Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guests are Raghu Markus and Parvati Markus. Raghu has been involved in music and transformational media since the early 1970s. In 1974, he collaborated with Ram Dass on the boxset Love Serve Remember and is currently the executive director of the Love Serve Remember Foundation. Parvati Markus is a developmental editor and writer of spiritually oriented nonfiction books and memoirs. Her new book, Love Everyone: The Transcendent Wisdom of Neem Karoli Baba Told Through the Stories of the Westerners Whose Lives He Transformed is a celebration of Neem Karoli Baba, one of the influential spiritual teachers of our time—a divine guru who inspired and led a generation of seekers. With Sounds True, Raghu has closely collaborated with Ram Dass to create a new online course called Being Here Now: The Essential Teachings of Ram Dass, an eight-week course that begins on September 19. For more information about Being Here Now: The Essential Teachings of Ram Dass, please visit SoundsTrue.com.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Raghu, Parvati, and I spoke about miraculous meetings with Neem Karoli Baba, known as Maharajji, and how these encounters impacted a host of influential teachers including Daniel Goleman, Larry Brilliant, Krishna Das, and, of course, Ram Dass. We talked about what it might mean to actually love everyone and how Raghu was delighted to find a photo of—you guessed it—Donald Trump on Ram Dass’ puja table in Maui during his most recent visit. And finally, we listened to an excerpt from the new course Being Here Now: The Essential Teachings of Ram Dass.
This is an excerpt from the mid-1970s, in which Ram Dass teaches on the essence of karma yoga. He talks about how to keep our hearts open and how we can stay light and uplifted even in the midst of terrible suffering. Interestingly—and you’ll hear in this clip—this was recorded more than 30 years ago, and yet it sounds like Ram Dass could be addressing our particular situation today. Here’s my conversation with Parvati and Raghu Markus:
Parvati, you’ve written a new book, Love Everyone, which tells stories about—really, I would call it the living legacy, if you will, of Neem Karoli Baba.
Parvati Markus: That’s a wonderful way to put it.
TS: A great Indian saint of the twentieth century. And, I wondered to begin with, if you’d introduce to our listeners who Neem Karoli Baba [is].
PM: It seems like a simple question but it really isn’t. What we knew about him when we were in India, with him, was very little. I mean, we just knew what we were experiencing with him, which was just incredible, unconditional love. And, we knew he was associated with the monkey god, Hanuman because that was in his temples. It was after he left his body that certain people in India started learning a lot more about who he had been. That he’d been married; that his father was a very wealthy landowner in his village, and, I believe, head of his village. And that Maharajji—when he was young, used to be running off all the time to try to be with the saints, I guess. His father got him married at the age of something like nine or ten—where they arrange a marriage. And so he was married and he eventually had children and grandchildren.
We knew nothing about that when we were with him. We learned about some of the austerities that he had done when he was younger. But really we don’t know a lot of factual stuff about him because it was really irrelevant to what we were experiencing in our hearts with him.
TS: How did you meet Neem Karoli Baba?
PM: Well, basically through meeting Ram Dass, after he came back from his first trip to India. The first time I met Ram Dass, I was driven up the driveway of his father’s farm in New Hampshire and Ram Dass was standing there. And I could see him glowing. I saw light coming from him—which completely blew my mind and eventually I learned that light was bringing Maharajji to the West. That’s what he had and that’s what we wanted and that’s why we went to India.
TS: Bringing the light of Maharajji through the light that you saw in Ram Dass. This all sounds very mystical, and even as I mentioned that Neem Karoli Baba—who many people call Maharajji—was an Indian saint, I noticed this use of the word “saint.” It’s not a word you hear thrown around very much in today’s world—certainly in the West. I’m wondering what does that mean to you—that Maharajji was known as a saint?
PM: Well, to me what it means is that he was a fully enlightened being. Another term for it in India is siddha. He was a siddha. In other words, one who was totally accomplished. He had finished his work. He was one with it all, as he let us know over and over again simply by telling us things about ourselves that nobody could know.
So, that to me was a saint. It was not a statue in a church somewhere.
TS:Now we’re going to go more into this—this idea that somebody knows all of these things about you and [if] that [is] a qualification to be “fully enlightened” and what might “fully enlightened” mean. We’re going to get into all of that, but I want to bring Raghu into our conversation who’s the executive director of Ram Dass’ Love Serve Remember Foundation and also the person who’s partnered with Sounds True to create a new online course called Being Here Now on the Essential Teachings of Ram Dass. Raghu, welcome.
Raghu Markus: Thank you.
