I ended up having this experience of really being confronted with my death, like as if my death was happening right there, even though they had told me beforehand, "Don't worry, you might feel like you're dying, but you won't die." It sure feels to me like I'm dying here.

Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump.

My name is Rick Archer.

The Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people.

We've done well over 700 of them now, and if this is new to you and you'd like to check out previous ones, go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and look under the past interviews menu.

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My guest today is Christina Guimond, probably I'll call her Chris during the interview.

She lives in Montreal, and I'm going to let her introduce herself a little bit in a minute.

I recently listened to a nice interview she did with Angelo Dilullo, which was very autobiographical.

She just went through her whole spiritual journey chronologically in that interview.

It was so well presented that I didn't want to have her just replicate that in this interview.

So what we're going to do in this interview is talk about a number of points that Christina has suggested, such as shadow work after awakening, the nervous system in awakening, trauma, something called TRE in the awakening process, the importance of silence and solitude, the widespread confusion around the term non-duality, investigating the subject-object illusion, the radiance of emptiness, distress about the current geopolitical situation, the whole issue of no self, and grace.

There'll be a bunch of topics about that.

One point we might even discuss toward the beginning is working with a teacher or an awakening guide.

How to find one, how to assess them to make sure you're not ending up with a turkey, and some other points that might save you a lot of time and money and heartache if you're aware of them.

So, Chris, for starters, why don't you just give us the elevator pitch, your biographical information, and we'll sprinkle more bits and pieces of it as we go through this interview, because I'm sure many of the points I just mentioned are inspired by your experience, and you probably have reasons why you consider those points important.

First of all, I wanted to say a big thank you to Rick for having me on your show.

It's a bit surreal.

I've been watching your show for about 10 years and found my teacher Gary Weber here, so I really feel quite a debt to you for that.

Probably Gary's watching this.

Hi, Gary.

Yeah, so I guess things started for me, you know, in a big way in 2001.

I went to a Goenka 10-day Vipassana retreat.

And you'd already been doing TM for some years before that, right?

Yeah, yeah, I started with TM, but then had a longing to do a retreat and go deeper.

I just had this intuition that, you know, it would be good.

So I went to attend a Vipassana retreat, really struggled.

One thing I want to maybe just say at this point to everybody listening, is I didn't really bring anything special to this in terms of capacity to meditate, or do spiritual practice, formal spiritual practice.

I was very, very ordinary in that way.

It was really quite hard for me to meditate, struggled a lot, just difficulty sitting still.

Ritchie: Did you get that with TM too or just the Goenka stuff?

Danielle: It came up more with the Goenka.

Yeah, I found like the TM I settled pretty quickly but 20 minutes is different than 9 or 10 hours a day.

Ritchie: Oh, I always cheated.

I never did less than half an hour and after a couple of years, I was doing an hour twice a day.

But anyway, keep going.

It was really tough that first course, but ended up having a pretty big shift on the eighth day.

That was life-changing for me.

Really think of my life as kind of like up to that point, and then after.

That's how significant it was.

And I don't know how often this happens, but it turned out I also had a pretty big heart opening a few hours later on the same day.

coming back into the meditation hall, I had what felt like this huge explosion in the heart area.

It felt like a download of something very rapid happening in the brain and it was like a lot of insight about the quality of all people and all living creatures, that there was this equality in everything that was living, that was basically what it was.

In a way, I didn't really understand so much of the significance of the first one, because the second one had some strong emotional aspect of it as well.

But I went home, everything looked different.

I think I had some capacity to experience things non-dual in the visual field because I just sat for hours just looking at trees or looking at the water.

A big part of this was a really sublime, sublime inner silence.

It was like the sweetest thing I'd ever experienced.

I wasn't calling this spiritual awakening.

In fact, the funny thing is I thought everybody went home from a 10-day Vipassana retreat feeling like this.

So I went through this like classic honeymoon period, not knowing that's what it was.

And as these things go, that came to an end that was quite devastating.

But because this happened in a 10-day Vipassana retreat, I thought, "Well, surely if I just keep going back and meditating, I will be able to get that silence back." And so I spent the next 14 years really, really quite dedicated to 10-day retreats, two hours of sitting a day, even took up vigorous Bikram hot yoga practice, you know, about seven, eight years into this.

But by the time I'd been into this for 14 years, I realized, although I'd gotten really good with the meditation technique and I was able to easily get into jhanas, what I really wanted was the silence back.

R: Jhanas are various states or stages.

T: Yeah.

That's not really part of the past in a thing, but they just started happening spontaneously.

R: We could go into a whole discussion about that, but that's not central to what you're trying to say.

So, 14 years into this, and I honestly didn't even see this coming, but I have a little meditation room in my house.

I would go in and sit down and meditate twice a day, and over a period of a few days, I couldn't engage the meditation technique anymore.

It just came to a stop.

I lost the will to be able to do the technique.

In a way, that was both shocking and I have to say some grief around it too, because this was kind of my spiritual community.

I felt like that's slipping away and I didn't know anything else to turn to.

It was roughly around that time that I heard this term non-duality for the first time.

There was something about hearing that word that really captured my attention.

I went online, I found YouTube, I discovered all these videos on YouTube.

I had no idea of what was going on on YouTube in terms of awakening.

It was just absolutely riveting.

I wasn't really thinking in terms of awakening and liberation, but suddenly I felt like, wow, there's people on YouTube that look pretty darn awake to me.

Pretty quickly I found your podcast and started to watch videos, and within, I don't know, a certain number of months I discovered Gary Weber.

So he became my main teacher, my first teacher that I ever worked with, from roughly 2016 to the end of 2019 when he stepped back from teaching.

I was really, really fortunate to have his support and guidance, a really incredible teacher.

Anyway, there's a lot of things that happened in those years.

We'll cover that, I guess, but a lot of things happened.

Gary even said to me at the end of 2017 that he said, "Kris, you could start teaching people now." A lot had happened in that year in 2017, and when he said that, I felt like I have no interest at all in teaching people.

I felt like I still need to do more myself, on myself.

That's just something that happened.

He stepped back from teaching, and then we had the COVID pandemic start.

I have a really nice group of friends, and somebody had discovered an awakening guide that they had started to work with and suggested that I work with them.

I ended up working with this person for two years, meeting them almost weekly over Zoom.

And this person was presenting himself as an authority on the teachings of Ramana Maharshi, and also presenting themselves as fully liberated.

We believed him, but almost from the beginning, there were some red flags.

One of the things I would say about that is the doubt that kind of kept coming again and again and again, we would struggle with doubt about whether this guy was as awakened as he claimed.

He was likable in a lot of ways.

But I think I'm really convinced at this point that he had only gone through that initial shift and had taken that to be full liberation.

I think he really didn't understand the awakening process.

I think somewhere I heard him say that in an interview that three weeks after he had his awakening, he started teaching.

You've probably heard the Zen thing about wait 10 years after your awakening before self-teaching.

Yeah, yeah.

Anyway, I ended up ending this relationship with this awakening guide and then was very fortunate to have a friend tell me about Angelo DeLullo.

And I reached out to him and wrote him an email, gave him a summary of what had transpired.

And he invited me to work with me, and it was pretty amazing.

I think like in a period of three or four months, things happen very, very quickly.

That was maybe June of 2022, I believe, that the identity fell away.

And that's something that was quite shocking in a lot of ways, and is still being integrated even now.

I have some notes here that you sent me, but then I have something at the end of them which I can't remember was part of what you sent or something I added because I wanted to bring it up.

Tell me what you think about this, feel free to disagree.

A personal self is needed to function in the world, but our attachment to it gets in the way of knowing our deeper nature, presence.

There was a renunciate trend in Eastern thought that saw the denial of the person, of desires, etc.

But most of us are householders.

It's natural to have desires.

What we seek is the falling away of the attachment to those things, so life can flow and express naturally.

Did you write that or did I just tag it?

But what do you think about it?

Yeah, I would agree.

I would agree.

Yeah.

Okay.

I get a little confused sometimes when people say, "I have no sense of a personal self." I think, "Okay, well, let's give you the old hammer on the thumb test." Yeah.

like my friend Francis Bennett, who is deceased now, used to say, "I thought I was a wave for a long time.

Now I realize I'm on the ocean, but I'm still a wave." It's like, of course I'm a wave, I'm just not only a wave.

Does that make sense?

You know, it's really hard to talk about it.

I was afraid that I'm going to be saying something that might be misleading about it.

There is this place where this realization can go, the words "I" "me" don't make sense anymore.

And that might seem bizarre or kind of unthinkable but it is like that.

Let's say that's your experience.

Is that your experience?

Okay so that's your experience and is that the only dimension of your experience or is your experience multi-dimensional?

So on some relative level you have what Advaita calls, you have a Harika which is transactional reality, which is, yeah, there's a me, I put on my shirt, I drive my car, etc.

But it's kind of just the very uppermost crust of reality.

There are deeper levels at which that languaging is absurd and meaningless.

Your husband comes in the room and says, "Hey, Chris," and you turn your head.

The dog doesn't necessarily turn its head.

There's some identification, some association with this mind-body system called Chris.

That's right.

There's some type of consciousness that's resistant so that you can function.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, I agree with that.

And if we want to call it ignorance, we can call it ignorance.

Vedanta calls it "lesh avidya," which means "faint remains of ignorance," but says that it's necessary to have that in order to function.

Sure.

And we probably will get into such things as integration and all that.

So there's the a danger of disassociation if a person prematurely adopts this as a perspective when it's not their living reality, I think.

Yeah, it's very easy for somebody to go through a big initial shift.

I think it's very typical that the mind wants to come back and reclaim its territory.

Well, the mind always has a function.

I think Ramana Maharshi had a mind.

He was speaking thoughts that implies the existence of a mind.

He was speaking words.

But the whole thing is, again, to the wave analogy, if we think, "I am only this wave," then you're missing out on something because you're actually the ocean.

