David Godman interview - Buddha and the Gas Pump (excerpt on Maurice Frydman)

Spiritual TeachersSpiritualityVedanta
Written By Wisdom2be
Frydman Collgue.jpg

David: Maurice Frydman is one of the most extraordinary people I have ever come across and virtually nothing is known about him. Because of his connection with Ramana Maharshi, Krishnamurti, Gandhi, Nisargadatta, the Dalai Lama, I kind of view him in my own mind as the Forrest Gump of 20th century spirituality. He was in all the right places in all the right times to get the maximum benefit from interactions with some of the greats of Indian spirituality, and at the end of his career he was just about the only person that Nisargadatta certified as a jnani.

So in between all these trips to India’s major gurus, he was a Gandhian; he worked for the uplift of the poor in India; he worked with Tibetan refugees; he edited extraordinary books. I am That is probably one of the all-time spiritual classics. This man for me is, how shall we say, a shining beacon of how devotees could and should be with their teachers. He was just an absolutely extraordinary man. Oh, and he went out of his way to cover his tracks, to hide what he had actually accomplished in his life.

So I have enjoyed the detective work of looking in obscure places and digging out stuff that he personally tried to hide, not because it was embarrassing, but because he didn’t like to take credit for what he had done. So I see this as an opportunity to wave the Maurice flag and say, ‘Look, this is one of the greatest devotees, sadhaks, seekers from the west who has been to India in the last 100 years and I think more people should know about him.’

Rick: Ok. So let’s start by talking about these people you wanted to talk about. I was thinking as I was reading about them, and listening to you say things about them, that as we do this we want to make this relevant to peoples’ current lives. So it is interesting to talk about people who were around Ramana and what their experiences were like. But whenever we can, let’s try to extract from that points which would be pertinent to contemporary seekers. I think we won’t have any trouble doing that. So why don’t we start with Maurice Frydman. Who is he?

David: Maurice Frydman is one of the most extraordinary people I have ever come across and virtually nothing is known about him. Because of his connection with Ramana Maharshi, Krishnamurti, Gandhi, Nisargadatta, the Dalai Lama, I kind of view him in my own mind as the Forrest Gump of 20th century spirituality. He was in all the right places in all the right times to get the maximum benefit from interactions with some of the greats of Indian spirituality, and at the end of his career he was just about the only person that Nisargadatta certified as a jnani.

So in between all these trips to India’s major gurus, he was a Gandhian; he worked for the uplift of the poor in India; he worked with Tibetan refugees; he edited extraordinary books. I am That is probably one of the all-time spiritual classics. This man for me is, how shall we say, a shining beacon of how devotees could and should be with their teachers. He was just an absolutely extraordinary man. Oh, and he went out of his way to cover his tracks, to hide what he had actually accomplished in his life.

So I have enjoyed the detective work of looking in obscure places and digging out stuff that he personally tried to hide, not because it was embarrassing, but because he didn’t like to take credit for what he had done. So I see this as an opportunity to wave the Maurice flag and say, ‘Look, this is one of the greatest devotees, sadhaks, seekers from the west who has been to India in the last 100 years and I think more people should know about him.’

Rick: Yeah. I remember. Well, there were so many stories I read in the thing that you wrote about him. He was from Poland originally and he emigrated to France to run a factory and discovered Krishnamurti there, and he saw Gandhi in Paris.

David: I saw one of his letters. He discovered Krishnamurti when he was a teenager at Warsaw and he spent his entire allowance for the week on a second-hand French copy of a Krishnamurti book he found on the sidewalk. He started extraordinarily early and never looked back.

Rick: Yeah, and then he was recruited by an official in Mysore to run a factory in Bangalore, came to India. He eventually became a sadhu in his own right, although he was a sadhu who perhaps never quite renounced women - there was somebody he wanted to marry.

David: (laughs)

Rick: He was also extremely inventive. When he met Gandhi he watched Gandhi spinning on his spinning wheel and he thought, ‘Well, I can invent a better one than this.’ And he actually came up with a better spinning wheel and presented it to Gandhi.

David: Yeah, he met Gandhi - this is one of the Forrest Gump stories. He was running his electrical factory in Paris. He was walking down the street and he saw a bit of a crowd at one of the train stations and wandered over to see what it was. And there was Mahatma Gandhi on the platform in Paris, of all places, changing trains. In those days if you wanted to go from London -he had just been to a conference in London - back to India, the quickest way was to get a train across Europe and then get a boat in Greece. But for that he had to change trains in Paris, and Maurice just happened to be on the platform for the two minutes that Gandhi spent in Paris to watch him change trains.

He said, ‘I looked at this man. I fell in love with him immediately. I fell in love with the idea of India and I just knew I had to go.’

So the first chance he got... the Chief Minister of Mysore state, which was an independent country in those days, came to his office to head hunt him to run a big factory in Bangalore and when Maurice agreed, the Chief Minister said, ‘When can you come?’ He said, ‘I will get my coat. I am coming with you now’.

That was it. He went off to India.

Rick: Just with his coat basically.

David: Yes, just with his coat.

Rick: That’s amazing. And he spent many years living as a sadhu, living under trees, sleeping on the ground. I think I also recall that when he was running this factory, he would not take a salary. He put all of his salary into a trust fund or a bank account.

David: The Chief Minister wanted him to be the modernizing front of Mysore state. So he was very upset when his western factory manager turned up for work in orange robes, (laughs). And not only did he turn up for work in orange robes, he went out to beg his food in the evening from the workers he was attempting to oversee during the day.

The Chief Minister said, ‘We can’t have this. It is bad for discipline for you to be dependent on your own workers to feed you in the evening, because you’ve got to boss them around the next day.’ (laughs).

He (the Chief Minister) said, ‘Contractually I am obliged to pay you. I will put your salary in an escrow, in an account. It’s yours whenever you want it.’

Maurice never touched it. He lived off the food he begged. The deal was that whenever some VIP came to see what a great modern state Mysore State was, Maurice had to put on a suit and tie. But when no VIPs were coming, he was allowed to run the place in his orange robes and go out and beg for food on the side.

Rick: And when he finally left the factory, he distributed his salary which he had accumulated to all the workers. He didn’t take…

…Rick: Let’s get back to Maurice Frydman. But let’s dwell on that point a little bit more. What do you feel like the role or significance or importance of that kind of attitude is for a spiritual seeker?

