Ram Das Batchelder Transcript

Ram Das Batchelder Interview

Summary:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest today is Ram Das Batchelder. And Ram Das, this is the first interview I will have conducted with somebody in India. He’s in Tiruvannamalai, which is famed of course as the place where Ramana Maharshi hung out for many, many years. Ram Das came to my attention about a year ago, when he sent me a copy of his book, which is entitled “Rising in Love, My Wild and Crazy Ride to Here and Now.” So, I read it and I really enjoyed it and ended up feeling inspired to write the introduction to it, or maybe he asked me to write the introduction, I don’t know. So, we went back and forth quite a bit and I ended up writing the introduction. We’re going to be talking about his book, which is basically about his life, and primarily about his life with Amma, the hugging saint, as she’s sometimes called. Her official name is Mata Amritanandamayi Devi and you see a picture of her behind my right shoulder and you also see a picture of her behind Ram Das’s right shoulder. He lives in her ashram in India and I’ve never visited there, but my wife and I have been seeing Amma since 1999 here in the States and have really benefited tremendously from that experience. So here’s a little bit about Ram Das, first of all. He was born in Pennsylvania in early 20s and has spent most of the last Amma. He has written four children’s books, which have been translated into several European languages and also a novel in rhyming verse, three full-length plays and 40 original songs. In 2012 he and his wife Tarini Ma wrote and co-taught a university course on Hinduism in Venezuela. His wife is from Venezuela. He has given numerous talks and workshops about various aspects of spirituality in many locations around the world. He and his wife are currently offering five-star tours of the sacred cities of India to both Spanish and English-speaking groups. His book Rising in Love tells the story of his…well I’ll probably just…this is a long introduction about the book. I think we’ll just let you talk about the book rather than me reading this whole thing. It goes from a powerful marijuana-fueled spiritual awakening in America which included meeting an angel, two years struggle with delusion and addiction, subsequent renunciation of drugs and eventual discovery of Amma, and covers about 27 amazing years in your life during which you’ve been seeking enlightenment as Amma’s devotee, most of that time in India. So where would you like to start? It’s about a year since I’ve read the book and I started reading it again last night and immediately got drawn into it again. It’s a very interesting story and you’re a good writer, but we have an hour and a half, two hours here to give people a sense of what the book is about, what you’re about, and what Amma’s about. So where would you like to start? Did you hear all that Ram Das? Well… Okay, you’re just pausing for thought. Incidentally Ram Das is somewhat deaf from having had his ears blown out at a rock concert. Why that didn’t happen to me I don’t know, but he’s hearing me okay.

Ram Das: I’m hearing you pretty good so far. Yeah. Well, I mean I guess the best place to start is just a few words about Amma, because she’s definitely the main focus of the book. Those who don’t know Amma, she’s known as the hugging saint because she travels all over the world giving programs of free hugs, and these programs go on for 12, 14, 16, 18 hours, sometimes more, and rather often she doesn’t take a bath break during that entire time.

Rick: Yeah, your voice broke up a little bit, but you said she doesn’t take a bathroom break during that entire time. Yes, she generally doesn’t.

Ram Das: When she gives Devi Bhava programs, in the West she gives a special program, so she’ll give hugs all day long, and then a special program during the night and this program will start at about when she’s hugging approximately 20,000 people or something, and during those programs, all night long programs, which could be break. Yeah. So, there’s something rather super human, I think, about what she’s doing. There’s no doubt about that.

Rick: Yeah, and even if she did take bathroom breaks, I’ve witnessed this whole thing many times. She kind of moderates her liquid intake so as to not need so many bathroom breaks, but still, even if she took them, there’s something remarkable about what- you feel like you’re witnessing some kind of miracle, because you picture yourself being in that situation, sitting on a couch without really going anywhere for that many hours, hugging thousands of sweaty, crying people, and you think, “I would have run out of steam so long ago, and she still reacts to each new person as if they were her long-lost friend that she’s so happy to see.”

Ram Das: Totally, and it’s, in my experience, it’s definitely not just a hug, it’s direct contact with the Divine.

Rick: Yeah.

Ram Das: Now, I know not everybody will see Amma in the same way I do, and there’s nobody insisting that anybody see Amma in one way or another. That’s one thing I like about the organization, is that you can come and meet Amma and have any opinion you want. Your experience is your experience, and nobody’s insisting that you see Amma one way, but in my experience, she’s a divine incarnation, and there’s a certainty that she’s knowing my every thought, and that even if she’s on the other side of the globe, she’s hearing my every thought, and she’s hearing this conversation now, even though her body’s a thousand miles away. So, that’s my experience of Amma for many, many years, and it enables an extraordinary level of communication, where I know if I have a question, she can answer me from inside my own mind immediately, and of course, she sometimes makes me wait a little bit, but that’s another matter. But there’s a sense that I’m really dealing with an all-pervading omniscient being of infinite love, not a human being.

Rick: Well, you’ve had a lot more exposure to it than I have. Let’s first of all deal with this point you just made, which is it’s not just a hug, which when I first heard about it, sounded sort of nice and touchy-feely, and She- it’s like there used to be this guy named Leo, somebody rather, in the U.S. who’s trademarked. Yeah, right, Buscaglia, who used to hug a lot of people, and I kind of put it in that category. But then when we actually went to see her, most people listening to this will be familiar with the word “Darshan”. When we actually went to see her and had this experience, it was so far beyond the physicality of getting a nice warm hug for a few seconds. Something really profound happens in the kind of inner dimensions of one’s life.

Ram Das: Totally, yeah. So, it’s for me as direct communion with God, And an embrace from the omniscience and omnipresence of the Divine. So, it’s not an ordinary hug by any means.

Ram Das: Yeah. Now, the other aspect of Amma, which is undeniable, is that she’s one of the world’s greatest humanitarians. So, that even if somebody isn’t ready to see that she’s a saint or won’t want to have been told that she’s a divine incarnation, we can certainly look at her charitable mission and realize that she’s doing incredible work for the poor. And this includes 45,000 houses that the ashram has built for the victims of the tsunami and the earthquake in Gujarat. And they now recently have built 5,000 more houses up in North India, where the flood was last year. And it includes 50 K-12 schools and one of the best hospitals in India, which gives a lot of free surgeries for the poor. And something like 10 million free meals a year in India. And pensions for 100,000 widows, which keeps these women from falling into the sex trade or from starvation. And that’s just the beginning. They have many, many programs which reach out into the Indian countryside to uplift women who are in rural areas and give them vocational training. They have programs to prevent farmer suicides. The huge fund that she’s created to support the children of farmers and help them go to school. And I’m sure I’m missing about 20 different projects because her outreach is just huge.

Rick: Oh, you’re missing more than of all the projects it would probably take you 15 minutes just to read the list. There are so many things that she does and or that are done in her name. And they’re not just token things where some announcement is made and then nothing happens, but stuff actually happens, lots of stuff.

Ram Das: It’s an excellent charitable organization. They have special UN status of being a very effective charitable service. So, people are requested to donate there and one of the good things about it, is that all the work is done by volunteers. So, there’s no salary bleed. In some of the charitable organizations, the people running it, get a million dollar salary. So, your donation is going there. Whereas with Amma, I would think 99.9 percent of it is going directly to the service of the poor. So, it’s quite impressive what they do.

Rick: Yeah. Let’s talk a little bit more about the actual Darshan experience, this hug, so to speak, and our subjective experience of it. Because my subjective experience is as if, first of all, initially there’s experience of kind of like sinking into the vastness, like Amma’s this kind of vast ocean of consciousness and we all are essentially, but it’s usually occluded to some extent. But when I’m having Darshan, it becomes much more clear. There’s a kind of a mind meld, so to speak, an entrainment and one becomes much more consciously vast oneself. But secondly, I really feel like Amma kind of, like you said, knows your thoughts, knows your innermost core, and is sitting at the master switchboard in such a way that when you have that interaction with her, she pushes a few buttons on that master switchboard and literally changes the course of your life in very significant ways, adds a very powerful evolutionary engine to your train.

Ram Das: Oh, I fully agree. There’s a sense that there’s- each of these Darshans is a karmic cleansing, which enables me to move forward and reach a whole new level which was not available even the day before. There’s definitely an acceleration with each bit of contact I have with her. Each time I see her, there’s a blessing.

Rick: Yeah. I have to admit that I don’t totally have the same faith you do in terms of her omniscience at all times, like that she’s actually listening to this conversation or knows what I had for breakfast this morning or anything like that. I sort of feel like she’s more like a searchlight which can shine at any particular thing that needs illuminating but that’s not sort of illuminating everything 360 degrees all the time. I’m not sure that that would be either practical for her or for us or or anything, but maybe you could comment on that. We can bounce that back and forth a few minutes.

