Tag Archives: Meher Baba

Experiences of the 1960’s

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NILS MONTAN: Can you describe some of the experiences you had in the 1960’s and later with Meher Baba, Ram Dass, Neem Karoli Baba, and Baba Muktananda?

RAMANANDA JOHN WELSHONS: Well, unfortunately, not really. Or – perhaps I should say – not adequately. In William James’s classic outline of the four primary characteristics of mystical experience, one of the characteristics was “Ineffability.” It’s that frustrating predicament in which you can’t adequately describe – in words – what has happened to you at the Soul level. But if you encounter someone who has had the same experience, no explanation is necessary. You can just kind of nod at each other and smile. When I recently spent time on Maui with Ram Dass, we were reflecting on some of the experiences we have both had. We just kept falling into that knowing nod and smile. I would start to describe a state of consciousness I had experienced, and he would just say, “Yup . . .Yup . . . Yup . . . ” And that was that. I never had to finish a sentence. I didn’t have to explain or describe. He just knew.

I will say this; The Bardo Thodol – known more commonly as The Tibetan Book of the Dead – contains the most vivid descriptions of what I experienced – specifically in the sections where “The Void” and “Clear Light” are described. What really amazed me – as it had amazed Ram Dass, and Tim Leary, and Aldous Huxley, and Huston Smith, and probably tens of thousands of others – was that The Bardo Thodol was written about 2500 years ago. It is a Tibetan Buddhist document that had nothing to do with psychedelics. And yet it portrays, in vivid detail, the experiences that we were having with psychedelics in the 1960’s.

I think it is essential to point out that although many of us had these experiences while using psychedelics, the experiences – themselves – were not an “effect” of the drugs. The drugs merely paved the way for us to experience something that is always inside us . . . inside ALL of us . . . inside everyone and everything. Psychedelics were just a means of overriding our habitual thought patterns and psychological identities. They paved the way for us to see “The Divine Light,” or “Brahman,” or “Nirvana,” or “Christ Consciousness,” or whatever you want to call the Ultimate Reality. They paved the way for us to see that the Source and substance of everything in the Universe exists eternally within each of us.

But drugs really aren’t a complete, or particularly safe path. As Meher Baba pointed out, they can cause a lot more damage than whatever good they might do. I know a comparatively small handful of rare beings – like Ram Dass – who have had profound and positive spiritual transformations from psychedelics. I know a lot more who had their consciousness essentially shattered by psychedelics, and who have struggled psychologically, spiritually, and emotionally because of them. Some are now dead as a result – either directly or indirectly – of their use of psychedelics. Not that the drugs themselves were toxic, but the drugs sometimes caused both short and long-term psychoses that made people essentially non-functional. They also can unleash latent bipolar and schizophrenic tendencies. And they have a tendency to inspire mind states of vast, sweeping, delusional spiritual grandiosity. I still see that fairly frequently in younger people who have been using psychedelics.

On the other hand, the Presence and Grace of the Master – or the Guru – is a much different phenomenon. A true Guru is living in a state of total – perpetual – immersion in the highest states of consciousness. Light and Love just radiate from them. They are totally connected with The Source, with The One. Just being in their presence is a great spiritual blessing. And since they are connected with everyone and everything . . . eternally . . . you don’t have to even be in their physical presence – and they don’t even have to be in a physical body – in order for you to feel it. Sometimes all you have to do is ask. And sometimes they “visit” you spontaneously. But the Grace that flows from such a Being is just incredible. And while they may turn your world upside-down, they’re not usually going to cause you to be psychotic . . . for very long, at any rate! (laughs)

The Mystics of Rock and Jazz

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

NILS MONTAN: Speaking of The Beach Boys, wasn’t there a period when you were spending a lot of time with them, and with some other famous musicians?

