Vasant Swaha Transcript - Buddha at the Gas Pump

Summary

The conversation explores a lifelong search for freedom, the transformative influence of spiritual teachers, and the experience of awakening. It also examines integration after realization, the value of discernment, and the common truth expressed through different traditions.

Questions This Interview Explores

What role can a spiritual teacher or guru play in awakening?
How can someone recognize genuine spiritual guidance without following blindly?
What happens after a profound spiritual awakening?
How can different spiritual paths point toward the same truth?

Key takeaways

Awakening can be deeply disruptive and may take years to integrate.
A true teacher awakens intelligence rather than demanding blind obedience.
Different traditions can express one underlying truth.
Spiritual growth is reflected in greater love, freedom, compassion, and lightness.
The right teacher and path often appear when sincere readiness has developed.
Spiritual communities can miss profound transformation when business and identity take over.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. This is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. If you would like to see previous interviews or support our efforts, please go to batgap.com, and I’ll give you more details about that at the end of the interview.

My guest today is Vasant Swaha, who is down in Brazil at the moment and divides his time pretty much between Brazil and Norway, where he’s originally from. Before we get into the interview, I just want to express a thought that I was having this morning, kind of related to my role in doing this interview show.

It reminded me of a friend of mine named Mirabai Starr, whom I interviewed last October. She gave a talk at the Science and Nonduality Conference entitled Bees in the Garden, and she said, “Like bees in the garden of spirit, we are designed to gather nectar from all the world’s spiritual traditions and allow it to become rich honey, with which to sustain ourselves and feed the hungry world. We are also endowed with the wisdom to recognize the nourishment and pass over the noxious weeds.”

I sort of feel like, in my role in doing this interview show, I’m like a bee going from flower to flower and connecting people with one another, cross-fertilizing in a way. It gives me a lot of pleasure to hear from people who say that they met their teacher or met someone they had never known about and had such a wonderful experience or profound awakening or whatever.

So, it’s kind of an honor to be playing that role, and I’m sure the same will occur with Vasant Swaha, whom some of you may not have heard of yet. Here he is.

Vasant Swaha: I think you’re doing a great job, Rick. I just recently saw it, but it is really like you are connecting people and making the world smaller in a positive way. There are so many negative things from the Internet and the new technology, but this is the positive side, so it’s really beautiful.

Rick: Well, thanks. It’s like we’re all on the same team; we’re just playing different positions. If you know baseball, some of us are on first base, some of us are at shortstop, and you can’t really run the team without all those positions.

Vasant Swaha: I had a really hard time finding my master in my time. I had to travel all the way to India, and it was very difficult, but now it’s an explosion.

Rick: It is, it is, isn’t it? And the fact that it’s an explosion gives me a lot of optimism for the world. It makes me feel like, despite all the serious problems that we hear about on the news and so on, something really good is happening that’s not making the news very much, but that is very powerful and gives us a lot of hope for the future. Don’t you think?

Vasant Swaha: Well, I think it touches more and more people, so in that way it’s beautiful. But the world is always getting more and more negative, and it’s also getting more and more positive, so there is a balance there.

Rick: Yeah, like the polarities are increasing.

Vasant Swaha: Yeah, it’s getting more and more unconscious, and you also have the balance: people are waking up and becoming more conscious. But it has to spread, and I feel you are doing your part in that, spreading it, like all of us are doing.

Rick: Yeah, it kind of reminds me of the Bhagavad Gita, where the polarities had increased to the point where supposedly the good guys and the bad guys were all sorted out into two armies, with God standing in the middle between the two armies. Then there was this huge shift and resolution and balancing of tendencies and qualities, and something like that’s going on.

Vasant Swaha: It has to change, it has to change. Otherwise, it’s really going downhill, so it has to change.

Rick: Yeah, so you alluded—

Vasant Swaha: People are already changing a lot. When I started, even yoga was a foreign name. Now everybody is into yoga. I mean, what they call yoga is just Hatha yoga, just the physical aspect, but at least it’s the beginning.

Rick: Yeah, and usually one thing leads to the next.

Vasant Swaha: We have to start with the physical body.

Rick: So you said you went to India to find your teacher. Let’s get into your story a little bit, because you do have an interesting story, and people can get to know you a little better. You’re from Norway, right? As I recall reading your story, you were pretty young when you became aware that there was a lot more to life than meets the eye, and you began searching.

Vasant Swaha: Well, I think I always had that in me. I wanted to be free, but I didn’t know what that freedom meant. Even when I was very little, around five or six, I wanted to leave my family. I had a really good family; it wasn’t because anything was bad. It was just the impulse in me that I wanted to leave. I remember something else, maybe—something unknown. It was an impulse I couldn’t put my finger on.

When I was only fourteen or fifteen, I finished school. I couldn’t handle school, and they couldn’t handle me. Then it really started. Of course, I was my parents’ worst nightmare, maybe—not that I was bad, but I was very different from the norm. So I left very early.

I was always positive, saying, “I don’t need that. I don’t need to study. There’s something else.” I didn’t find that until I found Osho, after trying many things—getting lost in the hippie days, drugs, alcohol, and all that. But it went very quickly, just a few years. Then I met Osho when I was maybe twenty years old.

Before that, I had also gone to India because I was pulled to India, especially to the Himalayas. That was part of it, too. There was something familiar that I couldn’t put my finger on, some old memory in me from the East or from the Himalayas. As soon as I was in India, I felt at home.

Rick: Do you feel that a lot of spiritual people have done a lot of work in past lives to create a certain momentum that just gets resumed in this life?

Vasant Swaha: Yes, yes, because I remember many things from the past.

Rick: You actually remember specific things from past lives?

Vasant Swaha: Yeah. I had also been with my Master in the past, and many people I have met have a connection with me from the past. I think that is natural. It’s the consciousness that wants to evolve, or the love—the love connection.

Rick: Some people reject the notion of past lives because they feel that, essentially, there is no person, no individuality; we’re just universal spirit. So how could there be past lives? That implies that something or other is carrying on from one body to the next. How do you reconcile those two ideas?

Vasant Swaha: Well, I haven’t gone so much into it, but as long as you are seeking and haven’t found the truth, or yourself—your true self—then there is something that is seeking, something that is longing.

When you have found your center, there is no more seeking. You are not identified with the seeking anymore; you don’t long for that process. So maybe that is what’s carrying us on—that connection—until you are self-realized. Then something is broken, and you are home again.

When you have found your center, there is no more seeking.

✨ Awakening and integration

Rick: Jumping ahead of our story—we’ll go back—but jumping ahead, it must have been quite a few years now since you became self-realized. Do you feel that that realization was actually not the end of the road, and that even since then there has been continued growth in some respect—integration, refinement, deepening, clarification, anything like that?

Vasant Swaha: Definitely. When it happened, I had no idea that that was what was happening, because it was totally new. When you have a master like I had, of course you put him very high, because he has given you so much. He was not only a master, but the master of the masters, I would say. It was huge.

So, it was almost impossible that you could have that experience, even though I wasn’t there for enlightenment. It was just life happening in that way. I met one man, the 16th Karmapa, by chance. He also had a connection from the past with Osho. In fact, he said that Osho was the greatest enlightened being in India since Buddha. Those are big words.

When I met Karmapa, it was just by chance. I almost just sneaked into his meeting with a friend who had been waiting four years to meet him. By chance, I was there, and I don’t know how it happened. When I came in, Osho started talking, and then I realized that there were other enlightened beings. That was the first time.

Rick: Other than Osho, you mean?