David: Maurice for me exemplified…

Rick: I mean, that attitude of prostration and surrender…

David: Maurice, I don’t think had this. Maurice was a karma yogi. I think of all the people who went to India that I know about, many of them, they had some devotion. They wanted to do enquiry, get enlightened. Maurice genuinely felt that the world was in a bad place and that he had the talent to do a lot about it. And he was always... I would not say on the lookout, but every opportunity he got to improve the lot of poor working people in India, he took it. He wasn’t a contemplative navel gazer. This was an extraordinary man of action who throughout his life was always looking to use his talents, his skills, to make life better for other people.

yogis by nature and some people are more bhaktas. They are going to have a more devotional bent, and so on. So, one size does not fit all. What was Maurice’s relationship with Ramana that’s significant that you would like to tell us? Did he get enlightened with Ramana?

David: Maurice came to India around 1933, started his factory and showed up at Ramanashram in 1934. He had a very very strong urge to become a sannyasi. He asked Bhagavan for formal initiation. Bhagavan never initiated anybody. His permanent, unflinching advice was whatever circumstances you are in, make the best of them. If you have a job, if you have a family, do your work in that context. He never ever gave anyone permission to renounce the world. Like several other people, Maurice wouldn’t give up. He went off to see Swami Ramdas. And Swami Ramdas - that’s the Kerala man - he initiated him. And he (Maurice) took sannyasa under the name Bharatananda, ‘the bliss of India’, (laughs) Always, I think, there was this strong desire.

He came and he saw the poverty, the poor conditions in India, and he just knew he had the talent to do something. The way he looked at Gandhi’s wheel and said, ‘Mr Gandhi, I can make you a better wheel,’ and went out and did it on the spot. This is pure Maurice. Maurice was a do-it-now bulldozer. Wherever he went, if he saw a problem, he addressed it and fixed it. That’s one of the things I like. No dithering. No committees. No consultations. He just went out and brought a better wheel back in.

Gandhi tried it, and said, ‘This is better. Thank you very much. This will be my personal wheel from now on. Go and see my people and make this the standard model for everybody in India, and I will keep this one for myself.’

That was just one of the extraordinary things he did, off the cuff, in an afternoon. That was the theme of his life.

Rick: Another thing he did off the cuff is while he was on his death bed…

David: (laughs) This story, yes.

David: So, I had been poking around looking for Maurice stories. Everybody has a really extraordinary Maurice story. Nobody has a lot. He was very careful about talking about himself, or letting things slip. I had a letter from his final secretary. Maurice fell and had a bad accident. He fractured his hip, and the doctors came and said, ‘He is not going to make it more than a few days. All his organs are failing one by one. Give him some painkillers, palliative care. We can’t operate, he is in too feeble a state.’

One of his organs that failed was his kidney or his bladder, and he needed to have a catheter. I don’t know if you have had a catheter. I know my dad had a catheter and when I went to see him in hospital, he said, ‘Don’t make any jokes. Laughing hurts too much.’ It’s not a very nice thing, even with an anesthetic. I have watched friends have this in India. It is a bit brutal and often inserted without an anesthetic.

Maurice, of course, had a fractured hip. You have to keep still when these pipes are going in. When his bladder had been emptied, he said, ‘Is that what people have to put up with having a catheter? This is terrible. Bring me my Stanley knife. Bring me some plastic tubes. I am going to make a better catheter before I die.’ (laughs)

So his last few days on planet earth, he’s lying on a bed with a fractured hip that no one wants to operate on. His organs are failing one by one, and the last thing he wants to do is make a better catheter so that other people won’t have to suffer the way he did. Whether he did or not (make a better catheter) I don’t know. But that is just so Maurice.

Rick: So, I think I gathered from reading your stuff that Ramana acknowledged Maurice as being Self-realized.

David: No, no. I have to back track on this. He went off to see Swami Ramdas in Kerala to get the initiation and Ramdas took one look at him and said, ‘This is your final birth,’ which was quite a bold prediction. This was a western man in a business suit who had just walked in on his first day. Maurice came back to Ramanashram and everybody there laughed at him because all they could see was the man in the business suit. But Ramana could see there was something different and special about this man. He said that Maurice had been in India before. That was something that Ramana was quite careful in saying. He said, ‘He is one of us. He has been here before.’ But he didn’t say he was enlightened.

His relationship with Ramana was a bit rocky. I said that Maurice was a bit of a bulldozer. Wherever he went he thought he knew best, and what people should do, and Ramana was one of the few people he couldn’t bulldoze. He was trying to give him a better diet, trying to make people look after him better. Ramana was basically saying, ‘Mind your own business. That’s not what you are here for.’

One thing I must say, though. I know a woman who was with Maurice in the 1970s and I had a discussion with her. I said, ‘I have read some summaries that Maurice gave of Krishnamurti talks that he attended in the 1950s in Madras, as it was then.’ He gave summaries to post out to all of the people all over the world who couldn’t come.

I said, ‘You know, Maurice summaries are actually more interesting, more comprehensible and I get more from them than reading Krishnamurti books. These are such excelling summaries. I wish they had been published.’

She said, ‘He always had that talent. He had an ability to go to a teacher, listen to what that teacher was saying, summarize it and explain it often in a better, more concise, more accessible way than the teacher themselves.’

And then she absolutely astounded me. She said, ‘Maurice told me that after he had been going to Ramanashram for a year, Ramana himself said (to him), “You can explain my teachings to people who come, who don’t know Tamil.’”

Maurice was actually designated to give summaries of certain aspects of the teachings. I don’t know anybody else in the entire history of Ramanashram who got the job, while Ramana was still there, of explaining the teachings in Bhagavan’s presence. This is an extraordinary endorsement of his state and his ability to give very good, very concise accounts of what the teacher was saying.

I think the same thing happened when he went to see Nisargadatta. Ganesan, Ramana’s grandnephew told me this, that Maurice had told him, ‘I heard about this man (Nisargadatta) so I went to see him and I was taking notes outside his beedi store in Bombay, writing things down, and after a few days Maharaj (Nisargadatta) called me over and said, “What are you writing?”’

Maurice showed him what he was writing and Maharaj was so happy with the quality of his understanding, his summaries and his notes that he invited him in. And he became, in a way, the official disciple, recorder, editor, and compiler. And the fruits of his work was / am That, which is an all-time classic. So he did have this ability to absorb teachings and, I wouldn’t say regurgitate them, but disseminate them in a way that everyone went, ‘Wow, that’s the perfect explanation’.

Even though it might not have been the original words, they were so good, people said, ‘That is even better than the original teacher’.

Rick: Did he speak ... What Indian languages did he speak?

David: He worked in Indian villages. I am guessing... Well he definitely knew Hindi. I have seen an article about his publisher in Bombay when Maurice went there with the first draft of / am That, saying, ‘Stop everything, stop everything’. This is very Maurice. ‘Cancel all your other projects. We must do this book’. The publisher was called Dikshit.

He said, ‘Maurice you don’t know Marathi. How are you going to do it?’

