Louis Brawley Interview

Summary

• Background: Louis Brawley is an artist and writer who spent five years traveling with UG Krishnamurti, a controversial spiritual figure known for rejecting traditional spiritual teachings.
• Meeting UG Krishnamurti: Brawley met UG in 2002 and became closely involved in his life, acting as a caregiver and companion during UG’s final years.
• UG’s Philosophy:
  • UG rejected the concept of enlightenment and spiritual authority.
  • He emphasized the natural state and the illusory nature of self-improvement.
  • UG’s teachings were often paradoxical, challenging conventional spiritual narratives.
• Personal Transformation:
  • Brawley describes his time with UG as deeply transformative but also disorienting.
  • He shares candid reflections on his own emotional struggles and the dismantling of his beliefs.
• UG’s Influence:
  • UG had a profound impact on those around him, often through intense and confrontational interactions.
  • Brawley portrays UG as both deeply kind and brutally honest.
• Critique of Spirituality:
  • The conversation critiques the commercialization and romanticism of spirituality.

Full Interview, Edited for Readability

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week is Louis Brawley. Welcome Louis.

Louis: Hi Rick.

Rick: Louis has written a book called Goner, which is about his experience with UG Krishnamurti. Let me just read a little bio he’s got on the back of it. Louis was born in Ohio and worked in New York where he met UG Krishnamurti in 2002. Louis traveled in the USA, India, and Europe with UG for the following five years, acting as an informal caregiver as UG’s health deteriorated. Louis works as an artist, photographer, and freelance art handler worldwide, occupations which fund his travels around the world, writing and recording accounts and impressions from friends of the “raging sage.” Here’s a little bit about UG “Goner will teach you the meaning of the phrase ‘paradoxical truth.’ UG Krishnamurti gave up everything for truth, but delighted in ridiculous fabrications. He was a teacher who refused to teach, a man who mocked do-gooders but was deeply kind. He was chaste but foul-mouthed. He was a man who decried the supernatural, yet there were strange coincidences around him.” I’ll just keep reading this, this is good, and then we’ll get into our conversation. “The way he lived, his living quarters, and his mode of expression were one continuous movement, a three-dimensional living book of teaching. If you were observant, you could learn from him on contact with no need for explanation.” Okay, I’ll keep reading. One more paragraph. “Louis Brawley doesn’t use honeyed platitudes to tell the story of a sage and his devoted follower. Instead he tells an often unflattering story of his own struggles and shortcomings, and the dynamic uncertainties of life with a man who ‘tore apart everything human beings have built up inside and out for centuries.'” I must say, Louis, in addition to being an artist, you’re a very good writer. I think this book is very nicely written.

Louis: Thank you.

Rick: I’ll tell you what, in this interview, I often try to leave my opinions out of interviews, but in my opinion, UG was a very opinionated man, and very assertive, and spoke authoritatively in his opinions. So I’ll be opinionated in conducting this interview, and I’m sure you can handle it. My opinions won’t be all black and white either, because I feel that … well, we’ll get into it. You’ll see what I mean. My impression of the guy as I read the book and listened to quite a few hours of his recordings was that, on the one hand, I disagreed with pretty much everything he said. But on the other hand, even a broken clock tells the correct time twice a day. But he wasn’t broken. I found myself seeing, in just about everything he said, I would find myself saying, “Okay, well, I can see how that’s true from a particular perspective. It’s not necessarily a universal, absolute truth, but yeah, fine.” But I also got the impression that he probably disagreed with most everything he said as well, and to a great extent he was being a shock jock of spirituality, a Don Rickles or a Howard Stern, just kind of messing with people’s heads and trying to be outrageous, and being, really, to some extent, an entertainer. So anyway, those were my impressions. Another thing I really appreciated as I read the book was your obvious love of the man, and sincerity, and dedication, and stick-to-itiveness, hanging in there through thick and thin. I honor anyone who comes from the heart like that and really puts his life on the line in service of something that is meaningful to him and inspires him. So kudos on that.

Louis: Thanks. That’s funny. [Laughs]

Rick: So, what do you think, based on that little strange introduction? What would be your…

Louis: I think it’s perfect. It’s perfect. When I first saw UG’s pictures on a website – I think I described it in the book – my reaction was, “Who is this narcissistic person who feels the need to put their quotes and photos on a website and post it on the internet as if, as if, as if?” Because I was, at that point, still kind of under the influence – not kind of, deeply under the influence – of J. Krishnamurti, who I’m sure anybody who’s checking this out has at least heard of. So my initial response to UG was a little note to the website, having not read anything, saying, “Can I get a poster or a T-shirt?” But then when I started to read what he had to say, something very peculiar happened and it was very simple and very ordinary and almost invisible. And that was that my obsession – and I have a tendency to lock onto this subject matter for whatever reason – my obsession with Jiddu Krishnamurti was evaporated. And that was something that came out of, that started with the exposure to him. I went to see him a couple of times in California and I really was deeply affected by his message and it changed the course of my life for a long time. So here’s this guy with the same last name, which immediately made me suspicious. “Oh, he’s just riding on the coattails or something.”

Rick: But it’s a common last name in India.

Louis: It’s like Smith over there. So I was just really taken aback by the effect of UG’s initial words, and that was just from reading the book. And it was confusing because he was saying, “There’s nothing you can do.” He says a lot of things that I found unnerving and at the same time a peculiar relief. But what it set up for me was the immediate urge, overwhelming urge, to find this guy. So for me, when he said later on, “Attraction is the action,” that rings true now as much as ever. I feel like I was kind of monogamous in my life with these Krishnamurtis somehow. It’s about the only thing I’ve been able to maintain monogamy with, because the rest of my life is a kind of shiftless mess. And it wasn’t by will or any good grace of mine that I stuck it out with these people. I think it’s an overwhelming attraction that you just get hit with.

Rick: Yeah. And we all have our paths and we all have our attractions. With somebody else it could be this teacher or that teacher, or gambling or whatever. People get addicted to all kinds of things. Spirituality in general tends to be a rather wholesome one, but not always.

Louis: Not always, I would say. For sure.

Rick: It can be abused like anything else.

Louis: Sure.

Rick: So let’s get a little bit more acquainted with UG. I understand that he himself was a student of J. Krishnamurti from a young age, or at least in that circle. His family were devotees or students of him or something like that. You can explain it better.

Louis: Yeah, it’s an interesting story because Jiddu Krishnamurti was the world teacher and he was being set up by the Theosophical Society as that vehicle for the society. When UG was a boy his grandfather was raising him, his grandfather and grandmother. His mother died when he was an infant, so his grandparents raised him, which is common there. So his grandfather was a kind of traditional Hindu who had an interest in Theosophical ideas as well – the Theosophical Society, which at that time was one of the earliest combinations of East and West thinking, spiritual thinking. So UG grew up in an environment surrounded by Hinduism, traditional Hinduism, and this kind of earliest form of New Age spirituality probably, or one of the earliest for sure. Jiddu Krishnamurti was a pretty glamorous character. He had movie star good looks, and a pretty charismatic personality, and he was really set up as quite the leader. And so UG as a boy was surrounded by images and the impression of this individual. Jiddu Krishnamurti also represents an interesting bridge from India to the West. My initial attraction to him was the lack of spiritual lingo in Jiddu Krishnamurti. I think that for me it was a good set up for meeting UG, of course, to be exposed to that initially, because UG really… there’s a point where he said, “I inherited three things from my grandfather: lots of money, the Theosophical Society, and Jiddu Krishnamurti.” And I think Jiddu Krishnamurti was the last one for him to get off his back.

Rick: My teacher, who was my teacher for a long time, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, made an interesting comment about Jiddu Krishnamurti. He said, “Sometimes people are born at a very high level of consciousness and they just fall into awakening quite spontaneously. And such people don’t make good teachers because they haven’t gone through the steps that it might take to attain that realization for the ordinary person. And so they speak from their level of consciousness and people listen from their level of consciousness and a connection is never properly made. So very few people get awakened as a result of association with such a person.”

Louis: It’s a tough one. I think a lot of people have these experiences when they meet a teacher because you’re accessing a part of your experience that hasn’t been encouraged or nurtured by society as it’s developed. So when you get interested in spirituality, there’s a whole area of experience which can be really shocking and deeply affects people. And I think that a lot of these people… There are so many teachers who have the capacity to incite that in a listener. And there’s also that innate quality in each individual. I think we’re all basically programmed the same way. The case couldn’t be any different than that. But it’s such an overwhelming experience to have a kind of a flash of insight or a worldly enlightened experience of silence or something, a pause in thinking… I don’t know what these things really are. But in my case, I had that kind of experience when I was exposed to JK. Then, for years, I think, inevitably, because this is how we’re hardwired, I was trying to reach it or go beyond it or capture what he was talking about or something. Which sets up a kind of funny dynamic inside, because you put this person who says there’s no guru, no teacher, you should live in a thoughtless state, you should practice choiceless awareness. That’s all well and good, but you’ve already put him in the position of guru because you feel that he’s given you an experience. You attribute it to that person. Then you struggle to attain a goal which is just some abstraction that you piece together from your past memory and whatever you may know about the subject at hand.

Rick: Yeah. That’s an example of him describing his experience. You should live in a thoughtless state. That’s like having some Olympian champion say, “You should be able to do backflips on a balance beam.” But it doesn’t just come naturally for the average person. So a description – even if the gymnast explains how she does the backflip on a balance beam – that doesn’t actually enable you to have that same experience. Very often that gulf remains there for followers of teachers for decades on end and they just sit there listening to these beautiful descriptions but not bridging the gulf.

Louis: I think, though, that there is something to that dynamic. I used to dismiss it. When I met UG I was so overwhelmed by the quality of him – that he was actually in his actions, he was what all these other people were describing, but what he was saying was confounding. When I met him he wasn’t using… I’ve since then listened to hours and hours of tape of him talking from shortly after this calamity in 1607 [meaning/ timeframe unclear] right up until the present, and his means of communicating changed over the years. When I met him he was talking what seemed like gibberish initially. It really felt ridiculous, but to look at the man and how he moved and the way I felt when I was around him and the response to the situation, it seems very natural and normal and actually quite ordinary. But at the same time it was confounding.

Rick: There’s a saying in India, “Babbling Saints.”

Louis: Yeah, it’s like a babbling brook.