But realizing your status as an ocean, there's still a unique expression of wave in this particular body-mind, in that particular body-mind.

Even though it might be just a small percentage of your total gestalt, your total reality, it's an element of it.

And the reason I'm emphasizing this a bit, there's There's a woman I interviewed named Jessica Eve, or Jessica Nathanson, who really focuses on this because numerous people who've been heavily into neo-Advaita teachers have come to her now.

She's kind of specializing in it for counseling because they found themselves disassociating, losing interest in their families and their jobs, becoming even depressed or suicidal.

This whole kind of you are not a person thing, if it's taken in the wrong way or overemphasized, be quite destructive to life.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

There's a lot of, a lot we could say about situations like that.

I would say I'm inclined to think the person probably has a trauma history, probably needs to do a lot of emotion and shadow work, body work.

And a neo-Advaita teacher might say, "Who has a trauma history?

Who needs shadow work?" Yeah.

You're just reinforcing the sense of a doer if you get into that stuff.

Or even meditate.

Or even meditate.

Exactly.

Or do yoga.

practices, it increases the association as a practicer.

Yeah, yeah, I've had many people come to me that have spent maybe even like a decade or more as part of the, you know, Neo-Advaita community and I think sometimes these people can have a real genuine initial shift, but after find themselves in this place where they're being gaslit and they don't have the resources and there's a this kind of like helplessness because again like there's nobody there to do anything.

I hear from some of these people that come to me about the scene that they've been part of and just how bad it can be.

It can be absurd too.

I mean, it's like, "Please pass the salt.

Who wants the salt?" Yeah.

I heard a story the other day from Swami Sarvapriyananda about Sri Ramakrishna, who is the founder of Sarvapriyananda's lineage, who had a guru named Totapuri, I believe it was.

And so he He was with Totapuri and Totapuri supposedly had been enlightened for decades and Ramakrishna observed that he was still meditating a couple hours a day and he asked him, "Why, if you've been enlightened all this time?" And he said, "You see that brass pot there?" He said, "If I don't polish it every day, it's going to start getting tarnished." Basically, I just kind of polish the pot every day to keep it bright and perhaps get it brighter, I don't know.

So this kind of segues into some notes you sent me about working with a teacher or awakening Guide and you mentioned this guy who claimed to be fully awake and started teaching a few weeks after his awakening.

Well speaking of Sarva Priyananda, another thing I've heard him say, he's kind of one of my main teachers, is anybody who proclaims that they're enlightened is to be suspect.

What was that saying, "Those who know don't say and those who say don't know." So in any case, how would you define awakening or even the word enlightenment if you're comfortable with that word?

Let me start with awakening.

The way I see awakening is it's really kind of a paradigm shift in how you take yourself to be, how you take the world to be.

It's like a defining moment, but there's other things about it that one is like there's like the seeing, seeing that this has been overlooked, that what you're seeing is something that's always been the case, but somehow it's been missed.

I think the way that this can unfold can be quite different person to person, the way it's experienced.

For example, a heart opening, as opposed to the experience of "I am not my thoughts, I'm not the mind, I am this presence in which the body-mind are appearing, the world is appearing." The way I think of awakening now is a lot more nuanced, but I do think that it represents the biggest shift in a person's life after they're born, that there is something about that is so defining.

So that's maybe how I would say awakening is.

Enlightenment, I feel like that's such an antiquated term.

I don't really use it myself.

I don't use it either without qualifying it.

If you're going to say it, you got to say what you mean by it because there's a lot of misconceptions, I think.

Yeah, it suggests something in the future that's not here.

That's one thing.

And it suggests...

Finality?

Yeah, the finality, which it's just not like that in my experience.

Right.

Yeah, it's like, I don't know about that guy you were with for a couple years, but maybe he was implying finality, like, I'm awake, I'm enlightened, I'm done.

I can hang up my spurs or whatever.

And as St.

Teresa of Avila put it, it appears that God himself is on the journey.

- I love that.

- Yeah, let's say, so you said that you had this awakening on a Vipassana retreat, and then a few hours later, you had a heart awakening.

So you had two different awakenings in a single day, and that was decades ago now, maybe a couple of decades.

And so have you had other occurrences since then, which you would characterize as awakenings?

Yeah, yeah.

The most significant one after that initial awakening in 2001 was maybe a few months after I stopped meditating, so it was April of 2015.

You know, one of the things I would say that has kind of returned a number of times over my journey was, I don't want to call it like seeking energy per se, but it was kind of like something was like intensifying, there was some energy that was building.

So I could see that happening in the spring of 2015.

I was getting ready for bed one night when I just kind of like walked to the kitchen to get some water and suddenly it was like the first really big mystical experience that I had since that day in 2001.

That was really quite something because I felt like it sprang out, somehow it was invisible, yet I could see something about identity, layers of identity that had never fell away with that first shift or had come back and rebuilt in the years since.

I could see instantly how identity, whether it is an identity that we feel good about or an identity that we feel bad about, ultimately they're both bad, are both very limiting.

And identities is their nature of them to need a lot of maintenance.

But another thing about identity that I could see is that ultimately what that identity is functioning as is a way to distract you from the fear, the fear of the unknown.

Like who am I without that identity?

So it was something that was like really quite significant for me.

Was there fear associated with that particular awakening when you're going to the kitchen to get some water?

Was there a wave of fear or anything?

No, no.

I had this feeling of like intensification coming, but it kind of took me by surprise.

For some time after, it almost felt like I was covered with Teflon.

I could feel identity wanting to come back to reform, and it was almost like it could like sliding off.

And I felt like, oh, I definitely don't want that back, right?

And so define identity here.

Yeah, you know, it is, you know, layers of identity that we are taking ourself to be, right?

So like, you know, in my case, I've been a vegetarian my whole life.

I have, I think, progressive political values.

I think I'm a basically decent person.

There was like a lot of identity that was bound up with that.

Oh, yeah.

And I'm, you know, I was a good meditator, all of these things, right?

And I could see how...

Now you're a gun-toting fascist carnivore, right?

There we go.

Yeah.

No, you're not.

I could see that it was about the fear.

Like I wasn't feeling fear, but there was something about that that I could see.

There was something about the insight of it that I could recognize that the way it was functioning was to basically be a diversion so that I couldn't see the fear of not knowing who I was without it.

So when you had that insight, did you change any of your dietary or political orientations or did you not need to, you just kind of realized that those were superfluous or not your essential nature?

You know, it opened up a lot for me to really examine.

For example, my news consumption.

Becoming aware of how so much of the news that we're exposed to is really reinforcing division.

I could see the negativity in a whole new way.

If I think of myself as a person that is on the right side of issues, it is identity and it's buying into this idea, reinforcing this idea of duality.

I could see the mind coming again, but now it was seen where, okay, these familiar thought patterns just keep arising.

But now I could see that, oh yeah, you know what, I don't need to buy into that anymore.

Right, but did you change your opinions?

Like, do you think Canada should become the 51st U.S.

state now?

No.

No.

Aw, shucks.

Yeah, so, I mean, I'm just trying to get at is, is there anything wrong with having opinions, And do you need to change your opinions once you realize that they don't entirely define you?

Or could you undergo a significant shift in your orientation and not be defined by those opinions, but still, if someone asks you your opinion about food or politics or something, you're going to pretty much say the same thing.

Yeah, I would agree with that.

Let's say the preferences, perspective on things, more or less unchanged, but that attachment to the identity that I felt like that's defining who I am.

That's what was seen through.

Yeah.

I can relate to all that.

And if you do see through it in that way, then you just don't get so bent out of shape by encounters with people who see things differently.

I mean, I have a t-shirt that has the word paradox on it because I've used the word so many times and someone sent me one.

In fact, you like Nisargadatta.

Nisargadatta said that the ability to appreciate paradox and ambiguity is a sign of spiritual maturity.

Absolutely.

You know.

Yeah.

And yeah, go ahead.

Yeah, well, I would agree with that completely.

I don't think you're going to get very far with this if you're not comfortable with paradox.

Yeah, because the universe itself is paradoxical.

I mean, you know, light is both a particle and a wave.

So at a very fundamental level, the universe is paradoxical.

Yeah.

Okay, so we might have covered that point.

We can always loop back to it.

Let's talk a little bit more about working with a teacher or an awakening guide.

Because like you said in your opening paragraph here, that one regret you have is that you waited 15 years into your own awakening to find a teacher and work with them one-on-one.

And some people might think, "Yeah, I want to meet somebody." But I guess it could be a little bit like dating, you know, you don't just marry the first person you meet or date.

And so how do people discern or discriminate or decide, evaluate a potential teacher?

Yeah, great question.

I think, you know, discernment is key here.

I found Gary through watching interviews with you.

And I actually had sessions with a handful of people, other people that I'd seen on your show.

I always felt like I came away with something useful from, you know, a session with these people, but there was something about Gary that I really felt like, "Okay, I really trust him.

I really feel like this is going to be the person that's going to be able to help me." Yeah.

So, yeah, there was that.

And somebody else might say, "Oh, there was really something about Joe, you know, or Mary, that I really felt like that person was going to…" So, there's, you know, we have different affinities and, you know, Gary might not do it for everybody and somebody else might do it for somebody else.

But so there's that, obviously, as with anything in life, we all have our preferences.

But then there are perhaps also more objective or universal criteria by which teachers can be evaluated.

- Yeah, I think anybody that's out there teaching, we should be looking at them very closely in terms of standards for behavior, their speech, how they treat people.

I think that it's a huge, huge problem.

Issues of exploitation and abuse and manipulation, all kinds of shady things going on in the awakening space.

There's a problem with probably a lot of people who start teaching too soon and maybe they don't really realize that.

They have had maybe a a big initial awakening and don't really understand how much more is to come.

When people go through that initial shift, like it's, I don't know if you've seen this, Rick, but it's amazing when you're sometimes around people that have gone through, you know, recent big shift.