Ram Das: Yeah. I think first of all, everybody has their own perspective on who Amma is and their own experience of what she is and it’s perfectly okay. Everybody has their own way of understanding Amma and that’s perfectly okay. It should be that way. I can tell you my own… It’s like my experience of Amma is that she’s literally… it’s like a goddess in disguise. And so, there’s the outer disguise of a woman who’s just very sweet and compassionate and loving and maybe she’s just a very sweet lady and she may pretend not to know what you know, not to know who you are or not to know the person who’s next to you or something or you ask her a question and you may get an answer which makes it seem like she didn’t really know what you’re talking about or something. But what I’ve come to experience, for many, many years is that if I ask her a question, she might initially give an answer which seems to not even have to do with the question, or maybe she didn’t really understand the question and then she just showed me that she knew absolutely everything about the whole situation.” It’s difficult to explain but my conception is just that right behind that human form is literally the goddess of the universe. So, some people talk about her as being Kali incarnated. Kali meaning the supreme power, the mother of the entire universal play. And so, this is my direct experience, is that really beneath that disguise is the supreme reality that is the author, producer and director of the entire cosmic movie and not a leaf in the entire universe has moved except by her will, by the will of Kali, by the will of Parashakti. And this is to me what is embodied in Amma. She is Parashakti in the fullness and she is also Brahman. She’s the supreme reality of just pure awareness. So, she’s absolutely, for me, she’s all levels of the divine embodied in the human disguise and the disguise is very thick because after all she’s hugging millions of people from all walks of life including alcoholics and murderers and prostitutes and whoever shows up. So she can’t, she says at one point- she was talking about Devi Bhava which is this program where she puts on the crown of Devi and the costume of the goddess and gives Darshan in that form. And she was saying if Amma showed herself as she truly is, no one would be able to come near. So, what she’s doing in Devi Bhava is just removing one or two veils of the many veils that are covering her true being so that she shines a little more light. But if she were to take off all her veils, we’d be beholding the blazing goddess in front of us and who among us would be able to come and give her a hug. It’s just too powerful what she is. But that’s my experience, that’s my conception of Amma and that’s my experience of Amma is that we’re really talking about the supreme reality on all levels in the human disguise.

Rick: Yeah, and I’ve experienced that with Devi Bhava too, that it’s like the whole time you’ve been with Amma for a few days, it’s like you’re sitting around a nice warm oven or something and then all of a sudden at the end, it turns into a blast furnace. And it’s like this, “Whoa, who is this?” And I think people listening to this show will be familiar with the concept of avatars. And it’s said that there are different avatars, there are different degrees of fullness of the Divine in their manifestation or in their embodiment. So, for instance, Ram and his brother were said to be avatars, maybe there were four brothers, weren’t there? But the second brother, Lakshman, I think, was half of the avatar that Ram was and the other two brothers were each a quarter, but Ram was more full. And then Krishna was supposed to be way fuller than Ram, according to this mythology, according to this tradition. And so, if we believe in the concept of avatars and then we can conceive of different avatars having different degrees of expression of the Divine. You want to comment on that?

Ram Das: Well sure I can’t say I take all of that too seriously, but at the same time if I had to say is Amma a full incarnation, I would say absolutely. That this is, in my opinion, in my experience, this is a full incarnation of the Divine Mother. And the Divine Mother, in Hinduism is not, it’s different than in Christianity where the Divine Mother is kind of an intermediary, she’s not quite God, she’s, an intermediary between man and God, that’s the mother Mary. But in Hinduism, the Divine Mother is the source of the entire cosmic movie. And she’s also a form of Brahman, the supreme reality. So, she’s, they call Parabrahma Swaroopini, is the Divine Mother that is the form of Brahman. This is what I see in Amma, is that she is Parashakti incarnate in a very full way. It’s interesting, one little story I tell in the book is when I first came to Amma’s ashram, I had heard somebody say that, “oh maybe Amma was the reincarnation of Sri Ramakrishna,” who was also considered to be an avatar. And I was reading the names of the 108 names of Amma that one devotee had written, and there were several which seemed to refer to Amma as if she has the qualities of Sri Ramakrishna and reminds us of Sarada Devi. And I was like, in the gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, there’s a little story where a woman of impure character touches his feet and he leaps up as if he was stung by a bee, and cries out. And Amma is hugging, as I said before, prostitutes and murderers and alcoholics, and all kinds of people of so called impure character, and for her it’s all the same. So, it was really hard for me to say, oh yeah, this is the Sri Ramakrishna reincarnated. I really didn’t believe it. And I asked one of the swamis, just, is Amma the reincarnation of Sri Ramakrishna? And he simply said no. And I was like, oh that’s good, at least I don’t know what he meant by that, but what I understood was that no, Amma is the Divine Mother herself. Ramakrishna was a devotee of the Mala Kali, and the only way I could think of Amma as being a reincarnation of Ramakrishna would be if, when Ramakrishna left the body, he merged completely in Kali, which is quite likely. And then it is that Kali as Ramakrishna, Ramakrishna as Kali, who has taken birth as Amma. Because to me it is very clear Amma is nothing less than the goddess of the universe in a human form. I could not, I cannot limit her greatness in any way. That’s my experience.

Rick: One time at a program I was standing by Amma’s couch and some reporter was interviewing her and the reporter was asking her how she manages to go on like this, so many hours doing this. And she said, “Well, if you work in a factory, you can only work so many hours and you get tired and you want to go home.” She said, “But if you’re the owner of the Factory, you could stay there any amount of time because it’s your factory.” So she said, “This is my factory,” meaning the whole humanity is, I own it, I engulf, I encompass it, it’s within me. And so,

Ram Das: She gives many little clues that actually she’s an embodiment of God, but at the same time she’s very subtle about it and she really prefers not to make any kind of declaration. She does not get up and say, “I’m an avatar,” or “I am God.” She never does that. Sif she says anything, it’s “I’m the servant of everybody.” She calls everyone “my children.” And there was, I think, one interview where someone was comparing her with Ramana Maharshi and she said, ” Ramana Maharshi lived in a cave for most of his life and worked closely with maybe 300 people during his lifetime. Amma is working with literally millions of people of all walks of life. So, if you want to compare Amma with anyone, compare Amma with Lord Krishna.”

Rick: She said that?

Ram Das: Yeah.

Rick: Now I can hear a question forming in the minds of viewers right now. They’re saying, “Yeah, but Ramana Maharshi is sort of famous for having actually caused a wave of enlightenment where a lot of his followers and their followers are actually waking up in terms of enlightenment. I’m wondering how, but Amma is sort of seeing millions of people. Is there any sort of loss of quality due to the quantity, where she’s uplifting millions of people a little bit but not necessarily bringing people to a state of enlightenment? And I actually asked her assistant, Swamini Krishnamurthi, about this one time. And why Amma doesn’t talk a whole lot about people getting enlightened? And she said, “Well, not that many people do. It’s a very rare thing, and maybe upon your death you’ll actually awaken.” And I haven’t quite reconciled that because I talk to people all the time who, I don’t think are, I wouldn’t use the word enlightened because I think that’s a very, has a very superlative, ultimate connotation, but who are experiencing profound degrees of awakening which are abiding, which are stable, which don’t come and go. So how would you address that?

Ram Das: Well, first of all, I have the utmost love and respect for Ramana Maharishi and his disciples. I love him very much. He’s been a very important pole star of truth for my life.

Rick: And he’s a case in point, by the way, because obviously we could use other examples. Yeah.

Ram Das: Sure. And I love his teachings. In fact, that’s really the focus of my own meditation. So, I certainly, mean no disrespect there. I love Ramana. But I think the main point is, what I would say is, if you talked about Ramana’s, if you talked to him while he was alive, you wouldn’t have seen many enlightenments.

Rick: Right.

Ram Das: So, I think you would have to give Amma 50 years, right? You look after, when Amma leaves the body, 50 years after, you might find enlightenment through her teachings and through her grace. I think that’s quite possible. I personally feel, by her grace, I am moving very rapidly towards enlightenment, for what that’s worth. So, I don’t think there’s any limit on what Amma’s grace can do. I also, I know, hold Ramana in very high esteem. I also, put a bit of a question mark around some of the so-called enlightenments that we see now, so many people giving Satsang and quite a number of them don’t look to me like they’re really enlightened at all. But I don’t know, I don’t mean to judge, but I say, let’s give Amma time. While she’s still in the body, she might have another So, let’s see. I think there probably will definitely be some enlightened disciples. I don’t know how many, but it’s not just a superficial huggy-buggy, organization, that’s just about being nice to people and doing charitable work. She definitely is focused on God-realization.

Rick: Yeah, actually, I’m sorry, go ahead. What were you going to say?

Ram Das: I’m definitely planning on attaining it, if it’s at all possible.

Rick: Okay.

Ram Das: I really feel very confident and very, very happy with the grace that’s going in that direction.

Rick: Yeah, I’ll hold you to that. Just yesterday, I actually happened to be watching a little bit of a interview with Papaji, that David Godman did. You know Papaji, and he was one of Ramana’s most famous disciples, even though he didn’t spend a lot of time with him. But he was saying that all these people that awaken quote-unquote in his presence and then go back to the West are really kind of just getting started, and he was a little bit upset about how much hubris some of them show in proclaiming their awakening and their enlightenment and so on. He said he’s really sending them out as spokespeople, not really as full-blown representatives of what’s possible.

