Īfter the death of Poonja in 1997, Godman returned to Tiruvannamalai.
In 2006, he edited a collection of conversations that had taken place in Poonja’s home in the early 1990s. Godman made a documentary on Poonja’s life and teachings, edited a collection of interviews that various visitors had had with Poonja in the early 1990s, and compiled an authorised three-volume biography entitled Nothing Ever Happened. In his later years Poonja was more generally known as ‘'Papaji’'. Poonja, Poonja, a devotee of Ramana Maharshi who subsequently became a well-known spiritual teacher. In 1993 Godman moved to Lucknow at the invitation of H.
Maugham used the character of Darrel as a follower of a Hindu guru featured in the novel the guru's physique and teachings were based on those of Ramana Maharshi. Maugham visited Ramanasramam in 1938 and later wrote an essay entitled "The Saint" about his visit. Godman has contributed to a scholarly debate on the true identity of Larry Darrel, a character who appeared in Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge. The interviews were the primary source for his book, Living by the Words of Bhagavan, a biography that chronicled Annamalai Swami's relationship with Sri Ramana. In 1987 Godman conducted extensive interviews with Annamalai Swami, a devotee of Ramana Maharshi who worked at Sri Ramanasramam between 19. In 1985 his edited anthology of Ramana Maharshi’s teachings, Be As You Are, was published by Penguin. When Lakshmana Swamy and Saradamma moved to Tiruvannamalai in the late 1980s, Godman looked after and helped to develop their new property, which was located close to Sri Ramanasramam. At the instigation of Lakshmana Swamy he wrote No Mind – I am the Self, about the lives and teachings of Lakshmana Swamy and Saradamma, the latter being Lakshmana Swamy's own disciple. In the early 1980s Godman started to visit Lakshmana Swamy, a disciple of Ramana Maharshi, in his ashram in Andhra Pradesh. In the 1970s, Godman frequented Nisargadatta Maharaj’s satsangs in Mumbai. For eight years, between 19, he was the librarian of the ashram. Godman first visited the Tiruvannamalai ashram of Ramana Maharshi in 1976. I suppose I must have read the book in an afternoon, but by the time I put it down it had completely transformed the way I viewed myself and the world. Because this state itself was the answer to all my questions, and any other questions I might come up with, the interest in finding solutions anywhere else dropped away. In that silent space I knew directly and intuitively what Ramana's words were hinting and pointing at.
It was more of an experience in which I was pulled into a state of silence. It wasn't that I had found a new set of ideas that I believed in. It was sometime in his second year there that he became interested in Ramana Maharshi after reading about his teachings in a book that had been compiled by Arthur Osborne. He was educated at local schools and in 1972 won a place at Oxford University. His father was a schoolmaster and mother a physiotherapist who specialised in treating physically handicapped children. David Godman was born in 1953 in Stoke-on-Trent, England.