Grace has no yardstick to measure us by.

Actually, grace is everywhere once we shift our perspective of what it is to be alive, to be human with this brain we have, with our ability to be aware of being aware.

Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump.

My name is Rick Archer.

Buddha at 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 haven't seen any and would like to check them out, go to bathcap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, where you'll find them all organized in various ways.

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That helps also.

My guest today is Karyn O'Beirne.

I read her book, Findings from the Hunting Party Scout.

Hopefully you can see this book.

I have some notes, but the book was finished 20 years ago, so we're going to get into stuff that wasn't in her book.

But just in brief, Karen's spiritual journey, which was documented in the book, kind of starts out with her being an atheist and she goes through a number of rather intense years of spiritual growth with kind of a foot in both camps, an ordinary working soccer mom who is pursuing all these spiritual opportunities and traveling around the world going to different holy spots and power spots and so on.

And she eventually became an embodied awakened faith leader.

After a life-changing spontaneous awakening, which we'll be discussing, she shared her Her Toltec teacher, Don Miguel Ruiz, shared his teachings and her own experiences as an interfaith minister, ordained by One Spirit Seminary in New York City.

In 2019, she was certified as a mindfulness meditation teacher, taught by Tara Brock and Jack Kornfield.

She incorporates methods of mindfulness, the Four Agreements, and mystical teachings of the world's religions into her talks, workshops, and writings.

She shares wisdom in a non-denominational, dogma-free style that is accessible to people who are searching for an open spiritual path that they can call their own.

On her sub-stack, Karen's Findings, it's called, she released Inviting Grace In, a curated full year of quotes to guide readers through four seasons of spiritual growth, Spring, uplifting spirit, Summer, shifting perspectives, Autumn, recognizing wisdom, and Winter, expanding the understanding of our being.

I've read a bunch of those and it's a wonderful collection of quotes.

I need to add them to my quotes collection.

As a lifelong social activist, Karen's posts highlight ways we can mindfully and compassionately co-create a world where all life is uplifted, with a new understanding of ourselves and the source of existence we often call God.

So, that's the intro.

So, Karen, a minute ago before we started recording, we were just talking about something, and you were talking about grace.

Repeat what you were saying.

One of the things that after a lot of what had happened to me, I realized that, and sometimes people question me, "Well, why'd that happen to you?" or I'd ask, "Why'd that happen to me or can I make it happen again?

But really, what I want people to understand is I didn't do anything or change the kind of person I was, but when I had my awakening, the spontaneous one, and it happened in my living room with a group of people, I wasn't very far on the spiritual path.

I didn't know anything about non-duality or I wasn't interested in enlightenment.

I just wanted to feel happy.

I was a time in my life, I have what the culture tells me is what I want or what I should have, and I can't feel happy.

So I didn't even have a really great reason to get spiritual.

But yet grace stepped in, that's what I call it, and when I get more into the story, and it wasn't like I was working on myself or trying to achieve something.

But I did feel a lack.

I felt a lack when I started meeting people who are in the spiritual, teachers, or have been doing this for a long time.

You meet some people who have been doing it for 15, 20 years.

I felt a lack, like I was, there was something that they had that I didn't.

I had this feeling of not being enough.

So I would have this sense of that.

But when I look back, none of that matters when it comes to receiving grace, recognizing grace, opening to grace.

Grace has no yardstick to measure us by.

And actually grace is everywhere once we shift our perspective of what it is to be alive, to be human with this brain we have, with our ability to be aware of being aware.

All of these things have nothing to do with doing certain practices over and over or becoming a PhD in this.

That is all great and wonderful, but I want people to understand we are enough exactly as we are in this moment to receive grace.

We're enough.

And, in fact, being enough is great because it allows us to be open.

we're not chasing some sort of idea of what a spiritual person is or what someone who is worthy of grace or that grace only happens to good people.

That's not it at all.

And I just wanted to make sure that that's one of the reasons I wrote the book.

I wanted people to say, "Hey, I'm just an ordinary person." But I went for it.

And throughout it.

You can too.

I didn't do anything extraordinary.

I have learned and grown.

It's been 20 years now.

But in all this intense four years, I was on a ride.

I was just opening to it.

And I think that's really the important part.

We really have to let go of what we think we know.

That's the biggest letting go.

You may have noticed the subtitle of this show is "Conversations with Ordinary Spiritually awakening people, and those words were carefully chosen.

One of my motivations for starting this is that I live in a town where several thousand people have been meditating for many decades out of a total of 10,000 population, and a lot of people were popping.

A lot of people were having profound spiritual awakenings, shifting into higher states of consciousness as described in the ancient texts and all that.

Sometimes they would tell friends and the friends would dismiss them as delusional.

They say, "Oh, you're just an ordinary guy.

I've known you for years.

You don't look different.

It couldn't have happened to somebody like you." They envision that you have to be sort of floating on a cloud or wearing white robes or whatever to have a genuine spiritual awakening.

And so I thought, "I'm going to start interviewing some of these people and let people know that peers, ordinary people just like them, are having spiritual awakenings and it can happen to them as well.

If you don't think it can happen to you, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, or it can be, where you can delay or postpone the possibility of receiving grace, as you put it.

Tomie: Actually, that was one of the things I, if someone asks, it really helps to be open to the idea of grace.

It does help, I agree with you.

But it took me a little while to get there.

Because as you said, my father was an atheist, pretty much, he said he was an atheist.

My mother brought us up Methodist, Protestant, Christianity.

But at a certain point, I just saw religion as a power play.

Because of all the Middle East, still going on, it's crazy.

Ireland, Protestant Catholic, you know, if you look at history.

And what really made me kind of lean towards my father's perspective of things was I have two older brothers and the brother that's closest to me in my age, Brian, very sensitive, intelligent young man, and he was so shy and he had a lot of little difficulties, but he was diagnosed schizophrenic in his twenties, and he suffered.

He suffered so, and I could not, could not conceive of a loving God that would let someone suffer like that for no reason.

So it was kind of personal.

I personalized God and I said forget it I just don't believe in this you know whatever.