Maurice said, ‘Don’t worry. Don’t worry. Minor detail. Minor detail.’ (laughs) Marathi is the local vernacular language of Bombay but everybody there speaks Hindi. I think Maurice was hacking his way through conversations in Hindi, but I am not sure he ever learned good enough Marathi to have deep conversations. But between the two of them they got the point across.

Rick:  What was Nisargadatta speaking?

David: He was speaking Marathi. He was a very uneducated man. He hardly ever went to school. He had a very rough, coarse village accent and village humor. I saw educated Marathis come in to talk to him and they could not understand a word he was saying because he was 80 years old, had a thick village accent, and wouldn’t put his false teeth in. (laughs) It was quite a task to actually get sense out of him in the final years. The people who were the regular translators, I think, they were tuned in to his accent and his lack of teeth, and they got it.

Rick: So what else would you like to tell us about Maurice before we go on to anyone else?

David: Can I tell you the story of how he went to do his project in Aundh?

Rick: Sure.

David: I must tell you about the Dalai Lama also. Do we have time for all this?

Rick: We have plenty of time? We have a couple of hours.

David: Ok. So after he left his factory... The reason he left was that the son of a raja in a state that was close to Bombay came to ask for advice on how his father’s state could be improved. And Maurice went off (to investigate).

At this point in time, the Gandhian idea, the political idea, was that villages should be self-governing. They shouldn’t have higher hierarchies of people telling them what to do. Middle and higher management was out. Gandhi had a notion of this thing called Panchayat Raj. The Panchayats were the village councils and ‘raj’ means ‘rule’. He (Gandhi) wanted India to be a confederation of self-governing villages with no higher management sucking out taxes and spending it on wasteful projects higher than the village level. So Maurice went off, and this is a typical Maurice story again. He walked in to see the raja.

The raja said, ‘Mr Frydman, we hired you as a consultant. How can we improve my kingdom?’

Maurice said, ‘The only thing you can usefully do is abdicate. You are a parasite, (laughs) You are sucking up all the revenue from your villages. You live in a big palace. Your villagers are poor. You don’t help them. You just collect their taxes and live a high life. What you need to do is to abdicate, but not in favor of your son or anybody else. Abdicate in favor of the village councils of your realm.’

Amazingly - Maurice was a very persuasive man - he actually persuaded this raja to abdicate. So far as I know, it is the only instance in Indian history where a ruler has abdicated in favor of his people rather than a general or a son or anybody else.

Because this was a Gandhian project, Maurice wanted Gandhi himself to endorse it and co-sign the constitution with the raja. Maurice went off to see Gandhi in his ashram. He explained what was going on. The prince was there.

Gandhi said, ‘It is a very nice idea but you can’t cut people loose like this. If you want my endorsement of this project, you both have to agree to live there for a number of years. You have to teach these people how to be independent, how to look after themselves.’

And then he jabbed his finger at the raja’s son. He said, ‘You,you can’t live in a palace. You are going there to try and convince these village people that village life is a good, viable way of living. They are not going to respect you if you rock up every day in a big car from the palace. Build yourself a mud hut in one of these villages, live there for ten years and demonstrate to your people that this kind of life can be a rewarding, productive way of life.’

And so Maurice and Apa Pant, as he was called, looked at each other and said ok. Gandhi signed. Maurice and Apa Pant went back to their state.

Maurice said, ‘The first night I slept under a tree. I didn’t even have a house to live in’.

Slowly, slowly they taught these people the basics of self-governance. Maurice was very practical. He taught them carpentry, plumbing, engineering, all the things they needed to know.

The one part of this project that really impresses me was that when the Central Government was dissolved, they said, ‘What to do with the people in the Central Government prisons?’

Nobody wanted them.

Maurice said, ‘Parole them all out to me. Put them on personal probation parole to me. I will be responsible for them.’

He went off and built a village with the aid of these prisoners. He taught them how to build houses, he taught them agriculture; he taught them all the skills they needed to live independent lives and the recidivism rate was zero. Not a single one of these people ever needed to go back to jail. I have seen interviews with these people. Filmed interviews (of them) in their 90s. They were old men, and they were crying.

They just said, ‘Maurice saved us’.

This was such a famous project that in the 1960s they made a Bollywood film about it and Maurice was hired as the technical advisor. So he went down to the set and made sure that everything was properly recorded.

The director said, Thank you very much. I will give you a credit at the end as “technical advisor”.’ Maurice said, ‘No thanks, don’t put my name on it’.

This is very Maurice.

And the director said, ‘Of course I am putting your name on it. This is your project; you are the technical advisor. Of course your name is going on.’

And Maurice said, ‘Well, in that case, I am going to the Bombay High Court to take out an injunction against you (laughs) forbidding you to put my name on this project.’

This is the way Maurice was. He went through his whole life doing absolutely extraordinary things and then when he had done them, he covered his tracks, pretending later that they had nothing to do with him.

Rick: That’s pretty neat.

David: He is a man who just didn’t want people to know all the good things he has done. That’s another thing I admire about him.

Rick: Yeah. You know some people might wonder, you know, ‘What’s the spiritual significance of all this?’ But I think, ‘By their fruits you shall know them’.

David: Maurice had whole orchards of fruits. This is a man about whom it could be said that any one of about twenty things he did would be the number one item on most other people’s CVs. He just had so many things that were just unbelievable - the things that he did and accomplished. May I talk about the Dalai Lama briefly?

Rick: Anything. You don’t need to ask.

David: Right. I’m on a roll about Maurice.

Rick: Keep going.

David: Maurice is one of my heroes. Go Maurice!

In the late 1950s the Chinese were slowly annexing Tibet and it was quite clear that at some point they would take over. The Dalai Lama was making noises about moving to India.

Rick: He was in Boulder the other day. Did you see him?

David: I went there two days ago. I stood in line to ask a question about Maurice. I have been trying to talk to the Dalai Lama about Maurice for years but his committee won’t let me in. So I was standing in the public line. He answered four questions from four people. I was number ten in line, so I didn’t get to talk to him. (laughs)

Anyway, Maurice was personal friends with the Prime Minister of India; and Nehru, the Prime Minister, didn’t want to provoke a war with China. He thought there might be one but he didn’t want to be the person who made a big gesture which the Chinese would react badly to.

Nehru said, ‘Sorry, I can’t let this man in. It is too provocative. The Chinese will regard it as tantamount to harboring an enemy. I can’t do it.’

Maurice pestered and pestered and pestered, and in the end he got Nehru to sign off on a deal that the Dalai Lama could come to India on condition that he didn’t come as a political leader. He was allowed to be the spiritual leader of the Tibetans in exile. He could do pastoral work in India but he wasn’t allowed to make any political speeches. If he wanted to do that, he had to go somewhere else. Maurice said, ‘That’s ok.’

You remember I told you about the prince, the son of the raja who abdicated. (Apa Pant)

Rick: Hmm... yeah.

