interview

WIE: I understand that about twenty-five years ago you were transformed by an experience that occurred after you woke up one morning, literally, from a night's sleep. What was that experience like, and how did it occur?

LEE LOZOWICK: It's something I never talk about. To define the experience is to lead people to expect something similar, which is very misleading. So I've really made an effort not to talk about it, beyond saying that it was the event that catalyzed my entering into teaching work, or that catalyzed my representing divine influence in the world. The actual description would be too specific and unique to mean anything to anyone else. What I do say about it is that I was doing very rigorous sadhana [spiritual practice]. None of that sadhana was itself responsible for the event that precipitated this shift in context, and yet, paradoxically, there is an association. The person who I was in a relationship with was traveling, and I was living alone. It was really the first time that I had had any time to do a retreat, and I took that week as a retreat week. The intensification of sadhana was not what precipitated the event, and yet a strong field of practice and intention—real exclusive intention in the sense that there was nothing that I wanted more than to serve God, realize God, commune with God, understand God—was very crucial.

WIE: So you feel that what most prepared you for what happened to you is the cultivation of that kind of intention?

LL: I don't think anything prepared me. I had no idea of the concomitant responsibilities involved. I mean, I looked at other teachers and one of my motives clearly was to enjoy the kind of adulation that other teachers enjoyed. My idea of awakening was that you wake up and you're free, and then you sort of do what you want. I had been teaching Silva Mind Control, a system of dream work and self-motivational practice, for several years, so I was in a position of some authority. My idea of awakening and being a spiritual teacher was that you just got into a position of more authority, that's all.

In Silva Mind Control, I really had no responsibility. I would do a training session and people would go home, and if they didn't practice, I didn't care. And it was a profit-making thing and I wanted to make money at it. I made up my own schedule and I would travel when I wanted. My time was my own. So I thought that a spiritual teacher just had more of all of those things. I had no idea about the absolute lack of freedom that spiritual teaching is. It's an absolute lack of freedom. You're so committed to the communication of what it is that inspires you that you can't pick and choose. You can't say, "I'll teach this weekend but I won't teach that weekend, and I'll do this and that and the other thing."

WIE: What was it that you realized?

LL: I suppose it could be said that I realized the nature of reality. Since that realization, there's been an unfolding articulation of the nature of reality as a way of attracting others to this work, as well as a communication of its foundation, and, at least minimally, its intellectual boundaries.

WIE: You said that before you woke up, you didn't realize the responsibility involved in being a teacher. How did you become aware of that?

LL: Before I woke up, I thought that it was all bliss, that you got union with God and you were ecstatic all the time. Exactly coincident with the event that precipitated this work came a tacit, moment-to-moment knowledge of what this work entailed. So in every moment, I know what I need to know. If what I need to know is that I am responsible in such and such a way, I know that. That's been constant in the last twenty-five years. Whatever I need to know having to do with my own responsibilities, with communication in a given space, whatever it might be, I know. So everything is tacitly obvious. There have continued to be catalysts in my life after that event, such as a book I read or a lecture I hear, or even something random in nature. Everything was already tacitly understood, but it wasn't all in language, and the different catalysts that I continue to intersect with provoke articulation.

WIE: From your own experience, what is enlightenment?

LL: It's an unflagging, not necessarily always willing, but unflagging, irrevocable commitment to serve what I call the great process of divine evolution. Basically, that's God, and we articulate what the process of God is in a very complex way. But enlightenment is an unflagging and irrevocable slavery to serving that which is God, the Divine, in whatever way the Divine deems is service.

WIE: Are you saying that since awakening you know what kind of service God wants?

LL: There's not an intellectual cognition of what is wanted in the moment. There is only action in response to what is wanted in the moment. Then in retrospect, I can define or discuss or consider what the will of God was. But in the moment, there's only an organic response. So the essence of my teaching work I call "spiritual slavery." And one of the key elements of spiritual slavery is that you don't have to understand because if you surrender to the will of God, you are active, you are manifested, you are moved. And if you understand—as most of us would like to because we're curious and we're thinking creatures—that's fine. But understanding is not a requirement for functioning in an enlightened way.

WIE: What role does discrimination play in the spiritual life, if any?

LL: I think discrimination plays a major role, particularly in the sense that the better the quality of the food one eats, the healthier the system is. And that applies on every level, including the level of what we read, what movies we see, even who we talk to. If we're indiscriminate about the energy fields that we intersect with, then the likelihood of developing a vehicle that is strong enough and clear enough to make the breakthrough is minimal. So I think what Buddha talked about when he spoke of right livelihood, right company, right speech, and so on is important. I think discrimination is very important. I think we should be sensitive to what we put in our mouths, what we put in our minds, what we put in our physical company, and things like that, if we can help it. Sometimes we can't help it.

In the beginning, the discrimination of a student has to be, in some sense, just an effort of education, and as time goes on, it becomes more instinctual. In my case, discrimination is itself one of the gestures of spontaneity.

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 work—the first trip to India, moving into a living situation with students, moving out here to Arizona, that kind of thing—are 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 with—to 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 teacher—and 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 him—none. 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 context—or the shift of context, since it wasn't mine—and 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 grace—and 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.