Rick: Yeah, what’s meant by that is that they have the experience but they haven’t learned to articulate it and so their speech is more or less gibberish, as you say. And perhaps in UG’s case, through talking constantly for years on end, he began to articulate more clearly.

Louis: I think that what happened with UG – and this is my experience – is that since he’s gone – he died in 2007 – in the years since he’s gone, all that gibberish that seemed like just an ongoing joke, with very ordinary language, which he repeated ad nauseum, he was actually making points all the time. It just seemed at the time like, “Well, I’m interested in a much bigger, more intricate answer to my question.” And he was undermining the mechanism in me, which is basically a torture machine, of this desire to understand and articulate what cannot be articulated, which is life itself. You can’t do that. And one of the things that I think is so remarkable about UG, and at the same time makes him nearly invisible to a larger audience, is that he would never compromise the ordinariness of himself as he felt it. You know, “I am not different from you people. I can’t tell you how to do something when I don’t know how this happened to me.” At the same time, he was always talking about it, how he functioned, how we function, as far as he saw that, and trying to make a connection with people that they could understand, using really ordinary language. As time goes on, he uses more and more and more prosaic language to talk. So in a funny way, it’s like it becomes invisible, because he’s not reaching for big, lengthy explanations. In fact, he would chop them at the knees, any intellectual explanation of anything that a child couldn’t pick up.

Rick: It’s true. As I listened to him, I felt like I couldn’t have had a conversation with this guy, because as soon as I started to ask a question, he’d cut me off after three or four words, and then he’d just carry on, and within a minute or two he’d be off on some tangent completely unrelated to what my question was attempting to be, and he’d just carry on and carry on and carry on, until somebody else tried to ask something, and then the same thing would happen. So it definitely wasn’t an intellectual inquiry in a traditional sense.

Louis: What’s really peculiar about that dynamic, Rick, which I saw happen over and over again, was any kind of pre-calculated question that I had would be chopped at the knees, as you described. On the other hand, if someone was sitting and genuinely started wondering something, and then just popped out of their mouth a question… he could be screaming at a person on the other side of the room, and he would stop and quietly, in the same tone of voice, answer that person’s question in the most direct, simple way imaginable.

Rick: Interesting. So he responded to deeply spontaneous and genuine queries.

Louis: Absolutely.

Rick: Or some complex, in-the-head kind of thing he wouldn’t, right?

Louis: He would never give space to predisposed inclinations. If something popped out, he would immediately address it. But if you sat calculating, it was over.

Rick: So in a way he was acknowledging and almost reinforcing spontaneity and naturalness.

Louis: Yes. Whatever was genuinely of that person, in that moment, was addressed. Something that was coming from the past would be shot down immediately.

Rick: You referred to what happened to him, and it’s referred to as catastrophe and so on.

Louis: Calamity.

Rick: And as I understand it, it was some sort of spiritual awakening or shift that took place after years of asking every spiritual teacher he could find what enlightenment was and how to reach it. Tell us about that a little bit.

Louis: Well, UG did spend his entire life seeking, despite his later claims. From the age of 14 until the age of 21 he had a very traditional practice of yoga. He had a guru, Sivananda, in the Himalayas. He ruined his college career by taking off every couple of months to go meditate for three months at a stretch and bribing the university officials to fill in his attendance records. He dropped that at the age of 21, when he caught Sivananda eating pickles when he was claiming to fast. So he was a guy who followed the rules like a boy scout, but if he saw someone that he looked up to not living up to what they were saying, he dropped it like a hot potato. It was over for him. So he did his homework in that area at a very young age. Then he went at the age of 21 to see Ramana Maharshi, who most people have heard of, who are interested in these things. He was there for one day, very reluctantly, because I think at that point, as a young man, he was extremely frustrated. I’m guessing – this is me projecting a little bit – but he had done seven years of sadhana and felt, for instance, his sex drive was completely out of control, and he was fed up with the traditional answers. From what I know of UG over the years, he really knew these sutras and the systems pretty well, as a Hindu does, especially someone serious. So he goes to see Ramana Maharshi, who has the kind of classic Indian guru set up, which was easier later for UG to bash. You have to keep in mind, here’s a guy who still has the exposure to the theosophical ideas and Jiddu Krishnamurti in his brain housing unit, as a deep influence.

Rick: And Jiddu hadn’t quite lived up to his image either, as I understand.

Louis: No, but UG wasn’t disillusioned with him yet. Not quite broken.

Rick: Despite the sexual affair that he had had.

Louis: Nobody knew about that until JK was dead. JK kept it clean under the carpet until he was long gone. It was quite an achievement, as UG later credited him. [Laughter] So he goes to Ramana Maharshi and he asks him flat out, “Look, what you have, can you give it to me?” First, I think one of the questions – there were three questions, but the essence was: if a person is there, can they go back and forth? Do you go into the state and out of it?

Rick: Can you lose it and regain it?

Louis: Maharshi said, “No. You’re done, you’re done.” And then, of course, UG being impatient, as I can completely identify with, “Can you give it to me? What you have, can you give it to me?” And the answer he would always relay to us – who knows what happened on that fateful day – but for whatever reason, UG says that Ramana said, “I can give it. Can you take it?” And for whatever reason, he finished his lunch with the comic book-reading guru and never went back. He did later acknowledge that that experience, that encounter, helped him to form his central question, which was, “What is the state that those people are in?” Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, whatever spiritual person, “What is that state, and can you give it to me?” And my understanding is that from that point forward until this calamity, his focus was on Jiddu Krishnamurti for whatever reason, probably having to do with his upbringing and his circumstances. He was an educated young man with money, so at the age of 21 he could go get a passport and fly to London, for instance. He wanted to get into Cambridge or Oxford and, like JK, he flunked out of both. They both said, “Forget about it. You’re a horrible student.” So he became a speaker for the Theosophical Society. I can’t be exact here, but it’s right around the time that JK dumped the TS [Theosophical Society]. He saw all the corruption in that organization, and he said, “This is not the way.” And then he said, “Truth is a pathless land,” and went on his own as a speaker. And UG continued, clearly, to follow his movements. So now UG’s a speaker for the Theosophical Society as a young man. He has been unable to resolve his sex drive, so he decides that he’ll deal with this the way it’s prescribed to deal with it. Like with sadhana, you do yoga and meditation and all these things. If you want to have sex in this society, you get married and you have sex. So he got married at the age of 24. So now he has a family, and he has money, and he’s a speaker for the Theosophical Society. He’s obviously educated, exposed to Western ideas of psychology and philosophy, as well as the Hindu background. And he is familiar with JK, and he somehow gets into his company in Madras, because that’s where UG lived. And the TS had their headquarters, and Jiddu would give his lectures there after leaving the TS. So in Madras, UG at some point – now he’s got two kids, and a third one on the way, or three kids – he meets Jiddu finally for the first time. And there must have been something in that dynamic, because Jiddu became friends with the family. The daughters – UG’s daughter has told me about hanging out with J.K. at a concert, and UG and JK went for long walks, and this went on. And the two of them really went at it. I think they had long discussions, and UG was very attached to the guy, clearly, and deeply devoted. There was a point in an early discussion that shocked me when I heard it, on an earlier tape from 1970 or something, of UG describing that he wrote, actually, a commentary of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, based on the teaching of J. Krishnamurti. It’s a long lost, but it shows you the degree to which he was focused on that one person, yet still bringing this whole Hindu background with him. So you have this young guy, and he’s obsessed with JK, and I’m sure he was convinced that he was enlightened, or whatever you want to call it, and his child had polio, so he moved to the US at one point to get the boy treated. He left his two daughters behind. He had his son and his wife in Chicago for five years. During that time, he left the Theosophical Society. He left his wife after a one-night stand.

Rick: Who had the one-night stand?

Louis: UG had a one-night stand with some rich Texan woman. While he was doing his lecture tour, I guess the lady invited him to stay at her house one night. And he said, “Well…” [Laughs]. It was funny. One morning I was sitting with him, and he said, “It was a very interesting weekend. We didn’t sleep much. We were staying in separate bedrooms, and then she said, ‘Well, you don’t have to stay alone.’ She’s a very interesting woman.” And then he went on to describe how even to that point, a woman’s breasts will attract the attention of the eye because of the movement. It was kind of a hilarious little aside there. My sense is UG was already telling his wife, “Look, this is not long for the world. This relationship, this marriage thing, this family thing.” And then he has this one-night stand. UG, if anything, was brutally honest with everyone in his life. I mean, brutally. I’m not using the word lightly. He was not an easy person, I think. As a young man, the description of his life, family life with his daughter – he admitted to it – if his wife went out and bought fancy furniture, he came home, he saw what she had done, he built a bonfire in the front yard and threw all the furniture and the colorful saris into the bonfire.

Rick: Wow. So he wasn’t an easy guy to be married to.

Louis: No, sir. He had married the wealthy daughter, the baby of the family, of a family of like 12 kids or something, and she was hoping for a house full of children and servants. And UG basically had the temperament of an ascetic. So aside from bringing her up to the bedroom to have sex, any other indulgence of the senses was completely banished from the house, like these colorful saris. In fact, he made his wife wear white, which in India is the color of a widow.

Rick: Right. Or a brahmacharini, one or the other.

Louis: So his wife… nobody around him had an easy time with it. But the point is that it indicates a person who is really dead set on one thing. And in Chicago he wrote to an uncle once, in a letter he said, “You would be surprised, but I can assure you that it’s possible to live in such a place and still pursue Brahman [or Brahma, Brahman I guess], which is what I intend to do until the day I die.” And shortly after that he comes home and tells his wife, “Look, I had a one-night stand. This is finished. The only way to have sex with someone is to use them.” And I guess that became apparent to him more obviously when he had that one-night stand. And he leaves. The wife is fed up now. She is sick of U.S. She hated Chicago. It’s not the best place for an Indian woman who has grown up in South India to hang out. So she moves back to India with the kids and UG stays on in the U.S. The marriage comes to an end. He goes through the rest of his money. So now he goes back to India. He tells his wife it’s over. He gets on a tour with some other prominent Indian businessmen to the Eastern Bloc countries. He goes to Russia, where he finds that communism – and this is around 1950, 1960. So I guess Nehru is in power now, or Nasser, which one?

Rick: Nasser was Egypt.

