Lee Lozowick
Though Lee was passionately drawn toward the Hindu paths of bhakti and tantra, his sudden awakening in 1975 was not defined by one specific teacher or religion but occurred in the fresh, original spirit of the Bauls of Bengal, who Lee would befriend and come to know years later as his friends and "spiritual cousins." Seekers flocked to the freedom and radiance of Lee's communication, and a growing community of students soon took form.
On pilgrimage in India with five of his students in 1977, Lee had an extraordinary encounter with an enigmatic holy beggar called Yogi Ramsuratkumar. During a second visit in 1979, Lee returned to see the unforgettable, disheveled mendicant, known in the dusty village streets as "Ram Ram." As the nature of their timeless relationship became clear to Lee, the realization dawned that Yogi Ramsuratkumar was the source of spiritual power behind Lee's personal wakening. Over the many years that ensued, they demonstrated a rare and tender spiritual love between master and disciple, touching all who witnessed them together. Each year Lee took a large group of his students on pilgrimage to India to visit Yogi Ramsuratkumar, building bridges and cultivating bonds of the heart that live on today.
After several powerful symbolic interactions with Yogi Ramsuratkumar during their second meeting in 1979, Lee returned to the States and began to send poems across the sea to Yogi Ramsuratkumar. The relationship between spiritual father and son developed over the next decade in a wondrous lila described in depth in the biography, Yogi Ramsuratkumar—Under the Punnai Tree, and Volume I of Lee’s biography, Spiritual Slavery, as well as in the biographical tomes, Only God and Father and Son, published by Hohm Press. In 1993 Lee’s poems to his master were collected and published—at the request of Yogi Ramsuratkumar—in Chennai by the master’s Indian devotees, under the title Poems of a Broken Heart.
Devotee and Master
In early December 1993, Lee and nine of his students visited Yogi Ramsuratkumar. At that time, the poetry became a matter of public knowledge when the paperback volume of Poems of a Broken Heart was presented to Lee, and he placed it in the hands of his students, to their awe and great joy. It was during this visit that Yogi Ramsuratkumar declared his American devotee’s poems to be the definitive statement on the beggar’s life and work.
Speaking ecstatically, he said, “Lee Lozowick has done a great work with these poems. The name of this beggar will be scattered all over the world with these poems, written in English by Lee. Lee Lozowick has given a gift to this beggar. Now this beggar won’t have to beg anyone to write about him anymore. No more. It is done now. Lee Lozowick and his reign of love will be all over the world!” The extraordinary affection and intimacy that was shared between Lee and Yogi Ramsuratkumar continued until the end of their lives and beyond death. It was and is a relationship with very deep roots, as Yogi Ramsuratkumar said many years later, “Lee and I have been together in many lives.”
Over the decades that followed their first meeting in 1977, Lee elucidated and embodied a timeless and contemporary teaching of diamond-like brilliance that blended his devotion to Yogi Ramsuratkumar and his certainty about the necessity of the guru with his realization of nonduality and awakened perception of reality as “Enlightened Duality.” Underlying all was his invitation to discover the innate relationship with the personal Beloved and his insistence upon faith and the reality of Grace.
Enlightened Duality
Enlightened Duality is a teaching that provides us with the
practical means and wisdom to navigate through daily life
with respect and innate regard for the sacred nature of the world.
—Lozowick and Young, from Enlightened Duality
Getting to know Khepa Lee leads eventually to one of the themes of his legacy—the realization of nonduality arising as an Enlightened Duality, experienced at its pinnacle as Grace or a direct relationship with the personal Beloved. It is this perception of the Supreme Reality, immanent and indwelling in existence itself, which Khepa Lee lived and transmitted, whether it was through his presence, his prolific writings, his music, or the example of his life and love for Yogi Ramsuratkumar.
From the beginning, Lee was provocative and irreverent, calling seekers to pierce the illusions that hide not only in conventional society but in the labyrinth of the spiritual path. In subsequent years, though Lee was tempered by the gentle and strong hand of his master, he still referred to himself candidly as “Your wild Heretic” in his poems to Yogi Ramsuratkumar. Lee’s heresies showed up in his inimitable style of teaching, in his music and lyrics, and in his resonance with the synthesis of tantra and bhakti practiced by Bauls.
Like many Baul khepas (Bengali: a madman for God) before him, Lee was at times controversial, cryptic or irascible. Because Lee assumed in 1975 that he had awakened purely by Grace, without a teacher or guru for many years, there was a heretical element to his work that never completely disappeared, but was always present in his sharp, uncompromising criticisms of conventional religious dogma as well as the contemporary spiritual scene. Lee was unrestrained in expressing his view of false teachers and the superficial, vain, materialistic aspects of modern seekers and spirituality. (CLICK HERE To read more about the Bauls of Bengal.)
So many people are sick, wounded, damaged. In America, fifty to seventy million people do some kind of meditation or worship, but you can't walk out on the streets at night because of all the violence. So what if people are meditating? People are self-centered, full of fear, and it's not getting any better, it's getting worse. The tantric practitioner is a transformer. You go into the world and clean it up so it is revealed in its beauty and majesty. That's our work, and there's a big job to be done. It starts here, with you and me. —Khepa Lee
If we seek to know Lee as a guide, contemporary prophet, guru, teacher or spiritual friend, we must turn to his teachings, which resound with depths and mysteries that must be pondered and lived in order to know them. This is a highly individual process—a matter of deepening one’s relationship with one’s own wisdom and instinctive knowing of the heart.
A naturally shy and retiring man, Lee often said that he spent many years cultivating his unique way of teaching, which he used to great advantage as a vehicle of spiritual transformation. He had a gift for translating the ancient wisdom of the spiritual path—and of the Bauls in particular—into contemporary perspectives. Using the language of the streets, Lee applied compassion and practical wisdom to the transformative potentials within ordinary daily life: in relationships, marriage, sexuality, conscious parenting, careers, money, friendship, food, music and all forms of artistic endeavor. Lee funneled his instinctive understanding of the transformational power of music into rock & roll, and he brilliantly used this to keep many of his students, born and fully entrenched in the Western milieu and culture, fully engaged with him in ongoing musical projects. Secondarily, he freely used this creative art form to deliver his message as poet of the truth.
A great passion for beauty and its expression through all forms of art and literature are powerfully threaded throughout Lee’s life and his teachings on how to live and navigate the challenges of life. His teachings on seeking and taking refuge in beauty are captured in Enlightened Duality (Lozowick and Young) and in The Baul Tradition (M. Young) as well as many other books published by Hohm Press.
