conversation last time.
Rick: Yeah, I thought so.
Kosi: Yeah.
Rick: And it was nice meeting you briefly at the SAND conference back there.
Kosi: Right, I saw you briefly there. I haven’t been able to get back to the SAND conference because I got so busy in Europe. I did spend some time in Croatia as well and there’s, a huge interest in Satsang throughout Europe. And now things are starting to happen in the United States and Virginia, and that’s where I am right now is in winter green Virginia.
Rick: Good, something good is happening all over the world.
Kosi: That’s right.
Rick: Yeah, well as a starting point perhaps, in the last interview, well in your book you allude to, here’s your book, I was reading that this week, Organic Awakening.
Kosi: Organic Awakening, yeah.
Rick: You allude to an experience of Ramana that you had, when you went to Tiruvannamalai, and I don’t think we talked about that in the first interview. So why don’t you tell that and we’ll see what we get into after that.
Kosi: Okay, so it was around October of 2010, it was in the year 2010, during the summer, late August, that time frame, October, I made the decision I was going to go to meet Ramana’s teacher, which is Arunachala Shiva. And for those of you who don’t know Ramana, Ramana felt that his master was this sacred mountain in southern India known as Arunachala Shiva. And the reason for that is I was recognizing in myself, I was a longtime student and devotee of Gangaji for many years at that point, and I felt that there was no real progress happening because there was a heavy emphasis on the inquiry into various emotions, the emotional states of the body as a way of accessing the self. And it’s powerful, Gangaji’s teaching is extremely powerful, but there was an aspect or there felt like there was something that was just missing. And so I made this decision to go to Arunachala, and the reason for that was that it’s very rare in a lineage to be able to go and meet the physical form of the master of masters, right? And Shiva, the mountain is considered the embodiment of Shiva or the formless presence of God. So I decided at that time that it would be powerful to meet Ramana’s mountain and understand for myself through direct experience what was it about this mountain that made him say it was his master. It wasn’t just a teacher, the mountain was his master. And by the grace of God you can actually go and experience this yourself, right? You can experience the physical form of Ramana’s master. So I went with that intention to see what is it about the mountain and what would it reveal. What I didn’t know or what I didn’t expect at the time was to have a mystical experience with Ramana Maharshi himself. So that’s pretty much the crux of what happened is I was staying in a hotel at the foot of Arunachala Shiva. My hotel window looked out at the mountain and I was alone. I spent a lot of time in the couch room where Ramana taught and there’s a palpable physical energy of him in that room and I found it to be a timeless experience. I would go in there in the morning and I would stay all day and it would seem like just a few minutes would pass by. It was a really transcendental kind of experience in that meditation room. When I came out one day I was walking towards the Samadhi tomb and Ramana Maharshi walked out of the big double doors that goes into the Samadhi tomb and I just kind of froze in my tracks because it was a shocking appearance of Ramana. And for those of you don’t know Ramana, Ramana left his body in 1950, right? So it was a real shock to see him and he stared at me with his famous stare for what seemed like an eternity. It was just a few seconds, but then he said, “This name of yours, is it real?” And when he said that I just kind of went immediately inside to inquire into the name, which is kind of the label we put on top of ego, right?
Rick: Was that the name Koshi or your American name?
Kosi: No, I was still Jill at that time. I was still going by my birth name. I had no intention of losing my name or anything. I went specifically to see the mountain and that was it, right? To actually have that direct experience. So Ramana appears, he says, “This name of yours, is it real?” I inquire into my heart instantly in that moment and could see not only was the name not real, this sense of me was not real at all. Now I had had many profound direct realizations of what we call the self before that happened. It was just a shocking revelation and experience of him manifesting in physical form to actually say that. Now David Godman has done many YouTube videos and stuff and he’s talked about how several people have had the experience of Ramana manifesting.
Rick: I’ve interviewed half a dozen people who’ve had that.
Kosi: David maintains that it’s mind only, but my experience that it was transcendent of anything you would describe as mind because it was such a potent transmission of his person but also a transmission of the teaching. I can’t explain it as simply mind.
Rick: I mean among the people I’ve interviewed who’ve had that kind of experience such as Pamela Wilson and Nick Gancitano and a couple others.
Kosi: And Robert Adams had that as a child.
Rick: And most of them had it when they had never even heard of Ramana, they didn’t know he had ever existed and yet in Pamela’s case she had this burning desire for truth and she was sitting in her bedroom and I don’t know if she had fallen asleep or was still awake but all of a sudden there was this Indian man sitting on her bed and she threw a pillow at him. But quite some time later she saw a picture of Ramana and said, “Well, that was the guy.” There are a number of others. So what’s going on with that?
Kosi: Well, there’s many instances of this and what’s interesting to me about that is right before he died several of his closest devotees asked him, “Okay, you’re about to leave your body, should we go get another guru?” And he said, “No, don’t go get a new guru, all you need to do is call on me and I will assist you because I’m not limited to the physical form.”
Rick: Yeah, like Yoda.
Kosi: Yeah, exactly. So he said that and of course when I went I had no expectations of this at all, I didn’t even know that other people at that time in 2010 had this experience, so it was a very fresh kind of shocking experience.
Rick: It was palpable, wasn’t it? He didn’t seem like an apparition, he seemed solid.
Kosi: Solid, like a hologram.
Rick: So somewhat ghost-like.
Kosi: Solid and not solid at the same time, real and surreal at the same time. It’s a very strange experience, there’s really no way to quantify it other than to say it was more like a holographic kind of experience, but it was like he was really there.
Rick: So what’s your best guess? Is Ramana hanging out on some level and intercedes in human affairs from time to time, or is there no such thing as the being that was once called Ramana, but the divine universal intelligence manifests a form that people can recognize and then identify as Ramana in order to give it a name and an identity and to have some influence on them? There’s a subtle distinction between those two things, or maybe not so subtle, or maybe there’s other possibilities. What do you think?
Kosi: Well, when you think of the mountain itself, when you look at the actual form of a being like Ramana, we can’t necessarily relate to it, we possibly couldn’t even look at it because of the brilliant light it would represent. So the mystical story of the mountain, Arunachala Shiva, was that Shiva took the form of the mountain because people could worship the mountain, right? But they couldn’t worship, when he was in his true form, which was this huge column of light, brilliant light, they were overwhelmed by that, right? So that’s the mystical story behind Arunachala Shiva. So maybe, in that sense, David has his perspective as accurate in the sense that maybe the mind can’t comprehend the true form of Ramana Maharshi, and in that moment it appears as a physical entity. My experience was that he was physically there, just like any human being would be standing there, but there was a different quality about him, possibly because there was a different quality about him when he was alive in physical form, right? So the next day after that experience, so I had a direct experience of emptiness, it was a direct, deep realization of emptiness in that moment. The very next day I was very, very sick with strep throat and a fever, and I had to stay in the hotel room for seven days, and I decided to use that time as a vision quest to be with the mountain, because you could see the mountain directly from my hotel window. So from dawn until dusk for seven days, I stared at Arunachala Shiva with the primary question, “What is it about this mountain that would make Ramana call this mountain his master?” About three days into it, this poetry and grace and a deeper realization of emptiness started to engulf me, is the only way I can describe it. So I started writing all of this poetry about the mountain and the grace of the mountain, the emptiness of the mountain. It was like a mirror that only reflects the truth of yourself. It sees beyond the ego. I experienced it as a living being, which is how Ramana experienced the mountain. So it was, it was really a visceral experience of the mountain. So this went on for seven days. Then it was the seventh day around dusk. The light was, the sun was setting. I was looking out at Arunachala Shiva and Ramana appeared in my hotel room. He was sitting cross-legged on the bed, but he was also kind of floating above the bed. He wasn’t like sitting on the bed, he was like just above the bed. And he stared at me in this most profound silence. Now this wasn’t just an instantaneous flash. He was there for about, 45 minutes, at least 45 minutes, almost an hour he was sitting there. So he was staring at me, staring at me, and then all of a sudden…
Rick: And what were you doing, staring at him?
Kosi: I was just staring right back in total shock.
Rick: Was there any kind of verbal communication or anything?