Louis: Nasser was Egypt. So Nehru is in power, but the Indian sympathies politically are with the communists because that’s their kind of backing. So UG goes to communist Russia and says later, “Your Karl Marx is basically Jesus Christ. Das Kapital is now the Bible. There’s no difference between this and religion. Communism is basically a restructuring, restructured religion, that’s all.”

Rick: Was he being complimentary or critical in that?

Louis: It’s funny because UG would say things that were just kind of plain spoken, like here’s the situation as I see it. And he wouldn’t participate in something if he felt that it wasn’t what it was speaking to. Like if it’s claiming to be some new thing, fine, but if you tell me it’s going to be a new thing and it’s just the same old thing in new clothes, then I don’t want any part of it. So when he was offered positions in government or in business where he could see a contradiction, he would refuse. For instance, after this happened, he made his way through Eastern Bloc countries back to London, at which point he’s kind of broke. He meets Bertrand Russell, who’s involved with the peace movement, and Bertrand Russell says to him, “Would you like to join? I can find a position for you.” And he says, “Well, are you ready to do away with the policeman? Because a policeman is an extension of the H-bomb, and that’s what your battle is against, right?” And Russell says, “Well, you have to draw the line somewhere.” And so any request [Laughs] to moderate his search or his standard was immediately rejected.

Rick: At this point, I would interject just to say that he had his way and he was entitled to it, but the pursuit of Brahman or enlightenment or whatever doesn’t have to be so iconoclastic. You can have nice furniture and wear saris and yet be a sincere and genuine spiritual aspirant. Society does need to have a few policemen around – obviously, anything can be overdone – to prevent anarchy. That doesn’t really pertain to the spiritual quest. You can be in the world and not of it. You can render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. But anyway, that’s the way UG operated. He was just a sort of a radical guy.

Louis: I think that’s why there’s not a big audience, Rick.

Rick: Yeah. [Laughter] I wouldn’t recommend anyone taking him as a role model or feeling like this is the perspective you have to have if you really want to get serious about spirituality.

Louis: He would have been the first one to say, “If you try to do what I’ve done, you’ll only be miserable.”

Rick: Yeah, you’d be mimicking a rather extreme way of behavior which may or may not have anything to do with spirituality. It could very well just be a personality among many personalities.

Louis: Yeah, the danger of my situation is that I’m so fascinated with the individual. I find that as I research him and think about writing a biography, for instance, and examine all the details of his life, the inevitable question comes up, “Why are you doing this?” Is it that by repeating or learning all this information about him, you expect that what happened to him will happen to you? What he was saying repeatedly was, “This is your trap.”

Rick: Right.

Louis: I think the basis of his expression was to undermine that imitation.

Rick: We still haven’t gotten to what happened to him. You’ve been talking about his travels and his marital travails and his attitude toward Karl Marx and so on, but we haven’t quite gotten to the catastrophe or the calamity.

Louis: The calamity! Calamity Jane.

Rick:  Calamity Jane, yeah.

Louis: Well, it’s difficult for me to separate it out, Rick, so forgive my long-winded answer.

Rick: No problem. Keep going.

Louis: Basically what I’m trying to convey, the picture that I paint of him, is a man who is pursuing with everything at his means, and as he goes along, he’s losing things.

Rick: He’s an iconoclast, and he just keeps smashing icons, and he’s ruthless. He doesn’t hesitate to burn bridges if he feels like the bridges are not worth crossing again.

Louis: Exactly. So here he is. He’s basically run the thread out. He’s still going to see Jiddu Krishnamurti. He has now begun to avoid Krishnamurti because his situation is dire. Krishnamurti knows that his wife has since died now. UG was in London when he got the news that his wife died. His kids are scattered to the winds, and young family, too. So now he’s in London, and he’s really down and out. He meets Jiddu for the last time. He says to him, “Why have I wasted all these years? If there’s nothing you can teach me to get me to that place, then I’ve wasted my time.” So he doesn’t see him again in person, but he continues. He meets at some point when he gets really down and out. He’s in Geneva looking for a bank account where he thought he had some money. Now he’s got nothing. He’s got a hotel bill that’s unpaid. He goes to the Indian consulate. He meets a woman who offers to give him shelter, basically. This is Valentine, an older Swiss woman who he spent the next 14 years traveling with, maybe longer, ’61 to ’96 or something, somewhere around those dates, whatever. So this lady is taking care of him, and now–

Rick: That’s 35 years, ’61 to ’96.

Louis: I got my numbers wrong. Left brain, right brain, whatever that is. Anyway, he meets this lady. She says, “I’ll take care of you. Don’t worry about it.” He doesn’t go back to India. Instead, every summer he goes and listens to Jiddu Krishnamurti again.

Rick: In Switzerland.

Louis: In Switzerland. Meanwhile, things are beginning to happen to him physically. He’s having experiences like a Kundalini experience where the energy is coming up through the spine. There’s all these descriptions of it, whatever. Finally, in 1967, he’s sitting in the tent listening to Jiddu in Saanen, Switzerland, and Jiddu is talking about the comparative mind. He’s talking about “There’s a silence. If you’ve been following what I’m saying, you’ll find that there’s a silence. In that silence, there’s an energy. In that energy, there’s an action. That action, you cannot know.” So, UG listening to this after all these years, all this loss, and he’s sitting there.

Rick: That’s very profound, actually. Maybe it’s a tangent, but action within silence is a very interesting thing to talk about. Continue on, though. I don’t want to interrupt your story.

Louis: It is key, Rick, because if there’s an action… And when I read that, when I listened to him describe this, I thought, “This is why, no matter how you speak of it, what you say about it, any description of the spiritual state, whatever it may be, is always secondary.” We all know that. Fine. So, he’s sitting there listening, and he’s struck by the fact that he’s been fooling himself, calling what he’s experiencing a silent mind, because the only way to describe a silent mind is by using a mind that’s not silent at all. It’s saying silence. So, there’s a word. So, there’s a noise. So, there’s silence. So, this kind of gets him to this corner that he can’t get out of. He walks out of the tent. I guess it was the last talk of the season. He goes back, and he’s sitting there on a bench, and he said, he suddenly feels all these funny feelings. Like, is this the state that they’ve all been describing? This is what Jesus was in, or Buddha was in? But if it is, how would I know? How would I know? And at that point, he says, or said, the question just stopped. It wasn’t resolved. It wasn’t answered. Who knows why? The question just stopped pestering him, I guess. And at that point, he went home, laid down, and some kind of physical death process happened, where he was fighting to keep his consciousness awake, and it closed like a black aperture. This is when his friend came over – the woman, Valentine, who knew nothing about all this Indian stuff, and was not a spiritual person, in the sense that she wasn’t a seeker, but she was a radical. She had been involved with the Paris art scene and all the rest. So they were living in the same building, and she sees him on the couch, looking really wacko. What is he doing over there? So she calls this young friend of theirs, Douglas, and he comes over, and UG is lying on the couch in the bow posture, completely out of it. And he says, “UG, what’s going on?” He somehow brought him back, and apparently what happened to him, as he described it, is that when the thought stopped, when the questioning stopped, there was a kind of – this is my word – but there was like a rebooting of the physical system. The chakras that are described represent glands, we all know that by now, and these things kind of got recharged. And why that question did it to him, and why that day in the tent did it to him, and how exactly that happened – all the stuff that he had done, the meditation, the yoga, leaving this, that getting taken away, this getting taken away, all that happened – but at one point, how do you figure out exactly what made that event? So after that event, the physical changes started in his body, and that’s a lot of what the first book that he allowed published about him describes, this unblinking thing, a death process, the ionization of thought. He describes all these things in a very scientific way, in a sense. It’s the body. It’s something that happens in the body when thought, which is this kind of servant which has taken over the house, is naturally put back into its place, where it’s fine, it functions, it works, you know what you’re doing, you know where you are, you can speak and operate in the world, but it’s not constantly pestering you with, “That’s a red chair, that’s Rick Archer, this is Louis Brawley, I’m sitting in the living room, what’s going to happen tomorrow? Am I getting what I need? Am I getting what I need?” All this worrying stuff is suddenly gone. And he used to say, “If that stops, then the body will restructure, and you’ll live a natural existence.” I don’t know if that answers the question well.

Rick: No, that’s good. Let’s talk about it some more. First of all, it’s hard to say which is the cart and which is the horse, which I think you were implying. Let’s play with a few possibilities. Did the physiology undergo this transformation because of some change in his mind? Did his mind change because of some change in the physiology?

Louis: But we know that there’s no distinction between those, right?

Rick: Yeah, you could say there is in a sense, but they’re tightly correlated. I’m just saying that mental activity is not physical in the sense that bones and blood are physical, but they’re tightly correlated.

Louis: I think it’s subtle, but if you look at the Yoga Sutras, I think those guys are amazing because they have been able to trace that it has its own kind of physicality.

Rick: Yeah, I would agree with that. Because it is a relative thing, therefore a manifest thing, therefore there’s some physicality to it. But it is subtle. And we could even borrow from physics to say that at a certain level this book is not physical, it’s just probabilities and so on in a field.

Louis: It’s easy to abstract all these things.

Rick: Yeah, but on a perceptual level it appears to be physical. So like that we have access to subtle realms of experience as a human being which are not so tangible as rocks and trees.

Louis: Right.

Rick: But anyway, what I’m getting at is – and let me just interject something. I said I was going to be opinionated, let me throw in some opinions here.

Louis: Please [Laughs], it makes life more interesting.

Rick: Again, it’s hard to pin down which is cause and which is an effect, but there does seem to be a correlation between people who are striving and seeking and practicing and what not, and realizations. Now maybe they’re doing all that striving and seeking because they’re destined for a realization and that destiny motivates them to do this stuff, or maybe the realization happens because they have done that stuff. I don’t know. Maybe both are true. But certain people just seem to be wired that way and it’s almost involuntary that they have to have this seeking tendency like you yourself.

Louis: Yeah. The one thing I would say just on that note is that the trick here and the tragedy is that there are no guarantees. I feel like that’s in a way a dirty secret that’s not talked about enough, is that there’s absolutely no guarantee of liberation by any technique.

Rick: I don’t know if anybody’s offering a guarantee. If they are, then I would not trust them, because there’s no proof of the pudding.

Louis: Exactly.

Rick: There does seem to be a higher probability in terms of what we observe of people awakening who have engaged in spiritual practices, but there’s no guarantee.