David: He joined the diplomatic service after Independence, and he became the Indian government’s representative in Sikkim. Maurice thought that as a final fig leaf to pretend that he (Dalai Lama) is not fleeing to India, we will arrange for the Dalai Lama to cross Tibet and go into Sikkim. He was welcomed there by Apa Pant, one of Maurice’s friends, and put in one of the local monasteries. Maurice also sent one of his Polish friends, Uma Devi, to look after him. She became the Dalai Lama’s cook and looked after him for several years.

After the Dalai Lama did come to India, Maurice ran all over India arm twisting his rich friends, getting money, land to establish all the Tibetan colonies in India, and Uma Devi, his friend, ended up running many of the refugee camps in and around Dharamsala.

I saw an old YouTube film of the Dalai Lama in Poland giving a speech there, and he (Dalai Lama) stood up and said, ‘I want to talk to you today about the two greatest Polish people I have ever met.’ And he talked about Maurice and Uma Devi; and everyone looked around as if: Who is he? We have never heard of him. And so that was Maurice. Maurice has no recognition anywhere in the world despite these extraordinary things. No one knows anything about him.

Sorry, I’ve got to tell one more story.

Rick: Yeah, keep going.

David: Apa Pant’s daughter... I called her up. I said, ‘Maurice came to see you and your dad. Did he tell you any good stories?’ This is what you do. You just keep calling and bit by bit all these amazing stories come in. She said, ‘Oh we were just young girls. Our job was to just to serve the tea and coffee. This was men’s business. We weren’t allowed to sit and listen to high politics in those days.’ And I said, ‘Come on, they were speaking English, and you were in the room. You must have heard some good stuff.’

And finally, reluctantly, she said, ‘I remember my father once asked Maurice how his recent trip to Russia was.’ And this was the first time I discovered he’d gone to Russia. I think he was on an economic delegation. He was a member of the Congress party and he probably spoke Russian, so he was a good person to send along. I said, ‘What did he say about Russia?’ She said, ‘He went to the Kremlin to meet Khrushchev, and he wagged his finger under Khrushchev’s nose and said, “Mr. Khrushchev, you are not a real communist. You are a fake. You are living off the fat of the land. You are not a real communist.’”

So, the same lecture he gave to the raja in India, he just walked into the Kremlin and wagged his finger at Khrushchev. He was probably lucky not to be sent off to the Gulag. That was Maurice. Maurice had no filters. If he thought that you were not a useful member of society you would find out very quickly, (laughs)

Rick: Very bold man.

David: Right.

Rick: I took a bunch notes when I was reading your stuff. What was this about orange juice with Maurice?

David: (laughs) This was Maurice being his typical bulldozery self. He walked in to Ramana and thought, this man is not eating properly. I will put him on a better diet. So he went off, bought a couple of oranges, hand squeezed them, brought them in, put them on a tray and said, ‘You need more vitamins. Drink this.’ And Bhagavan of course never consumed anything that he couldn’t share equally with everybody in the hall. So he waved his hand around saying, ‘What about these 200 people here?’, as a way of saying, ‘No, thank you.’

But to Maurice, that was just a challenge. He went to town and bought every single orange he could find and hand squeezed 200 glasses of orange juice, (laughs) He had them all paraded in on a big tray and gave everybody, the 200 people, a glass each; and then he gave Bhagavan his glass and said, ‘Now you can’t refuse. Everybody else has had a glass first.’ And Bhagavan said, ‘Ok, you have made your point. I will take it. But don’t do this again. It is not necessary.’

That’s just the way he was. He was just a man who saw things, thought they needed to be changed, and took action and got them done.

Rick: I suppose the significance of our talking about him is that he is an excellent example of a karma yogi. Somebody who puts his money where his mouth is.

David: Exactly. He had a dual strand. While all this was going on, he had an intense relationship with Ramana, with Krishnamurti, with Nisargadatta; and I think he got it finally with Nisargadatta. I am not saying his karma yoga got him enlightened. That was an unquenchable thirst he had to make the world a better place. But as a kind of parallel internal practice, a strand of his life, he was going to see all the big name Advaita gurus in India, sitting with them, getting their darshans, listening to their teachings; and he got it. He definitely got it with Nisargadatta.

Rick: Hmm... yeah.

David: Can I tell you about how I asked Nisargadatta about this?

Rick: Sure.

David: He (Nisargadatta) was cranky, feisty. He was always complaining what terrible people we were. ‘Oh! Why do I waste my time talking to you people? Nobody listens to me.’ No, sorry. The first question was... I said, ‘In all the years you have been teaching, how many people have actually got enlightened.’ And he said, ‘What business is that of yours?’ ’ (laughs) And I said, ‘It is a bit like a lottery. If you know there are a hundred winning tickets out of a thousand, you think, “That’s not bad,” but if it is one in a million then you are a bit discouraged. So I just want to know what the success rate is here.’ And he said, ‘None of your business. How will that fact help you any way whatsoever?’ And I said, OK.

And a few days later, he was saying, ‘Why do I waste my time talking to you people? Nobody listens. Nobody understands.’

So I thought, OK, let’s try again. ‘In all the years you have been teaching, how many people have actually understood what you were saying and experienced it?’ And he said, ‘One. Maurice Frydman,’ and that was the only public certification I ever heard him make.

Except that, every morning he did a very elaborate puja to his guru and all the other gurus in his lineage. In his puja room he had photos of all the big-name saints that weren’t in his lineage; Ramana was there, Ramakrishna was there. So first he would put a blob of kumkum on his guru’s head and then all the people in his lineage. Then he would go around the room and put a blob of kumkum on all the people he thought were worthy of kumkum, because they were enlightened even though they weren’t in his lineage. Maurice had two photos in that room. I think he was the only person who managed to get two photos, and every morning both of Maurice’s photos got the kumkum treatment.

Rick: Hmm.

David: So, Maurice was the one person he was satisfied with in his life…

…Rick: Interesting. Here is something you sent to me. (Rick reads a note.) ‘If you want an entertaining digression here I would be happy to talk about Gandhi’s attempts to meet with Sri Ramana and how one of his leading followers prevented it from happening. If we take this side trip I shall also like to talk about Gandhi’s spiritual status with reference to Papaji, Ramana and Lakshmana Swamy, all of whom had a high regard for him. He is primarily known in the west as a politician, freedom fighter and social reformer. His elevated spiritual state tends to be ignored.’

But did I shift gears too quickly? I didn’t mean to suddenly abandon Maurice…

…There is a lot of myth making going on about Maurice. One of the things I have been doing is trying to find facts rather than myths. There was this story that he was a brilliant scholar, learned lots of languages, and got ‘A’ grades on all his courses. And I actually sent someone down into the basement of Warsaw University to check his transcripts (laughs), and he wasn’t a very good student at all, and he got really bad grades in his foreign languages, English and French.