Kosi: No, but it was like the hair on my skin rose, like there was electricity in the room. It was goosebumps, but it was more than that. It was like there was this visceral feeling of a profound energy in the room. So I just sat with him, staring at him in total awe and shock and amazement, and suddenly in front of him, it was like he was showing me something. What he was showing me was the River Ganges flowing into the ocean, and this other very large river flowing into the Ganges flowing into the ocean. And he just showed me these rivers, and to me in that moment it meant a kind of surrender. So when I looked it up later, so I looked up the rivers flowing into the Ganges, and the image that I saw was the Kailash River. And I really think what he was showing me at the time was kind of like Kosi was this new, kind of like a rebirth or a letting go of the birth name. So the very first thing he said was, after several minutes of total silence, he said this birth name of yours, “Leave it at the feet of Arunachala Shiva.” And these rivers were kind of flowing in front of him into the ocean. He said, “Just leave your name here, your birth name here.” He didn’t say what the name was, he just said what the new name was going to be, he just said, “Leave it.” Right? That also shocked me, but I said, “Okay.” I just sat there, I didn’t say anything, and then he was silent for another easily 15 minutes, just staring with this palpable energy in the room, and then he suddenly, the intensity of his stare increased with a really intense energy coming from his eyes into me, and he looked at me and said, he leaned forward a little bit and said, “Sunyata,” and then he vanished and it was gone, and it was like an audible “whoosh,” gone. And I sat there for several hours after that, completely and totally stunned, because “sunyata,” the word “sunyata” is a Buddhist term, and I knew that “sunyata” was Buddhist. But I actually at that moment in time wasn’t sure what it meant, so I had to go on Wikipedia and I had to look it up to see what is “sunyata,” what is he saying? And “sunyata” is really the Tattva state or the Tathagata state, which is beyond the fourth state of consciousness, of Tathagata. It’s beyond even ideas of emptiness in the Buddhist way of thinking of “sunyata.” So really, emptiness, you could say, was the name. “Sunyata” was the name. But I was fascinated by the river that he showed me, this river flowing into the Ganges, flowing into the ocean. So it was really an astonishing experience, but I was going to let it go. Even though he said, leave the name, because the relationship with Gangaji was really transforming at that time, I really wasn’t sure I wanted to come back from Arunachala and say, “Oh yeah, Ramana appeared in my hotel room and I think I’m going to take on this name.” So I really was going to just chalk it up to another mystical experience, because I’ve had many really profound mystical experiences in my life. When I went to Kauai, Hawaii, right after India, a good friend of mine, without me ever saying a word about this, I hadn’t talked to anyone about it, I hadn’t said anything to anyone, he comes out. It was a beautiful bed and breakfast in Kauai, and he says, “This name you were given in India, you got to take it on.” And this is a good friend of mine, he’s known me for like 15 years, he goes, “Whatever the name is, you got to do it.”
Rick: And you hadn’t told him that you had gotten a name?
Kosi: No, I hadn’t told him. So he goes, “You go down to the beach and you decide, based on your experience, what is the name?” So I wrote down the words Kosi and Sunyata, and I put my hand on both, and it felt like both were the name, so Kosi-Sunyata. You could say Sunyata was really the ultimate name, because it’s the teaching, the mantra, and the realization all in one, because Sunyata is beyond name and form. But at that time, that’s what seemed right, was Kosi- Sunyata, and Gangaji actually was the first person I told. I wrote that in a little note to her, and she immediately accepted that name.
Rick: So for the sake of those who might think that it’s silly or sort of trippy to take on an Indian name like Kosi-Sunyata or Adyashanti or something like that, what would you say to them, to convey that there’s some, perhaps some serious significance to it, and you’re not just trying to seem exotic or something?
Kosi: Right, it’s a profound spiritual practice. Now, I didn’t, like I said, I didn’t really want a name. I felt like it was going to be really awkward and strange, and oh God, Jill’s having another mystical experience, right? Because people who knew me, I’ve had so many, right? So I just really didn’t want to go there with the whole name thing, but then my friend was so strong in his insistence, and the experience was so strong, and it was coming directly from Ramana Maharshi, I said, “Okay, let’s surrender, because the name means surrender. Let’s let go and do it.” And in the process of actually doing it, you don’t realize how much your name is tied to your identity, to the ego, to cultural conditioning. In my case, it was tied directly to my father, because my father wanted me to have his initials, which was JLW. My middle name wasn’t even a female name, it’s Leslie, and it was tied to his uncle, his favorite uncle, and he wanted me to have that middle name. So all of a sudden, all of this family history came up, and that fell away. All of this stuff fell away, and all of the past memories and experiences from my childhood, everything started to shift and fall away. So I would describe it as a profound spiritual practice.
Rick: I wonder what women experience when they get married and they change their last name. I wonder if there’s some degree of the same thing that happens.
Kosi: Well, I think initially, the whole purpose of the woman taking on the husband’s name was a surrender to the man as the head of the household, because that was traditionally how it was, and that’s how it’s actually held biblically, is that the husband is the leader of the family, not the woman. So the woman had to surrender her name and all that was associated with that from her childhood in the act of marriage. But now a lot of women are resistant to that and don’t take on the name of the husband or do the hyphenated name, that kind of thing. And the middle name often became the maiden name.
Rick: Yeah. A somewhat related question came in from Kartik Prasad from Mumbai. He asks, “Is belonging to a lineage really crucial for a spiritual seeker?”
Kosi: What committing to a lineage does for you is it enables you to deepen very deeply. If you don’t commit to a lineage or a teaching, you keep going from teacher to teacher to lineage to lineage, your mind becomes polluted in a way with all the different information and it keeps you more superficial.
Rick: Okay, but some people might say, “Wait a minute, now you’ve been through half a dozen teachers, the Dalai Lama and Guru Maitreya and Gangaji.”
Kosi: Yeah, that’s right, because there is a spiritual evolution that happens, but really when I met Gangaji, she was the first person to say, “Call off the search.” Just before meeting Gangaji, I spent seven days with the Dalai Lama and he was going through the Heart Sutra and he said, “It’s fine to be a spiritual seeker and explore many different traditions and lineages, but at some point you must choose or the mind becomes diluted with too much information.” So this came from the Dalai Lama. At the time, I didn’t like that because I was a minister in a multi-faith church, so we embraced every tradition, so I didn’t really like that perspective. But then when I met Gangaji, she said, “Call off the search,” and there was something about the transmission in her emphatic assertion that calling off the search was essential for deepening. Now Papaji had also said that, “Call off the search.” She was the first one that said that. So I really stopped and it really struck me really hard and I really felt that Ramana Maharishi and his master Arunachala Shiva was the lineage, and I committed to that in that time. That was in 2001, in July of Ramana Maharishi ever since. Sri Amma Karunamayi appeared right after the mystical experience of Ramana in India. Just four months later, she appeared in my life. That was not planned, that was something that happened. I really had no intentions of leaving Gangaji, but that’s what happened. Once Amma came in, there was such a potent transmission of grace and her teaching is so advanced that there really was no going back. When I first met her, I really was meeting her in the sense of, I thought naively, because at that time there was some friction between Gangaji and I, and there was a lot of friction between Gangaji’s husband and myself, and I was thinking maybe this saint could help clear some of that through, maybe it was a Vasana or a Prabhupada karma, or maybe she could clear that out for me, but I didn’t know that actually it would end that relationship, it just annihilated it. I had Shaktipat from Sri Amma Karunamayi in July of 2011, and it was really game over. And in that moment she became basically the guru, the avatar, the living guru in a physical form, supporting the teaching that I’m offering around the world right now in a very powerful, potent, omniscient way.
Rick: Yeah, a couple things to say here perhaps. I mean, one is that it would be one thing to just be living your life such that, “Oh, I think this week I’ll go see this teacher,” and “Oh, now this person’s come to town, I’ll go see them.” That would be a sort of a dilettante way of approaching it, but the way you’ve gone about it is basically years of deep dedication to whichever teacher you were focused on, so it’s not like you were just flitting about.
Kosi: And I think it’s really important for people to understand that from the very beginning, before I even met Gangaji, my focus and attention was on liberation. I wanted the real deal. So I went, I had the mystical experience of Christ, which revealed that there was something much more than what we call or what we perceive to be the physical reality of the earth and, our experiences and stuff. So I knew there was something there, and I believed, because the Buddha was a human being, that it was possible for an ordinary person to not only awaken but become an enlightened master, which means, from this point of view, that you are liberated from the karmic wheel of suffering. I went to Muktananda’s lineage, or Nityananda’s lineage. Nityananda was also an avatar and received Shaktipat in 1997-1998 timeframe, directly from Guru Mai. And the emphasis of that lineage was on the mantra and singing the mantra. There was not a lot of inquiry or discussion, and also the Siddha yoga, the physical postures of yoga. But at that time, I was so confused by the mystical experiences, and I had profound experiences with Guru Mai, and I didn’t really have a context for any of that. So it just seemed like I couldn’t ask my questions, I couldn’t get close enough to Guru Mai to ask the many burning questions that I had. And one of them was the paradoxical nature of physical reality. If you have happiness, you have sadness, you have light, you have dark, so what is the resolution of the paradox? So I had these kind of really deep questions that I wanted answers to, but I couldn’t get to her. And so then I knelt down, I was with Guru Mai. I stood up in the middle of a beautiful chant. There was probably about a thousand people singing the mantra around Guru Mai in that moment, and when you have a thousand people singing the mantra, the sound is celestial, it’s just unbelievable. But suddenly, it was almost like the body itself stood up. It just stood up, and the only person in the room with their eyes open was Guru Mai. And I was standing 50 feet from her, so we were staring at each other for what seemed like a very long time, and then I just turned and I walked out into the sunlight, because I knew my questions would not be answered. So I walked and I knelt down in front of a statue of Christ, and I prayed like I had never prayed in my life for a teacher I could talk to. I was very specific. I don’t want a mystical experience. I don’t want Jesus to pop out of a cloud or Buddha to appear with lotus petals falling from the sky. I wanted a real physical teacher that I could speak to, and then 14 days later I was introduced to Gangaji.
Rick: Yeah, and we actually covered that in quite some detail in the first interview, so we won’t go into that too much, but people might want to refer back to that.
Kosi: Right, so that’s how the commitment to Ramana occurred, it was through that prayer. So I see the relationship with Gangaji, although the form of that relationship has changed drastically, I see it as divinely ordained.
Rick: How do you reconcile the saying “call off the search” with your understanding that spiritual evolution is kind of a long haul and that there’s a lot of, whatever stage you may be at, there may very well be a great deal yet to realize.