I mean, they can look, they can look pretty liberated, like, you know, it can be pretty impressive and they can even be quite charismatic the way they come across.

So, I, you know, see how easy it is for people to kind of like just maybe be drawn to someone and think, "Okay, that person looks pretty awake and I think they can help me." You know, I know when I went to Vipassana back in 2001, like I didn't set myself up as a teacher at any way, you know, at all.

But I know that, you know, when I came back from that, there were There were 11 or 12 people that quickly signed up for a 10-day retreat.

These were neighbors, they were people that my husband worked with, but people who knew me saw such a change, it was like, "Oh, I got to check this out." Yeah.

And that can, of course, happen at many stages of the game.

I remember I was just telling my friend Steve, whom you met earlier today, about an experience I had when I'd been meditating about six months, having been a high school dropout, getting arrested and doing all that crazy stuff.

And, you know, he was lying on the couch in the basement of our home crying because he was so unhappy.

And he looked at me and he said, "I don't know what you're doing, but I want to do it too." And then he went and learned to meditate and it helped him somewhat.

But the thing you say about charisma, people might want to watch an interview I did nearly 10 years ago now.

I should do another one with or Joan Sheever Pita Harrigan, and she's an expert in Kundalini video or Kundalini knowledge and has written a big, fat, comprehensive book about it.

And one of the things she says in that book and in that interview is that there's such a thing as a partial or deflected rising of Kundalini.

And there was also a lady I interviewed recently named Mary Shutan who talks something related to that where, and I think people listening kind of know what Kundalini is, but the Kundalini can rise and it can purify the various chakras as it encounters them, but it can also bypass them when they're only partially purified.

And it can rise to quite a high level and can get deflected off into some side channel instead of the sushumna, the main channel that leads to the thousand-petaled lotus at the top of the head.

And one can be charismatic, eloquent, radiating shakti, just glowing in the dark, perhaps even have siddhis and very much think that they are enlightened and also convince others that they are enlightened, and yet they are not.

They could still have a lot of gunk in the lower chakras which hasn't been purified and worked out, and it inevitably leads to serious problems.

they end up becoming sexual predators or financial predators or alcoholics or behaviorally abusive people in various ways, full of anger, various things.

And there have been some very famous teachers who fell prey to this and thousands of followers suffered some consequences.

That was a mouthful, but you're on board with all that?

- Yeah, absolutely.

- Yeah, so how does one know?

One thing I would say, and I'm speaking too much, but I'll get it back to you in a second is that if you're sitting there with a teacher, and incidentally I helped to establish an organization called the Association for Spiritual Integrity, and because this is such an important consideration in my mind, we have about 800 members now and about 60 member organizations, and we've spoken at Harvard Divinity School and Parliament of World Religions and stuff, but if a student is sitting there with a teacher and feels like something is off.

It doesn't mean you have to head for the exits right away, but don't ignore your impulse.

Don't feel like, "Okay, well, this guy is supposed to be enlightened and I'm not, so it seems like something strange is happening here, but what do I know?

I'm ignorant, so I'll just keep sitting here." Because if you do that, it can go farther and farther and farther off the rails, and you go off the rails with it without realizing how far off you've gone because it's incremental, it's gradual.

And you know that's how the way cults work.

We've all heard stories of very weird cults.

You know, a person wouldn't get like that overnight, but they can get like that incrementally under the influence of a teacher who is not really qualified.

Yeah.

You know, there's another issue that I want to speak about, and that is there's an issue of people with personality disorders who have a significant amount of awakening insight and from what I can see, one can have this idea that well surely awakening is going to resolve that but I don't see that to be the case.

And there's something about that type of personality disorder that they seem to be like really inclined to kind of get out there and start presenting themselves as a teacher.

They're often highly charismatic.

I would say anybody that is highly charismatic, I mean just in terms of life advice, I think it's good to be very cautious around anybody who is highly charismatic.

You know psychologists tell us like that, you know, is a thing that kind of is strongly associated with personality disorders.

But I think like there is this phenomena in the awakening world where it seems like we've got like a disproportionate number of people that are stepping into a teaching role that have personality disorders.

I read a book a few years ago, I wonder if you've read it called, I think it was called A Path With Heart.

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

Who wrote that?

Oh, Jack Kornfield.

No, no, no.

Am I actually giving the right title?

I think he did write A Path With Heart.

No, no, no.

I think I've got the wrong one.

Maybe it will come back to me, but A Heart Blown Open.

A Heart Blown Open.

Yeah, that's a fascinating book that really delves into this topic.

really interesting, I highly recommend it.

Yeah, so that's interesting.

I've heard that too, that you know, narcissism, charisma can be a symptom of narcissistic personality disorder.

And you can think of various political leaders who had a great deal of charisma, but were obviously screwed up in various ways.

Absolutely.

And spiritual teachers.

So that kind of begs the question of, you know, well, what is spiritual development really?

Is it just an awakening in consciousness, and you can be an awakened narcissist or an awakened sexual predator or awakened alcoholic or whatever?

Or is it more, as Ken Wilber would say, a holistic development of all your different lines of development, consciousness being only one of them?

Absolutely, I agree with that completely.

Like the way I see it is, shadow work I think is an integral part of the awakening process.

It's not something that is separate from the awakening process.

The shadow is something that's like we're seeing something about ourself, right?

Just like we've overlooked true nature, we've overlooked what's in the shadow, right?

So we're illuminating these parts of ourselves that we didn't want to see.

learning something about ourself, but we're also learning about humanity as well.

Right?

Like if I imagine, oh, you know, I'm not the type of person to ever get jealous, right?

I have this idea about myself.

I don't experience jealousy, right?

But then find myself in a situation like, oh my gosh, actually there's jealousy there, right?

I mean, that's a good example of shadow, right?

To realize, wow, I didn't see that about myself.

And then you can look and go, "Well, okay, like, what exactly happened?" You know, to really kind of like see what did I imagine was going to happen that provoked that, to really kind of like explore that.

But you're also seeing that, right, like how this plays out in humanity as well.

There's so many things like that.

R.

Is shadow work something one can do on one's own or does it require a therapist of some?

I think you can do a lot on your own, but it depends on the person and there may be things that can be done better, more efficiently with a therapist or with a guide, somebody who has skills.

I mean, there's so many different kinds of shadow work and I think emotion work and modalities and I think, you know, this is one of the things I feel is most exciting about the contemporary spiritual awakening scene is how much we have available, right, to be able to work in this area.

And I think it's probably going to get better, you know, over the years to come.

We're going to see more things come along.

R.

Yeah.

I think for some people it can help to be married or to have close friends, at least.

One problem with some spiritual teachers is they don't really have any close friends other than their students.

And that's usually not a good formula for getting critical feedback.

Absolutely.

I remember Gary Weber saying to me that he thought that it was probably the case that there were people out there that assumed that they were very highly realized, but they lived alone.

And he said if you took them out of their living situation and put them in a family situation or a community, that he said their awakening would probably quickly fall apart.

- Yep, yeah, which speaks to the importance of integration and stabilization.

Doesn't mean that you have to start going to bars and discos and doing all kinds of crazy stuff, but which may really not be conducive to spiritual evolution for almost anybody, but being able to function normally in everyday circumstances, such as a job or relationship or whatever, It's not always easy to learn how to do that, and sometimes people might shy away from it because it's not easy, but sometimes it's good to just sort of grit your teeth and learn how to do it, and you find after a while that you have integrated, you've adjusted.

- There's aspects to identity that really can only come into view when we're in relationship.

With my husband, my husband actually started the awakening process years before me, and it's actually worked out really well that I think that we have a relationship in which we really were able to kind of like point things out in a way that the other person could hear most of the time.

I remember a couple of times going into the bedroom and shutting the door and holding it and he knocking and saying, "But you told me to tell you." - The Scottish poet Robert Burns has a line where he says, "Would some God the gift he give us to see ourselves as others see us." - That's great.

He did it in Gaelic or something because he couldn't understand it, but that's the translation.

So one thing we have in the Association for Spiritual Integrity is we have these peer groups which people, it's kind of coordinated by time zone or whatever and done online, but little groups of four or so where people can meet once a month and interact and get personal feedback and so on.

That's proving to be helpful.

We're also starting more of an initiative for students because so far the whole orientation or emphasis has been on helping teachers align with ethical values.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Great project.

Yeah.

So like what you just said, shadow work requires turning toward long-avoided aspects of oneself and deeply distrusted emotions.

It's, you know, shame, guilt, fear, grief.

So it's not something that one would naturally gravitate toward because it's uncomfortable, one naturally gravitates away from it.

Yeah.

So in my experience, after I had that initial shift in 2001, what I found was happening, I think that post awakening, we become, the system starts doing a purging, right?

And for me on retreats, I mean, the retreats were really valuable in the sense that a lot of that purging process took place, I had loads of shame, guilt, rage, grief, you name it, you know, come up many, many times.

But, and I would say, you know, in retrospect, like I didn't really understand it.

I think it would have benefited from somebody actually telling me, you know, giving me more assurance that this is all normal, and you're not, there's no regression here.

I didn't understand that.

probably they didn't offer that on the retreat.

It was like, "Okay, keep meditating.

You've got to put in your 10 hours today." And there was no discussion about this, right?

Yeah, that's right.

There's not really much discussion in Vipassana.

You're really on your own in a lot of ways.

A lot of it is really about the technique.

Just stay with the technique.

The idea there is that the technique will resolve everything, more or less.

Yeah.

Another thing that concerns me about that is that a relative newbie to meditation goes on a retreat and all of a sudden they're meditating 10 hours a day, day in and day out, and that has not gone well for some people.

There's a woman named Willoughby Britton down at Brown University who runs something called Cheetah House, and it basically deals with train wrecks, people who've had serious problems as a result of their spiritual practice.

- Yeah, so it's a really intensive thing to submit yourself to.

One thing I will say about the Gwenk retreats that I am grateful for.

It really set me up for that initial awakening.

