Over the last three and a half decades well-known producer and Vedic scholar Michael Sternfeld has emerged as the undisputed scholar on Ramayana, the Indian epic, outside India. A passionate devotee of Ram, who breaks into chants of Ram effortlessly, Sternfeld has produced his Ramayana magnum opus in the form of a 75-hour-long audio rendering of the great epic that took him seven years to produce. Titled ‘The Ramayana of Valmiki’ it is possibly the longest audio book of its kind in the world.
An MA in Vedic Psychology from Maharishi International University, he has had a distinguished career as a producer having created more than 400 productions for the David Lynch Foundation involving Paul McCartney, Ringo, Eddie Vedder, Sheryl Crowe, Jerry Seinfeld, Moby, Ben Folds and the Beach Boys, as well as other productions with Jim Carrey, Marianne Williamson and Donovan.
An MA in Vedic Psychology from Maharishi International University, he has had a distinguished career as a producer having created more than 400 productions for the David Lynch Foundation involving Paul McCartney, Ringo, Eddie Vedder, Sheryl Crowe, Jerry Seinfeld, Moby, Ben Folds and the Beach Boys, as well as other productions with Jim Carrey, Marianne Williamson and Donovan.
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00:00Over the last three and a half decades, well-known producer and Vedic scholar Michael Sternfeld
00:24has emerged as the bridge between all things Ramayana and the rest of the world. A passionate
00:31devotee of Ram who breaks into chants of Ram effortlessly, Sternfeld has produced his Ramayan
00:38magnum opus in the form of a 75-hour long audio rendering of the great epic that took him seven
00:45years to produce. Titled the Ramayan of Valmiki, it is possibly the longest audio book of its kind
00:52in the world. He has followed that up with three distilled spin-offs in the form of Ram's Dharma,
01:00Hanuman's Leap of Faith, and Sita's Gems. For someone so immersed in the Ramayan for so long,
01:08Michael speaks with the enthusiasm of someone who has just discovered its profound value.
01:15An MA in Vedic Psychology from Maharishi International University, he has had a
01:21distinguished career as a producer having created more than 400 productions for the David Lynch
01:28Foundation involving Paul McCartney, Ringo, Eddie Vedder, Sheryl Crow, Jerry Seinfeld, Moby, Ben
01:36Fowles, and the Beach Boys, as well as other productions with Jim Carrey, Marianne Williamson,
01:43and Donovan. Michael spoke to MCR. Welcome to Mayan Shire Reports, Michael. It's a great pleasure to
01:50have you. Thank you so much, Mike. It's really a pleasure to be here and to share background in
01:56Chicago. You know, it's interesting that you and I are talking about, are going to talk about the
02:01Ramayan, something that has been your long-time passion. Let me begin with the beginning. When
02:09was your first brush with the Ramayan? Yeah, I know. You're right. It's gone back quite some time.
02:15It's 34 years now. I keep saying 33 years because it sounds good, but 34 years.
02:23Since I was young, I loved epic myths, epic adventures, you know, from Star Wars, Lord of the
02:31Rings, especially in the Odyssey from Greek mythology. So I loved epic myths. And I remember
02:38when Peter Brook, the famous English playwright, came out with the Mahabharata, which was an
02:44extraordinary, originally a worldwide tour of theater. It was a nine-hour theatrical production,
02:50and then later made into a trilogy movie. Really profound. I know some people had issues with it
02:56because he did a worldwide cast. I loved it. It was so powerful, I thought, bringing this world
03:04stage and world performers together for the Mahabharata, which was a world war, ultimately.
03:11At that time, I was taking my master's degree in Vedic science at Maharishi International
03:17University here in Fairfield, founded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who's been my lifelong teacher.
03:23And at that time, I was going deep into that knowledge. And at the end of that program,
03:28which was 1989 for me, parallel to that, I'm probably giving you a longer answer than you
03:35want. That's when Ramanan Sagar came up with a video series in India. And I thought to myself,
03:43at the end of my program, Maharishi asked my classmate, an excellent, deep class,
03:49said, what would you, please write me a one-page statement of what you would like to do with this
03:54precious knowledge of the Vedic knowledge that you've soaked in your master's program.
03:59And I wrote back that I wanted to work under his guidance to create productions of the Ramayana.
04:06And the only reason I didn't choose Mahabharata, which I actually liked even more at that time,
04:10because I thought it was more modern and more dramatic, was it was already taken by Peter
04:14Brooke. He had already done it. So that's what started it, just that feeling. And even though
04:20I didn't get immediately direct feedback from Maharishi on this, it was like, literally since
04:27then, 1991, I have been on the Ramayana trail, all this time, doing various productions of the
04:35Ramayana. And I can go into some of those in a second, but at least I want to give you my
04:39answer there for starters. I'm curious to know when you first started reading it,
04:47which particular translation did you go for? I think you mentioned on your website,
04:54the one by the Indian journalist and Raghunathan. Is that the one you started
05:00reading? No, but this is a really good story. You're going to really like this as a journalist.