Louis: I suppose I bring it up because one of the things early on that really impressed me was a book by a guy, you probably know the book, it’s Varieties of Religious Experience by William James. He describes spontaneous spiritual awakenings. In a way I feel like what you’re saying is – the reason I thought of that – is that I think unless you’re really looking and preparing or doing something in that area, something can happen. I think the body is trying all the time to get us, whatever this thinking thing is, in tune with itself so that it’s not so stressed. Sometimes I think this kind of thing happens to people, but they don’t know what it is and then they attribute it to Jesus or Buddha or something and they go off on a tangent with it.

Rick: Yeah. I just interviewed a guy a couple of weeks ago who wrote a book called Am I Getting Enlightened or Losing My Mind? He’s a psychiatrist and he has years and years of experience in dealing with people who had spontaneous kundalini awakenings and thought they were going crazy and went to a doctor and got institutionalized or medicated or whatever. So this kind of stuff is relatively common. I think you make a good point, which is that the body does want to be in a natural state. It’s a natural tendency the body has, but to one extent or another we’re all out of tune with that natural state. We can talk more about that. That’s interesting. Another thing I think to throw in is, in my opinion, there is a very broad spectrum in terms of the possible range of both biological and spiritual evolution, and human beings occupy just a small segment of it, just as visible light is only a small segment of the electromagnetic field. I don’t care how enlightened somebody is, they don’t necessarily have the complete package, if there even is such a thing. There’s always room for refinement, purification, greater clarity of cognition and so on.

Louis: Hmmm… I don’t agree with that.

Rick: Okay, good. Tell me how not.

Louis: What you just said there is a lot. That’s a lot, actually. I guess I would stop where you were saying, if there is an enlightenment, because I was always suspicious of the term.

Rick: It’s a loaded term, like God. You use it and who knows what people are hearing when you say it.

Louis: Exactly. It’s a wide blanket. There’s something in that… I don’t want to sound as if I’m making a claim for UG. That’s what I don’t want to do. I suspect that what you were saying came out of, or maybe was responding to that, and I just want to nip that in the bud, that I don’t want to make any claim to understand what his state was, or to speak to whether that’s better than somebody else’s or any of that.

Rick: No, no. I don’t think I was implying that. You would know whatever state he was in better than I would.

Louis: Exactly. I was going to say, I don’t know about that.

Rick: But you hung around the guy for five years, and I would, having never met him and having only read a little bit about him and heard a few things, I would say, “Yeah, definitely.” Everybody’s on a spiritual path, all seven billion of us, and many people, millions perhaps, have spiritual awakenings to some degree or another. I think very rarely, if ever, are these awakenings final because there’s always another horizon, another frontier, another breakthrough. But one can have a profound shift and yet spend the rest of their life on a plateau. And yet you yourself said that UG seemed to refine, at least in his verbal expression, he seemed to evolve over time.

Louis: I can tell you that my attraction to him was that – I sensed this at a gut level, Rick, and I could have been totally wrong about this (I like to keep open the possibility for being wrong and wait to be proven either way) – but what I felt around him, and no matter what has come along or whatever interaction I had with him from the time I met him until this moment, I haven’t found any evidence yet to contradict that this was a person who was completely finished with the dynamic that I am engaged with as a socialized human being. That is to say that that servant-master relationship, the master being the body and the servant being thinking or the parallel movement of thought in all its forms – ideation, mentation is the way he used to describe it – but I would just say any thought-driven motivations were absent from that individual. And, again, that’s not something I can prove. The reason I wrote this book was to try and describe what I saw, because I found it so remarkably clear and clean and unmistakable, and at the same time discuss myself so that people would know, “Well, maybe this guy is just full of shit. Maybe he’s projecting all this.” But I wanted to present the case that there is no need for all these things.

Rick: What kind of things?

Louis: As I saw it in him, that he had no need of anything but food, clothing and shelter. There was no more striving left. There were no levels or anything, I think. And it was just one thing that was happening there.

Rick: Yeah. Now what I would suggest, my opinion, is that – and there’s that common saying in spiritual circles these days, “Give up the search” – a person may reach a stage at which the search has been given up quite spontaneously, there’s no striving left, and anything else you want to say about it: natural state, automatic, spontaneous functioning, so on and so forth. But, like the infomercial says, “But wait, there’s more.” That doesn’t mean that there is no possibility of further unfoldment. It just means that that person is functioning in a radically different way than people commonly do.

Louis: What do you mean by further unfoldment? I guess that’s where my question is. What is the further unfoldment?

Rick: Well, let’s explore this. And who knows, maybe I’ll completely change my opinion in the course of talking to you. But if we think about what enlightenment really means, and let’s try to define it.

Louis: Yeah, how would you define it? That’s the thing, I guess.

Rick: My understanding is that, obviously, if we speak of non-duality, if we speak of God, if we speak of the absolute reality of things, it’s one holistic, unified, omnipresent wholeness. You can use a bunch of adjectives there, keep on using them. It’s like this one unbounded ocean. We spoke recently, a little earlier, of activity within silence. So the reality is a totality, it’s a wholeness, and within that, it’s like currents within the ocean. Consciousness in motion within itself. And somehow it appears to take aggregated forms, through which it can experience itself as a living reality. We have bodies, we move around, but we are nothing but that. But that somehow having taken a form which can know itself as that, and which can speak and act and breathe and live, and yet it is only that. So it’s a fascinating, mysterious, marvelous thing. When that realization has reached a sufficient degree of clarity, one realizes, “Oh, I’m not just this little meat puppet, I am that.” I am this carbon unit, to quote Star Trek, I am that reality, primarily. Secondarily, in a relative illusory sort of sense, I am this breathing, living organism, which is somehow anchored in – and nothing but – that ocean, but able to function in this apparent world. So a perspective like that – experiential, not just intellectual the way I’m describing it, but totally experiential – is my concept of what enlightenment is. As an instrument of that, as a sense organ of the infinite, there is no end to the refinement, to the subtlety, to the comprehensiveness of perception, the depth of clarity, with which that instrument can detect things. You can get a $10 microscope at Walmart, or you can get a $100,000 electron microscope, and they’re both microscopes, but the $100,000 one can see the fine details, which the $10 one can’t see. So you can have people who have shifted to a natural state, if we want to call it that, to an enlightened way of functioning, where they feel like they’re no longer calling the shots, they’re just an instrument of the divine, or just expressing living naturally, spontaneously. But there can be vast differences between such people in terms of the clarity with which they experience and understand. There can be vast differences in terms of their emotional development, in terms of their perceptual refinement. There’s no end to unfoldment. Even some very advanced teachers, whom I respect a lot, refer to themselves as beginners, like Adyashanti, and he says, “With me, I’m always just beginning.” Or St. Teresa of Avila said, “It appears that God himself is still on the journey.” So that’s my perspective, and again, it’s just based on my opinion and my experience so far, subject to revision. But I would take someone like UG or like anybody else, like Ramana Maharshi, and say, “They’ve still got exploration yet to do.” Then we have to get into, well, what happens when the body dies, and is there anything more to life? Is UG still kicking around on some level? That’s all very speculative, and who knows?

Louis: It doesn’t get us anywhere.

Rick: No, it doesn’t, and we can only conjecture. As long as this life continues, I’d say that there’s always going to be the possibility of something more, even though it’s maybe more of the same, essentially, because once you realize the essential nature of everything, it’s all the same stuff. But somehow, as an instrument of the divine, as a sense organ of the infinite, there’s always more possibility of greater refinement, and perhaps even greater influence of that person or that entity. Anyway, I’ve talked enough. You kick in.

Louis: I think I get where you’re coming from, Rick. I think basically we would disagree on this point in the sense that I think that it is possible, and I feel that I’ve witnessed the situation where a person’s capacity for operating from the thought, the parallel thought mechanism, is blown out. That’s finished. And I think once that occurs, then the body is in charge, and it’s physical. I have to use the words he used, but I do that because it best describes what I saw, what I witnessed, which is a physical phenomenon. And in the company of that phenomenon, for myself, all these ideas of levels and achievement and refinement are completely obliterated. And that’s why I was so fascinated and continue to be so fascinated by that phenomenon. And when I go back to India, for instance… Before I met UG, I didn’t know who Ramana Maharshi, Anandamayi Ma, Nisargadatta… Because of my JK background, and because I’m such a fanatic maybe, any guru, anyone who appeared, even gave the faintest whiff of being a guru, I completely dismissed. Since meeting UG, I’ve been exposed to these classic Hindu scriptures and studied these people, read about Ramana Maharshi and Anandamayi, and people that seem to have been blown out, or whatever I’m describing here. And it does look to me, the evidence seems to point in the direction, to me, that if the mind is severed by whatever means, however – by accident or by happenstance or practice or whatever – if this thought-driven parallel universe, which enables you and I to have this conversation, is no longer in charge, then that is a final situation. And thereafter, then the person is just functioning like a machine. I mean, it sounds belittling, but I don’t think…

Rick: I totally understand and I agree with you, and just to be UG-esque in my response, I would say that that’s when it actually gets started, when the mind is blown out. In a way, you can see that as a starting point.

Louis: I think the evidence that I see is a lot of people saying that the mind is blown out.

Rick: Well, whatever you… wasn’t that the terminology you just used?

Louis: Yeah, but I’ve heard this terminology… this is the difficulty of this whole subject. It’s so rife with a few different things, and one is the… There’s no way to prove anything, there’s no way to… Yeah, I don’t know where I’m going with that.

Rick: Okay, let me put it this way. Most people feel like they are in charge, right? And my mind is in charge, and I’m making my decisions, and I’m the master of my destiny, although they might feel that they’re getting kicked around a lot, but they’re doing their best.

Louis: In the process of ruling the universe, I’m really being screwed.

Rick: Now, eventually, one undergoes a shift, and we’ve been alluding to this, in which you realize, “Oh, this individuality which I thought I was, is not what I am. I am that totality, and that’s in charge.”

Louis: I think that’s a kind of awakening, for sure.

Rick: Yeah, for sure. And this individual body – you said the body runs the show, or something – after that stage I would say it’s not the body that runs the show, it’s the intelligence which governs the universe, which runs the show, and which animates the body, and always has, but at least we’ve gotten out of the way, and we’re allowing it to do its thing unimpeded. So we become an expression of nature’s intelligence through this body, and that’s what UG was, to use terminology you may or may not be comfortable with. But nature’s intelligence is not necessarily through with this body. It’s got a tool that it can use without as much interference as it gets from all the other expressions.