Vasant Swaha: Yeah, yeah. In those days there weren’t many. It wasn’t this explosion that we are seeing now, or like what you are doing, talking with so many people. For me, that was really an eye-opener at that time, to see that there was more. What has been happening now, after Osho left his body and after Papaji left his body, is huge.

Rick: Yeah, I think it’s good for people to have that perspective. I was listening to an interview on Skeptic.com with Dr. Jeffrey Martin, a researcher who has gone around and interviewed hundreds, if not thousands, of people who are supposedly enlightened or awakened to whatever degree, in a kind of scientific way, with surveys and so on.

He expressed some surprise that even among all these apparently enlightened people, there tended to be a certain fundamentalism—a certain attitude that our way is the best, or that our type of realization is the best and everything else is a little less than that. It seems to me that that’s a kind of human shortcoming that creeps its way into a lot of spiritual groups and spiritual people. Do you have any comments about that based on your experience?

Vasant Swaha: Well, then they’re not spiritual, as far as I’m concerned.

Rick: Or perhaps not as spiritual as they might become.

Vasant Swaha: Yeah, or they think they are, because you cannot have any opinions. It doesn’t belong to anything. It’s freedom itself. It’s nothingness. That division, that separation, has to go for the whole to appear. You have to leave for the whole to come.

Then all this is just a joke, and even the Master is no separation. So, it’s a paradox, because from what I have gone through, it’s like you need the Master, but you don’t need the Master. You are and you are not; it’s both.

But as long as you are identified with a physical form, a mind, or an ego, then that will help. That is the beauty of the enlightened ones: you get recognized. That is what satsang is. You come back to your own self. Nobody is teaching this in the world, as far as I’m concerned, except the gurus, the mystics, or the Masters.

Rick: Yeah, right. It’s not something you’re likely to learn in high school, but there are a lot of spiritual teachers out there teaching this stuff. I guess the point I was making is that there tends to be, in many spiritual groups, this sort of holier-than-thou attitude.

It’s almost like if we were talking about food, some people aren’t just saying, “I like Indian food better than Italian food.” They’re saying, “Indian food is the best. If everybody really wants to appreciate food, they should just have Indian food,” because it’s better than all other kinds of food. To me, that seems a little narrow-minded.

Vasant: Yeah, it’s very narrow-minded, but you have to know that people are narrow-minded if they can say something like that, because maybe it’s his part or my part that you met—that guru, or the Sufi, or the Sun, or the Buddhist—but this has nothing to do with it when you realize it, you know. It doesn’t matter what part of the mountain you take. It’s like that.

Rick: Well, speaking of paradox, though, are there qualitative differences between paths, or is it really a matter of whatever path you gravitate to? There’s a verse in the Gita that says, “Because one can perform one’s own dharma, the lesser in merit is better than the dharma of another. The dharma of another brings danger; better is death than one’s own dharma.”

So it’s sort of like, in one verse, it says, “Okay, yeah, there could be qualitative differences between different paths, but at the same time, you should choose the one that’s right for you, and that will be better than one that is somehow intrinsically, on some kind of objective scale, more effective or higher.” That’s more of a statement than a question, but feel free to respond.

Vasant: No, I have nothing to say, because when the student or the disciple is ready, then the Master appears, it says, you know, and that was what happened for me. So I can only talk about my own experience. I have no—I mean, God bless anybody who finds a Master or a teacher. That’s what I say. It has nothing to do with that.

As long as the path gets more and more light, as long as they get more and more happy, as long as they get more and more loving, compassionate, free, light, and non-serious, God bless them, you know.

Rick: Yeah, so you shall know them by their fruits, as the saying goes.

Vasant: Yeah, but like you asked before, it definitely took a long time for me to incorporate it when it happened. It’s not like—I see those people who come for one or two satsangs and then want to have a certificate that they are enlightened. It’s not like that, you know, because you are totally lost, in a way.

I had to start functioning again without knowing myself, and that took many years.

Rick: Yeah, and that’s not an uncommon thing either. I mean, Eckhart totally went through that. He basically just sat on a park bench for a couple of years after his awakening and tried to make sense of it. Byron Katie went through that, and there are plenty of other—dozens, hundreds of other people—who can report similar experiences.

So what you’re saying is that awakening is not the whole package, that a profound awakening has to be integrated, and that can take years, right?

Vasant: Yeah, it is shattering when it happens, but shattering in a good way. For me, it happened when I was still in Pune, but I had also left the body a year before. So I was in a limbo, and I didn’t know what to do anymore, because, in a way, while I was there, I was gone. Vasant was gone, and I had not much interest in leading the groups and the therapies and the meditations and all this.

Then something happened that all the wires in my head got rewired, in a way, and I didn’t find myself. I didn’t know who I was. I was like a newborn, clean baby in a grown-up body, and it was very interesting.

I went to the ashram and said, “I can’t do this, what I’ve been doing up to now, anymore.” Even there, nobody understood. I was feeling that this is why we are here; this is what the Master wanted to give us. It was like something beautiful was happening, but they were thinking about the money and the groups and the business.

So that was an eye-opener for me also: even there, in the communes or in the mystery schools, you can easily miss it.

Rick: In the mystery schools around Osho’s ashram, you mean?

Vasant: Yeah. There were very few people. It was just a few Indians, I felt, who had been with Osho in the early days, who maybe had it more in their genes also, to see that some transformation had happened.

So I totally retreated. Just like Eckhart Tolle said he sat on the bench, I sat on my balcony, watching the river, you know, like that. But then, luckily—or I don’t know if luckily—then I met Papaji, and he incorporated that.

❤️ Meeting Papaji

Rick: Yeah, let’s probe into that a little bit. First of all, with regard to the awakening, how long had you been with Osho before he died?

Vasant: Twelve, thirteen years.

Rick: That’s pretty long, and I know you were his bodyguard at one point, so you were fairly close to him and one of his bodyguards. Did you also come to Oregon? Were you up at the ashram there?

Vasant: Yeah, yes.

Rick: That was quite a scene, from what I understand.

Vasant: Yeah, I wouldn’t have missed that for anything.

Rick: Incidentally, I should just interject here before asking this question: sometimes when I’ve interviewed quite a few people who were with Osho, I get feedback from certain people who say, “Oh, brother, another Osho person,” and they have this attitude toward Osho that’s based upon things we were hearing in the news during those days in Oregon and stuff like that.

And yet, generally, the people I’ve interviewed have had nothing but positive feelings about him, and I respect that. I was with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi during the days you were with Osho, and the two of them actually had some sort of rivalry going, where they would make somewhat disparaging comments about one another.

I look back on the whole thing and think, with Maharishi, that he was a remarkable soul, an extraordinary man, but he was a man. As a man, he had flaws and shortcomings, and he was a human being with human foibles, you know.

Do you have that attitude toward Osho, even, or do you see him in retrospect as having been really perfect and without any sort of shortcomings or flaws?

Vasant: No, I think everybody has that. You are in a physical body and you have your things, you know, so that is clear for everybody, I think. It’s not like they say about Mahavira for the Jains in India, that when he got cut, milk and honey were coming out, you know. It’s not like that. They are not shitting gold.

The Master, for me, is someone who can help tremendously to open your heart, your seeking, or your consciousness. I mean, look how difficult it is even for people to start driving a car, learning mathematics, or playing a guitar. You need a teacher.

For me, as soon as I came into his energy field, and especially when I started guarding him or being physically around him, it was so dense, so thick with nectar, that I could cut it. It was like that. It’s beyond anything. I think it’s nothing to do with that; I’m just talking about my experience. I don’t care.

Rick: Yeah, I totally know what you mean, and I’ve had that experience myself. It’s like the darshan is so thick you can cut it with a knife, like you say.