Rick: Hmm.

David: So, I am not quite sure how stories like this came up. I think he got to where he did by dogged perseverance rather than any individual talent or brilliance. He worked very hard at mastering the things he had to master.

Rick: Here is a little story about Maurice. Apparently when he was on his deathbed, he was sick, some nurse showed up, and the nurse had been told that there had been some mistake. She was about to leave when she spotted a photo on the wall and she said, ‘He, Ramana, is the man who told me to come here.’

That’s so interesting. We talked about this in our last interview, but there are so many stories where Ramana shows up for somebody while they are in their bedroom, or while they’re walking down the street or something, and we kind of played with the notion that some actual entity representing Ramana is still hanging around doing things; or whether it is just the divine that somehow knows to manifest using Ramana’s appearance in order to direct people to do this and that.

David: Again, I remember that last interview. I came down on the side that there wasn’t somebody up there supervising all the devotees’ activities and intervening as and when needed. I think when a need is there then somehow the Self produces a form that looks like Ramana. In this particular case it told the nurse to knock on that door because there was an old devotee of his who needed palliative care for a few days.

Nisargadatta was there on his (Maurice’s) final day and somebody said, ‘Maharaj, what’s happening?’ And Maharaj said, ‘Nothing is happening. Nobody is dying’. The implication of that was he was long since dead. A body was about to disintegrate but nothing was happening to Maurice because Maurice was already home….: Yeah. I remember. Well, there were so many stories I read in the thing that you wrote about him. He was from Poland originally and he emigrated to France to run a factory and discovered Krishnamurti there, and he saw Gandhi in Paris.

David: I saw one of his letters. He discovered Krishnamurti when he was a teenager at Warsaw and he spent his entire allowance for the week on a second-hand French copy of a Krishnamurti book he found on the sidewalk. He started extraordinarily early and never looked back.

Rick: Yeah, and then he was recruited by an official in Mysore to run a factory in Bangalore, came to India. He eventually became a sadhu in his own right, although he was a sadhu who perhaps never quite renounced women - there was somebody he wanted to marry.

David: (laughs)

Rick: He was also extremely inventive. When he met Gandhi he watched Gandhi spinning on his spinning wheel and he thought, ‘Well, I can invent a better one than this.’ And he actually came up with a better spinning wheel and presented it to Gandhi.

David: Yeah, he met Gandhi - this is one of the Forrest Gump stories. He was running his electrical factory in Paris. He was walking down the street and he saw a bit of a crowd at one of the train stations and wandered over to see what it was. And there was Mahatma Gandhi on the platform in Paris, of all places, changing trains. In those days if you wanted to go from London -he had just been to a conference in London - back to India, the quickest way was to get a train across Europe and then get a boat in Greece. But for that he had to change trains in Paris, and Maurice just happened to be on the platform for the two minutes that Gandhi spent in Paris to watch him change trains.

He said, ‘I looked at this man. I fell in love with him immediately. I fell in love with the idea of India and I just knew I had to go.’

So the first chance he got... the Chief Minister of Mysore state, which was an independent country in those days, came to his office to head hunt him to run a big factory in Bangalore and when Maurice agreed, the Chief Minister said, ‘When can you come?’ He said, ‘I will get my coat. I am coming with you now’.

That was it. He went off to India.

Rick: Just with his coat basically.

David: Yes, just with his coat.

Rick: That’s amazing. And he spent many years living as a sadhu, living under trees, sleeping on the ground. I think I also recall that when he was running this factory, he would not take a salary. He put all of his salary into a trust fund or a bank account.

David: The Chief Minister wanted him to be the modernizing front of Mysore state. So he was very upset when his western factory manager turned up for work in orange robes, (laughs). And not only did he turn up for work in orange robes, he went out to beg his food in the evening from the workers he was attempting to oversee during the day.

The Chief Minister said, ‘We can’t have this. It is bad for discipline for you to be dependent on your own workers to feed you in the evening, because you’ve got to boss them around the next day.’ (laughs).

He (the Chief Minister) said, ‘Contractually I am obliged to pay you. I will put your salary in an escrow, in an account. It’s yours whenever you want it.’

Maurice never touched it. He lived off the food he begged. The deal was that whenever some VIP came to see what a great modern state Mysore State was, Maurice had to put on a suit and tie. But when no VIPs were coming, he was allowed to run the place in his orange robes and go out and beg for food on the side.

Rick: And when he finally left the factory, he distributed his salary which he had accumulated to all the workers. He didn’t take…

…Rick: Let’s get back to Maurice Frydman. But let’s dwell on that point a little bit more. What do you feel like the role or significance or importance of that kind of attitude is for a spiritual seeker?

David: Maurice for me exemplified…

Rick: I mean, that attitude of prostration and surrender…

David: Maurice, I don’t think had this. Maurice was a karma yogi. I think of all the people who went to India that I know about, many of them, they had some devotion. They wanted to do enquiry, get enlightened. Maurice genuinely felt that the world was in a bad place and that he had the talent to do a lot about it. And he was always... I would not say on the lookout, but every opportunity he got to improve the lot of poor working people in India, he took it. He wasn’t a contemplative navel gazer. This was an extraordinary man of action who throughout his life was always looking to use his talents, his skills, to make life better for other people.

Rick: That brings up a point itself. Some people are karma yogis by nature and some people are more bhaktas. They are going to have a more devotional bent, and so on. So, one size does not fit all. What was Maurice’s relationship with Ramana that’s significant that you would like to tell us? Did he get enlightened with Ramana?

David: Maurice came to India around 1933, started his factory and showed up at Ramanashram in 1934. He had a very very strong urge to become a sannyasi. He asked Bhagavan for formal initiation. Bhagavan never initiated anybody. His permanent, unflinching advice was whatever circumstances you are in, make the best of them. If you have a job, if you have a family, do your work in that context. He never ever gave anyone permission to renounce the world. Like several other people, Maurice wouldn’t give up. He went off to see Swami Ramdas. And Swami Ramdas - that’s the Kerala man - he initiated him. And he (Maurice) took sannyasa under the name Bharatananda, ‘the bliss of India’, (laughs) Always, I think, there was this strong desire.

He came and he saw the poverty, the poor conditions in India, and he just knew he had the talent to do something. The way he looked at Gandhi’s wheel and said, ‘Mr Gandhi, I can make you a better wheel,’ and went out and did it on the spot. This is pure Maurice. Maurice was a do-it-now bulldozer. Wherever he went, if he saw a problem, he addressed it and fixed it. That’s one of the things I like. No dithering. No committees. No consultations. He just went out and brought a better wheel back in.