But I don't know if you've ever read anything by Carolyn Mace.

A little bit.

Yeah, The Anatomy of Spirit.

I don't know why I I picked up that book because I was starting to read Buddhist stuff because they don't have like a deity, pretty much.

So that kind of, and I was very interested in that and humanists, humanist movement.

But I picked that up and I was working in New York City.

I worked in New York City for many, many years.

So I would take the train from Long Island, if anybody's familiar with that, the Long Island Railroad.

It's quite a long trip from where I lived, so I would read this and I was reading Carolyn Mace's Anatomy of Spirit.

And I'm in one of those train cars where you're sitting facing the other people, the end of the car, right?

And we're all New Yorkers, commuters, and we know we don't even look at each other.

You can't, after 10 years of commuting, either you sleep or you're good.

But anyway, I read something that she said that was like, "You do all this, you get your books, you "da da da da da" and then you have to let it all go because you just don't know.

Or whatever it was, something like that.

But whatever it was, I just started crying.

I don't know why, but whatever she said really hit me and that's another thing I'd advise anybody.

If anybody starts weeping when they're reading something in a book or if they're listening to a speaker or anything, I think that's a good sign to follow.

if you're interested in finding your own spiritual path, because there's something inside of you, all the things that have made up your psyche to this point will respond often with tears.

So I'm there crying on the Long Island Railroad.

It was so embarrassing.

I'm embarrassed at the same time.

I'm like, "Why?

Why is this happening?" And so she opened the door.

It doesn't have to be, "Don't believe in God and believe in the God that I grew up with as a Protestant, because I just couldn't relate to any of it.

So that was what it was.

She opened up the space of what our idea of, not even God, grace.

I think she uses the word grace a lot.

And that gave me an opening to explore.

And I'm always grateful for that.

And then of course, I bought all copies of the books because that's what I do.

I find a book that I really love and I start sending it.

I did that with the Four Agreements and I did that with Inner Bonding.

But so that's usually the start of anything new spiritual adventure is.

It's a book or a podcast now.

So that's another recommendation to, you know, turn off the TV and read a good book.

Oprah Winfrey was interviewing Eckhart Tolle one time and towards the end of the interview she would start sentences and have him finish them.

So one of the sentences was, "I believe," and he said, "Nothing in particular." And here's a guy who has pretty profound experience and you'd think he has deep beliefs in profound things.

The reason I like that is that belief is not all it's cracked up to be.

If you study all the different worlds, religions, and all the different philosophies and everything, people get so invested in elaborate beliefs about the afterlife and God and what you should do and how you should dress and all this stuff.

thousands if not millions of people have been killed for having beliefs that differed from somebody else's beliefs.

So it's just absurd.

I'm often reminded of and often mentioned a video by Carl Sagan called "Pale Blue Dot".

You can find it on YouTube where you see on the screen a picture of the Earth taken from somewhere out near Saturn Saturn by the Voyager spacecraft or something.

It's this little pale blue dot.

They have an arrow pointing at it so you can actually see what it is.

And Sagan gives this eloquent commentary about all the bloodshed and strife and war and whatnot that has taken place throughout human history over little tiny fractions of this pale blue dot.

People thinking they're going to gain something by acquiring this little fraction and that little fraction.

And it just seems so absurd from that perspective.

So belief, you know, it's not that important.

What's important is what you really experience, and if you're not experiencing anything which could conclusively confirm this, that, or the other belief or philosophy, then hold them all lightly and don't get so invested in them.

Yeah, and I think people stop questioning when they're brought up in a certain tradition, and it's just surface, but yet they'll defend it, you know, because it's just like your sports team, you know?

Yeah, I remember when I was in about second grade, I was walking home from school with a girl who lived on my street, and she told me that under the ground, deep down, is hell, and people are down there.

And I knew a little bit about geology at that point, and I said, "Well, actually, there's all these strata of rock, and then there's molten lava and stuff like that deep down.

You see it coming out of volcanoes.

There's no place down there where people are being tortured." And she was adamant, "No, there is such a place.

there really is.

So there you go.

And when I went to One Spirit, the first year is learning about the world's major religions and they all sound crazy.

One Spirit is an organization or?

One Spirit Seminary is an actual seminary created by Diane Burke and a few other people in New York City, and it's a two-year program.

But they have other programs, too.

But I went to the seminary because I was getting involved in the Unitarian Universalist congregation near my home.

And what I love about them is, you know, they have a set of seven principles, and three of them are just fabulous from my standpoint.

I just was so great I fell in with them.

The first one is the inherent worth and dignity of every person.

The fourth one is a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.

So meaning they're not going to tell you what to believe.

I was like, I never knew there was a religion that let you do that.

And then the seventh principle is respect for the interdependent web of which we are all a part.

So I found that so liberating.

So I was heavily involved in the church, so I met someone who had gone to One Spirit, so I said, "Well, let me do that.

The kids are in college.

I'll go to seminary." But it's funny because we learn about the religions, and they all sound like crazy if you take them literally.

Pete: I know.

Weird stuff.

Jodie: And then I looked back, and then I go and I look at Christianity and I'm like, that's crazy!

[Laughter] And so, Diane Burke, Reverend Diane Burke, who was one of the founders, she said the problem isn't this or that, it's when people start taking it literally, the texts because they're meant to spread their wisdom stories or their this, but if you take it literally, you're gonna end up with fundamentalism and you're gonna end up killing each other.

So I was really blessed to follow that route.

It was great.

And now I can respect, because when you learn about the mystical core, you know, Jesus started, you know, Jesus didn't go around to start Christianity, but his core teachings, his core experience, Muhammad, what's the… Nathaniel Oh, Krishna, Buddha, you know, founders of all these different religions.

Dr.

Anne Mary Yeah, and so when you learn about their experience and how they turned it into sharing, basically they wanted to share it.

When that happens, you want to share it.

And then it just gets further and further and further and further away from the original things.

And so that's where forgiveness comes in for people who unfortunately just can't get past or don't question until something happens.

And I think it's used, I think, was it Marx who said, you know, "Religion is the opium of the..." - Yeah, that was Carl Munch.