Vasant: So that goes beyond anything. When your heart, your mind, and your soul open, it’s like you’re not functioning from reason anymore. You’re functioning out of love or a longing for the truth. It’s like this: you have felt something that goes beyond the mind.

Rick: Yeah. I think that one thing that concerns people, though, is that there have been so many instances of people who have discarded reason and begun to take every utterance of their Master as a sort of gospel truth that can’t be disputed, rather than maintaining some degree of discrimination and discernment.

The Buddha, for instance, was famous for saying, “Don’t accept anything because I said it. Just measure it against your own experience, and you should be the final arbiter of what’s useful and what’s not for you.”

There have been so many instances in which people have gotten into trouble by following teachers blindly, without any discrimination, and have ended up being disillusioned, taken advantage of, or something like that. It has given some people the attitude that the whole guru scene is a thing of the past and is no longer appropriate in our modern culture.

I’m just airing those points for the benefit of those who have been pondering those issues, to see what you have to say about them.

Vasant: I think it’s great, but any guru is opening the eyes; he doesn’t make them blind. Either people feel they need to follow blindly and don’t have the intelligence to see through things or follow their own understanding, but the Master is there to open your own intelligence, both in the heart and in the mind.

It’s not like the Master says—maybe in the beginning, because it’s like when you fall in love; it’s the honeymoon. But as you go deeper, then it’s your own truth that responds. Any Master would say, “Don’t follow me, but look at what I’m saying, feel what I’m saying, meditate on it, go deeper. Maybe it brings truth; maybe it becomes your own experience.”

As far as I’m concerned, there’s only one truth. It doesn’t matter if it comes from Krishnamurti, Osho, or Ramana. It doesn’t matter, you know. There’s nothing to do. God bless you if you have found the Master.

I also know about the Guru, the Master, in the West, and I totally understand that. In a way, we don’t need that anymore, but that can also be a total cop-out, because you do need it. You do need it.

The one who is still enslaved by the ego or the mind, of course, doesn’t want a Guru or a Master. They don’t want to surrender. No ego wants to surrender. So how can they pull themselves up by their own shoelaces? It’s impossible.

I have seen this; I know that. I’m not identified with any role, but I can play different roles if it’s helpful. It’s like Ramana said: you need a thorn to take out another thorn, maybe. But who cares? Afterwards, you will laugh about it.

It’s like now I can laugh about Osho, that crackpot. It doesn’t matter, you know. It’s like that, because he worked, and Papaji worked, and Ramana worked. They are all friends on the path for me.

Creating a supportive environment

Rick: Yeah, good point. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, they say.

I have a number of friends and have interviewed a few people who were with a guy named Adi Da. I don’t know if you know who he was, but sometimes he was called Bubba Free John. He did some really crazy stuff—really out there, really quite decadent. I wouldn’t even want to mention some of the things on a family-oriented show.

But I’m very impressed with some of the people who were his students. They really got something out of it, despite the craziness, which is not to excuse or pardon craziness. I’m not saying that it should give teachers liberty to do whatever the heck they please, with the sense that, “Oh, I am perfect, and whatever I do has got to be right.” That could be very dangerous.

But surprisingly, sometimes teachers who have that attitude still manage to turn out some pretty impressive students.

Vasant: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: And I’m not implying for a second that you’re doing anything like this. I don’t know anything about your scene. I got a very good feeling listening to videos and so on. In fact, it was really sweet, because most of the time when I prepare for these interviews, it’s kind of intellectual. I’m listening to people give talks and all sorts of intellectual stuff, and it was just really sweet listening to some beautiful devotional music and seeing the joy and the love and so on that seems to predominate in your ashram.

I’ve had some very devotional, loving times in my own life, and so it was kind of nostalgic and just very nourishing to experience that.

Vasant: Well, I don’t really have any teaching. I haven’t written any book. This is the first time I’m on Skype.

Rick: Really? Congratulations.

Vasant: Yeah, you pulled me out of this, Rick. So, you know, I’m not much of a public person. It’s not like I have to come out. It’s an intimate thing, and for me, love or the feeling of love is intimate.

Books can do a lot, but that is just the beginning. They can read so many beautiful books; it’s all out there. Everybody is giving out books, all the beautiful masters who have been here. But for me, it’s the setting. I feel like it’s now, because the truth is in the moment. It’s happening now, and the energy that can transform is happening here and now. That is what is beautiful with this also, which is why I said, “Yeah, this Skype, let’s try that,” because it’s happening now.

Rick: Yeah, I can relate to that. I mean, I’ve lived in ashrams and around situations like that, and I know that the energy can become very palpable, very rich and thick. You just bathe in that atmosphere, and it can be very transformative.

I do get the feeling that you’re helping to create that sort of atmosphere in your places in Brazil and Norway, and people around you seem to be very happy. So, yeah, great. Something is happening.

Vasant: Something is happening, but I wouldn’t say I have an ashram, because I don’t want to be locked in an ashram. I’m creating both.

Rick: Some kind of facility.

Vasant: Yeah, I have long retreats, but then I also want people to be free and need to be free. It’s not like we’re there all the time. I have both.

Like Osho, he created a huge ashram, but Papaji was totally against any ashram, anything like that. Those were my two biggest influences, I would say, so I have a balance. I have an ashram, but I don’t have an ashram. I have both.

They can also incorporate this into their lives, into their ordinary lives, because the ashram can also become like a safe zone. You have to live your own life in the world and bring what you learn in meditation and self-inquiry, and in being together in love, into the world and be more creative. That’s the challenge.

Rick: Yeah, it can be like a womb or an incubator, and at a certain point the chick is ready to leave the incubator. If the chick tries to stay in the incubator, it’s kind of a cramped situation. It’s time for the chick to go out and start pecking around in the farmyard.

Vasant: Yeah, yeah. I mean, here anybody can come and go as they want. It’s total freedom. There’s no rules, no regulations, nothing to follow except your heart.

There’s no rules, no regulations, nothing to follow except your heart.

Rick: Yeah, that’s great. So, when you were talking about your awakening that happened a year after you’d been with Osho, after he passed away, it sounded like it was quite sudden. You were taking a shower, eating breakfast or something, and all of a sudden, pow, there was a big shift. Is that kind of the way it was?

Vasant: No. In fact, I was in the middle of leading a therapy group in the ashram, a tantra and hara group, a centering group, and then I got very sick.

I had been going through this dilemma, thinking, “What to do now?” I was questioning myself inside: What is it now that is happening? Who am I now in this new situation?

Then I got very sick with dengue fever or malaria, and I was just lying at home. I wasn’t being well taken care of, so it was quite serious. That sickness almost killed me, I think. I don’t know. But that combination, together with the inner spiritual path, meditation, or whatever it was, created something.

When I came back after that sickness, I was totally different. It changed in that week; it changed totally. For the longest time, I could just—I remember going down to the little bakery on this Indian street from my house, and I could use hours. It was only 200 meters away, but I could stop and watch the children and be in awe of them, or talk to the little cat. I mean, it was just like being a three-year-old again. It was totally amazing.

I felt super fragile, and you don’t even know it, but I knew where my space was and I knew how to get into these things. It took a long time to absorb or integrate, or whatever you should call it, and Papaji helped me a lot with that. I met him.

Rick: It’s interesting about the sickness. A similar thing happened to Saint Francis. He was very sick and almost died, at least according to that movie Brother Sun, Sister Moon, and then he came out of it in a transformed state.

I thought of the phrase, “Catharsis precedes metamorphosis.” Another way of putting it is, when the postman knows you’re going to move, he tries to deliver all your mail.

But that’s interesting. Let’s talk a bit more about this integration thing, because it’s very interesting that you were so childlike and delicate, and perhaps vulnerable would be another word. It took a long time to toughen up, in a way, to integrate, to be able to do normal stuff and yet retain that state of realization, right?