Louis: Wait, Rick, how can you use the expression “that nature would use”? What is it using the body for, I guess?

Rick: What is it making the universe for? Why is there one?

Louis: Yeah, I guess it sounds… yeah, okay, anyway. No, it’s just that word made me kind of think, that’s all.

Rick: Well, yeah, and words are crude and limited, and you know…

Louis: But they’re giving us the opportunity to have this chat, so we can thank them for something.

Rick: So we’re just kind of blind men feeling the elephant here, but like it or not, we’ve got a universe. And maybe human logic can’t fully comprehend why it exists or how it came to exist or anything else, but it appears to exist. And there appears to be an evolutionary momentum governing it. I mean, we start out with basically hydrogen, and somehow stars are formed, and then the stars explode, and we get heavier elements, and then bodies are formed – and I’m cutting a long story short – and those bodies can have conversations and can…

Louis: I got you.

Rick: They can start thinking about why there’s a universe…

Louis: And then the trouble begins.

Rick: And so where I’m going with this is that there seems to be an evolutionary force driving this whole show for the past 4.7 billion years, and it’s in us as much as it’s in everything else in the universe, and when this so-called shift takes place to an awakened state, that force doesn’t take a vacation, it’s still driving, still running the show, but it has an instrument through which it can express itself with less impediment, with less obstruction than is… I can refute what I’m saying right now in the next breath, but in other words, one becomes a sort of a… I used the phrase “meat puppet” earlier – one really does become a meat puppet in the sense that we’re meat, but now we’re really a puppet. We’re kind of just the spokesperson for the infinite, and without so much individual agenda as we once might have had, you see? Hey, “You see?” Boy, I listen to a lot of UG. Oh! now I’m saying “you see?”

Louis: He picked that up from JK too.

Rick: Oh, did he? He said that…

Louis: ”You understand what I’m saying? You see, sir? You see?” He said that all the time.

Rick: So anyway, swing back. I just hit the ball on your court. Go ahead and play it.

Louis: I’m not sure where it went. I think I got… I missed that point totally. [Laughter]

Rick: Well, we’re talking about… x

Louis: I’m confused with you, Rick, because I’m lost now.

Rick: We’re talking about refinement. We’re talking about there being further progress, if we want to use that word, even after awakening takes place. And what I’m saying is the intelligence which is running the universe continues to work on us, to work on its expression. And the net result of that is, in the experience of that expression, in the living experience of the person who has undergone this shift, is continued refinement of perception, emotions, understanding. And those things are not a given. I mean, it could be that even then one can sort of plateau and not progress at any tremendous pace. One can stay stuck in a realized state for the rest of one’s life without exploring the further possibilities that that realization potentially offers. But those possibilities are nonetheless there.

Louis: See, I feel like this is all speculation, Rick.

Rick: I’m basing it on not necessarily my own experience, because I never make any claims…

Louis: Ah, that is speculation.

Rick: But it is my own experience in that I have interacted with so many people now who have undergone such a shift and described their experience to me, and there is a kind of a similarity amongst the accounts. It’s like if you meet a hundred people who have all driven from New York to Montana, maybe they have taken slightly different routes, but if you talk to enough of them, similarities arise in their descriptions of the trip. “Well, first this happened, and then I saw that, and I stopped at Devil’s Tower,” and things like that. Since enlightenment or awakening has been such a rarity in our world up till now, it’s not something that’s popularly agreed upon in terms of what the details of it might be, or the possibilities, or the stages, if there are any, and all this and that. But I think we’re entering into a time when it’s becoming more and more commonplace, and a couple hundred years from now it might be that the difference between our current understanding and then will be like the difference between the maps when Lewis and Clark first went west and the maps we have now of the topography of our country.

Louis: Well, I guess the feeling, the reason that I felt the need to write this book is that my – and I don’t know how this will sound – but what I saw was that here’s a person who’s actually living in a way that seems to express what all those things that I read in those scriptures are talking about, while in a way he is saying… It’s like there’s a continuous movement between what was being expressed and what was being lived. Whereas in my experience that has not been the case with many of the other examples that are given of this. And that’s why I suppose I was so curious about whether he was… For instance my interest in Jiddu Krishnamurti… I had a very powerful experience, it changed the course of my life, I had great respect, I built an image, I had the whole thing. And then I find out after he’s dead that he was having an affair with his manager’s wife, which I have no problem with on moral grounds, if there is such a thing, but if a person says “the thought of sex never enters my head” and probably means it, that’s fine. But when I find out that they are having sex, then whatever they say has been tainted and beyond that there is the issue of saying “no teacher, no teaching, no taught” and then opening schools and giving talks and charging money for people to attend these talks. So there’s money and there’s sex, and those are big acid tests. If someone is using this alleged experience as a means of income, then in my… because I’m perhaps opinionated, but it seems that there’s a contradiction there. For me that implies that they’re not actually a living expression of what they claim.

Rick: Well I agree with you, but I would use that as an example of the point I’ve been trying to make in the last few minutes, which is that it’s not a black-and-white world. And because he did those hypocritical things doesn’t mean that he was zero on the scale of zero to one.

Louis: No, no, no, no, I’m not saying that.

Rick: He could have been a very realized man to a profound degree, but obviously with more growth yet to undergo to become really consistent, to become a more perfect expression of that. To be rid of… well, go ahead, I can carry on here, but I’m talking too much.

Louis: I just find that my judgments of JK, for instance, after I met UG, my thoughts for a while were, “How could I be so hoodwinked? How could I fool myself so completely? How could I be such a sucker?” So I started looking at UG with that kind of scrutiny. Like, “Is this guy pulling something on me? Is there maybe something I’m not catching here?” And in the process what I realized was, Here’s someone who has no motivation for… maybe the only motivation for his existence is to help other people to free themselves of that burden. But he was saying all the time, “I can’t do it.” So it was a real interesting thing. And then I was able to look back and see, “Okay, if it weren’t for JK, I never would have met this person.” So it’s all, as you were saying before, it’s not a black-and-white thing. It’s not even gray. I don’t know what the hell color it is. It’s just like I can’t figure out the relationship between these two guys, UG and JK. Like, here’s a guy, JK, who comes from abject poverty. He’s kind of handed the kingdom. Is that the dog?

Rick: Yeah, I’m letting the dog in.

Louis: What’s his name?

Rick: That one’s Shanti.

Louis: Shanti, nice.

Rick: We have another one named Nikos who’s in the other room.

Louis: Got it. Anyway…

Rick: Yeah, you’re talking about JK coming from abject poverty.

Louis: He’s the person who gets everything handed to them. And then you have a guy like UG who’s given everything, he’s born with a silver spoon and he loses everything. So, looking from one example to another example, and then I go back to India and I see, here’s an Anandamayi Ma, this remarkable manifestation of all these things, this cornucopia of amazing spiritual whatnot. I mean, what a story.

Rick: Yeah.

Louis: And in my mind, because I’m a human being, I’m comparing, well, how come she was encouraging Westerners to follow Hindu traditions and do this, that and the other, and UG was doing the complete opposite. He was saying, “Don’t do this, don’t do that, don’t listen to me, do whatever you want.” Where’s the contradiction here? Where’s the common ground here? And Ramana Maharshi is telling people, “Just chew, sit there and listen,” and blah, blah, blah. So, in each individual, I still have the same feeling of, they’re saying the same basic thing. How can it be more than one thing? It’s just what I find so fascinating for me with UG is that he was so, kind of, he made himself invisible by being so obscure and bizarre, really, and yet his expressions were so filled with implications that went in all these directions. So, I’m fascinated, in a way – because I’m an artist, maybe – with the aesthetics of the situation. Like, here’s a guy who is disappearing himself, and as that happens, as my fascination grows, his capacity for expressing ideas that he denied is so incredible and perfect in its own way that it’s a mystery to me, and I can’t get my mind around it. So, I’m caught up in my own little obsession, Rick.

Rick: Well, as an artist, imagine yourself going to the Amazonian rainforest and looking at all the varieties of birds there, and they’re so incredible, and there’s so much creativity and variety and diversity and so on, all being expressions of that same ecosystem. So, all these different teachers, most of them are like tropical birds in that they’re such colorful characters. No Casper Milktoast among them.

Louis: It takes some charisma to get on that.

Rick: Yeah, these remarkable, charismatic personalities, some of them hard to live with, some of them easy to live with, but definitely all challenging in their own ways. And, to quote the Incredible String Band, “Light that is one, though the lamps be many.” They might have been quoting somebody else. And to quote the Band, “You take what you need and you leave the rest.” So, there’s just this great variety of teachers in this whole garden of God, and we gravitate toward the person that we’re karmically or personality-wise attracted to, and we benefit from that person to the extent that we do. The people who were around UG, maybe it must have been his function and destiny to have had a small audience, but the people who were in that audience probably benefited from it. Some teachers have these world followings and so on, and Anandamayi Ma functioned in one way, and Neem Karoli-Baba in another way. It’s like comparing apples and oranges. Each has its own nutritional value, and you kind of go with where your tastes lead you.

Louis: Yeah, and I think it’s inevitable that you do that comparing, but in the end, as I said earlier, I’m quoting him, who’s quoting whatever, “Attraction is the action itself.” If you’re attracted to it, that will do its work.

Rick: Yeah, and I think one thing we haven’t really addressed, which you’ve alluded to, is there’s something going on under the surface. It’s not just like one shouldn’t take a book of the teachings of UG Krishnamurti and study all his little aphorisms and…

Louis: And you end up in the loony bin.

Rick: Yeah, but there was some kind of dynamic going on in his presence, which was really sub-rational or irrational or something. It didn’t have a heck of a lot to do with the words that were being spoken, but that nonetheless had a transformative effect on the people who subjected themselves to it.

Louis: Yeah, I would agree.

Rick: And, boy, he didn’t pull punches. I came across this thing…

Louis: Well, he did, Rick.

Rick: Really? He could have punched harder?

Louis: He punched me. Oh, pull punches.

Rick: That’s a saying in boxing where you don’t punch as hard as you might.

Louis: No, no, no, you’re right. You’re absolutely right. Never did that. Never.