Ram Das: Right, but the problem with that, I love Papaji also and spent four months with him and had a powerful experience with him. But the problem with some of that is that almost like the word enlightenment gets watered down, so it doesn’t really mean anything anymore. And you have people claiming enlightenment and giving Satsang and putting on a whole guru show, and they’re not enlightened at all, and they don’t embody any of the divine qualities. So, I would rather have a guru who will not encourage a false declaration of enlightenment and not send out people, “Yes, you’re enlightened, go tell everyone and start giving Satsang,” and then have these little disasters happening all over the place and everybody giving up on enlightenment just because it starts to get a bad odor, the whole concept. So, I would rather have a fully God-realized master who insists that there’s not going to be any display of false ego or no false gurus. The one thing I have prayed for is to never let me be a false guru. I’d much rather be a sincere disciple, than a false guru.

Rick: Beautiful. Yeah, and what we’ve been talking about the last couple minutes I think brings up a very important point about Amma and about the whole enlightenment scene, which is that Amma is very strong on really culturing personalities, not just sort of like eliciting some profound inner experience and you could still be a jerk in terms of your comportment, but actually, refining and culturing and working out all the quirks that we’re all inflicted by, and so that you ultimately will come out as really a saintly person, a shining example of full possibility of what it means to be human, rather than just someone who might still have a lot of ego and have had some kind of inner awakening, and hop up on the Satsang dais.

Ram Das: Right, yeah, I agree. She’s working very hard to weed out all the little weeds in all the characters that are around her, and any flaw, she’s going to find a way to point it out and remove it, and challenge the ego in all of its aspects until there’s nothing left. This is a long process, and I don’t imagine it’s an easy process, but I’m grateful for it. There’s something really cool about being in that ashram because I’m surrounded by people who are in many ways superior to me in one aspect or another, and so, there’s a kind of a “I’m always inspired to do better, to become better.”

Rick: Yeah, which actually leads to my next question, which is, what is it like in the ashram? I know sometimes in spiritual groups it’s kind of crazy, everybody’s purifying like crazy, and unstressing, we used to call it in the TM movement, and there’s all kinds of strange frictions and obsessive idiosyncratic behaviors, and it’s kind of like a a nuthouse, you know? So is it kind of like that, or maybe part of it’s like that, but there are a lot of much more mature spiritual aspirants, and so there’s really a kind of a holy atmosphere, or all of the above, or what?

Ram Das: Well, I think it’s probably all of the above, and each person coming to the ashram is going to have their own experience, and my experience of the ashram, first of all, I really love it there. It’s really a home for me, I feel like I have a beautiful family, beautiful friends there, and when Amma is there, it’s like a heaven realm for me. Every day, I go up and sit next to Amma, even if it’s only for two minutes, and I pass her the candies that she’s giving to the devotees, and there’s a beautiful two minutes of extraordinary communion. It may be very deep silence, no-mind space of just a oneness with her, but this is extremely sweet. It’s just the nectar of of devotion. It’s like Radha and Krishna, even if it’s only for two minutes, and then I also sit on stage with her, and that usually, it’s supposed to be a half an hour, but usually, I try to sneak back and get another half an hour. And this is, to sit on stage with her, this is a heaven realm for me, and just the extraordinary bliss of, the closer you get to her physically, , this is sometimes my experience, it’s like she’s a giant sun of love and bliss and peace, and the closer you get, then she’s radiating that into you, and just filling your entire being with this love and this bliss, and the whole body gets filled with this divine energy. And also, I’m having, in the last couple of years, I’ve been having fairly consistent samadhi experiences in my meditation, and so, these days, it’s like three times a day I’m going into meditation, and I’m just really blossoming within like 10 minutes into samadhi. So, this is incredible. What a grace that is to have that kind of bliss and peace at will. Isn’t it incredible? Because, I have been trying for 25 years, and I met Amma actually 27 years ago, and I have watched this steady progression of trying, trying one form of meditation after another, after another, and all the sufferings and strugglings, and big problems with lust, and big problems with all kinds of stuff going on, and ashram politics, and a lot of headaches, and, coming to a place now where there is this samadhi happening, it’s like, “Oh my God, this is incredible. I’m so happy with Amma’s grace.” It hasn’t been something that was given instantly. It’s not like she gave me a pill. I’ve seen the 27 years of evolution, but it’s incredible. I’m so grateful.

Rick: So, when you say samadhis are happening, what’s actually happening, and how long do you sit there, and what actually is going on?

Ram Das: Well, it’s a little bit hard to explain it, of course, but I’m getting into a space which is, I’m entering this space which is prior to the mind. I had a very, very cool epiphany a couple of years ago, which was, I think it was on Facebook that I saw some post about how the atom, a physical atom, is like 99.9999999999 percent space. It’s almost nothing there but space.

Rick: Right, it’s like a pea in the middle of a baseball stadium, and the electrons are running around the edges of the stadium like that.

Ram Das: Exactly, exactly. And so, I thought to myself, I bet the “I thought” is the same thing. It’s completely empty. And, the illusion of the “I thought” as being something solid, as being the root of “I’m the thinker” of this person, is nothing but an illusion. And it just occurred to me that what the “I thought” is full of is actually Brahman. It’s pure silence, it’s pure awareness untouched by the thought “I”. That’s the innermost essence of the “I thought I”. And this was in Amma’s presence when this kind of dawned on me and I had a kind of a bright moment of thousands of light bulbs going off in my head and discovering, oh my god, right inside me all the time is the supreme reality hiding within the “I thought”. And of course it’s not limited by the “I thought”, it’s subtler, it’s infinite, it’s always here, and it’s always the supreme reality. Oh my god, that is what I am. And so, I’ve been able now to, I have been working with the contemplation for many, many years that gradually takes me into a state, into the state of abiding in that pure silence. And it’s just become much more simple now, become a radically simpler where I’m able to enter into that space, into the innermost essence of the thought “I” and watch the “I thought” fall away. Because in that pure awareness there is no “I thought”, it exists prior to the “I thought”, it’s what’s prior to the thought “I”. And therefore, in that space of pure awareness there’s no one to perceive anything. All perception hangs on the “I” that perceives. And so, without that perceiver the whole realm of perception falls away, the whole realm of thought and imagination falls away because there’s no one to think and no one to imagine. falls away, there’s no one to do anything, there’s no one to make any effort, so all effort and all doing falls away and nothing remains but pure being. And then, there’s an energetic component to this that manifests as if it’s as if the mind is like a closed lotus and as I open up into that silence the mind opens up like this and a tremendous amount of energy starts filling my body and it comes out- it’s like radiating in all directions, up and down and inside and back, and it’s just like I’m being fully opened up and there’s like nobody there and it is so sweet. And the energy just it’s like it’s as if the energy like the mind blocks the energy and when the mind is opened up like this the energy flows without any obstacle and it’s extraordinary, it’s just amazing and I feel like, oh my god, my body is radiating this bliss in all directions. That’s a very, very sweet peace, it’s a very sweet bliss.

Rick: Nice. I heard a quote from the Tao Te Ching the other day which said something like “Make all things orderly before they arise” and then there’s a quote from the Gita that goes “Established in yoga perform action.” So, do you find that having had this samadhi experience several times a day that it’s totally lost when you get into activity or is there a newfound orderliness and coherence to your activity which maybe hadn’t been there before you were experiencing this samadhi thing?

Ram Das: Well it’s been a gradual, gradual progression. So on the one hand I think that definitely, definitely the meditation over the years has totally given me a lot more mental clarity and a certain skill with certain things that’s kind of extraordinary, but what I cannot claim, wish I could, but I cannot claim that I’m pure awareness and No, that’s not yet where I’m at.

Rick: Right.

Ram Das: I’m certainly not claiming that but definitely there is an increasing level of peace in my life, there’s an increasing level where something may happen that would have previously caused me agitation and now it’s just almost like nothing.

Rick: Yeah.

Ram Das: So that’s a very sweet feeling but I can’t claim yet that that I don’t have my moments of agitation. Maybe it’s not necessary to claim that but I’m not claiming enlightenment. I sure wish I could.

Rick: That’s all right. I know you’re not. I’m just wondering about the impact of it on your on your active life.

Ram Das: Well I think it’s that the peace that I’m discovering very, very fully in meditation is definitely soaking in and does permeate, but it’s just this you can’t claim it’s 100% now. Eventually this whole damn structure is going to crumble and there’s nothing going to be nothing left but that peace because that’s the reality.

Rick: Yeah. Yeah, you know you probably see this in India, but traditionally how they dyed cloth would they dip it in the color and then bleach it in the sun and dip it in the color and bleach in the sun, keep doing that repeatedly and every time it sat in the sun it would get less and less bleached until the point where it became retained its color as much as in the sun as it was in the dye. So, you know there’s a culturing process that has to take place, right?

Ram Das: Yeah, definitely. I don’t know what the best metaphor for it is. I have to tell you when I actually attain Enlightenment, but I think is I feel like it’s almost like any structure of ego that remains just finally collapses and nothing remains but the Supreme Being which is just pure awareness, peace itself and then God is speaking through your form and there’s no “I” left to claim ownership of anything other than that Supreme Being. Speaking of Ramana Maharshi, my understanding of his state is that there was nobody left there and anybody interacting with him was Actually, it was the Divine Mother speaking through him and he was gone, he was Brahman. There was nothing there for him that for him that all the karma was finished and all the mind was finished and he was established as Brahman itself, changeless pure awareness which knows no subject and no object. But the Divine Mother was interacting through his form to serve the devotees but there was no “I” there left.