Kosi: I think “call off the search,” at least the way I received it as a transmission, was really the command to stop, to stop seeking, stop looking outside of yourself for the answer. Stop looking for a teacher that’s going to give you the answer, stop. And so really before Gangaji even said anything, when she walked into the room, first of all I knew she was the master that I had prayed for, and I just kind of fell into the silence of the heart before she even said a word, and I knew instantly this was home, this was the place. Then she said “call off the search,” and that made sense to me because at that point in my spiritual evolution, every weekend I was going to do something else. I was doing Native American spirituality, I was a minister at this very eclectic church where it was a non-dual church. You have a body, but you’re not your body, you’re not your past, you’re not your story kind of a church. So I was very much into the path, but I was going from person to person to person. I spent a lot of time with Dalai Lama, etc., and so her command to stop, which is really Papaji’s teaching, it’s also Ramana’s teaching, to stop and turn your attention in, stop looking on the outside.
Rick: Yeah, so maybe that’s it in a nutshell. I mean, and that’s what meditation does if it’s effective. You’re not looking for something outside yourself to find fulfillment, you’re just turning your attention 180 degrees within and discovering that there’s a great reservoir of fulfillment deep within.
Kosi: The reason for that shift and the reason why that shift is so essential is that if you keep seeking then you remain at the effect of your five senses. So you’re following the senses outward instead of turning within. So this is a dramatic shift when you first awaken to this living energy, the living truth that you are, you have to stop, be still, be quiet, to actually have a direct experience of that. So Ramana’s teaching is all about direct experience, not reading scripture, not discussing it, not some philosophy, not some esoteric discussion, right? It’s not a discussion group, it is the point of stopping to turn within for your own direct discovery of your eternal nature. And Gangaji knew you had to stop in order for that to start to mature.
Rick: Yeah, sometimes when I hear the phrase “call off the search” I have a feeling that some people might interpret it as meaning just sort of don’t even have a fervent interest in spiritual development or anything like that, just let happen whatever happens. And I don’t think that wouldn’t make sense to me because I mean there were people around Ramana who spent their whole lives around him who were avid, we could say seekers, who were avidly focused on what Ramana had to offer. So it’s not like they were just sort of ho-hum, whatever happens, but they were in a position or in a situation which enabled them to discover where what they were looking for was actually located.
Kosi: Well it’s not like your education ends because, that’s why I called the book Organic Awakening. So there’s the moment of awakening which is dramatic. It’s a dramatic shift in your consciousness and all of a sudden you realize, “Oh I’m not this body, I am this eternal presence of the heart.” This is what Ramana described as seeing the seer or seeing the witness, right? This is the Tariya state of the heart. So it’s a really dramatic shift and you can experience profound euphoria and bliss in a moment of awakening. But then there’s a deepening that happens over time and part of the deepening is studying. It’s reading scripture, it’s reading the Vedas, it’s reading the Upanishads, it’s studying Ramana’s life. In my case this was the lineage, so I wanted to know everything about Ramana Maharshi. I wanted to know everything about Papaji because that was Gangaji’s master. So I read The Truth Is cover to cover seven times. I really focused on this teaching and this lineage and this point of view because each teacher and lineage has a unique perspective, a unique point of view. And so I just took a deep dive into this lineage because the goal was always liberation. So I was never a casual student, never.
Rick: Right, so this realization, which you say is quite sudden and dramatic, that I am not this body, I mean ten minutes later you may stub your toe, and you might feel like, okay I got it, I’m not this body, but damn this hurts. So there’s still some relationship to this body obviously.
Kosi: That’s right. And well seeing the seer for me was a major shift in consciousness. I read that tiny little sentence in the book The Truth Is and that stopped my mind cold. It was almost like my mind just completely froze in that moment. And a deep examination of seeing the seer, it was kind of like an inversion of mind. It was like the mind turned inside out and I can only describe it as an experience that was not an experience. And that was really an initiation coming directly from Papaji through Ramana, through the mountain. But that was the beginning of the spiritual evolution.
Rick: Had you already been meditating a fair amount at that point in one form or another?
Kosi: I had meditated during retreats with Guru Maya, but I wouldn’t describe myself at that stage back in 2001 as a serious meditator. I was really more of a seeker and that’s why Call Off The Search was so powerful because there was this really dramatic stop and commitment to this lineage. So I committed to Gangaji as my teacher and I committed to the entire lineage which was the mountain, which was Ramana, which was Papaji.
Rick: What do you think of the potpourri of spiritual teachers who consider themselves to be in a lineage tracing back to Ramana? I mean David Godman is rather insistent that Ramana never established or intended to establish a lineage and there’s quite a pretty wide range of things being taught in the name of this so-called lineage, so what do you think about that?
Kosi: Well Ramana said the lineage was Arunachala Shiva and I think that is the absolute truth because Shiva, the omniscient presence of God, is the lineage.
Rick: But then it would go Arunachala to Ramana to let’s say Papaji and a few others and then from there to even more others. Is that really a lineage that Ramana would have put his seal of approval on?
Kosi: No, because he’s not thinking in those terms, that’s a human way of thinking of it is in terms of it being passed from person to person, that’s why he said there is no lineage, the mountain is the lineage, Arunachala is the lineage, right? So he was really adamant about that point because there was no form, right? So this is sunyata, this is the formless presence of God, this is the lineage. So that was his emphasis, he emphasized that quite a bit.
Rick: So would he say for instance to all these teachers who are sitting there with a picture of Papaji and Ramana next to them that, well these are intermediaries, maybe you should have a picture of Arunachala on the table there.
Kosi: He might, or no picture, just an empty table. Yeah, I think from my direct experience, Ramana is right in that the the lineage is Shiva, is the mountain, that is the lineage. The reason for why I call this Shiva Kashyapa is that when I, in Karunamayi at her ashram in India and she looked at all of us and said, I want you to take on the lineage, her lineage is Kashyapa, it’s an ancient gotra and it means all of creation.
Rick: And Kashyapa was a rishi also.
Kosi: Yeah, that’s right, and Kashyapa was a rishi. So she said, this is the lineage that I want all of you to accept as yours. So I added Shiva because the emphasis of the teaching is on self-inquiry. Right, so you can’t really leave out Shiva or Arunachala in the context of what this form is currently teaching throughout the world, right? So that’s why it’s Shiva Kashyapa. So it’s the divine masculine combined with the divine feminine. Kashyapa is the divine feminine, Shiva divine masculine, and often Shiva himself is predicted as both masculine and feminine, right?
Rick: Yeah, I didn’t mean by my questions to imply that I don’t think there’s any significance to lineages, I just wondered what you thought about it. I mean, when I was teaching TM for many years, we did a puja to honor the teachers in the Shankaracharya lineage, Shankaracharya tradition, going back even preceding Shankara, and it was very potent experience to do that and it gave some potency to imparting the mantra to the person. So there’s definitely something to all that.
Kosi: Right, well I think that Ramana was very clear about that, that there is no lineage, and so I’m in total alignment with David Godman on that, because he said it, he was very clear, he didn’t name a person to be his successor, which is what usually happens in a lineage, that somebody is anointed as the person that’s going to follow, and that never happened. And the reason is simply because the mountain was the lineage, which is the formless presence of God.
Rick: Yeah, so you mentioned awakening to the realization that one is not the body, and then you distinguish between that and liberation, and you distinguish between that and self-realization. It kind of reminds me of a Tibetan saying, although they have it slightly differently, they say don’t mistake understanding for realization, don’t mistake realization for liberation. So to a certain extent it might be semantics, and you know what word we want to use to apply to what stage of development. But anyway, in your terminology, how are you distinguishing between awakening, liberation, and self-realization?
Kosi: Awakening is that initial shift in consciousness, it’s an initiation into your eternal nature, regardless of what lineage you’re resonating with, awakening is that dramatic shift in your perception, that I’m more than the physical form, I am eternal, that is awakening. The next phase, if you will, is self-realization, and that is a deeper realization of yourself as that omniscience that resides in the heart, and then liberation is the complete and total annihilation of the sense or feeling I am the body, or, Ramana described it as, I am the doer. This is the Turiya-Tita state, which is the state beyond Turiya, which resides in the heart, it’s the fifth dimension of enlightenment.
Rick: Okay, so one roadmap I was familiar with was that, Turiya would be the fourth, it means fourth, and it would be perhaps akin to what you refer to as awakening, where there’s a sort of a glimpse of the transcendent, either brief or longer, which shows you experientially that you are not the body, you are something beyond that, and then Turiya- Tita, I believe that means without break.
Kosi: It means there’s no experiencer. Turiya-Tita is there is no experiencer, period, there’s no witness, it’s beyond language, it’s pure consciousness itself, so there’s no way to articulate it.
Rick: And it’s not momentary, it’s more of a perpetual sort of state.
Kosi: It’s constant, that’s true liberation, there’s no break, it’s the continuum.
Rick: Now it’s my understanding though that there are states beyond that as well, you too, I mean, do you understand, is that your orientation?
Kosi: That’s my direct experience with Sri Amma Karunamayi, and it’s also my direct experience of Ramana Maharshi, that they had attained a state of consciousness that is not typical, so it’s way beyond what we would even describe as liberation.
Rick: Yeah, and one thing that’s often described is that reality is not two, and that’s what Advaita means.
Kosi: That’s right.
Rick: And that in other words, there’s not only not ultimately the dualities that we see in the relative world, but there is actually not also a duality between self and non-self, between pure consciousness and the relative world, that in fact the relative world is made of the same stuff-less stuff as pure consciousness, it’s all one holistic solid mass of being.