05:08At that time, I had a severe visual problem, which was affecting my reading ability.
05:15So I was unable to, I mean, I was kind of reading short abridgments and so on,
05:22but I really wanted to get it down into the, you know, you can't really abridge Vedic literature
05:27if you're a purist, because the richness is in the detail of it and the flow of the sequence.
05:33And the reason why I said that, even though I put out this desire to work with the Ramayana,
05:39the first opportunity did not come until 1993, when I got a call, basically, from where Maharishi
05:45was stationed in Vlodrav to do a production with all the children at the Maharishi school here in
05:50Fairfield, because there's not only university, but there's also a lower and middle school,
05:55Maharishi school. And the only criteria was that I had to use all the children.
05:59So happens there was 600 children in the school at the time. It's a little smaller now.
06:06And I decided this was more like a halftime show at the opening Olympic ceremony. And I did this
06:13production and ended up being about 400 of the children. At that time, I could not read the
06:19unabridged text, which, of course, wasn't really necessary. The way I did my research,
06:25which was appropriate for the children at the time, you know, those 12 comic book series from
06:30India? I forgot the name of it. They're really quite good. That was my initial research on the
06:35Ramayana. I was reading comics. Interesting, yeah. And then I realized, I felt the limitation,
06:41the frustration, because I couldn't, you know, so long, the Ramayana is so long. It's the second
06:47longest book in the world after Mahabharata. I decided, you know what? I have to have someone
06:52read it to me. And who am I going to get to read this to me? And then I said, you know,
06:58as long as I'm going to have someone read it to me, I should record it. And as long as I'm going
07:02to take the time to record it, I might as well do it to professional standards because I have
07:06a background as a producer. This thing snowballed out of my visual impairment. I see. And I ended
07:14up spending seven years from 1997 to 2003. I never thought it would take that long. I'll
07:21explain why it took so long in a moment, but recording the complete unabridged Ramayana
07:27of Dhammiki. And it took seven years because it's incredibly long. It's a fully dramatized
07:33production of the Ramayana. And you're right, we did choose, I did a lot of research to find out
07:38what's the best translation. And the one that I found was by N. Narayananathan from India,
07:43who is a journalist. And so many of the English translations, the abridged and unabridged,
07:49Gita Press is kind of well known as the red version. The English language is very clunky.
07:55It's just awkward. Narayananathan, the journalist and also a scholar, did an absolutely beautiful
08:01job. So, again, I'm trying to get a handle on this. When you say you decided to make it into
08:09an audio version of that, when somebody reads it, are you reading the actual text by Narayananathan
08:16or somebody rewrote it? The original unabridged English translation by Narayananathan, all of it.
08:26I mean, complete, meaning that's why it's 75 hours long. It's the world's longest audio book.
08:32I mean, I haven't gotten the Guinness Book of World Records because I haven't taken the time
08:35to do so, but it should be. There's some other audio books, but they combine the Old and the
08:40New Testament. That's longer. If you combine Old and New Testament, it's longer. That's the full
08:44Bible. But if you just compare it to the Old or the New Testament, it's the longest audio book,
08:52as far as I can tell. And these days, in the early years, it was released on cassette. All unabridged
09:00audio books were released on cassette in 2000. It was released in three volumes, 1997, 2001, 2004.
09:07Each contained several of the khandas or books of the Ramayana. And it won the National Endowment
09:14for the Humanities, Humanities Iowa, Outstanding Project of the Year. It got a lot of press, a lot
09:19of publicity. It was three binders with over 50 hundred minute cassettes. It weighed six pounds
09:26of cassettes. Now it's completely been digitally remastered. Oh, I finished it in 2004. Finally,
09:34done. This took so long, seven years. And by that time, cassettes were obsolete.
09:41So I had to go back, digitally remastered the whole thing, which took another year,
09:44and now it's available as a digital download because people don't even listen to it on CDs
09:50or DVD anymore. So describe to me, did you enlist actors to intone the text?
10:01I heard a little bit, not a lot, but I can see that it is a performance.
10:07Right. There's two kinds of... What the BBC does is called radio theater, where they have multiple
10:14actors. And usually they have a beautiful version of Lord of the Rings, but it's done with multiple
10:23actors. And it's usually an abridgment because it would be too long. Usually unabridged audio books
10:29from some of the great books are done by one actor doing all the different voices.