Rick: Yeah, some people say that there’s got to be some remnant, in fact I read an article by Amma which she says that you sort of take on the semblance of an ego in order to function in the world and the Sanskrit term is “lesh avidya” “faint remains of ignorance”, but you need some kind of semblance of ego in order to do anything. But it’s no longer running the show.

Ram Das: Right, okay, that’s fine.

Rick: Yeah, and Ramana, he liked to read the newspaper and he sort of listened to the radio and keep up with current events. He had personal interests still as a human being, which made different-

Ram Das: On the one hand even though he was doing all those things, it’s like Nisargatta says somebody said to him, “Yeah, but I see you smoking.” He said, “Well, that’s what you see, but you have no idea what I experience.”

Rick: Right, yeah.

Ram Das: No, we could argue on that one but it’s kind of esoteric. But anyway, whatever.

Rick: It is, but it’s practical in a way because a lot of teachers keep hammering on, completely eradicating the ego and if the ego is something that actually never does get completely eradicated, but just gets put in its proper place, then, maybe people have a more realistic evaluation of where they’re at and where they should be at.

Ram Das: Yeah, I guess that’s why I’m reluctant to accept it but because I want the complete eradication of the ego. I want nothing left here but the supreme reality. I want to merge fully in Brahma now, not after death. Thank you. I want it now. I want that eradication.

Rick: Yeah, it’s just a question of whether you could actually function as a human being if it were completely eradicated. Maybe we’re kind of nitpicking but I’m just suggesting that the ego is a faculty which has kind of usurped. It’s sort of like a kind of a servant sort of sitting up on the king’s throne where he doesn’t belong and saying, “I am the king.” So, in most cases the ego is sort of running the Show, but doesn’t deserve to be, but it still has its function. It’s just has a much more subsidiary function than it actually ends up having in most people’s lives.

Ram Das: Yeah. Okay.

Rick: Yeah, that kind of thing. [Laughter] And getting back to something you were saying a little bit earlier about how glorious it is to sit on the stage with Amma and bask in her radiance and all, that might sound a little poetic or it might sound like the ravings of a, lovesick devotee or something like that, but if anyone listening to this has never had that kind of experience of sitting in close proximity to a genuine saint and experiencing the energy in that atmosphere, the darshan as it’s called, I highly recommend seeking that out and having that experience because it really is profound and significant and evolutionary. I know people that have undergone profound awakenings just sitting like that in that atmosphere. And it’s kind of commonly understood that there’s this sort of transmission thing that can happen around enlightened beings, and but it’s definitely a real phenomenon. I just want to say that. It’s not just some kind of romantic mood that you’ve gotten yourself in here.

Ram Das: No, definitely it’s a real phenomenon and anybody can experience it to some extent when you come to see Amma. Everyone can have their own individual experience and who knows what they’ll see or what they’ll experience, but it certainly is a very, very, very palpable. I think nobody can come up and receive a hug from Amma and not be affected in some profound way, even if they don’t know it.

Rick: Yeah, and as I say, I’ve never been to the ashram, but people say that the whole ashram kind of has that atmosphere to a profound degree.

Ram Das: Yeah, it’s a beautiful place. It’s the place of her birth and it’s the place where she cried buckets of tears for God when she was a girl. And so, there’s something in the soil there that is just extraordinary. There’s a purity there and definitely a protection. Yeah, I love the place.

Rick: Yeah, it’s kind of interesting. Here this little girl grew up in a poor fishing village on the coast of Kerala and ended up having to leave school after the fourth grade to help with family chores and stuff, and just kind of blossomed into this world figure, and with this huge following all over the world and this huge ashram kind of springing up in that spot. You got to figure there’s definitely something behind that. It’s not something that’s going to happen to the average kid who grows up in an Indian fishing village.

Ram Das: Right, this is a very low caste in India, the fishing caste, and a little girl, in India, women are expected to be out of sight for the most part, unless you happen to be born in the Gandhi family or married to it. But the fact that a little girl with a fourth grade education from a very low caste in India has become a global celebrity and a source of this huge charitable mission is amazing. And she speaks at the UN, she’s given speeches all over the world, so, it’s quite something. It can’t just be a matter of some personal charisma or something like that, it’s much bigger than that.

Rick: So, we’ve been talking about enlightenment and people in the ashram, and you mentioned earlier that you feel like a lot of them are a lot more advanced than you or something. And I know, given the culture around Amma, no one’s going to be broadcasting their enlightenment if it’s happened, or their realization, or their awakenings or anything else. People are probably all kind of discreet about it. But do you feel, do you have the sense that there are people there who really have undergone profound abiding awakenings, whether or not we want to call them enlightenment, but who’ve really shifted into profoundly higher states of consciousness in a stable way as a result of their whole involvement?

Ram Das: Yeah, I would say at least one Swami definitely comes to mind. I won’t say his name, but the look on his face is extraordinary.

Rick: Is that the guy who plays the flute and has the thing pulled up over his… I know, I totally like… he’s amazing.

Ram Das: So, he looks definitely like an enlightenment that’s already happened, but that’s just being kept under wraps.

Rick: He really does. I’d like to interview that guy if he’ll agree to it.

Ram Das: Yeah. I think we’ll see a number. I think we really will see a number of enlightenments.

Rick: Yeah. You wonder, in terms of Amma’s mission, do you feel like her mission is… maybe it’s just a multi-pronged project, but on the one hand there’s the alleviation of suffering, the widows and the orphans and the prostitutes and the suicide farmers, and all the stuff she tries to do to tsunami victims, just to alleviate basic human suffering. And then there’s this whole theme that we’re talking about of higher consciousness and enlightenment and so on. Do you feel like she has a priority one way or the other, or is she just multitasking and covering both these bases with one effort? Do you feel like the actual alleviation of suffering is just a tool she uses to help her devotees? In other words, give them some sort of selfless service to do so as to attenuate their egos and further their evolution? Or, where I’m going with this question, or is it sort of like killing two birds with one stone and both things are equally legitimate and one serves the other?

Ram Das: No, I think it’s a good question, but I think for sure that both of them are equally legitimate and they do serve each other naturally. But Amma’s concern for the suffering of the people in the world is very real and very sincere and very intense. She sees them all as her own self and she knows, “Oh my God, that’s God in suffering in this human form,” and doing everything she can to alleviate that suffering. It seems to me that this is one of the most beautiful and full expressions of Advaita that the world has ever seen. And at the same time, she’s given an opportunity to serve to thousands and thousands of devotees from around the world. And as time goes on, it’s like her mission reaches out to more and more and more people and the way they do that is by these service projects. Because if you talk about God and talk about Advaita, you’re going to get understanding what that’s about in the world. And you talk about a divine incarnation and people go, “Oh God, that sounds weird. I don’t want to hear about that. No, don’t tell me that.” But if you tell people about beautiful charitable projects which are serving the poor, which they can verify as being legitimate, then they go, “Oh, I can help that. I can come and teach in the university or I can come and work with tribal women and help them.” And so, this brings in more and more people. And as you enter the service of Amma and the service of humanity, this enables you to receive Amma’s grace. And so, it enables more and more people to come in and become involved and give whatever talent they have and whatever level of knowledge they have and whatever spiritual level they may be at. It doesn’t matter. They’re all welcome in to come in and serve. And so, this is benefiting hundreds of thousands of people who are doing service, volunteering in some level. And I think it’s also genuinely benefiting millions of people who are suffering in the world. So, and I don’t think that Amma sees a difference between her disciples and the people suffering in the world. They’re all her children and she’s doing whatever she can to alleviate our suffering. And she knows, of course, that the ultimate way to alleviate suffering is to teach, is to bring us to enlightenment. That’s the only real, that’s the end of suffering and everything else is relative degrees of suffering. But she’s reaching out to whoever and whoever she can reach with the best method she can, to alleviate their suffering at whatever level it’s manifesting. I think this is just amazing.

Rick: That’s a good answer. Yeah, while you were saying that, I was thinking, yeah, well, suffering is not, there’s a continuum… from having had your house washed away by a tsunami and, shivering in the cold, that’s one level of suffering, or being a sex slave in Mumbai or something, to, being a highly evolved person, but still being kind of caught up in ignorance. And, there’s still a degree of suffering there. And so, I guess Amma’s just sort of dealing with people at whatever level they’re at and kind of hopefully moving them along the scale toward ultimate elimination of suffering.