Kosi: Right, well everything perceived through your five senses ultimately is an illusion, it’s maya, but maya itself is infused with the living presence of the self. So you can say it’s ultimately real, and then the resolution of the paradox is beyond the fourth.
Rick: Yeah, I find this interesting, it may sound like nitpicking to people, but I think it’s interesting to strive toward an understanding of the map of the territory based upon direct experience and to compare different maps, because there can’t really be a different reality to the universe for every tradition, they must all be climbing up the same mountain, and ultimately it should be possible to have a scientific uniform understanding of the range of potential human experience, and up until the highest level of whatever enlightenment may be.
Kosi: Right, well Ramana’s focus and emphasis was the intense application of self-inquiry, which means training the mind to stay in the source until it completely vanishes. The mind, you sent me an email earlier about the genetic mind, so the genetic mind is,
Rick: I did?
Kosi: Somebody did, I thought it was you.
Rick: Oh, it was a question somebody sent in about it, in fact I can probably even read it here if you want to. This is Gorjana from Belgrade, Serbia, who said, “The genetic mind is basically the deeply ingrained physical sensation and belief that you are the body. When you are at the effect of the genetic mind, your perception of reality is filtered through the genetics of your physical form. Another way of thinking of it is egoic mind, but genetic mind addresses the genetic conditioning or the parabdha karma stored in the DNA.”
Kosi: Right, and that is the clearest definition I can provide for the genetic mind, because really it’s not, we think of mind as thought and really mind is so much more than just thought. Mind itself is kind of beyond, it’s in the physical form, but it’s beyond the physical form, and so the transcendence of mind requires the very intense practice of self-inquiry.
Rick: I also like the fact that, here’s some little snippets from your book, you say, “Self-realization is holistic. All aspects of brain, body, mind, etc. are involved. Vasanas are real and have,” some of this may be my alteration of what you wrote, “Vasanas are real and have a biochemical or neurological basis.”
Kosi: That’s right.
Rick: Yeah, so they’re not just a concept, they may involve something in the subtle body which neurophysiologists couldn’t detect, but I think they could probably also be, on some level, in terms of the biochemistry, there would be some impression. I mean, we don’t even, there’s very little understood about how the brain works. Neurophysiologists don’t know exactly how thoughts occur or how memories are stored or any of that stuff.
Kosi: Or how energy even got into the brain for us to even think.
Rick: There’s a lot we don’t understand.
Kosi: We don’t even know what consciousness is.
Rick: Or how the brain creates it if it does, or transmits it if it’s something that’s more fundamental than the brain. It’s like this great big open field of investigation. But anyway, I like the fact that you place emphasis on the multi- faceted nature of self-realization, that it’s not just a mental thing, it’s not a heart thing, it’s not, it’s everything, it involves every and all aspect of whatever it is that comprises our total makeup.
Kosi: This is why the statement that Papaji made, “No teacher, no student, no teaching, this is the teaching,” ultimately falls down in the relative sense. What he’s really pointing to is the absolute. So in the absolute, you are already the self and you can’t do anything to be the self because you’re already that. You are already your eternal nature. But you can say that, you can understand that, but the ego is still very, very much there and present until you actually purify the mind through, in Ramana’s teaching, through self-inquiry, the mantra. He did emphasize the use of the mantra, even though that’s not emphasized often in the West. And silence, meditation, that those three things, the purpose of it is to train your mind to focus on and stay in the heart. It’s the staying and not forgetting the self that’s the great challenge, because we can have a direct realization of self. Even after awakening we can have the realization, deeper realization of self, of the eternal nature, and then walk out the door and, like you said, you stub your toe or, somebody stole your bicycle and suddenly you’re back in the, same patterns of suffering.
Rick: Or as Ramana said, if you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your parents.
Kosi: That’s right. And the Sargadatta, when he was on his deathbed he said, “Forget the book, I am that, I’ve gone so much deeper.” So there is this evolutionary nature of your own realization until there is no one realizing anything.
Rick: Yeah, and even then there may be an evolutionary process. I tend to emphasize that point in these interviews just because I think it’s a common trap, and actually some traditions recognize this, that there are many stages at which the experience is such that one is totally convinced that this must be it, there couldn’t be anything more, and one can get stuck there.
Rick: That’s right, and I often say in satsang that you can never, ever allow yourself to think you’ve arrived. Don’t ever allow yourself, “I’ve done it, I’ve got it, I am the enlightened master, I am free, I am liberated.” The “me” is still there in those kinds of statements, so it’s very humbling to realize that this evolution continues until your last breath.
Rick: Yeah, Adyashanti says that, he says, “I always have the attitude of a beginner.”
Kosi: That’s right.
Rick: And Amma, the hugging saint, says that too, she said, “It’s always good to have the attitude of a beginner.” That’s right. Maybe that’s what Zen means by “beginner’s mind,” I don’t know.
Kosi: And cultivating humility, I think, is essential because after the awakened experience, often what happens is the ego grabs a hold of that, is, “Wow, I’m awake, I’m special.” So there’s a arrogance, especially in the West, which I describe as “enlightened ego.” And this is why you really want to be vigilant, right, and not allow yourself to grab a hold of a realization as a kind of indication of “I’m special, I’ve made it, I’m the master now.” It’s dangerous when you do that, and I think this is where abuse can sneak in, is when people think, “I’m above the student.”
Rick: Yeah, it’s dangerous for teachers and it’s dangerous for students, because if a student has the perspective of, “Well, this guy has reached the pinnacle of human evolution,” then by implication he can do no wrong.
Kosi: That’s right.
Rick: Even if he starts saying and doing things that are completely crazy, the student would tend to doubt their own perspective before doubting the teacher. They say, “Well, I’m unenlightened, I can’t possibly, it’s inscrutable, it’s crazy wisdom, he must be right, I’ll just jump off a cliff with him,” or whatever.
Kosi: That’s right, exactly. People have done that, or come close to death, because, the deep desire for liberation is so strong, that once you identify with a human being, especially as your teacher, there’s a very sacred bond that happens, and it’s powerful, and it’s also very Eastern, it’s not common in the West for us to commit to an individual as the Master who’s going to guide us all the way through to liberation. So, there is an intensity in that kind of relationship, and sometimes there is a place for crazy wisdom. Amma says, “No, there’s not.” She said, “Love only is the way to liberation, and love only is liberation.” So, she doesn’t buy into the whole crazy wisdom thing, because there’s too much mind involved in that, and there’s too much potential for abuse, but it is a very sacred and deep bond when you find your true teacher, and there is a natural love that evolves over time for your teacher, because they are revealing your eternal nature. It’s the nature of redemption and salvation, and on a deep, deep level, many of us that are on this path have had many, many lifetimes of incarnations, and so when that spark of awakening occurs, there’s a passion for this. And that passion often gets projected onto the teacher, and like you’re saying, we can put the teacher on a pedestal, and then when we see that something’s really off, we’re afraid to articulate that, or accept it even, just say, “that’s crazy.”
Rick: There are kind of parallels in certain situations in the West where people have been taken advantage of by those in positions of power, and have been afraid to say anything for fear of, losing their job or their position or, their membership on the athletic team or whatever, and a lot of that stuff.
Kosi: Or your position in the inner circle.
Rick: Yeah, that too, and a lot of that stuff is getting called out these days, but I think part of the mix with spirituality is that there’s an implicit and even explicit suggestion that surrender here and obedience and commitment will be a good thing, which you don’t get from a mathematics teacher or something. You’re expected to put aside your own ways of thinking and feeling and align yourself with the mind of the teacher, and that can get real, you want to hit your wagon to a star, but you want to really make sure it’s a star before you do that.
Kosi: That’s right, because you can really get burned, you can really get hurt psychologically, emotionally, even physically you can get hurt if the master is really not a true master. And what I will say in my case, I was a very committed student to Gangaji, but when I reached a very critical stage in that relationship, there was a betrayal, it became very cultish, the whole inner circle, and it was a very painful end to that relationship. Now, Amma did come in at the same time, and I wouldn’t change anything about it, because the way that ended was, I would describe it as an egregious abuse of power from Gangaji directly. There was a very vicious and violent attack at a very critical stage in my evolution. Now, this happened 24 hours after meeting Amma, so there could be some energetic correlation to that, I don’t really know, but I will say that not long after that, even though we made several attempts to work through it, through inquiry and different things, Amma’s presence was so palpable and so potent and so omniscient that it really, about six months later, it was clear that the relationship with Gangaji had ended, and Amma had come in at that particular time to support an evolutionary perspective. And the change since Amma arrived, there’s no words for it, there’s just no words for it.
Rick: Yeah, I had a similar transition from the TM movement to Amma, the hugging saint, Amrita Mata and Amritanandamayi. It was like cosmic timing in terms of just a smooth transition, which wouldn’t have really been possible 10 years before that, but when it happened, the time was right.
Kosi: That’s right, and there was a process that I had to go through because I was so committed to Gangaji. I was not expecting this saint to appear in my life, this avatar, and I even at one retreat sat at Amma’s feet, I gave her a copy of this book, Arunachala Shiva, Heart of Ramana, it was the poetry that I had written, and in that book I asked her, I said, “I wasn’t expecting you to appear, I don’t want to leave Ramana,” and she laughed, because how can you leave Ramana? You can’t leave the omniscient presence of God, you can’t leave Shiva, right? But she spent a great deal of time, she went through every page of that book by the way, it was a beautiful transmission of grace and love and compassion, and she said, “My appearance in your life is to support you in final liberation in this life.”