Gandhi tried it, and said, ‘This is better. Thank you very much. This will be my personal wheel from now on. Go and see my people and make this the standard model for everybody in India, and I will keep this one for myself.’

That was just one of the extraordinary things he did, off the cuff, in an afternoon. That was the theme of his life.

Rick: Another thing he did off the cuff is while he was on his death bed…

David: (laughs) This story, yes.

David: So, I had been poking around looking for Maurice stories. Everybody has a really extraordinary Maurice story. Nobody has a lot. He was very careful about talking about himself, or letting things slip. I had a letter from his final secretary. Maurice fell and had a bad accident. He fractured his hip, and the doctors came and said, ‘He is not going to make it more than a few days. All his organs are failing one by one. Give him some painkillers, palliative care. We can’t operate, he is in too feeble a state.’

One of his organs that failed was his kidney or his bladder, and he needed to have a catheter. I don’t know if you have had a catheter. I know my dad had a catheter and when I went to see him in hospital, he said, ‘Don’t make any jokes. Laughing hurts too much.’ It’s not a very nice thing, even with an anesthetic. I have watched friends have this in India. It is a bit brutal and often inserted without an anesthetic.

Maurice, of course, had a fractured hip. You have to keep still when these pipes are going in. When his bladder had been emptied, he said, ‘Is that what people have to put up with having a catheter? This is terrible. Bring me my Stanley knife. Bring me some plastic tubes. I am going to make a better catheter before I die.’ (laughs)

So his last few days on planet earth, he’s lying on a bed with a fractured hip that no one wants to operate on. His organs are failing one by one, and the last thing he wants to do is make a better catheter so that other people won’t have to suffer the way he did. Whether he did or not (make a better catheter) I don’t know. But that is just so Maurice.

Rick: So, I think I gathered from reading your stuff that Ramana acknowledged Maurice as being Self-realized.

David: No, no. I have to back track on this. He went off to see Swami Ramdas in Kerala to get the initiation and Ramdas took one look at him and said, ‘This is your final birth,’ which was quite a bold prediction. This was a western man in a business suit who had just walked in on his first day. Maurice came back to Ramanashram and everybody there laughed at him because all they could see was the man in the business suit. But Ramana could see there was something different and special about this man. He said that Maurice had been in India before. That was something that Ramana was quite careful in saying. He said, ‘He is one of us. He has been here before.’ But he didn’t say he was enlightened.

His relationship with Ramana was a bit rocky. I said that Maurice was a bit of a bulldozer. Wherever he went he thought he knew best, and what people should do, and Ramana was one of the few people he couldn’t bulldoze. He was trying to give him a better diet, trying to make people look after him better. Ramana was basically saying, ‘Mind your own business. That’s not what you are here for.’

One thing I must say, though. I know a woman who was with Maurice in the 1970s and I had a discussion with her. I said, ‘I have read some summaries that Maurice gave of Krishnamurti talks that he attended in the 1950s in Madras, as it was then.’ He gave summaries to post out to all of the people all over the world who couldn’t come.

I said, ‘You know, Maurice summaries are actually more interesting, more comprehensible and I get more from them than reading Krishnamurti books. These are such excelling summaries. I wish they had been published.’

She said, ‘He always had that talent. He had an ability to go to a teacher, listen to what that teacher was saying, summarize it and explain it often in a better, more concise, more accessible way than the teacher themselves.’

And then she absolutely astounded me. She said, ‘Maurice told me that after he had been going to Ramanashram for a year, Ramana himself said (to him), “You can explain my teachings to people who come, who don’t know Tamil.’”

Maurice was actually designated to give summaries of certain aspects of the teachings. I don’t know anybody else in the entire history of Ramanashram who got the job, while Ramana was still there, of explaining the teachings in Bhagavan’s presence. This is an extraordinary endorsement of his state and his ability to give very good, very concise accounts of what the teacher was saying.

I think the same thing happened when he went to see Nisargadatta. Ganesan, Ramana’s grandnephew told me this, that Maurice had told him, ‘I heard about this man (Nisargadatta) so I went to see him and I was taking notes outside his beedi store in Bombay, writing things down, and after a few days Maharaj (Nisargadatta) called me over and said, “What are you writing?”’

Maurice showed him what he was writing and Maharaj was so happy with the quality of his understanding, his summaries and his notes that he invited him in. And he became, in a way, the official disciple, recorder, editor, and compiler. And the fruits of his work was / am That, which is an all-time classic. So he did have this ability to absorb teachings and, I wouldn’t say regurgitate them, but disseminate them in a way that everyone went, ‘Wow, that’s the perfect explanation’.

Even though it might not have been the original words, they were so good, people said, ‘That is even better than the original teacher’.

Rick: Did he speak ... What Indian languages did he speak?

David: He worked in Indian villages. I am guessing... Well he definitely knew Hindi. I have seen an article about his publisher in Bombay when Maurice went there with the first draft of / am That, saying, ‘Stop everything, stop everything’. This is very Maurice. ‘Cancel all your other projects. We must do this book’. The publisher was called Dikshit.

He said, ‘Maurice you don’t know Marathi. How are you going to do it?’

Maurice said, ‘Don’t worry. Don’t worry. Minor detail. Minor detail.’ (laughs) Marathi is the local vernacular language of Bombay but everybody there speaks Hindi. I think Maurice was hacking his way through conversations in Hindi, but I am not sure he ever learned good enough Marathi to have deep conversations. But between the two of them they got the point across.

Rick:  What was Nisargadatta speaking?

David: He was speaking Marathi. He was a very uneducated man. He hardly ever went to school. He had a very rough, coarse village accent and village humor. I saw educated Marathis come in to talk to him and they could not understand a word he was saying because he was 80 years old, had a thick village accent, and wouldn’t put his false teeth in. (laughs) It was quite a task to actually get sense out of him in the final years. The people who were the regular translators, I think, they were tuned in to his accent and his lack of teeth, and they got it.

Rick: So what else would you like to tell us about Maurice before we go on to anyone else?

David: Can I tell you the story of how he went to do his project in Aundh?

Rick: Sure.

David: I must tell you about the Dalai Lama also. Do we have time for all this?

Rick: We have plenty of time? We have a couple of hours.

David: Ok. So after he left his factory... The reason he left was that the son of a raja in a state that was close to Bombay came to ask for advice on how his father’s state could be improved. And Maurice went off (to investigate).

At this point in time, the Gandhian idea, the political idea, was that villages should be self-governing. They shouldn’t have higher hierarchies of people telling them what to do. Middle and higher management was out. Gandhi had a notion of this thing called Panchayat Raj. The Panchayats were the village councils and ‘raj’ means ‘rule’. He (Gandhi) wanted India to be a confederation of self-governing villages with no higher management sucking out taxes and spending it on wasteful projects higher than the village level. So Maurice went off, and this is a typical Maurice story again. He walked in to see the raja.