TS:How did you meet Maharajji? How did you first connect with Maharajji? Was it through Ram Dass?
RM: Yes, it’s through Ram Dass. I was program director of a major rock n’ roll station in Montreal, where I’m from, and somebody called and said, “Hey, would you announce the fact that Ram Dass is giving a lecture at McGill?” and I had no idea who Ram Dass was or what a Ram Dass was. So, he told me, “Oh, you know, Richard Alpert and Tim Leary,” and, of course, I loved them because of the psychedelic era and the days that we were all a part of. I asked him to send a tape over. He sent a tape over of a previous lecture. I went into his studio and instantly got everything he was saying. He answered so many questions that I had about my own life and about what reality potentially was.
Then I put it on the air and it lit up the switchboard in the middle of the week, and, oh God, people could not believe what they were hearing. Then I went and I brought him to the station, I interviewed him, and from that point on we had a relationship as a student and then as a friend. I went to India as a result of that.
Just like Parvati, I saw in him something that I totally trusted and I wanted to experience it myself. Finally, after badgering him, I went to India just after he did the second time and finally did meet up with Neem Karoli Baba.
You’re talking just now about saints and what a saint is. In India, many, many people are known as saints and not all of them, shall we say, have the qualifications of a true—what they call a sat guru—in India, necessarily. It’s a highly colloquial-ized word at this point—same as “guru” is actually in the west. What Parvati was mentioning—that word “siddha”—which means “totally accomplished being,” that being is living in non-duality but in a body still. That would be the experience that we had. That is the experience I had when I first met Maharajji. It was like meeting—there was no back and forth; it was like being with a computer who just did the right thing. There was absolutely no object, subject; no polarization whatsoever; it was just being in a pool where that entity just did the right thing and for the first time we felt—not just I—that feeling “home” is probably the best word. When you read many of the stories in Love Everyone, that is probably the most common word people use to describe what it felt like. Home. Unconditional love. We had never been loved in that way previously in our lives. Aside from all the miraculous stuff of him presciently knowing stuff from our past, future, and whatever on a day-to-day basis. That really is the correct description of what Maharajji is.
TS: You’ve both mentioned the fact that he was prescient—he knew what was in your mind. In the book Love Everyone, there are tons of miracle stories, if you will, in Maharajji’s presence. First of all, I’d love for you to give our listeners a taste of some of the miracle stories that you yourselves both witnessed.
PM: I can certainly give you one that started in America and that he brought up when I arrived in India—which was that after that summer of being in New Hampshire with Ram Dass—in the summer of ’69—I went back to New York and I was going to go get a job so I could make money to go to India.
In the meantime, I wound up splitting a tab of acid with an old college friend and having a trip that went on for several days. As I was coming down, I was getting very scared, but I couldn’t call Ram Dass. He was off in Lama Foundation, where they had no phone at the time. I hadn’t yet met another teacher and I knew no one to call about what was going on. So, I sat in front of this little black and white picture of Maharajji that Ram Dass had given me that summer, clutching my wooden mala beads that Ram Dass had given me that summer, and saying over and over again to Maharajji, “I’m scared and you’ve got to help me. I’m scared, and you’ve got to help me.”
The picture dissolved in blue light and I could see Maharajji there. It was only for a second, but it was enough for me to lie down, go through whatever I had to go through, and everything was OK. Needless to say, after that I got a much larger picture of Maharajji and I did everything in my life in front of that picture. I talked to it all the time. But, back then you didn’t tell people that you talked to pictures.
TS: But now, Parvati, this was at the end of an LSD trip that you were on?
PM: That was at the end of an LSD trip.
TS: So isn’t it reasonable for someone to think, “Well, you know, you were tripping. And, of course, you saw the picture do all kinds of things.”
PM: Well, no, I only saw it do that one thing. I had long since passed the peak of the trip. This was like day two. It wasn’t like that. I would see him periodically in the picture completely in a normal state of consciousness—well, not tripping, let’s put it that way.
Anyway, when I got to India, my very first darshan was Maharajji. At one point, he looked at me and he said, “You used to talk to my picture all the time. You asked many questions.”
RM: And this he did on a day-to-day basis. It was many, many things. I went there one day and he said, “Gee, did you just meet a Tibetan lama?” And, I go, “Tibetan lama? We were supposed to have a Buddhist teacher come and we were supposed to get some teachings.” And he said, “No, Tibet. Tibet. Tibet lama. You didn’t have darshan of a Tibet lama and then he went and gave you teachings for 45 minutes?” I go, “No I’ve never even met a Tibetan, never mind a lama.”