Rick: Yeah, and it’s interesting to note that Ramana told Karunamayi’s mother that she would give birth to the person who became Karunamayi.
Kosi: That’s right, so there is a connection, a profound connection to Ramana, and what I find interesting about it’s the location where Ramana told Amma’s mother that. So, she was standing at the cow shed, the cow shed was a very sacred location just outside where the Samadhi tomb is right now. It’s one of the first structures that was built, the mother’s tomb was the first thing that was built, and the next thing that was built was the cow shed, which was an offering to Lakshmi, It was not just Ramana’s cow, but Lakshmi, the deity, the abundance, and the cow, of course, because he had a very special relationship with Lakshmi, the cow, right? So, he asked Amma’s mother to meet him at the cow shed, and when I read that I burst into tears, because if there was any place on the mountain that was sacred to Ramana other than the mountain itself, it was the cow shed.
Rick: Yeah.
Kosi: Right, and it was there that he told her, he looked at her and he said, “Oh, so you want to live in an ashram?” Because she did, she wanted to leave her role as mother and just be with Ramana all the time. She was an ardent devotee of Ramana Maharshi, and he just was silent, he stared at her with his famous deep stare, and then he said, “You will live in an ashram, but it won’t be this ashram, it’ll be the ashram of your daughter. She will be born as Tai, the divine mother, and she is the real thing, Rick.” And you’ve experienced her, so there’s a transmission beyond anything you can understand, it’s beyond
Rick: Was he implying that Ramana’s mother would be reborn and then live in her daughter’s ashram?
Kosi: No, she actually lived in…
Rick: Oh, as an older woman she did.
Kosi: Yes, well she knew that Amma was a special child, in fact when the moment she was born her mother did a namaskar on the ground, a full namaskar to the little infant, so they put the infant in a basket and her parents did a full namaskar on the floor recognizing her as Tai because they believed and trusted fully that Ramana knew what he was doing, and Ramana doesn’t really normally prophesies something of that nature, so she was treated as a deity and an avatar from the very beginning, and of course there was many signs of that. She shared a story, if you want to hear the story, it was such an astonishing story that she shared in satsang a couple years ago about her grandmother’s burial, so I can go into that if you like, but it was just, it was so out there, it is so ancient, her perspective.
Rick: If you feel it would enhance what we’re talking about here, go ahead.
Kosi: So her grandmother died when she was about six, seven years old, and her father was a Rama devotee, not a Ramana, but a Rama devotee.
Rick: Like Rama and Sita, yeah.
Kosi: Yeah, and a Vishnu devotee, so he had a guru that was really into Vishnu, so they had the burial on the banks of, I believe it was the Ganga, I’m pretty sure it was the Ganga, and it was a traditional Vedic ceremony, but it was a Vishnu ceremony. They had all of the accoutrements of that kind of a ceremony, right? So they had baked all of these special offerings for Vishnu, which is considered the supreme god, right? And he was a Vishnu devotee, so he didn’t want Amma there because she was so small, she was just a child, and he said, “Well, she can come to the ceremony, but she has to sit on the steps down by the river and be really a good girl and be quiet so she doesn’t interrupt the ceremony.” Now, they had a tent with all of these things that they had cooked and baked, and it was a traditional funeral. So the body is burning, Amma is down by the water, and she looks out over the Ganga and a Shiva lingam, which is a stone, which is a big Shiva lingam, about this size, was rolling across the water towards her. So she’s looking at this Shiva lingam rolling across the water and it comes right to her and she picks it up, and the priest sees this happening and he says, “That’s a Shiva lingam, get rid of it! This is a Vishnu ceremony!” So he wasn’t impressed that this stone was rolling across the water, he said immediately to get rid of it. Amma said she, you can just picture this little girl hugging the Shiva lingam, and she said, “No, this is a gift from the Ganga, I’m not going to do that.” And so she walked up the steps holding the Shiva lingam and walked into the tent where all of these little cakes and things were, and Shiva appears.
Rick: To everybody?
Kosi: Now to her, and everybody could see him, yes. So he came in and he starts eating these little cakes that they made, and he’s enjoying it, he’s laughing, and he’s with Amma, and he’s radiant, right? He looked like a young man and he’s eating all this stuff. Well, the priest seizes and he’s furious, so he runs into the tent and he says, “How dare you eat the sacred food!” And suddenly Shiva just stopped and went, it was gone. And the guy like fell on his knees because he suddenly realized it was Shiva, it manifested in human form. And here’s Amma sitting there holding the lingam. Now what’s interesting about the story is just a few hours later he had a massive stroke and died two days later because he was so distraught. His entire life he had prayed to see Shiva in physical form, and when he manifested because of his own arrogance, he had sent him away. Can you imagine how devastating that would be for a priest? So that was just a story that she shared when she was just a child, and there’s many, many stories of miraculous things such as that occurring around her. But when she told that story, there was such a transmission, it was so potent. And the visual of the lingam rolling across the water and this little girl picking it up and then Shiva manifesting, they still have the lingam. It’s at their ashram in the place where they keep these ancient Vedic papyrus scrolls and codexes that her father collected. So they have codexes written on papyrus of the Vedas that are over 5,000 years old. And when I was there in 2012, we actually did a namaskar to the papyrus. She said this is directly written by the hand of a rishi. This is sacred text. And her father was a Vedic scholar and he just collected many of these.
Rick: They would last that long if they’re just papyrus.
Kosi: Well they’re in a controlled environment.
Rick: A special vacuum or something.
Kosi: And they’re in the process of trying to scan them so they aren’t lost.
Rick: All right, I’m going to change the subject a little bit. In your book you talk about the power of mantra quite a bit and you talk about the fact that Papaji himself used the mantra to a great extent and eventually stopped it and then eventually didn’t recommend using one even though he himself had used one for perhaps decades. So let’s just touch a little bit on what a mantra is, what the significance of it is, and various ways of using it and so on. Might be worth throwing in there. And you mention in your book that a lot of Advaita people in the West at least dismiss the significance of mantra or say that it’s not any sort of practice involving a mantra is not going to be efficacious.
Kosi: Right, it’s often considered dualistic and that’s what Papaji, once he had the realization of the self, once he met, when Ramana said, “See the seer,” so that was really a transformative moment for Papaji when he was out playing with Krishna. So he was a Krishna devotee and sang the Krishna mantra for something like 20 years he sang the mantra, but he was very proud of the fact that Krishna would manifest and he could actually play with him and talk to him. And he was out on Arunachala just after he met Ramana playing with Krishna and he went back to the Satsang hall and Ramana said, “Well, where have you been?” And Papaji said, “Well, I was out playing with Krishna.” And Ramana said, “Is Krishna here now?” And Papaji said, “No, sir, he’s not.” And Ramana stared at him with his famous stare for a while and then said, “Anything that comes and goes is not real. See the seer.” And Papaji said his whole body shook in that moment and he had a profound, deep and lasting realization of the self. After that occurred he could no longer do the Krishna mantra practice that he had done for years.
Rick: He tried but it wouldn’t work.
Kosi: He tried but it wouldn’t work and he was very uncomfortable with that. So he went back to Ramana and said, “I can’t do this practice anymore.” And Ramana’s response was, “Well, how did you get here?” And he said, “Well, on the train.” He goes, “Well, how’d you get to the train from to the ashram?” He said, “By a bull cart.” And he goes, “Well, where’s the bull cart now?” And he goes, “Well, it’s gone.” And “Where’s the train? It’s gone.” He goes, “Well, the same is true of the mantra. It served you up until that point but you no longer need it.” But he didn’t say it had no value. Papaji heard that as it’s dualistic, you don’t need it. And so he said it was a dualistic practice from that point forward. Then, my direct experience is that the mantra is really potent and powerful and Amma’s teaching really emphasizes the use of the mantra and there is a science behind it. So the purpose of the mantra is that first of all the sounds of the mantra are fused with silence and it affects a different part of your brain. So she maintains that you cannot just awaken with just understanding that the practices of the mantra silence are essential because it affects a different part of your brain and also the puja, the colors of the flowers, the brilliant colors of the flowers affects another part of your brain and the incense affects a different part of your brain. And so the brain, it’s like a more holistic perspective of the brain and these practices train the mind to focus on the source in the heart without the purification of the practices, whether it’s a devotional practice of the puja or self-inquiry or whatever the practice might be, it’s a letting go of. So sadhana, which is spiritual practice, means to let go, right? It’s a form of surrender, but it’s also the physical energy of burning through this deep sensation, “I am the doer, I am the ego, I am the body,” right? So anyway, there’s this whole science behind how it actually affects the whole person. It goes back to what you were saying earlier that I wrote in Organic Awakening, it’s a holistic process because you can’t just know that you are the self, you have to directly experience that for yourself.
Rick: Yeah, you say in the book natural organic awakening simply requires time, and that’s good to know because, teachers who say that you’re already awake or that you should wake up now might make people feel that there’s something wrong with them if that isn’t happening.
Kosi: That’s right, you can have the awakening is instantaneous, it’s less than a fraction of a second. That can happen very quickly, but the evolution is over a period of time, towards the ultimate goal of liberation. The difference is that Papaji says you already liberated, so there is no goal. You’re already that. That’s absolutely true in the absolute sense. It’s not true in the relative sense or the physical nature of the body because you know and I know the sensation of me, which is ego, is very, very strong. So you can have a profound realization of truth, and like you said, stub your toe and then you’re back into old patterns of suffering, you’re back into the identification with the physical because of the feeling nature of the body, the sensations.
