Steve Briggs Transcript - Buddha at the Gas Pump

Summary

Steve Briggs describes how meditation and intense athletic focus opened experiences of heightened awareness, inner stillness, and effortless performance. He also recounts transformative encounters with Maharishi and Kali, exploring witnessing, devotion, and the relationship between spiritual practice and embodied activity.

Questions This Interview Explores

Can meditation improve athletic performance and help someone enter the zone?
What is witnessing, and how does it differ from mentally observing oneself?
Can spiritual experiences arise through intense focus, devotion, or ordinary activity?
How can encounters with a guru or deity transform one’s inner awareness?

Key takeaways

Deep focus can produce a state of clarity, intuition, and effortless performance.
Meditation may support both spiritual development and refined physical skill.
True witnessing enhances participation rather than making a person detached or dysfunctional.
Spiritual awareness can remain present during sleep, activity, and changing mental states.
Devotion can quiet thought and fill experience with a profound sense of inner light.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done hundreds of them now, and if you find this interesting and would like to check out previous ones, please go to BatGap.com and look under the past interviews menu.

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My guest today is an old friend of mine, Steve Briggs, who is sitting here. Steve and I have known each other for decades because of our background in the TM movement, Transcendental Meditation. We had adventures together in France and Switzerland and India, and now in Iowa, where I see Steve several times a week because I go up to the gym and he teaches tennis up there.

Steve was sort of a tennis prodigy in his youth, as we’ll probably be talking about here, and went to the University of Arizona on a tennis scholarship. I would say his main love, though, is spirituality, which there’s probably some overlap with. Tennis can have a spiritual dimension, as I think we’ll actually be discussing, and so, consequently, he met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at a meditation retreat in the Swiss Alps in probably the ’70s.

Steve: ’73.

Rick: And eventually became a TM teacher and spent a lot of time in India—seven years, actually—teaching TM to corporate executives. During that time, he also traveled around and went to the Himalayas many times, where he encountered many yogis and sadhus, and he has some interesting stories about that.

Steve is a devotee of Mata Amritanandamayi, Amma, whom he met in India in 1996. He still practices TM, has been doing that for the past 46 years, and he credits Maharishi, his guru, with showing him the path to enlightenment.

Steve has written two books. The first is India: Mirror of Truth, which came out about 15 years ago.

Steve: Yeah, in 2006.

Rick: Which I read at the time and found fascinating. More recently, this is nonfiction chronicling Steve’s adventures in India. This one is fiction, but also based largely on his experiences with yogis and saints and so on: The Tale of the Himalayan Yogis. I’ve been reading that one. I’d forgotten—you’d never written any fiction before, so…

Steve: That was the first try.

Rick: Yeah, I was pleasantly surprised at that. Wow, I couldn’t possibly do this. Somehow, you just churn the stuff out.

Steve: Well, when I got to the University of Arizona, where I went ostensibly to be a tennis player on a scholarship, I thought I was going to be a creative writing major. I went into a creative writing seminar with graduate students and an author-professor, and I was totally intimidated by the things I was asked to write and read.

I immediately shifted over to literature, and I did not write for a long time, because it was just more than my confidence level in my writing at that time. So I left it for some time, but eventually, things that you love to do, you get back to. I started writing.

Rick: And they say if you want to be a good writer, read good writing, and so you must have done a lot of that as a literature major.

Steve: I thoroughly found it a great experience to read Shakespeare and whoever else I read. It was just a really great experience.

Rick: Abraham Lincoln did that. He read Shakespeare every day, and he credited his love of good writing with his eloquence and ability to speak well. Of course, many others say that as well.

Steve: I didn’t know that.

Rick: Yeah. Now, I guess there will be two aspects to this interview. One, we could say, is the inner aspect, and the other the outer aspect. The inner aspect would be your subjective development over these decades, and the outer aspect would be some of the very interesting experiences you’ve had and people you’ve encountered and so on.

So maybe we should start with the inner aspect. Right after you learned to meditate, was your experience significant? Actually, prior to learning to meditate, did you have any kind of spiritual inclinations, even as a much younger person?

🕊️ The zone and the beginnings of spiritual interest

Steve: I was in college when I learned to meditate, and the very first time I sat down and “transcended”—I was given a mantra and sat down for 10 minutes to meditate in the room—my first thought after I had the experience was, “I’ve had that before. I’ve clearly had that experience before.”

The reason why I believe I could say that honestly is because, as a young tennis player growing up in athletics in a family that was just crazy over sports, I started playing tournament tennis when I was six years old and got into the national tournaments, I think, by the time I was nine or ten. I was playing all around the country, and by the time I was 15, my brother and I—he was two years older—and I had become pretty well-established, highly ranked players.

I was playing a guy on the stadium court in Kalamazoo, Michigan, at the U.S. National Junior Championships. He was ranked about tenth in the country and was from Pacific Palisades, California. It was a really close match, and I was having a big problem picking up the ball—not picking it up from the ground, but picking up his shot, seeing the ball.

The backgrounds had a red, white, and blue banner behind the server, and every time he served, I’d lose the ball in the banner. I thought, “I’ve got to do something about this fast, because I’m not getting into the points where I should be.” I started focusing more and trying different things because I really had to pick up the ball, see the ball.

As a result of that increased focus and obviously a big desire to win, I was playing on the stadium court, with probably 1,500 people watching in the stadium, and a shift started to occur. It took about 10 minutes to fully occur, but it was an internal shift. Nothing in the match had really changed. We were 50/50: he won the first set, I won the second set, and we were getting down to the final stages of the match when this huge shift occurred.

I started to be very lucid internally. My mind was picking up the things he was about to do, but he hadn’t done them yet. I thought, “Okay, I’ve got a real advantage here.” I sensed where he was going to serve, and I knew where he was going to hit the ball. I was a step ahead of him. I was a step ahead of what I usually did as a tennis player, and I went on and won the match. That put me in a great position in the national tournament.

I had no idea what had happened, except I knew something in my awareness had changed. It wasn’t just being more alert, because you can be more alert while driving, but you don’t necessarily know what is going to happen a moment before it happens. It may be that way, but I felt almost prescient. I just said, “This is cool.”

Then I started finding out that other tennis players—not, of course, only tennis players, but skiers, joggers, and basketball players—talked about being in what they referred to as “the zone.” Back then, that was a layman’s term. Getting in the zone meant everything, and people used to say, “Michael Jordan, he’s in the zone again,” because he would just kill everybody and make ten shots in a row.

The human relationship to the laws of nature may be very different than we think.

Turning Peak Performance into a Repeatable State

I identified that. “Okay, I was in the zone.” But then the next question, two months later, was, “All right, so I was in the zone. Was it an accident? Could I have that again? Could I have it regularly? Could I find some way to make it happen?” Because that’s a huge competitive advantage.

I didn’t know of any way or means to make it happen other than to try to redo the same things, but it didn’t work the next time.

Okay, so then we fast-forward to high school, or back in school. I’m a sophomore at Rock Island High School, and my AP English literature teacher said, “Okay, pick one of four novels.” She wrote the names on the board, and the fourth title was totally different from the other ones, which were clearly English-type titles. The fourth one was Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse.

I chose that on a whim, and I read it and thought, “There’s something really unique here embedded in what he’s saying.” It was a story of two friends who went to meet the Buddha. One friend stayed with the Buddha, and the other one loved his wisdom—or, sorry, loved who he represented, who the Buddha embodied—but decided to go on his own path.

Both were on a big spiritual, lifetime path. After reading that, I started thinking, “Maybe I should meditate. Maybe I should do some yoga.” But how do you do that on your own? You get a book from the library in 1968 or something, and you don’t go very far.

Rick:Siddhartha kind of got me going. And Timothy Leary…

Steve: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: So that was kind of the jump-start, officially, in my mind, knowing there was something that I thought might help me. It just so happened that it came from the East. In reading the book, I realized that this was an Indian story of two Indian boys who charted their spiritual path, and that didn’t lead me very far except to experiment. Then, very soon, in my first year of college, two or three years later, I got to TM.

Steve: I saw a poster or something?

Rick: Yes, in a Shakespeare classroom. Maharishi’s picture was there, and I kept turning to the picture. I think I was studying King Lear, or whatever, and kept turning to the picture. Of course, the picture won.

Steve: Yeah. King Lear didn’t do so well.

Rick: Okay, so you learned, and you had this profound experience, and it was reminiscent of…

Steve: On the day of instruction, we went in and sat down. My teacher had been to Europe to be with Maharishi. He gave me this instruction and a mantra, and I sat down and just sank into a lake. I went to the bottom, sat there, and when I came out, I said, “I’ve had that. I had that before.”

Maybe now this would be how I could replicate it and do something for my tennis. Honestly, within six months, my game took a big step forward. By the spring of our season—we had a very good team at Arizona—we were in the top ten in the NCAA every year that I was there.

Five of our eight players were meditating, much to the disappointment of our coach, because we were meditating when he wanted to sit down to breakfast in the hotel and talk to us. We were always meditating. I don’t know what his real feelings were, but anyway, we were pretty dedicated because everyone was playing very well as a result.

Rick: That’s great.

Steve: Not long after that, I just have one more bit about the tennis. We actually taught a lot of the top players in the world, Arthur Ashe and so forth, to meditate, and two or three of them said the same thing: “I’ve had this experience before.”

More recently, I came across a book about how to develop children’s potential in life, about a substance or quality in the brain that surrounds the neurons called myelin. The book was titled The Talent Code, by a guy named Daniel Coyle.

Daniel Coyle went all over the world to find out what the commonalities were, what the common features were, in places like Brazil, where they have an inordinate number of great soccer players; Moscow, Russia, where they have a ridiculously high number of great tennis players; and North Korea, where the women have dominated the professional golf scene. Maybe 15 out of the top 30 are from Korea. It’s just outrageous.

Rick: The Dominican Republic in baseball.

Steve: Dominican Republic baseball. Some little town in Texas that had a lot of country-western singers. This study that he did was to see if something that surrounds the neuron in the brain, called myelin—if that sheath was somehow enhanced or made stronger as a result of repeated athletic performance, musical performance, or dance performance, where you train rigorously and with focus but in a joyful way.

And that’s what they found. They found that people who spend long hours in focused activities, people who do things they’re passionate about, do develop this myelin sheathing of the neurons. That myelin gives a smoother, more consistent, more effective, and more efficient transfer of information through the brain to other parts of the body, and that’s very helpful in performance.

Imagine the analogy of these 16-year-old Olympic girls who are gold medalists in ice skating. They perform these mind-boggling gymnastic feats on skates in front of how many millions of people, and they’ve repeated that performance so many times that it is second nature for them. Their brain finds its way through, and brain functioning is benefited by this myelin sheathing that helps insulate the neurons and all those types of things. They perform spectacularly under the heaviest pressure.

Rick: Yeah, what always gets me is these little girls who can do backflips on a balance beam and stuff like that.

Steve: The beams are only a few inches wide.

Rick: A few inches wide. I believe a neurophysiologist could comment a lot more eloquently, but I believe that destruction or deterioration of the myelin sheath is involved in such diseases as multiple sclerosis. I know there’s research on meditation that shows a thickening of the frontal cortex and actual physical restructuring of the brain in people who have been meditating for a long time, and the term neuroplasticity is very popular. A guy I interviewed named Rick Hanson is one of the primary authors on that. Anyway.

Steve: If you look at it, America is really into athletic heroes. You’ve got your—

Rick: Tiger Woods just won—

Steve: Tiger Woods, right. We’ve got Steph Curry, LeBron James, and Michael Jordan. From Europe, in tennis, you’ve got Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, and Serena Williams, of course, who grew up in Los Angeles and lives in Florida, I believe. These are role models for many, many, many millions of kids.

Rick: You told me the New York Times did an article entitled “Roger Federer as Religious Experience.”