Ram Das: Right, sure. Yeah. And as I said, it’s an expression of Advaita. It’s like, I think Ramana is at one side of the scale. Maybe, I know, I’m not sure that I want to say that, but it’s like Ramana sat in a cave and he was in silence and he did very little on the physical plane to alleviate suffering. And some, some are, establishing like, I see no one. There is no one but the supreme reality. I see no one suffering. Ramana said, well, if you see someone hungry in your dream, then yes, go ahead and feed them. But when you wake up from the dream, then you see there’s no one suffering. It was just a dream. So, there’s no need to do anything. You are the only reality. Brahman alone is real and that never suffers. So, that’s one side of the scale. Amma takes that full realization of and says, yes, these are all my children. All is Brahman and every bit of suffering is the suffering of God. Let me go serve. Well, both are beautiful, both are full and yet I must say this is amazing what Amma is doing. And I rather prefer the vision that says, yeah, sure, let me have the bliss of Brahman and also let me go out there and serve the poorest of the poor with all my energy and all my love and with full courage because I know I am Brahman. I am therefore fearless in my service of of humanity and I can manifest huge compassion. I love that. It’s courageous to walk with great compassion among the suffering and take their suffering upon yourself. I love that.

Rick: Yeah, and I guess with regard to Ramana or anybody else, different saints have different roles to play. They’re just wired differently, have different dharmas. But one thought that’s been coming to mind the last few minutes is that for Amma this is not some kind of merely altruistic effort that, she conceives of intellectually as being important or some such thing. She really feels the suffering of people. I’ve seen so many cases, I’m sure you have also, people coming to her whose husband just died or whose husband had been beating them or something that’s really causing. And Amma’s tears are streaming down her face. She commiserates with them in a very personal way and a minute later somebody else can be coming and cracking a joke and she’ll be laughing uproariously. So, she doesn’t get stuck in any one state but she’s definitely, her heart is so involved in each person that interacts with her.

Ram Das: Yeah, one of the books I wrote for children is called “The Awakening of Wendy the Wave” and basically, it’s conveying the image that our true self is like the ocean of consciousness and the so-called separate souls are like waves that float on the surface of the ocean. And the waves don’t even know that there is an ocean, most of them, but they think they’re separate and they think they’re a Mr. and Mrs. wave. But a wave like Amma has realized that in fact she is the ocean. She has merged in the ocean and discovered her true being to be the ocean and that ocean is fully present within every wave. So that when we come up to her it’s not like she’s meeting a stranger, she’s meeting herself and she fully, fully knows every detail of our personal life, knows all of our suffering, knows all of our pleasure and all of our pain and she is so fully with us in our life so that’s just like there’s no distance between Amma and wherever we might be in our life. She’s fully with us already, she’s already, always within us, always hearing our thoughts. So, this is why when somebody comes up before her, the tears flow because she’s in that person, there’s no separation. This is one concept.

Rick: I think you’re right. That’s my experience with her, that she really tunes in and knows you very intimately, knows things about you that you yourself don’t know or that you haven’t told anybody or whatever and just responds in those few moments that you’re with her in such a way as to help to move you along, to remedy the situation or to protect you from some harm you might be doing to yourself or about to do or all kinds of situations. Everyone is Different. But it’s really remarkable.

Ram Das: I think she’s taking your suffering onto herself in those moments also. When you see her with tears streaming down the face, she’s taking your suffering and in those tears that she’s shedding on your behalf and she may be taking years of pain from you.

Rick: Yeah, that’s an interesting point in itself. If she is taking your suffering, then obviously the ocean can absorb a lot of dirt, before it gets muddy, whereas a glass of water can’t absorb very much before it gets muddy. And Amma herself on a personal level experiences a lot of suffering. Physically she’s in severe pain from this repetitive motion injury of hugging 30 something million people. She has diabetes, she has various physical difficulties, some problems with her lungs and so on. So she’s not like the epitome of physical Health, and yet she continues to do this thing, and shows very little evidence of what she’s going through. I think if any of us were to actually experience what she’s experiencing physically, without being her, without having her level of consciousness, we’d be like in bed flat, calling for the doctor. –

Ram Das: Probably be instantly dead, actually, with the amount of karma she’s carrying. But she’s never cancelled the darshan program, even though she may be bearing tremendous pain. She just never shows it. I mean maybe at the end of a darshan she’ll get up and and you go, “Oh my god!” She can barely walk for a few steps, but then four or five steps later she’s just again radiant, after one hour of sleep she’ll do the same thing again the next day. So, there’s something superhuman going on there.

Rick: There is. I’ve said it, I’ve seen her have to interrupt the program to go and vomit, because she was physically sick, and then come right back and keep smiling and doing it for quite a few more hours. The rest of us would have said, “I’m off for the day.” I heard Amma say an interesting quote recently, and I think it was her Christmas message this year, New Year’s message, she said, once Amma gives something she can never take it back. So that she’s given her life to the world and she’s just not going to be an Indian giver, so to speak, pun intended, and take it back once it’s given. So, she’s just going to carry on like this regardless of her physical experience or, whatever. It was actually in the context of something where she had to be put in the hospital for a few days because she was having such a hard time of it and yeah, anyway, that’s the point. My wife Irene just passed me a note, she just wanted me to mention that she herself has had many experiences of Amma’s kind of all-knowing nature or omniscience. I have, I have had, and anyway, obviously this is an interview in which we’re just kind of a couple of Amma devotees talking to each other, saying all this stuff. Yeah, but anyway, there are probably there are thousands and thousands of people who could say what, what Irene just said, that it’s kind of a remarkable phenomenon. Let’s talk about you a little bit more. Your book is really interesting and you have kind of a wild and crazy and interesting background of all the stuff you’ve been through over the years. If you feel that that wouldn’t detract from the conversation we’ve been having, it might put it more into a context. The subtitle of your book, “My Wild and Crazy Ride to Here and Now,” there is a sort of divine madness, I think, that many people go through on the spiritual path where, you no longer have the stable moorings of conventional life in the world, and you kind of cast those moorings free and begin to float on an unknown ocean, to mix the same metaphor, more or less. And you can go through years and years and years of pretty crazy stuff as your life gets rearranged on the inside, and your outer life might appear to be rather dysfunctional, rather nutty, rather unconventional, and you don’t care because you’re so fixated, so focused on the inner metamorphosis that you’re trying to go through. So, that in a way is the theme of your book, I would say, isn’t it?

Ram Das: Well, yeah, I had a very, very intense spiritual awakening when I was young. It went from, when I was about 21, I went from, basically, from cynical atheists to deluded prophet within about six months. So, I was studying theater in a theater conservatory college, the State University of New York at Purchase, and I was really a cynical atheist. I had decided when I was in my mid-teens that this whole religion thing was just baloney. I was raised in a Protestant family. We went to church, and we did not believe any of it. I mean, it was like they wanted us to become very good. It was about morality, but we were very clearly told we don’t really believe this stuff about the miracles of Jesus. That’s just a myth that was made up. Science is the truth. And so, I rather fully embraced atheism. By the time I was 16, 17, I was absolutely not buying any of this stuff. And, well, when I was in college, I was trying to become an actor, and I was very unhappy, and so I was in psychotherapy trying to get to the root of my misery and to try to find the root of some new talent which could turn me into a new Marlon Brando. And in theater classes, doing all this emotional expression and all this physical work to free the voice and all these emotional things coming up, and I was looking at my childhood and all the things that had happened. And at some point, I started smoking marijuana, and I think it was these three things, the psychotherapy and the theater and the marijuana, that began to culminate in these epiphanies, where suddenly I began to see the whole world in a new light, and a new understanding would dawn on me, and this might last for two or three days, and then it would fade, and then maybe a couple of weeks later I’d have another one, and it was pretty extraordinary. And this culminated in one night, the whole mind kind of collapsing, and suddenly God was speaking to me, and God, who I hadn’t even believed existed just a week before, is speaking to me in great clarity and showing me tremendous truths that I just had no clue existed. Numerology, yin and yang, there was a discovery in me somehow, I don’t know from a past life or what, but yin and yang came into me like a seed and showed me a vision of the supreme reality which encompassed all and transcended all, and suddenly this supreme reality was speaking to me. And it put me in a whole new territory, and no one in my life knew anything about this stuff, no one who I knew really even believed in God, really, maybe there were people who were religious, but there wasn’t any sense of anybody actually in direct contact with God, no, no one knew about it, and I was in direct contact with God, and it was so real and so powerful and so incredibly exciting that it was like a complete non-sequitur to everything in my life at that time, there was no one I could turn to for advice because no one knew about it, at least as far as I knew, and with the ignorant childhood, that I had, I had little, I did not know there was a spiritual path, I didn’t know anything about saints, I didn’t know there was enlightenment, I didn’t even know about the Catholic saints, this was my upbringing, we didn’t know anything, we knew Jesus was the only divine being who’d ever come to the planet, and then there were two thousand years of spiritual drought, and suddenly me, I had been chosen to be in contact with God, and I had a very powerful experience of meeting an angel, that’s quite a story, it’s in the book, and

Rick: You feel like telling it, or you want to like leave that as a teaser for the book?

