Ziel des Lebens

A few years ago Viorica, a Romanian friend of mine who was translating Ramana literature into Romanian, asked me to do an interview by email that she could use as an introduction to one of my books that was going to be published in Romanian. We started out with questions on my early years in Tiruvannamalai, but somehow the project petered out without coming to any apparent conclusion. This is as far as we got…

Geraldine invited me to join them since she knew I loved walking in the Himalayas. I in turn invited my wife Miri Albahari since she too had a passion for long walks in wilderness areas. I knew she would love the trip. I had done the same route once before in the early 1990s, and had visited Haridwar, Rishikesh and Uttarkasi on several other occasions. My left knee was starting to get very sore and painful. I wanted to have one last major trek while it was still functional. My knee did start to disintegrate a few weeks after we returned, forcing me to have a total knee replacement in January 2018. My new knee functions very well. I walked to Skandashram most afternoons before covid rules confined me to my house.

David Godman has lived in India since 1976, mostly in Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu. He spent his time there studying and practising the teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi. His anthology of Ramana Maharshi’s teachings, Be As You Are, is probably the most widely read book on Sri Ramana’s teachings. During his fourteen-year stay at Ramanasramam (1978-92) he managed the ashram’s library, catalogued its archives, and recorded the stories and experiences of devotees who had had direct contact with Sri Ramana.

David is the authorized biographer of two devotees of Sri Ramana Maharshi (Lakshmana Swamy and Papaji) who realized the Self in Sri Ramana’s presence and who later went on to become gurus themselves.

He has written and published several other books that contain first-person accounts of devotees who moved closely with Sri Ramana Maharshi and who were transformed by his power and presence.

In collaboration with two Tamil scholars, T. V. Venkatasubramanian and Robert Butler, he translated and edited several Tamil texts including two authoritative collections of Ramana Maharshi’s teachings that were originally recorded in Tamil verse. The three of them also joined forces to bring out Sorupa Saram, a translation of a text in which a 15th century Tamil saint and Guru, Sorupananda, speaks authoritatively of his experience of the Self.

Earlier this year David and T. V. Venkatasubramanian completed a new book that will be entitled The Shining of my Lord. It will contain translations of Tamil verses by Muruganar, an enlightened devotee of Ramana Maharshi who wrote thousands of verses in which he praised his Guru, spoke of his own liberated state and thanked Sri Ramana for bestowing it on him. It will be published later this year.

In the 1970s David frequented Nisargadatta Maharaj’s satsangs in Mumbai. In the 1980s he was a regular visitor to the ashram of Lakshmana Swamy and Saradamma in Andhra Pradesh. When they moved to Tiruvannamalai in the early 1990s, he helped them to establish and landscape their new property at the foot of Arunachala, the holy mountain where Sri Ramana Maharshi spent all his adult life. For four years in the 1990s he lived with Papaji in Lucknow and ended up writing or editing five books about him.

Last year David released a series twenty-seven films on Youtube in which he spoke about Ramana Maharshi, the places where he stayed, his devotees and his teachings. The series contains about fifteen hours of talks about Sri Ramana.

The feeling ‘I work’ is the hindrance. Ask yourself ‘Who works?’ Remember who you are. Then the work will not bind you; it will go on automatically. Make no effort either to work or to renounce; your effort is the bondage. What is destined to happen will happen. If you are destined not to work, work cannot be had even if you hunt for it; if you are destined to work, you will not be able to avoid it; you will be forced to engage yourself in it. So, leave it to the higher power; you cannot renounce or retain as you choose. (Maharshi’s Gospel, page 5)