Rick: Yeah, I sometimes use the metaphor of, let’s say somebody has won the lottery and but he doesn’t know it and he’s begging on the street and someone comes up to him and says, “Well you’ve won the lottery, you should stop begging,” but he still doesn’t have the money so he has to maybe go through a process of finding the lottery ticket in some sock drawer or something like that, going and getting an attorney and an accountant and cashing it in and all that, and there’s going to be quite a few steps before he actually has money to spend. So we’re all the self, we’re all enlightened ultimately and essentially, but that’s just nice words if it’s not your direct experience and there may be some steps you need to take for it to become your direct experience. And what you were saying before a few minutes ago about all the different aspects of the brain and so on that might be affected by different practices and things, it’s like there’s a whole huge variety of different spiritual practices and techniques and teachers and teachings and all that, and obviously you can’t do them all and you shouldn’t do them all and wouldn’t want to do them all, don’t have time in life to do them all, but different things are relevant to different people and at different stages of their development, and so to just sweep them all away and say this ultimate teaching alone is what everyone should do is not practical for almost anybody.
Kosi: Right, it ultimately doesn’t work. I often say that even though Papaji said the practice was effortless because you are that already, it was a Zen practice. He was fiercely here. He often said “Surrender to now as your guru.” So that’s very Zen and I think this is why it works so well for Gangaji because she was a Zen practitioner for many years before she met Papaji, right? She did a very austere Vipassana practice which was all about stillness. So you could say that that was…
Rick: I’m sure that had an effect.
Kosi: It definitely did. So when she heard Papaji speak, she received the stillness. But that preparation was essential for her to receive that. So Papaji’s teaching was really very Zen, very here, very now. Many people cannot do that practice. Because it’s very hard to stay with this stillness of the heart. And not go to the past, not go to the future.
Rick: Yeah, Ramana himself said that he had undergone a great deal of practice and development in previous lifetimes and that the reason he woke up when he was 16 was because of all that preparation.
Kosi: That’s right, so it was lifetimes in the making. And when I asked Amma about Ramana, she spent an entire weekend talking about who Ramana was and how many incarnations he had. It was incredible. I wish there was a recording of it because she went through how many incarnations he endured to realize the self at the degree that he did in this life.
Rick: Here’s a question that’s totally unrelated to anything we’ve been talking about, but some nice fellow from Iowa, he might even be here in Fairfield, sent it in. I think I’ll ask and see what you have to say. He said, “I became awakened to my non-physical nature a few years ago and since then it seems like I sleep every day away and I can’t find the energy to do what I really desire in life. This doesn’t feel like depression, it feels like a part of me just wants to exist. But I don’t want to just exist, I want to do, and experience. How do I make this go away and why am I experiencing it in the first place?”
Kosi: It sounds like he received a true transmission of the heart, the self, and so that’s like an awakened experience when you realize the self. So he had the awakened experience. Sometimes, not all the time, when that happens, the desire to do completely falls away and there’s really nothing you can do about it because the self is an intelligence and once that happens it literally at a certain point pulls you into itself. So Ramana Maharshi, when he awoke at 16, he was pulled into the self, he was pulled by the Satguru. The Satguru is one, it is not a person, so there is no person that is a Satguru. And often I hear that stated that Gangaji was a Satguru or Mooji was a Satguru or this person was a Satguru. That is a dualistic perspective of what Satguru is. Satguru is the only and one Guru which is pure consciousness, which is beyond the fourth. That is the Satguru. And so you surrender to the Satguru and that generates the fire that burns through the egoic identification. So this desire to do that, this friction or this frustration that this person is experiencing is due to the fact that his mind and ego don’t like this. It’s not what he had in mind, right? We like the idea of awakening. We like that, but we don’t necessarily, we’re not necessarily prepared for what that entails, which means it can completely alter the course of your life.
Rick: It can. I have several things to say to Matt. One is that, as you and I were discussing earlier, Kosi, awakening involves a physiological shift. And a lot of times when there’s a significant awakening, the physiology takes a while to catch up. And there can be a lot of house cleaning and a lot of stuff happening. You might sleep a lot, you might not sleep so well, you might, experience varying kinds of turbulence in the body as the physiology tries to adjust to that new level of consciousness.
Kosi: A lot of emotion can come up too. Things that you thought you dealt with in therapy or whatever can come flooding to the surface. This happens quite often after satsangs in Europe. This has been happening quite a bit, where people have this flood of emotion right after satsang.
Rick: Yeah, I think as one sage once put it, when the postman knows you’re going to move, he tries to deliver all your mail.
Kosi: That’s right.
Rick: Yeah, but there might be things Matt can do in terms of helping the physiology, such as Ayurveda or various other things along those lines, or actually just trying to get out of bed and get some physical exercise. One time a fellow I knew who was really kind of lethargic, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi said he should go get a job loading trucks, do something physical.
Kosi: Or building fences.
Rick: Yeah, building fences or doing something, because I’ve gone through something like Matt describes myself at a certain stage, but physical activity, even very dynamic physical activity, is not incompatible with awakening. In fact, the whole point of karma yoga is to integrate the awakened state with activity, by alternating the experiences of transcendent with activity, and the two need to be and can be integrated. So, there might be some particular activity that Matt enjoys. He should come down and play pickleball with me at the MUM rec center, if he likes that, I’ll give him some activity.
Kosi: And Sri Amma Karunamaya recommends selfless service to others. When you’re feeling really lethargic. She said that many people cannot meditate, it’s just the way their bodies, the way their biochemistry in the brain is, they just cannot meditate. So, she often recommends karma yoga, just like you mentioned, which is selfless service to others with no expectation of getting something in return.
Rick: And Shankara says that, and the other Amma says that, that’s a traditional thing.
Kosi: That’s right, and that also burns through the egoic structure as well, that’s the purpose of it.
Rick: Yeah, but it’s easy to sort of fall into a rut, I think, and to sort of like various things become habitual. So, you start staying in bed all day and you become acclimated to staying in bed all day. It’s just like one time I went on to this whole purification fasting routine for a whole summer and I was doing all these extreme diets and fasting, and I got to a point where I couldn’t hardly eat any normal foods without having some kind of weird reaction because my body had lost the familiarity with those things. So, you can acclimate yourself to anything, and so perhaps the antidote to not wanting to do anything and just wanting to sleep all the time is to just make yourself do something and get involved in activity and see what happens.
Kosi: And the other thing I would say, I would ask him, what does he really want? What does he want? What was the catalyst for the awakening?
Rick: Yeah.
Kosi: And that’s a deep, that’s a question that we don’t often sit with, but what do you really want?
Rick: Good question. Now, one thing I want to get into with you in our remaining time is you’ve put together these beautiful materials with all kinds of interesting charts like this, and I think there are two or three such charts that you want to talk about. Is this something, this book I’m holding, is this something people can buy or download from your website or what is it?
Kosi: Basically, this is part of a course that I put together, and basically it’s a workshop, but the reason for the workshop is it’s a kind, it’s more than just a workshop, workshop is the term that I use because that’s something people can relate to, but this is an initiation into the core teaching of Ramana Maharshi, so it’s really nothing to fool around with, it’s appearing in the physical realm as a PowerPoint presentation, but it’s so much more than that, and it comes from a dialogue between Ramana and a very serious student of his who fundamentally had the question, when he was sitting with Ramana, he was at the experience of profound peace and his mind would completely stop, he would often fall into a samadhi state when Ramana was physically present, but as soon as he got up and went home to his wife and his children, his anger would return, his frustration would return, his boredom would return, his tendency to want to stay in bed would return, and he was like, “What’s going on, why is this happening?” Now, he was very sophisticated in his questions because he was off, the whole dialogue is really he’s asking about yoga and the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita in particular, but certain Vedas and how they emphasize different yogic practices, and basically what he was trying to figure out is how do you burn through the vasanas so that you don’t forget the self after a profound realization or a profound samadhi experience, so how do you maintain the realization is what his question was, and why do these patterns of suffering return? So this presentation came out of the realization that many of the students that I’ve worked with now for the past four years, many of them are very, very serious students about Ramana Maharshi and self inquiry, and I noticed that there was a group of people that were progressing at an alarming rate of speed, so much so that they physically have changed. They don’t even look like the same people I met four years ago, they are radiant, omniscient presences of the self, and you can physically see it in their faces shining through. The other group had made no progress and they were just stuck, and I started asking them what was going on, and the group that really wasn’t making any progress had not applied the teaching at all. They were waiting for satsang to happen. The other group, the ones that had made this astonishing progress, had actually applied it every single day.
Rick: By doing what?