The next thing I knew, I was in Delhi because I was trying to get my passport renewed. While I was there, I was actually at the house of the Canadian High Commissioner. He was a friend of the fellow I worked for at the radio station in Montreal. So, I said, “By the way, is it true that Canada is letting in Tibetan refugees?” Which I had read in the paper. He said, “Yes, that’s true and as a matter of fact,” and he pointed to a door, which opened up and out walked Kalu Rinpoche, one of the great, great lamas of the last century and I ended up being taken into a room with him and given teachings for half an hour, 30 [or] 40 minutes, by Kalu himself.
Of course, as soon as I realized—oh my God—that this was happening, I was pretty tripped out for about a week on that one. How could this all be possible?
He did stuff like that all the time. It could have been something in the past; it could have been something in the future. All of it was so obviously just to break our minds down from thinking that we were that mind, that ego, those senses. That seemed like an obvious way that we had the karma to get that all shattered. Once we got that shattered, then we could actually start to relate with more true nature of who we really were.
TS: I want to ask you both what I think might come off as sounding like a challenging question, but I’m really curious how you’ll respond in terms of the current zeitgeist, if you will, in the western world—which seems very much [like] it’s looking for evidence-based practices. Mindfulness and other practices where we can document this is how people are changing, this is what’s going on in the brain, and that the time, if you will—going along with this logic here—the time of the Indian guru is over. Yes, this was in the 1970s—the 1960s—it’s not making it into the 21st century. Indian saints: thing of the past. I’m curious how you respond to that.
PM: I think there will always be saints in India. Or here. I don’t know. I think that as we evolve in consciousness there are always going to be these beings that are here to guide us—even if it’s just vibrationally and if we don’ t meet them. I believe they’re always present. At least some of them are. Raghu?
RM: This thing in the West of course around mindfulness and some of the things that are going on in terms of science and study of the brain—and the Dalai Lama himself, is doing fantastic work with scientists like Richie Davidson around just this kind of a thing. He’s saying, “Yes, this is starting to prove out what we have studied for centuries [and] fleshed out.
PM: For thousands of years. The Vedas.
RM: Yes. But particularly around the Tibetans who have all of these teachings like tormas which get revealed by different Tibetan Rinpoche saints—shall we say—if you want to use that term loosely. I think that’s a natural thing and I think the fact that this stuff is getting proven out through scientific investigation is all really wonderful.
But, I also truly believe that in many cases, in my own experience with people, that delving and using non-dual thought sometimes leaves out the heart. I think that is a tough situation for us in the West because we are so used to the glory of our minds. I think that these beings will always be there because they—sitting with them, and I’ve sat with one recently myself in India, who is a very free being. [This is] one of these babas and they remind your heart. I think that’s a huge thing that needs to be brought into what people are doing with mindfulness practices and so on and so forth. I mean, our tradition—as you know, Tami—is very, very centered around using chant and mantra as a heart-opening practice alongside what many of us that were in India with Maharajji have taken teachings through Tibetan teachers and so on. Which is kind of an unusual thing for a bhakti yoga tradition. In fact, in Maharajji’s temple in India—the one that we went to—it said on the sign as you walk through the temple: “This is a non-dual Hanuman temple.” That is kind of our tradition. And in that way—I don’t know if this is addressing completely the question of the continuation of the importance of these beings being in our lives through being born in India—or maybe they’re going to be born in America like some Tibetan reincarnations have in the recent past. So, I think it’s tremendously important that there are examples of people who are free—just call it “a free being”—who can share their hearts in this way that helps us open ours.
TS: Thank you, I think that’s a beautiful response and what it brings me to is the title of the book that Parvati has written, Love Everyone. Raghu, you’re the executive director of the Love Serve Remember Foundation. So, this Love Serve Remember [and] Love Everyone—how did Maharajji teach you to love everyone? That seems pretty difficult if not impossible
.
PM: Well, he did it really through one main phrase which was sub ek: “It’s all one.” And if it’s all one, and if you and I are one, how can I not love you? As I’ve said to some other people, it doesn’t mean you’re necessarily going to like everyone, but you’re going to recognize and acknowledge that they are a soul just like you. And in that place of the soul, that place of spirit—whatever you want to call it—in that place of love, we are one and we do love everyone. Ram Dass over and over would say—Maharajji would say to him, “Love everyone.” And he would say, “I can’t.” And, Maharajji would say, “Yes, you can. Do it.”
TS: I guess what I’m curious about is: it sounds good, but how’s it actually going in your life—this loving everyone? I’d be curious to know, for real.
