Ramanand

These events took place in 1983, I think, and this is my recollection. I was staying in Rishikesh, India, when I met Ramanand while walking to Muni-Ki-Reti, a small town about two kilometers outside Rishikesh.

Ramanand was an unhappy and disillusioned yogi. He had once been an engineer, specializing in air-conditioning and ventilation, but he had left his career to become a sanyassin, a monk. For years, he wandered, looking for the truth. He came from Tamil Nadu in the south but had somehow ended up here in the north. For years, he taught meditation at Maharishi Mahesh's ashram, but he grew tired of the place and left. Some time back, he stayed at the Mangal Nath ashram, which wasn't really an ashram, but a very low-class guest house. He helped the owner bring guests to the place and stayed there for free as payment. Anyway, he asked me if I needed a place to stay, and I said yes, so I moved to the Mangal Nath ashram.

For months we discussed life, often at night in an open tea shop for truck drivers in Rishikesh, smoking Panama cigarettes and drinking tea in the light of kerosene lamps. When we went home, a pack of growling wild dogs always followed us.

One late afternoon we visited some other people who stayed in another ashram on the other side of the river Ganges. This was a bigger place, near the Maharishi Mahesh Ashram, but I can't remember its name. I remember they had a cow hospital there, an old cows' home. This place was more like a real ashram, but it also served as a kind of hotel. You didn't have to pay rent for a room, but you were expected to donate. I think the donation fee was 10 rupees a day.

One of the guests was a Canadian woman, but I can't remember her name, which is unfortunate because it would have been so interesting to contact her to confirm what happened there. She was Armenian by birth, had lived in Egypt for many years, but eventually moved to Montreal, I think, where she worked as an art teacher at an art college. She was a big, very loud, intense woman. She wore brown corduroy pants and a dark blue sweater, and she had very bad hearing. The day before, she had lost her hearing aid, and she was very upset about it. She couldn't hear almost anything.

We were sitting there, a bunch of people, on the porch outside one of the "rented" rooms, drinking tea and talking. The room was a small studio with an adjoining kitchen and bathroom. I can't recall the others, but there must have been six or seven of us altogether. They had just finished their meal when Ramanand and I came. When Ramanand learned about the missing hearing aid, he said he would see what he could do. So he went into his Kali meditation, as he called it. This meditation began with about half an hour of what looked like "normal" meditation: a yogi sitting there with eyes closed in a lotus position.

We soon lost interest in him and went on with our discussion about this and that. But after some time he gave up an incredible howl and fell down looking dead. What the hell was going on? The ashram managers came running, wondering what we were doing. When they saw Ramanand lying there on the floor, they became as alarmed as we were. He was clearly dead. They couldn't hear any heartbeats and didn't know what to do. So they carried him to their office and tried to wake him up. They didn't have any success with that, and Ramanand was just lying there on the floor when he suddenly sat up and shouted at the top of his lungs: GO TO THE BATHROOM! GO TO THE BATHROOM! GO TO THE BATHROOM!" And then he fell down again, but now he wasn't "dead". He was breathing and fast asleep.

When we went back to the studio and went into the bathroom, the hearing aid was there on the floor. The concrete floor was completely dry, but the hearing aid was wet and probably ruined.

Isn't all this very strange? We had been coming and going to the kitchen and bathroom all evening without noticing the hearing aid on the floor.

When Ramanand woke up in the morning, he had absolutely no idea about what had happened. He didn't remember anything, but he was very happy and a little bit proud when we informed him.

These events took place 25 years ago. As I write about it now, I realize how poor my memory is. I remember some parts clearly; others are faint, and much of it is lost in a haze. It makes me think of the Gospels. Mark, the oldest Gospel, was written more than forty years after Jesus' death. How much of these stories are real memories, and how much was added later?

It would be very interesting to get in touch with some of the people who were there and who can help to confirm this, and maybe fill in where my memory is failing, but how can I find them? I don't even remember their names. And where Ramanand is, I have no idea. He left Rishikesh many years ago.

Ramanand was very adept at meditation, but he wasn't very happy with life. To conjure up hearing aids for tourists wasn't enough for him. And though he loved the stories about the God Krishna, he was very displeased with Hinduism, yoga, and the caste system that permeated it all. The Vedanta philosophy didn't appeal to him. He used the expression "mental speculation." It was all mental speculation, not simply speculation. Finding happiness or bliss wasn't enough either. Happiness could just be another self-deception. Many people in Germany, for example, became incredibly happy when Hitler came to power in the early thirties. They had finally found meaning and direction in their previous empty, hand-to-mouth existence.

I also learned many other expressions from him, for example: the false ego. A false ego implies a true ego, but by true ego he didn't mean the Atman; he simply meant the true ego, the one you are when you are not lost in some crazy idea about life. Atman is the eternal soul. The body, the mind, and indeed the whole world are illusions or misperceptions; only Atman is eternal and real. This concept, along with the karma theories and the caste system, has caused endless miseries in India. Today, India is experiencing an incredible economic boom. But the rich middle class hesitates to spend money on the poor. They want to spend just enough to ease their conscience and take the edge off the arguments of those who criticize these injustices. UNICEF has recently criticized India for its reluctance to build a proper health care system for the poor. India has a much higher rate of child death than both Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. And one-third of the women in India are malnourished, which leads to them giving birth to malnourished children, which makes them much more susceptible to all kinds of painful diseases. So what? This world is but an illusion, and if someone suffers, it is because of the bad deeds he or she did in a previous lifetime. In this way, the Indian philosophies of life cause a lot of misery.

I also learned from him this, for me, very meaningful and interesting expression: "Yoga connection." By this, he didn't mean how to connect oneself to the greater source. He meant a special kind of synchronicity, a mysterious principle that lets people who need to meet, and are supposed to meet, find each other.