10:34And some of those voice actors are brilliant. So for this production, I directed it and produced
10:41and directed it, but volume one had one reader doing all the voices. Volume two had a different
10:46reader that was including... Volume one was Bala and Ayodhya Khanda. Volume two was Ranika
10:57and Sundarakhanda. Hold a second, I'm missing one of them. Volume three was
11:02Yutakhanda and Uttarakhanda. Now I got tired of working with
11:08voice talent, which can be challenging because we weren't in the studio for a few weeks. We were in
11:12the studio for a year on each volume. And then I had to raise the money to produce the next.
11:17And the third, I decided to go on the other side of the microphone. My reading ability had improved
11:22by this point. And I do the voice of volume three, Uttarakhanda, and I do about 150 different
11:29character voices myself. I heard some of that, yes.
11:32This sounds exhausting. I'm a good producer. I've done 400 productions in my life in theater,
11:39music, dance, audio production, video production. I know how to produce.
11:43This project was the most challenging of all time for me. That's why it took seven years,
11:50lots of interruptions, lots of karma, lots of challenges. But look, Ramayana is filled with
11:55extraordinary challenges. It's not all a walk through the daisies, as you well know.
12:01Indeed, indeed. You know, the Ramayana's cultural and religious rootedness is in Vedic India, but
12:10its ethical essence is universal. Do you think this attribute of this epic is evident to those
12:18outside India? You know because you've studied it. You've read the Ramayana.
12:23Right. So what I've seen over the years, you know, it's been many, many years. There's
12:32my mission, if you could say. I mean, I'm not, I get invited to speak at scholarly conferences.
12:38For example, the World Ramayana Conference in Jalapur. Every three years I speak there,
12:41I speak at other conferences. People cast me as an academic. And I can work on that level,
12:48but I'm really a producer. My mission has been to bring the Ramayana to the West.
12:53Or to open up the doorways of perception of Western listeners. By the way, one of the
13:00reasons I do audio productions is not only because of my visual impairment. The Vedic knowledge,
13:07the Vedas and Vedic knowledge were originally an oral tradition. They were always passed down
13:11pundit to pundit. So part of it, part of it, it comes from a, you know, a limitation in me.
13:16But the deeper impulse is to preserve the essential oral tradition of Vedic knowledge.
13:22Oh, yeah, that's true. I mean, the oral part is something that I'm sure baffles a lot of
13:27people outside India. Because historically, it's all right up to the Bhakti movement,
13:34which is you're talking about five, 600 years ago. Oral traditions were everything in India.
13:40Exactly.
13:40So the written material is hard to come by.
13:43Exactly. And that's why, you know, these critical translations of the Ramayana
13:47by Professor Goldman at University of Berkeley, which they created these critical editions,
13:53it's hard to piece together what was the original manuscript. Let me go back to what your question
13:59is, the receptivity in the West to the Ramayana and its values. I mean, that's been my mission,
14:07and I feel like I'm making good headway. For example, it's well known that George Lucas was
14:13strongly influenced by Joseph Campbell in creating Star Wars. If you look at the storyline,
14:20it's a conglomerate of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.
14:23It's been pointed out, yes.
14:25It's been pointed out. It's well known. This is not esoteric. You know, Joseph Campbell,
14:31and this archetypal perspective on myth has influenced so many filmmakers. So these archetypal
14:37values have slowly infiltrated into society. And I point out over and over again in my
14:44presentations that, first of all, the Ramayana was the, I mean, Valmiki was the Atikavya,
14:50the first poet. It was the first great epic. So many of the themes that are in the Ramayana that
14:55are seminal to Western literature come from the Ramayana. Where was the first exile to the forest?
15:02Where was the evil stepmother? Where was the betrayals, the journey into the forest,
15:09some of these monsters that forced battles between good and evil? We forget that the Ramayana was
15:17the first great epic. It was the first heroic quest. And it's because of that, and that's what
15:23I stress over and over again. It's the first heroic quest. So we have to look back to find
15:28some of these. And the Odyssey, I've done presentations with an Odyssey scholar and
15:32myself. The Odyssey is one little chapter in the Ramayana. So many elements that are parallel.
15:39You know, one of the striking features for me, both in the Mahabharata as well as the Ramayana,
15:45are fantastic names. Forget everything else. Forget the plot lines. Forget the profundity
15:50of the themes. Just the names. I mean, say it's a name like Yudhishthira from the Mahabharata,
15:58or even in Jatayu, you mentioned Jatayu. Now, what's such interesting names? That alone to me
16:07is something that requires scholarly attention. What kind of...
