Kosi 2nd Interview

Summary

Kosi describes mystical encounters with Ramana Maharshi and Arunachala, including a transformative experience of emptiness and receiving a new name. The conversation also explores spiritual lineage, committing to a path, and how different teachers shaped her understanding of liberation.

Questions This Interview Explores

• What is the spiritual significance of mystical encounters with Ramana Maharshi?
• How can a spiritual seeker know whether to commit to one teacher or lineage?
• What does receiving a spiritual name mean in the process of awakening?
• How can surrender help loosen identification with personal history and ego?

Key takeaways

• Arunachala can be experienced as a living spiritual presence and teacher.
• A mystical encounter can reveal that the personal identity is not ultimately real.
• Receiving a new name became a practice of surrendering inherited identity.
• Committing to one lineage can help a seeker move beyond spiritual superficiality.
• A lineage may evolve while remaining centered on the aim of liberation.
• Deep spiritual transmission can radically change a seeker’s direction.

Transcript

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. 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 a 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 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. I thought it was a pretty good conversation. So if people enjoy this one and haven’t heard that one, they might want to listen to it. They might even want to listen to it first.

In that interview, we go a lot more into Kosi’s whole biographical background and all the stuff she’s been through, which we’re not going to try to repeat 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. 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: It was nice meeting you briefly at the SAND conference back then.

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. Now things are starting to happen in the United States and Virginia, and that’s where I am right now—in Wintergreen, Virginia.

Rick: Good. Something good is happening all over the world.

Kosi: That’s right.

❤️ Meeting Ramana at Arunachala

Rick: Yeah. Well, as a starting point, perhaps, in the last interview—in your book, you allude to an experience of Ramana that you had when you went to Tiruvannamalai. I don’t think we talked about that in the first interview. So why don’t you tell us about that, and we’ll see what we get into after that.

Kosi: Okay. So it was around October of 2010. During the summer, in late August or that time frame, I made the decision that I was going to go to meet Ramana’s teacher, which is Arunachala Shiva.

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. The reason for that is that 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.

Gangaji’s teaching is extremely powerful, but there was an aspect, or it felt like there was something, that was just missing. So I made this decision to go to Arunachala. 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?

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 it was about this mountain that made him say it was his master. It wasn’t just a teacher; the mountain was his master.

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 it was about the mountain and what it would reveal.

Ramana Maharshi’s Unexpected Mystical Appearance

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.

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. I found it to be a timeless experience. I would go in there in the morning and stay all day, and it would seem like just a few minutes had passed. It was a really transcendental kind of experience in that meditation room.

When I came out one day, I was walking toward the Samadhi tomb, and Ramana Maharshi walked out of the big double doors that go into the Samadhi tomb. I just kind of froze in my tracks because it was a shocking appearance of Ramana.

For those of you who don’t know Ramana, Ramana left his body in 1950, right? So it was a real shock to see him. 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?”

When he said that, I immediately went inside to inquire into the name, which is kind of the label we put on top of the ego, right?

Rick: Was that the name Kosi 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 and says, “This name of yours, is it real?” I inquire into my heart instantly in that moment and could see that 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.

Rick: David Godman has done many YouTube videos and so on, and he’s talked about how several people have had the experience of Ramana manifesting.

Kosi: David maintains that it’s mind only, but my experience was 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: Among the people I’ve interviewed who’ve had that kind of experience, such as Pamela Wilson and Nick Gancitano and a couple of others—

Kosi: 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. 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.

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 are many instances of this. What’s interesting to me about that is that 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 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 interceding 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 are 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 him when he was in his true form, which was this huge column of 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, 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. 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.

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 a really visceral experience of the mountain.

This went on for seven days. Then, on the seventh day, around dusk, 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 sitting on the bed; he was 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, 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, shock, and amazement.

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. He just showed me these rivers, and to me, in that moment, it meant a kind of surrender.

When I looked it up later, I looked up the rivers flowing into the Ganges, and the image that I saw was the Kailash River. 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.

Leaving the Birth Name at Arunachala

So the very first thing he said was, after several minutes of total silence, “This birth name of yours, leave it at the feet of Arunachala Shiva.” 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. Then he was silent for another easily 15 minutes, just staring with this palpable energy in the room. Then suddenly, the intensity of his stare increased, with a really intense energy coming from his eyes into me. He looked at me, leaned forward a little bit, and said, “Sunyata.” Then he vanished, and it was gone. It was like an audible “whoosh”—gone.