Kosi: By inquiring. They’d be walking down the street, who is noticing the mountains, who is aware of the crying baby, they were inquiring, they were inquiring into their emotions, they were applying the teaching, they were meditating, they were singing the mantra, but the other group wasn’t doing any of it, and so there was no real progress happening. And so then I started thinking, what it was, was a catalyst for what I would describe as a radical return to Ramana’s teaching, and I stumbled upon this, it’s a very short little book, it’s about it’s called “Self-Inquiry.” When I first met Gangaji, I found this book, and there’s a drawing in the book, and I want to hold up this, this is what what Ramana’s response was to this guy. Now, if you read the book, he goes into a lot of detail about different yoga practices. I’m going to hold it up in the in front of the camera so you all can see. So this is the drawing Ramana created. And when I saw this drawing, my mind froze on this drawing. Now, this was, Gangaji, and I didn’t understand really states of consciousness, or I knew the self was in the heart, so when I saw this drawing, even though it’s 2D, I immediately knew because this little flame, see the flame up here at the top, is the self, that’s a representation of the self. So I immediately knew it’s 3D. So I told this group about this drawing, I said this drawing is showing that regardless of the state of consciousness, so you have three primary states, you have the waking state, the dream state, the deep sleep state, and then you have the Tariya state, which is the self, which is in the heart. Regardless of what state you’re experiencing, the self is unmoving and always present. This is what he was trying to show. These little windows down here are the senses right here, the five senses. So I saw that and I just didn’t really understand what, I mean I knew that the self was always there, I had the direct experience of seeing the seer, seeing the witness kind of thing, but I didn’t know anything about at that time about the Tariya state or Tathagata, or any of that stuff. I just was curious about this and I was also very curious about the mantra because I had been, I came to Gangaji from Guru Mai and the emphasis was on the mantra. Gangaji pretty much had rejected the mantra, didn’t use the mantra. There was music in Satsang, Kirtana would sing in Satsang, people would spontaneously sing in Satsang, but there was no emphasis on the mantra as a teaching. And so I was asking Gangaji very early on about that because the mantra had been such a powerful catalyst for my own awakening and also deepening, and then Amma kind of confirmed that because it’s a kind of science as well. So then I told this group of people that it’s 3D and one guy said, “Well, can you draw that for us or maybe I can draw it, I’ll put it in AutoCAD.” So he tried to draw it in AutoCAD and it was really not right, it was not accurate. So I drew it in 3D. So this is what it looks like in 3D, and hopefully everyone can see it up there. And what’s interesting is when you look at it in 3D, it changes, it just is so profound in 3D because basically he’s showing the self in the lower chamber and the number five in there is the ego. And the ego he was describing in this document as reflective consciousness, and it’s so important to recognize what he’s talking about. So the the two chambers, it looks like, and I want to put this up again, it looks like a castle, see that? So the the five senses are all in your head, they’re holes in your head. When you think about that, that’s so bizarre. How we perceive everything in our environment is through the holes in our head.
Rick: Except for touch.
Kosi: Except for touch, exactly. But he’s depicting it as a castle because your sense of sight and smell and taste are kind of our defense mechanism when we’re looking out at the environment in which we’re in. It’s a way that we protect ourselves from any potential threat. This is the genetics of survival. The natural tendency when you’re in the waking state is to move up into the upper chamber to give your attention to your senses, not to the heart or the self. So Ramana’s whole teaching is you have to retrain and rewire your mind through the practices. But what was so cool about this drawing and the initiation that this presentation represents is that he ties this to the mantra. So here’s the drawing again.
Rick: He, meaning Ramana.
Kosi: Yes, this is Ramana’s drawing in teaching. And he breaks it down and it’s really amazing. So the Gayatri Mantra he emphasizes as part of a pranayama practice, which is a breath practice, and he said basically to control the mind, to learn to control the mind, you must use pranayama. It wasn’t like you sort of could use it or maybe it would be nice. It was like pranayama was essential to train the mind to stay in the source as a form of inquiry. So everything that Ramana was focused on was a form of inquiry.
Rick: And again I want to emphasize you’re saying that Ramana said this because you very seldom hear that Ramana advocated any sort of practice like that, at least from the people who speak of his teaching.
Kosi: Right, but you got to put it in context of this guy who was a very serious student and a Vedic scholar who had studied yoga, had practiced physical yoga, and he was kind of asking this this fundamental question, “Why is it that I’m at peace when I’m with you, but when I go home I’m back in the same patterns of suffering?” So then, and we don’t often think of Ramana using the mantra. So each state of consciousness, so this drawing is showing states of consciousness. So what I’m showing here is that drawing again, but the sound OM, which is the sound of the Tariya state in the heart, the Tariya state in the heart is the constant, the one constant. And the sound of it is OM, but the seed letters of OM are A-U-M. And what Ramana does in this document, which most people I think have just totally overlooked this, is he said the A sound is tied to the waking state. That’s the sound of the waking state, so it’s basically a syllable of the sound OM or the primordial sound. And then he did the same for the deep sleep state, which is down here, and also the dream state. Those are the three primary states of consciousness. So he tied these seed letters to the various states, the primary states of consciousness. This is such an astonishing document. You can become liberated just by reading this book and fully, not only understanding it, but actually applying it. So I went through this whole presentation, I was giving this presentation in Switzerland, and I drew it 3D. Everybody was blown away, they were blown away with the A-U-M, because when you sing these sounds, when you go ah oo mm you can actually feel this motion of energy coming into the heart. OM is the sound, if you put all of them together, that is the heart, that is the Tariya state, that’s the fourth state, is the sound OM. This is what the rishis had realized and why the mantra is so potent and so powerful. Ramana recommended the Gayatri mantra, and the reason was the whole mantra is this sound aligning with self, it trains the mind on the beyond the heart chakra, the Tariya state. So it’s really, really potent. So I was giving this presentation, and everybody was like, “Oh my God, this is truly incredible,” because you could actually physically see in the 3D version how simple the teaching is, but how profoundly hard it is to do. So the ego itself is reflective consciousness, that is like looking at the moon, a full moon is reflecting the light of the sun. The moon itself doesn’t glow, it’s reflecting the light of the sun. So what Ramana is saying is that the ego or the sense of me is reflecting the light of the consciousness, which is the self, which is the Tariya state in the heart. But because the level of ignorance, so what separates those two chambers is what he called ignorance. We tend to focus on what our senses are sensing, so we overlook this presence in the heart, but really the practices let you fall through the trap door, which is the door of sleep. When that shuts, when you go into deep sleep, you naturally fall into the self. That’s why we like to sleep, because we’re falling into the self, we lose the body consciousness in true deep sleep state. So understanding the ego as reflective consciousness, that it’s reflecting on one side, so it’s a double-sided mirror. He draws it as a double-sided mirror, so it’s reflecting your senses and it’s reflecting the self, the light of the self, and this is why it’s so hard to break free of patterns of suffering, because the ego is such a powerful illusion, like this little mirror. And then what came from that was what I would describe as a tantric text, because I recognize that in order to put into practice what Ramana is talking about, this 3D drawing and the states of consciousness tied to the mantra, but if you had a little book, which I call the pocket practice, not to market it, this is not a marketing kind of thing, this is not a meant to be a commercial book, it’s an initiation into the really deep teaching that Ramana’s teaching represents, and the correlation to the mantra, and that’s this little book, yeah exactly, you’ve got a copy of it. So this book basically guides you into using Ramana’s teaching into a direct experience of the self. It just takes you one step, one page at a time. This came into being within three days, there was really very little thought processes involved, it’s very simple, so I’m going to show you the very first page, you see Ramana there, and he’s basically saying in order for you to achieve what’s known as liberation, no one succeeds without effort, those who succeed owe their success to perseverance. So Papaji was saying effortlessness, Ramana’s saying there’s this intense effort required. So this is why I call it a radical return to what Ramana himself said, and I put it in this little book. Now when you go through this as a practice, and we did this as a group, there’s a committed group of students in Switzerland, we spent seven days going through each page of this practice.
Rick: Not seven days per page, but seven days for the whole book.
Kosi: No, we did the practice every day, all day, that’s all we did. Now that was not planned, it’s what happened. So the book came into being, we practiced this thing every day, and the reason we kept doing it is it felt so amazingly good. By the time you get to the final page, you just feel good, you feel the happiness, the unalloyed happiness that Ramana is talking about, but you have the direct experience of it. So we did it again and again and again and again. By the seventh day, everyone was ecstatically happy, ecstatically happy, because the difference was we stopped talking about it, we stopped inquiring, we stopped thinking, we stopped even trying to meditate, and we just did what Ramana said to do. We just did it, just do it, like the Nike commercial. Stop talking about it, stop thinking about it, do it. And I made it in a little book form so that you could put it in your pocket, that you could put it in your backpack, you could put it in your purse and have it with you, so that whenever you thought about it, you could whip out your pocket practice, and do it. You can do it in 10 minutes, or it could be a two-hour practice, however much time you want to commit to it, but it’s really, really, really potent, and it is a radical return to precisely what Ramana recommended for liberation. So you have to remember, my perspective and where I’m coming from is going all the way, going for it.
Rick: Can people buy this little book, or do you have to get it in the context of a course, or what?
Kosi: Right now there’s no way to buy it, because I didn’t want it to become a commercial thing. I really wanted it to coincide with the proper instruction. For those people who know Ramana, you could flip through that book and go, “Oh yeah, I know that, I know that,” you can kind of just whip through it and get a sense, “Oh yeah, I got it.” So I didn’t really want that to happen, and for new people, they don’t have enough understanding. So the presentation actually ties to quantum physics. It shows this really profound correlation between quantum mechanics and the human mind and how the human mind actually creates our reality. And this is specifically what Ramana was talking about, that what we perceive to be reality is in fact an illusion, it’s maya. And we get trapped in maya, we get stuck in the upper box, So really the practices are letting go of the senses and falling through the trap door of the reflective consciousness, moving through the reflective consciousness of ego into the self. And the book is a practice that enables you to do that, using the seed letters of A-U-M and the Gayatri mantra as an inquiry. The entire book is an inquiry and application of Ramana’s teaching. So without that context then you don’t necessarily appreciate or understand, number one, how sacred this book is. Because this is like the heart of Ramana manifesting in physical form, saying okay, if you’re serious, you want to make progress, this is what you got to do. It’s simple, it’s not very many pages, but the more you do it, the better you feel, the more progress you make naturally. But it’s kind of like the end of talking about it, it’s the beginning of really applying it. And the people that have done it have just been completely and totally floored.