PM: For real it’s like, —I don’t know if I can use a political example, but maybe I shouldn’t. But, let’s say there’s somebody who really upsets you because he is spouting values that don’t seem very humane to you.
TS: I think our listeners are with you.
PM: OK. Let’s say that you’re looking at that person and you’re going, “I just can’t stand what’s going on here.” There is still a place where you can recognize that this person has been chosen for this role just like Ravana in the epics of India, who looks like a really bad guy but in the end he is just trying to be killed by God. In other words, he’s playing a role, he’s bringing up all the things that are dying from the patriarchal age—and I can have compassion for that. And in that place, I can say I love him. I can’t say I like him. Do you hear the difference?
TS: Of course.
RM: Interestingly enough, as I mentioned to Tami earlier, I just arrived last night in Maui to visit Ram Dass. So, it’s kind of good timing. I just walked in this morning, I looked at his altar, and guess who was there? Donald Trump. I said, “That’s interesting. You’ve got him on your altar.” And he has a history of putting polarized people on his altars so that he can get beyond their personality, their particular attachment to that incarnation and to that mission they feel that they have. However we may feel about it [Ram Dass’] whole thing is to get behind that to the soul because, absolutely, we are all interconnected. There is no way we’re going to get around that. That is his particular little practice. He’s got that beautiful little picture of Trump on his mantelpiece—on his puja table.
Love everyone. Extraordinarily difficult.
None of us that were in India can vouch—Ram Dass is a good example though. I do see Ram Dass, and I see him with everybody and he stops his world for everybody that walks by. I remember—he’s in a wheelchair, as many of you know. He had a stroke almost 20 years ago. I was once at an event with him and I was wheeling him, and we were late for something, and I was pushing the wheelchair energetically trying to get out of the room. Somebody really wanted to stop and talk to him, and he just touched me and made me know—stop. He stopped his world and he became full present with that being like that being was the only person in the world. There was nobody else.
So, he actually has engaged that concept probably better than anybody I have met that’s not “a free saint being [or] siddha,” whatever we want to call it. Ram Dass is certainly a teacher and a very high being. But, that is the way that we can pay attention to somebody and give them that full presence. That’s “love everyone,” for sure. The way that we can address our polarizations with people we don’t agree with—that’s “love everyone.” Just addressing it, there’s no way that we can be fully there. That’s going to take a lot of work—and a lot of years. That’s certainly is, to me, being fully present, and fully attentive to somebody—that’s “love everyone.”
TS: Now, Raghu, you mentioned that you were on the radio in Montreal. You must have been in your 20s—something like that?
RM: Yes, yes, 23.
TS: You played some audio by Ram Dass on the radio and that it, not only really got your attention, but it got the attention of your listeners. I want to do that right now. I’d like to play for people an excerpt from this course that you’ve helped Sounds True put together: Being Here Now: The Essential Teachings of Ram Dass. This is a section where Ram Dass is talking about karma yoga or the path of service. I wonder if you can say a few words about the clip and then we’ll take a listen.
RM: Again, this is something that we got from Neem Karoli Baba—from Maharajji. The way that there was nobody who came anywhere near him that didn’t get served food, number one—that was a big thing, Maharajji’s thing around food was number one—everybody needs to be fed. There should be no people going hungry. All day long, bags of food would keep coming out from the back and given to people. He would sit there and listen to everybody’s worldly troubles and respond to them however which way they needed responding to. We were young, so people would say to him, “Maharajji, how do we raise Kundalini?” We wanted some yogic philosophy about practice. “How do we get there?” He would say, “Feed people and serve them. That’s how you get your Kundalini to rise.” We were constantly, constantly given this idea of service.
PM: Can I say something for just a second?
RM: Yes.
PMI just wanted to say that in Love Everyone, one of the reasons that I put in short bios of everybody whose story is in there is so you could see how they took Maharajji’s teachings and the seeds that were planted in us at that time, and how they all wound up serving in one way or another. It was a very, very important part of what we learned.
TS: I think it’s important to say too, Parvati—I’m glad you brought that up—that we’re talking about a pretty influential cast of characters that came into contact with Maharajji, including Daniel Goleman, Krishna Das, Mirabai Bush, Lama Surya Das. These are people who have been tremendous movers and shakers in the last three decades in terms of bringing consciousness and service to the world. That’s an important point.
PM: Even one’s who didn’t become big names in whatever field they were in were still doing their work in the world in the most conscious and compassionate way they could. There were people helping on all levels whether it was through acupuncture, or through doing honest real estate deals. Whatever it was they were doing, they were doing their best to keep that in mind.