16:10Kumbhakarna. Kumbhakarna is another good name.
16:13There you go.
16:15Yeah. Now, tell me, do you have any favorite sound among these names?
16:21Well, that was, by the way, the real challenge in the recording,
16:24by the way, because if you listened for Westerners, one thing I'm very proud of,
16:31for Westerners, on my original Ramayana production, our pronunciation is pretty darn good.
16:41Not as good. It'll never be as good as an Indian pronouncing it because we just don't have the
16:44phonetic structure in our mouth. But there's nothing... We got coaching, and Richard Ross
16:51on volume one did an excellent job because he was steeped in Vedic knowledge. Stephen
16:55is the best actor of the three of us. Boy, did I have to coach him on the pronunciation. But he
16:59eventually got it to a good extent. And it's something that I've studied for a long time.
17:05But just saying the names and getting them right, sometimes there'd be a long list of names,
17:09like the names of 20 trees in a row, and if you blow one, we'd have to do a retake.
17:14Exactly. No, this really, I mean, I'm just thinking about it, I feel tired. It is so much
17:22work. No kidding. Mayur, let me tell you about one of the biggest challenges when you're doing
17:27a project this long. Sometimes there would be a minor character that would appear once and then
17:32not until three months later in the recording process. How do we make you remember to do the
17:37exact same voice for that character? Yeah, that's a fascinating challenge.
17:43Yeah. I essentially hope this becomes a worldwide phenomenon because you've done
17:51an extraordinary job. My compliments to your team. It's quite remarkable.
17:5575 hours of recording of the Ramayana is quite astonishing.
18:00And now it's available as a digital download. It takes literally, I mean, it's about four
18:05gigabytes. But I remember when we first came out of it, people get four gigabytes. How can
18:09you handle a four gigabyte download? Now it downloads in five minutes. And they're a media
18:14player and they can play it out perfectly. And it costs a third of what it did when I first released
18:19it. Exactly. To digress a bit, now that AI is everywhere, are you planning to use AI to
18:27somehow upgrade what you've done or you're done with Ramayana?
18:32I was just in Kauai, Hawaii. And I don't know if you're aware of the famous Hindu temple in Kauai.
18:38And I visited, it's extraordinary, absolutely beautiful. And I met with their director
18:43of communications. I forgot his name right now. A Swami, a Western Swami, very knowledgeable,
18:51very deep guy. And their guru who founded their temple, who's now passed, they had asked,
18:59he wrote extraordinary books and they wanted to recapture his books and his voice. And they did
19:04a few of them before he passed. He passed already 20, 30 years ago. They're using, now that they
19:10have a record of his voice, they're using AI to recreate his exact voice for the materials that
19:17he had never recorded. And he played me the two. I could not tell the difference and I have good
19:21ears. And he was trying to explain to me that I can now use this to apply to do my next projects.
19:27I don't think that's my thing, you know, personally. I mean, I've now, as you've seen,
19:35after releasing the Ramayana in 2004, it was such an extraordinary journey, a real hero's
19:44quest to even complete that. I didn't know what to do with myself after a while, after I finished
19:50that. It was like, you know, and it got a lot of attention and awards and
19:59a lot of people purchased it. Many, many university libraries purchased it for their
20:03collections. They felt obligated because it was, you know, the full unabridged Ramayana in oral
20:08form. But I began a few years later, I realized as people can barely, you know, now human beings
20:17apparently have a shorter attention span than goldfish. That's research. So I began to do
20:26distillations. And then you notice, and I thought I should bring up the shorter distillations
20:33on the three main characters of the Ramayana. So in 2014, I decided to, I mean, the Ramayana
20:41is a textbook in discriminating dharma, finer and finer levels of dharma. That's one of its
20:47aspects. One of its profound aspects is because it's an exercise. There's so many challenging
20:52gray area scenes in the Ramayana, like when Ram slays Vali, when Bharat goes back into the forest
21:04to retrieve Ram. And then they're having these dialogues and Bharat is right, Ram should go home.
21:13But then Ram at the end, the subtlest logic makes Bharat realize that he has to continue
21:20his commitment and the promise that he had made to his father Darshana.
21:25Same thing with Vali. When Vali is dying on the battlefield, Vali appeals to Ram explaining
21:30why, how could you slay me like an assassin from the back? That was wrong action.
21:37And Ram carefully takes him through this beautiful dialogue where you realize
21:42that Vali did not deserve protection of dharma because he had taken his brother's wife while he
21:48was still alive. So he did not deserve the protection of dharma. He couldn't invoke dharma
21:54to protect him. So those are examples. So you're discriminating finer and finer levels of dharma.