Vasant: Yeah, everything was gone. The only link I had, in a way, was the link with the Guru, which I think is why the Guru is there in the end, because everything goes. But this was something that was okay. It was okay. I could feel the presence of the Guru, that this was okay, because nobody else understood, and I didn’t even understand. But there was something in me that knew it was okay.

It was a total acceptance. It was a very blissful space, but it was very new, and I was very fragile and very sensitive on all levels—physical and emotional. You feel like you are see-through, and you can feel and sense what people are thinking beyond the words.

That was also something I didn’t want to feel, because it’s almost madness in people’s heads.

Rick: Too much, yeah.

Vasant: Yeah, too much. So, I can totally understand why people have retreated when these things are happening, away from the world, because you just want to have peace. That came up in me too. I wanted to go back to the Himalayas. I just wanted the solitude of the mountains and the peace of people who live naturally in the mountains.

Rick: Did you find yourself crying a lot during that phase?

Vasant: No, no.

Rick: Okay. That happens sometimes. People have this opening, and then they’re very vulnerable and the heart is really tender. They can’t go to a movie, for instance, because some simple scene in a movie will get them sobbing and disrupt all the other people in the theater.

Vasant: No, I didn’t experience that, but crying with children in the street, or something like this happening—a spontaneous thing in the moment. But I don’t remember it being like that.

I went to the mountains and stayed there for a long time to integrate, and I felt like, “I want to be here. I want to live here.” But then something else was happening: “No, those days are finished. I have to go back to the world.”

I resisted it too. “I don’t want to. At last I have peace. I don’t want to.” But there was something else, and then I met Papaji. He helped me in a way.

Just drop the ocean also”

Rick: Describe that. How did he help you? What was that process?

Vasant: Well, I was living half the time in America and half the time in India in those days.

Rick: Oregon?

Vasant: No, Long Island. I was staying in America as a base to make money after Oregon, where I’d been for a long time. In the Hamptons, in fact. I studied there—super rich, the super rich—and then I had my rice and dal in India.

Rick: What were you doing in the Hamptons, cooking for people or something?

Vasant: No, I was doing sessions, teaching yoga, Tai Chi, and meditation like this, and I could charge them a lot.

But when I met Papaji, I was on my way back to the Himalayas. I had heard of him, of course, because this was all in the circles about Papaji there. Then I took the train to Lucknow and arrived early in the morning. I think his satsang was starting around seven or eight o’clock, so I just reached the satsang house. Very few people came in those days.

We had the satsang, and while I was sitting there, I was thinking, “I’m not looking for a master. I’m not looking for a guru. I’m not looking for anything, in fact. But there’s something I’m here for.” I had nothing to ask. I didn’t know. I felt like, “What am I doing here?” But I was there, and it felt very right that I was there.

There was also this traditional Indian, Hindu setting with the guru, and it was a little foreign for me.

Rick: Really? Even after all that time with Osho, it was foreign?

Vasant: Yeah, it was a different setting there. It was a different setting.

After the satsang was finished, I was still sitting there for a few minutes. Then one of his caretakers came and said that Papaji was asking for me, that he wanted to see me.

I went into his room, and he asked me, “Do you know where I live?”

I said, “No, Papa. I just came now. This is my first time.”

He said, “Then come.” He grabbed my arm and took me out. All his disciples were standing outside in namaste, waiting for their master. Then he came pulling me out. I didn’t even have my flip-flops with me. We got into the car and went to his house.

Then he said, “Now you know where I live. You come for lunch tomorrow.”

That’s how it happened. The next day at lunch, I asked him a question. I said, “I know this ocean, this ocean of peace, of love, but sometimes the past, the mind, comes, and then I leave the ocean.”

Rick: In other words, sometimes you found yourself getting caught up in the mind and losing the ocean status?

Vasant: Yeah. It was a very new thing, no? The balance wasn’t totally stabilized.

Rick: Right, totally stabilized.

Vasant: Yeah, and then I realized that this was why I wanted to check, because he was like a lion. There was no bullshit there.

He just looked at me. Of course, in that situation, I was totally intent and focused on him and on the question, and he said:

Just drop the ocean also.

Rick: What did that mean to you?

Vasant: Everything disappeared. Everything disappeared. There was nothing left. We just started laughing, looking into each other’s eyes, and we laughed and laughed and rolled around on the floor, thumping each other, totally blissed out.

Afterward, he wanted to feed me mangoes. He peeled the mangoes, and we were both sitting there like little boys, eating them and slivering the mangoes.

Rick: Messy mangoes.

Vasant: And I thought, “This is just fantastic.” He totally took care of me. But it had already happened; it wasn’t like it was happening for some people who came to him and then had things happen.

He recognized something there, and he just took me and helped me. That was how he was really a guru. We had many amazing times together. He even came to Manali, to the Himalayas, and we were together there, where I stayed. So, it was beautiful.

Rick: Nice. So, when he said, “Drop the ocean,” and that somehow shifted something for you, was it just a kind of momentary shift that you enjoyed when you were there in his presence eating mangoes, and when you left there it kind of got back to the delicate thing and sometimes getting caught up in the mind? Or was that like a second awakening, in a sense, where it really shifted and didn’t—in a stable way, it just kind of added a new level of stability to your realization?

Vasant: Yeah, I just got a deeper trust or acceptance of the state, you know, because even if the shift happens, the old mind has been there so long that it still goes on, but you are not so identified with it. But it’s also new. So, I feel like what you call self-realization or enlightenment, that is a new beginning.

So, the darkness of the past is gone, the suffering is gone, and it’s amazing, because there’s no more darkness, there’s no more suffering. But still, it’s so new. You have to incorporate it, you have to learn how to function, because you still need the mind to function.

Rick: Sure, you need the body, you need the senses, and all that.

Vasant: Yeah, and it can be so big, like it was in the beginning, that I just surrendered to it. You know, it takes time to incorporate. And he gave me this push, a very strong push again, that it is like it is, and you can let go totally, and the mind will function, do its job by itself. You don’t need to be—I don’t know what happened, but something happened. It’s the grace of the Guru, you know.

Rick: In some subtle way.

Vasant: It’s a transmission or something. I don’t know.

Rick: Yeah, I was going to ask that. In some subtle way, before he said that, do you think that you had had a tendency to kind of hold on a bit to the ocean and push away a bit at the mind when the mind was trying to do its thing, and he just inspired you to be more natural, so that you just didn’t have to manipulate and kind of instilled confidence in you that you weren’t going to lose this if you weren’t vigilant every moment to stay on your toes and hold on to the ocean? Was there anything like that? He just kind of removed some doubts and instilled a certain confidence in you.

Vasant: Yeah, in a way. But after the first happening in Pune, it was totally—the mind never really thought. But I had to also find something to ask him about, because I was there, you know? So, it was something that happened in that moment, like he himself said happened with Ramana when he talked with Ramana. I don’t know. It’s like beyond what is said. It could be anything, you know, but something happened, something transpired there.

And there were even more shifts happening on a deeper and deeper level, I thought. The last thing that went for me was kind of—I think the last thing that goes is doubt.

Rick: Yeah, that’s why I use the word doubt. It’s sort of like doubt is this dry rot, you know, which kind of keeps us from accepting it fully or something.

Vasant: Yeah, accepting it and accepting that it’s real, you know. You have this kind of doubt, or the mind itself is doubt, or you have a self-doubt: How can this happen to me? But it is happening.