- Yeah, so, you know, and when you look at history, you can see how he could say that because it was crazy.

Still a little crazy.

- I mean, the thing is, mystics don't make good administrators.

They're not interested in it.

You know, they're deep in their mystical experience.

And so administrators come along and say, "Hey, well, there's a joke, actually.

"God and the devil are walking down the road, "and God sees something interesting on the ground, "picks it up, puts it in his pocket, "and they keep walking, and the devil said, "Hey, what did you pick up?

what was that?" And God says, "Oh, it's the truth." And the devil says, "Oh, give it to me.

I'll organize it for you." Yeah, so that happens every time.

Administrators come in who aren't having the mystical experience and necessarily don't get what the founder of the religion was actually experiencing and talking about.

And they end up with all their baggage and rigidness and cruelty and fundamentalism and so on.

And the whole thing, knowledge crumbles on the hard rocks of ignorance, as one of my teachers used to say.

Teresa: Yeah, so, but that's what it is.

But we can transcend that, I mean, and be respectful because I have people who are pretty devout Christians, and so I have to be respectful.

And they listen to me here and there.

Nathan: I want you to talk more about the awakening you had.

And we never really defined grace.

We just threw it out there as if people know what we mean by it.

So let's hear about this awakening you had and weave in a definition of grace.

Okay.

Well, I eventually found my way to Don Miguel Ruiz.

I read his book.

It made sense to me.

It just made a lot of sense to me.

And so I went to see him talk and then I went to Omega for a five-day retreat.

My husband went with me and it just was incredible.

And And part of what he did, he did a lot of rituals, and he had two helpers, two apprentices, Rita Rivera and her name is escaping me now, but they had us as one of the things we did is envision our own funeral.

Rita Rivera was very good at setting the container and the, you know, the atmosphere.

So you're there, you know, envisioning your funeral and she guides you and so you go down and I'm seeing my casket and I see all my loved ones and they're all sad and everybody's, you can hear the people around you, like people had been sharing for the first two days about abusive fathers or just different difficulties and they're sobbing now that and you know you go up there and you know I look and I'm like wow you know I'm dead and I'm dead and I see my Joe and how sad he is and I'm like oh my god you know I love them so much you know and I'm gone I just want them to go on I just want them to be happy and then whatever whatever and then you hear Don Miguel's he's got a very soft You know Mexican accent why why do you wait so long to tell me you love them and Everybody just you know when we realize you know, we're just like it's loving that That's what is what it's about.

But we don't realize it because we just take it for granted after a while.

So that was just one way of doing it.

And then he had another, he just had a bunch of rituals that took us out of our normal environment.

Because I had never been on retreat, We'd never been, you know, we were a suburban couple commuting into New York City.

It was like so different.

That's another thing I would advise to people.

If you really want to get engaged in a spiritual journey, you have to do something that's not in your wheelhouse.

You have to do something that takes you out of what your routine is that challenges you and expose yourself so that you can't be managing every moment.

Because that's what we have a habit of.

That's what I realized.

I was always managing the next moment because I wanted to be what I wanted to be.

So I was never present.

I was always in the future or, you know, manipulating things.

And there's nothing better than not managing the moment.

That's, I guess, Eckhart Tolle too.

But anyway, six weeks after that retreat where it was an opening, again an opening, like I had an opening about what God might be.

I had an opening of what is real, you know, because it's all about we're conditioned, we're domesticated.

9/11 happened and I was I worked in Manhattan, 53rd and 6th, and it was, you know, horrific.

I saw the people walking out of Manhattan because they weren't allowing any more buses or trains or cabs in, so people had to walk over the bridge out into the Bronx or Queens to get out of Manhattan.

And I realized, I don't know what time I have, I just did that whole funeral thing, it could be a reality.

And don't wait.

Don't wait.

And I didn't.

And we would meet with Rita Rivera who would come from the West Coast to the East three or four times a year and have a weekend workshop where we all slept at a, you know, whatever kind of retreat house we could get and really deep work.

And so I got to know about 30 people, you know, we would see this kind of the same people again and that's another thing.

When you can have a community where you can be vulnerable while you're going through this kind of seeing all the things that you believe that are all in like you know contrary to each other just this bundle of beliefs and reactions and conditions and all this you know things where you know this is this is how I live my life I you know you don't know it until you have time to process with someone who knows how to do that.

And so it was the summer of 2003, so I'd only been doing this two years.

2001 was when I met Don Miguel.

I invited a bunch of those people to our house on Long Island for a weekend, just because no teacher, just to have them there, to be with them because we could be ourselves, we could take off the masks, that's a Toltec thing, we all have a mask, we have many masks, take off our masks and be together in community.

And it was Sunday morning and I asked Joe, let's have everybody meditate before they leave so we can do that together.

We were in my living room in a circle, some people on the couch, a few chairs, and we said a prayer and we thanked Rita, you know, how grateful we are to her that we have this ability to be together.

And I noticed before when we were holding hands, when we said the prayer, my heart was beating like very, very erratically.

And it was like, you know when you put popcorn in a microwave and it goes pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, you know, not a regular beat, very fast.

I said, "Wow, that's really strange." And then I let it go with everybody's hands and I rang the Tibetan bell to start the meditation.

And I noticed I wasn't really thinking anything, is very odd because I think a lot even when I'm meditating.

And then I just felt the connection.

I just said, "Let me just feel the connection of these people I'm here with.

I'm so, so grateful.

My life has changed so much in two years.

I feel things.

I'm understanding better.

less, you know, feeling happiness, closeness.

And then I had a vision of just these white lines, just kind of this soft velvety darkness, which I had felt one at a time before.

And just these white lines, you know, intersecting.

But where we intersected, there was just space.

I thought, "That's interesting." And I felt myself just opening up and I felt I really reached out to the people and just feeling and I kind of felt my self kind of slipping into them and then something unhooked and I was just out there.

I knew I was me.

I knew I was still Karen.

It wasn't like but I was boundless.

I mean I was just aware of just everything and I knew everything.