21:59And I realized how powerful that would be to bring out those values. So I created this Ram's
22:05dharma, Leadership Secrets of the Ultimate Warrior Sage Prince, which was released in 2014. And at
22:12that time, I was trying to bring it out to the business community because I thought at that time
22:16there was a re-issuing or republication of Leadership Secrets from Attila the Hun, which
22:25became a bestseller. I don't know if you remember that. Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun. I go,
22:30if all these business people are buying up a leadership book by Attila the Hun,
22:34who is an incredible barbarian and killer, maybe there'll be some receptivity in the
22:39West to Leadership Secrets from Ram. You can churn that out. That's a fascinating idea.
22:46So it was released. This is a two-hour, this is one of my shorter ones, two hours going through
22:5125 core principles of ideal leadership extracted from the Ramayana,
22:56from a particularly from Bala Anirudha Khanda.
23:01In my years of interaction with friends in the West, especially in the US,
23:08a thing that throws them off a bit about Indian epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana,
23:15is it's very stark situational logic. There is no overarching morality in the Indian context.
23:22Morality is a shifting idea. I'll give you a simple example. To the extent that even in popular
23:30Hindi movies, the idea of situational logic has percolated. There was a movie some time ago where
23:38the villain tells the hero that you have to kill so-and-so. So the hero says, how can I kill him?
23:45He saved my life. He's troubled by the order that the villain gives him. So the villain replies that
23:54he saved your life, was in its own place. Now you have to take his life,
24:01it has its own place. The situational logic of that is everywhere across both in the Mahabharata.
24:08I think that shows the sophistication of Indian tradition and culture because, and this is the
24:14key thing when we look at our world today, is every businessman knows that. That's why I brought
24:21it up for Businessman. Every political leader knows this. Every mother knows this. There's so
24:28much nuance in the way we need to live from a high level of integrity in dharma.
24:39And there's so many gray areas and the classic archetypal advantage of that is right in the
24:45Mahabharata, when Arjuna is standing on the battlefield of Kurukshetra in suspension between
24:51his heart and his mind. People characterize him as weak and then he will not fight.
24:56No, he wasn't weak. He was at the pinnacle of development in his heart and the pinnacle
25:00of development in his mind. And he looked at the situation and he said, either I uphold
25:05righteousness, on the other hand, I kill my family members. And he was in suspension,
25:10he could not act. I think Indian literature, the Vedic literature is filled with these,
25:16mainly because that's really the reality of life. Sometimes it's just not black and white.
25:23And what I realized in all my work, everyone wants to know, what does this mean? What does
25:31this part of the Ramayana mean? When did it happen? They want to know the details, who,
25:35what, when. For me, this is the key shift. The Ramayana, Mahabharata, especially because
25:43the Itihasa, it's process oriented. We evolve as we read and listen to the Ramayana and Mahabharata.
25:52We refine our discrimination. We refine our sense of dharma. We learn to distinguish between right
26:00and wrong and all the subtle nuances. That is what it's cultured. That's a process oriented thing.
26:05Ultimately, there is no definitive answer of what it means. It's what it means to you as you go
26:11through it. You know, this is counterintuitive to a lot of people in the West who are raised
26:19in the Judeo-Christian traditions, where black and white is pretty sharply defined.
26:24Skins are pretty sharply defined. In the Indian context, it is so amorphous. There is back and
26:31forth between all of these feelings. I mean, you mentioned Arjuna and Krishna.
26:38Gita is such a fantastic example of the situational logic that I was just mentioning.
26:44I quote it all the time, because I think it's just classic, classic. Ramayana is filled with
26:51it as well. Look at Dasaratha, when he promises his two boons to Kaikeyi, and she calls him on
26:57these two boons. He loves his son more than he loves his own life, but yet he has to exile. Oh,
27:02my God. See, this play of opposites, this play of opposites is key. This play of opposites
27:12is the whole nature of this evolutionary process. Then you see Dasaratha torn between his love for
27:19his son, and as the king, he must uphold his word. That process, that process that's pulling,
27:26like Arjuna being pulled, like Dasaratha being pulled, like Ram being pulled, versus treatment
27:32of Sita, we're constantly working through. The reason why I think this is so common
27:40in Indian knowledge, the Vedic tradition, is because it purifies our hearts and minds.
27:46Right.
27:46Moves us in the direction of wholeness. That's the key.
27:51How did you first react when you became aware of what we are talking about, this kind of
27:56situational logic? I'm sure as you read, you realized that this is very different.
28:01Well, I had a, you know, a cognition, I guess you could call it, you know. I feel,
28:08first of all, I also feel a great affinity towards Valmiki. I always felt like whenever
28:13I would look at a picture of Valmiki, or whatever they create for Valmiki, it feels like my father.