So, that takes time to integrate. And I remember also when that moment was where it was totally gone. I mean, for many years I became very, very sensitive afterward. I couldn’t even drink chai, which I love, or coffee, or beer, or anything. It took maybe four or five years. I was super sensitive. But then I started practicing again, so now I can drink beer even.

Rick: You started practicing what?

Vasant: Taking in some normal…

Rick: Oh, just doing some of that stuff.

Vasant: Yeah, to get used to that again, you know, because you can take it totally the other way also, but then you become very reclusive. I think that could also happen. You become protected in that space, but I want to integrate it. It’s like the Buddha at the gas station, no? It’s like that. That is the new thing.

Rick: That’s the idea, yeah. Yeah, I’m sorry, go ahead.

Vasant: Some years later than that again, which I really had—it was just a very peaceful year then, because it was all new, and I was in India. It was a beautiful place, and there were beautiful people.

But then I was in the heart of India, and I was walking out to a cliff that was sticking out like a mini Grand Canyon. I was lying down there, and I fell asleep on this cliff, on like an island out there. When I woke up there, it was fantastic. It was not polluted at all by people.

Then, when I opened my eyes, I saw a little monkey baby with its mother, eating some fruit just three or four meters away from me. In that moment I felt like I was in paradise, in the garden of paradise. Everything was so simple, everything was just ordinary, everything was just so beautiful, everything was just so lovely.

It was like then tears came, just from the beauty, and I remember that something just melted totally. It was a total meltdown.

It is so beautiful, it is real, but without the words it’s impossible to talk about it, you know. I’m just doing my best.

Rick: I’m getting the sense of it, and I have a feeling that what you’re saying is that this incident with the cliff and the monkey was like another shift, and it was more of a heart shift.

The previous one had been like, “I am the ocean,” kind of in a way—a mind shift into a kind of cosmic, unbounded awareness—and this was more of a heart awakening, where everything, you know, there was an enhanced appreciation of everything. Would that be true to say?

Vasant: Yeah. You have to—I mean, first, I think in the spiritual part, people want to go from the denseness, from the suffering, from the problems, higher, no? So, they want to go out, but that is a big job, that’s a struggle. They have to let go of everything that is holding them back, so that takes work.

If that happens, then again you have to incorporate that down again, because I see some people can just sit with it here in the intellectual, talking about it. It has to be incorporated into the physical, you know? So, you become very human.

Rick: Yeah, you know how we were talking in the beginning about this change that seems to be taking place in the world, or in the culture, with awakenings becoming more and more common? I’ve seen a trend that is similar to what you just described, where there has been a phase where a lot of people have had kind of an awakening, but it has more of an intellectual flavor. Or even if it’s experiential, it’s not integrated into the human, as you say, to use your words.

And these days the word “embodiment” is all the rage, you know. There are so many people talking about becoming embodied, becoming integrated, living not just as spiritual beings but also as human beings, and somehow fully bringing the two of those into one larger whole.

So, it does seem to be the kind of direction in which contemporary spiritual development is moving, in my experience.

Vasant: Yeah, let’s hope so, because we should be human, you know? That’s why the heart is such a balancing point. So, you have the—it’s a lot of people who are talking. Maybe they have it, but it’s just from here, and people already have too much in their heads.

They have to be more empty here, more full in the heart, sinking down to the heart or the belly, being, yeah, just naturally living. It’s no big fuss, you know? It’s no big fuss.

All the teaching and all the sadhanas and all the meditation, all that will go, you know. You will just be a natural, free human being. It’s no separation. We are all part of it. We’ve just been separated for so long, keeping ourselves separated.

You will just be a natural, free human being.

Rick: But you know, it’s a little bit of a delicate thing, because, for instance, you were with Osho for a dozen years and then another year after he passed away, and then you had your awakening. Now, what if after six years, instead of thirteen, you had sort of convinced yourself that you were awake? Whatever doubts your mind was entertaining, you thought, “I’m not going to have those doubts anymore. I’m already enlightened. There’s nothing to do, nowhere to go. Whatever I am experiencing, this is the reality.”

And I’m actually using words that I hear people using these days, who I often don’t think have actually had a genuine realization. But, as you were just saying, they’re very much in the head, and they have read too many books and gotten a little bit hypnotized with this line of thinking.

So, I see it as sort of a pitfall or a trap sometimes, a stumbling block on people’s path, where we could call it “premature immaculation.” There’s this sort of premature assumption that I’m enlightened and I don’t need to do anything, as opposed to someone like yourself who maintained, as I gather, a certain devotional stance and didn’t assume anything. Then, when genuine realization came, it was unmistakable.

So, have you run into this as a teacher, you know, and what would you care to say about it?

Vasant: A lot, a lot. And that is—I mean, that must come from somebody, because I don’t even say that I’m enlightened. What is enlightenment? I’m just a natural, free human being, you know? It’s just words.

Yeah, self-realization, maybe, because you realize who you are. Or you don’t even realize who you are; you realize who you are not. So, it’s all a paradox to talk about. How do you talk about it? The closer you come to the truth, the more difficult it is.

That’s why I say I’m not out there to spread that I have a big teaching. No, it’s very simple, you know. It’s so easy that it’s so easy to miss also. It’s so close—closer than you think—so don’t think about it.

It’s like all that has to go, you know. But people have all this, and of course you see, because we are so much “special” in the West—we are so developed in the head—that is the first thing: you have to empty all that garbage and all those thoughts and all that frustration. How can there be any peace when people go around with all that?

That is the first thing. That is the work, you know. That is the sadhana: first to empty yourself, and then only can you start being more sensitive and listening more deeply, and meditation can start.

Meditation comes later. First, you have to do work on yourself. You have to see, you have to grow, you have to empty all the garbage. How can they have any—I mean, it’s ridiculous as it is, you know, when people say this.

I have nothing to say, you know, but they are already too mental. You have to empty that, because when you touch somebody in the heart, when you talk from the heart and you know you have established the connection there, then there is more trust. There is a relaxation, because it’s not my opinions and your opinions; it’s the truth, you know.

It has nothing to do with any teaching, any religion, anything. It’s just now, here, open, free, beautiful—and then you feel it. You get goose pimples.

Rick: “Gooseys,” they call them, yeah. So, I’m kind of reminded of Christ saying that, except you be as little children, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven. And I’m sure that doesn’t mean peeing in your pants; it means having a sort of innocence and kind of naturalness, which brings with it an openness.

Not a thing of, “I have all the answers already, so who am I going to listen to?” but more like, “What do I know for sure?” You know, so I think I’ll listen to whatever comes along that sounds useful.

Vasant: I mean, that’s always in India, they said: when you are ready, when you can accept that you don’t know, then only can you get anything out of the satsang. You have to empty yourself to be available for something that is beyond you. It’s a mystery. You cannot learn it, but you can catch it in a way.

Rick: So, when somebody comes to you, let’s say in Norway or Brazil, and you know they’re brand new, how do you help them empty themselves, or how do they end up getting more emptied by being there? What do they go through so that they can become more fit to go deeper?

Vasant: We have a lot of different meditations, therapy, dance, creativity, sharing, self-inquiry, hypnosis, physical things, creative things. The whole spectrum is more to get people more in tune with themselves, to find that innocence again, which is the most important, because people are not happy at first. When you get lost in your mind, you lose your heart. The heart is happy, spontaneous, and free.

So, the first thing is to lose the seriousness, I would say, to become like a child, to teach them that, to create a safe place where you can let go. Then that let-go-ness, I would say, goes deeper and deeper. First, the holdings outside: who I am, who I think I am, I have to behave like this or like that. Then, deeper and deeper, if you can’t even let go of that, how can you let go of your whole identity, which is what meditation is all about—to go beyond your image? So, it’s a gradual thing, and that is again the paradox, because you are already there, but people have to loosen up. They are too tense. You understand?