“This birth name of yours, leave it at the feet of Arunachala Shiva.”

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 look it up. What is “sunyata”? What is he saying?

“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—came out to a beautiful bed and breakfast in Kauai and said, “This name you were given in India, you’ve got to take it on.”

This is a good friend of mine; he’s known me for about 15 years. He said, “Whatever the name is, you’ve 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 said, “You go down to the beach and decide, based on your experience, what the name is.” I wrote down the words Kosi and Sunyata, and I put my hand on both. 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, what seemed right was Kosi-Sunyata. Gangaji was actually the first person I told. I wrote that in a little note to her, and she immediately accepted that name.

🧘 Names, Lineage, and Spiritual Commitment

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 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, like I said, I didn’t really want a name. I felt like it was going to be really awkward and strange: “Oh God, Jill’s having another mystical experience,” right? Because people who knew me knew I’ve had so many, right?

So I 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, that I said, “Okay, let’s surrender, because the name means surrender. Let’s let go and do it.”

In the process of actually doing it, you don’t realize how much your name is tied to your identity, to the ego, and to cultural conditioning. In my case, it was tied directly to my father, because my father wanted me to have his initials, which were JLW. My middle name wasn’t even a female name; it was Leslie. 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 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: 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 use a 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 enable you to deepen very deeply. If you don’t commit to a lineage or a teaching, you keep going from teacher to teacher, from 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, 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. 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. 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. Papaji had also said, “Call off the search.” She was the first one who said that to me.

So I really stopped, and it struck me very hard. I felt that Ramana Maharshi and his master, Arunachala Shiva, were the lineage, and I committed to that at that time. That was in July 2001, and I’ve been devoted to Ramana Maharshi 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; it was something that happened.

I really had no intention 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 thought, naively, that perhaps this saint could help clear up some of the friction between Gangaji and me. At that time, there was a lot of friction between Gangaji’s husband and me, and I was thinking maybe Amma could help clear some of that out for me. Maybe it was a vasana or some prarabdha karma, and perhaps she could clear that out.

But I didn’t know that it would actually end that relationship. It just annihilated it. I had Shaktipat from Sri Amma Karunamayi in July 2011, and it was really game over. In that moment, she became the guru, the avatar, the living guru in 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 of things to say here, perhaps. It would be one thing to just be living your life such that, “Oh, I think I’ll go see this teacher this week,” and, “Oh, now this person has come to town, I’ll go see them.” That would be a sort of 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: I think it’s really important for people to understand that, from the very beginning, before I even met Gangaji, my focus and attention were on liberation. I wanted the real deal.

So I went through 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, our experiences, and so forth. I knew there was something there.

I believed that, because the Buddha was a human being, it was possible for an ordinary person not only to awaken but to become an enlightened master. From this point of view, that means 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 I received Shaktipat in the 1997–1998 timeframe directly from Gurumayi.

The emphasis of that lineage was on the mantra and singing the mantra. There was not a lot of inquiry or discussion, and there was also Siddha Yoga, the physical postures of yoga.

At that time, I was so confused by the mystical experiences. I had profound experiences with Gurumayi, and I didn’t really have a context for any of that. It seemed like I couldn’t ask my questions. I couldn’t get close enough to Gurumayi to ask the many burning questions that I had.

One of them was the paradoxical nature of physical reality. If you have happiness, you have sadness; you have light, you have darkness. So what is the resolution of the paradox?

I had these really deep questions that I wanted answers to, but I couldn’t get to her. So I knelt down. I was with Gurumayi, and I stood up in the middle of a beautiful chant. There were probably about a thousand people singing the mantra around Gurumayi 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 as if the body itself stood up. It just stood up, and the only person in the room with her eyes open was Gurumayi. I was standing 50 feet from her, so we stared at each other for what seemed like a very long time. Then I just turned and walked out into the sunlight because I knew my questions would not be answered.

I walked and 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 didn’t want a mystical experience. I didn’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.

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 it too much. People might want to refer back to that.