RAMANANDA JOHN WELSHONS: Well, actually, yes. I was working on my first book, which was titled The Mystics of Rock and Jazz. It was an in-depth look at many of the musicians of the 1960’s and 1970’s who had gurus, or were influenced by meditation and Eastern thought. The Beach Boys had spent time with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi just after the Beatles met him. So I was interviewing them – especially Mike Love and Al Jardine – who had both become teachers of TM. I was also spending time with Carlos Santana and Mahavishnu John McLaughlin, who were both with Sri Chinmoy. I was communicating with Pete Townshend of the Who about his connection with Meher Baba. He was kind enough to put me in touch with George Harrison, who had been influenced by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Swami Prabhupada of the Hare Krishna movement. I spent time with Charles Lloyd, a wonderful man and a wonderful jazz artist, and was planning to interview Turiya Alice Coltrane, John Coltrane’s widow, Pharoah Sanders, and Carole King, who was with Swami Satchidananda. I worked on that book for about three years, from 1974 to 1977, but it was never published.

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

My First Meeting with Ram Dass

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An excerpt from an interview with Ramananda John E. Welshons

NILS MONTAN: When did you actually meet Ram Dass?

RAMANANDA JOHN WELSHONS: In May of 1973 while I was an undergraduate at The University of South Florida in Tampa. I was asked by the Director of the University Program Office to help set up a series of lectures for Ram Dass on the campus at USF.

Our first meeting was just sublime. We met at the Holiday Inn on Fowler Avenue. Krishna Das was with him. After visiting on the lawn at the Holiday Inn for a while, a group of six of us piled into my 1968 Volkswagen Van and drove to “The Natural Kitchen,” a local vegetarian restaurant I frequented. We sat across the table from one another at lunch. In one moment, Ram Dass and I spontaneously locked eyes, and the entire physical universe just melted away. There we were – Ram Dass and I – just gazing into each other’s eyes . . . floating together in The Eternal Light of God . . . while sitting at the local vegetarian restaurant with our forks stuck in our tofu and brown rice! In that moment, we embarked on a delicious adventure that has lasted nearly forty years. As a result of my connection with Ram Dass, I began to feel a deepening inner connection with Meher Baba, and eventually – also – with Neem Karoli Baba. Ram Dass really helped me to integrate the path known as Guru Kripa, or the path of devotion to the Guru. Now – nearly forty years later – Ram Dass is my spiritual brother and dear, dear friend, Stephen and Ondrea are also like a brother and sister, and Meher Baba and Neem Karoli Baba are like my father and my favorite uncle.

I was also very influenced by Dr. Allan Y. Cohen. Allan is a wonderful psychologist who had been a student of Ram Dass and Tim Leary at Harvard, and later became a devotee of Meher Baba. He is a dear friend and an amazing human being. I went to see him in Berkeley, California in the summer of 1973, and gave him a long tale of woe about how I felt my life was meaningless. He chuckled, looked deeply into my eyes, and said, “John, there is a simple prescription for that.” I said, “Really? What is it?” I was desperate. And he said, “Whenever your life feels meaningless, start doing more things for other people.”

A few months later – at the end of 1973 – I went to India and spent many weeks with the close disciples of Meher Baba. That was an amazing, amazing experience. Ten years later – in 1983 – I went again with Ram Dass, and spent time at Neem Karoli Baba’s ashram in Vrindaban. Both of those journeys were life-changing and consciousness expanding. The India stories are far too involved to get into right now. We’ll have to do another interview someday for that. Suffice it to say that India – in those days – was like being on another planet. Very few of our Western comforts and conveniences were available. Much of the time we lived in the same manner that people in rural India had lived for thousands of years – no electricity, no plumbing, no telephone . . . you know? We were thrust into a culture that was so deeply immersed in its very extraordinary – and ancient – spiritual traditions. I mean – like in Delhi, one of the taxi drivers Ram Dass and I rode with kept a small puja (altar) on his dashboard with a photo of Ram and Sita and Hanuman. Every time he picked up passengers he would stop for a moment and say a prayer to Lord Ram – praying that he would get his passengers to their destination safely. I’ve never had a taxi driver like that in New York City!