Steve: Yeah. When you see him, he looks like Baryshnikov. It’s balletic, what he does. It’s so graceful, so coordinated, so transcendent, so effortless, it appears—

Rick: Yeah.

Steve: Now, we don’t see what he does behind the scenes. We don’t see all the work he puts in to develop the brain physiology and the physical skills, but we see the beautiful end product, and he doesn’t ever want to quit. He just loves doing it. He’s 37, which is not old as human beings go, but it’s ancient, very old for tennis, because the wheels, the legs—

Rick: And he’s still winning.

Steve: Yes, he’s still number two in the world, and he’s got 20 Grand Slams.

Rick: Wow, that’s great. Okay, well, this interview is not going to be all about sports, but it’s important. I mean, it’s important to have a healthy body, for one thing. Most of us aren’t going to be professional athletes, but the body is the vehicle through which enlightenment or spiritual evolution takes place.

This is one thing I realized when I was about 18 and had been damaging my vehicle for some time. I realized you’re stuck in this body, and if you damage it, you’re going to be stuck all of your life in a damaged body. So I thought, that’s it, I’m going to stop taking drugs, learn to meditate, and turn it around.

This is one thing I realized when I was about 18 and had been damaging my vehicle for some time. I realized you’re stuck in this body, and if you damage it, you’re going to be stuck all of your life in a damaged body. So I thought, that’s it, I’m going to stop taking drugs, learn to meditate, and turn it around.

Steve: Yeah. Well, tennis is one of many, many great musicians’ and dancers’ activities, but the interesting thing with tennis specifically is that it began with a bit of a spiritual-religious beginning. It was very popular in European monastic life. It was an indoor game, slightly different, but it was played with an early version of a racket and a ball. The monks, the monastics, used to go in after their lunch or sometime during the afternoon and hit it around.

Rick: Yeah, actually, it feels good if you’ve spent a lot of your time meditating to do something rather strenuous. It helps to integrate and counterbalance all that sitting.

Steve: Interestingly enough, probably that early version of tennis was more like your game, pickleball, because I don’t think it had strings in the rackets, and the balls were not the same as tennis balls. But it was very popular, and then it became a sport that the kings in France and England took up.

✨ Milestones in consciousness

Rick: Yeah. So you learned to meditate in the early ’70s, probably about 45 years ago, or more, or almost about that much. If you look back over those 45 years, are there milestones that stand out in your memory in terms of your subjective development as being significant shifts of some sort?

Steve: I’d say there are three or four. I’ve given some thought to that over the years, and there are three or four, and three of them relate to saint or guru figures. We can start with those, if we like.

Rick: Okay.

Steve: Well, the first one was in the early ’90s. I was visiting with Maharishi in Holland. He had moved from Switzerland to Holland, and he was preparing us for this project that I spent seven years in India doing, teaching TM to corporate people, which was what this memoir travel book was about.

I was sitting with Maharishi one night with a couple of the other people who were on their way to India with me, and he kept looking over my head. I don’t know why, but I just noticed he was looking over my head, and I was feeling a little uncomfortable, like, “What’s he seeing?”

Rick: He was seeing your aura? [laughing]

Steve: You know, I didn’t have a lot of skeletons in my closet. I’m sure everyone has a couple, and I’m sure I had some, but nothing else happened. But then that night I was awake in the night in my room. The room was perfectly black, with curtains blocking out all the light from outside, and Maharishi popped into my awareness.

He wasn’t in the room physically, let’s make that clear, but he popped into my awareness in a very clear manner. He didn’t say a word to me. He just smiled, and it was like he reached inside my torso and took both hands and took what appeared to be one pipe here and one pipe here—presumably some part of my physiology—and stuck them together.

Rick: Hmm.

Steve: When he left, then he was gone. It was like, “This is the most efficient plumber. I came to do this. We’re not having a conversation. Don’t even ask me what I’m doing,” and then he vanished. But everything shifted, big time.

Inside, everything shifted from what had previously been kind of a half-light inner awareness that I was sitting there with, to a brilliant, at times golden, shimmering awareness. The rest of the night was uncharacteristically sleepless. I don’t think I was ever unconscious at all for the rest of the night and the next day.

Rick: In other words, your body was sleeping, but your inner awareness was aware.

Steve: It’s what sometimes people call witnessing sleep. I don’t say I was sitting above my body looking down, but I was wide awake. I could hear my breath—

Rick: Yeah.

Steve: —when it got heavy and so on, and sometimes even a light snore, but I was fully aware of all that, so I knew I was sleeping.

Rick: I was going to throw in a point here, which is that witnessing is often talked about, either in sleep or in the waking state. It’s not a dissociative thing where some part of you has stepped aside and stepped back and is witnessing the other part of you.

It’s more like your essential nature, which is pure consciousness and is not an individuated thing, has become awake to itself, and there’s a contrast between that and the individual and the individual’s activities. Because its nature is pure silence, it often feels like, “Well, I’m doing stuff, but I’m not doing anything at all,” or, “I’m asleep, and yet I’m not asleep.”

Your senses may not be functioning, even, so it’s not like you could be thinking about it if you’re fast asleep. All that can be shut down, and yet that inner awareness persists.

Witnessing should, if anything, enhance your functionality, not detract from it.

Steve: And that inner awareness can be described equally well when people are in dynamic activity, and that was a great description of it. That’s what athletes sometimes describe. I remember Michael Jordan—he’d come off a game for the NBA championships, and he was just in his zone. He would say, “Hey, I was just watching myself do this. It was like I wasn’t even doing it,” and Steph Curry has said that kind of thing.

That was a little bit of the experience I had—that first kind of taste of higher consciousness—when I was playing that match I mentioned in Michigan when I was 15 or 16 years old.

Rick: Just to add a point to that, I wanted to emphasize it because some people do misconstrue witnessing as something one should do or try to do. I was interviewing a guy one time, and we got onto the subject of witnessing. He said, “I can witness,” and he kind of went into this slightly strange state where he was a little vacant and couldn’t talk with me quite so fluently and everything.

Witnessing should, if anything, enhance your functionality, not detract from it, if it’s real—actual witnessing in the way that was traditionally meant or understood.

Steve: That experience with Maharishi was about two weeks before he sent a couple of us to India to do this project that I had mentioned. I was carrying with me a book about Swami Ramakrishna’s life. Ramakrishna was a Bengali, and he was a great devotee, a great bhakta devotee of Kali.

I was reading about his life, and much of it was about his relationship with this aspect of Divine Mother, Kali. By the time I got to India, I had finished the book, but I hadn’t somehow finished with Kali, because I walked into my room at the ashram—we were staying at an ashram outside of Delhi, one of Maharishi’s ashrams—

Rick: Noida?

Steve: Noida. In the guest room, there was a substantial painting. It was an original painting of Kali and some of her different aspects.

I would sit down and do our assignment. Maharishi said, “Okay, you’re going to go and meditate for X number of hours before you go to town and meet all your appointments, and then you’re going to come back.” So we had a very—we were on his brahmachari routine at that time. We were supposed to meditate five or six hours a day, in spite of the fact that we were—

Rick: In addition to running into New Delhi.

Steve: Yeah, in addition. And so, I would sit there, and as I was so immersed in the story of Swami Ramakrishna and Kali, I kept having my attention pulled away from my meditation mantra, and it kept falling on Kali. I kept looking at Kali. It wasn’t just like, “Okay, I’m looking at the picture on the wall,” but the picture was internalizing itself to a great extent. Eventually, I stopped looking at her picture on the wall and started looking at my imagination, maybe, or my vision of her within me, and it was not one-dimensional.

It was like it would inspire or generate what I would call a feeling of liquid light. That liquid light would, like a liquid, begin to fill up my physiology, and as it filled up, I would find my breathing and my thoughts were just on the way out. As it really filled up, then that all subsided. I don’t think the breath was totally gone, but the thoughts were. It was such a relief to find there were no thoughts here. I was just sitting here and having this beautiful, transcendent experience with this aspect of Divine Mother, free from thought, free from ever wanting to have thought again, and just sitting there for hours at a time—no mantra, nothing, just Kali, the sense of Kali or the image of Kali.

One or the other would always be there, and she would appear or present herself at 3:00 a.m. I’d get up, and I’d had a long day, but I wasn’t going to lie down when I had this opportunity. So, I got really immersed in Kali, and very soon after that, the first trip that we made for our corporate work took us to Calcutta, which is the home of Kali.

Rick: They’ve got Ramakrishna.

Steve: Yeah, and they were all Kali bhaktas long before Ramakrishna, but he became the head priest at one of the two most famous Kali temples, Dakshineswar, on the Ganges. They call it the Hooghly, but it’s the Ganges River. So we were flown in for a cement company, did our meetings, and as we were leaving, we said, “Can we visit this Kali temple?” I was with a friend, Lane Reiger, and so they took us to this temple.

Again, it was like she came out of the statue, the murti there of Kali, just out of her statue into me. I just thought, “Wow.” I didn’t know anything about Kali three months prior. Obviously, I did, but I didn’t consciously. I just got further and further immersed in her world, and it wasn’t that much longer before I met Amma.

My experience with Amma was, again, that there was this Kali quality about her that, to me, was unmistakable. I think some other devotees of hers have recognized that and maybe even written about it. I met her as a result of the CEO of Hughes Communications, a very big satellite communications company in India. He said, “Would you like to meet a saint?” I said, “Absolutely,” and it turned out to be Amma, at her ashram near the Indira Gandhi Airport.

My jaw dropped. I just couldn’t believe the power of this human being. I thought to myself, “I don’t know who she is. I haven’t heard much about her, but a friend just innocently took me. I want to know more.” I thought to myself, “If there’s a Mahatma in this world of that power”—because she hugged us all—“then I think it would be a big mistake not to see her whenever I could.” I started seeing her whenever I could.

When I got back to the U.S., of course, we were lucky that she came to Iowa. I didn’t know what to call her—saint, guru, Mahatma, Devi. All I know is that it led to a second kind of darshan-type awakening, which was when Amma came to Cedar Rapids that year.

There was an announcement at the public meeting on the first day: Would anyone be willing to iron some of Amma’s saris for this thing called Devi Bhava? I said, “I know how to iron.” Okay, and I mean, I’m this guy. There were three ironing boards, and I’m ironing these silk saris while two ladies were ironing. I didn’t think anything of it because I was single—actually, I wasn’t single at that time, but I’d been single for all those years prior, ironing my own shirts for these meetings. When we did TM stuff, we always had to wear a dress shirt.

So, I didn’t think anything of it. Then I was told, “You can go sit near Amma. Just go sit near Amma.” I went and sat down there, and she had an assistant right next to her. The lady whispered in my ear, “Amma wants you to massage her feet.”

Rick: I remember that. I remember you massaging her feet for about half an hour.

Steve: Yeah. She said, “Amma wants you to massage” and I said, “How do you do that?” She said, “Well, don’t rub too hard, but just take hold of both her feet in both your hands and just gently.” So I thought, “Great.”

I’ll tell you, the lights went on—another awakening. I’m using the word awakening; I wouldn’t say awakened, but more was there. More was added, and I was just floating for days. I just thought—and I really realized and respected the fact that a human being of a substantially higher vibration, whether it is Amma or Maharishi—when I first saw Maharishi and gave him a flower, I was just dumbfounded at how powerful his eyes, his gaze, were.

These special individuals can really bestow and give grace to an individual at a time when they want to. That was a big awakening for me.

Rick: Yeah. This Amma that we’re talking about—if anybody’s curious, it’s amma.org, if you want to check her out. She goes all over the world. I had an experience one time. My mother had a rough life, with my father being rather abusive. She tried to commit suicide three times and had been in and out of mental hospitals during most of my adolescence.