I was intimate with everything and when I mean intimate with everything with molecules, with atoms, with it was and but I was experience in it but I knew it was an experience that was being given to me.

And the overall thing that held it together was this incredible love just this incredible unconditional love of its own creation and it was intimate and it was new.

I just knew things.

I knew.

And it was, you know, I was out of my body, obviously.

And I was experiencing that.

I was like, "Whoa." And then I had a question pop in my, you know, what is this?

And my dog barked.

My dog barked and...

But it didn't matter.

Because it was the realest thing that ever happened to me.

I said, that's reality.

That's the underlying nature of everything.

And I don't know why, but I first explained it to myself.

God let me know what his heart and mind was.

Because it was that boundless and intimate at the same time.

And like I said, love was more like the ooze that made it all happen.

And I didn't say anything to anybody because you can't talk about something like that after it happens.

And I was just so grateful.

I was so full.

I was like, I don't care if anything else ever happens to me in the rest of my life, I know this is reality and we're just on the surface and we're just kind of like you said, we have all our ideas and we have all these theories and all these philosophies and it's, you know, the essence is this is one.

There's source of this and for whatever reason I was able to experience it.

And then after everybody left I was kind of tired so I laid down on the couch, you know, I was like...

And as I was waking up, the first thing I experienced was terror, just absolute terror.

And then I felt a grasping for some sort of identity.

Where am I?

What is going on?

And then I was on.

And I didn't know who I was.

And then it kind of seeped in and then I calmed down.

I was like, "That is really...

What is that all about?" And I said, "I don't know." But I was feeling calmer.

I said, "I'm going to just go back to sleep." And I did.

I fell asleep again.

Same thing, terror.

First thing of awareness is terror.

And then grasping, know grasping for some sort of anchor you know some sort of identity and then coming into it.

And luckily I kind of have a sense of humor I think I've inherited from my mother.

But anyway I heard Robin Williams voice from being the genie in Aladdin and the Lamp who says big powerful genie teeny tiny bottle.

And I don't know why that pops into my head but I said yeah you know I don't know what happened today I don't know why today this is happening but you know it's real it happened to me and I don't know what to do with this but I'm gonna keep going because I want this again and I'll be honest it never happened again.

It never happened again.

But it didn't matter.

And it doesn't matter.

And that's why I call it grace.

Grace stepped in.

Grace stepped in and grace steps in in many ways.

And for me it was this.

And I use it in my writings.

I use it in my poetry.

I I use it in my sermons.

But it's very hard to articulate because it's, like I said, the feeling of love is there.

Now how do you have feeling of love when you're not a body?

I don't know.

Yeah, that's beautiful.

A few thoughts on that.

There is this Zen teacher, I forget who his name is, people have told me, but he often said to his students, "Enlightenment may be an accident, but spiritual practice makes you accident-prone." So you had been doing some stuff.

I mean, if you hadn't been doing your Don Miguel stuff and whatever else you'd been doing for a couple years, that might not have happened.

You kind of set the stage for something like that to happen.

What's that saying?

"God helps those who help themselves." So you had cultured some readiness.

Also, there have been great poets and so on who have had an experience like that, and then the rest of their lives it inspires their poetry.

But These things don't have to be a one-shot deal.

They can be more and more frequent and eventually stabilized.

I believe that there are people walking the earth and have always been, who are in a state like that all the time.

And it gets integrated.

And that is not to say that you would be in a state of fear.

That's just the initial kind of shock of the ego being dissolved.

There's a great book called "Collision with the Infinite" by a woman named Suzanne Siegel.

Have you ever read that book?

Anyway, she had been doing deep meditation practices for some years, but had sort of drifted away from that.

And she was in Paris and married and pregnant.

And she was coming from a swimming pool, getting on a bus one day, and all of a sudden, poof, big shift, just like you described.

And she was immediately terrified because she couldn't locate a personal self anymore.

She was just like out there, and yet still able to get on the bus and know where to get off the bus and so on.

And for 10 years, she went on like this, raising a daughter, getting a master's degree, and doing various things, but always like searching for a sense of personal self and in a state of fear because she couldn't find it.

Finally, she met with Jean Klein, who was Francis of Seale's teacher.

Francis was Rupert Spira's teacher.

But in any case, Jeanne realized what had happened to her and just pointed it out, said, "Stop looking for a personal self." And then she kind of relaxed into it and went into an abiding state of unity consciousness.

So these things can be cultured.

That's what spiritual practice is ultimately all about is not just giving us a momentary experience, but culturing a state in which that sort of thing is our living reality all the time, but very well integrated.

So we could do whatever normal things we do in life and certainly not be distracted or hampered in any way by that experience.

And in fact, a state like that can actually enhance your functionality and your skill in action, your capability of doing things.

Yeah.

When I say that didn't happen again, I have had other experiences.

Maybe just not quite so dramatic, right?

Yeah.

And I think the terror, if anything, was it was so glorious that to come back to that limited persona or the limited, you know, not so connected.

I mean, I think the contrast of it is what?

R.

So getting squeezed back into the bottle was the terrifying part.

T.

Yeah, getting squeezed back in the bottle.

R.

Okay.

T.

So, but it didn't matter.

That's the other thing I want to get.

I did for a couple years try to, you know, get conditions the same so that might happen again.

And it didn't, but It left me so sure, so sure of that love, that source, and that knowing, the knowing.

It's like, that it didn't need to, eventually it came to me.

It doesn't need to, it's I need to, it makes you want to be in service of that love, right?

So what would happen is, and you know, between the Toltec Dreaming, which is very powerful, and then meditation and different practices, I, you know, that spirit of that, that grace of that does inform me in my writings.

And when I would put together services for the congregation, or I would do a workshop, or when I was picking the quotes for inviting Grace in, that experience is always in - I don't want to say the background, but it's always referred to as truth.

it keeps me on a kind of on a through line, you know?

So that knowing of our ultimate source and unity and its love, you know, I couldn't have made that up.

I didn't know anything about non-duality or enlightenment or anything like that at that point.