At the same time, India threw me into a full-scale confrontation with all of my greatest fears and insecurities because there was so little access to modern conveniences, and such a profound awareness of mortality. You know, after landing at Mumbai Airport in 1973, my friends and I got into a taxi to go to Victoria Train Station. I had only been in the taxi for about five minutes when I saw a big truck – like a garbage truck – that went around picking up dead bodies every morning – the bodies of people who lived on the streets and sidewalks who had died overnight. That really set the tone for the first trip. If I had to sum it up on one sentence, it would be “there are so many, many ways to die in India!”

– Nils Montan is a writer and 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

The Evolution of My Spiritual Path

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– An excerpt from an interview with Ramananda John E. Welshons

NILS MONTAN: Can you tell us a bit about the most important influences on your thinking, and how your spiritual path has evolved?

RAMANANDA JOHN WELSHONS: Wow! That’s a BIG question!

I would have to say that the first big spiritual event in my life was being miraculously healed from Polio in 1953 when I was three years old. That was – and continues to be – a profound influence. The doctors had said that my case was “hopeless” – that there was a 99 percent chance I would die. But my father was a student of metaphysical Christianity – teachers like Emmett Fox, Norman Vincent Peale, and Mary Baker Eddy – and he wasn’t going to take that lying down. So my parents asked all of their family and friends and business associates to pray. Within a few days hundreds of people were praying in Protestant Churches, Catholic Churches, and Jewish Synagogues. One night, just after praying with our minister, my father had a vision of Jesus standing next to my bed in the hospital. Twenty minutes later, at 2:30 in the morning, the hospital called and said, “there has been a miracle!”

It took a few years, but when I was finally old enough to begin to understand the implications of that experience, I started to realize several significant things: First of all, I realized the power of prayer – of group consciousness. But I also realized that children can die. Since my life had been spared, I began to sense that I had better do something meaningful with it. I have often felt that I only get to stay on this planet as long as I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing.

The next great influence began when I was eleven years old, and I watched my happy family dissolve into madness as my parents both suddenly descended into a very sick pattern of alcoholic behavior. Though they were affluent and had everything – materially – our culture says we need to be happy, they were miserable. That made a profound impression on me. Through their suffering, I began to see the essential spiritual emptiness of much of what our culture values and believes in.

As soon as that chapter of my life began, I felt totally depressed and lost. One Sunday morning I was sitting in church, and I started to gaze at a beautiful painting of Jesus. The minister was droning on and on, and I wasn’t really listening. I was just looking at Jesus. And a voice inside me said, “Why can’t He be here now?” And the answer that arose inside me was, “He Is.” At that moment, I transcended into another realm of consciousness – overtaken by waves of the most delicious bliss I had ever experienced. No sermon, and no Bible reading had ever taken me to that place. But the simple inner reflection on Christ’s eternal, omnipresent Being did. I felt His hands sweetly caressing my shoulders and my head, and tears of joy flowed down my cheeks. I think that was the first time I consciously experienced “darshan” – or, the Presence of the Master.

Around that same time I first heard Martin Luther King speak. Again, I was moved to tears. I had goose bumps and waves of energy running up my spine. I had never heard a speaker who moved me the way Martin did. I just sat there crying and smiling. He spoke with such strength and clarity. The minute I heard Martin speak, I got it. I got the simple truth that we are all God’s children – there is no one higher or lower, no one better or worse. All are loved equally by God. Later, I became aware of Dr. King’s hero, Mahatma Gandhi, and Gandhi became a huge influence on me.

When I was eighteen, I encountered the teachings of Meher Baba, who lived from 1894 to 1969 and was one of the greatest saints in India’s history. Shortly after that I came into contact with Ram Dass, first through hearing a tape of a lecture he had given, and later through his classic book, Be Here Now. Through Ram Dass, I connected with Neem Karoli Baba, another great Indian saint. A few years later Ram Dass introduced me to Stephen and Ondrea Levine. Stephen is the author of some magnificent books, including A Gradual Awakening, Who Dies, Meetings at the Edge, and A Year to Live. It was Stephen who really helped me get grounded in Buddhist thought and meditation practice.

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