Then I got into TM and got into teaching and was over in Switzerland. I asked Maharishi if she could come over there, and he agreed, so she came over and spent nine months. The first time she saw him, she was 20 or 30 feet away as he was coming into the hall. He came along giving people flowers, and people were giving him flowers. Then he got up to us, my mother handed him a flower, and he handed her a flower. He looked at me and said, “Keep her happy,” and then he walked on up to his couch.

She turned to me, and her whole face was different. She looked at me and said, “He looks right into your soul.” She stayed there for nine months and was never back in mental hospitals. It really transformed her.

Steve: A very perceptive thing that she said. I think a lot of people have had that experience. You see videos of people seeing Maharishi for the first time or being hugged by Amma, and the tears—

Rick: Yeah, sometimes big football-player types.

Steve: Yeah. How many times have you seen them coming away from the hug, with tears streaming down their faces, or their bodies even shaking because they’ve had this huge relief of stress from their lives? Maybe something traumatic had happened, and they’ve just been relieved of it.

I think what’s cool about it, among other things, is that it’s an example of what a human being can become. Even though you can’t totally fathom her subjective status or experience or anything, there’s something evidently so extraordinary—especially if you watch her for hours on end—that you think, “How could a person do this or be like this?” It gives you a broader, more profound sense of the possibilities for human life.

Rick: I think what’s cool about it, among other things, is that it’s an example of what a human being can become. Even though you can’t totally fathom her subjective status or experience or anything, there’s something evidently so extraordinary—especially if you watch her for hours on end—that you think, “How could a person do this or be like this?” It gives you a broader, more profound sense of the possibilities for human life.

Steve: Well, those two examples were kind of focusing right now, and if you look at their lifestyle, I mean, the times I’ve spent with Maharishi in Switzerland, he would sometimes meet with us until 3:00 a.m. We’d be exhausted, and we were in the prime of our lives, age-wise—30 years old—and we’d be exhausted. He’d say, “You guys go to bed now.” Then another group would come in.

His secretary would say, “Well, it’s late, Maharishi.” “Oh, yeah, we’ll go to bed,” and he would continue until the sun was coming up. We know from seeing Amma that she works and functions that way without stopping, hugging hundreds and thousands of people every year, and it goes on like that.

So those are kind of like being plugged into the big, big power source. We’re trying to get there, and we’re improving. We’re adding more wattage to our capacity over time, I think.

Rick: Yeah, I think we talked about the brain undergoing transformation. I think there are other dimensions to the instrument which also have to be transformed—the subtle body and stuff like that.

Perception Without the Senses

Steve: There was one more awakening that I thought I would like to address. This one was completely based in a phrase that I like to use sometimes called “perception without the senses.” I don’t know; I hope this will make reasonable sense. I think it will.

Human beings live in a physical, vibrational world where we see trees, we see each other, we see animals, and we live on that level. If we give any credence to the various religious descriptors around the world, or to the things that religious and spiritual leaders and Mahatmas might say, they’ll say, “Well, you see that range of creation, but you should know that there are greater possibilities in creation than what you can physically see.”

There are lower levels below a human being, which we might call asuric, even demonic, or rakshasic. Those are Sanskrit terms for that level. Or there may well be levels higher than the human level, which we could call angelic, devic, God-like, or something. The only reason we don’t see them is because our eyes and senses are not developed enough to go beyond this certain range of sense experience, just the way, if you’ve got a dog, dogs can hear far better than humans.

Rick: And smell.

Steve: Yeah, and I think a bear can smell like one hundred or one thousand times better than a human being. So, we may not pick up the scent of a strawberry from 200 yards away, but the bear can. It doesn’t mean the strawberry isn’t there; it just means that we don’t have the sensory apparatus, or the development of those senses, to appreciate it.

I think that analogy is appropriate for other levels of creation. I preface this other awakening because this one was completely without the use of the senses. I was just awake in meditation, and again, it was a Maharishi experience. It was only a few months ago.

He just appeared. I did not see him at all—not an iota with my physical eyes—or hear him with my ears. But he appeared with both hands on my head. Again, there wasn’t any communication, but it was completely an internal experience. Then he left, and that one left me reeling in a very positive way.

I found that very unexpected because Maharishi passed away ten years ago. I’ve never abandoned Maharishi, but I haven’t been thinking a lot about him since he left. It almost was a surprise to me, but it was a very, very expansive and very welcome experience, and again, a reminder.

I don’t think my three-minute awakening anecdotes were all with guru-saints, but awakenings—I’m sure you’ve done this interview so many times that you’ve heard a thousand different vehicles for having an awakened experience. Maybe a river, maybe when Siddhartha had his awakened experience at the end of—

Rick: The flow of a river, yeah.

Steve: And the wisdom of a very simple ferryman who hardly had anything to say.

Rick: Who was it? Eckhart Tolle talks about somebody who got awakened looking at a cat watching a mouse hole because of the sort of presence and focus of the cat. He kind of entrained with that, and that was the trigger to his awakening.

Steve: My experience of various levels of awakening always begins internally with this thing of filling up with what I would like to refer to as liquid light. I think it’s a quality of prana and a quality of consciousness that blend together and just fill me up. Maybe it’s a physical feeling of pure consciousness; I can’t say, but it feels liquidy to me, three-dimensional. It doesn’t feel like it’s less than that—maybe multidimensional. Then, when it fills up, I feel like I’m free.

I feel like I can very easily just float up into what might be conveniently called a higher reality, or cosmic reality, or divine reality, and then I really feel like I’m closer to who I want to be or who I am becoming.

Rick: My cup runneth over.

Steve: In my meditation, at a certain point, I consciously… To me, when people ask, “Have you had an awakening? Are you awakened?” I’ll say, “I can’t really answer that. You’d have to ask someone else.” I’m kind of stuck with this idea that I know. Anandamayi Ma, the great Indian saint, could sit in samadhi for days at a time. I sit down and can meditate for hours at a time—you can too—but days? I’ve never done that, and I don’t know that it would be appropriate. I don’t know what state of consciousness that requires, if it’s more or greater; I can’t say. But it’s somehow… I can’t fly.

Rick: Well, that brings a couple of questions up. One is that if flying were the criterion, or the acid test, for being awakened, pretty much nobody we know of is awakened, although there are historical anecdotes.

Steve: St. Francis, yeah.

Rick: St. Francis, St. Joseph of Cupertino, and many others. But if being able to meditate for days on end is a criterion for awakening, then that too could be a problem. I mean, we could presume that somebody like Amma could do it, but she doesn’t do it.

Steve: I think she might have when she was young, maybe sitting on the beach.

Rick: Yeah, she’d go into samadhi. She’d actually be walking along, and she’d think of Krishna or something, and she’d just fall to the ground in samadhi. Even while using the toilet over the backwater, she’d fall in. [Laughing] Anyway, we have to be careful, I think, establishing…

Steve: No, there are no criteria there. I do think it would be beneficial in many—possibly most—circumstances to be in a holier place. Being along a holy river might help, although it certainly could happen anywhere, I would imagine.

Rick: Yeah. Also, when you say people ask you if you’re awakened, I react to that the same way I react to the word enlightened, or enlightenment. There’s a sort of superlative, static connotation to it which, in my experience with all these hundreds of people I’ve interviewed, I’ve never seen an example of. I mean, maybe they have reached some terminus point and I’m not able to appreciate it, but I really have gotten the impression that everybody is a work in progress. If you’re still breathing—and even if you’ve stopped breathing and you’ve gone on to some other level—the range of potential unfoldment is vast.

Steve: I think that’s a great way to phrase it: a work in progress. I don’t think we’d want it any other way. I would always look forward to the idea that there’s something more out there. I could say I have an adventuresome side to me, and I always look. Whether it’s going inward, going on a pilgrimage, or going on a vacation, I always feel like, “Oh, I’d like to have a new experience.” I think that’s a healthy thing.

Rick: Yeah. Just to put a fine point on that, when you say, “I’d like to have a new experience,” that gives the impression that enlightenment or awakening is an experience which may come and go, like sensory experiences do. But what we’re talking about here is awakening to something which abides: “The unreal has no being; the real never ceases to be.” The ephemeral experiences may come and go, whereas this baseline is established which doesn’t.

Steve: Yeah, I like that old analogy of Maharishi, where you’re sitting in a really comfortable, warm bathtub. You’re just sitting there, and it’s quiet. You could say that the warm bathwater is being. You’re just immersed in this abiding, soothing quality of being. Then maybe, at some point in the bath, you might want to slosh around and move the waves. When I say “a new experience,” I’m referring to sloshing the waves around a little bit and experiencing on that level, and having it be that much more rewarding and enriching as a result of having a foundation which is abiding and unchanging underneath it.

Rick: Yeah. Actually, Maharishi did change his emphasis a little bit in the late ’70s, from just transcending and getting established in the transcendent to stirring it up and practicing the Siddhi Program in order to enliven specific channels.

Steve: Yeah. I was thinking about the mantra for a second. What role does it have in this whole process? Many people are taught that the mantra is a meaningless sound. But as time went by, and as I was living in India and having these Devi-kind-of-awakening experiences, a part of my experience got morphed into the experience that my mantra became the most meaningful word in my life.

In Sanskrit, mantras, we can understand, are Sanskrit words that are in the Vedic scriptures, many of which are said—and I think Ramakrishna said it about as well as anyone—that a mantra is like an acorn. Within the acorn is the oak tree, and within the mantra is the form of a god which you are thinking about or meditating on.

Rick: Enlivening or invoking.

Steve: And so I think that’s a process of self-discovery. That’s part of the discovery: I realized that here I was sitting, not even knowing if my mantra had anything other than a soothing effect, which I was told it had. Then I came to the cognition, the realization, that my mantra was an aspect of this Divine Feminine that charmed me so much when I saw Amma, when I saw the picture of Kali, and when I went to the Kali temple. The pieces just started to fit together.

Rick: Yeah. Traditionally, and more esoterically, mantras are considered to be—it’s crude to say—names of gods. They’re sort of auditory representations of primal impulses of intelligence. There’s a verse in the Gita that says, “You support the gods, and they support you.” There is sort of this reciprocal relationship that gets established in using a mantra—a correct mantra, correctly—in which, somehow or other, and I’m just speaking off the cuff here, those primal impulses of intelligence that are imbibed or embedded in your mantra, you begin to align with, and that supports your life.

So a mantra is not only for transcending; it actually results in what we might call support of nature, or support of Divine Intelligence, in order to more evolutionarily orchestrate your life.

Steve: Well, there’s a lot of sayings in scripture, and one of them that’s always made a lot of sense is: You are what you meditate on; you are what you think; you are what your attention…

Rick: To which you give your attention grows stronger and stronger, and you become that.

Steve: …and you become that. I can’t imagine how many times someone who’s meditated for a few decades has repeated a mantra, in whatever technique they’re using, so that becomes a vehicle of inward and outward development and support of nature, as you’re saying.

Rick: I mean, if what we’re saying here is valid, it also makes it clear that just sitting down and picking any old meaningless sound is not going to have the same effect. In fact, when we were on our teacher-training course, people were practicing how to teach people, and people were picking sounds like “tugboat” or something. Some people would actually begin to get physically sick… [Laughing] thinking of a different sound like that.

Steve: Well, I think with mantra, or in the whole tradition of bhakti yoga, there’s more emphasis on devotional yoga in Amma’s path than possibly would at least have been articulated by Maharishi. I do feel that as a person grows in devotion toward some ideal—whether it’s Devi, Krishna, Jesus, or whoever—there’s a scripture I came upon, maybe a group of Vedic scriptures, which said that the devotion of a human being toward one of these higher beings is food for that being. It’s like their nutrition.

Rick: You support the gods, and they support you.