TS: Alright, let’s listen to this excerpt from the Being Here Now course with Ram Dass:
Ram Dass: So, what’s happened is that my own suffering has turned from not anything I say, “Come on give me more suffering.” I’m not a masochist. But when the suffering comes along, and it does come along, it comes along because your heart becomes more and more open because as you go deeper in spiritual life, you love people more and more and then their suffering is your suffering. And there’s a pain. It’s interesting. What I do with my suffering is I use it for my spiritual growth. But I can’t say to anybody else—if somebody comes up and says, “Hey man, you got any money? I haven’t eaten in two days and I’m really suffering,” [I can’t say,] “That’s great, you can do great work with that.” You feel how wrong that feels? You can’t tell another human being that they should use their suffering to awaken. All you can do is use your suffering to awaken. You can see that the root cause of suffering is the clinging of mind and that if you’re suffering, it’s because the mind is clinging. .
Those moments get heavy. Those moments get really heavy to work with. Now, how you respond to somebody else’s suffering—is this too heavy? Are you all here? How you respond to somebody else’s suffering—see there’s a difference between how you respond to your own suffering once you start to awaken and how you respond to someone else’s suffering. Someone else’s suffering is part of our suffering. What the totality is is that person is totally identified with their suffering. That hurts. You can’t manipulate them. You can merely create a space where if they would like to use their suffering, they could.
But, in the meantime, you feel compelled out of the truth of your compassion—because you and they are one—to do something about their suffering to relieve it. So, you are in the funny position where, for someone else’s suffering, you’ll act to get rid of it even though you know that at some level suffering can be grace. Suffering can help one awaken. Because you appreciate that people are at different levels of their evolutionary readiness. Some people are absolutely ripe to use their suffering to grow and others aren’t.
It’s not blame. It’s not “lesser.” It’s just different. It’s just different. I go into one hospital room and a person is dying and they’re in the last stages and they completely want to deny they are dying and everybody around them is a conspiracy to deny their dying and it’s none of my business to say anything—except to just be there and be loving.
Walk into another room and the person says to me, “What do you think is happening to me?” I said, “I think you’re dying.” And then we work with that and what it awakens and the fear and that person is asking for it. The license between us is different than the license was with the other person.
So, when you’re dealing with fears in other people or in the universe, there are a couple of things to work on from a spiritual point of view. One is to open to suffering—to not use mechanisms of defense—again, denial, defense. Now, you say, “But I can’t do that because my heart will break because there’s so much of it.” As you proceed in cultivating the part of your awareness that lies behind the drama of life, it deepens a place in you of equanimity and nonjudgment. It just looks at the universe as it is and in effect says, “Ah, so.”
I remember once I was in India with my guru and the whole scene in Bangladesh—a very bad scene was going on. I was very, very upset by it. So many people dying and starving. And, Maharajji looked at me and said, “Don’t you see it’s all perfect?” I said, “No, I don’t.” Don’t you see it’s all perfect?
Now, he didn’t mean it is just perfect. What he was doing was reminding me of the plane of reality where law is unfolding—like there are laws that keep this building up. There are laws that determine the way your body is digesting food. There are laws of interpersonal relations. There’s laws the way the thought process works. There are laws that explain why there is violence, why there’s greed, why there’s lust and hatred and ill will and sloth and torpor and doubt. There are laws about all of this. In fact, it’s all lawful. Every form in the universe is related to every other form in the universe lawfully.
If you could stand back far enough, you could see that when this person comes up and does this thing, this other person’s going to hit them. And then this person’s going to suffer. Now, that suffering person opens your heart because that’s part of the law of your humanity. But, the other part of your awareness looks at all of it and says, “Perfect. It’s just the law unfolding.” In other words, what I’m saying to you is, you cultivate two planes of reality that you acknowledge simultaneously. Put simply, from the heart’s point of view, suffering stinks. And from the higher awareness point of view, it’s all just the unfolding of law and it’s doing its thing perfectly. The capacity to have both of those is what the root of what true compassion is about.
Otherwise, when things get bad on this plane, you start to say to God, “Why did you screw up?” Because if I were God, I wouldn’t have done this. But after a while you see that part of you that gets angry against the system of the universe is part of the form of the universe itself—it’s part of the conditioned mind, it’s called—and that you are reducing yourself to a thing when you think that. Now you’re the character in the book rather than the reader or the author of the book. But you’re actually all of these things. The author sees that it’s perfect. The actor doesn’t see that at all.