I think you talked to Geoffrey Martin some years ago and he did some research on awakening and what he saw is that of all the different approaches that people were using at the time they had awakening, it was the Gwenk of the Passen Retreats that came out of the top of the list.

So there is something about that that can really set a person up for that initial shift, but almost hesitate to say this, but I would really be hard-pressed to recommend going to Vipassana beyond a few retreats.

That's my perspective on it now.

Yeah.

And of course, there are exceptions to every generality, but that might be a good general prescription.

And you actually, it wasn't Vipassana, but you actually did have some years of meditation under your belt at that point.

I think that helps.

You mentioned in your notes someone named Kevin Shanalek.

What's his deal?

Yeah, you haven't heard of him?

No.

No?

Oh, really?

He would be good for you to interview.

So yeah, he's a really interesting fellow.

He's an engineer who, as far as I know, was working for the EPA.

I don't know if he's still working for the EPA at this point, but I think he was like some part of some, he took ordination in, what's it, something like the order of the Western, the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order or something like that, and was part of that community for many years.

And then I think he went through an awakening with Liberation Unleashed, and really interesting guy.

So he's an engineer and he studied some of the, I think the Pali Canon, looking at the texts that they had on something called the ten fetters, the Buddhist ten fetters.

And it's pretty interesting what he came up with in terms of coming up with what I would would say it's like a really amazing, elegant approach that has helped a lot of people be able to access deeper stages of awakening.

Yeah, I think it's a pretty interesting contribution.

Not everybody takes to it, but I'm a fan.

I feel like it's an interesting approach that can be helpful.

Do you think that anyone ever reaches a point at which they've healed or purged all of their shadows and traumas and all that buried stuff, or do you think it's a…purification and healing is a lifelong process?

Yeah, I think it's a lifelong process.

The latter?

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, I actually had an experience two years ago where I felt like I encountered shadow material from my ancestors.

Ah, interesting.

Yeah.

I mean, a number of traditions do talk about that.

they say that we come in with ancestral karma or whatever it is and need to work through it and that actually in working through it, we help to liberate our ancestors.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It was a very interesting, very intense and very painful experience actually.

- Wow.

I know that Thomas Hubel, excuse me, who I've interviewed a couple of times has this whole process where he's trying to use groups of people to help dissolve the trauma between entire cultures, such as the Jews and the Israelis and the Germans.

He's German, his wife is Israeli.

And that's a whole topic for conversation is trauma in collective consciousness and how it could give rise to war and other conflicts and what we can do to neutralize it.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a huge topic.

- Yeah.

A question came in, let me ask this question, it might be a bit of a segue, but a couple of questions came in.

One is, this one's from Sterling Taylor in Mesa, Arizona.

Chris, you've spoken about motivation and acting from clarity, what if, quote, not doing much feels aligned in the moment and has felt that way for years, even when one has plenty of free time.

How can one tell genuine alignment from subtle avoidance, perhaps using the Sedona method, especially when they want to start an online business or move across the country?

Do you get that question?

- Yep, yep.

- Okay, good, I'll let you go for it.

I'm trying to interpret it, but go for it.

- Yeah, so yeah, I mean, it's something that a lot of people kind of get all tangled up in.

say reactivity can hide itself in avoidance, okay?

But to discern that, discern that from, okay, I actually am content with the way things are.

You know, you have to really, let's say, be clear on what it is that you want, right?

What does your heart really want?

And if you're experiencing a conflict, "Okay, I want to start an online business, but I can't seem to get myself to do certain tasks that would need to be done." There, I think, is an example of how I would put in the category of reactivity, like procrastination.

It's essentially like, "I don't want to feel the discomfort that might arise if I do this task, so I will avoid doing it." I'm a fan Sedona Method.

Gary introduced me to Sedona Method back in 2016 and probably for a couple of years, you know, I did it pretty regularly.

It was really useful for me.

I think you interviewed Hale Dwoskin at one point.

That's right.

I was trying to think of his name.

Hale, yes I did.

I listened to quite a few of his talks before that.

There's a kind of a phase one that goes through where, you know, a shift from "I am the doer" to "Hey, Brahman is the charioteer, I'm in the back seat, nature is doing everything." And you can kind of be wobbling on the fence for quite a while between those two.

Individual volition versus nature, you know, the gunas of nature being the actual agents of action.

There's a transition you go through where you kind of vacillate between those perspectives and it can lead to periods of passivity or lack of motivation I think because you're kind of waiting for nature to carry the ball for you.

So I think for a lot of people post awakening they're going to go through periods where maybe they can see that there is no sense of agency and then other times it's going to feel like it's there.

It will be oscillating like that.

I think this whole area about non-doership, actually I'm seeing less people kind of fixating on it now than maybe a couple of years ago, where people would really kind of get up in their head about it.

But I think the question, actually the whole thing tends to sort itself out as awakening progresses and it really kind of comes down to just seeing with more clarity how things are actually happening.

The difference between the layer of thought versus what the body is actually doing.

Gary helped me a lot with that.

He told me, he says, "Look, you can make this like a practice for a while where you just, instead of looking for the doer, right, he said, "Notice the absence of doership.

Notice the absence of doership, that things are just happening." Right?

And for me, that was super helpful.

And he said, like, you can start by just watching how the body is just going to move.

Like, you get up out of bed and you go to the kitchen, you make coffee.

When you're sitting and you're get thirsty, the body just gets up and goes to get water, right?

We don't need the thought to say, "I need to go get a glass of water." And a lot of the things that we do are really coming from an instinctual level, right?

Like, so, you know, example, like you're in the kitchen and you go, you know, into the living room, sit down, and a few minutes later you think, "Well, wait a second, maybe I left a burner on it.

I need to get up and go check." But that impulse to get up and go check was coming, that was what was getting up with a chair, but the mind claims that, "Oh, that's what's keeping me from getting the buzz burned out." Rick: Yeah, but then let's say this fellow from MESA or person from MESA wants to start an online business.

Okay, so maybe they need to write a business plan, they need to build a website, they might need to get a bank loan, they might need to get some training, hire an employee.

All that stuff is not necessarily just seedy-your-pants intuition automatically happening.

you might teach the think and plan and hire a consultant and do a bunch of stuff, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So on a related point, there's a verse in the Gita which says, "Yoga is skill in action." And I was thinking during this conversation that perhaps one good litmus test or criteria for the effectiveness of spiritual practice is that not only does it not detract from your effectiveness in action and make you, you know, spacey or less efficient or something.

Although that might, you might go through momentary phases, but on the whole, it should actually make you more dynamic, more skillful.

Yeah.

That, that's been my experience.

I actually found myself actually less avoidant, less tending to procrastinate.

It felt like a lot of energy was just getting freed up.

Energy, I was going to say.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Interesting.

I'm going to go on to another question here.

is from, again, Sterling Taylor.

"How do we shift the way we see the world when external events feel frightening or overwhelming?

I don't follow the news, yet I still absorb pieces about global instability, rising costs, and systems that seem stacked against most people.

From a non-dual perspective, how do we relate to these narratives without collapsing into fear or cynicism?" Yeah, see, spiritual awakening doesn't let you off the hook here.

I think that, you know, one of the things is that you can see the problems in the world, but there's not anything meaningful that you can do other than maybe donate money to causes or volunteer work or vote or these kind of things.

If we become fixated on it, that's a whole other thing.

And I think the reality is probably a lot of people that are getting fixated on what's going on out there would probably be better off turning their attention and looking at themselves.

Where do they need to do some shadow work on themselves?

Yeah, I would agree with that.

But at the same time, I don't think it's unspiritual to be following political events or voting or being passionate about certain principles or certain initiatives that the government should follow and things like that.

Some act that way, they don't want to have anything to do with it.

But there have been some very spiritual people who have been very politically engaged such as Mahatma Gandhi or Desmond Tutu or people like that.

Absolutely.

And I think it's great that we have people like that in the world who step into these leadership roles.

I think even in the political world today, some of the global leaders from my perspective are really interesting, decent people.

Yeah, there's another question.

Let's see if it's from somebody other than Sterling.

Yeah, it's from John Weakley.

All the great spiritual traditions speak of desirelessness.

In a world that seems to be the manifestation of desire, this seems to be the gold standard of right understanding.

Could you give some further insight into desirelessness?

Wow, that's a huge topic.

I know enough about the ancient texts that they would talk about avoid pleasure because it will cost you contentment.

And I think what we know now about, let's say, the dopamine reward system is that if we're always stimulating those responses in the brain, what ends up happening is it increases restlessness and it doesn't lead to satisfaction.

And I think we're in an environment now that is just so hyper-stimulating that I think this is a big challenge for people on a spiritual path now.

But part of this, I think, is really looking at one's tendency to indulge in all kinds of maybe mini addictions, for example, and see what's really underneath that.

Again, this comes back to reactivity and avoidance.

Yeah, I have an analogy.

Let's say you only have $10 to your name.

You really have a desire for more money.

And then you lose $5.

And then now you only have $5.

You know, that's a big downer.

And somebody gives you a $20.

Oh, that's a huge boost.

You're kind of rocked this way and that because you have so little to begin with.

But let's say you're a multimillionaire and you lose $1,000 here, gain $1,000 there.

It hardly has any impact because you have this foundation.

So, that's analogous to the idea of inner fulfillment or contentment, which if it becomes full and stable enough, the ups and downs and gains and losses of relative life just don't toss you about the way they do if you're really unfulfilled inside.

Okay, any comments on that?

Yeah.

Well, as a guide working with people, I find like the area of reactivity is one of the key things that most people would do well to really look at in themselves.

And what we don't realize is how much impact it's having on consciousness.

You know, that tendency to kind of get caught up in our head, right, with useless thinking, a lot of that is related to reactivity.

And reactivity is related to addictions, avoidance, people pleasing, passive aggressive behavior, many ways it manifests.