Steve: That’s right. In the Sama Veda, in the Sama Mandala, there’s this idea that you’re providing them with something, because devotion and love and human emotion, human feeling, are their apple, their rice and dal, if I have this understood right. That’s also been verified by some personal experience: when I felt gratitude and great upliftment of feeling toward some Divine Being, I felt a very strong reciprocation, and it felt along the lines of grace.

Rick: Yeah, reciprocation is the key word here, because I’ve heard somebody critique that point and say, “Well, yeah, I believe in these beings, but they’re like energy vampires, just sucking off and living off your devotion.” But it’s reciprocal. You probably receive more than you give.

Steve: Possibly multiplied. The reverse of that is that we talk about the human condition. If you think about it, free will is a big part of our lives, and then there’s the question of destiny. That’s always been the philosophical question that people grapple with. But the free will that we have to think and to feel means that we can have our attention very high, in an elevated place, in terms of devotion or even ideal thoughts about the universe and how vast it is, or whatever.

Or, if we’re a little bit stressed, irritated, and discordant internally, we might turn that toward, “I really don’t like that guy,” and if I start to feel it strongly, to the level where I’m feeling anger and hatred and all those kinds of things—which people don’t generally feel day to day, but there are some who do—I think it’s important. In my experience, I’ve noticed and observed that negative feeling, negative emotion, and negative thought are also a type of nutrition for some level of creation.

Rick: Yeah, definitely. For instance, when they made that movie The Exorcist, there were all kinds of stories about really bad things happening to people—actors and others who were working on the project—because they were putting their attention on this demonic stuff, and they were also preparing something which would give a big wave of demonic energy.

In fact, this fellow whom you would know, Andy Rhymer, was really into that movie for some reason. I went to visit him and our friend Rob Cox from Chicago, and he made me watch that movie. He was into it; he thought it was some kind of cosmic drama. I felt so polluted that I actually set up a puja table and did pujas for a while, just to purify myself after watching it.

Steve: Well, you can walk into a room where there has been beautiful sentiment, maybe a family reunion or something, and a lot of people are gone, but you feel that love is still a residue in the room. Or you can walk into a room where some crime or murderous thing has happened in an odd place, and suddenly you want to get out of there. It’s very real.

Rick: Well, when my mother was in mental hospitals, I used to go and visit her. I was a new meditator at that point, and whatever degree of awakening I had attained was very fledgling, flimsy, unintegrated, and unstable. I would go in there and could just feel whatever degree of coherence I had breaking apart. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t stay in there and visit with her, because I would just get so…

Now, some people obviously work in those places, and they’ve developed some kind of ability to function normally. But for me, I was kind of wide open in a way, and not stable in it, and I couldn’t do it.

Steve: Yeah, I remember even fear falls into that category. In the world we live in today, where there’s terrorism and people have natural responses to things like their children’s safety, we never want to let that runt get free rein within ourselves, because fear corrodes, or kind of erodes, the soul, in my observation.

I want to—I think it’s one of the great lessons that I’m still trying to digest and assimilate: discipline not being hard-hearted, but being disciplined enough in my emotional, day-to-day functioning as a coach not to scream at my kids, “Hey, you know you can do this.” You know, old football coaches—I let go of that a long time ago.

That was a lesson I learned in Asia, in the Tibetan community, in the Nepalese community, and in the Indian spiritual communities. They are very much heart people, but they’re not as emotional people, if you can make the distinction. They are heart people, but in day-to-day situations, you would think, “Well, they don’t show much emotion a lot of the time.”

So, I think it’s a lesson I was learning in India. Coming from the West, my focus was always, “What was I thinking? Thinking, thinking, thinking.” A transition occurred where I suddenly realized, “No, I need to be much more in my heart.”

Having a conversation with a Tibetan lama up in this district of Ladakh in northern India, I took it to heart because he said, “We don’t even want to have the same thought twice.” It’s like we pour the pitcher of water into the teacup and we don’t refill the pitcher. We would rather—but that may be okay for contemplative lamas or monks.

For the rest of us who earn a living and pay mortgages and so on, the mind is kind of thrown into activity. But at the same time, we would probably be spared a lot if we kept it in a very simple manner and didn’t keep running the same things through our heads.

Rick: Yeah, I have a friend who commented on Facebook recently that she kind of—I don’t know if she just realized this or has known it for a while—but she doesn’t really think. She is surprised that people think in such a verbal way in their heads. It’s like she’s functioning from a preverbal level.

In fact, there are levels of speech in the Vedic thing: vaikhari, pashyanti, and madhyama. Somehow, she’s at one of those subtler levels, just functioning from there without verbal mental processes.

Steve: I think that’s a good candidate for describing what happens to these advanced artists, athletes, and performers. You can’t think your way through the triple toe loop thing in the Olympics. You can’t do it. If you start thinking in a tennis match, other than sensing and being alert, you’re going in the wrong direction.

So, I’m sure a musician, a pianist, can’t think. There’s no way he can think his way through what he’s doing.

Rick: I was watching Zakir Hussain’s tabla solo a while back, and he was just going blazingly fast. I thought, “What would it be like to be him doing that?” Definitely, he couldn’t be functioning in any kind of rational or logical way in his mind to make his fingers and hands do what he was doing. It’s got to just be coming from some deep, intuitive level. That, plus huge—

Steve: Plus eight or ten hours of training—

Rick: Waking up in the middle of the night to practice.

Steve: It’s wonderful, in a way, because it gives them a training, and that training spills over into other areas of their life as well.

Rick: Yeah. Okay, so we’ve kind of sketched out a lot of your subjective development. I’m sure there’s more to say about it. One thing you just alluded to, which maybe you could elaborate on a bit more, is this kind of shift from head to heart. That actually would lead us into some of the more outer stories, because that was facilitated by an encounter with the sage up in Jyotirmath in the Himalayas.

Steve: The first time I really started thinking in terms of head and heart—not necessarily very clearly—was way back in 1974. You and I were both in the French Alps, and Maharishi came to our Advanced Course, our Advanced Retreat. He said, “I’m going to give you all some advanced technique, some initiation.”

I went into the room, and I was only in there with him for about five minutes. He said, “Now you need to follow your fine feeling level.” My thought, like it jumped out of my head, was, “Well, what’s that?” It was almost like he picked up on what I was thinking, and there was sort of a laser thread of light or something that kind of tickled my chest.

I thought, “That’s it. Somehow it’s being woven. I’m feeling it right now.” Then he said, “This is something you can cultivate.” Maharishi said I could do so by using my mantra meditation. He elaborated on that, and that was my instruction. Then I was sent away to do it.

That was sort of like my intention of having my meditation process be more of a mental technique. It had just shifted, as a result of something Maharishi told me, to what I would call more of a heart technique. That began to cultivate something a little different inside of me at that point.

Rick: Did it kind of stay shifted after that?

Steve: No, not immediately, because I would forget. I’ve never been an intellectual person, for whatever reason, but I realized I was in college at the time. I had to do my schoolwork well and all that, so I had to think clearly, and I had to remember things and whatnot.

But it did make an impression. When I would come to junction points in decisions in my life, I would think, “Where do I want to make this decision from—up here or in here?” I at least gave 50 percent of my attention to what I felt about it, because I don’t think a lot of us in the Western world are taught to make decisions based on the feeling level, as much as maybe other parts of the world. That’s just a guess.

Anyway, I got to India some years later, after Maharishi gave that instruction in the French Alps. Later, I did get to India on this project, again from Maharishi’s instruction. At that point, I met a sage or a saint on a couple of different occasions—three that I remember—and that really turned me 180 degrees around in how I viewed my life as a human being and the direction I wanted to take.

I met him up in the Himalayas. He referred to himself as Keshava, and I wrote about him in a chapter in my memoir book, India: Mirror of Truth. He had this quality about him that I would only describe as ageless. He didn’t seem like—you couldn’t define him. He could be 20, he could be 50, but he looked like he wasn’t ever going to age.

He was mysterious and extremely comical, but very simple, and seemed to be in complete control of every situation. We talked very openly about spirituality. I told him at the time, “I’m aging fast. I’m 50 years old. I have a lot of gray hair. I’m losing my hair.” It’s all gone now.

He was laughing. He said, “No, no, no. Age is just a byproduct of a few negative thoughts you’ve had.”

I said, “No, I don’t think so.”

He said, “Here are some things I would like you to try.”

He gave me three different instructions over the course of my encounters with him. The first one he referred to as continuous breathing. He said, “Every human being breathes, but how many people are aware that they’re breathing? It’s involuntary. It just happens. But if you can add consciousness to your breathing—and you can do this when you’re on a telephone or anywhere you are, in an airplane—if you can do this conscious breathing, you can breathe your way to enlightenment.”

He said, “You can reverse your aging, because it’s the cells in your body, in your brain, that require this prana, and they get cut off through blocks of stress and so on, in all the subtle physiology.”

He referred to the spine as the backbone of the person, the great transmitter and receiver of all the cosmic knowledge that he seemed to have. He referred to the spine that way, and we know about it from various systems of yoga. That may be true in Kundalini Yoga or whatever.

So, he said, “Breathe.” That was the first thing. “And do it effortlessly. Don’t do it—it might be one way one day, it might be another way another day, so don’t get too rigid about it. But it’s a type of—”

Rick: Do you do that even if you’re playing tennis?

Steve: I do it, not during a point, but in between points.

Rick: In between points, you bring your attention to it.

Steve: When I’m teaching, I absolutely do it every few breaths. When I started to learn more, I realized at one point I was reading a little about Kriya Yoga in Yogananda’s tradition, and it seemed very much in sync with what he taught. I know he taught more than one technique, but that Kriya Yoga breathing process seemed to be very, very similar.

So that was one thing. The other thing that seemed to be more profound was that Keshava said, “You can close your eyes, and you have meditated long enough now that you can merge”—that was the term—“with any Divine Being with whom you feel an affinity.”

I said, “Who are we talking about here?”

He said, “Buddha, Krishna, Jesus,” and some other names he mentioned, but those were the primary three.

I said, “Okay, Krishna. I feel very Hindu. I’m living in India. I’ve been thinking of and reading Hindu books and reading Sanskrit scriptures.”

So he said, “Okay, merge with Krishna.” He said, “Breathe Krishna into yourself through your heart, through your chest, and then feel the open expansion. Keep doing it.”

He said, “There is literally no limit to how wide you can expand. Do it, but don’t think of this as a formal initiation. Just enjoy it. You don’t have to do it every day. You don’t ever have to do it again. But if you practice it, you’ll get benefit from it.”

So those were the first two things he told me up in the Himalayas. In another encounter—which would have to involve this comment of perception without the senses, because it was not a physical—we were having a physical conversation. This was more an internal, vision-type of thing.

He said, “It would be wonderful if you could keep your mantra going 24/7.” I’ve never been able to do it. I know a couple of people who have been able to do it, but to think that I could do it during sleep or during my job, or while I’m eating or whatever, that’s still—

Rick: I heard Maharishi say that one, too. It wasn’t so much that you would make an attempt to do it; it was more like it would become automatic. It would just be going on in the background.

Steve: This is it. You nailed it, Rick. Just on autopilot. In a sense, it’s just the background music in your mind rather than thinking about a Beatles song.

Rick: “Here Comes the Sun.”

Steve: Yeah. So those are the three things, spiritually, that I thought could be of benefit to my life, to my evolution, to my growth. I’ve tried to integrate them, because Maharishi had given some beautiful instructions for the spiritual path. Amma has given beautiful advice.

At one time, Keshava said, “You’re far enough along. You can look at it as though you have a menu in front of you. You have been doing the same thing for so many decades. Now I’m going to say to you, if you’re willing to accept this, have the menu. One day, maybe you’d like this thing from the menu; maybe one day chocolate cake, maybe one day apple pie.”

So don’t feel like you have to do the same thing every single day of your life. You want to go into it inspired and fresh, and look forward to your evening spiritual sadhana. Take that approach. One day you might chant, one day you might breathe more, and I have found that to be useful for me.