See, I may say to the universe, “I don’t understand why children have to die, I don’t understand why AIDS has to exist, I don’t understand why there has to be so much violence.” But there’s something in me that knows enough not to say that it’s all wrong. All I can say is I don’t understand it, and my heart hurts and I’ll do my best to stop the suffering. And to be able to acknowledge those two levels of your own existence—your heart hurts and you do what you can to relieve the suffering in other people, and at the same moment there is a part of you that is perfectly in equanimity in saying, “It is as it is.”
And that is quite a program because it allows you to move—like, I work because I want to be free so badly or goodly. I work with the sufferings that are often the most intense—the sufferings around death, the sufferings—now I’m starting to work with the sufferings that come from ethnic prejudice. And they hurt.
As I said yesterday, I think, this friend of my Rabbi, Zalman Schacter[-Shalomi], said to me, “We have to learn to grieve with one another. We have to learn to let our hearts break for another person’s pain. We have to share our pain.” Just doing that sucks you into the stuff so deeply that pretty soon you’ll burn out and you’ll start to defend because you can’t—it’s unbearable. The suffering is immeasurable. What are you going to do? You can’t get rid of it. It’s going to go on and on and on. Suffering is. It’s part of this plane of reality.
The people that burn out in action—in caring action, in therapy, in social work, in community work, in any kind of service work, or any kind of action—burn out specifically because of where they are headed in regards to the act they are performing. They don’t usually burn out that they are physically done in; they are psychologically done in is what they mean when they say they burned out. Now, suffering—how you react to suffering is a key point of whether or not you’ll burn out. To the extent that you can keep your heart open in hell and let it keep breaking again and again and again—“Oh my heart’s broken,” somebody says to me. I say, “It’s fine, it’ll mend and then it will break again and then it will mend and it will break again. It’s OK.” People feel I’m not romantic enough because they really want to milk [that], “My heart’s broken.” Yes, your heart’s broken. It may take you a couple of years to grieve over your loss and then something else will happen.
The ability to stay open in the presence of suffering because you have cultivated a place in you that acknowledges that there is the Tao, there is a wisdom in the lawful unfolding of the universe—it’s not good; it’s not a good guy or good girl up there and it’s not bad. It just is. It’s a set of phenomena occurring. That is a key component of being able to do karma yoga.
TS: Wow, listening to Ram Dass, it’s like he could be speaking today. His comments are so relevant and timely and meaningful in our current landscape even though that was recorded more than three decades ago. That’s so interesting.
RM: Yes, it’s so relevant. That’s the key in what he’s represented all these years—which is, I work on myself so that I can become free, and in that work, I serve others at the same time. There’s no fear on his part to do so and I think that that’s just the absolute essence of what true karma yoga is.
Tami, can I go back? I just was thinking, while Ram Dass was talking, about one thing about “love everyone” before we move on. That question of: how do you love everyone and what did you get when you were with Neem Karoli Baba in India? I think that Dr. Larry Brilliant’s story in the book Love Everyone is really the essence of what was transmitted to us.
One day, he went through whole bunch of different negative, cynical stuff until he had a shattering of the mind one day, and you can read about that in the book. But more to the point was, after that happened, he found himself sitting in a group of Westerners with Maharajji and then this overwhelming feeling of love came to him. He said, “I expected I was going to be loved by the guru, by the saint. That’s normal. That’s his job. But what I didn’t expect was to love everyone around me.” In that one moment, he had this tremendous wave come over him of just absolutely being at one with everybody he was sitting with in that moment. That was a major realization for him—of “love everyone.” I just wanted to throw that in there because it’s such a powerful moment in the book.
PM: And it comes from the statement that Maharajji said all the time, which was, “Love everyone, serve everyone, and remember God.” That was our basic instruction. That was the teaching. It was not long lectures, it was not anything for the mind. It was, “Love everyone, serve everyone, remember God.”
TS: And what does that last part, “remember God,” what does that mean to you?
PM: As Raghu was talking about Ram Dass being able to be totally present with somebody, to listen with your heart—that, to me, is reconnecting with the place in you that’s the same as the place in the other. And that place where you are one. It goes back to sub ek. That’s how you get there. You love everyone, you serve everyone, and you remember that we all have that divinity within us.
TS: OK, I’m going to confess something now: which is whenever I read a book that is about Maharajji or a book by Ram Dass, or in some of the conversations I’ve had for Sounds True as a host that focus on Maharajji, I sense something that I would say is this loving field that’s being invoked. I can feel it here in this conversation.