Ram Das: Rather too subtle to be told very quickly, but I was taken to a mental hospital afterwards by by the campus security, because I had gone out to meet the angel in the middle of winter barefoot and wearing my biblical bathrobe, and I met the angel by God, and the angel’s name was Serenity, and it was a Very, very profound moment of a discovery of that which is beyond time, it was at the first meeting with the guru, , I don’t know what it was really, but it was a an extraordinary divine experience, and then I was taken to a mental hospital and rapidly talked my way out of the place, I think I spent an hour in the lobby and that was it, but for quite a while I thought, well, I must be the messiah, because God has chosen me, and I just met an angel, and God is speaking to me, and I have this incredible communion happening with the Divine is speaking to me through all these signs, and I’m like, holy, I must be, what explanation could there be other? And this was the, I guess, the problem of growing up in a culture that had, that was completely ignorant as far as the divine reality, but so, this was my awakening, and it was very dramatic, and I was quite deluded for about six months, and I was smoking a lot of marijuana. Marijuana was kind of key to my experience of God at the time, and I want to just, when I say that, I want to point out I have, I quit smoking marijuana and doing any kind of drugs 30 years ago, so, it’s not part of my path anymore at all, but in the beginning it was very key, and when I would smoke a joint in those days, I would glow with the visible light so that people who did not see auras, would suddenly see an aura around me, and It was kind of exciting. People would treat me as if I was the Messiah, people would talk to me as if, “Oh my God, you’re him, aren’t you? You’ve come,” and even when I was clean-shaven and had painted my face with a hideous design- I was at my brother’s university visiting him, and they were having a party, a somehow Vietnam War-themed party- I painted my face in red and black and told everybody I was the ghost of all the dead Vietnamese, but when I smoked a joint and got my usual glow happening, one of the fraternity brothers looked at me for a few minutes, and he said, “It’s cross time, isn’t it?” And I said, “Yeah, you have good eyes, man.” So, there were many, many experiences of this kind, and it wasn’t just light, it was also energy that would fill a whole room, so it was really weird, it was a really weird kind of awakening, which somehow, I don’t know from what past life, I got this weird awakening. But it took me, and I did six months of that, and then fell into a suicidal depression where I began to see myself as someone who had gone crazy, and I lost all my friends, and I thought I was, I thought I was what? I thought I was the messiah, I must be a complete nutcase, complete failure, suicide is the best option here, bum, maybe, so I suffered very much, and then I came back out of that into another six-month messiah trip, and had all kinds of amazing experiences, and then fell back again into another depression, and then it was at the end of the second depression that I came out of that and discovered meditation, and I discovered the book of Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi, and this was the beginning of the end of my insanity. So, my delusion fell away completely, very quickly, I quit smoking weed altogether, and quit smoking cigarettes very quickly, and meditation proved to be, “okay, this is clean, it gives me what I need spiritually, it gives me a glow, maybe not quite so visibly as marijuana”, but boy, it was very sweet, and so I was like, okay, this is the beginning of the end of my craziness, and now I’m on the spiritual path, let me see if I can find my guru, and I, then discovered the books of Ram Dass about Neem Karoli Baba, and had many subtle experiences with Neem Karoli Baba, so I knew, I’m being guided by a God-realized being, I don’t know who my guru is, but I trusted Neem Karoli Baba was going to guide me to my guru, and then I met a beautiful girlfriend who wanted to practice tantric sex, and so we did some of that, and that was very healing, and I studied the Course in Miracles for a couple of years, and that was very empowering, and healing -wasn’t fully my path, but it was beneficial, and then after this I met Amma, and it’s funny because I was trusting Neem Karoli Baba to lead me to my guru, and the night that I realized that Amma was my guru, Ram Dass, the American, the famous American teacher came to see Amma in Boston, and when he was lying in Amma’s lap, receiving her embrace, and she put flower petals over his head, and there was suddenly a little epiphany, “Oh, Amma and Neem Karoli Baba are one being,” and we were in a church that night, and there was a banner of the Holy Spirit, and “Oh, Amma embodies the Holy Spirit,” and then the cross is there, “Amma embodies Christ,” and suddenly it was like the whole universe was saying, “Yes, she embodies all the forms of God, all the masters you’ve ever read of, she is your guru, and this is why you’ve come to the earth,” and so, I’m having this huge divine revelation of, “Oh my God, oh my God, I want so much to be called by her. Yes, she’s my guru, but shouldn’t she tell me so?” So, I went up in the darshan queue, burning with this desire to be called by her, and when she gave me the hug, she whispered in my ear, “Join us,” and joining is an essential concept in the Course in Miracles. You join with your brother to discover that there’s really only Christ in both of you, and hearing her say, “Join us,” it was like it wasn’t even in Indian English, it was an accentless English. It was like there was no doubt God was speaking directly through her, and she was God, and it was an explosion that it was like the end of the old life, beginning of the new life. I was ready to take a new name, I was ready to leave everything in my God, I found God incarnate, and it was this beginning of huge love, and it put the whole Messiah trip I had been through, and all the suffering I had been through, in a whole new perspective, and I fell completely in love with Amma, and I guess that love has continued ever since, and only gotten deeper and deeper and deeper, and my experience of who and what she is has only gotten deeper and deeper and deeper, the more and more full of the revelation that she’s actually God in a human disguise, it’s just become more and more strong. So that’s the summary of it, and it’s a very funny story how I overcame my Messiah delusion, and all the little experiences I had along the way, and it’s a fun book. I’ll just hold up the book cover.

Rick: Sure.

Ram Das: “Rising in Love, My Wild and Crazy Ride to Here and Now with Amma the Hugging Saint.” It is a lot of fun.

Rick: Yeah, you’re a good writer, it’s a fun book, and there’s all kinds of interesting little stories in it, just different cosmic little events, that helped to, I think, convince people that, , there is more to life than meets the eye, and that someone like Amma could exist, to know things and do things that, ordinarily people don’t know or do, just this little insightful connection kind of things that I don’t know, I thought it was very beautifully depicted.

Ram Das: It’s a fun book, and people are, I’m getting a lot of really positive feedback, people who I don’t know on Twitter are writing me and saying, “Oh my God, I laughed hysterically and cried throughout your whole book.” Yeah. And somebody else saying, “My chakras were opening, my mind is racing, I’m having an awakening just from reading your book.” And there’s been like five or six people saying, “I received Amma’s darshan through your book.”

Rick: Cool.

Ram Das: So, that’s pretty damn amazing. Yeah. what happened recently, which was really fun, is that Russell Brand came to the ashram at New Year’s, and I happened to be giving prasad, sitting next to Amma, passing her the candies, when he came up and received a mantra from Amma. And I thought, “Russell Brand’s getting a mantra, that’s pretty cool.” And some little light bulb went in my head, “Oh, I bet he would really like my book.” So, I better not miss this opportunity, he might be here only one more day. So, I I went and wrapped up the book and put a letter in it, and the next day I happened to find him at just the right moment, and gave him a big, beautiful hug, and we had a very nice couple of minutes together. And I gave him the book and he said, “Oh, I’m gonna check this out.” And a couple of days later, he posted a photo of himself reading the book on Twitter and Facebook to a combined audience of 11.7 million people. So, this has suddenly got this global publicity going. It’s fantastic publicity.

Rick: Yeah, did you notice a big spike in book orders at that point? I honestly haven’t been checking. I haven’t been following the book orders so closely.

Rick: Yeah. Yeah, I’m hoping that Russell read my introduction to your book so that somehow or other it’ll enable me to do an interview with him. I’d love to do that. He’s a lot of fun. A lot of your book, not a lot, but a fair amount of your book has to do with your various struggles with relationships, your attempt to be celibate, and then various relationships you went through, and then your marriage, and some of the difficulties you face in your marriage. You want to talk about that kind of thing a little bit? Because a lot of people, everybody has this in their life, and people appreciate hearing somebody else’s take on how to deal with it all.

Ram Das: Well, yeah. When I first met Amma, I was actually in a relationship with a woman. This was a woman that we were practicing some tantric sex, and that was very beautiful. I liked her, and she liked me, and we were thinking, well, maybe we should get married. But after I had been with her for about a year, I was feeling actually very full, as if, I’m really not that interested in sex anymore. It’s like, it’s okay, but it’s like, when you haven’t had it, there was that huge hunger for it. But once I’d had it, and I had a very fulfilling sex life with practicing tantra together, and I was like, wow. Then, suddenly, I didn’t really care that much about it. And I was like, what I really wanted was to find out what these yogis in autobiography of the yogi had found. I wanted to become a monk and live in India. So, when I then told Amma that I wanted to become a monk, at basically our first meeting, she laughed hysterically, and she laughed, and laughed, and laughed, and laughed, and she’s holding somebody on her lap, and giving them a tremendous ride while she laughs and laughs like I’ve never seen anybody laugh before, as if this is the funniest thing. Probably, you’ve never seen anybody with so much sexual desire saying they want to become a monk. I think that was probably the root of it. I think she was also seeing my entire messiah trip, and having a great laugh about all that also. But she’s basically, I can tell that story. I suppose we have time for that.

Rick: Sure, we have time.

