Tag Archives: India

India ~ An Amazing Place

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-An excerpt from an interview with Ramananda John E. Welsons

NILS MONTAN: India is an amazing place. There is nothing quite like it. What would you say was the most profound realization you had there?

RAMANANDA JOHN WELSHONS: That you don’t have to go there – or anywhere else – to find God. God is everywhere . . . and the place we find God is right here in our own Heart. Still . . . India is an extraordinary place for spiritual awakening – though the experience may not be what you expect. Before I went, I had envisioned India to be a place where everyone was in deep states of samadhi (spiritual ecstasy) – floating in bliss, and levitating when they sat down for tea. Instead, I found the culture – at least in the cities – to be absolutely chaotic, frenetic, noisy and crowded. The drivers drive like absolute lunatics, and the air pollution is almost unimaginable. You have to look beyond the surface to find the peaceful, spiritual places – but when you do, they are quite remarkable, and you eventually realize that they are tuning you to the highest place in yourself. I generally say to people who are considering going to India, “If you have any doubt, don’t go. Go to India when your longing for God is inescapable and undeniable. Go when that yearning becomes a desperation in the deepest levels of your being. Go when your hunger for God is like an unquenchable thirst . . . when you feel like you will die if you don’t immerse yourself in God. The irony is, when you immerse yourself in God, you will die . . . but generally only at the ego level . . . and there comes a time when the ego is ready to die, even though it usually doesn’t want to admit that.

Nils Montan is a writer and a social commentator who lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Southern Brazil

What Captivated Me about Ram Dass

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An excerpt from an interview with Ramananda John E. Welshons

NILS MONTAN: What was it that captivated you about Ram Dass?

RAMANANDA JOHN WELSHONS:  Well, for several years prior to hearing that first recorded lecture, I had been struggling to understand some profound mystical and spiritual experiences that began happening to me in April of 1969, when I was just eighteen. They started the night I first heard Meher Baba’s name. That was all it took. Just hearing his name triggered a series of life-changing, transcendent experiences. Those experiences turned everything I knew and everything I understood about life upside down and inside out. And I had no idea who Meher Baba was! From that moment on, my life has been focused on returning again and again to the extraordinary experience of Divine Love and inner Bliss I tasted that night.

The next morning I sat down and spontaneously began to meditate. I didn’t need any instruction. I just did it. It was like I “remembered” how to meditate. I’m sure the “remembering” came from previous lifetimes. And I have continued to meditate pretty much every day for more than forty years. Meditation has been the central focus of my practice. I later discovered that the style of meditation I spontaneously began to practice when I was eighteen was the Tibetan form of Vipassana. About a year later I began to practice hatha yoga as well.

As I mentioned, I had experienced some deep depression during my teenage years which coincided with my parents’ drinking. For about six months prior to the onset of the spiritual experiences, I had been in Freudian psychoanalysis with a very gifted psychiatrist. I had also been experimenting with psychedelics since 1967. When the spiritual experiences began in 1969, I became convinced that there was a link between spirituality, psychology, and psychedelics. About a year and a half later – when I heard that recording of Ram Dass – he became the link. He had been a Freudian, he had been very influenced by Meher Baba’s teachings, and he had a lot of experience with psychedelics. So Ram Dass spoke in the language of all three of my primary influences, and he – essentially – wove the disparate threads of my fledgling consciousness into a beautiful plaid blanket!

NILS MONTAN: Did you continue to use psychedelics after that?

RAMANANDA JOHN WELSHONS: Not for very long. Meher Baba had urged those of us who were touched by his teachings to give up the use of psychedelics. Neem Karoli Baba, who became Ram Dass’s guru, also said that psychedelic experience was not a true Samadhi – or a true experience of enlightenment. So I completely gave up psychedelics in 1971, largely because – after hearing what Meher Baba and Neem Karoli Baba had to say – psychedelics just didn’t seem to bring the ecstasy that they once had. Instead of getting me “high,” they started bringing me “down.” I gave them up and I have never missed them.

Nils Montan is a writer and social commentator who lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Southern Brazil