Rick: When we did our last interview five years ago, you mentioned that you were starting some 10-year program. Did you actually start that? And is that what these people are in the middle of now?
Kosi: Yeah, it’s called the Clear Way and everybody that’s currently involved in the Clear Way, most of them have been doing this now for four years.
Rick: Can people still start that or have to wait?
Kosi: You can start that, it’s on the website. And also, there is a tuition for that, but I’ve always told people if you really feel called to come, you don’t have the money, just email us and let us know you want to come.
Rick: You say come, is it something you have to do in person, like you have to go to Switzerland or something?
Kosi: Yeah. Well, right now the Clear Way is in Europe. There’s two retreats annually. Right now they’re both happening in Switzerland, but there’s also this group that I just was introduced to here in Virginia, so it’s very possible that the Clear Way is going to start here as well because they are also very excited about this. We just did a workshop, it was called the Yoga of Freedom, where I did the whole presentation and the initiation into the practice and the feedback I’ve been getting from people is complete and total astonishment, because this group here in Virginia has studied Ramana for years and they all had the same question, “Why am I not making any progress?” And so we went through this whole thing and all of a sudden they’re just in this direct experience of this unalloyed happiness that we’ve all talked about, we’ve all had little tastes of, we’ve had those direct realizations, we’ve had maybe even profound deepening into that, but then when you actually put it in a physical context like this little book and it just kind of guides you page by page, it’s astonishing how simple it is and how potent it is, and you start to realize the pure genius of Ramana Maharishi. It’s genius, that drawing is genius, and he did it within a few seconds, he drew that drawing,
Rick: he scribbled it out,
Kosi: yeah he’s kind of scribbled it out and of course they made it really nice in the book, but he just made that drawing really fast for this guy to kind of show him that no matter what state of consciousness you’re in, the self is always there, and then beyond the Turiya state is the fifth state, beyond the fourth.
Rick: Maybe you should offer one of these groups on the west coast too, you probably have a lot of takers out there.
Kosi: Well, and maybe do something online so that people don’t have to travel. It’s just right now, as you know, my mother is transitioning, and so I’m here in, unexpectedly in Virginia, it’s kind of a medical emergency. So I’m going to have a base here in Virginia and also I have a base in Prague. I have an office in Satsang Hall in Prague and it’s going to be something similar here in Virginia. So it’s expanding and evolving here in the United States as well, and we can do things online. It’s not like we necessarily physically have to be in the same room. Of course it’s much more potent and palpable if you can travel and be in the same room.
Rick: Yeah, give it your immersion.
Kosi: And it can be a weekend retreat, it doesn’t have to be a seven-day retreat. The clear way is for people who really are really serious about liberation and living a life from that place of the eternal.
Rick: Yeah, and as always I’ll be linking to your website and people can get in touch and get on your email list and find out about all these things.
Kosi: And the reason for the 10 years is that Ramana and Papaji as well said for true liberation to mature it takes 12 years. So I shortened it to 10 because I even thought a 10-year commitment for most people is like kind of out there. But you can sign up for one year, you don’t have to commit to the full 10 years. Now these people that are in it are really in it, they’ve committed and they’re going for it.
Rick: Yeah, and other traditions say things like that too. I’ve heard that some traditions they say, after awakening 10 years before you should teach and things like that, but there’s definitely that kind of, it’s a long game. I also wanted to just comment quickly on your comment about Ramana emphasizing effort and Papaji not emphasizing effort. I think there’s there can be a reconciliation of those two, that there’s a Vedic verse that says, “Be easy to us with gentle effort.” And, let’s say to become like Serena Williams or somebody like that and to excel at a sport takes a lot of practice, but it’s not effort in the sense that you’re straining and struggling and, breaking your sinews trying to do a thing, but you’re doing a thing. In that case you’re building muscle memory and your neuroplasticity, your brain is restructuring to be able to do this thing.
Kosi: And it’s really sharpening the blade of discernment so that you don’t forget the self, so you can have a profound realization and walk out the door and forget it. So it’s learning to train and focus your attention and purifying the mind at the same time. This is part of the science of it, so it’s not like simple understanding means you’re enlightened.
Rick: Sure, of course not.
Kosi: It’s the actual burning through that structure which is genetic in nature. It’s this feeling nature as well, it’s the sensations. So this is not an easy thing, it’s a simple thing, especially when you see the drawing and examine the two chambers. The goal is to stay in the lower chamber no matter what’s happening. This is really what Ramana was saying, stay as heart, regardless of what’s happening in your immediate surroundings.
Rick: And that takes time, it’s not just like, “Oh, that sounds like a good idea, I guess I’ll do that now for the rest of my life.” It’s just going to take a while to culture that habit.
Kosi: Sometimes I use the analogy of the karate, if you go to karate, you’re not given the black belt the first day.
Rick: Yeah, almost everything in life is like this. The whole educational system, I mean almost everything, involves gradual culturing of the ability to do mathematics or tennis or karate or anything.
Kosi: It takes commitment, it takes perseverance, it does take practice and vigilance. This is the resolve, “I’m going to be free no matter what.” And when I met Gangaji, that resolve was already there, it’s like no matter what, I was going to find that way to liberation.
Rick: Good, well, do you feel like there’s anything important that we haven’t covered that you would like to cover?
Kosi: I think that the main thing that I would tell people is, if you’re serious about liberation, regardless of what path or lineage you resonate with, really look at what is the core teaching and how can you apply that teaching daily, not just once in a while or waiting for the teacher to be in town when you go into satsang. In some cases you could be waiting an entire year for the teacher to return to a specific area, so what are you doing in the meantime? And, I listened a lot, especially in the early stages, to Robert Adams, and he emphasized the I am practice, which is so hum, breathing in so, exhaling hum, to align with the self every day, wherever you were, and that’s a simple practice that you can apply. So, it’s the application of the practice and the teaching that gives you the direct experience and the realization.
Rick: I agree. In four days it’ll be my meditate, and I’ve never missed one, at least two or three hours a day.
Kosi: Oh, that’s fantastic. See, that’s connected.
Rick: I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging, because I’m not, and some people think I’m just obsessive, or after 50 years I should have gotten it by now, but it’s the thing of consistency, and just sticking to whatever you’re, and, it might be that you stick to, like you did, you stuck to a teacher or a practice or something for a number of years, and then you switch to another one, but you still, it’s like traveling, you take a flight from, some little town to a bigger town, then you take a bigger flight to a different place, and each flight is an essential part of the journey.
Kosi: That’s right, and it’s part of the evolution and support of that evolution, but the application becomes essential, because what we can get caught in is the esoteric conversation or the philosophy of Ramana, or whatever teaching we resonate with, and we get into this very intellectual conversation, and we’ve overlooked that we’re not actually applying it. It feels good to think about it, but it’s still not the application of it.
Rick: Yeah, like I sometimes say, you could stand on the sidewalk reading a restaurant menu until you starve to death, but you want to go in the restaurant and eat.
Kosi: Right, and Papaji said, “Stop reading the menu, eat the food.”
Kosi: Same metaphor, okay, I didn’t even know he said that. I love that about Papaji. “Stop reading the menu, eat the food.” So, this little book is eating the food, eating the food of the grace of Ramana Maharshi, applying.
Rick: Well, on that note, I think I’ll go have lunch.
Kosi: Perfect. Well, thank you so much, Rick, it was really wonderful to connect with you again, and hopefully this serves everyone, this discussion.
Rick: Oh, I think it will, and if it doesn’t, then I’ll interview somebody else next week, and maybe that will.
Kosi: That’s right, you never know. Whatever resonates.
Rick: But I’ve really enjoyed talking to you.
Kosi: My message to people is, wherever you feel that you’re called to go, apply whatever the teaching is.
Rick: Yeah, and God is not a one-trick pony, look at the abundance of nature. I just heard today, this is an interesting factoid for you, Tucson, Arizona, for some reason, has the greatest variety of birds other than one other place in the whole world, which is the Amazon rainforest. Who would have thought that a deserty place like that? But the reason I’m bringing up this point is that, the diversity of nature, I think, is a testament to the creative potency of the Divine, and the same can be found in the spiritual realm, where there’s as many paths up the mountain as there are people, in a sense. And so, there’s something there for you, whoever you are, and there’s something that will suit your particular proclivities, and just, find it and apply it.
Kosi: Right, all paths lead to the same place. All right, well, namaste.
Rick: Namaste, thank you.
Kosi: Have a great lunch.
Rick: Yeah, now don’t disconnect, because I just want to make a couple quick concluding remarks. So I’ve been speaking with Kosi, and I’ll be linking to her website and her books and so on from her page on batgap.com, so you can just bounce from there off into her world. And while you’re at Batgap, check out the menus and see what else is available. It’s all pretty self-explanatory, and I mentioned it in many interviews, so just poke around a little bit and see what we have to offer. So, thanks for listening or watching, and I’ll see you next week. Thanks, Kosi.
Kosi: All right, thank you. Namaste.
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