28:19Oh.
28:20And very devoted to Valmiki. And that's why everyone asks, why don't you work with
28:23the Tulsidasa? And I go, no, I'm just Valmiki. This is the original, this is the original.
28:28But when I was in graduate school, I decided, I was fascinated with the structure of myth.
28:38Now, I know many Indians object to the word myth, because that means something fanciful
28:45that didn't really happen. And when I apply the word myth to Mahabharata or Ramayana.
28:51But if they hear my definition of myth, then they usually accept. And my definition of myth
28:57is the one that Joseph Campbell or the great other mythologists, Marcea Eliade, said,
29:04that the myth is the sum total of all the cultural values and stories. It's the essence
29:12of how creation became created. And the massive cultural, ethical
29:22origin stories of a culture is its myth. And when you define it like that, people go, okay,
29:28yeah, I can accept that that's what you mean by myth. And that's what Joseph Campbell did.
29:33Right.
29:33Later, when we grew up, and we went to high school, and the story we listened to the
29:37Roman and Greek gods, and those were myths, because they were stories, they didn't really
29:41happen. But, you know, that's what itihasa. Itihasa has both its historical reality,
29:49and it has its subtler, symbolic, metaphorical, evolutionary values.
29:56There are seven karnas in the Ramayana. Which one is your favorite?
30:02That's a really good question, Mayank.
30:05You know, actually, I'll give you my answer. I can give you my answer.
30:09Okay.
30:09And this will surprise you and probably most people. It's Uttarakhanda.
30:14Okay.
30:15Now, there's a lot of debate whether, was Uttarakhanda part of Valmiki's original cognition?
30:21There's some evidence that suggests that it was written in a different style,
30:25and it was added later by later moralists. Personally, I don't, just the story of
30:33Uttarakhanda is not complete. If you just finish at the end of Uttakhanda, when they return home
30:42triumphantly and Rama's crowned king, the whole powerful transcendental value, the transcendental
30:50value that takes you to higher states of consciousness, happens in Uttarakhanda.
30:55Without Uttarakhanda, it's just they lived happily ever after, and usually things don't
31:01work that way. This is the subtlest transformational value of Vedanta. Uttarakhanda is Vedanta.
31:08In fact, I gave a talk once on the Vedanta of the Ramayana, because I realized, I felt like
31:14I've completed so many things, you know, from my mega production, I call my opus of the Complete
31:20Unabridged Ramayana, my theatrical productions of the Ramayana, I've done two or three of those.
31:25I built a theme park based on the Ramayana. I've done many, many scholarly articles, and so on.
31:33I've consulted with the Sagar family on some of their productions. I wondered what else to do,
31:39so I gave a talk on the Vedanta of the Ramayana. But, so that's my favorite. It's taking us to
31:46this transcendental value of letting the smallness of the relative behind, and ascending to the
31:54fullness of the absolute. That's what happens in Uttarakhanda. True. Would it make a difference to
32:00you if Uttarakhanda wasn't written by Valmiki? You know, I'll let the scholars decide that,
32:10but for me personally, it completes the whole story. So, and my intimate feeling, my intimate
32:16feeling is it was included. If Valmiki didn't write it, well, for example, many people feel
32:21that Pilsudas was a later incarnation of Valmiki. Maybe one of the authors who finished Uttarakhanda
32:28was, I mean, I'm sure Valmiki has had many incarnations. You know, but now, as I said,
32:35I'm focused more on trying to, like, you know, that first one in 2014, the Ram's Dharma.
32:42Later, I taught a course for the Neem Kerali Baba Ashram in Taos, New Mexico, at the end of COVID.
32:50This, now, here's an example of showing the receptivity in the West. They had never offered
32:54an online course. One of their board members had purchased my Ramayana. They incurred, they,
32:59she said, Michael would be a good person to teach this course. We created a seven-lesson
33:03online course on the Ramayana, and I pulled together everything. This was in 2021. I pulled
33:10together 30 years of my material and taught just really deep course on the Ramayana. It's available
33:15online, and we expected 100 people would register. Over 1,000 registered, and we turned 600 away
33:23because we only had a Zoom license for 1,000. I see. These are almost all Westerners.
33:29Really? So that, that's an example of the receptivity.