I’m bringing it up because I’m imagining listeners who might be thinking, “You know, hey, you know I never met Neem Karoli Baba. He died before I was even on the spiritual path,” or, “I never made it to India.” How could somebody who wants to tune in, if you will, to that love signature of Maharajji—how do they do that? What would be your suggestion? How could you point them to that?
RM: First of all, let’s remember one thing: that Maharajji—that body in India we met; this love that is represented that we’re talking about—this—I love the word you just said, “signature”—is really from that same place that we all access at different times in our lives. It’s that ineffable place. It may be through you took a psychedelic and you got into that feeling of complete love and oneness in a moment. It may be through a piece of music. It may be through a poem. My first experience was a John Coltrane concert that I went to when I was 15, luckily enough, and he played My Favorite Things and I went into that place. We all have a recognition, and that place isn’t associated with a physical body necessarily.
I mean, Maharajji himself said, “It’s not necessary for a guru to be in a physical form.” I personally do believe that we all have that guide deep inside of us that manifests at one point in our lives and it does not need to be physical. So that’s absolutely the case.
As far as being able to connect with it, in this particular case, Maharajji has certainly—since he left that body in 1973—through some of Ram Dass’ books, through this book,Love Everyone—we’re getting feedback of people reading a story and suddenly something happens that opens them up in a certain way that they haven’t previously felt in that particular way that is so meaningful for them. Or people have dreams or—I could tell you wild stories.
Krishna Das just told me about somebody—Parvati, you don’t even know this. This is great. A young kid—a 23-year-old kid—wrote to Krishna Das and said, “I’ve got to go see Ram Dass. Can you help me get there because the other day I—” His parents were hippies and into the path and all that, but he wasn’t particularly. This is a really wild story by the way, everybody out there. So, you can take it with a grain of salt if you like.
But this kid was walking along and an old man came up to him and said point blank, “Love everyone.” And he went, “Yes, right. Who’s going to love everyone?” And he walked away. For a week, that person kept bumping into him and he kept meeting him. And he was like, “What the hell is this?”
And then he went to somebody’s house and he opened Be Here Now and he started reading it because a friend liked it. He came to a picture of Maharajji and he just fell down because that was who it was.
He was freaked out for about a week until he did some research and he found Krishna Das. The long and the short of it is he came to Maui to meet Ram Dass, and Krishna Das just hooked him up with Ram Dass the other day.
So, who knows? The ways of these beings are beyond any kind of understanding and everyone who is supposed to meet somebody like that meets somebody like that or has some experience that leads them inside themselves to find that place because it is not external.
There is a great story in Love Everyone from Lama Surya Das and it’s about his experience. He met Maharajji—he went to an actual house where we all were and Maharajji was in his room and not available. He sat in front of the bench where Maharajji usually sat and he had a complete experience of Maharajji—what he called “The Big Maharajji”—like that which is the reality of unconditional love that is inside all of us.
Then he went and saw Maharajji the physical being, and he understood that the experience he had was with Maharajji—that which is unconditional love—was so beyond the physical body that he couldn’t believe it. So, that thing is available all of the time—and I call it “a thing”—to everyone and it’s just a matter, as Ram Dass was talking in that lecture, everything [is] all lawful in this universe and whoever opens up in a certain way, in a certain moment with whatever teacher or saint or guru—we will all be led to that place eventually, where our hearts open and we have a compassionate relationship with the world and with the people in it.
PM: And, of course, I recommend looking at pictures [laughs].
TS: One of the things that’s interesting to me is—and this goes back to what I was saying about our current zeitgeist—that it seems that people want their hearts to open and yet, at the same time, the idea of falling down at the feet of another human being—being, if you will, a devotee—is not particularly in fashion right now.
PM: Because it’s not something that happens from your mind. That’s why. It’s like I met any number of so-called saints—holy men from India—who were very, very well regarded by millions of people, and when I met them I couldn’t bow down at their feet. I mean, there was nothing in me that thought that that was something that I wanted to do or even that I needed to do in any way. I kept thinking that maybe there was something wrong with me, maybe my heart wasn’t open—whatever it was, I couldn’t bow down to them. When I met Maharajji, it was instantaneous. It was an instantaneous surrender—the surrender that is no surrender.
It’s not something that happens with your mind. You can’t think your way to it. You can’t think, “Oh, that’s something I’ll never do.” You can think that. But, the reality is, for almost all of us—I mean, you can read it in story after story. Mirabai said she walked off the bus the first time she met Maharajji and she was coming out of a teaching that was very against gurus. She instantly fell at his feet. It’s just something that happens within you that can’t be denied.