Kosi: Right. So that’s how the commitment to Ramana occurred. It was through that prayer. I see the relationship with Gangaji, although the form of that relationship has changed drastically, 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 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 and stop looking outside of yourself for the answer. Stop looking for a teacher who’s going to give you the answer. Stop.

Before Gangaji even said anything, when she walked into the room, I knew she was the master I had prayed for. I just 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 nondual church: You have a body, but you’re not your body; you’re not your past; you’re not your story.

Turning Attention Inward and Ending the Search

I was very much into the path, but I was going from person to person to person. I spent a lot of time with the Dalai Lama, and so forth. Her command to stop, which is really Papaji’s teaching and also Ramana’s teaching, was to stop and turn your attention in, to stop looking on the outside.

“Call off the search.”

Rick: Yeah, so maybe that’s it in a nutshell. 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. You’re following the senses outward instead of turning within.

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, and be quiet to actually have a direct experience of that.

Ramana’s teaching is all about direct experience—not reading scripture, not discussing it, not some philosophy, and not some esoteric discussion. It’s not a discussion group. It is the point of stopping and turning within for your own direct discovery of your eternal nature. 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, “Don’t even have a fervent interest in spiritual development or anything like that. Just let happen whatever happens.”

That wouldn’t make sense to me, because there were people around Ramana who spent their whole lives around him and who were avid seekers, we could say—avidly focused on what Ramana had to offer. It’s not like they were just sort of ho-hum, whatever happens. They were in a position or situation that enabled them to discover where what they were looking for was actually located.

Kosi: Well, it’s not like your education ends. That’s why I called the book Organic Awakening. 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. This is the Turiya state of the heart. 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, reading the Vedas, reading the Upanishads, and 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. I read The Truth Is cover to cover seven times.

I really focused on this teaching, this lineage, and this point of view because each teacher and lineage has a unique perspective, a unique point of view. I took a deep dive into this lineage because the goal was always liberation. 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”—ten minutes later you may stub your toe, and you might feel, “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. Seeing the seer was a major shift in consciousness for me. I read that tiny little sentence in The Truth Is, and that stopped my mind cold. It was almost as if my mind just completely froze in that moment.

A deep examination of seeing the seer was kind of like an inversion of mind. It was as if the mind turned inside out, and I can only describe it as an experience that was not an experience.

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 Gurumayi, 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. There was this really dramatic stop and commitment to this lineage.

I committed to Gangaji as my teacher, and I committed to the entire lineage, which was the mountain, Ramana, and 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, 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. 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, “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 lineage is Shiva, is the mountain. That is the lineage.

The reason why I call this Shiva Kashyapa is that when I was with Karunamayi at her ashram in India, 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.” I added Shiva because the emphasis of the teaching is on self-inquiry.

So you can’t really leave out Shiva or Arunachala in the context of what this form is currently teaching throughout the world, right? That’s why it’s Shiva Kashyapa. It’s the divine masculine combined with the divine feminine. Kashyapa is the divine feminine, Shiva the divine masculine, and often Shiva himself is depicted 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. When I was teaching TM for many years, we did a puja to honor the teachers in the Shankaracharya lineage, the Shankaracharya tradition, going back even before Shankara. It was a 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: there is no lineage. So I’m in total alignment with David Godman on that, because Ramana said it. He was very clear. He didn’t name a person to be his successor, which is what usually happens in a lineage: somebody is anointed as the person who’s going to follow. That never happened.

The reason is simply because the mountain was the lineage, which is the formless presence of God.

Rick: Yeah. 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.”

To a certain extent, it might be semantics, and it might depend on 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: “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. Then liberation is the complete and total annihilation of the sense or feeling “I am the body,” or, as Ramana described it, “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 glimpse of the transcendent, either brief or longer, which shows you experientially that you are not the body, that you are something beyond that. Then Turiya-Tita, I believe that means “without break.”

Kosi: It means there’s no experiencer. Turiya-Tita is that 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: 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: In other words, there are not only not ultimately the dualities that we see in the relative world, but there is also not a duality between self and non-self, between pure consciousness and the relative world. 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, up until the highest level of whatever enlightenment may be.

Ramana’s Intensive Practice of Self-Inquiry

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 under 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 the egoic mind, but genetic mind addresses the genetic conditioning or the prarabdha 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 are 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, some kind of impression.

We don’t even understand very much 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 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.