33:34That's amazing, yeah. I was, in fact, that was my next question. You already answered it. So
33:38a lot of non-Indians are drawn to this. Yes, I mean, there was Indians about because
33:44Ashram has many Indian followers, Neem Karoli Baba, who was Ram Das's teacher. But from that,
33:50by the way, they invited kirtan singers to kind of sing at the end, Krishna Das being one of them,
33:55who's the most popular kirtan singer in the world right now. And we ended up, I just pitched him on
34:01the idea, let's do a project together on Hanuman, because all the Neem Karoli Baba people are real
34:07devotees of Hanuman. Right. So we collaborated on this project where I pulled out every passage,
34:15almost every passage featuring Hanuman from the Vamiki Ramayana. And then Krishna Das and I
34:21wove them together with our commentary on Krishna Das Sings. And that one was Hanuman's Leap of
34:25Faith. That's an eight hour production that I released in 2022. And once again, I went and I
34:32used the original clips, I repurposed the original clips from my original audio Ramayana.
34:38But we wove it together with modern commentary, just kind of what was really happening. And that's
34:43what I mean by distillation. It guides you through the story. Anyone, even if you don't know Hanuman
34:48that well, it's accessible because it's, you listen to the Ramayana. And you know, it's original,
34:54original audio from the original Vamiki Ramayana. And then you hear a commentary giving context,
35:00what this means, where does it take us? And of course, I bring out this evolutionary value
35:04of being in process with it. I'm bringing these up just so you get a flavor for how I've been
35:09evolving this in terms of its accessibility, in the way of orienting the knowledge for Westerners
35:14to enjoy. A lot of Indians are, you know, they've been really into this as well. It's, you know,
35:20there's a lot of Indians of the diaspora in English speaking countries. I get orders from
35:26Australia, UK, US, Canada. I see. No, that's good to know. You know, if you,
35:33I mean, there are fantastic characters in the Ramayana, any number of them. But if you were
35:37to boil it down, you're looking at essentially four great characters. One is, of course,
35:43Maryada Purushottam Sri Ram, as he described, the ultimate in restraint and moral rectitude.
35:51Almost, I mean, he's not flamboyant like Krishna, for instance. Krishna has a different kind of
35:58following. He's got a straight arrow. He's a straight arrow. So it is Ram, then you have,
36:06interestingly, Hanuman. What a character. Then you have Ramana. And then you have Sita. These
36:13are the four grandees of the Ramayana. Of course, there is so much more to it. But I'm saying,
36:21in terms of giving you hooks, which was your most important hook? How did you look at,
36:26say, someone like Ravan, for instance? Well, I'll come to Ravan. Let me go to
36:30the first part of your question. I've been a Ram devotee for 30 years. Everything is Ram, Ram, Ram,
36:36Ram, Ram. Maryada Purushottam Ram. Ram, Ram, Paramara. This was my thing.
36:46And the reason I brought up that course, from the name of Prabhupada Ashram, one of the directors
36:51there, they invited me out. He said, Michael, I know you love Ram, but we're all about Hanuman.
36:58You need to do a program on Hanuman. And I said, my main focus, I'm just devoted to Ram.
37:07And then one of the students there said, Michael, if you're devoted to Ram,
37:11then you know all about Hanuman. And I go, wow, you're right. So that's how Hanuman took birth.
37:18And one of the reasons why I do projects, I learn through my own projects.
37:25Meaning, when I did that Hanuman's Leap of Faith project, the purpose for me, personally,
37:32is the imbibing the qualities of Hanuman. You become, you move in the direction of embodying
37:39Hanuman. I've done that for years with Ram. But the one that was in the back of my mind
37:45all this time, and this is the one actually that I'm most excited about, it seems that
37:49we waited till now to talk about it, is Sita. Sita, there was some lack of familiarity with
37:59her, but deep in the background, I had a beautiful relationship with my mother,
38:06who passed away very young, when I was young. But the feminine energy, the divine feminine
38:12goddesses, I always have a deep longing for that. And so even though I did the whole Ramayana first,
38:21and then the first distillation was Ram's Dharma, the second distillation was Hanuman,
38:26Sita, even though she's come last, except we'll come to that in a second, was the one that was
38:31really most dear to my heart. And this one, I knew, I could not be the commentator. There's no
38:39way for a man to be the commentator on Sita. And I had, this was just a few years ago, I went to India,
38:47and the Sagar family arranged a meeting for me with Deepika Tapiwala, who played Sita in the
38:52original Ramanan Sagar production. Of course, I had a crush on her, you know, back from the first time
38:58I saw her in 89, and just to meet her now, and she gave the blessings to the project. I almost tried to
39:04invite her to be one of the readers on it, and she agreed, but it ended up not working out.