I never feel that it’s rote now, or that I do this because I have to do it, or that I’m letting somebody down.

Rick: Of course, he was saying that to someone who was pretty well established, and perhaps a beginner wouldn’t want to be such a dilettante.

Choosing Gurus and Avoiding Spiritual Pitfalls

Steve: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a good point. There are pitfalls. I think you want to establish yourself on the path and be consistent. Follow gurus; they’re there for a reason. Their advice matters. They are sages, and there’s a reason why they are sages. If you can choose wisely, you should follow as best you can. I have never done what any guru figure taught me to do perfectly, but I’ve tried.

Rick: Yeah, so I’ll come back to Keshava in a minute. A thought popped into my head that, for some reason, I want to have you comment on completely. It’s a little bit out of the blue. We live in a community where a lot of people have been meditating for decades, and we’ve also frequented the Amma community, where people have been on the path for a long, long time.

You see some people who seem very happy and well-adjusted, and they’re doing well. You see other people whose health is deteriorating. They seem mentally unbalanced, even crazy, even though they’ve been meditating for ages, and you wouldn’t hold them up as poster children for the benefits of spiritual pursuit. Do you have any insight or comment as to why there seems to be a fairly significant percentage of people like that?

Steve: Well, let me step out of our immediate community and answer that question. I think I can, because I was reading a book about a Tibetan medical lama a few weeks ago—actually, when I was in San Diego on vacation just last week, it really was.

He was this very intuitive medical lama, and he was very young. Monks from around Asia would come to this Tibetan in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, and they would come because they were having a mental breakdown, or they were deranged, or they were frustrated. They would say, “Why am I angry? I’ve been doing this since I was twelve years old. I’ve been a monk, a monastic.”

They would come and test this young medical lama and say, “Tell us what’s wrong with this guy.” This Japanese monk came, this Chinese monk came, and he would say, “Well, that one is straining. He’s just straining. He’s not being natural. He’s not listening to what his body is telling him. He’s not living a balanced life. He’s read every scripture known to man, but he hasn’t digested or integrated it. He’s lost his mind because he hasn’t assimilated what he’s tried to do in his life, so there’s been a fracture.” This is exactly how he described it, and this fracture is what caused the mental instability.

So that was one guy. Then there was an Indian monk, a sadhu, who came. He was quite arrogant and highly versed in the Vedas. He said, “All right, if you’re so skilled, you tell me what’s wrong with me.”

He said, “Sir, I don’t want to tell you, because you won’t like it. You’ll be unhappy.”

He said, “No, no. I’m here because I know something’s wrong with me, but I want to see if you can tell me what’s wrong.”

He said, “Okay. Your liver is like weeds growing uncontrolled.”

He said, “I don’t know the name of this disease.” Then his mentor, the senior lama, said, “It’s called cancer.” This book was written thirty or forty years ago—thirty years ago, actually. He said, “It’s called cancer.”

He said, “Well, I don’t want to tell him that, because it’ll only put his attention on it, and it’ll only get worse in his life.”

He said, “No, no. He’s asking you, so you have the freedom to tell him.”

Then the Indian sadhu said, “Well, why do I have that?”

He said, “You get angry very fast, and that anger has calcified or metastasized, or whatever, and it’s affected your emotions. The emotions—one of the places they deposit themselves is in the liver.”

So, bringing it back to some of the situations—maybe we’re talking closer to home here—people have grown up in Kali Yuga in the United States, and you mentioned you’d had a rough situation with your dad, maybe. It leaves its residue for people.

We do dissolve a lot of the stress that comes into our lives. Amma hugs the person, and she helps, and I think that’s one of the reasons why sometimes people are sobbing: because she’s taken away something that’s been there forever.

But the karma associated with those things may accelerate, or they may work themselves out. It may best be just being too rigid—thinking, “I have to do something, and I’m going to do it,” even though I’d rather not do it, or someone has told me I have to do it every single day, and it’s going against what your heart yearns to do. If that becomes metastasized or rigid, that’s one of the things that this young medical lama described.

He was highly intuitive. He said, “I could just see. I could see around the person what the issue is,” like lettering, practically, telling him that his body was saying, “I’m unhappy. I’m angry. My liver is stressed.”

I can only imagine that people are going through some of those kinds of experiences. I really don’t know why. But if we could address ourselves and say, “Am I feeling content? Am I feeling peaceful? Am I happy in my life?” then I think things are probably going in the right direction.

But if I feel like I’m doing this against my own will, that might be a problem. I think fear is a factor in people’s health. I remember one astute comment: “Fear is a prayer we don’t want answered.” I think there is some fear in people’s lives—maybe I’m not going to achieve what I’ve dedicated forty years to achieving. Maybe I won’t get enlightened, and that would be unfortunate.

I think you’d have to look case by case. I do notice some people say, “Well, we live in a chemically infested part of Iowa, where the crops are in the water,” and so on. I don’t know. I see healthy people here also. So those are a few possibilities.

I do feel that happiness—and I mean, I felt so good getting out to the ocean, getting in the ocean, walking along the ocean. You see that unbounded Pacific Ocean there in San Diego. People had a smile on their faces a lot out there. So those are some possibilities.

Rick: Yeah, several things came to mind as you were speaking, in addition to the things you said, which are good. Diet is a big deal, and some people have very unbalanced diets. Maybe they’re eating a lot of starches and sugars and that sort of thing.

Exercise is another factor. A lot of people just sit on their butts, meditating and looking at their computers, and don’t get adequate exercise.

Another thing is relationships and social interaction. Sometimes people are in lifestyles where they can get very idiosyncratic, and there’s no one to call them on their stuff. If you get into a marriage or some close relationship, there’s definitely someone to call you on your stuff.

It was a bit of a shock for me when I first got married, because I was straight off this monastic program that I had been on for a long time, and so was Irene. I’m grateful for that, and I see old friends who are on that program who are having a hard time, some of them.

There have been some suicides and some mental breakdowns. I know these guys; they were brilliant and had deep experiences, but there was never any kind of close personal interaction with the Master, where the Master is going to keep whacking you with a stick, if necessary. So they’re able to go off on tangents and get farther and farther off with no checks and balances, and the next thing you know, there’s a serious problem.

Steve: There’s that old Vedic analogy: You get in the ashram, and all these rocks are put into the tumbler. They’ve got edges, and then the guru starts spinning the tumbler. It’s just like the rocks on the Pacific Coast. They’re all smooth and round and beautiful, and my wife is trying to bring them all back in my suitcase. The suitcase weighed an extra, you know! [laughing]

That tumbler effect is there, and sometimes when the rough edges are getting smooth, it can be rough for people.

There was a sadhu, a reclusive sadhu, I met up in a place called Gangotri, which translates as “the source of the Ganges,” at about 10,500 feet in the Himalayas. Honestly, I met him for the strangest reason possible. I was up there, and I was trying to find a Times of India. Why was I looking for that? I’m not going to even say why. But they said, “There’s a guy up there in a cave named…” I can’t think of his name right now. “Anyway, go up there, knock on his door, and he’ll have today’s or yesterday’s Times of India.”

I said, “How?”

They said, “Well, there he gets them.”

So I went up there, and I got to the wrong cave. The guy next to it was sitting outside with a big smile on his face, and I said, “Do you have the Times of India?” He goes like this [waving his arms] and points to the cave next door, but then he picks up a paper and pen and writes, “I am in silence. I don’t speak, and I haven’t spoken for many years, but I’d be happy to write a message back to you if you have any question.”

This fellow’s name was Swami Rama Paramantir, and I said, “Sure, I have a question. Do you want me to write it to you, or do you want to not hear my words?”

He said, “No, you can speak,” and he wrote this down: “I will answer by paper.”

He started out by asking me a question: “Why are you here?”

Rick: Well, The Times of India…

Steve:[laughing] We were laughing. He had sunglasses on. He was sitting out in the bright sun and was about thirty-five years old. He had strong arms and broad shoulders, and I said, “I’m a part of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s group, and I’ve been teaching meditation in India for the past so many years to corporate types.”

He gets his paper and says, “Is Maharishi University still in California?”

I thought, “Wow,” because it started out there, in Santa Barbara, and moved here to Fairfield, Iowa, in 1974 or so, I guess. I said, “No, it’s not there anymore,” and then we struck up this dialogue.

We went on, and he started sharing things with me, and I shared things with him. I mention him because when I ultimately got to the next cave, where the guy had The Times of India, he said, “Oh! You probably got sent here by Swami Rama Paramantir.”

I said, “Yes. How would you know?”

He said, “Well, we’re neighbors. I know him very well, and I come here for the summers. He’s been here seven years without leaving. But Paramantir tried to do a shortcut to enlightenment, and it backfired. He ended up in the hospital in Uttarkashi twice. It basically caused a huge internal explosion of some sort.”

I don’t know the details of what he was trying to do, but I do know that sometimes people want to get to the goal so badly that they abandon the middle way. Intensity is a good thing up to a threshold, but if we push it too far, I think things can crack.

I don’t know the details of what he was trying to do, but I do know that sometimes people want to get to the goal so badly that they abandon the middle way. Intensity is a good thing up to a threshold, but if we push it too far, I think things can crack.

The guy next door, who was from Rajasthan, said he’d been down there twice, and that he’d tried to use these yogic techniques. He had a guru, but his guru was old. He lived in Uttarkashi, and he very rarely saw him. His guru was three hours away, so he was kind of doing things on his own without guidance.

Rick: The silence guy?

Steve: The silence guy. He was doing things on his own. If you read The Value of the Guru and what techniques… Some are very powerful, especially if you get into these techniques that wake up the subtle, powerful shakti inside. I think that’s what he had done, and it kind of ran rampant for a bit.

Rick: Good point. Other things can do that, too. Intensive pranayama, for example—if you do too much of it, there are all kinds of things that can drive you crazy, literally, if you don’t do it right.

Steve: You mentioned diet. He was living off seeds and grain and powdered milk. He was part of a Sannyasi sect that does not cook food. That’s a vow they take. He had a fire, but that fire could keep him warm. The Sadhus say that if you meditate by a fire, the mantra value of the repetition is more potent. Agni is considered the communicator to the gods in the Vedic tradition, so if you meditate by a fire or even a river, it’s more potent than meditating in your bedroom. He had a fire, but maybe his diet was imbalanced, and the winters up in that area are very severe. He’s all alone, and he doesn’t speak. So, he was trying.

Rick: So, safety first, I would say. That was Maharishi’s master’s motto: safety first. I know that Joan Harrigan has the Kundalini Care Institute in Tennessee. There’s also Bonnie Greenwell, whom I’m going to be interviewing on October 20. I have encountered many people who have had deflected risings of Kundalini and have gotten stuck or even into serious problems.

Steve: Maharishi once said, “Okay, you’re in this boat and we’re going somewhere. Stay in the middle of the boat.” He said, “Don’t lag in the back of the boat, and don’t try to get in the front of the boat.” To be honest, when I got to India, I thought, “I want to be in the front of the boat. I want to just get going.” I honestly pushed it to my limits, and I don’t say I’ve ever regretted a moment, but I do know that there were times when I thought, “Well, okay, I’ve got to hold on with both hands. I need to buckle the seat belt right now,” because with these Kali experiences, it was kind of really free-flowing inner experiences, and I realized I’ve got to throttle back a tad.

Rick: Yeah, I remember the first time we were told we were going to India. They said, “Yes, you’re going to India, and it’s going to be intense.” A friend of mine, Larry Keith, would say, “Oh boy, intense! It’s going to be really intense!” It turned out we were in tents. [Laughing]

Steve: In British Army tents. [Laughing]

Rick: Right, something like that, with little cots. Let me get back to Keshava. He comes up in both of your books, explicitly in your first book.