TS: One thing I’m curious about is how devotion works for each of you as a contemporary path, if you will. How does your devotion work on you?
PM: It’s always a reminder. To me, Maharajji is a constant reminder of the path, of the work I’m doing here. In other words, you’re sort of surrendering to the concept that your purpose in being here is spiritual evolution and thank God for these beings that are there to take you along the path.
TS: Raghu?
RM: Let’s not forget one important thing: you’re talking about devotion and talking about touching the feet of a guru—and, by the way, none of us that went to India are any different than anyone listening to this podcast of yours. We all were cynical about it, we all were like, “What in the hell was that?” And as Parvati said, there was no mind at all when we met this particular being, Maharajji. There was no mind at all.
But what is it really? It’s really returning to ourselves. It’s devotion to that place inside of us that is beyond our duality, beyond our polarization, beyond our “us and them.” It’s about to really opening up and allowing, as Ram Dass said in that talk that you just played, allowing suffering to be and not running away from it. And, devotion is a practice to allow the heart to open where it’s not running away from the world and from—every day, as the Buddha said, suffering is present. “How do we make friends with it?” is the big question and why I feel really blessed, above all things, to have a practice that allows the heart to open. And at the same time, we are taking advantage of the different traditions—particularly, the Buddhist tradition—that allow for a framework for us to connect with a framework of reality and how it all really is. Again, it’s the devotion aspect is about opening our hearts so that we are not walking around in fear. We have trust.
TS: I’m going to ask you each just one final question. Parvati, tell me, from the book Love Everyone: what was the one moment that touched you the most in the whole book? If you could do it—a few sentences, a paragraph.
PM: Well, let me put it this way: as an author, you write and you rewrite and you reread the manuscript over and over and over again. And every time I read the manuscript, something different would catch me and I would start crying. I can’t give you a one example because at each different moment it would be something else that would strike my heart. Even though I knew these inside out, reading it again would suddenly touch something in me and would bring out tears.
TS: OK, and then Raghu, here you compiled the various teachings that are making up Being Here Now, this online course that covers the essential teachings of Ram Dass. Tell me: for you, what was the part that process that really went in deep and touched you in a special way.
RM: First of all, I’ve been involved in this material [and] we’ve been creating at the Foundation a digital asset management of all of these assets—of Ram Dass’ talks and videos from four to five decades. In the middle of doing all of that, of course you came along and said, “Hey, we’d like to do this course.” Then I thought, “OK, we’re not quite ready. We don’t have all of these assets lined up.” So, we had to do a lot of research to find exactly what would be the most essential—because Ram Dass has talked about all of these subjects at such great length—to find and hone it down to this eight-week course. Some of it was quite difficult.
But what I found in going through all of this material was what you just said actually earlier in the podcast—about that clip of the talk. How amazing is it that this material is so relevant today—[which] he started talking about literally in the late 1960s? How amazing is [the] relevance of what he’s saying? I’ll tell you: I think you—for this particular podcast—you sure picked a great excerpt because the way he brought together the concept of us dealing with suffering, and dealing with people’s pain, and dealing with our own intention to be free and how that all works together in terms of karma yoga, I think was just one of the most valuable and essential pieces of information.
Tami, that little ten-minute piece alone is worth the price of the whole thing, I think. I’m really glad you played that because the way that it brought together these different aspects of what is so important today with so much suffering going on in this world, I think that gives people a real vantage point to see what they can do to change their lives and change their hearts.
Ram Dass’ big thing all along has been—from the day that he came back from India the first time and he started giving these talks and he was told by Maharajji, “Do not say anything about me,” and he did nothing but talk about Maharajji because he couldn’t stop himself. He could not stop that sharing. He just had that tremendous intention to share what he got. I just think that is so transparent in all of these talks in this course that I think people will get a lot out of it. A lot out of it.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Raghu Markus. He has worked with Sounds True to create a new online course called Being Here Now the Essential Teachings of Ram Dass and that’s an eight-week course that begins on September 19. You can visit SoundsTrue.com for more information. Also, as part of our conversation, we’ve been talking to Parvati Markus, who has written a new book called Love Everyone: The Transcendent Wisdom of Neem Karoli Baba Told Through the Stories of the Westerners Whose Lives He Transformed.
I want to thank you both for being with us. Thank you for bringing the love. Thank you.
PM: Thank you, Tami.
RM: Thank you. Thanks, Tami.
TS: SoundsTrue.com. Many voices, one journey. Thanks for being with us.