39:09But since then, I began to recruit these women wisdom leaders, and including Nina Rao, who is
39:18Krishna Das's musical partner, extraordinary Kirtani in her own right, the Mirabai Star, who's a
39:25well-known author, who's written many books, like on Saint Teresa, many of the women saints,
39:31Christian and mystics, but she's also done on Acharya Shunya, who's written Roar Like a Goddess,
39:39she's in the lineage of Ayodhya, from Ayodhya, is a Vedic priest from Ayodhya, and then the big coup
39:46was to get Vandana Shiva, who's one of the world's most famous environmental, and it went on and on,
39:52that the people, oh, and Chitra Devakaruni, the famous novelist who wrote Forest of Enchantment
39:57and Palace of Illusions, and Ramayana and Mahabharata, those are the commentators.
40:03Then I realized, wow, I wanted to use the original audio from my original, just like I did on the
40:08101 Project, I realized I cannot have a man reading Sita's voice, so I had to re-record
40:15all the passages that we use, we pulled out 24 of these passages from Sita, and I hired some
40:21young women, I tried to get some very famous celebrities, but ended up getting some young
40:25actresses to do, once again, all the parts, three of them, there was 24 passages, each of them read
40:31eight, so it's, once again, a beautiful interweaving of original passages from Valmiki Ramayana,
40:36read by women's voices, and then commentary by these 12 women wisdom leaders, it's absolutely
40:43beautiful, you know, you can hear about it at sitasgems.com. Yeah, I heard a bit of that.
40:51Yeah, and it's just, it's a very attractive landing page, a website, and then you can
40:57listen to some of the clips, but this one, this just came out in December, this is hot off the
41:01press, and of all the projects I've done, you see, Sita is very much misunderstood, her role
41:11in the Ramayana is very misunderstood, she's cast as the victim, she's weak and submissive,
41:17and those role models, that perception of her role model, I think, has done very destructive
41:25in Indian consciousness, and here's the key, Mike, this was not a modern, I didn't change it,
41:34I didn't change the original Valmiki text, when I pulled out those 24 passages,
41:39I stayed true to the original, but when you pull them out, like Sita's passages are only 10%
41:47of the Ramayana, when you pull them out and they stand on their own, and you listen to them in
41:53sequence, you realize Sita's an extraordinarily powerful character, she has power, the power of
42:00her word, her sense of dharma, she's not in conflict, she has such resilience and strength
42:07and inner conviction, power and subtlety, and she may be the active ingredient that propels the
42:14whole storyline all along, and hardly anyone has done this, people have done many treatments of
42:22Ram and Hanuman, but to do this for Sita, I feel this is truly empowering to women, Indian women,
42:32Western women, I'm getting beautiful feedback from people, people are just finishing it now,
42:37this one is nine and a half hours, and there's some music, Christian Das has contributed music,
42:43as well as Nina Rao, saying, I had, I struggled so much with the Ramayana,
42:52now I can accept it, and that's extremely gratifying. Yeah.
43:00Let me just, one more thing is, you know, they had this love and devotion for Ram,
43:03but they could not accept Ram's treatment of Sita, and this, the way it's framed,
43:11when you really realize what actually happened in the original text, people are coming to peace,
43:17they can have their love for Ram, and they can understand the deeper mechanics of how it happened,
43:21they accept, and then they can extol Ram and Sita. There's no Ram, there's no, we're not trying to
43:27beat up Ram in this, in this production, Sita's Gems, glorifying Ram and glorifying Sita.
43:33Right, right. You know, we will, of course, do perhaps a separate one on your other interests,
43:38like Vedic psychology and Transcendental Meditation, that's a whole different area,
43:44I will set it up different times. But, you know, I wanted mainly to focus on your
43:51Ramayan project, and I'm glad we got to do it. This is what I learned from my knowledge as a
43:56TM meditator, I've been doing TM, Transcendental Meditation, for 50 years now, since I was a teenager,
44:03is people talk about this deep state. There is no deep state. You know what there is? There's a
44:09shallow state. There's a shallow state, people operating from these very shallow levels of laws
44:17of nature. That's the threat, is the shallow state, not the deep state. I want the deep state.
44:24I want people to operate from these deeper laws of nature, like, like Krishna in front of
44:30the hybrid. So, Mike, I really appreciate you having me here. I hope that some of your listeners
44:37will share and take a look at some of these productions.
44:42They certainly will. In fact, a lot of them were quite excited when I announced you on Facebook.
44:48A lot of them didn't know about this. So this is going to help them reach out to your site and
44:53maybe start downloading what you produced. Can I mention the sites? Or are you going
44:59to just put it on? No, please do it. I will. I'll do it, of course.
45:02So the most recent one is sitasgems.com. The one on Hanuman is hanumansleapoffaith.com.
45:11And the website, my main website, which includes all the programs,
45:15is the original one on the 75 hour long Ramayana, is ramayanaudio.com.