Ram Das: Yeah. She said, “There’s a name for the kind of sannyasin you would be.” Sannyasin is monk, and I had said I want to become a sannyasin. So, she said, and this was being translated out loud, in those days, the questions were translated for everybody. So, everybody heard the question and the answer. She said, “There’s a name for the kind of sannyasin you would be. When a newly married husband has his first quarrel with his wife, sometimes they’ll say, I’m leaving you and renouncing the world, and they’ll put on an orange robe and go out into the town, and within a few days, he’ll be winking at all the women and making all kinds of mischief. That’s the kind of sannyasin you would be.” And then she said, “You have a mind like a cat. No matter how much you feed it, it will always be stealing something.” And actually, this was sort of reflecting something that, in some of my earlier years, I had actually done a little bit of mild shoplifting. When I was working as a waiter, in my anger and my frustration at everybody, I would steal a pair of salt and pepper shakers and steal it. I had brought, it was probably about fifty dollars altogether worth of stuff I had stolen. It wasn’t a lot of stuff, but nonetheless, it was a pretty nasty little sin. And there was something about her saying, it will always be stealing something. I said, oh, I wonder if she knows about that. There was, of course, a moment earlier where I had decided I had to renounce all of those kind of wrong actions. I woke up a little to spirituality and realized I had been really on the wrong path. But anyway, so I decided, I said, okay, after this darshan where she had laughed at me and, said basically, you’re not a monk material buddy, I said, wait a minute, that’s the goal of my life. I want this so much. I have to have this. And, oh my god, I’m not giving up so easily. Give me a sign. So, as I was driving back home, I said, give me a sign, God. Then I was driving through all these little towns in Massachusetts and I kept seeing in every single town, Maple Street, every town. I saw five or six of them and I was like, wait a second, is that the sign? And I understood may pull. If you really want to become a monk, you may pull for that goal and Amma will help you. So, I got this very clear message. So, I decided then and there, yes, I’m going to do it. I’m going to pull for that. Whether I succeed, I don’t know, but I’m going to try. And so, within a couple of months, my girlfriend and I had broken up. It just naturally kind of happened. And I moved in with some friends who were doing a spiritual community and sort of decided, let me increase my meditation time from two hours to four hours a day and let me try to become a sannyasi. And then fairly quickly, I had a rather powerful miracle from Amma. I don’t want to tell the whole story, but at a time when I was stuck in a snow drift.

Rick: Oh, that was amazing. Yeah, I read that story.

Ram Das: Quite a powerful story. She literally manifested a jack in the trunk of my car which had a piece of candy wedged into it.

Rick: Yeah, I just read that last night and it’s like you were trying to get your thing out of the snow drift, your car, and you already had one jack and you’ve been working and working and you needed two jacks to really get it out. And you’d been getting sand from a bag in the trunk and you couldn’t get it out. So, you opened up the trunk again and there on top of the bag of sand, which you’d been getting sand out of all this time, was a new jack that hadn’t been there, and it had a piece of candy wedged in it. So, that was kind of amazing.

Ram Das: It was amazing and I knew in that moment this is a miracle. This is like a biblical miracle I’m seeing. Absolutely. And I took the piece of candy and ate it and had a moment of ecstasy and put the second jack in there and vroom, we got out without any more struggle. So, this was definitely a sign that there’s very powerful grace here. But to get back to the relationship question, so then I was determined to become a monk. And so, there were some ladies in the town where I was living there in Massachusetts who were winking at me and sort of, “Hey, would you like to have dinner with me? Are you sure?” and I was like, “I’m so sorry, but I’m going to become a sannyasin.” So, I pushed that away and ended up going to Amma’s ashram and as a brahmachari with the determination, I’m going to become a sannyasin. I wanted so much to be a brahmachari. And for a couple of years, it was, I was just very engulfed in the ashram life. I was doing my best to meditate all day and do seva and be fully absorbed in Amma’s scene and I didn’t have much difficulty with sexual desire. It was kind of a bit of grace from  Amma. And then I went through a period of suddenly very, very intense lust and struggling with it very intensely. And there was one woman in the ashram and I think she wanted to have a kid and I felt like, “Oh my god, I’m so in love with this woman,, and she’s so in love with me and I’m going absolutely crazy. I was trying to push it away. No, I don’t want that.” And yet, all night long, I’d be, “Oh my god, I want that. I want that. I want that.” And so, I suffered very much and it’s, I tell you, a funny chapter in the book where I really wanted to get married and surrendering all that to Amma and praying to Amma for her help and her guidance and, giving her a series of notes where I said, “Amma, take this away. I don’t want any of that. I want only God realization.” And then a week later, “Amma, I will marry anyone you say.” So rapidly crumbling discrimination and renunciation there. And then finally, , Amma gave the final answer to the question which was, “Don’t change your path.” It was just kind of in code saying, “Stay celibate.”

Rick: Keep on trucking, yeah.

Ram Das: Keep on trucking. And so, I went through…

Rick: Not the opposite thing which rhymes with trucking, right?

Ram Das: That’s right, absolutely. That’s not what the way for. At that moment, anyway, she didn’t give that guidance. So, I cried a puddle of tears and, and then, fairly quickly accepted that this was God’s guidance on the matter and let the relationship idea go. And got busy writing a new play for Amma. I was writing plays for her in those days which we were performing on the US tour.

Rick: Let’s just have you interject. Let me just interject a question, have you elaborate on this. There are people who say, , this whole thing about being celibate and being a monk and all that stuff has nothing to do with realization. It was just some kind of cultural, male-dominated society issue that crept into spirituality and that it’s really irrelevant. And, , just do what you like in that department and it won’t make any difference as far as your realization. So, how would you address that and, how would you justify the determination with which you tried to maintain this, celibate lifestyle?

Ram Das: Well, I should probably, before I do that, I should probably just tell you a little bit of the rest of my story around this question. Is that at one point I actually left Amma’s organization. As guided by Amma on the inner plane, I left and I went to several other gurus. I spent actually seven years outside of the ashram. I would come to see Amma every few months but I was not in the organization anymore. And towards the end of that time I was brought together with a young woman. Another guru brought us together and we decided to get engaged and we ended up coming back to Amma’s ashram and Amma married us. So, and we’ve been living together at Amma’s ashram for the last 13 years and we haven’t been celibate. In fact, we went to her and at one point I said, Amma, I maybe would like to become celibate now. We can be brother and sister living together and my wife was like, I don’t want that. Come on, I want a full sex life. And Amma told, no, you should not be celibate. You’re married and you have to fulfill this for your wife and accept. So it was like we were very specifically guided to not be celibate and to live a normal married life. And I have to tell you that my spiritual life has only gotten better since then.

Rick: And were you able to do that without any kind of hang-up or conflict? Since you had brow-beaten yourself so severely for so many years over the celibacy thing, were you able to just sort of relax on it and put it behind you and just live a normal sex life or were you still kind of a little inhibited or hung up?

Ram Das: I think there was a transition there but it wasn’t a long transition. I like sex. I’ve always been very sexual in my thinking. I grew up as a normal American kid And when I was in high school, I think sex was probably 90 percent of the contents of my mind.

Rick: As with most high school kids.

Ram Das: Yeah, celibacy is very foreign to my nature, really. So, to come back into having a very fulfilling sex life has been just sweet and natural, really. It’s been very nice.

Rick: You don’t find it draining or anything like that?

Ram Das: No, I don’t. Considering that now I’m having these wonderful meditation Samadhi experiences, I have to agree with these people who say it really doesn’t matter. But at the same time, I’m very glad that I spent the early years with Amma as a brahmachari and struggled and struggled to, because basically it’s a form of prayer which is, I want God more than anything in this world. And it is a powerful channeling of all your energies. And I think, if there are many times when, a young man will spend most of his energy seeking sex, seeking a new partner and then they break up and he gets all engrossed in the emotional drama of that and then eventually finds another partner. And there’s no time for God. And when you’re being, like, when you’re having a lot of sexual pleasure, you don’t necessarily have much energy left to seek God. So, I think there’s a value in both ways. I’m glad I spent years struggling with it and years as a celibate seeking, seeking, seeking. But now to have the fulfillment of the marriage and also to have beautiful samadhi experiences like this is just great. I have the best of both worlds and I’m very content with God’s gift. can’t be unhappy with this lifetime. It’s been fantastic.

Rick: Great. And in your notes that you sent me, you said something about difficulties you faced in your marriage. Is that what you were just alluding to or is there something else?

Ram Das: Yeah, that’s, well, we’ve been through tough times. It hasn’t been the easiest of marriages. I think this is also, comes along with the package, that Amma gave, gave a challenging marriage which would make me really work to develop compassion and forgiveness and Patience. And my wife has had her difficulties with faith at times. So, there was a period where she really sort of fell out of love with Amma for a while and lost her faith in Amma and that was very difficult for us to walk through together. And Amma really, really helped us to walk through that time and kept us together. At one point we thought maybe we should divorce. I thought we were going to divorce and I finally went up to Amma and received a hug and I gave her a note saying, “Should my wife and I divorce?” And Amma said no. And I’m so grateful that …

Rick: She doesn’t always say no, by the way.

Ram Das: No, I’m sure she doesn’t. But in this case it was very beneficial that she kept us together and I ended up going to Venezuela to be with my wife there for some time and learning Spanish and teaching in Spanish and it enabled a whole new level for my life, a new fulfillment. Because in English, the teaching thing wasn’t likely to happen. In Venezuela, suddenly, naturally, I was teaching in Spanish and we were giving Satsang and I ended up giving this full university course in Spanish, which I wrote myself with a little help from my wife and a translator. So, this opened up a whole new level of my life. And then, my wife regained her faith. And yeah, so it’s been very, very sweet.