Rick: Oh, yeah. There’s a verse in the Gita which goes, “The unreal has no being, the real never ceases to be,” and you can read that as meaning that you’re already there. I mean, there’s nothing but that reality. How could there be anything other than that? But that’s still a concept unless it becomes an experience, and it doesn’t necessarily become an experience on reading that verse one time or contemplating that idea one time.

Wouldn’t you agree that there have been years, if not lifetimes, of conditioning, layer upon layer upon layer, that somehow have to be purified or cleared away before we can begin to seriously realize this stuff as an experience rather than as a concept?

Vasant: Yeah, that is what the homework is, I would say: to cleanse oneself. Many people come to satsang; they want to go from that denseness to that beyond, because they are longing for that, like people before, or maybe still, longing for heaven in the afterlife. Because it’s so terrible here, why? Be happy here.

So, you have to transform your own life into a happy life. Then it’s easy when you have happiness, when you have peace, when you are truthful. People talk about it, but to be truthful, that takes some guts. You have to be really truthful, but in that truthfulness, then you cleanse yourself. In that cleansing, the spirit gets stronger. You have to be strong in spirit, then you become an integrated human being.

Most people are not integrated; they are all scattered. There are many, many personalities, and all the personalities have to go to become that simplicity again, that innocence, that childlike nature, that spontaneous nature that is present in the now. So, it is a gradual thing most of the time, but when it happens, it’s instant, it’s—

Rick: Yeah, well, I mean, if you’re taking a boat across a river, or across an ocean, then it’s gradual as you go across. But when you get to the other shore, boom, it’s instant: you’re on the shore. So, there’s no contradiction there, and you don’t jump out of the boat halfway across the river thinking, “Well, this should be more instant. I’d rather just be done with this; I’m jumping.” You’d be in trouble if you did that.

Vasant: Yeah, so I think my main thing is just to share the love and the happiness, because out of that love and happiness and togetherness, and being in love with life again—loving your life—then creativity comes, and the energy starts moving by itself, higher, freer.

So, the first thing is to create the right base for it, where people are free, they feel free, they feel happy. There’s been so much suffering, and you see that now. It’s like a depression, stress; it’s never been like that. Prozac Nation, you know, it’s like that.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, so many people have insomnia.

Vasant: All that has to change, and people have to start taking responsibility for that change.

Rick: Yeah, so I get the sense that the role you’re playing is to create an atmosphere which is saturated with love, and in which, if people place themselves in that atmosphere, then the tight knots of tension, stress, and constriction can relax a lot more quickly and safely than they could in other atmospheres that they might ordinarily be in.

Vasant: Yes, and in that relaxation, then you can go deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper, and that is stopping, you know, to stop. But how to stop is almost impossible if you don’t have a place to stop where you want to stop.

Rick: In other words, what you’re saying is, if you’re caught up in your usual everyday life, it’s very difficult to make that sort of transition. But if you can take a break from that and get into a loving, protective, supportive atmosphere, then it becomes easy. Is that what you just said?

Vasant: It is easier, yeah. That is why it’s always easier in communes or in spiritual gatherings or in meditation with fellow travelers in the sangha, like this. Of course it is. Not that one should get stuck there, no, but you need that help.

I mean, if it’s your life, yeah, fine, there’s nothing wrong with that. But like Buddha said, the worst thing, as a seeker on the path, is to be with the unconscious. Find conscious people. If you don’t have conscious people, if you don’t have people who are coming more from the truth, then stay alone. Make your own little beautiful place. You can do your thing, come back, have a meditation, dance in your apartment, like that.

But even better than that is to have a gathering, a sangha, a commune of fellow travelers. It’s supposed to be like that, and you know that. And then, if you have a Buddha there also, of course, then you have a…

Rick: All the better.

Vasant: Yeah, it’s like that, no? It’s very simple.

The worst thing, as a seeker on the path, is to be with the unconscious. Find conscious people.

🧘 Places, people, and the energy of practice

Rick: Yeah, and that is so traditional. I mean, in every culture, I think that understanding is expressed in one way or another: the company you keep makes a big difference. If you can be in the company of the enlightened, however that’s defined, it’s going to be very conducive to your growth. And if there’s a teacher there, like you say, a Buddha, a master, someone who has really awakened to a profound degree, then it’s going to be an even more powerful atmosphere. So, it’s a great blessing to be able to be part of such a thing.

Vasant: It is. It really is.

Rick: Are you married? Do you have a partner or anything like that?

Vasant: I have a partner.

Rick: Okay, been with her a long time?

Vasant: Yeah.

Rick: So, I just want to say to my friend Dan, who is fielding the questions, if anything has come in, go ahead and send them. I’ll ask Vasant those questions. Someone said, “I read someplace that you went on to spend some time with Ramesh Balsekar also after Papaji.”

Vasant: Yeah, well, he was on my way there in Bombay. I was living more or less in India for a very long time. I had been traveling a lot, so I went to him also, and we became very good friends, enjoying each other.

But it wasn’t anything new for me. It was just a beautiful man. I wasn’t seeking anymore. So, I remember he just always came to hug me. It was like that. There weren’t any questions, but it was the love of truth, or to be with somebody like that. I had met many known and unknown people like that.

I also know people in India who live very quietly with just five or six people around them—beautiful, enlightened beings. You have the whole scale.

Rick: Yeah. Do you feel like there’s a particular advantage to having a really small group like that, or is it really, as they say, different strokes for different folks, according to what you’re attracted to? A big, huge crowd could have its value, and also a very small, intimate one could have its value, according to what you’re attracted to.

Vasant: I feel the intimacy is incomparable because it’s human, you know? It’s like how it has always been. Papaji said that truth never lives in big gatherings. It is small, and that’s my feeling. I don’t say it has to be that, because I know people can get a lot out of a big gathering also when people speak the truth, but it takes time.

I stopped traveling around, having a satsang here and there, in this city and that city, because people just came saying, “Oh, are we going to go to satsang? Are we going to the movie tonight?” So, I want people who are more devoted to themselves or to the truth.

Rick: You mentioned that being in your—you didn’t call it an ashram—being in your facility is not a permanent thing. People go out in the world and do their normal thing, but do you have a core group in each place, Norway and Brazil, who stay there year-round, or what?

Vasant: Yeah, I think it’s like the bees for the honey. When the honey is there, the bees come. Here in Brazil, it’s a whole village around it. It’s happening, and it’s beautiful. It’s really a place of freedom. Maybe a hundred people have come here. It was nobody when I started here.

Rick: Nice, so they’re building little homes and buying homes.

Vasant: They have houses and schools and work and everything. They give sessions and teach yoga and do all the things that all these people do.

Rick: Cool.

Vasant: Yeah, and the same in Norway, but in Norway it’s more difficult because we are more in the beautiful mountains; it’s not so easy.

Here, in Brazil, I like it. It’s like I always say: it’s my new India, because it’s pleasant and there are good fruits and vegetables, and people are very relaxed. So, it’s very easy. We are very well treated here, to say it that way, because some places in Europe and America have this old Christian denseness, and that is not here at all.

Rick: Yeah, really. It’s interesting. I know when I spent some time in India, first of all, when you first go there, there’s this feeling of softness in the atmosphere. It’s just like, ah, a soft feeling.

Then you come back, you fly back to the United States, you land at Kennedy Airport or somewhere, and you start driving around. There’s this kind of denseness or hardness or grossness in the atmosphere that contrasts quite noticeably when you go back and forth like that.

Vasant: It is different energies in different places, of course. India, for anybody, I think, on this path, or who is into themselves, meditation, or self-inquiry, will feel like coming home, because it is still special there, even though it’s changing a lot, of course.