Steve: In the memoir, I refer to him as Keshava. In the novel, he is referred to as Yogi Raj. Both have similar personalities: ageless, perhaps a thousand years old, or a few centuries old. Who could say, and who could verify it? I couldn’t. When I met him—

Rick: You have a question about Keshava?

You believe that Keshava is Babaji, who is spoken of in Yogananda’s book and by Sri M, whom I’ve interviewed a couple of times and who has met him. Yogananda presents him as this sort of immortal yogi who lives in the Himalayas and shows up from time to time and intercedes in people’s lives. But three times you met him, I believe he appeared in different forms each time. Nonetheless, you felt it was the same being because he apparently has this sort of shape-shifting ability.

Steve: I want to say he never referred to himself as Babaji.

Rick: Right, just your assumption.

Steve: Right, my assumption. We can let a listener or an audience formulate their own opinion. I’m perfectly happy with that, and I’ll tell a story about my second meeting in a different place.

I talked about the things he taught me. When I went to Maharishi’s memorial services in 2008, they were in Prayag, about a three-hour drive from Varanasi, or Banaras. Some people call it Shiva’s city, perhaps the oldest city in the world, and generally the holiest city in India. Many thousands of Indians, when they’re ready to pass away, go to Varanasi to do that and then have their ashes sprinkled on the Ganges. That’s considered a lifetime wish for many people.

Rick: What if you go there and you don’t die? Like Little Big Man, where he gets up on the stage and says, “It’s a good day to die,” then it starts to rain, and he wakes up and says, “I’m not going to die.”

Steve: I’m sure there are people who have been living there for years, waiting to die. I’ve seen many of them, and I’ve seen many corpses being incinerated. I’ve seen all that. It’s quite—

Rick: It’s an industry.

Steve: It’s a shocking experience the first time, and it’s also a very powerful one in a positive way. We were done with the memorial services, and there had been a highly respected Swami there who had come to visit and pay respects to Maharishi. He had an ashram at the Manikarnika Burning Ghats in Varanasi, which I had heard about. I had met him at some point in my travels, and I wanted to pay my respects and thank him because I didn’t get a chance to see him at the memorial services. I was so close, and I wanted to say hello and greet him.

I was making my way with a friend, Will Fox, into the Manikarnika Ghat area. I think they have a hundred cremations a day there, so it’s a big operation. I couldn’t find his ashram, and suddenly, out of nowhere, this extremely handsome, beautiful teenage boy appeared in front of me. I said, “Do you know where Swami Satya Baba lives, or where his ashram is?” He said, “No, no, I’ll take you where you want to go.”

This boy was not only striking—maybe fourteen or fifteen years old—but he was dressed immaculately in a beautiful silk kurta and dhoti. He looked just spectacular, as I remember him. He was with three, four, or five other boys about his age who were kind of his buddies, his cohorts. I said, “No, I’m going to see Swami Satya. I have this fruit with me.” Then he said, “No, no, I’ll take you where you want to go.” He repeated it, and I said, “Well, where is that?” He said, “Follow me.”

We started off upstream, actually, up the Ghats. There are multiple burning Ghats as you go along, and there are ashrams on the hill and temples—all those things are there. It was very near where some of Maharishi’s ashes were deposited in the river, and it was also where his guru had been put into the river. That’s what they call Jala Samadhi, or water burial.

We walked for ten or fifteen minutes. There were all these huge stone steps that went down, and some of them were concrete. It was just this massive scene at nine o’clock at night. You heard temple bells and people chanting, and it was surreal. It was sort of like you were by the River Styx in Greek mythology or something. You were just walking along.

Suddenly, he said, “We’re going up there now.” We turned and climbed these steps. We went up to the bluff, which is where most of Varanasi is, above the river. You look down onto the river from there. We were up on this bluff, and now we were in these awful, smelly alleyways that had no lights or streetlights, with street dogs running around and sniffing.

You’re just thinking, “This is the worst. This is the worst thing that could possibly have happened. What’s going to happen next?” I was thinking bad things could happen, because bad things sometimes do happen to Westerners who are a little naïve or unsuspecting and not careful. At nighttime, you usually don’t just go up alleys like that in Varanasi. You could get robbed.

So, this beautiful Sadhu boy said, “You should go into that. At the end of this one alleyway, you should go in there.” By “in there,” he meant through a gate into a two- or three-story building that looked fairly old. “That’s where you want to go.”

I said, “Really?” I had no idea where we were. We were in the middle of these alleys, and there was no sign in front. I said, “Really? Inside?” He said, “I’ll take you in.”

He let us in. Will was with me. He said, “You should go around the edge of that wall.” There was a little partition, a concrete wall, and he said, “Go in there and sit down and meditate. That’s where you want to go.” He said, “Just go.” So, he went in there, and around the corner of this wall was a life-size statue of Mahavatar Babaji.

He might have been five feet tall if he had been standing, according to the way he looked. He looked the way he did in Yogananda’s book. His hair was pulled back, and I don’t know what kind of material it was made from. It wasn’t granite; I don’t know. Behind him was a mural of planet Earth.

Before sitting down to meditate, as the boy had instructed us, I went back and said, “Can I give you some rupees? This is really fascinating, because I feel like I know this situation here.”

He said, “No, no, no. I don’t want your rupees,” and he kind of blew it off and rolled his eyes, as if to say, “You silly guy.” It wasn’t disrespectful, but I got it. He was kind of humorous about it. He said, “You go and meditate.”

Will and I went and meditated there, and we had literally some of the best experiences I can ever remember in forty years.

When we were done, an hour or so later, the boys were long gone. I never saw them again. I never asked the boy his name, and I never knew who his buddies were. But we stayed there for another four or five days—not in that building, but in a hotel—and we came back two or three more times.

The second time we came back was to meditate again. This time, there was a friendly lady in there, about forty-five or fifty years old at most. She said, “Can I be of some help?”

I said, “Yes. We were led here a day or two ago by some gorgeous, beautiful little boy and his friends. We were told to meditate by the statue of Babaji.”

There were two other shrines there. One was a shrine to Lahiri Mahasaya, Babaji’s disciple, who was Yogananda’s great guru. The other shrine had a big clot of dirt, with words beneath it in English that said, “Dirt taken from Babaji’s cave in the Himalayas.”

I said, “Where are we?” I didn’t know. The boy didn’t tell us. He just said, “This is where you should meditate,” and there was some connection to Babaji.

She said, “I’ll tell you. I am the great-great-grandniece of Lahiri Mahasaya, and this was his ancestral home. Upstairs was his home, and down here was more of the ashram.”

I said, “Really? Lahiri Mahasaya, the disciple of Babaji?”

She said, “Yes. If you want to go upstairs, you can sit in the room where he meditated.”

We did, and there were his paduka sandals—the wooden sandals with the pegs—and other personal effects of his. There may have been a tiger skin that he meditated on. I don’t know; there was some kind of skin there. There were also old scriptures, which were really fascinating.

She said, “You’re welcome to meditate here for a few minutes, or sit here if you’d like.” She said, “If there’s anything we can do, we’d be happy to assist you.” Then she left.

I thought that was very interesting. She said, “By the way, I have cousins and uncles who are Swamis and gurus in Europe and elsewhere.” The tradition within their family had been carried on, and she just happened to be a relative of Lahiri Mahasaya. That added a little bit more recognition to what was going on there.

If you remember Autobiography of a Yogi, you remember that Lahiri met Babaji in Ranikhet in the Himalayas, where he had been moved in his job position with some help from Babaji. He met Babaji, received some instruction up there, and went from there.

So, that was the other encounter. There was no transfer of knowledge; it was just this experience of being told to meditate there: “This is where you want to be.” I thought that was interesting, because he was—

Rick: Was there a third encounter?

Steve: Yes. The third encounter was, again, not physical. There were three encounters in succession in the Himalayas, and I call those one encounter. Then there was this encounter in Varanasi. The third encounter was a perception-without-the-senses type of encounter, which we could go into or not go into.

Rick: If you feel it’s significant; otherwise, there are other things we can talk about.

Steve: He appeared—as such a mischievous personality—as a cat. Not the whole time, but as a talking cat. He was very—

Rick: Like Alice in Wonderland.

Steve: Well, okay, and then when he left the session, on a surfboard, he surfed right out of the room.

[Laughing]

Rick: So, people keep watching [laughing].

Steve: I thought I did not force it on you. I’m having my moment. I did not want to force any [laughing].

Rick: He’s blushing.

Steve: I qualified it by saying it was perception without the senses, so it could be who knows where, but I have some trust in my inner eye, mind’s eye, whatever you want to call it—the third eye—and that was one of them.

Rick: Hmm, well, I like cats.

Steve: That could bring us around to a discussion of a perfected siddha, those beings in the world who have the ability to morph. Shape-shifting is one term that’s kind of used in popular Hollywood movies, where these superhero comic characters become super strong, super big—Ant-Man. I don’t know who they are.

I used to take my tennis team to see those movies because that’s what they wanted to see when we’d go to the state tournament, so they could relax at a movie theater. But I saw that these guys were heroic, and they were able to change form. Well, I think that might be an analogy for some of the things that may even come from a tradition of the yogic tradition in India, where certain highly enlightened individuals can perform those.

Rick: Yes, I mean, there are all kinds of stories like that from the yoga tradition of India, shamans in South America, Carlos Castaneda—all the different cultures have these stories.

Steve: One of the cool things when we were up in Tibet—again, it was me and Will Fox—we were there, and we said, “Where are the really deep lama monasteries?” We went to the monastery that supposedly had the records of Jesus coming to Tibet and to India, Hemis. We went to another one called Lamayuru, where there were half a dozen places where lamas would go underneath, and they would stay for three years at a time without light. They’d just get one meal a day, and if they didn’t eat for two weeks, then they broke down the wall, and they figured the guy had left his body.

So, these are pretty heavy-duty kinds of places, but they said the real place was beyond this range of mountains that they pointed to. They said in the winter, when no one can get there, that’s when they practice levitation. In the summer, they come out and fundraise, and they work with the community, and they do puja.

Rick: Don’t want people to see him.

Steve: Apparently, but in the winters, I can’t even imagine. The snow is as high as the roof, and if you haven’t dug out a trail, you don’t go anywhere.

Rick: A friend of ours named Craig Pearson wrote a book about levitation. He collected all the accounts of it from around the world and different cultures and everything. There certainly are a lot of accounts. I’ve never seen it, and you and I have practiced the TM-Sidhi program for years with a couple thousand people who are all trying to do it, and I never saw an example of it. There are all kinds of explanations as to why that never happened. People can think what they want.

Personally, I think probably some of these accounts are true, that it’s possible. It’s interesting because it suggests that the human relationship to the laws of nature, such as gravity, is very different than we might think. That sort of suggests that consciousness is so fundamental—not just the product of the brain, but so fundamental—that if you can really learn to function at a deep enough level, you can master certain laws of nature that reside there and create all kinds of effects.

Steve: My better experiences of Liquid Light filling up and kind of propelling me, or freeing me to go places that didn’t feel like Fairfield, Iowa—the subjective sensation was, “I’m free. I could do anything.” Obviously, I couldn’t do anything, otherwise I would have done it. I would have said, “I’d pop in on Rick and say, ‘Hey, I’m going to win Wimbledon next week.’”

But the conviction and sensation—and maybe this is where people get kind of fritzed out—the conviction and sensation that in this octave of vibration that I referred to earlier, that’s not visible to my eye but was visible to me in that inner state, was so liberating and so freeing that I felt like, when I go back into the six-foot body, I’m in a prison.

And that’s not a negative comment on being in a physical body, because we all chose to do it and there’s so much that we can get from it. So, I’m happy, and I want to perpetuate it. But the freedom I felt in that state—maybe I was just delusional—but I felt like I could pretty much do anything.