I was looking how to using the four agreements to shred myself of my conditioning, what Don Miguel calls our domestication, into the dream of the planet, which is how we just kind of go along and accept the way things are without understanding how we're just reacting to everything.

We're not choosing, we're reacting because we're conditioned a certain way.

So that's what I was working on.

And I was pretty much - I wouldn't say I was a mess, but I had to go to a therapist for a while.

I had a lot of - Marc: You mean after that big opening?

Dr.

Anne: No.

I mean, that's the condition I was in when that happened.

So it wasn't like I was chasing an experience.

It happened.

It was nothing I could have made up or even thought of.

Darrell Bock Yeah, you weren't trying to make it happen.

It just happened.

even know that there was such a thing.

That wasn't the spiritual books I was reading, or that wasn't how Don Miguel was presenting anything, or Rita.

So that's how I...

That's why you use the word grace.

Grace, yeah.

is something that happens that is not asked for.

It's because, like I said, the source, not only is it unbounded, it's connected and it's intimate.

It knows.

And everything is is, well, that's like the Buddhist concept.

Everything is conditioned by everything that's happened before.

Nothing is separate on its own.

So once we start paying attention, a lot of Buddhism is awareness and attention, Dhammagal, Four Agreements, Toltec, awareness, awareness, awareness, paying attention, directing your own attention, mindfulness, directing where your mind goes.

You'll start seeing grace.

Because I had that experience, I can recognize it easier.

But it's happening all the time.

These opportunities for us to enhance our lives to be kind, to cultivate love, to have access to joy, to be joyful, to have better relationships.

Grace is always there.

We just don't see or turn to it because we're still in our conditioning.

We're still believing certain things.

And that's why we almost have to put ourselves in a setting where you don't have control, where all your assumptions and beliefs don't do you any good because it's just too new.

So grace, our heart is grace.

feeling heart is kind of like grace living inside of us when you think of it.

I mean, where would you be without love, without being able to love, even if it's you love your car?

I remember I loved my minivan.

You know, one day I'm driving down after, you know, I was so happy, I was feeling so good.

I was like, "I'll put on the gas to pass somebody," and minivan just took off.

It had really had eight cylinders.

I love my van.

And I realized it was when the love's coming out, that's, that's aliveness.

That's what brings us to that higher state.

And it's natural, you know, you know, you know, babies love, come out loving, they come out screaming, too.

And so what you were saying at the beginning, people just make things so complicated.

But it's dynamic and it's intricate, but it's not really complicated, actually.

It's very simple.

And we are created to receive this and then share it.

I think sometimes we're blessed with a thing like that by God or by our guardian angel or whatever you want to understand it to be as a means of giving us a glimpse of what's possible and creating a kind of an implant that we can't forget.

Sort of like Saul on the road to Damascus, who had been persecuting Christians, got zapped and had this profound experience and eventually became the Apostle Paul, totally transformed him.

Or, you know, Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where he got zapped by the spaceship and it left an impression that he couldn't forget that just drove him to find this thing that he had to find.

So I think that happens along the spiritual path very often where we'll have a beautiful experience like that, and it leaves a lasting impression.

It actually does involve a subtle reconfiguration of our nervous system and our mind-body system that is perhaps irreversible and that we're not going to be able to forget.

And it becomes an inspiration or a motivator to carry on and deepen it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And, you know, it's kind of when I was learning about the...

that happened well before I went to One Spirit or got certified as mindfulness.

How these religions touch on that.

They're originators.

They're original person who had the experience, Jesus or Muhammad or Buddha.

You know, there's a commonality there.

And yeah, so respect, you know, but then discernment.

Respect and then discernment, as we said.

But I just want to say what happened a year after that.

We went to Ireland and there's a mountain called Crobe Patrick.

And again, we're with Rita Rivera, another woman, Gloria, that we met when we went to France.

And that was a power journey.

But anyway, so remember my, I had that thought, I said I had that thought and then my dog barked and the thought was, "Well, what is this?" Right?

So I was, I never got an answer to that because it was gone.

So I met, you know, the group of people, these are the dreamers, we call ourselves dreamers, and we're, you know, not too far up the mountain.

And it was this little, just this little side place that we went that had a little spring and some wildflowers and this big rock.

And we were just, she had us meditate, you know, sit and dream, meditate.

And I'm, I'm just feeling the sun on me and the coolness of the rock and smelling the flowers and hearing the water and feeling the breeze.

And I hear these words in my mind, specific words, just so clear.

It wasn't the first time it happened, but to me it felt like the answer to my question, is this but it was put in these phrases, these three phrases.

I am the awareness that allows the sun to be aware of the moon.

I am the awareness that allows the air to kiss the water and merge as one.

I am the awareness that is God being aware of being God.

And I just, I was like, yeah, that's the answer.

That's the answer.

We exist because through evolution, because you can believe in God and evolution, you know, why not?

We as a species, and there might be other species, we have the capacity to be aware of being aware.

And I think that what happened the year before, that experience, is God wanting to "Hey, you know, I like being aware of all this." And we're a conduit for that.

We're a conduit for that awareness, which means we're not separate.

We're not separate.

God is always seen through our eyes and our hearts.

But the concept of God is what gets all mucked up.

And so I just left it as grace because the more I tried to have a concept of God, the further away I got from the experience.

It just did.

It had to stay open.

there's no reason to put a label or a box it because when we do, we limit it.

We limit the possibilities of it and for ourselves as this kind of evolved species that, you know, we can reflect.

We can reflect on ourselves.

We can reflect on...

So, years later, it's not in the book because it was after 2004.

I had an experience, it was kind of like a purification thing in Teotihuacan where we go.

And I was asked to speak later that evening just and I didn't know what I was going to say.

I was kind of wiped out.

But I just relaxed about it.

I was like, "Yeah, I'm amongst friends." And what ended up coming out of my mouth was until we realize that everything is God.

And I didn't think I would have that thought until it came out of my mouth.

So that's, again, I feel I'm being informed always by that experience.

I don't have to be disconnected from this body, this mind, this ordinary, to still benefit from that awareness still coming through me one way or another.

And I was like, when my teacher heard me say that, she was just like, "You got it, you got it, you got it." But why limit?