Rick: Yeah.

Ram Das: There’s a beautiful story, if you don’t mind, I’ll just tell a quick story about how my wife was called by Amma. She was in India, her whole family was in India, in another ashram and her parents were the devotees of another saint. And her father is a writer and he was just finishing up his writing work for the day and he was feeling really tired. He said, “Let me just meditate lying down before I go to sleep.” And he starts feeling this very deep, unusually deep level of peace. And suddenly he feels like there’s another being in the room and he opens his eyes and he sees Amma standing in the room in a living form. And she says to him, “Give me your baby.” And he said, “Mother, I have no babies. My daughters are all grown women.” And she says, “Give me your baby, Tarini Ma.” And then she vanishes from the room. And Tarinima is my wife’s name. So, and he comes out of his room and sees her and says, “Daughter, go to Kerala at once. The Divine Mother is calling you.” This gives us a nice story because it gives a clue as to Amma’s not just a nice lady giving hugs, she’s more in the realm of Jesus Christ.

Rick: Yeah, and there are a number of stories like that too. If you start reading the books about Amma, there’s this series called “Awakened Children” and there are all kinds of stories like that where she’ll show up and say something to somebody and then they’ll come to the ashram and she knows all about it and it was all kind of like perfect and it’s pretty far out actually.

Ram Das: It’s pretty far out and it seemed to me even more far out the fact that she pretends to be just an ordinary lady.

Rick: So, why did you come back to the ashram after seven years of bopping around India visiting other gurus?

Ram Das: Well, I guess you would have to say it was God’s will, the whole thing really. She pulled me back. It was just, it was time to come back. She did it through my wife because I was with another guru. I had stayed with many different gurus and at that time I was living outside the ashram of this guru, and I said well the divine mothers put me here and when Tarini Ma basically fell in love with Amma, she came down to meet Amma and fell in love with her. I said, “well okay that’s fine, but I’ll go down to Amma’s ashram and visit Tarini Ma there and I’ll also have Amma’s darshan.” I totally still love Amma and I knew Amma was God, but somehow God had put me out and put me in another situation and I didn’t see any need to change it. But then I was going to, I would go to Tiruvannamalai for a while then I would go down to see Amma and see Tarini Ma down there and then I would go back to this other ashram where I was living and I did this two or three times and then Amma sent a note to our room, sent someone to our room to tell us that she said what she said was since Tarini Ma is focusing on Amma then she should stay here. But since you’re focusing on this other guru then it’s not good for your spiritual life to be coming here and seeing Amma, it will only distract you, so you shouldn’t come here anymore. If you want to come it could only be for two days at a time but at the same time if you want to get Married, then you can, Amma gives her blessing. So, we were left with this perplexing message that “oh you can get married if you want to, but you can’t stay, you can’t be together because she’s going to be here and you’re going to be there.” So, we were left with this rather confusing message. I thought this has to be a leela, I don’t know what this can be but it doesn’t make much sense so let’s see what happened. So, we went back together to see this other guru where I was living and every day when he came out for his Darshan, I suddenly began hearing very clearly from him “it’s now time to return to Amma and lay your life at her feet.” I heard the same message seven days in a row and I was like okay I get it.

Rick: He wasn’t saying that, you were just sort of feeling that, right?

Ram Das: Well, my relationship with him was something where I would hear his voice in the same way that I hear Amma’s voice. I heard his voice very clearly and I had no doubt that he was, It had been confirmed hundreds of times, I was receiving direct communication from him on the inner plane. So, this was one of thousands of these communications where yes, he was telling me very clearly on the inner plane it’s now time to return to Amma and lay your life at her feet. So, then it was very clear that’s what was meant to happen and we went back to Amma and I explained to her this is what I have received. I’m going to be coming back here now and she very quickly accepted me back in the ashram fully and so, it was fairly easily accomplished the move.

Rick: Nice. Okay, well there are tons of things in your book which we could use as springboards for discussion but we’ve been going on for a while here now so maybe we should wrap it up, but I want to just make sure that there isn’t something that’s important to you that you feel we haven’t covered. I always like to ask that towards the end of an interview: is there anything you’d like to talk about that I haven’t thought to ask?

Ram Das: Well one thing I would like to mention is that all the royalties from the sale of Rising in Love will be going to Amma’s orphanage. Amma actually has three orphanages. This money will all be going to her orphanage in India and that’s a charitable part. And it’s nice because I know you don’t have a lot of money. Like I asked you if you’re coming to the states this summer that we might do this interview in person and you said we don’t really have the money to come there so it’s nice of you that you’re donating it that way.

Ram Das: Yeah I’m happy to do that. It’s my whole life story in the book and I’m really happy to just lay it all at Amma’s feet. I want her to take all the karma. I don’t want any karma so I’m very happy to give all the money to the orphanage.

Rick: Yeah, how do you generate money? How do you support yourself? Just these tours that you organize?

Ram Das: We have a couple of- yes the tours is a one main way and these are really fun, so I would like to invite anybody who’s interested in coming to India to do tours with us. We do really five-star tours. We have beautiful- my wife selects very, very good hotels and very good transportation and we go to the holy cities and we go to actually meet some of the living saints in India. And I give classes during the retreats about various aspects of Hinduism and I try to convey the essence of Hinduism so it’s not just a tour of locations. We’re trying to give the essence. So, people are really enjoying the tours.

Rick: So on your page on batgap.com, I’ll link to whatever website presents these tours. You have some website that talks about them?

Ram Das: yeah, if you come in, I’ll just hold up the website here. It’s the risinginlove.org

Rick: Oh, the rising in love website.

Ram Das: www.risinginlove.org

Rick: rising-inlove.org and I’ll be linking to that.

Ram Das: Okay, so rising-inlove.org If you go to the first page at the bottom of the page, my email address is there. Okay. So, we’re still putting together our English website. Previously we were working with the Spanish website.

Rick: I see.

Ram Das: So we do both Spanish and English, but if you come into that rising-inlove.org site, you can find my email address and contact me and I’ll send you the latest about the tours we’re giving. And if you have a group we can organize a tour especially for you according to your own itinerary.

Rick: You go all over the place, north and south India, the whole thing?

Ram Das: We do everything.

Rick: Cool. Do you like go way up to Gangotri or anything like that?

Ram Das: We haven’t done that yet but we want to. We’re looking at even going into Tibet and Nepal.

Rick: Cool. Well, that’s a fun life you’re living.

Ram Das: We have a good life. We have so much fun.

Rick: Yeah. That’s great. Alrighty, well I think this has given people a nice taste of what Amma is all about through two people’s perspective, primarily yours. But maybe it will interest people to go and see her. Incidentally she tours all over the world so she’ll be touring Singapore, Australia, Japan pretty soon I think. And then she comes to the States and goes all over the place. Amma.org is the website where you can find tour information. And then in the fall she goes to Europe and then she comes back to the States and then she tours all over India. So, she gets around and chances are she’ll be… Pardon?

Ram Das: She sure does get around.

Rick: Yeah, she does. And I don’t know how many more years she’ll be able to do this. You always wonder whether this might be the last year or something because it’s very arduous but she keeps on doing it. So yeah, make hay while the sun shines.

Ram Das: Yeah, sometimes I wish she would stay in one place only so we could have easier access to her because following after her around the world is just too difficult for me.

Rick: Yeah, but it’s also too difficult.

Ram Das: But it’s lovely that she can come to people’s hometowns. She comes to Seattle at the end of May and ends up on the east coast by, what is it, end of July.

Rick: Yeah, end of July. And in the meanwhile goes to Seattle, Bay Area, Los Angeles, Santa Fe, Dallas, Chicago, and then up the east coast. And she may end up coming to Atlanta one of these days soon, she said she would. But it’s all… next summer’s tour is all sort of tentative and unannounced so far.

Ram Das: Yeah.

Rick: And Toronto, she also goes to Toronto. Yeah, okay, great. Well, let’s wrap it up. So, I’ve been speaking with Ram Dass Batchelder, who has written this book, “Rising in Love, My Wild and Crazy Ride to Here and Now.” I’ll be linking to his website and to the book on his page on batgap.com, as well as putting up a bio of him. And you can get in touch with him, get the book if you want, and take it from there. This show that you’re watching is part of an ongoing series. There are about 270-something of them now, and you can find them all at batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P. You’ll find their past interviews menu, and under that they’re categorized, all the past interviews are categorized in various ways. There’s a future interview’s menu showing what’s coming up. There’s a donate button, which I… that’s how I support being able to do this. I don’t give tours. There is a place to be notified of upcoming… of new interviews as they’re posted. There’s an email sign-up thing, and a bunch of other things. Explore the menus and you’ll see what’s there. So, thanks Ram Das, it’s been a lot of fun.

Ram Das: It’s been really nice to talk with you, Rick, really a pleasure.

Rick: Good, and we’ll hopefully meet you in person one of these days.

Ram Das: Yeah, definitely, this summer hopefully.

Rick: Yeah, that’d be great. All right, thanks, talk to you later. Beautiful, thank you very much.

Ram Das: Om Namah Shivaya.

Rick: Om Namah Shivaya.