Anyway, I like the fact that you place emphasis on the multifaceted nature of self-realization: that it’s not just a mental thing, it’s not a heart thing, it’s not just one thing; it’s everything. It involves every 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.

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.

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, and the ego is still very, very much there and present until you actually purify the mind through, in Ramana’s teaching, self-inquiry and the mantra. He did emphasize the use of the mantra, even though that’s not often emphasized in the West.

And silence and meditation—the purpose of those three things 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 the self.

Even after awakening, we can have a deeper realization of the self, of the eternal nature, and then walk out the door and, like you said, stub your toe or have somebody steal 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 Nisargadatta, when he was on his deathbed, 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. Actually, some traditions recognize this: there are many stages at which the experience is such that one is totally convinced that this must be it, that there couldn’t be anything more, and one can get stuck there.

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 to say, “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.

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 to say, “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.

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 hold of that and says, “Wow, I’m awake, I’m special.” So there’s an arrogance, especially in the West, which I describe as “enlightened ego.”

This is why you really want to be vigilant, right, and not allow yourself to grab hold of a realization as an 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: 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.

Spiritual Authority and the Risk of Abusive Teachers

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 know. 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. Once you identify with a human being, especially as your teacher, there’s a very sacred bond that happens, and it’s powerful. 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 who are on this path have had many, many lifetimes of incarnations. So when that spark of awakening occurs, there’s a passion for this.

That passion often gets projected onto the teacher, and, like you’re saying, we can put the teacher on a pedestal. Then, when we see that something’s really off, we’re afraid to articulate that, or even accept it, and 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, their membership on the athletic team, or whatever. A lot of that stuff is getting called out these days.

Kosi: Or your position in the inner circle.

Rick: Yeah, that too. 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, 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 hitch 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 and emotionally. You can even get hurt physically if the master is really not a true master.

What I will say in my case is that 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, 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.

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, so potent, and so omniscient that, about six months later, it was clear that the relationship with Gangaji had ended.

Amma had come in at that particular time to support an evolutionary perspective. And the change since Amma arrived—there are 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 ten 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.

At one retreat, I sat at Amma’s feet and gave her a copy of this book, Arunachala Shiva, Heart of Ramana. It was the poetry that I had written. In that book, I asked her, “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, 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. What I find interesting is the location where Ramana told Amma’s mother that.

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. 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 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, the moment she was born, her mother did a namaskar on the ground, a full namaskar to the little infant.

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. Ramana doesn’t normally prophesy something of that nature, so she was treated as a deity and an avatar from the very beginning. Of course, there were 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 of years ago about her grandmother’s burial. I can go into that if you like, but it was just—it was so out there. Her perspective is so ancient.

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 or 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 who was really into Vishnu. They had the burial on the banks of, I believe it was the Ganga. I’m pretty sure it was the Ganga. It was a traditional Vedic ceremony, but it was a Vishnu ceremony.

They had all of the accoutrements of that kind of ceremony, right? They had baked all of these special offerings for Vishnu, who is considered the supreme god, right? He was a Vishnu devotee, so he didn’t want Amma there because she was so small. She was just a child.

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.”

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. A Shiva lingam, a stone—a big Shiva lingam, about this size—was rolling across the water toward her.

She’s looking at this Shiva lingam rolling across the water, and it comes right to her. She picks it up, and the priest sees this happening and says, “That’s a Shiva lingam. Get rid of it! This is a Vishnu ceremony!”

He wasn’t impressed that this stone was rolling across the water. He immediately said to get rid of it. Amma said—you can just picture this little girl hugging the Shiva lingam—“No, this is a gift from the Ganga. I’m not going to do that.”

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 started eating these little cakes that they had made, and he was enjoying it. He was laughing, and he was with Amma, and he was radiant, right? He looked like a young man, and he was eating all this stuff.

Well, the priest seized up, and he was furious, so he ran into the tent and said, “How dare you eat the sacred food!” And suddenly Shiva just stopped and was gone. The priest fell to his knees because he suddenly realized it was Shiva, manifested in human form. And here was Amma, sitting there holding the lingam.

What’s interesting about the story is that just a few hours later, the priest 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 Shiva manifested, because of his own arrogance, he had sent him away. Can you imagine how devastating that would be for a priest?

That was just a story that she shared when she was a child, and there are 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. 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 codices that her father collected.