You don't have to define God.

It's just a word that I use because I don't have a better word.

But you can feel it.

You can have it live through you.

You can align with that.

But you can't rationalize your way to God, in my opinion.

Everything is God.

I mean, of course, God is a word, and words are concepts, but there's a reality to which that word refers.

And you can't rationalize your way into God, I suppose, although there is an intellectual path to God realization in the Vedic tradition called jnana yoga.

But if you think about it, I mean those plants behind you, for instance, if you got a powerful microscope and looked at an individual cell in one of those leaves, you would see something that was more complex than the city of New York in terms of what's actually going on there and that couldn't possibly be happening through random chance or little billiard balls knocking into each other arbitrarily.

There's an intelligence permeating every cell and every iota of the entire creation and there's nowhere you could look where you wouldn't find it if you knew what to look for and if you looked closely enough.

So, I mean, that's the kind of thing I think about when I think about the saying such as God being omnipresent.

I mean, it's actually staring us in the face that this intelligence is omnipresent.

And what was the last of those three phrases that you came up with?

Okay.

Yeah.

"I am the awareness that is God being aware of God." Yeah, it kind of reminds me of Muktananda's catchphrase, which was "God dwells within you as you." So the whole thing is God, and we're just all the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.

We're just instruments of the divine, sense organs of the infinite.

Yeah, for me, what came to me one time when I was at One Spirit is, "We are God's love made manifest." Yeah.

And the other thing, a phrase that I really like for myself, "I feel like I've been invited to the mystery." And the beauty of that is we are the mystery and we get to live it too.

Now, to me, I'm like, "How can I not be grateful?

How can I not be grateful to, you know, yes, I'm a mystery to myself, but that's okay, I can keep, you know, and I get to live this mystery, you know?" And that's why I like when I talk about making a spiritual journey that is of your own making, of your own.

That's the gift, you know, to use this wonderful mind and heart and hormones and senses.

it's a feast, you know.

Now sometimes it really hurts, you know, with my brother.

I mean, I have to come to terms, well, yeah, there's the mystery, and sometimes it really is horrible and what happens to other people.

So there's that.

But we have a choice in any given moment where to put our attention.

Sometimes I put my attention on where can I help?

What can I do to either shed light or send money or be a good friend or and I can also put my attention on just feeling the gift of existence and not having to make it be anything other than what it is.

know, Eckhart Tolle, you know, The Power of Now was a huge thing just because he was so clear.

He was just so clear.

And like you said, he doesn't really have like this string of beliefs.

Because I, after doing a lot with Dumb Gal and the Four Agreements and Rita, know, after a while, I needed something else.

And I started, oh, oh, it's because Adyashanti put out a...

Adyashanti?

Adyashanti, yeah.

Right, Adyashanti.

Adyashanti, yeah.

It was called Spontaneous Awakening.

Right.

And it was a series of his talks.

And I started crying listening to that.

I was like, "Oh, this guy knows what happened to me because he had a, you know, it's not the same as his, but some of the things with the heart and the boundlessness and I was like, oh, you know, because really my teacher, which I think was smart at the time, she didn't want to define any of that for me.

She just said, remember how grateful you were before that happened so that gratitude has something to do with it.

But she wasn't going to lay around any conditions on me from what happened to me.

And I appreciate that because that was a whole part of the four agreements was stripping away our conditioning.

But listening to Ajah Shante, I was like, "Oh, he kind of contextualized it for me," to the extent that I could say, say, "Hey, this is happening to a lot of people." Or, what was I...

I don't know what I did with it.

But anyway, oh yeah, so Ajah Shanti told a story of way back, maybe the 1400s, whatever, it was after Buddha, obviously, and there was a big meeting of all these Buddhist monks or teachers or, you know, sages, and they all took time, took them weeks to get and they all got together and they were waiting for the big kahuna, you know, this one guy who was thought to be really the guy, the sage, and it was time for him to come up and speak and so everybody's waiting, you know, and he goes up there and he has a walking stick with him and all he does is he takes his stick and hits the earth a couple of times and then walks away.

I wasn't sure exactly, I can't remember what I just had said about that, but finally, that just stuck with me.

I was like, "You know what I think for me what that meant was, hey," and it's also helped to have Eckhart Tolle, you know, just be present, not just, simply be present and don't make a virtual reality in your mind about what is happening.

Because that's how we live.

When we're not connected to the body, the emotions, the mind can just create these scenarios that have nothing to do with, you know, we think somebody's thinking this or they think whether thinking that about us or whether it's all virtual, you know, and it creates a lot of angst and suffering.

But if we can simply be present to what is here and let our senses take it in, but don't create a virtual model of what's here.

What do you think prevents people from doing that and what can facilitate their doing it?

I think it's habit.

I think it's habit and we're not taught anything like that.

Lots of distractions going on.

You got your phone in your face and you got all the things on TV and all the other things coming at us.

the mind is not a good barometer of reality.

It really isn't.

We think things we think that's what it is.

And you know, and our thoughts are coming all the time.

That's why mindfulness is so good.

Mindfulness training, becoming aware of your thoughts, you know, thoughts are real, not true.

A lot of them aren't true.

Most of them are repeats.

98% of them are just repeats, so we're constantly telling ourselves a story.

We don't even check in anymore.

And now it's like so easy not to, you know?

Nature.

Nature's a good place to be.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But I would say mindfulness, like John Kabat-Zinn and the mindfulness training I had, it's It's being more and more aware of being aware, resting in the awareness, instead of manufacturing scenarios in our mind.

The mind will become the boss if we don't do some sort of mind training.

Yeah, and one thing I often say to people is, if all of this sounds appealing to you and it's not your experience yet, but you'd like it to be, then do something.

Find something, learn something.

One step leads to the next.

And "seek and ye shall find, knock and the door shall be opened." Just get together with a teacher, go to a class, do something online or in person.

Once you have that initiative, you'll be given the next opportunity when you need it at each step.

And if you're super busy and you couldn't possibly imagine taking anything like this on, you're raising young kids or something, if you have time to watch a TV show or whatever, time to do some kind of meditation practice.