The raja said, ‘Mr Frydman, we hired you as a consultant. How can we improve my kingdom?’

Maurice said, ‘The only thing you can usefully do is abdicate. You are a parasite, (laughs) You are sucking up all the revenue from your villages. You live in a big palace. Your villagers are poor. You don’t help them. You just collect their taxes and live a high life. What you need to do is to abdicate, but not in favor of your son or anybody else. Abdicate in favor of the village councils of your realm.’

Amazingly - Maurice was a very persuasive man - he actually persuaded this raja to abdicate. So far as I know, it is the only instance in Indian history where a ruler has abdicated in favor of his people rather than a general or a son or anybody else.

Because this was a Gandhian project, Maurice wanted Gandhi himself to endorse it and co-sign the constitution with the raja. Maurice went off to see Gandhi in his ashram. He explained what was going on. The prince was there.

Gandhi said, ‘It is a very nice idea but you can’t cut people loose like this. If you want my endorsement of this project, you both have to agree to live there for a number of years. You have to teach these people how to be independent, how to look after themselves.’

And then he jabbed his finger at the raja’s son. He said, ‘You,you can’t live in a palace. You are going there to try and convince these village people that village life is a good, viable way of living. They are not going to respect you if you rock up every day in a big car from the palace. Build yourself a mud hut in one of these villages, live there for ten years and demonstrate to your people that this kind of life can be a rewarding, productive way of life.’

And so Maurice and Apa Pant, as he was called, looked at each other and said ok. Gandhi signed. Maurice and Apa Pant went back to their state.

Maurice said, ‘The first night I slept under a tree. I didn’t even have a house to live in’.

Slowly, slowly they taught these people the basics of self-governance. Maurice was very practical. He taught them carpentry, plumbing, engineering, all the things they needed to know.

The one part of this project that really impresses me was that when the Central Government was dissolved, they said, ‘What to do with the people in the Central Government prisons?’

Nobody wanted them.

Maurice said, ‘Parole them all out to me. Put them on personal probation parole to me. I will be responsible for them.’

He went off and built a village with the aid of these prisoners. He taught them how to build houses, he taught them agriculture; he taught them all the skills they needed to live independent lives and the recidivism rate was zero. Not a single one of these people ever needed to go back to jail. I have seen interviews with these people. Filmed interviews (of them) in their 90s. They were old men, and they were crying.

They just said, ‘Maurice saved us’.

This was such a famous project that in the 1960s they made a Bollywood film about it and Maurice was hired as the technical advisor. So he went down to the set and made sure that everything was properly recorded.

The director said, Thank you very much. I will give you a credit at the end as “technical advisor”.’ Maurice said, ‘No thanks, don’t put my name on it’.

This is very Maurice.

And the director said, ‘Of course I am putting your name on it. This is your project; you are the technical advisor. Of course your name is going on.’

And Maurice said, ‘Well, in that case, I am going to the Bombay High Court to take out an injunction against you (laughs) forbidding you to put my name on this project.’

This is the way Maurice was. He went through his whole life doing absolutely extraordinary things and then when he had done them, he covered his tracks, pretending later that they had nothing to do with him.

Rick: That’s pretty neat.

David: He is a man who just didn’t want people to know all the good things he has done. That’s another thing I admire about him.

Rick: Yeah. You know some people might wonder, you know, ‘What’s the spiritual significance of all this?’ But I think, ‘By their fruits you shall know them’.

David: Maurice had whole orchards of fruits. This is a man about whom it could be said that any one of about twenty things he did would be the number one item on most other people’s CVs. He just had so many things that were just unbelievable - the things that he did and accomplished. May I talk about the Dalai Lama briefly?

Rick: Anything. You don’t need to ask.

David: Right. I’m on a roll about Maurice.

Rick: Keep going.

David: Maurice is one of my heroes. Go Maurice!

In the late 1950s the Chinese were slowly annexing Tibet and it was quite clear that at some point they would take over. The Dalai Lama was making noises about moving to India.

Rick: He was in Boulder the other day. Did you see him?

David: I went there two days ago. I stood in line to ask a question about Maurice. I have been trying to talk to the Dalai Lama about Maurice for years but his committee won’t let me in. So I was standing in the public line. He answered four questions from four people. I was number ten in line, so I didn’t get to talk to him. (laughs)

Anyway, Maurice was personal friends with the Prime Minister of India; and Nehru, the Prime Minister, didn’t want to provoke a war with China. He thought there might be one but he didn’t want to be the person who made a big gesture which the Chinese would react badly to.

Nehru said, ‘Sorry, I can’t let this man in. It is too provocative. The Chinese will regard it as tantamount to harboring an enemy. I can’t do it.’

Maurice pestered and pestered and pestered, and in the end he got Nehru to sign off on a deal that the Dalai Lama could come to India on condition that he didn’t come as a political leader. He was allowed to be the spiritual leader of the Tibetans in exile. He could do pastoral work in India but he wasn’t allowed to make any political speeches. If he wanted to do that, he had to go somewhere else. Maurice said, ‘That’s ok.’

You remember I told you about the prince, the son of the raja who abdicated. (Apa Pant)

Rick: Hmm... yeah.

David: He joined the diplomatic service after Independence, and he became the Indian government’s representative in Sikkim. Maurice thought that as a final fig leaf to pretend that he (Dalai Lama) is not fleeing to India, we will arrange for the Dalai Lama to cross Tibet and go into Sikkim. He was welcomed there by Apa Pant, one of Maurice’s friends, and put in one of the local monasteries. Maurice also sent one of his Polish friends, Uma Devi, to look after him. She became the Dalai Lama’s cook and looked after him for several years.

After the Dalai Lama did come to India, Maurice ran all over India arm twisting his rich friends, getting money, land to establish all the Tibetan colonies in India, and Uma Devi, his friend, ended up running many of the refugee camps in and around Dharamsala.

I saw an old YouTube film of the Dalai Lama in Poland giving a speech there, and he (Dalai Lama) stood up and said, ‘I want to talk to you today about the two greatest Polish people I have ever met.’ And he talked about Maurice and Uma Devi; and everyone looked around as if: Who is he? We have never heard of him. And so that was Maurice. Maurice has no recognition anywhere in the world despite these extraordinary things. No one knows anything about him.

Sorry, I’ve got to tell one more story.

Rick: Yeah, keep going.
David: Apa Pant’s daughter... I called her up. I said, ‘Maurice came to see you and your dad. Did he tell you any good stories?’ This is what you do. You just keep calling and bit by bit all these amazing stories come in. She said, ‘Oh we were just young girls. Our job was to just to serve the tea and coffee. This was men’s business. We weren’t allowed to sit and listen to high politics in those days.’ And I said, ‘Come on, they were speaking English, and you were in the room. You must have heard some good stuff.’