They have codices written on papyrus of the Vedas that are over 5,000 years old. 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.” Her father was a Vedic scholar, and he 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 mantra to a great extent, eventually stopped it, and then eventually didn’t recommend using one, even though he himself had used one for perhaps decades.

So let’s touch a little bit on what a mantra is, what its significance is, and various ways of using it and so on. It might be worth throwing in there. You mention in your book that a lot of Advaita people in the West, at least, dismiss the significance of mantra or say that 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 Ramana, when Ramana said, “See the seer”—that was really a transformative moment for Papaji when he was out playing with Krishna.

He was a Krishna devotee and sang the Krishna mantra for something like 20 years. He was very proud of the fact that Krishna would manifest and that he could actually play with him and talk to him. He was out on Arunachala, just after he met Ramana, playing with Krishna, and he went back to the satsang hall. Ramana said, “Well, where have you been?”

Papaji said, “Well, I was out playing with Krishna.”

Ramana said, “Is Krishna here now?”

Papaji said, “No, sir, he’s not.”

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.”

“Anything that comes and goes is not real. See the seer.”

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.”

Ramana’s response was, “Well, how did you get here?”

He said, “Well, on the train.”

Ramana said, “Well, how did you get to the train from the ashram?”

He said, “By a bullock cart.”

Ramana said, “Well, where’s the bullock cart now?”

He said, “Well, it’s gone.”

Ramana asked, “Where’s the train?”

“It’s gone.”

He said, “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.

How Mantra Practice Trains the Mind

My direct experience is that the mantra is really potent and powerful, and Amma’s teaching really emphasizes the use of mantra. There is a science behind it. 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.

She maintains that you cannot awaken just through understanding. The practices of mantra and silence are essential because they affect a different part of your brain. 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.

So the brain is engaged in a more holistic way, 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 such as puja, self-inquiry, or whatever the practice might be, it’s a letting go.

Sadhana, which means 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?

Anyway, there’s this whole science behind how it actually affects the whole person. It goes back to what you were saying earlier, which 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. The awakening can be instantaneous—it’s less than a fraction of a second. That can happen very quickly, but the evolution occurs over a period of time, toward the ultimate goal of liberation.

The difference is that Papaji says you are 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 in the physical nature of the body, because you and I know that 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 be back in old patterns of suffering, back into identification with the physical because of the feeling nature of the body—the sensations.

Rick: Yeah. I sometimes use the metaphor of somebody who has won the lottery but doesn’t know it, and is begging on the street. 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 go through a process of finding the lottery ticket in some sock drawer or something like that, getting an attorney and an accountant, cashing it in, and all that. There are 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.

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.

What you were saying a few minutes ago about all the different aspects of the brain that might be affected by different practices and things—it’s like there’s a whole, huge variety of different spiritual practices, techniques, teachers, and teachings. Obviously, you can’t do them all, and you shouldn’t do them all. You wouldn’t want to do them all, and you 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. 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. Ultimately, it 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 it.

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 or 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. It was lifetimes in the making. 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 had been a recording of it, because she went through how many incarnations he endured to realize the Self to the degree that he did in this life.

✨ Integrating Awakening with Daily 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 nonphysical 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. That’s 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. Once that happens, at a certain point it literally pulls you into itself.

So Ramana Maharshi, when he awoke at 16, 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 who is a Satguru.

Often I hear it 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, beyond the fourth. That is the Satguru.

So you surrender to the Satguru, and that generates the fire that burns through the egoic identification. This desire to do, this friction or 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’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. There can be a lot of housecleaning and a lot of stuff happening. You might sleep a lot, you might not sleep so well, and 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 the 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 and their biochemistry in the brain are; 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 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 this whole purification fasting routine for a whole summer. I was doing all these extreme diets and fasting, and I got to a point where I could hardly eat any normal foods without having some kind of weird reaction, because my body had lost its familiarity with those things.

So, you can acclimate yourself to anything. Perhaps the antidote to not wanting to do anything and just wanting to sleep all the time is to make yourself do something, get involved in activity, and see what happens.

Kosi: And the other thing I would say—I would ask him—is, what does he really want? What does he want? What was the catalyst for the awakening?

Rick: Yeah.

Kosi: And that’s a deep question that we don’t often sit with: What do you really want?

