WIE: In 1976, you went to India and ultimately met Yogi Ramsuratkumar, whom you recognized as your guru. Most people who go to India for spiritual reasons are seeking enlightenment, but you went after your awakening already had occurred. Why did you go?

LL: A lot of the major movements that happened in the evolution of my teaching workthe first trip to India, moving into a living situation with students, moving out here to Arizona, that kind of thingare not things that I have reasons for, although being minimally intelligent, I can always come up with reasons. The reasons I gave for the first trip to India were wanting to pay respect to the sources of what I felt was my cultural leaning, cultural resonance; to visit various teachers, including people whom I felt a very powerful resonance with, like Ramana Maharshi; to visit ashrams; and to offer prayers and gratitude. Those were the stated reasons for going. Of course, the real reason for going was a pre-awareness instinct in relationship to beginning a different level of engagement with Yogi Ramsuratkumar, but it took many years for that to become apparent. Again, that's only in retrospect. At the time I went to India with students, one of the things I thought was to get it over withto go and check out my roots and pay my respects. You go, and that's the end of it. Little did I know I would find what I found.

WIE: When you first met Yogi Ramsuratkumar, did you recognize him as your teacher?

LL: No. It took the first trip, then the second trip, which was three years later, and then about a year after that I started responding to him as my teacherand even then, very lightly. It wasn't until maybe three or four years after that, in the early to mid-eighties, that I really dedicated myself to him as my teacher, of course, without even knowing if he would accept me as a student or what would happen.

WIE: You have said that Yogi Ramsuratkumar was the source of the awakening that occurred to you one year previous to your meeting him. How can someone be the source of somebody else's awakening that occurred before they ever met?

LL: Well, to a spiritual master, there's no such thing as the past, the present, or the future. To us, everything happens very linearly. In 1975, this shift of context happened for me. In 1976, I met Yogi Ramsuratkumar. In 1983, I really dedicated myself to him as my teacher. But to him, when Jesus was born might have been fifty years in the future. And some person that to us hasn't even been born yet, to him was like a living, breathing presence. Time is completely malleable. So for a master like Yogi Ramsuratkumar, the past, the present, and the future are completely interchangeable. He could shift them around at his will. I can't describe that according to a law of physics, although I'm sure that's possible. But that's how it is.

WIE: Did he ever acknowledge to you that this is the case in terms of your awakening?

LL: Not linearly. I mean he didn't really just sit down and talk to you like that. First of all, my relationship to him was one of 200 percent receptivity, so I never asked him for anything. I never asked questions. Occasionally I'd have some curiosity, but as a principle, I would not ask him for anything, except for everything. When I was in his presence, I would not make any gesture of appeal to himnone. So I never asked what his perception of all this was, although he said things to his Indian devotees that got fed back to me. I got feedback, but it was never direct. And I knew that if I had asked him directly, he would not have given a direct answer anyway.

WIE: Most people would say that after enlightenment you don't need a guru. But you entered into a guru/disciple relationship after your awakening, at a time when you were already taking on students of your own. Did that mean that in some way you felt there was something lacking in your own realization?

LL: No, I didn't feel there was anything lacking at all. My view of it is that I was in a guru/devotee relationship before my shift of contextor the shift of context, since it wasn't mineand that's what actually led to the shift of context. My relationship to him was not one in which I felt incomplete and he was somehow going to provide the missing pieces. All that's been done; that's over and done with. It's a love affair, that's all.

WIE: What is the purpose of the guru/disciple relationship? What's the role of this love affair?

LL: Well, in the real sense it's not sadhana that produces awakening. It's assimilation that produces awakening. So to assimilate something, you have to be in its field, in its aura. The guru is that which is grace, living grace, and the real essence of sadhana is to assimilate that. When the disciple wakes up, it's because they've assimilated the guru's grace, not because they've done sadhana. Paradoxically, one has to do sadhana to create the kind of resonance that allows the assimilation to occur. sadhana is like preparing the field, but really it is all grace. And to get grace, you have to be in relationship to grace. You don't have to be in its physical presence necessarily, although there are benefits to that. You can get it anywhere as long as you hook into it. But the guru is the hook, the source of it. A lot of people say, "Well, why can't I go directly to God?" We can't go directly to God because the human vehicle, which is the guru, is basically about all we can take. Now there are examples such as Anandamayi Ma and Ramana Maharshi who ostensibly didn't have a human guru. But neither of them is alive to talk about that, and I think that they could have been cornered into acknowledging the need for a human medium through which one hooks into grace.

WIE: When I hear people speak in terms of devotion or grace, it makes me wonder what role understanding plays.

LL: Devotion doesn't necessarily have to show up in the form of bhakti [the yoga of devotion] alone. Devotion can show up in the form of jnana yoga [the yoga of wisdom]. So grace itself is not this kind of romantic, soft, fuzzy thing. One could say that Nisargadatta Maharaj, for instance, was a transmitter of graceand he was hardly devotional. He wouldn't stand for any devotion around him. So one shouldn't exclusively identify this idea of grace with the bhakti traditions because grace is available in many, many different traditions.

Even in any bhakti school, if it's a real bhakti school and not just some sentimental approach, love is a fire. Love is a burning, raging conflagration. It's not this weepy-eyed thing where everybody walks around saying, "Oh, my guru is so gentle and I love my guru so much." If you call up a school and the person on the phone is talking like that, you have to question it.

WIE: What is it then that makes it not just a sentimental feeling but actually something that is fiery?

LL: It's absolutely transformational. A metaphor might be a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. The alteration of structure is so great and so profound that it can't take place without crisis. Often one element of the crisis will be what we call this tremendous fire, this heat, or tapas.

WIE: What is the nature of this tapas or crisis?

LL: Some of it is the standard confrontation with ego's autonomous identification with illusion as if that were reality, and having to dismantle that dictatorship. But the first thing that's required in any kind of healing is that you have to acknowledge that there's sickness. So the first order of business is getting some recognition of the illness of identification with the body as total reality. That involves an honest recognition and ownership of the neurotic aspects of behavior that ego has assumed as necessary protection for itself. That can be shame, pride, all forms of narcissism and greed, and so on. We've lived twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years, and to admit that in all of that time everything that we've done has been informed by self-centeredness, egotism, and narcissism requires tremendous, tremendous discipline, attention, and a lot of just basic hard work.

Theoretically, we could come into this fire and see that we've been selfish and that could be revelatory. We could just go, "Oh wow, I don't want to live like that anymore," and go on from there. But realistically, most people aren't willing to do that. The bottom line is, it's a matter of a kind of core willingness to give up fifty years of whatever we think we've accumulated. It's like taking this immense bank account and just giving it up. It's as if you were a Jew in Germany or in Russia at certain times in history and you had a vault full of gold, and you had a chance to hop on a boat with nothing but the shirt on your back and get out. What would you choose, life or your gold? Most people chose the gold and died for it under horrific circumstances. It's the same analogy. Someone could come to this work and realize the fact of the illusion and then choose life, but most of us want to take the gold along with us. Really the gold is shit, but it's just that it's familiar and it's served us well.