Rick: Yeah. I just became aware of someone who has deeply studied Patanjali and also Carl Jung and is an expert in juxtaposing their perspectives. I think I’m going to be interviewing her a little bit later down the line.

I mentioned Patanjali because the third chapter of the Yoga Sutras is all about siddhis. Most teachers and people dismiss siddhis as a distraction or a kind of hang-up or sideshow, but then why did he devote a whole chapter of a four-chapter book to explaining how to do them?

Steve: Well, I believe they’re deep practices, and I believe that the tangible results are not the main show. I think the process of—

Rick: Of mastering them.

Steve: Learning to function at the deep levels of consciousness would be valuable.

Rick: Yeah, right. Because obviously, an elephant is as strong as an elephant. That’s one of the Patanjali sutras. Or a crow can fly. So, it’s not the ability to do those things that’s significant, but the sort of development that acquiring the ability to do those things would entail would be kind of real interesting.

Steve: And even if someone had developed them—Keshava has discussed this in conversations with me—to my mind, he had those abilities. He said once one has mastered those abilities, there are only a few circumstances where you would use them. You would never use them to control another person, ever; the consequences would be dire. If you were to get hold of some of those powers without the big picture, the consequences could be dire.

Rick: Yeah, I think people become black magicians and so on.

Steve: And if, on the other hand, you have developed the full perfection of your human nervous system, I’ve seen Amma do things, and I’ve seen Maharishi do things that you and I just can’t do—superhuman-type stuff. If they are doing it with the intention of helping someone else in the right context, helping the world, or seeing a potential catastrophic situation in the world, that would be different.

Amma addresses that many times, saying, “These dark clouds are gathering, children, and let’s intensify our prayer or meditation.” She’s seeing something in the future, which is a siddhi in itself, and then she’s saying we need to avert it. So, those kinds of things are proper uses of Patanjali’s teachings. He probably addresses it somewhere in his treatise, too.

Rick: He probably does, I imagine. I interviewed Dana Sawyer a couple of times, who has been to India 20 times, speaks fluent Hindi, and everything. I was asking about siddhis and whether he had seen any in all his time in India. He said, “I never did.” He knew all the tricks.

I mean, you can take a walnut and put it in your armpit and cause your pulse to stop, and claim that your heart has stopped. You can conceal a sponge in your hair, squeeze it, and have milk flow down, and things like that. He knew all these tricks, and he called people on it—these fakers—but he said, “I saw one guy who was actually able to swallow a live snake and then regurgitate it.” He said that was the most amazing thing he ever saw. Don’t try this at home.

So, before we get too goofy here, we talked earlier about enlightenment and whether such a term is even meaningful, because it implies some kind of an endpoint. You mentioned in your notes that some spiritual authorities consider enlightenment to be the beginning rather than the goal of human evolution.

Enlightenment, Human Error, and Guru Misconduct

There are many people—many masters, teachers, and gurus—in this world who are supposedly enlightened, who did things that did not seem very enlightened, and that’s caused a lot of confusion in people. So maybe we could talk a little bit about that: why so many gurus seem to screw up, and whether enlightenment really is sort of an endpoint or actually a beginning point to higher levels of potential development.

Steve: There’s a term used in Vedic parlance called lesha-vidya, which I believe translates as “the faint remains of ignorance.” It’s my understanding that the faint remains of ignorance remain even in a highly enlightened individual.

Rick: And it’s said that without such faint remains, you wouldn’t even be able to function. You need to sort of stay grounded on the Earth. To a certain extent, you need to be able to distinguish between a door and a wall and things like that.

Steve: One of the fun lectures I ever heard was an advanced lecture by a friend of mine named Jeff Tepper. He was down in Tucson, Arizona, right in the heart of the Saguaro National Desert. He said, “If you’re in unity consciousness, folks, you’re not going to go out in the desert and hug a saguaro cactus.”

So, you might see everything as one, but the practical differentiation is that’s still a cactus, and it can really rip you up if you do the wrong thing. You don’t walk in front of a bus. Those boundaries need to be there, and they serve a purpose, and that lesha-vidya is that—

Rick: Those are practical examples of why it would be good to still perceive duality, even though duality might not ultimately be the reality. Then you have gurus getting involved with sexual escapades and money issues and all kinds of strange things.

Steve: Yeah. I’m certainly not qualified to address that very well, other than to say that it’s chronicled in Tibetan tradition, the yogic tradition, and in the lives of yogis we’ve read and admire, and gurus.

Part of the lesha-vidya that comes along with being a human being is something called prarabdha karma. In theory, we all have mountains—Himalayan mountains—of karma kind of behind us, and we can’t take it all on in this incarnation, but we carry a suitcase of samples of that karma.

Maybe I didn’t learn something very fundamental about how to interact with my mother or my wife, whatever it might be, or women. I mistreated a woman in my past life, or I was a woman and mistreated my husband in a past life. Well, that karma I may have to sort out in this life, and I come in with that suitcase of karma. We all do.

The possible exceptions might be those few that we could call divine incarnations, and I don’t know. I heard so many amazing stories about Amma, even as an infant, sitting on her mother’s hands and meditating, or something like that. I can’t know, other than the stories.

But the average jivanmukta goes from ignorance when he or she is born and grows into enlightenment, working out the karma. That suitcase of karma may perpetuate itself a little bit even beyond the stage where they’re fully enlightened. That could be an answer.

Maybe, as people have said, Buddha just walked away from his wife and family at some point.

Rick: Well, they were well taken care of. And they became his disciples—his wife did later on. So, it’s not like he was going out to womanize. He left for a reason; he dedicated himself to something. Ramana stole his brother’s school money.

Steve: Krishna was the butter thief, and his mother kept saying, “You can’t keep going to Auntie’s house and taking the butter. Butter is a very cherished thing. They make ghee, and they cook with it.” And he kept taking it and stealing it, taking it for his friends and the cows in the field, out in the forest, and on…

All these are lore and legends, but that’s kind of beyond my—

Rick: Even in the Mahabharata, for instance, there are stories of Krishna, who was supposedly an avatar, kind of cheating: telling Arjuna to break someone’s leg, to hit him below the belt, or telling—I think it was Yudhishthira—to lie about whom he had just killed. He said, “Ashwatthama, the elephant, is dead.” Ashwatthama was also the name of the son of Dronacharya. They told the white lie, and his chariot wheel sank in the mud.

Steve: There are all the ethics about Vedic warfare: you don’t fight after dark, and all these things you don’t do. These are “underhanded” things. They were tricks.

Well, I think mistakes can be made, and I remember hearing Maharishi tell the story that he made a substantial mistake when he was a young brahmachari who had been out of the Himalayas for some years. Indira Gandhi was Prime Minister around 1980.

Rick: Is that when she started?

Steve: Somewhere in there. He’d been out for some time, but the story he told was that it was a mistake on his part. He was sitting in a room when she was coming in to be received by an audience. Everyone in India would stand up for the Prime Minister. Maharishi said, “I couldn’t make myself stand. I just didn’t stand.” He said it was taken note of not only by her, but also by her sycophants and all the people around her.

The way I understand it, the Congress Party, which she ruled for a long time, was then ruled by her son Rajiv, and then her son’s wife, Sonia, was the head of the Congress Party, and on and on. So this went on for 30 years. It always created problems for him because of that one initial incident.

Rick: He did some other things, too, that might be construed as mistakes. But I guess the deeper, broader question is: Is there a tight correlation between higher states of consciousness, or the highest state of consciousness—

Steve: And moral decision-making?

Rick: And ethical behavior? Some say, “No, no, none whatsoever. You can be an enlightened ex-murderer or something.” Others say, “Yes, there’s a correlation, but it’s loose.” I bring it up too often for some people’s tastes, just because there are so many examples of it.

Creating Ethical Standards for Spiritual Teachers

In fact, I’ve been involved in helping to establish the Association of Professional Spiritual Teachers, and I will be presenting that at the SAND conference. It has a code of ethics, such as the AMA or the American Psychological Association would have, that teachers could perhaps aspire to, and that students could take as an example of what to expect in a teacher.

Steve: Well, I would say one general thing. I don’t know if we’re kind of uncles at this point to a younger spiritual generation, but we’ve been around the block at least. I mean, I’ve learned meditation as a teenager and all that. I’m sure you did the same and became a teacher of meditation as a teenager.

I would say, don’t be in a hurry. Even our grand guru, Swami Brahmananda Saraswati—what did he do? He searched for three or four years, did he not?

Rick: He left home at the age of eight or nine, and it was about five years traveling up the Ganges.

Steve: And he interviewed—

Rick: Yeah, he interviewed.

Steve: He had several requirements that were non-negotiable for him. So he took—

Rick: His time finding a teacher—someone who met the criteria.

Steve: I think that would be some advice I would give: There are many, many people in India and other parts of the world who would consider themselves gurus and are venerated as gurus. They’re not necessarily people that I would look to in that role. But I also feel that there are highly, highly qualified people, and I would certainly put Amma in that group.

I have yet to find that her practical knowledge and her example as a saint have been anything less than really impressive.

Rick: Yeah. All right, we won’t dwell on this point too much longer. Perhaps just to say that people have a tendency to see their guru as perfect and divine and totally enlightened and all that. It’s good to respect your teacher and even to feel devotion for your teacher, but one should never abdicate one’s own judgment and discrimination.

Even the Buddha said that. He said, “Don’t believe something just because I said it.” You have to sort of figure it out on your own and make your own decision. So, if you see somebody doing something and you think, “Well, it seems wrong to me, but they’re so highly evolved—what do I know?” that’s not the right way to look at it.

Even the Buddha said that. He said, “Don’t believe something just because I said it.” You have to sort of figure it out on your own and make your own decision. So, if you see somebody doing something and you think, “Well, it seems wrong to me, but they’re so highly evolved—what do I know?” that’s not the right way to look at it.

Steve: Jesus said it many times in different ways—beautiful phrases. “Trust your higher self” is a paraphrase of how he would have phrased it. But I think Divine wisdom is what we’re all after: divine experience, divine consciousness, and a divine permanency about our life.

I think it’s in the DNA. At a certain stage, that DNA gets activated. We first read about it—I read Siddhartha, you read Siddhartha—then we started poking around. Maybe marijuana would provide the answer, or maybe this would provide the answer.

But waking up to the understanding that there is a higher state that’s awakening in itself—that’s the first step. The next step is to actually taste the fruits of consciousness growing. Then we see the benchmarks that some senior people have written about in the past—Ramakrishna, whoever—or that scriptures have elucidated, and hopefully we can find them and tap into them.

We can truly trust our own inner wisdom and the higher self that is there to guide us. I’ve said this many times in different contexts: It’s my experience that there is a quality of higher self that moves with us from incarnation to incarnation, and it doesn’t really get down in the mud. We’re down in the mud, finding our way, but it doesn’t.

We go through many incarnations—hundreds—and may not even know that there’s such a thing that would guide us consciously. But it may still be guiding us subconsciously, in a dream, or in some other way. When we start to get to a state of full awakening, full realization, we are getting closer to that perfect template that resides in us, above us, where we don’t need to talk in terms of spatial relationships.

But we start to become one with it, and that’s when I think the game of evolution really gets interesting.

Rick: Yeah, there was a charming, wonderful woman named Peace Pilgrim who wandered around the United States with nothing but the clothes on her body and totally relied upon the kindness of strangers to subsist for a long time. She wore a T-shirt or sweatshirt that said “Peace Pilgrim.”

Anyway, in her little book, which is beautiful, she talks about how, at a certain stage, there’s a degree of awakening where the individuality is pretty much out of the way—not interfering with or trying to conduct the process of evolution. She said then it really takes off, because as long as our limited human efforts are trying to orchestrate it, we’re kind of handicapping God in a way.

Steve: Sometimes it’s two steps forward, one step back, and all.