📚 Ramana’s Practical Teaching

Rick: Good question. Now, one thing I want to get into with you in our remaining time is that 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, that people can buy or download from your website, or what is it?

Kosi: Basically, this is part of a course that I put together. It’s a workshop, but the reason for the workshop is that 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.

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 children, his anger would return, his frustration would return, his boredom would return, and his tendency to want to stay in bed would return. He was like, “What’s going on? Why is this happening?”

Now, he was very sophisticated in his questions because he was asking about yoga and the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita in particular, and certain Vedas and how they emphasize different yogic practices. Basically, what he was trying to figure out was: How do you burn through the vasanas so that you don’t forget the Self after a profound realization or a profound samadhi experience? How do you maintain the realization? That was his question. And why do these patterns of suffering return?

So, this presentation came out of the realization that many of the students I’ve worked with now for the past four years are very, very serious students of Ramana Maharshi and self-inquiry. I noticed that there was a group of people who were progressing at an alarming rate of speed, so much so that they had physically changed. They didn’t even look like the same people I met four years ago. They were radiant, omniscient presences of the Self, and you could physically see it in their faces shining through.

The other group had made no progress, and they were just stuck. 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 who 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 asking, “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, meditating, and 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 about what it was that acted as a catalyst for what I would describe as a radical return to Ramana’s teaching. I stumbled upon this very short little book. It’s called Self-Inquiry. When I first met Gangaji, I found this book, and there’s a drawing in the book. I want to hold this up. This is Ramana’s response 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 front of the camera so you all can see. This is the drawing Ramana created. When I saw this drawing, my mind froze on it.

Now, this was with Gangaji, and I didn’t really understand states of consciousness. I knew the Self was in the heart, so when I saw this drawing, even though it’s two-dimensional, I immediately knew—because this little flame, see the flame up here at the top, is the Self, a representation of the Self—I immediately knew it was three-dimensional.

So, I told this group about the drawing. I said, “This drawing is showing that regardless of the state of consciousness”—you have three primary states: the waking state, the dream state, and the deep sleep state, and then you have the Turiya 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—the five senses. So I saw that, and I just didn’t really understand what it meant. I knew that the Self was always there. I had the direct experience of seeing the seer, seeing the witness, that kind of thing, but I didn’t know anything at that time about the Turiya state or Tathagata or any of that stuff. I was just curious about this.

I was also very curious about the mantra, because I had come to Gangaji from Gurumayi, and the emphasis was on the mantra. Gangaji pretty much had rejected the mantra and didn’t use it. There was music in satsang; Kirtana would sing in satsang, and people would spontaneously sing in satsang, but there was no emphasis on the mantra as a teaching.

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 for deepening. Then Amma kind of confirmed that, because it’s a kind of science as well.

Then I told this group of people that it was three-dimensional, 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, but it was really not right; it was not accurate. So I drew it in three dimensions.

This is what it looks like in three dimensions, and hopefully everyone can see it up there. What’s interesting is that when you look at it in three dimensions, it changes. It’s just so profound in three dimensions, because basically he’s showing the Self in the lower chamber, and the number five in there is the ego.

He was describing the ego in this document as reflective consciousness, and it’s so important to recognize what he’s talking about. The two chambers—it looks like, and I want to put this up again, it looks like a castle. See that?

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 senses of sight, 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 that 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 and teaching. He breaks it down, and it’s really amazing. He emphasizes the Gayatri Mantra as part of a pranayama practice, which is a breath practice. He said, basically, that to control the mind—to learn to control the mind—you must use pranayama.

It wasn’t as if you could use it, or maybe it would be nice. It was as if pranayama was essential to train the mind to stay in the Source as a form of inquiry. Everything that Ramana was focused on was a form of inquiry.

Rick: And again, I want to emphasize that you’re saying 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’ve got to put it in context of this guy, who was a very serious student and a Vedic scholar who had studied yoga and practiced physical yoga. He was kind of asking 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?”

We don’t often think of Ramana using the mantra. Each state of consciousness—this drawing is showing states of consciousness. What I’m showing here is that drawing again, but the sound OM, which is the sound of the Turiya state in the heart. The Turiya state in the heart is the constant, the one constant. The sound of it is OM, but the seed letters of OM are A-U-M.