Learn something that's easy to do and that's enjoyable that you feel like that you look forward to doing every day, not something that's unpleasant, and try to stick to it and it'll immediately start yielding results.

As the Gita says, "No effort is lost and no obstacle exists." Yeah, and that, you know, I went back and looked at some of my, what I did is, have you ever heard of Artists Way and Morning Pages?

No.

Okay, so Julia Cameron wrote Artists Way, but she has a thing called Morning Pages, and so the first thing you wake up, you just stream of consciousness, write it down.

And, you know, it's not for everybody, but doing that, that, writing out, you know, on paper, your thoughts, it helps you see the repetitiveness of what's going on in your head.

But it also helps because it's usually all junk.

So it's it almost like taking out the trash before the start the rest of your day.

And you don't you don't monitor yourself.

You don't.

So There are ways to bring certain things to the surface, but if we don't express it in some way, or pay attention to it in some way, we don't have the awareness of it.

So that's one way to do that.

But I found this back in one of my more recent notebooks, Keys to Happiness, acceptance of the moment.

Now that's a, you know, that's pretty big, you know.

If you're always resisting, you're not going to go anywhere because you're in, you know, like Adyashanti would say, resistance is futile.

I think that actually came from Star Trek originally, I think.

Anyway, did it?

I think so.

One of those sci-fi movies.

Because he had it at the back of the big room he was teaching in.

You know, I looked back, "Resistance is futile." Like, what does that mean?

So enthusiasm for the opportunity inherent in life.

So just thinking to yourself, you know, I'm here.

Just the thought of I'm here.

You don't even have to ask why am I here, which I'm not sure.

But just to contemplate that.

I'm here.

You know, I'm alive.

You know, there's opportunity here.

You know, I'm not a rock.

I have a way, something simple as that to get out of that habit of, because we're almost like we're looking out of like a very small window and we've put ourselves in that box.

It's like that Pink Floyd song, "Another Brick in the Wall." You know, if we don't have some other way of perceiving or looking at ourselves or the moment, we just get smaller and smaller, our bandwidth for grace or whatever.

So try to find some enthusiasm for the fact that you exist.

Darrell Bock I think these things help, like acceptance of the moment.

That's a very Byron Katie-ish kind of thing.

But loving what is was her catchphrase.

But there's something to that.

I mean, if you have an attitude like, "Oh, this sucks.

I wish I weren't here, this shouldn't be happening.

That very attitude sabotages your experience of what's happening right now.

But if on the other hand, you have the appreciation that there is some kind of intelligence orchestrating the universe and whatever is happening right now is all as well and wisely put, to use that biblical phrase, and there is some significance or value or opportunity in what I'm experiencing right now, even if I'm working at McDonald's or whatever, it can change your whole perspective on what you're doing.

And rather than despising the situation that you're in, you think, okay, well, this is what I'm doing right now and let's take full advantage of it.

And I won't be doing this all my life.

And one thing will lead to the next, but every day is life and you don't wanna pass over the present moment for some glorious possibility in the future.

Right.

Yeah, and like I said, when I went to that first retreat that I ever went to and I had to visualize my own funeral, I was like, "Yeah, I am alive and that's me dead, and that's going to happen someday, but let me not waste." So we just never think of that.

In fact, you know, in our culture, we pretend nobody's going to die.

And then discerning and choosing one's own response and perspective, you know, what you just said, we do have control over that.

That's probably the only thing we have control over is our response in the moment and our perspective and our, you know, our engagement.

We can't control anything.

Everything is interconnected.

It's so dynamic.

That was another thing I got.

Just had this download of how it works.

And I can't describe it, but it's so dynamic.

It's like you can't keep track of it.

There's no way.

So anybody who thinks they can like, I think of the people who are in office now.

They think they can control the country and manage, you know, this and the foreign affairs and what they're doing.

But it's an illusion because anything could happen because everything's connected.

So something could happen who knows where, you know, and which would just change the whole thing.

So the only thing we really have control over is how we respond to life, to what is happening, and how our attitude, our perspective of it.

And we do have control of that, but we have to be aware of being aware.

You know, we can't just go around reacting through our senses because, you know, then we feel powerless.

not having control doesn't mean powerless.

It just means you have to accept in the moment this is what it is.

You can take apart the word responsibility.

It's the ability to respond.

And we can culture that ability.

I mean, the time to culture it is not right now, but the time to prepare for like let's say a dance recital or something is not the moment of the dance recital.

It's the time leading up to it where you prepare to be able to do it properly.

And so every - there's another Gita verse - "You have control over action, never over its fruits.

Live not for the fruits of action, nor attach yourself to inaction." So every moment is an opportunity to increase or improve our response ability, our ability to respond to whatever else is gonna be happening.

And there's one more verse I'll throw in here which I've quoted before.

It's from the Yoga Sutras, which is, "Avert the danger which has not yet come." You know, when the danger comes, you can't do anything about it, as you were just saying, but you can do something now to avert the future dangers.

Like maybe you have some karma coming down the pike that'll cause you to break your leg, but you can perhaps do something that when that moment arrives, you'll stub your toe instead.

You can lessen the impact of future repercussions or karma coming down.

Yeah.

I'm not sure I see all of that, but "Karm" is another one of those words that has so many connotations.

So I do the cause and effect, but taking responsibility of what happens, even though we don't cause it, you know?

It's...

Yeah, like give me an example.

Yeah, like give me an example Let's see, I had I had a friend and we were very close but certain things happened and we kind of had to dissolve the the friendship and I you know, it was a loss it was a loss but and You know, of course, I would tell my story to somebody and they'd say oh, yeah yeah, she was da-da-da-da, and then she tells da-da-da-da.

But I had to take responsibility for that.

I chose to let that relationship go down rather than to keep trying to have it work, you know.

And that might have been the right thing, to let it go.

Yeah.

But I take, I stop blaming her and be responsible for my own either unskillful means of responding or reacting to certain things.

And that I think helps maybe, I'm not sure what you're saying, as you learn from something that you claim responsibility for rather than blaming, you can avert other things in the future because you're learning to be aware of your own reactions or responses and learn from that.