Rick: Somebody sent me an account of Byron Katie’s encounter with UG in the late ’90s. She was very impressed and went to visit him in Palm Springs. In those days she was quoting him all the time. I’m reading now. So much so that it began to irritate people. She was always defending UG. She told me that he was the only person she ever met who was in her state, whatever that means. So they set up an interview between the two of them. She was very excited about that possibility. Then during the course of the interview, which apparently is on YouTube, UG goes on to say how the work of Byron Katie can never work and tells her she’s only interested in money. Towards the end he brings up copyright issues and says you can never claim anything as your own. Afterwards Katie and those in her inner circle brush UG aside as a rambling old man. She herself never mentioned him again.

Louis: It’s funny how that happened there. Yeah, yeah, that’s a brilliant interview. At one point he compares himself with a common sewer rat. It’s genius, I tell you.

Rick: Did he say something at some point about this natural state he had achieved, or, excuse me, the terminology, but this natural state he had somehow fallen into as being unprecedented and unique and unlike anything? Somehow I heard that.

Louis: It’s very tricky because he would say that every single – and he repeated this, I can say literally until his dying day (I think people either hear one version or the other according to what they want ) – but he said every single living organism on the planet is completely unique, and what I’m expressing here is no more important than a common garden slug, and he really meant that. What you will express when this happens to you will be extraordinary and will make what I’m saying completely obsolete. So he never made the claim that he was the ultimate anything. He only said that at some point he threw out everything that man had thought and felt before him, and that enabled him to experience life at a point which had never been experienced before because memory was no longer in operation there. So every moment was so fascinating with him, for me, because it was like watching fire. It moves in all these directions. He used words like a computer in terms of repetition of the sequence of a sentence. It was bizarre, Rick, I tell you. He could repeat things over and over and over, and each time the effect would be slightly different. So I think what he was saying is, “Look, once you sever that tie with the past, you’re finished. All this, ‘I want this, I want that, I enjoy this, I despise that, I like this’ – that’s all gone. And the only thing that’s left is life, and however that expresses itself, you won’t know. You won’t be able to direct it, you won’t be able to capture it. There will be some remnant of that which will affect everything around it” – just as this conversation is affecting us – but he never made any claim that he was superior.

Rick: He did have very strong opinions.

Louis: Sure, he does.

Rick: Well, apparently. It’s not like everything is perfect just as it is, and there’s no qualitative differences. He was saying pretty outrageous things, “Mothers are bitches,” or whatever that phrase is.

Louis: The funny thing about those Ten Commandments, for instance, is that they actually describe how people behave.

Rick: I see.

Louis: And the same thing with these money maxims that he wrote toward the end. I was so baffled by that whole thing. And it occurred to me that he was simply describing consciousness as humans experience and are tortured by it. That every single person I know wakes up thinking about money, and it drives us crazy. And so in a funny way, he was really addressing core issues of how we function without realizing it. I think that he was just using whatever means he could find to upend this whole ideational fascism of achieving a higher goal or becoming a superior being. He was really trying to strip people and push them into a corner where they would be forced to be themselves. And that’s not an easy job for anyone to do. But I think that he was right when he said that any real teacher, any real guru, will do that to you, and it will not be a pleasant experience.

Rick: So he just had his own way of going about it.

Louis: Yeah, I mean, like everybody else, he was a unique individual, and he did it his way, like Frank.

Rick: Like Frank, yeah, I was just going to say.

Louis: And Sid later.

Rick: Who was Sid, Vicious or something?

Louis: Yeah, that was his final swan song, I believe. “I Did It My Way,” and he sure did.

Rick: Or as Jimi Hendrix put it, “I’m the one who’s got to die when it’s time for me to die, so let me live my life the way I want to.”

Louis: Yeah. It’s funny, UG… we were watching… He was so great at pulling stuff out of common pop culture and using it, and it was wonderful. I mean, there was Bill Maher. Bill Maher was quoting that Janis Joplin song, “The Only Thing…” Oh, Jesus, it’s such a simple line.

Rick: Oh, I think I know what you mean.

Louis: ”Nothing Left to Lose”?

Rick: Yeah.

Louis: ”Freedom means nothing left to lose.”

Rick: Right, right.

Louis: Something to that effect. And UG just mumbled, “That’s it.” I think unless you lose everything, including your ideas – and I speak to myself on this – your ideas, your ambitions, your hopes, unless all that goes, you’re stuck in the kind of merry-go-round, you know? And this is what I saw in him, was someone who got thrown off of that, to use his expression. That’s why I respond to – when you say levels and all these other things, because I just feel like I know, I understand what you’re saying, and I’m not dismissing that that’s irrelevant – but I saw someone who seemed to have been thrown off of that, and it really fascinated me.

Rick: Well, you know, I think what I’m referring to when I speak of levels is kind of the idea of integration, in a way. I mean, I haven’t really brought that up. I interviewed a guy last week, and at one point in the interview I said, “You’re Israeli, right?” And he said, “No, I’m not Israeli.” And I think what he was saying was, “Pure consciousness is not Israeli.” And I should have said, “Well, what’s on your passport?”

Louis: That’s pretty pretentious. That’s the kind of stuff that I find really offensive. I get really annoyed with these people that pretend like they’re not what they are.

Rick: Well, I think, you know, the guy has had a genuine level of experience, but if you ask somebody their nationality, obviously you’re not referring to pure consciousness. You’re asking, “What’s your nationality, dude?”

Louis: You’re not on a plane as a pure consciousness, you know? You end up…

Rick: So, what I’m getting at here is that on the one hand we can be stripped clean of all our assumptions and biases and this and that, but also if you’re going to live life in the world, you have to kind of put on those suits. You don’t necessarily have to abandon your family and be penniless, and you can play that game and yet not be duped by the maya.

Louis: I do think, though – and this is probably where we would part opinions – is that if and when, when and if, if at all this thing would happen to an individual, those things become no longer possible. No, no, they’re no longer possible.

Rick: Why? In what sense? So, you mean you couldn’t hold down a job or raise your kids or anything?

Louis: I don’t know about that, but all I…

Rick: What did you mean by “no longer possible”?

Louis: That that vocabulary would no longer have an effect on your actions.

Rick: Maybe not.

Louis: I don’t know, but I suspect strongly, and I would put my eggs in that basket, that that vocabulary would no longer have an effect on your action at all.

Rick: I’m not entirely sure what you mean by that, but let me just posit this: I have a friend who lives here in my town who had his calamity when he was a young man. Now he’s in his 60s. He’s been living in what we might call an enlightened state, for lack of a better word, for decades now. He’s raised a family, married, has two kids. He’s an artist, like yourself, but he works in a company, produces beautiful pieces of art, owns a car, has investments. He’s living, by all appearances, a totally normal life. If you talk to him about his actual inner experience of life, what’s going on as he walks down a trail with you on a walk or something like that, he’s in another world, completely different than the average person experiences. But he’s so well integrated that there’s no possibility… The people who are just listening to this in audio can’t see you scrunching your face up there.

Louis: Yeah, I cringe.

Rick: Yeah, why are you cringing with that? Why can’t there be that kind of integration?

Louis: All of this and heaven too.

Rick: Yeah, exactly. 200% of life.

Louis: I know nothing about your friend. I can’t speak to his situation at all. I would absolutely have no idea. But I cannot imagine that one could be stripped of the burden of this parallel thinking and carry on without somehow… I feel that it just wouldn’t look like that. How the hell would I know, man? I can only say this. I would only say this. I don’t know your friend’s situation, and I can’t speak to anybody else.

Rick: He’s just one example. I could cite others.

Louis: I feel like there’s a lot of people who are having amazing experiences, and there may be various levels of consciousness that can be experienced. There are. It’s just a fact that there are. But I suppose I would have to then say that… Yeah, I don’t know. I just…

Rick: You’re skeptical that that’s possible.

Louis: I’m skeptical of the claims.

Rick: He’s not making claims. In fact, he refuses to be interviewed because he doesn’t want to go public. He’s very private. So he’s not out to prove anything. But I’m just holding that up as an example of the degree of integration that’s possible. It’s not necessarily… It’s not necessary to come across as a crazy man to be enlightened. It’s not that enlightened people – I’m using that word just because it’s a convenient word – are going to necessarily stand out in a crowd or act inappropriately in social situations. They can be, for all intents and purposes, completely integrated with their families, their societies and everything else, and yet be living an inner experience, living in an inner world, so to speak, that is quite out of the ordinary.

Louis: See, I just… There’s a line that was… It’s a really beautiful line that I’ve heard several times. But he said, “I’m not in conflict with the society exactly the way it is.” There’s no conflict with that. I never saw him behave in a way that would get him arrested. He never said anything inappropriate to a person that wasn’t capable of taking it. He was only outrageous with his friends. I never saw him deliberately go out and hurt someone’s feelings. But I did see there was a complete disengagement from the life that I know and experience as a personality. And I think for me those key things again were money and sex. And I can’t make an argument for these things, Rick, and I’m not trying to sound like a prude, but I feel like this burnt seed phenomena that is described so well in the terminology of Hinduism, which I’m not subscribing to, I’m just saying that I did see these examples after he was gone, these descriptions, and they somehow ring true. That’s just my little opinion. And obviously, as you’re pointing out here, I’ve been deeply influenced by this man. But the inability to function sexually seems to be a part of it. And I think that has to do with something which is curiously human in this… maybe when a human being is completely… I don’t know what you would call that. I don’t actually know because I’m… This is where I’m now in the realm of speculation.

Rick: Yeah, it’s tempting to drift into speculation. Well, as I say, my friend has two kids and those were post-awakening pregnancies. What I would suggest here is that UG is not the only template of what it is like.

Louis: No, absolutely not.

Rick: And the variety, the diversity of awakened people is perhaps almost as diverse as the diversity of humanity itself. It can show up in so many different forms, householder, recluse, crazy man, sane man, business person, bum. There can just be so many different channels, so many different instruments through which that is realized, and the external appearances are just not going to fall into a neat cubbyhole.

Louis: And there’s no way to prove anything either.

Rick: No, of course not. You’re the only one that’s there at your graduation, so to speak, so nobody can…

Louis: After that it’s… [shrugs]

Rick: No one can give you the stamp of approval that others can agree upon. So we all have to reach our own conclusions.

Louis: Yeah, it’s a funny business.

Rick: Yeah, very funny business.

Louis: Yeah, it’s very, very strange.

Rick: In a way it’s the most intangible thing that we can possibly talk about or experience, and yet there’s this huge historical fascination with it.