What Ramana does in this document, which most people, I think, have totally overlooked, is that he says 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. 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.

I went through this whole presentation—I was giving this presentation in Switzerland—and I drew it in 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 Turiya state, that’s the fourth state—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 that the whole mantra is this sound aligning with the Self. It trains the mind beyond the heart chakra, toward the Turiya state. So it’s really, really potent.

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. It’s 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. What Ramana is saying is that the ego, or the sense of “me,” is reflecting the light of consciousness, which is the Self, which is the Turiya state in the heart.

But because of the level of ignorance—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 the true deep-sleep state.

Understanding the ego as reflective consciousness—as reflecting on one side, so it’s a double-sided mirror—he draws it as a double-sided mirror. It’s reflecting your senses, and it’s reflecting the Self, the light of the Self. 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.

What came from that was what I would describe as a tantric text, because I recognized that in order to put into practice what Ramana is talking about—this 3D drawing and the states of consciousness tied to the mantra—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 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.

That’s this little book.

Rick: Yeah, exactly. You’ve got a copy of it.

Kosi: So this book basically guides you into using Ramana’s teaching for 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 were really very few thought processes involved. It’s very simple. 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, and Ramana’s saying there’s this intense effort required. This is why I call it a radical return to what Ramana himself said, and I put it in this little book.

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 that 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 that 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, and do it.

I made it in a little book form so that you could put it in your pocket, in your backpack, or in your purse and have it with you. Whenever you thought about it, you could whip out your Pocket Practice and do it. You can do it in ten 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.

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’ve got it.” So I didn’t really want that to happen. For new people, they don’t have enough understanding.

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. This is specifically what Ramana was talking about: what we perceive to be reality is, in fact, an illusion. It’s maya.

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 the ego into the Self.

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.

Without that context, you don’t necessarily appreciate or understand, number one, how sacred this book is. This is like the heart of Ramana manifesting in physical form, saying, “Okay, if you’re serious, if you want to make progress, this is what you’ve got to do.”

It’s simple. It’s not very many pages, but the more you do it, the better you feel and 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. The people who 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 ten-year program. Did you actually start that? 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 do they have to wait?

Kosi: You can start that; it’s on the website. Also, there is tuition for that, but I’ve always told people, if you really feel called to come and 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 are two retreats annually. Right now, they’re both happening in Switzerland, but there’s also this group that I was just 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 called the Yoga of Freedom, where I did the whole presentation and the initiation into the practice. 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?”

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, that 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 guides you page by page, it’s astonishing how simple it is and how potent it is.

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 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. 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’d probably have a lot of takers out there.

Kosi: Well, and maybe do something online so that people don’t have to travel. Right now, as you know, my mother is transitioning, and so I’m here in Virginia. Unexpectedly, it’s kind of a medical emergency.

So I’m going to have a base here in Virginia, and I also 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: It can be a weekend retreat; it doesn’t have to be a seven-day retreat. The Clear Way is for people who are really, 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, 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 both said that, 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 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 who 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 say that after awakening, you should wait 10 years before teaching, and things like that. But there’s definitely that kind of—it’s a long game.

I also wanted to comment quickly on your comment about Ramana emphasizing effort and Papaji not emphasizing effort. I think there can be a reconciliation of those two. There’s a Vedic verse that says, “Be easy to us with gentle effort.” Let’s say that becoming like Serena Williams or somebody like that, and excelling 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. 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. You can have a profound realization, walk out the door, and forget it. So it’s learning to train and focus your attention and purify 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 the 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 karate. If you go to karate, you’re not given the black belt on 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.” When I met Gangaji, that resolve was already there. 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 the core teaching is and how you can 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? I listened a lot, especially in the early stages, to Robert Adams, and he emphasized the I Am practice, which is so on the inhalation and hum on the exhalation, to align with the Self every day, wherever you were. 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 meditation anniversary, 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 that after 50 years I should have gotten it by now. But it’s the thing of consistency and just sticking to whatever you’re doing.

It might be that you stick to a teacher or a practice, as you did, for a number of years, and then you switch to another one, but you still continue. 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. 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.”

Same metaphor. 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—the food of the grace of Ramana Maharshi, applying it.

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—that 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. The same can be found in the spiritual realm, where there are 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. 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 of 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 mention 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.