By addressing reactivity and understanding what's in it for you to work on reactivity, I often say to people, if you understood what you'll gain from working on reactivity, you would waste no time because it is going to have such an impact on everything else, like your capacity to be able to kind of like continue this awakening process to keep it unfolding.

What gets in the way of a lot of people is reactivity.

Yeah.

So by reactivity, do you mean a kind of a habitual conditioned way of behavior?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, you know, I mean, in spiritual teachings, there's the understanding of the action-impression-desire cycle.

You perform an action or have an experience, it creates an impression, that impression gives rise to a future desire which spurs an additional action or additional experience and then you just kind of condition yourself deeper and deeper into that cycle.

I mean one of the talking points that you wanted to discuss is the nervous system and awakening.

It's my understanding that any experience a person has has a corresponding neurophysiological correlate and part of the whole process of spiritual development is a neurophysiological transformation as well as a consciousness transformation.

So you're actually on a neurophysiological level you're working out those deep impressions that keep you bound to that cycle.

Yeah, yeah, this is a huge, huge area.

One of the key insights for me was to realize how significant the nervous system is in terms of how we feel moment to moment.

I knew nothing about this whole topic until maybe 2015, 2016.

But what I would say is that the vast majority of humanity beyond early childhood are walking around in a chronic survival-based fear response.

And that includes people in the awakening community as well.

This is something that we need to understand how much impact that is having and how that is impacting the awakening process.

So the way I see it is that the awakening process is, it has its own divine intelligence.

Once that process gets going in a person, and assuming that that person's life in this such that it's making sense for that process to continue.

Sometimes it's a matter of timing, like somebody might go through an initial awakening, but be about to enter grad school, and it's just not the time for them to be going all in on their spiritual path.

Maybe once they've got their education out of the way, they can come back to this.

But the nervous system, if we understand, if we learn a little bit about this and are able to look at ourselves through the lens of the nervous system, it can really help us to understand ourselves a whole lot better.

And what we need to do is to get that nervous system into a place of safety.

In a place of safety, you can say that a lot of the awakening process has the capacity to kind of keep going on its own.

But while we're in that survival-based fear response, well, it's kind of like our energies are being diverted, right?

Where's the danger?

But it's often at a level like we don't even consciously know about.

So if I, you know, ask people, "Are you aware of having fear or anxiety, you know, or having a nervous system that's activated?" Often people aren't consciously aware of that.

subliminal or it's unconscious.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is not quite directly to the point you're making but you mentioned maybe it's if you're undertaking it you know your education it might not be a good time to focus on your spiritual practice.

I would say it's a matter of proportion.

You know it's not a good time to meditate 10 hours a day but it might be a good time to meditate you know 20 minutes or 30 minutes twice a day or something.

It could help you with your studies.

It could keep you away from taking drugs or whatever that would otherwise damage your educational pursuit.

Sure.

I could definitely agree with that.

Been there, done that.

Okay.

Another question came in.

This is from Lissetta Tripodi in Exeter, UK.

You mentioned having a deep inner stillness or inner silence after that initial shift and that you spent the next years trying to revisit that place.

Have you refound that inner stillness?

Yes.

good.

And what was it that caused you to re-find it?

I would say for me, the top thing, I would say, was having discovered something called TRE back in 2015.

TRE stands for trauma release exercises.

As far as I know, Rick, I don't think anybody's ever mentioned it on your show.

Am I right?

Well, they might have because I'm familiar with it, but I'd have to look it up.

There's an index you can look things up on that gap.

In fact, let me just make a plug for that.

a thing called video content search.

And if you just type TRE into that, it'll immediately show you a list of any time TRE has been mentioned in any interview.

And if you click on that little listing, it will immediately take you to the video and you can start watching it from the point where it was mentioned.

So I don't know if people know about that feature, but it's cool.

Anyway, so TRE, so tell us about it.

Yeah, so it stands for trauma releasing exercises.

It was developed by a trauma expert named Dr.

David Berselli, and he was, he had a PhD in social work, but was working in the Middle East, working with people in places that were experiencing civil war, natural disasters, things like that.

So he was going, he was actually part of the Maryknoll Order from the US, and going as like a mental health professional.

That's like a Catholic.

Yeah, it's a Catholic order.

Charitable organization or something, yeah.

So they weren't going to convert people, but they were going to really provide psychological relief services, you know, for very vulnerable populations.

So he was in Lebanon, I believe, this probably goes back 25, maybe 30 years ago, and he was, I think it was like in an embassy building one day, and they were having a civil war, so some heavy fighting broke out.

Everybody went into the basement that was being used as a bomb shelter.

So I think there were about two dozen people, and maybe half of them were adults and the others were older kids, younger kids, and some infants.

So everybody sat down on the floor around the perimeter of the room, back against the wall, their legs stretched out, and the adults took the infants and the small kids in their lap, and there they were for several hours as this building was getting struck with mortar shells.

So the thing about a mortar shell is it doesn't take out a building, but it can punch a hole through a brick wall.

And you can imagine how terrifying that might be, right?

The shaking building and the sound and everything.

And so they were there for several hours and David had this opportunity to kind of like see this whole room full of people, what was happening.

And he said it It was really interesting to him to observe how the older kids, like let's say 7, 8, 9 and up, and the adults would curl their body, like in a kind of contract in a fetal position, folding over their legs every time a mortar shell hit the building.

But the younger kids and infants were just shaking.

And he saw this repeatedly over several hours, which was really interesting to him.

He had, by the way, quite an extensive background in one of the earlier forms of body-based psychotherapies called bioenergetics that was developed by a guy named Alexander Lowen, Dr.

Alexander Lowen.

So he had this background, but so, I mean, the body was already quite interesting to him.

But seeing this difference, and then after the bombing stopped, what he noticed is that the infants and the young children recovered rather quickly, but the the older kids and the adults that had contracted their body showed signs of dissociation and they were having a tougher time.

And there was that incident, that was the first one, but there were a couple of other incidents that really got him thinking.

And you know, he had this idea, part of his work was working with people with PTSD.

And he started to have this idea that I wonder if I can figure out a way to get these people with PTSD to access this shaking, when they're not in danger, I wonder if we can do something to help them.

This was quite a bold idea, because if we go back to that point in time, the thing was is that if somebody had PTSD, it was really considered a pretty much hopeless situation.

That there wasn't medication, there wasn't psychotherapies, there really wasn't much you could do.

And often these people would be told, "Really sorry, this is really tragic, you're probably going to lose a decade or two at least of your life because of this.

So really devastating situation and that really frustrated David a lot.

So he started practicing on himself to see is there some way I can figure out how to access this shaking and then he did and he started to show it to some people with PTSD and what he saw was that there were cases of people even with severe PTSD that made a beautiful recovery.

And so that was kind of like the origins of this.

And, you know, very quickly, you know, it started to be adopted by military agencies around the world.

One of the things I heard is that in the early days, it was, believe it or not, military agencies in ayahuasca communities in South America that were the quickest to get interested in this.

Interesting.

David, he kind of attracted some interesting people, you know, that, you know, started to volunteer with him.

These are often like very educated people, maybe doctors or psychiatrists and so on, that said, "I will use my holidays, you know, I will go with you." And he would go to places that were experiencing civil war or natural disasters and then start teaching this to like 300, 400, 500 people at a time.

And, you know, it's, you know, what came to be seen about it was that it is potential to help people extend it far beyond PTSD.

And today it's, I don't know if I could say it's mainstream, but it's definitely moved in that direction.

I've heard from many people from Europe or Canada, all over the world, how it's being used in hospitals or mental health clinics or kids with ADHD, all sorts of things.

So anyway, the thing is that I found myself finding out about this thing called TRE and wasn't really thinking that it was something I needed.

I didn't think of myself as a person with trauma, and yet it was suggested I try it.

And the first time I did it, I didn't know what to make of it.

But the second time I tried it, I thought, "Oh, I just instinctively knew there's something about this that my body needs, and I don't know where this is going, but I'm going to continue with this for a while.

Now, one thing I had been struggling with my whole life was a situation called TMJ, which is a situation where you've got an excessive amount of tension in the jaw.

And it was really bad.

It was particularly severe.

My dentist told me I had damaged my teeth quite a bit, grinding them at night, and I was looking at getting a very expensive procedure that was going to cost me $5,000 to some sort of new treatment that was coming out.

And it was just like roughly at that time that I heard about TRE, and in two weeks it was gone.

It was completely gone.

And not only that, like a lot of tension I had in the neck and the upper body went along with it.

And that was quite an eye opener because After the awakening, I think what happened, I also had some energetic stuff, Kundalini stuff that happened with that initial shift, and I think energetically I was getting more and more, let's say, messed up.

So much of the time that I'd been doing Vipassana meditation, I had been really trying to have equanimity around this TMJ, but if anything, it was getting worse rather than getting better.

And that was just the beginning.

In two weeks, that was gone.

When you did it, did you actually somehow shake?

It somehow gets you shaking around?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So basically what TRE is, is really just a few exercises that you do that will help you access what's called a neurogenic tremor.

So this is a, it's apparently it's like not just one, but maybe a few complex pathways that go between the brain and down the spinal column to the base of the spinal column.

This is an ancient reflex that we have as part of the autonomic nervous system that branch for fight-flight-freeze.

And that shaking mechanism is something that we're born with.

We actually see babies in utero that are engaging this tremor reflex.

We see it in newborns, we see it in babies and young kids.

And kids will typically start to suppress this out when they go to school, you know, they learn to suppress out crying, but it's really how our nervous system helps us to downregulate after we've had like a lot of, you know, stress hormones released in the system.

And I mean, it's, you know, very efficient at clearing what we call, you know, chronic tension or energetic blockages.

Okay, let me put it this way, the, our contemporary understanding of trauma is that it's not like a memory that we need to pull up and retrieve and that that's how we heal from trauma.

The understanding now is that trauma essentially lives in the body as chronic tension.

So let's imagine you're a small child and I don't know what could happen.