Rick: Yeah.

Steve: Well, Maharishi did make a comment one time that evolution really begins in cosmic consciousness. I do remember that phrase.

📚 Lessons from saints and pilgrims

Speaking of wandering around and letting nature provide for you, I had what I think is a fun encounter in South India once upon a time. This was in 1982, on another project prior to teaching corporate executives. That came later.

We were directed by some German friends, “You must go to Kanyakumari,” which is a very holy little temple at the very southern tip of the subcontinent, where the three seas meet—the Arabian Sea, Indian Ocean, and Bay of Bengal. They all converge there.

This is a Devi temple, a very holy place dedicated to a certain aspect of the young-girl aspect of the Divine Mother—the unmarried, virgin aspect. Living next to the temple was this avadhoot. An avadhoot is a yogini who doesn’t ever cook or provide for herself or anything. Whatever someone hands her, or if an insect crawls along, she might make that her meal. It’s kind of bizarre, but she was famous and venerated.

People would come to see her. Saints would come from the Himalayas to see her, we were told. We were also told by the local fishing community—Kanyakumari is a fishing community—that she was frequently seen floating on driftwood out in the ocean when the tides would go out. She looked ancient. Her skin was totally leathery. She had just a little bit of cloth for her attire, and when we were there, she was there.

She was not floating in the ocean, and we were told to bring bunches of bananas. So, we came with these bunches of bananas, and as we came, dogs started to come. Twenty or thirty dogs started to hang out there because, as we found out later, there was a reason for it.

She came out and didn’t speak, but she looked ancient. We were told she was centuries old—who could say? She just looked very, very weathered. Her eyes, though, kind of told the story. To me, they were brilliant.

Anyway, we were told by one person who was helping take care of her at the time, “You should peel the bananas, break off pieces, and give the peeled banana to her.” Her name was Mayi Amma.

We had huge bunches of these red bananas, which were very tasty. She started breaking off a piece and giving it, say, to Rick. Then she would break off another piece, and there was a dog between Rick and Steve, but she gave it to the dog.

Then she’d break off another piece, and the same hand that had been in this street dog’s mouth was now going into my mouth, and then it was going into the next guy’s mouth and the next dog’s mouth.

She kept repeating this cycle over and over, and we were just like the dogs. We had no understanding of anything. Fortunately, we were just doing as we had been instructed, and she fed us for about twenty minutes—bite here, bite here, dog, person, dog, person, around and around.

It was quite a fascinating experience because as she came to hand it to you, you looked her in the eye. I always felt there was something behind those eyes. She was not just some old village lady.

That was our experience with Mayi Amma. Later on, I met a Swami who had lived, I believe, for a decade at 15,000 feet without coming down much, up above Gomukh and Gangotri, in a place called Tapovan. He lived up there in very sparse and austere conditions. His name is Swami Rama Kripalu.

He told the story that he had gone down to Kanyakumari to have the darshan of this yogini, this avadhoot yogini. He said that when he got down there, she wasn’t there. He had heard that she was out in the ocean, and he was told that she didn’t float around on driftwood; she just lived in the ocean, which was a stretch. But having been in India, I was willing to accept anything if they could prove it, or at least come close to proving it.

He said that he prayed to her and prayed to her and prayed to her, and after a couple of hours she came walking out of the ocean. As she came, the entire population of dogs in the village was on the beach. When she got onto the sand, the dogs just converged on her like bees on a hive.

He couldn’t even see her. Then the same ritual that we had gone through happened again. He was told to give her a banana, and she would do the right thing, called prasad—give the blessing. That’s how she blessed people.

Rama Kripalu, the Swami from the Himalayas, said she gave the dog a bite, then the next dog a bite, and then she was about to put it in his mouth. He put his hands up, and that really disturbed her. She slapped him—hit him really hard across the face.

At that instant, he knew exactly the mistake he’d made. He was a high Brahmin by birth, and Brahmins don’t do anything with dogs. We all have pet dogs, but he then realized his mistake.

I can’t remember whether he rebounded and said, “Yes, please give me.” That part eludes my mind and memory. But anyway, he told us it was a big lesson for him: his arrogance in thinking he was somehow too high a soul to do this was a mistake.

Rick: Too prissy. Yeah, there are stories of Shankara with dogs, and sort of—

Steve: Yudhisthira with his dog.

Rick: Yeah, there’s that one at the end of the Mahabharata. But also, I think Shankara—was it Shankara who encountered some dog on the road? He was like, “Get away from me, dog,” and then it turned out it was Lord Shiva disguising himself as a dog?

Steve: These are the kinds of tests, the cosmic—

Rick: Humility.

Steve: There was one other little story that involved an Amma devotee who had gotten restless. Amma’s ashram is only two hours from that place in Kanyakumari—at most two and a half hours, I believe—out in the backwaters in Kerala.

He got restless, as can happen when people sit in the ashram, so he went on a pilgrimage without telling anyone, including Amma. He went down to this place and had this same saint’s darshan.

Again, he did the same thing that Swami Rama Kripalu did: he rejected the prasad, thinking, “This doesn’t have to happen. We don’t need to do this. I just wanted to see you and have your darshan.”

He went back to Amma’s ashram, and within a day or two he developed a huge stomach problem. He was having terrible cramps and was in great pain, and it really felt serious to him.

He went to Amma and said, “Amma, I’m having a horrible problem in my stomach. I feel really sick.” Amma very innocently, using her greater omniscient capacity, I’m imagining, said, “Son, did you go on a pilgrimage recently?”

“Yes, Amma, I did. I was so restless.”

She said, “I understand. Did you go to Kanyakumari, to this place, and have prasad from some saintly person?”

He said, “Yes, Amma, I was there.”

She said, “Son, did you accept the prasad?”

He told the story of the dogs, and Amma said, “Son, you need to go immediately, directly back to her and accept her blessing, because it was a blessing. Then I think things will be fine.” And things were fine.

So, he didn’t tell her the story. She just saw—however she saw. That’s an example, in my mind, of how a saint uses their consciousness to help a person in a tight spot.

Rick: Yeah, and it’s also an example of how things aren’t necessarily as they appear. They don’t necessarily conform to our structured notions of what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s good, what’s bad, what’s pure, what’s impure, and so on.

There was a story in my interview last week with a fellow who told the story about how these two wealthy women from New York City went to see Edgar Cayce back in the day, when he was—

Steve: That would have been interesting.

Rick: Yeah, they were very wealthy women. They went down there, and they said—

Steve: In Virginia Beach?

Rick: Virginia Beach. “Edgar, we have this brother who inherited a third of the fortune, and we have the other two-thirds. He squandered it. He now lives under a bridge in New York City. We don’t know what to do. If we give him any more money, he’ll squander that, so we’re stuck.”

Edgar Cayce went into a trance, and when he came out, he said, “This man who lives under the bridge is probably the most highly evolved of all the persons I’ve ever done a reading on. He’s agreed to take on this role in order to teach you two a lesson, I guess, or to serve some kind of function in your karmic dynamics—the three of you agreed upon it before you came into this life.”

Anyway, I just tell the story. Probably people who listen to BatGap regularly heard it last week. But it’s an example of how we shouldn’t be so cocksure and judgmental about the way things are. We should be a little bit more pliable.

Steve: Absolutely.

Rick: And not jump to conclusions.

Steve: Keshava once said to me, “There is more love than oxygen on this Earth, but who would know it?” He said, “If you just don’t make any assumptions about this person’s status in life—maybe they irritate you—at least have a neutral outlook toward them. Your friends you love, your family you love. Your enemies—there’s a lesson there. But just take neutrality as far as you can go.”

If the person is approaching you with a knife, you don’t say, “Hey, please hug me.” There’s a story in the Buddhist tradition that says, “If I fed myself to the first tiger that came along, he’s going to be hungry again tomorrow.” So, you don’t feed yourself to a tiger just because the animal is hungry. You have to look at all angles of the circumstance, maybe.

There is more love than oxygen on this Earth, but who would know it?

Rick: Yeah, well, there are many more things that you and I could talk about, I’m sure. We didn’t even get into the whole thing about the absolute body, rainbow body, and all that stuff, but we’ve been going on for quite a while, and we alluded to that kind of thing.

🎵 Writing, books, and staying in touch

So, are you working on any more books?

Steve: The novel stands on its own as a piece of fiction, but I have the rough draft—it’s called The Nirvana Chronicles. I have about 200 pages of a rough draft for book two and a full outline for book three.

I want to see the traction and the enthusiasm. I’ve had some lovely reactions. I have a neighbor who asked if he should read it. I said, “Yeah, read it. You’d probably enjoy it.” He read it three times.

Rick: Wow.

Steve: I don’t know why he read it three times. He said, “I loved it.” This morning I got an email from a monk in Germany saying, “I just read the other one, India: Mirror of Truth.” He said, “Thank you so much for opening my heart to India, because I hadn’t had that feeling about India prior to reading that.”

So, I love to write, and I will probably continue on with the trilogy. I’ve just had kind of an interlude here.

Rick: Well, my problem is that I interview somebody every week.

Steve: And everyone gives you their book.

Rick: The guy who is coming up next has about 500 pages’ worth of stuff. I don’t usually get through it all, but we’ll see. I’d like to finish it. I was really enjoying the story.

Those of you who have time to read might enjoy these books, and I’ll link to them both from Steve’s page on BatGap.com.

Steve: I want to mention, as a wrap-up for the books, that the first book mostly started with letters to friends back in the States. When I met Keshava, he said, “Write your book.”

I said, “I don’t have a book in mind.”

He said, “No, no. Start writing and see.”

So, he kind of pushed me into that one, and then I finished it. Later, in the encounter with him when I referred to him as appearing as a cat, he suggested, “Try your hand at fiction.”

I said, “Fiction?”

So, there we have it. I don’t know. In a sense, the thrill, joy, and creativity of writing were plenty of reward for me. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Rick: It is fun when you’re in the groove and you’re writing something.

Steve: You are in the zone.

Rick: Yeah. Get in the zone. By the way, finishing where we started, talking about the zone.

Steve: There you go.

Rick: All right, well, thanks, Steve.

Steve: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Rick: It’s been good, and maybe we’ll do another one when volume two comes out or something, to get into other topics.

Steve: A pleasure and an honor to talk about any of these topics.

Rick: Yeah, so thank you to those who’ve been listening or watching. You’ll find a link to—well, there will be a page about Steve and this interview on batgap.com, a link to his books, and—do you want to be in touch with people? Do you have time to correspond?

Steve: I make the time. I got this email from the German guy this morning, and I took the time. I want to take the time. If I suddenly have a thousand in my box, then it would take me more time, but I will still take the time because I feel like this is important.

Rick: Is contact information on your website, or how should people contact you?

Steve: Yeah, the website has an email address, and I believe it’s the same one that’s on my book also.

Rick: All right. Well, since you’re putting it in your book, I’ll also put it on your BatGap page, as well as the link to your website, so if people want to get in touch, they can.

Steve: Yeah, absolutely. It’s not anything to do with finances. It would just be my pleasure. If there’s a question or something, I’m not going to say, “Okay, you’ve got twenty minutes of my time now. Pay me on PayPal for this.” It’ll just be as best I can do as a fellow traveler on the spiritual path.

Rick: Okay, great. Well, thanks. Thank you. I appreciate it. Thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching. See you for the next one.

Summary

Questions This Interview Explores

Key takeaways

Transcript

🕊️ The zone and the beginnings of spiritual interest

Turning Peak Performance into a Repeatable State

✨ Milestones in consciousness

Perception Without the Senses

Choosing Gurus and Avoiding Spiritual Pitfalls

Enlightenment, Human Error, and Guru Misconduct

Creating Ethical Standards for Spiritual Teachers

📚 Lessons from saints and pilgrims

🎵 Writing, books, and staying in touch

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