Rick: Getting westernized.

Vasant: Getting westernized so quickly, but you still have that because, for thousands and thousands of years, it’s the only place I have been where I come into a place—a temple, an area, or in the Himalayas—and I can feel like, “Whoa! It’s been like this for thousands of years.” I feel embraced. That’s how I feel: you are embraced. If you are sensitive to it, you get embraced by it, by the peace.

Rick: Yeah, I think it’s worth dwelling on that point for a moment, just that a certain place can get—I don’t think this idea will be too alien to the listeners—but a certain place can get just saturated with Shakti or with a certain quality, as you say. If there’s been something going on there of a spiritual nature for thousands of years, it just gets soaked into the rocks, so to speak.

Vasant: It does, it does, and that is very much the case in certain places in India. I remember Papaji. I went to Gangotri, which is the beginning of the Ganges. It was quite a nice walk, and I filled a kind of container for him with this holy water that had just come out from the glacier.

Because I knew he had this love of Mother Ganga, which is not like that for me, but I love it, I felt that this area where the Ganges is coming out from the glacier is very unique. It’s a dance of good spirits, you know. It’s yogis who have died, mystics, enlightened beings. The whole area there is superb.

When I came down again and told him I had brought this from Gangotri, he was ecstatic like a child. The first thing he did was take it, drink it, and splatter it on everybody who was in the room, like blessings, you know. For him, it was so real and so beautiful to see this. It’s like—you know it, but for an ordinary person, a Westerner, they think it’s just silly. But it’s from your soul.

Bliss, gratitude, and devotion

Rick: I’ll tell you a funny story. I have a couple hundred friends who live in ashrams up in Uttarkashi, and another guy who lives up in Gangotri a lot of the time, actually. He sent me a Facebook message recently. He said, “There’s a beautiful sadhu in Gangotri who loves your Buddha at the Gas Pump stuff.” He lives in Gangotri year-round, much of the time with no electricity. His kutya, which means a little hut, is buried in snow. He lives there; he’s one of only six people who live there throughout the winter. But somehow he found your site and loves it. I thought that was kind of cool.

Vasant: That’s great.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, somehow he has electricity, somehow he gets an Internet signal through a cell tower in the area. So, kind of amusing.

Vasant: Really, really nice. I have a very dear friend there also who is an enlightened being, but he just has five or ten people around him in that area between Uttarkashi and Gangotri, and he’s not interested anymore. You know, that’s what I mean. I know enlightened people that I met—one, in fact, was sitting under a blanket. He didn’t want to say anything; he even wanted to hide when you came.

Then you have people who want to speak to the whole world. You have everything. Yeah, I mean, there are stories of—I guess it was in Yogananda’s book—people who throw rocks at anybody who tries to come. They just want to keep them away, you know. It’s just not their dharma to deal with big groups.

Yeah, I keep the middle way.

Rick: Yeah, yeah, somewhere in between. Well, you know that thing I started out with, the bees in the garden? I really get the sense—maybe we can talk about this for a few minutes and let’s see if any questions come in. Maybe no questions have been sent in this time—but, you know, we’re all, I mean, if we understand God to be omnipresent and all-pervading and so on, then we’re really all just sort of reflections or expressions of that divine intelligence.

The more we—you were talking earlier about purification—the more we purify or clarify our instrument, the more fully we can be an expression, and the more we can be a kind of servant of God or a tool of the divine. I’ll bet you have a sense of that very profoundly in your own life, that it’s not really you doing anything. It’s more like you have somehow put yourself in the position to be useful to divine intelligence, and you’re just spontaneously carrying out the impulses of that deeper, more profound intelligence. Does that kind of ring true with you?

Vasant: Totally, totally. And that’s the beauty, because one has no more problem. You are just a servant, servant of love, servant of truth, servant of grace, servant of God—call it what you want—but nothing can be more. That’s why we are here.

Rick: And there’s something very blissful and joyful in that, isn’t there?

Vasant: Yes. Everything that is true, everything that is right, everything that is God, everything that is love is blissful, no? They say, “Sat Chit Ananda” in India. The last is Ananda, bliss. It’s higher than truth even, you know, and you cannot talk about it, but it’s the ecstasy of just feeling oneness, of being part, of being at the service of the good, of the beauty.

Rick: Yeah, that’s really sweet, and sometimes people downplay that. In fact, I have a friend who recently told me he was getting a lot of flack on Facebook because he was talking about bliss a lot, and some people’s understanding of realization doesn’t really include bliss very much. They think of that as kind of more of an emotional thing, whereas realization is just this cognition of reality that’s not terribly heart-filled.

But you know, you read the lives of the great—even the great non-dualists: Shankara, Ramana, Papaji, Nisargadatta—and they all have this devotional side in which they reveled in the bliss and the joy and the Ananda, as you say, and found great sustenance in that, great sweetness.

Vasant: Yeah, those who say that don’t know what they’re talking about, because I’ve been rolling on the floor with Papaji in bliss. And so many of these non-dualists, or Ramana, they don’t know. It becomes dry; it becomes mental; it’s not integrated.

When that bliss gets absorbed into your whole body, you become a blissful being. You don’t need to wait to become an angel. It is blissful, then life itself is bliss, you know. It’s joyful, and that’s how it should be. It’s a gift. And you are grateful, you know. It’s a gratefulness, and that gratefulness can only come when that love is there.

I don’t know. I never think about it. I’m trying to formulate words, you know. I’m not…

Rick: No, you’re doing a good job. And the reason I like talking about this is, well, firstly, it doesn’t get talked about too much. But these qualities of bliss and gratitude and devotion—and the whole realm of sweetness and sumptuousness—is sometimes left out of spiritual discussions.

But it really is a delightful feature of the whole thing of spiritual evolution, in my opinion. I mean, there’s nothing dry or heartless about full realization. It’s like a life of joy. And I’m not speaking necessarily from any sort of personal authority. I mean, I’m a work in progress. It’s a matter of growing happiness and growing bliss for me.

But I’ve had enough tastes of it and seen enough examples of it to know that it’s something well worth aspiring to, and that one minute of life in that state, realized fully, would derive more happiness than an entire lifetime in many ordinary states.

Vasant: That’s how it is. Just one taste and it will change, and that’s why I said this with the more intimate gathering—or what is, you know, in India they call satsang. If it’s real satsang, that nectar is dripping. Then just one taste and people transform; they change. They have to change, because they’ve been living in lies, they’ve been living in illusions.

So just one taste, something changes, and that can be a start to a happier life, a freer life, a real life. So we need to recognize that, you know, to be open. Even spiritual people have these ideas, and it doesn’t make sense. We have to be open to so many teachings.

You had Ramana; he was just sitting there, you know, but he was very juicy. And for me, what is more juicy than to be part of this? It doesn’t make sense, you know.

Rick: He was a great devotee of Arunachala.

Vasant: Don’t hold back. I just want to shake them. You are both, you know. You have the physical, but you have the ecstasy also.

Rick: Yeah, and Shankara, I mean, who was considered the founder of Advaita, wrote all sorts of beautiful devotional poetry and was really a great bhakti, a bhakta, as well as being a great jnani.

Vasant: I see no separation from that—from bhakti and jnani, or Advaita or Sufi. I see no separation. When they are like this, you know, it’s like you have love and you have meditation, you have self-inquiry and you have bliss. It’s like they come together.

On the path, you can talk about these things, but in the end, essentially, you are blissful, and one day you are totally in the silence. It’s like that, you know. It’s just different aspects of God, I would say.

When that bliss gets absorbed into your whole body, you become a blissful being.