Let's say mommy and daddy have a big fight, okay?

And it's just too much for the child to deal with this.

So they go into, maybe the stress hormones come up and they dissociate, like this is unbearable.

So they dissociate from their experience.

So we could say that part of that emotion that got stirred up there just becomes stored somewhere in the body and it gets stored as tension.

But there's an additional thing too, where even if we have something like a fall off a bike, fall out of a tree, things like that.

The body has taken some impact.

The body can go into this response later where it's just contracting up in a habitual way.

It's like the body has a mind of its own and is anticipating future trouble.

So I was thinking recently about Ajah Shanti, who went through this really horrible situation for 15 years.

Apparently he had been taking this over-the-counter antihistamine or allergy medication and ended up with this excruciatingly painful bladder condition that went on for 15 years not knowing that it was caused by this medication.

A couple things he said, his background as an athlete, and I'm sure the depth of his realization, he was able to teach us brilliantly as he was with that.

But what happened is when he finally realized what happened, there was like this brief relief where it was like, "Oh, wow, okay, that's great.

You know, the pain is gone." But then what happened is the body went into this, you know, like fear response, like as if it was expecting this to come back.

Right?

And it's not something that you can just talk yourself out of and say, "Oh no, the danger's past." It's not like that.

Right?

So there is this aspect that if we've been through something really overwhelming, it can be surgery, it can be a car accident, you know, it can be emotional in nature, all kinds of things, that there's that aspect where the body can kind of go into this, they use the word armoring, where it will just kind of go into this contraction, right, as if it's like anticipating future trouble.

But when we're going into this, you know, habituated fear response, what's happening is it's also getting us out of, you could say like that's, there's a term for this called ventral vagal, which is like a feeling of safety, feeling of like I can be calm and safe in my environment, there's no danger here, to up into what's called sympathetic activation where we've got stress hormones that are released.

And this can become very, very difficult for us to be able to navigate.

You know, it's not something like meditation, or just talking yourself through it is going to resolve it.

This is where like body-based practices can be a huge help.

Yeah.

You mentioned in your notes that TREE is a simple, free, self-directed method that a person can do.

So I'm sure there's a website about it.

Incidentally, a friend named, who coincidentally is named TREE, T-R-E-E, whom I've interviewed twice and lives in Australia, discuss this in both of my interviews with her, so people could look that up also.

Yeah, I'm acquainted with Tree.

She's lovely.

Oh, good.

Okay.

More questions have come in.

Let's see here.

Can I say one more thing about this?

Yeah, sure.

Absolutely.

Because somebody asked about the inner silence.

So what I want to say about that...

So you're saying the TRE reestablished it or something?

Yeah.

So what I would say about that is what I found, and now this wasn't something that happened in a matter of weeks or even in a few months.

But from the very beginning, when I did TRE, probably like in the first few sessions, something that I noticed when I got up off of my yoga mat or whatever that I was doing this on, I would do maybe like 15 minutes or 20 minutes of this, the spontaneous shaking.

So once you get into the shaking, you're not doing anything.

Your body is just tremoring by itself.

And it's called trauma releasing exercise.

how this begins to happen for you or should people just look it up?

Okay, yeah, you have to look it up.

But I could say, maybe think of it like this, like we can kind of fake a yawn, right?

We can get into it and then yawning will just happen, right?

So this tremor is...

You can fake a shake.

It's not exactly like that, but kind of like we can get ourself into that natural shaking.

And once we get into it, like it's like the body knows what to do from there.

So we'll just, the tremors will just like seek out where there's contraction and then it will shake and then what's happening is it's dissolving those areas of contraction, doesn't dissolve it all at once, that wouldn't even be good, it would be probably destabilizing if it did that, but a lot of people might do something like 15 minutes a day, you know, a few days a week or something like that.

I did it probably most days of the week for a couple of years and from almost like the beginning, and this is something that I know is true for most people is that even after the very first time you do it, you will probably notice that your mind is considerably quieter after doing it, which is showing you how getting out of this, you know, chronic fear-based, you know, stress response and down into safety, which is like called dental bagel, has an immediate impact on consciousness.

So this was really intriguing to me and I continued with it and I would say it took maybe about two years but after two years I had access to very effortless silence.

You know what kriyas are, right?

Yeah, a little bit.

This kind of reminds me of kriyas.

Kriyas are movements that spontaneously can happen as a result of kundalini or various other energetic things going on in the body.

can shake and gesticulate and go through various motions.

Yeah, I'm not sure it's the same pathway though to tell you the truth because you know I've had some of that myself on retreat years ago, I don't anymore.

So I've had that, I've seen it, I've experienced it, but I would say in my experience neurogenic tremors are, it's different, it's kind of going more into the core.

Okay, good.

Okay, getting a lot of questions today, this is good.

Karen McBride wants to know, "Do you see value in a somatic practice with awakening?

If so, what do you recommend?" Yeah, I'm a big fan of somatic practices.

I think probably most people would benefit from including some somatic practices as part of their overall, whatever their spiritual practices are.

Explain what they are.

Yeah, I mean, we could think of even like things like yoga, tai chi, qigong as part of that, but I would put also, I would put breathwork into that category as well.

TRE, we have other approaches that are interesting, like I'll mention like Hannah's Somatics has been around for a few decades, there's stuff on YouTube about that.

There's something that I've just recently become aware of called fascial maneuvers, which the person who trained me in TRE told me about and I think that that's interesting.

So if we think about like probably about 70% of the population has a lot of freeze, you know, in their whole abdominal, chest, solar plexus area.

And that freeze has come about because that person has gone through a lot of stressful life events, and the body has gotten into this contraction.

And when you're in that kind of a contracted state, if you're serious about awakening, this is something that would be well worth it for you to look at that and maybe try some different things, see what resonates with you, what feels interesting to you.

You're only going to do something if you find it interesting, right?

And there's some modalities like are hands-on, you have to go find a therapist.

Sometimes there's some really talented therapists that can do hands-on body stuff.

You know, I remember once meeting somebody who was acquainted with Eckhart Tolle before he became really famous.

And they told me that, you know, in the early days, Eckhart Tolle was, he came across as pretty ungrounded.

And he ended up going around to a lot of body workers for 10 years.

And- After his awakening?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Interesting.

Yeah, I mean, he confesses in The Power of Now that he just sat on a park bench for a couple years after his awakening.

He was pretty ungrounded.

You know, in the East, like, a lot of these traditions had these body-based movement practices.

Yeah, like you just mentioned yoga and all those things.

And here we are, we've brought these, you know, powerful practices to the West.

And in the West, you know, as a culture, we just tend to be more in our head anyway, right?

And I think this has been an issue.

Gary really saw it this way too, that there's like this imbalance where we focus really heavily on meditation and inquiry, but we're ignoring the body.

But you cannot really separate, oh, the body from consciousness.

And one of the things I'll say about this, that, I mean it really became obvious to me, is that the way we talk about dissociation, like when you talked about dissociation earlier, like that kind of dissociation that you were speaking of is what psychologists would call like a pathological level of dissociation.

But I would say like there's another form of dissociation that is virtually everybody has this more subtle tendency to dissociate virtually all the time.

And that's well, that disperses well into the awakening process.

And so we have to understand like, why, what is happening here?

You've had the clear insight, and yet the tendency to kind of get back up into your head lost in thought, lost in narratives, right?

It's like, you know, there's feeling of helplessness, Well, I don't know what to do about it, right?

But a lot of this mental agitation is arising because your nervous system is activated and because you have stuff that's actually happening at the bodily level.

Yeah.

I often think about how much stress there is in the world, especially among certain populations like the military, which has a very high suicide rate, and homeless people or the people in Gaza or Ukraine.

all those people who are under bombardment day and night, and the children and all, and what kind of stress they're incurring and going to grow up with, and you think, "Geez, how can whole populations like this be cured of such trauma?" Yeah.

Well, you know, I think it is also true that humanity, we have a lot of resilience.

We have, you know, we really do have, I believe, more capacity to heal from trauma than we might think.

Yeah, it just needs to be widely applied.

A relatively small percentage of the human population is enjoying these days, like the spiritual practices you've been doing and the healing modalities you've been using and so on.

But if those could somehow be mainstreamed more so that they were in education and various forms of social work and therapy and so on, I think huge changes could be affected in society.

I agree.

It's 10 years since I stumbled upon TRE.

I remember when I first discovered it thinking, I don't know why I haven't heard about this, why everybody isn't talking about it, especially since it's free, right?

I mean, you can find a facilitator and that can be valuable, you know, to do a few sessions.

But, you know, it's really about, this is really DIY and in some ways, I would say, you can be a better therapist for yourself in this way than anybody else could.

If I look up TRE, will it be obvious to me what the main website you should go to is to learn it?

Yeah.

Otherwise, send it to me because I'll put it on your BatGap page to make sure because people are going to want to look it up and want to make sure you find the right thing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think it really deserves to be better known in the awakening community.

I'm hearing from people that their Zen teacher told them about it several years ago.

It's making inroads.

All right.

Here's another question.

This is from Ivan Dimitrov in Bulgaria.

As far as I understand, the logic behind the soul incarnating in a body is to experience the limitation and hardships of having a body, which renders the urge to transcend that limitation as counterproductive selfishness, a cop-out from the task at hand.

Aha, that's interesting.

In other words, he's kind of saying, "Hey, we're here to suffer," and the desire to get out of suffering is a kind of counterproductive selfishness, I think.

Sounds like what he's saying.

I would disagree.

What would you say about that?

Yeah.

Well, I think the suffering is here to help.

Yeah.

And it's not like we're here to suffer and shouldn't want to get out of it.

It's like the suffering is telling us something that needs attention.

- Yeah, yeah.

I think it was like a passage in talks with Ramana Maharshi where somebody comes to Ramana and says, "If there is a God, why doesn't he send help for all the suffering in the world?" - Yeah.

- To which Ramana replied, "The suffering is the help." - Yeah, good point.