Louis: Yeah, I think that’s… As a young person I totally rejected religion, because I thought, “This is such a perfect tool for manipulating people. What better way to make money off of people than to claim that some guy told you, like some guy in the main office said, ‘You owe me 50 bucks or you’re going to go to hell.'” What a great setup. And it continues to be, I think, because people are so disconnected from their own natural state.

Rick: Right. And I think that cynicism is totally justified. I mean, I look at all the fuss they make over the Pope, and I think, “So what? Who cares what this guy said?”

Louis: Look at that life. I went to the Vatican, and I just remember walking in thinking, “This is obscene.”

Rick: Right. The amount of money here, and this is supposed to be all about service? What is it? Service and selflessness?

Rick: Yeah.

Louis: Good God. That goddamn column over there could feed an African country.

Rick: Yeah. And that column over there could feed a U.S. country now. I mean, several states in the United States.

Rick: Yeah.

Louis: It’s obscene. I feel like it’s also one reason that I’m very touchy about these people that make claims and then go out and make a lot of money off of this stuff, because it sticks in my craw that it’s such an easy ploy to prey on the gullibility of these poor people that feel like, “Oh, that guy knows, and he’s saying this.” That’s why I get worked up about it.

Rick: Yeah.

Louis: I think that’s why I was so impressed with UG. I really saw, “This guy lives what he speaks.” He had all the people giving him money, and he gave it away.

Rick: Right.

Louis: I saw that happen, so I was impressed by that. And then the fact that… I remember sitting in his apartment after he–he kicked us all out at the end there. I was helping him when he was sick, and then he was like, “All right, you people go back where you came. Whatever. Get out of here.” So we left, and I went back to his apartment, and, Rick, there was nothing in there to distinguish that any particular person lived there. So here’s a guy who lived what I thought I was interested in, and I found it very unnerving. Like, wow, this is really… he had nothing. That was a little spooky. I have to say, when you’re faced with that sort of thing, it can be unnerving.

Rick: So when he died, was there a big hole in your life? Did it take you–are you still kind of–are you still grieving, in a sense?

Louis: [Laughs] I was so relieved, man, I can’t tell you.

Rick: Because it had been so intense?

Louis: It was so goddamn intense, and I’m glad for every second of it. It was a fucking nightm…excuse me, sorry, are we on the air? It was a nightmare at times, but I knew the whole time that there was good reason for me to stick it out. That this was the most unique and interesting thing that could ever have happened to me. And once he was gone, the interesting thing about the experience with him, for me, is that it just kind of makes its way into the world in my life in ways that I cannot explain or justify to anyone. It’s just there, and all the things that he was talking about, I see around me all the time. All those funny phrases that sounded so ridiculous and absurd, like the money maxims. I have a friend that made a beautiful recording of them, this Indian woman with a voice like an angel. “Money is the only thing worth living for!” You know, there’s 108 of them. It’s this 10-minute passage, and I sometimes listen to it when I’m going to work. And I look around, and I work in the art world, where somebody takes a shit in a corner and gets $200,000 for it. And if you think I’m exaggerating, I can give you concrete examples of this. And I realize, wow, money is it, man. Money is the baseline of our consciousness. Until and unless something like that snaps you out, you’re in there. So all those things that drove me crazy, and for some reason my relationship with him was so peculiar and perfect. I was a smart ass, and he out smart-assed me. He out smart-assed me every time. So it was at times like having an annoying little brother, and at other times like this angelic presence. At other times it was like Satan incarnate up my ass. I mean, it was intense in every possible way. So when he was gone, I felt like I had my life back in one way. And I had it back like, “Nobody can ever take this from me again.” And after that encounter, I felt like nothing was wasted there. I did not make one wrong move to hang out with the guy. It was for sure a good investment in that sense.

Rick: There’s a line in the Gita where Krishna says, “As men approach me, so do I favor them.” Did you find that you were the smart ass, and so there was a tit-for-tat kind of relationship, but then someone else with a completely different personality, he would morph into a completely different response?

Louis: It was bizarre to see it, Rick. There were very quiet people who I have since talked to. There was a woman in India, a young woman. She was 13 when she met him. Her parents were both really intensely seeking. She was this kid kind of lost in this world of the adults screaming at each other because the meditation was being interrupted, and getting involved with swamis and pundits. And here was this kid, like… She meets UG, and he just very sweetly engages with her in a couple of very simple ways that she, 10 years later says, “That changed my whole life.” She was at one point upstairs in the house where we would meet in India. She’d kind of get sick of the whole scene and go upstairs and watch TV. She’d talk the old man up there into letting her watch MTV. So she’s up there watching MTV, which her parents forbid, and she suddenly feels this presence over her shoulder. And she looks up and it’s UG, and she’s terrified.

Rick: She’s like, “No, I’m screwed.”

Louis: And she changes the channel, and he goes, “Why’d you do that? I was watching.” And she said this whole thing just kind of melted for her. And he kind of watched with her for a while, and then he left. And then she felt, you know – these little tiny encounters, like you were just saying – it wasn’t me, it was every person that came in contact with him he responded to in kind. So that was a nice thing to see.

Rick: That’s sweet, yeah. I’m glad we brought that point up.

Louis: You know, he has a reputation for being a real hard-ass, but I can tell you, he did things that would bring tears to your eyes, just like those kinds of little tiny, tiny little gestures.

Rick: Yeah, kind of just intuitively knowing what each person needed.

Louis: Yeah, and not making a big deal out of it. I mean, I once tried to thank him for something. Wow.

Rick: Huh, huh.

Louis: That was a severe heat blast there. And I understood why. He did not want people to feel – what’s the word, when you do something for someone and you expect something in return?

Rick: Right, obligated or…

Louis: Obligated, or any of those words like responsibility, obligation. That kind of thing was an anathema to him. He did it because it was needed. Like with that kid, it was needed that someone recognized, “Look, this is a kid. She should be allowed to do what she’s doing.” For Christ’s sake, there was one guy who was in his room jerking off. I’m not exaggerating. He comes in, and UG immediately starts talking about pornography and masturbation, and he said, “Why do people have a problem with this?”

Rick: So he put the guy’s mind at ease.

Louis: Yeah, like, you’re a human being. There’s nothing wrong with that. So those kinds of things were very immediately communicated to people. And there were countless descriptions. I was in the room so many times, and people would… He’d be screaming at one person, and the person on the other side of the room in the corner would be feeling it. Because he was discreet enough to realize that that person in the corner couldn’t handle it.

Rick: Couldn’t take a direct hit, yeah.

Louis: But they knew exactly what he was talking about.

Rick: Interesting.

Louis: And I felt that from him at times as well. It was a great ballet to watch. The theater was incredible.

Rick: I had that same experience with Maharishi one time. There was something that I was responsible for that I completely screwed up. And he was screaming at everybody about the fact that this thing had been screwed up. And I was sitting there just feeling mortified, because I knew it was about me. But then finally he said, “Who’s responsible for this?” And someone said, “Rick Archer.” And it was like, “Oh, okay.” And he just kind of went on to something else. But, you know, lesson taken. But I couldn’t have taken the direct blast, I don’t think.

Louis: Yeah, it’s funny how they know.

Rick: Yeah.

Louis:  These people, they sense.

Rick: Well, very often it’s completely intuitive. Not to tell too many Maharishi stories, but another time I was in Belgium with him, and he was speaking to an audience of a thousand people or something. And he was going on and on and on about some point. And later on, after the thing, I was standing up around his couch, and he was saying, “I wonder why I was going on about that point so much.” He said, “There must be somebody in the audience that really needed to hear that.” But that’s the point. It’s like there’s this kind of cosmic intelligence that’s pulling the puppet strings. And very often – probably all the time, at least in UG’s experience – it wasn’t like this rationality that was driving him. He was just a force of nature.

Louis: Yeah, I think that’s what’s so fascinating about these people. Again, it’s like that thing where nobody’s really in charge. And there’s something very liberating about that kind of company. I remember initially thinking, “This is so ridiculous.” The first week I met him, I went to the hotel every day and sat there thinking, “What the hell am I sitting here for?” And at one point I would fall asleep. I’d wake up thinking, “This is really, really odd.” And the irony of this is, I met him in the hotel room across the street from where I first saw Jiddu Krishnamurti speak in New York City.

Rick: That’s funny. And then you were in the same town in Switzerland and the same place in India.

Louis: The parallels just go on and on. And how could anybody plan this? Some Irish Catholic kid from Ohio, ending up in a living room in Bangalore with some nutty Indian sitting next to him, smacking him on the head. None of this really adds up.

Rick: There’s a saying in, I don’t know the Sanskrit, but the saying is “Brahman is the charioteer.” And the implication is what we were just talking about. Someone living in that state, they are not the charioteer. Brahman is the charioteer. And they’re just kind of like this force of nature. They themselves couldn’t often explain to you why it is they do what they do. They’re just automatic.

Louis: It’s really wonderful, too, because I was able to go to India. As a person who had completely rejected… There were two places in my life that I was not interested in: Switzerland and India. Really, I was a New Yorker in my mind, if not in my life, and I wanted to be like Jackson Pollock or one of those guys. I wanted to be an artist, an American known thing. And then I end up in Switzerland and India for years with a guy who dismisses my paintings as the worst shit he wouldn’t even wipe his ass with. [Laughter]

Rick: Take you to down a notch or two.

Louis: Thank God, because my life is so much easier. And what’s interesting is that my fascination for these Hindu texts came from watching someone about whom those things are written. So I got to see it from the inside out, because I would not have had the patience to find the best stuff that’s there. And because of his company, I was around other people. And this is the interesting part about UG, that he seemed so radical and he was so extreme, but the core followers or friends of his in India were all very serious Indian seekers. And they knew all this stuff. And the people who were really sincere immediately spotted this in him, like, “Oh, this is what it looks like.” And the pundits and the intellectuals over there, who were steeped in it intellectually, would walk right out of the room. Because he would look at them and say, “You know, a tape recorder could do a better job than you are.” “Is that operating in your life?” That was his question. “Does that operate in your life?”

Rick: Kind of reminds me of Jesus railing against the scribes and the Pharisees and kicking out the money changers in the temple. Just being a radical dude who rejected intellectual understanding, mere intellectual understanding.