Trusting the movement of life

Rick: Yeah, there’s a beautiful talk I heard one time about realization of God, and it was phrased in the way that, once awakening has occurred, the ability to appreciate really begins to ramp up. It really begins to become much more profound, and the appreciation just accelerates and accelerates to the point where the desire to know God becomes really acute.

The example used was as if someone was watching and appreciating some artist’s work and thinking, “Oh, this is such a great artist. I would really love to meet this artist. His work is so beautiful.”

Eventually, the artist hears that, keeps hearing that—“Some man here in this village appreciates me so much. I think I’ll go and meet him and surprise him, maybe.” So God comes to meet someone who is really capable of appreciating God—or the artist comes to meet someone who is really capable of appreciating his creation.

I just thought I’d throw that little story in there. You might like it. But you seem to be a great devotee, you know, and, yeah.

Vasant: Yeah, I’m a devotee of truth, of life, of love, of joy, of ecstasy, of all. You know, it’s all; in the oneness is all, and you are attracted to it.

There came a time—I’ll tell you a little story also with Papaji—that after this love affair and this caretaking of Papaji, when I came to India a year later, I was always going to visit him before I went to the Himalayas, just out of respect, out of love. I didn’t look for anything, you know, just like pranam.

Then I came to Delhi and realized that I couldn’t go there. I thought, “I’m not going there.” Why? Yeah, why? This was inside my head, you know. I should go there because I always go there. No, but I don’t—I cannot go. It was very strange because I couldn’t go there, and I didn’t know why.

Then I went to my place in the mountains in Manali, and I was wondering, “What am I doing here?” You know, it’s like, “Why didn’t I go there? Why? I was supposed to go there, but I was supposed to go to Lucknow first.”

Just two days after I came, I went to the hot bath. They have these hot baths there from the springs. I opened the door into the bath, and out comes Papaji straight into my belly, belly to belly. He said, “Swaha, you are here? Did you know I was here?” And I said, “No, I didn’t know. I didn’t know you were here.” “Come!”

That was it. Then he took me to his hotel, and that was amazing. I really felt like, here now, even the Master—I cannot escape. You know, it’s effortless. Even the Master comes to me, because that’s how it was in those days. I had that deep respect, which I still have for anybody like that, of course.

We went to his hotel, and he had a few devotees with him. I said, “This is not so nice. I have a much nicer place.” So I took him to the place where I stayed, which he liked a lot, and he just moved in there.

Here I was, staying together with him in the same house. Then I took him around all the sites in the mountains, because I had a car. There was also a little jeep, you know, an Indian jeep.

That’s how it is, you know. You don’t know, but if you just trust, if you are surrendered to that, if you are a servant of that, it will happen. It’s impossible. Even if you don’t do anything, it will happen.

Rick: That’s a very cool story, and it sort of shows, in a way, how an awakened person’s life can work, where you just feel to go this way, and for reasons you can’t understand, you go this way. Yet then you see, maybe in retrospect, “Oh, so that’s why I went this way, because this and that happened. I met this person, or such and such happened,” and so on.

It kind of makes you wonder, really, what is the mechanism of that? I’m letting the dogs in and out here. What is the intelligence that is orchestrating such a thing, that was causing your mind to say, “No, I’m not going there,” and just kind of moving the pieces of the puzzle together so that you can see what they meant at that place in the Himalayas? It’s cool to contemplate.

Vasant: Yeah, there’s something there on a higher level that is happening, you know, that you are not so used to yet, because now these things are much smoother. It’s happening.

But at that time, a few times, it was really like that. Your mind had a plan, and then your reality said, “No, you are not going there.” So it was like this. You have to trust, you know.

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

In my own life I’ve gone through phases where that’s been happening. For instance, doing this show: I had this idea that I was going to do a little radio show on the local station here in my town, which has about a ten-mile radius. I kept pushing on that, and I kept getting resistance, and it wasn’t working out.

Finally, a friend said, “You know, you’re thinking too small. Put this on the internet; it’ll become much more worthwhile.” So I ended up doing that. You know, it kind of was a no-brainer to do the radio show. I mean, this is a very spiritual town where I live, with a lot of people who would find it interesting, but it was like something was causing the people at the radio station to resist the idea. It was the perfect thing, and I’m so glad they did.

But other times in my life I’ve followed whims and tendencies that I thought might be some kind of divine guidance, and they weren’t so much. So it’s nice when it becomes more and more and more clear, so that you’re not just kind of muddling around, thinking that it’s God guiding you.

Vasant: Yeah. Well, it comes to a point where it’s only God guiding you, because there’s no more you in the way.

Rick: No more you to muddle, yeah. Yeah. I can’t say that I’m totally there yet, but it’s moving in that direction.

Vasant: Yeah, soon.

Closing reflections

Rick: Okay. Well, is there anything else you’d like to throw in that we haven’t had a chance to talk about, that you feel like you’d like people to hear?

Vasant: I’m just happy that all this is happening, and that more and more people are awakening, and that we can share the love and the joy. In this way, it spreads, and we feel each other and support each other.

Today is the 21st of March, and that was the enlightenment day of my Master. Without my Master, I wouldn’t be here. So, for all the enlightened ones—past, future, and present moment—I am very happy and grateful for all of them.

I think we should all be grateful for them, from any tradition or any path, because the only work for one is to uplift consciousness, so that people become happier, free, and self-realized.

The only work for one is to uplift consciousness, so that people become happier, free, and self-realized.

Rick: Great. That’s a nice blessing, so thank you for that.

Let me just make some wrap-up points. I’ve been speaking with Vasant Swaha. He’s in Brazil at the moment. Someone told me it’s about four hours south of Rio.

Vasant: Yeah, it’s the most beautiful place, of course.

Rick: Check out his website. I’ll be linking to his website from his page on batgap.com. It’s a really beautiful website, and I’ve asked him to send me the name of his web developer, because I have people who would like to have their websites look like that.

When you’re not there, you’re generally in Norway. Do you sometimes lead tours to India or anything like that also?

Vasant: Yeah, I was just in Thailand a month ago, and I go to India. So it’s Brazil, Norway, India, and Thailand.

Rick: Is that a bird? You’ve got birds; I’ve got dogs.

Vasant: Yeah, I heard him. He wanted to go out.

Rick: Yeah, I know.

Vasant: It just started raining now.

Rick: Oh, you have something over your head, I hope?

Vasant: It’s beautiful, yeah, it’s beautiful.

Rick: Good.

Okay, so for those who’ve been listening or watching, this is an ongoing series. I think I’ve done about 280 of them now, so if you go to batgap.com—B-A-T-G-A-P—you’ll find them all archived and organized in various ways.

You’ll find a link to Vasant’s website, and you’ll find a list of upcoming interviews, quite a few of them, some scheduled as far away as next September. The ones that are done through Skype we’re making live now, streaming, so that people can send in questions. There’s a form on that upcoming interviews page that you can use to submit questions during the interview.

There is also a donate button, which I depend upon people clicking if they feel so inspired, in order to support this whole venture. There’s a place to sign up to be notified of each new interview by email.

There is an audio podcast of all these interviews, so that you can just listen on your iPod or Android device or whatever. There’s a page that gives you all the options for that, and a bunch of other things. Explore the menus and you’ll see what’s there.

So, thanks for listening or watching. Thank you, Vasant. It’s been a great joy.

Vasant: Yeah, it has been. Nice to meet you.

Rick: Yeah, I hope to meet you in person someday and give you a big hug.

Vasant: Yeah, I was thinking the same, so it has to happen. May everybody be happy, and let’s relax now.

Rick: Okay, thank you very much. Namaste.

Vasant: Namaste.