As well as people like Ramana are the help.

I mean, it's like, the help is there.

Yeah.

But, yeah, I mean, and it's not like you want to say to somebody who has cancer or something, "It's your karma.

It's supposed to have happened." And it's teaching you a lesson or something like that.

It can be kind of heartless, the way people sometimes use these concepts.

But on the other hand, I mean, in my own case, I was behaving in ways that were causing me a lot of unhappiness when I was a teenager.

And I eventually found spirituality and began to experience, began to feel a lot better in every way, and life got better and better.

If I had kind of been content with my life as it was, it wouldn't have been a very long life I don't think.

And I kind of took off like a shot because I think of the intensity of my life up to that point.

So in a way I could say that the suffering gave me a really good kick in the pants to try to live differently and repair whatever damage had been inflicted on my nervous system.

Sure, yeah.

I mean, I think a lot of people find their way to the spiritual path because of suffering in some form, and there is the longing for truth, but there's also the longing to be free of the suffering.

Yeah.

There's a great story of, I think it was again, Sri Ramakrishna, it could have been Ramana, but I think it was Sri Ramakrishna, where he was dying of throat cancer and apparently suffering a lot.

And some guy came to see him and he said, "Sir, everyone says you're suffering so much, but I see that you are in bliss." And Sri Ramakrishna said, "Aha, the rascal has found me out." [Laughter] That's great.

[Laughter] Which illustrates a nice point, which is that his body was suffering, no doubt.

He was aware of the pain, but he was established at a level of experience which transcended that.

And the same might even be said for Christ on the cross, that he could have actually been in a state of inner bliss despite the outer agony that his body was experiencing.

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

So one chapter in your whole spiritual journey was psychedelics.

And it was kind of a surprise to you in a way because you probably were at a stage where you wouldn't have expected to go that route, but you did.

You mentioned your son was having trouble with drugs and so in an attempt to help him, you did a little exploration and I thought it was interesting.

Do you want to talk about that a little bit?

Yeah, so yeah, I ended up exploring psychedelics myself in, this was, I think it was like end of 2016.

And yeah, this was really, I don't think this would have happened if it hadn't been for our son who had been struggling with a pretty bad crack cocaine addiction for several years and had been in and out of rehab, had been hospitalized a couple of times, even in the ICU on life support at one point for six days.

It was a really, really horrendous situation and nothing seemed to be working.

I was really kind of coming to terms with, I don't know if this kid is going to make it.

It didn't seem like he was able to be able to get any control.

And then I heard about Ibogaine and told him about it and said we'd be happy to arrange it for him, pay the cost and everything.

But I felt obliged to kind of really tell him as much as I could about it.

And when I showed him information about it, he really got scared and I totally got it because when I read the accounts and saw videos of people talking about it, I mean people were saying things, I think this is overblown, but people were saying like this is like a hundred times stronger than LSD or that's overblown.

He takes ibogaine recreationally.

I can tell you that, like this is not a party drug.

Anyway, he got scared and then I thought, oh, I've blown it.

And I thought the only way I can fix this now is for me to go and do it and show him that it's doable.

If mom can do it, then surely you can do it.

So ended up going to Mexico.

I found a really good place.

I think it was kind of like, almost like a mini John Hopkins in Mexico.

It was a research facility, really wonderful people that were running it.

And I went there as part of the psycho-spiritual group.

So they mostly did treatment for addiction.

US military were sending officers down there for treatment and research.

But I was part of this little psycho-spiritual group and it was like really quite incredible.

Did the Ibogaine first.

was a pretty extreme experience.

Maybe I could say it's a bit like the worst flu you've ever had.

The visions like the auditory hallucinations were really, I don't know, there's something about them that is just really, really hard to describe.

But the next day after, I couldn't believe how good I felt and how it really felt like something had happened to my brain that was really useful.

It was almost like somebody had gone in and just kind of like, you know, defragged it and cleaned up all the files, put everything back in order, and everything was just running at, you know, top speed.

And it was really a remarkable feeling.

And I'm really grateful I did it.

I would say that the benefits that I got from that were, I didn't lose that.

And then, as part of this retreat, what they did is three days later, did this, offered the participants a substance called 5-MeO-DMT.

So for anybody who doesn't know, this has been called the God molecule, and I think it's considered the strongest psychedelic known to man.

And I really had no idea what I was getting into.

The people that were running this, I mean, they were doctors and nurses, and they had a psychospiritual facilitator.

They did a really good job of trying to educate people for the variety of experiences that you can have with this.

Then we each took our turn one by one, and when I had my experience, it was the last thing I expected.

I ended up having this experience of really being confronted with my death, as if my death was happening right there, and that felt like, even though they had told me, "Don't worry, you might feel like you're dying, you won't die.

I really felt like, it sure feels to me like I'm dying here.

And it was like the most intense anguish I've ever had in my entire life in those minutes.

When I came out of it, I immediately regretted having done it.

I really felt like, oh, I should have just stopped with the Ibogaine.

But anyway, ended up going back home, and I'm pretty sure I would have qualified for a mild PTSD diagnosis because although I felt good, there was like a sense of well-being, at the same time I had like these intrusive thoughts, like constant intrusive thoughts that were bringing me back.

And it wasn't like I was seeing anything, there was no vision, there was no demons or anything, it wasn't like that, but it was just like the feeling of I am right at the brink of death, and that means that everything I know, like the narrative of this life, my loved ones, everything that is near and dear to me, all of it will be gone.

And it will be gone for all of eternity.

And so I came home thinking I had gone to this not having any fear, I thought, of death.

I remember thinking sometimes if the subject would come up with people, I would say something like, "Oh, I'm sure death isn't that a big a deal.

It's a natural process, so I'm sure it'll be fine." But I think unconsciously I probably did have a lot of fear.

And the thing about it was now I was having these intrusive thoughts, I was waking up through the night, the thought that they would be bringing me back.

So this persisted about three or, I'm going to say three or four months.

And I felt like now not only am I afraid of dying, I'm going to be afraid of dying until it actually happens, right?

And anyway, so one day I was doing yoga, this is maybe like maybe four months into this, and doing dead body pose, samasana at the end, and I suddenly had this impulse to turn and actually look face on to what had happened.

It was the first time I'd done it.

And up to then I just wanted to kind of like put it behind me, but I knew there was no putting it behind me.

there was just no getting away from this reality.

This body is going to die one day.

There's no two ways about it.

So I turned and I kind of like look at the experience to see what was it?

What was it that was so bad, right?

And I realized that this was about the attachments.

It was about the attachments to the narrative, the story of me, the attachment to my loved ones to the life that I've been living.

And I was able to remind myself, "But wait a second, it's already been clearly seen that I am this formless presence in which this is appearing." So, immediately I felt like everything just fell away, this distress, PTSD symptoms.

I just had such a sense of relief turning toward it.

I can't properly convey what a sense of relief it was.

So this was, I'm going to say, the beginning of 2017.

I must say, this thing that had happened in 2015, this energy that was gathering, started again.

Over the next several months, it was like this energy was building.

I was working intensively with Gary.

I was spending maybe a couple of hours a day, I wouldn't call it meditating, but just sitting in total silence and doing yoga, a lot of emotion work, a lot of shadow work, just having this sense of well-being that was building as well, like a really incredible sense, like the body was starting to feel incredibly blissful at this point.

And then what happened is that this all kind of culminated in, I believe it was like maybe mid-September of that year.

So the energy was like building over the course of this year.

And then in September, I found myself alone one day, it was the evening, and my husband had run out to do an errand.

And just walking across the living room floor, when it felt like almost like an invisible tsunami wave of energy was just like rolling toward me.

It was like just like an enormous wave of energy was like coming at me with such so rapidly so it was such force and it all I could think was oh my god I think I'm dying and and and the thought was like man I won't even get to say goodbye to my husband right the next thing everything just kind of like disappeared there was like just like this vast, most extraordinary golden light that I immediately recognized, it's like, oh my god, that's gods.

And one thing I will say about this, Rick, is I have something called aphantasia, which I don't know if you know what that is, but I lack the ability to produce images in my mind.

So I think it's like maybe 1% or maybe 2% of the population has this.

I didn't even know I had it until, believe it or not, like just a few years ago.

So you can't like picture a sunset or an apple or something?

No, no.

I close my eyes and you say picture an apple or a sunset, like it's absolutely black.

There's nothing, nothing I can pull up.

And I remember having like odd time thinking, you know, when people would talk about visual images, thinking, I don't know, it was always puzzling to me that people could talk at length about things that they were anyway, you know.

How about when you dream, do you have images in your dreams?

I would say there's some fragments in dream, some fragments, but yeah.

Okay, but that's kind of aside from the point.

So go ahead.

Yeah.

So I had this vision of God, right?

And the thing about it is, like I said, I have aphantasia, but this golden light was like, it was not something that I could say was like in the range of colors that we can talk about.

It wasn't like that.

And, you know, it was another thing that was really interesting.

I remember telling Gary about this.

It was like I could see these strands of what looked like mathematical symbols, like ribbons that were just like very gracefully kind of like coming out of this golden light.

And there was a feeling of being with the presence of God.

It felt like, oh, I'm in the presence of something that has been here for countless eons, but eternal, but like the most salient thing about it was the amount of love that I was experiencing.

And it was like I was experiencing myself as like a derivative of that, of God, right?

Like I didn't have a sense of having a body, but I experienced myself as almost like, like the ray of the sun or something like that.

You know, like this formless thing that is like a derivative of it.

It was like something very, very unexpected.

And I think, you know, it ended up representing like a huge heart opening.

I had this heart opening back in 2001.

And this represented another major heart opening again.

And similar to the first time this happened, I would have spontaneous tears for quite a while after.

Just no reason at all.

But I couldn't make sense of it.

It felt like, well, this isn't part of the Advaita Vedanta tradition where they talk about God as like this.

How do I understand this?

How do I put this into some context?