And finally, reluctantly, she said, ‘I remember my father once asked Maurice how his recent trip to Russia was.’ And this was the first time I discovered he’d gone to Russia. I think he was on an economic delegation. He was a member of the Congress party and he probably spoke Russian, so he was a good person to send along. I said, ‘What did he say about Russia?’ She said, ‘He went to the Kremlin to meet Khrushchev, and he wagged his finger under Khrushchev’s nose and said, “Mr. Khrushchev, you are not a real communist. You are a fake. You are living off the fat of the land. You are not a real communist.’”

So, the same lecture he gave to the raja in India, he just walked into the Kremlin and wagged his finger at Khrushchev. He was probably lucky not to be sent off to the Gulag. That was Maurice. Maurice had no filters. If he thought that you were not a useful member of society you would find out very quickly, (laughs)

Rick: Very bold man.

David: Right.

Rick: I took a bunch notes when I was reading your stuff. What was this about orange juice with Maurice?

David: (laughs) This was Maurice being his typical bulldozery self. He walked in to Ramana and thought, this man is not eating properly. I will put him on a better diet. So he went off, bought a couple of oranges, hand squeezed them, brought them in, put them on a tray and said, ‘You need more vitamins. Drink this.’ And Bhagavan of course never consumed anything that he couldn’t share equally with everybody in the hall. So he waved his hand around saying, ‘What about these 200 people here?’, as a way of saying, ‘No, thank you.’

But to Maurice, that was just a challenge. He went to town and bought every single orange he could find and hand squeezed 200 glasses of orange juice, (laughs) He had them all paraded in on a big tray and gave everybody, the 200 people, a glass each; and then he gave Bhagavan his glass and said, ‘Now you can’t refuse. Everybody else has had a glass first.’ And Bhagavan said, ‘Ok, you have made your point. I will take it. But don’t do this again. It is not necessary.’

That’s just the way he was. He was just a man who saw things, thought they needed to be changed, and took action and got them done.

Rick: I suppose the significance of our talking about him is that he is an excellent example of a karma yogi. Somebody who puts his money where his mouth is.

David: Exactly. He had a dual strand. While all this was going on, he had an intense relationship with Ramana, with Krishnamurti, with Nisargadatta; and I think he got it finally with Nisargadatta. I am not saying his karma yoga got him enlightened. That was an unquenchable thirst he had to make the world a better place. But as a kind of parallel internal practice, a strand of his life, he was going to see all the big name Advaita gurus in India, sitting with them, getting their darshans, listening to their teachings; and he got it. He definitely got it with Nisargadatta.

Rick: Hmm... yeah.

David: Can I tell you about how I asked Nisargadatta about this?

Rick: Sure.

David: He (Nisargadatta) was cranky, feisty. He was always complaining what terrible people we were. ‘Oh! Why do I waste my time talking to you people? Nobody listens to me.’ No, sorry. The first question was... I said, ‘In all the years you have been teaching, how many people have actually got enlightened.’ And he said, ‘What business is that of yours?’ ’ (laughs) And I said, ‘It is a bit like a lottery. If you know there are a hundred winning tickets out of a thousand, you think, “That’s not bad,” but if it is one in a million then you are a bit discouraged. So I just want to know what the success rate is here.’ And he said, ‘None of your business. How will that fact help you any way whatsoever?’ And I said, OK.

And a few days later, he was saying, ‘Why do I waste my time talking to you people? Nobody listens. Nobody understands.’

So I thought, OK, let’s try again. ‘In all the years you have been teaching, how many people have actually understood what you were saying and experienced it?’ And he said, ‘One. Maurice Frydman,’ and that was the only public certification I ever heard him make.

Except that, every morning he did a very elaborate puja to his guru and all the other gurus in his lineage. In his puja room he had photos of all the big-name saints that weren’t in his lineage; Ramana was there, Ramakrishna was there. So first he would put a blob of kumkum on his guru’s head and then all the people in his lineage. Then he would go around the room and put a blob of kumkum on all the people he thought were worthy of kumkum, because they were enlightened even though they weren’t in his lineage. Maurice had two photos in that room. I think he was the only person who managed to get two photos, and every morning both of Maurice’s photos got the kumkum treatment.

Rick: Hmm.

David: So, Maurice was the one person he was satisfied with in his life…

…Rick: Interesting. Here is something you sent to me. (Rick reads a note.) ‘If you want an entertaining digression here I would be happy to talk about Gandhi’s attempts to meet with Sri Ramana and how one of his leading followers prevented it from happening. If we take this side trip I shall also like to talk about Gandhi’s spiritual status with reference to Papaji, Ramana and Lakshmana Swamy, all of whom had a high regard for him. He is primarily known in the west as a politician, freedom fighter and social reformer. His elevated spiritual state tends to be ignored.’

But did I shift gears too quickly? I didn’t mean to suddenly abandon Maurice…

…There is a lot of myth making going on about Maurice. One of the things I have been doing is trying to find facts rather than myths. There was this story that he was a brilliant scholar, learned lots of languages, and got ‘A’ grades on all his courses. And I actually sent someone down into the basement of Warsaw University to check his transcripts (laughs), and he wasn’t a very good student at all, and he got really bad grades in his foreign languages, English and French.

Rick: Hmm.

David: So, I am not quite sure how stories like this came up. I think he got to where he did by dogged perseverance rather than any individual talent or brilliance. He worked very hard at mastering the things he had to master.

Rick: Here is a little story about Maurice. Apparently when he was on his deathbed, he was sick, some nurse showed up, and the nurse had been told that there had been some mistake. She was about to leave when she spotted a photo on the wall and she said, ‘He, Ramana, is the man who told me to come here.’

That’s so interesting. We talked about this in our last interview, but there are so many stories where Ramana shows up for somebody while they are in their bedroom, or while they’re walking down the street or something, and we kind of played with the notion that some actual entity representing Ramana is still hanging around doing things; or whether it is just the divine that somehow knows to manifest using Ramana’s appearance in order to direct people to do this and that.

David: Again, I remember that last interview. I came down on the side that there wasn’t somebody up there supervising all the devotees’ activities and intervening as and when needed. I think when a need is there then somehow the Self produces a form that looks like Ramana. In this particular case it told the nurse to knock on that door because there was an old devotee of his who needed palliative care for a few days.

Nisargadatta was there on his (Maurice’s) final day and somebody said, ‘Maharaj, what’s happening?’ And Maharaj said, ‘Nothing is happening. Nobody is dying’. The implication of that was he was long since dead. A body was about to disintegrate but nothing was happening to Maurice because Maurice was already home….


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