Louis: Because if you’re living something, you’re not going to have patience for somebody’s petty interpretation of something that you live. That doesn’t have any room anymore. “Sorry, pal. Go somewhere else.” And he was the first one to encourage people, “Look, if you want the easier, softer way, please go find a guru. Because I’m not going to do it for you.” His first line to me was, “I’m sorry that you are here. The best thing for you to do would be to pack your bag and go. Because you’re not going to get nothing here.”

Rick: So what did you get? Looking back on those five years and the way you feel now, how has your life been transformed, if it has, by the whole phenomenon?

Louis: [Laughs] It’s funny because I think I’ve been disabused of a lot of useless ideas. At the most basic level, I lived in my studio and had a steady job and a life in a career track that was frustrating the hell out of me. Since meeting him, I no longer have a home. I pretty much trashed my career. I feel less stressed in terms of dealing with life’s demands than I ever did. Somehow things got easier without my really… I don’t know how that happened, really.

Rick: Well, those aren’t exactly sales pitches. Get into UG and you’ll be homeless and jobless.

Louis: [Laughs] I’m not jobless, actually. This is the interesting thing, that I’m more efficient in my life than I was. And my life is much more what I had hoped it would be without my somehow having orchestrated that.

Rick: Right. Came about in a way that you couldn’t have anticipated or orchestrated.

Louis: I tell you, man – and I work in the art world – the fact that everything he said is true, and that’s why I couldn’t succeed as an artist. Because I can’t get up there and say, “I’m a great, brilliant… and I believe that I’m…” You have to pitch something to the world. I said to him once, “Look, I’m looking at you and I’m seeing what all these people are claiming is in operation there. Why are there 10 of us sitting here? What’s the explanation for this? Please.” And he said, “If you want to be famous, you have to sell something. Bottom line. I refuse.” That was the end of it. That was it. And that is… If you become invisible, your life gets really interesting. It opens up in ways. I learned from him that a shopping mall, which I used to find was an anathema to a New York hipster living downtown, was a really interesting place. The little exchanges in the world that I was rushing through are where life is happening. And with this guy, with all these endless, absurd, torturous drives through four countries and three states, and shitty food and weird… going into someone’s house and being thrown across the living room floor, and like, “What the hell am I doing here?” Once he was gone, I kind of dusted myself off and I realized, “Wow, a lot of my baggage got dropped along the way here. This is kind of okay.” I’d be walking along thinking, “I should be more worried about things than I am. What’s wrong with me? How come I’m not thinking about this, that, and the other?” And then I would think, “Wow, so things have changed.” But like you said, it’s not exactly the sales pitch.

Rick: Right. Yeah. Interesting.

Louis: It’s a funny, funny life, I tell you. That’s for sure.

Rick: It’s a fascinating account. And obviously it’s not something that anybody else can repeat now, because he’s gone, although they might find some other teacher. And there are similarities in terms of being in this kind of maelstrom around a teacher like that, or like anything, just this tornado, and when it’s over you think, “Holy mackerel, what was that?” And yet, “Wow, I’m not quite the same person that I was.”

Louis: Rick, I never imagined in my entire life that I would write a book.

Rick: Right.

Louis: Then I write this book, and I rewrite it 14 times. It gives me something to do while I’m cruising around the world being homeless. It’s a great thing. When you’re an artist, people look at you like, “Oh, that’s nice. Oh, I have friends who are artists.” But when you’re a writer, they go, “Oh, really? That’s interesting.” Because I think they think you might write about them. So I felt I was getting kudos for being a homeless, wandering idiot. Then I get two publishers, the biggest publisher in India, and a non-duality press in the UK, which these people were fantastic to work with. And it all just happens like that. First book. I mean, this is ridiculous, really. But I also discovered that I love to write.

Rick: Yeah, you’re good at it.

Louis: I really enjoyed the whole thing. And he was the one… I was sitting there when he first fell, sitting with him at night after everybody left, and I was making notes to myself.

Rick: Fell, meaning he had fallen, broken bone or something?

Louis: Yeah, I think he strained a leg muscle.

Rick: Okay.

Louis: And he couldn’t walk without assistance. So then I got this incredible 24-hour exposure to the guy, which was bizarre in its own way. So I started making notes. And then he started saying, “Oh, look, he’s writing a book.” And I’m like, “I’m just making it. Don’t get excited there, champ.” So I’m making my notes, and then at some point it became a refuge for me, because it just got so crazy, and it was a place where I could go and note it down. “This is crazy.” And also then after he was gone, it was a great way to kind of process the whole thing. People would ask me… Rick, I wasn’t surrounded by spiritual people until I met him. I was surrounded by artists or people that I worked with or whatever, and I never discussed these things. People would ask me, “So what do you do? You go to meditate?” “Well, not really. We go to the mall and have coffee.” “What? Then how do you explain? What the hell are you doing up there?” Or I’d come back after a month, and the guys I was working with would be like, “So, are you enlightened yet? How’s life on the mountain? Are you going to get a diaper and set up a business?” So it became a way of explaining what happened. So it all kind of falls into place in a funny way.

Rick: So you’re still a relatively young guy.

Louis: Thank you.

Rick: It’s hard to tell when you have no hair, but you look pretty young.

Louis: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rick: Do you feel like you’ll ever associate yourself with another teacher? Do you find yourself reading or visiting other teachers or anything like that? Or do you feel like you’ve been there and you’re just going to kind of do whatever you do for the rest of your life? Or is it hard to say?

Louis: Very hard to say. I thought there was maybe more that I should be doing initially when he was gone. I was fascinated by a couple of people, but eventually everything came back to him because the experience was so intense and overwhelming. I have very close friends that I’ve met through him, and I continue to discuss these things with them. The implications of this, and what about that, and what he was saying here. And because I still write about him, I’m pretty wrapped up in what he was saying. And I just have no idea. I cannot imagine that I would find anyone… Of course there would be no one like that. But I’m very fortunate to have friends who were deeply affected by him in my life. So I have people I can bounce stuff off of. And who the hell knows? I wasn’t expecting to meet him, that’s for sure.

Rick: True. And he didn’t teach practices, obviously, so I presume you don’t have some kind of spiritual practice you do on a daily basis or anything like that?

Louis: You know, it’s funny. I’m not supposed to. But since meeting him, my obsession with the material is such that I cannot have one waking hour without wondering how all this is processing in here. And I think that’s probably its own practice.

Rick: I kind of know what you mean. I have a meditation practice myself, but aside from that, I’m just kind of obsessed with reading this stuff, talking to people, in a much more diverse and eclectic way than I once was, when I was just with one teacher. But it’s kind of the focal point of my life and it probably always will be.

Louis:  When somebody plants the seed in your head, if you want one thing and one thing only, then you will surely get that.

Rick: Seek and ye shall find.

Louis: But that will bring you to a corner that’s really tight. And so I find myself wiggling out of that corner every day. And I think that’s its own practice.

Rick: Well, and I think that things come to fruition in time, just as with UG, after a couple of decades of seeking and obsessing about this stuff. He sat down on a bench and something happened to him.

Louis: Or Anandamayi Ma just got born and looked up at the mango tree. How do you predict this stuff? It’s ridiculous.

Rick: Right. For all you know, you could be walking down the street this afternoon and bingo, some dramatic shift could take place.

Louis: Gosh, I hope so. It would be nice if it happens at three, Rick, because I’ve got to do my laundry. [Laughter]

Rick: Well, you know, chop wood, carry water. You can still do the laundry after.

Louis: That’s right. See how I forget.

Rick: Or like Jack Kornfield said, “After the ecstasy, the laundry.”

Louis: Yeah, there you go.

Rick: You can do it.

Louis:  Ecstatic laundry doing.

Rick: Right. Great. Well, this has been fun. Fun conversation, fun book. I don’t just mean that in a trivial sense. It was really enjoyable talking to you and it was enjoyable reading the book and dipping into the UG world a little bit. All I’d heard about him before that was a friend of mine who had seen him in India and came back and said, “God, he’s a horrible man. It was terrible. I left as soon as I could.” [Laughter]

Louis: Oh, that’s great. I took a friend from the JK discussion group and he had the same reaction.

Rick: But I realized there was more to it. Of course, your book paints a much more multi-colored picture.

Louis: Well, that’s good.

Rick: Yeah, it does. It really captures your love of him, I think, which was beautiful. Despite all the craziness and the difficulties and all, there’s this love that shines through and it’s really sweet.

Louis: Yeah, I would have found that word horrifying, but there’s no way around it.

Rick: Yeah, it’s evident. Even at one point in this interview, you almost began to cry at a certain point. We were talking about it and I could see the emotion welling up. It’s very sweet.

Louis: Well, Rick, I just really appreciate you giving me your time here. I’ve seen your interviews. I think you’re doing a great service there. I’m always surprised when someone takes an interest, so it’s a pleasure to be able to talk about it.

Rick: Yeah. Well, thanks. I really appreciate everything you’ve done and the efforts you’ve gone through to make this book and everything. It’s worth reading, I think, for people. It will give them a different perspective on spirituality and perhaps our conversation will be a taste of that and they can decide whether they want to read it or not.

Louis: I should put a warning on the label, though. Mental warnings.

Rick: And I’ll link to the book from your page on batgap.com. It’s called Goner by Lewis Brawley, The Final Travels of UG Krishnamurti. Do you have any wrap-up points before I make mine?

Louis: I guess not, Rick. If I haven’t said it yet, I can’t say it now.

Rick: Yeah. Well, it’s been a good conversation.

Louis: Thank you very much.

Rick: Yeah, you’re welcome.

Louis: Thanks for having me.

Rick: So let me just make a couple of wrap-up points to those who have been listening or watching, which is that this interview is part of an ongoing series and there are 170-something of them now all archived both on YouTube and on batgap.com. That’s the easiest place to check it out because there’s an alphabetical listing there and also a chronological listing of all the people I’ve interviewed and also a page announcing the people I have yet to interview, including a link where you can send in recommendations if there’s somebody you would like to see interviewed. There’s also a discussion group that crops up around each interview, which usually elicits hundreds of posts. People really get into it. There is a “Donate” button, which I appreciate people clicking if they feel inclined. There’s a tab where you can sign up for an email notification each time a new interview is posted, and there’s a link to an audio podcast so you can subscribe to this in iTunes, listen to it on your iPod and not have to sit in front of a computer in order to participate. So feel free to check all that out. Thanks for listening or watching and we’ll see you next time. [Music]