I didn't really know what to do with it.

And when I talked to Gary about it, he suggested just move on.

There are spiritual traditions which talk about this.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who founded the TM movement, used to talk about God consciousness as being like wearing golden glasses all the time.

Everything is shimmering in the celestial light, golden celestial light.

He didn't originate the idea.

It's been talked about in various traditions.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But do you see this experience as a consequence of the psychedelics you had done some months before?

before?

It felt like there was something that was unfolding and that was, yeah, that was part of it.

But what I didn't know was there was going to be something even bigger a few weeks later.

Tell us more.

So now what happened was I had this video come up into my YouTube feed one day of Papaji who I never really paid a lot of attention to, but this video came up titled "Consciousness Alone Is" and I clicked on it and I watched it and as I watched it, it was like maybe 11 minutes long, I felt like, okay, I understand part of it but I'm not getting all of it and it kind of set off, like I told you, like this thing about this energy building, well it was kind of like almost like I'd been given a zen koan and it was kind of like I had this urgency to solve it.

And over the next several days, I kept watching this video and I felt like this almost like a feeling of desperation, like I really need to get this.

And then I had this idea of like after a few days, I think I'd watched it probably at least a dozen times, and my husband was working downstairs and when he finished work I said, "Hey, you want to to come up and I want to show you this video." And I had this idea that there was a possibility that he would be able to help me with it.

So I came up in the living room and he sat beside me and I took out my iPad and I started to play this video.

And this time, I knew there was something about it that as soon as I started to play it this time, I just felt like, "Oh, I'm getting it." I think in retrospect, having him there, right, gave me some sort of safety was required for what was about to happen.

But as it started to play, I think it just got into a few minutes, where suddenly it felt like my body had just turned into this pillar of sand that in a second or two was just rapidly crumbling.

I lost all sense of having a body, knowing who I was, any memory of the world, the world was gone.

I then was just left with this, I'm going to say, I'll call it like a primal void, where the only thing that existed was like the most, I would say, exquisite, sublime awareness.

There was something unbelievably pointing into about it.

It was just kind of like I was experiencing myself as that.

I had no idea how long I was gone to the world.

I actually tumbled onto the floor and my husband had the good sense to leave me alone and not pour cold water on my face.

But when I came out of it, it felt, it was my first glimpse of no self, by the way, when I emerged out of that.

But it felt like it changed everything.

It felt like, it wasn't like I went and had, I had experiences in Jannas, right, where, you know, it's like, you know, some disappearing into a void, but this was like an altogether different level.

And, you know, my take on it now is that was really, you know, an encounter with, you know, what, you know, we could call the divine ground or the absolute.

And when I came out of it, it felt like, "Oh, that wasn't a thing that I went to and came back from." That this is something that is simultaneously a part of reality.

It is almost like the yin and the yang symbol.

I never really thought about the yin and the yang symbol.

But suddenly, I found myself thinking, "Oh, that all makes sense now." There's something about how you can say the absolute in this completely undifferentiated form has this intelligence creative capacity to create what we'll call like the manifestation.

Why it does, we could speculate, right?

But, you know, it's somehow I felt like I could understand how something could come from nothing but not be able to explain how.

Some would say that's not just a part of reality, but that is the totality of reality.

There's nothing but that.

That alone is.

Sarvam kalpidam brahma, as they say.

That alone is.

All this is that.

Yeah, I would say whether it's in the undifferentiated form as the absolute, or even this, this conversation.

It's all part of that, right?

- It's contained within that.

There's a saying, Brahman is the eater of everything.

(laughing) Consumes and contains everything.

- Yeah.

- Wow, well, never a dull moment in your life.

(laughing) Pretty cool.

Did your son use Ibogaine and get over his addiction?

- He did, he did.

It took a few treatments, but he's been stable since 2018.

- Fantastic.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

- Excellent.

So, there are a bunch of points in your notes that we didn't get to.

If you want, I'll just read them quickly, and if there's anything you want to say about any of them that you feel is really important, we could just take a couple minutes.

But the things you didn't get to were, let's see, the widespread confusion around the term non-duality, investigating the subject-object illusion, the radiance of emptiness, I think we just covered that distress about the current geopolitical situation, no self, and grace.

So, PT Barnum said always leave wanting more, so we don't necessarily have to cover all this, but if there's anything you really feel like we should have covered and haven't, please.

- Yeah, so I think I'd like to talk about the widespread confusion around the term non-duality because I think it is something that is the case.

I do think that there's some people are really doing their best to try to rectify that situation.

But I think it's all too common where people are confusing that initial shift, right?

That seeing that formless awareness and everything is appearing in that, taking that to be the realization of non-duality.

And there's some people that can speak very eloquently about non-duality as a philosophy.

But what we need need to understand is that their awakening is a process and almost nobody, I wouldn't say nobody, I have seen it, where people have that initial awakening and they're deep in the realization of what's called emptiness.

But I think that that's relatively uncommon.

What is more typical is people go through that initial awakening, honeymoon phase, and start to work on shadow work, emotion work, and so on.

And they can start to maybe have glimpses of non-duality.

The real non-duality is when, let's say, awakening is coming down into the body sense and into the sense gates.

There is a recognition.

I want to just point out, because I've seen this confusion too, where people take it to be what we call direct experience.

Okay, I put my attention into the visual field, my attention is in the visual field or we are intentionally putting attention into the hearing or so on.

I would call that direct experience or we can even put that into sometimes mindfulness practices, but it's an altogether different thing when we talk about the realization of non-duality.

Non-duality meaning not two, that what is appearing is non-dual, that is its nature, and to understand that it's in consciousness that we are, let's say, for example, looking out in the visual field, right?

Most people post-awakening, until they have this realization, they're going to have a sense of "I'm here, looking behind my eyes, and there is this world of forms that is not me." And what we need to understand is that the visual field itself is non-dual, it's inherently non-dual in nature, but what's happening is we are in the sense gate of consciousness, we're placing a thought, usually in the body, somewhere that is establishing a here.

So we have to establish a here in thought for there to be a there.

And that's kind of like the basis of the basic part of the subject-object illusion.

And then as non-duality continues to unfold, we get to the point where we realize, like, oh my gosh, all I'm actually looking at is this ocean of colour, this intangible image, and that there's no substance, there's no solidity in what I'm seeing.

That's a layer of thought that we've been adding on to that.

And I think it's good for people to understand that there's no way we can actually imagine what this is like.

I've seen people sometimes think that they actually have realized non-duality of formlessness, sometimes people can convince themselves of that.

True non-duality is really, really, really quite radical, and a lot happens to further, let's say, look at layers of identity.

What do I take myself to be?

Am I contained inside this form, seeing that that's not true, and then you realize, "Oh, okay, those other people I I see out there too, that is the same for them as well.

And then a further extension of that realization is really, "Oh, yeah, the world isn't what I've taken it to be either." And this has really profound implications.

When this is not just glimpsed, but is really seen in a way that becomes like a permanent shift.

Do you feel that true non-duality as you've just described it is something that people will eventually arrive at or should aspire to arrive at?

I think it's good for people just to know that this is a potential.

I think it's a part, a natural part of the evolution of human consciousness, this stage of development.

I would love to see more people aspire to this.

I think everybody, it's my opinion that, well, I think going through that first shift, if we're willing to do the work, do the shadow work, emotion work, everything that we need to do to address our conditioning, our traumas and so on, that is basically what's necessary.

That's the most essential thing, to be able to realize non-duality.

Okay, good.

So in other words, pull out all the stops.

There's that saying, you know, dig one deep well rather than ten shallow wells and then you'll actually get water, you know.

But another way of putting it might be, use ten tools if necessary to dig one deep well.

Yeah, yeah, that's the way I see it.

Yeah, yeah.

If one tool doesn't seem to be getting anywhere, you know, try a different tool.

Exactly, exactly.

I think this is the age we're in right now.

Yeah, true, there's so many things available.

So I saw in your notes that over, you know, since I don't think you really proclaim yourself to be a spiritual teacher, but you've talked to about 2,000 people or something like that.

So, you know, what can people do who are watching this if they want to interact with you more?

I mean, do you have a YouTube channel?

Yeah, I'm not really on social media, but I do meet with people one-on-one and I do meet with people as groups.

You have little Zoom meetings or something?

Yeah.

Okay, and can people find out about that or sign up for that on your website?

Yeah.

Okay, good.

So I'll be linking to your website from your Back That page.

Yeah.

I have an email list, or I let people that are on the email list know, but I don't really kind of like put on my website that, okay, there'll be the next thought saying on the stage.

But there's a thing on your website where you can sign up for for that email list.

- Yeah.

- Yes?

- No, but maybe I should put it.

- You should put it.

(both laughing) In fact, put it for in the next week or two before I put this interview up 'cause people might wanna be in touch with you.

Otherwise, you'll have people pestering you to, "Where, how do I do it?

"How do I sign it?" Just make it easy.

All right, great.

Well, thanks.

I enjoyed getting to know you better.

It's been an interesting conversation.

- Likewise.

I really appreciate this opportunity to have this conversation with you.

Keep up the good work and keep Canada independent.

And Greenland.

Don't worry, this too shall pass.

All righty, well thanks.

And thanks to those who've been listening or watching.

I appreciate it.

And my next interview will be on the 18th with Swami Sarvapriyananda.

And we got more planned for season 17, which is next year.

Keep on truckin', as the Grateful Dead said.

- Yeah, thank you, Rick.

I really appreciate all the work that you're doing.

It's a really major contribution to this awakening community.

- Well, you know, what was it Joseph Campbell said?

Follow your bliss.

Somebody else said, if you enjoy what you're doing, you'll never work a day in your life.

So there have been many days in my life in which I have worked, but these aren't one of them.

(both laughing) - Yeah.

- All right, take care.

Hope to meet you in person someday.

- Yeah, that would be great.

- Okay.

- Thanks, okay.

- Bye, everybody.

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