So it's like, instead of just being reactionary all the time and saying, "Well, how come I always meet these same kind of people?" Well, maybe you're not always meeting these same kind of people.

Maybe your response or your reaction to certain things continue to cause the same sort of issue where if you take responsibility for it, have some agency in this situation that you're not recognizing, and it's uncomfortable to do that because it's not flattering, obviously.

I was mean, I was petty, but you have to recognize those things, not to beat yourself up, which is I gotta be careful with that, but to learn, to grow.

And that I see how you can avoid similar things, but I'm not sure.

I just not sure.

I mean, I was there for 9/11 and these people just went to work one day.

Sure.

So are you saying that that makes it hard to understand how there could be such a thing as karma?

these people.

Kim: No, I'm just saying, karma, it's not personal.

I don't know how personal it is.

I mean, I guess certain traditions say each person has their own particular karma, but I'm like, "Well, you know, I don't know." I guess that could be true.

It's hard for me to see because, you know, a tsunami happens because the earth opens up.

Pete: Sure, there was a tectonic plate shift or something like that.

Debra: Yeah, so how is that personal to me?

Was I, are you, is it telling me that I was particularly put there at that time so I could be pushed out by a wave?

So, that's why there's, it's a paradox.

Pete: Yeah, no, it is.

Debra: It's very, very personal, but it's also not personal.

Pete: Right.

And some would argue, like, this is an example of what we were talking about earlier, which is that you can take everything as a hypothesis.

And there are so many different beliefs.

You know, some religions and traditions would say, "Oh yes, if there's a plane crash, everybody on that plane had the karma to be in that crash, and it was all arranged by cosmic intelligence for them to have that experience then." Other people would say, "Eh, it was an accident.

It was arbitrary.

You can't read that much into it.

And there is no cosmic intelligence orchestrating everything.

you know, shit happens, that kind of thing.

So, you know, I lean more in terms of cosmic intelligence orchestrating everything, but I don't hold that as an adamant certainty.

I don't hold anything as an adamant certainty.

It's just that it kind of makes sense in terms of to me with my worldview of things that nothing is accidental or arbitrary and everything is orchestrated by, actually to quote the Gita again, it says, "Karma is unfathomable." Human intellect cannot possibly fathom the mechanics that would be involved in the way it works, if we accept that it works.

But it's just one way of looking at things.

And I don't think there's any compulsion to believe in it or anything.

If it works for you, great.

if it's just an interesting thing to think about, or if you don't believe in it and you'd like to argue against it, great.

Life is for learning, as Joni Mitchell sang.

I can see that.

I mean, there's always cause and effect, so things happen because of something else.

But it's just how you're going to interpret that, and that's up to each person, how they want to.

Yeah, and another element we could throw in here is, is there an evolutionary trajectory in the universe?

Do things happen for an evolutionary purpose to foster the growth of human, or not all human, to grow the evolutionary development of souls?

Or does that just happen sometimes and other times things are just totally accidents and they don't have any evolutionary significance or meaning.

Something to consider.

What do you think?

Well, I think the evolution, evolution, that is intentional.

That is intentional and it's intentional for us as beings, aware beings, to be more participatory in this.

And we do that by aligning with higher principles, love, the interdependence, kindness.

In Dalai Lama, my religion is kindness.

It would change the whole world.

There's so many things that could change the whole world.

So I do feel that that is evolutionary.

And since you brought it up.

It's also, it's like the trifecta for me, the awakening by, you know, the expansion of my awareness into everything.

And then, you know, I am the awareness of God being God, that message.

And then the dream I had, this is, again, at least 10 years after the book, I was studying with another teacher, she's a Gnostic Christian, because I was exploring Christianity just because it was how I was brought up and I wanted a different perspective of it.

And we were going to go on retreat and she told us, there were about five of us, she told us the night before on the phone, "When you go to sleep tonight, you know, look for your, look for a guide, look for your guide, you know, and see what they have to say." And I'm like, "I don't know, I don't know." I know I, there's probably angels that kept me alive during my 20s because I was very reckless, but I don't know.

But I said, "Ah." You know, I kept it open in mind.

And I had this dream.

Now, there are dreams and then there are dreams, you know.

And so in the dream, I'm in this cylinder stone, kind of ancient tower, you know, and you can see the, you know, the big giant chunks of granite that built and it's all circular and there's nothing else in there.

And then I look over and I notice a narrow window.

And I go over the window to look out.

And it's absolutely stunning.

I mean, the colors and it's just alive with life and it's kind of choreographed and it has a path or whatever and did you ever you know in The Wizard of Oz when Dorsey lands and Oz and she opens the door she goes from black and white color to color well that was like the inside of this turret cylinder and looking at was so different and I just say oh yeah who created this and a voice says, "Humans did." I'm like, "No, no, no.

We don't create like that." And I'm envisioning in my head, you know, like, you know, you know, these cities, you know, ghettos, you know, just, we just, we have concrete jungles and all this.

I was like, "No, no, that's-- we don't do that.

That's not how humans do this." And the voice just said, "They will." - Nice.

- And so I was like, "Woof." But it was, you know, and that-- so I said, "I don't know where-- what this was." But it was, you know, a message.

And it's taken me a while, but for me, that turret, that concrete is something we build.

I think we talked about this already.

But that we have created this inability to see, but we have that window of opportunity.

and that's for me is the message is we have to participate because we created the bricks and the walls, but we have an opportunity to be creative and we want to create with awareness and with an alignment, you know, a different motivation than the level we are at now.

Interesting.

That's what I...

Yeah, that's cool.

It was a hopeful dream even though it was just like, "How do I get out of this turret?

I don't want to just look at the window." Well, how do you do that?

You have to take down the turret and you have to create differently from a different place than what we do now.

and that's one of the opportunities.

Perhaps a vision of possibilities.

I'm listening to a podcast called The Last Invention, which is about AI, and it's mainly interviews with the most knowledgeable people in the world about it who have created it, and about half of them think it's going to kill us all, and about the other half think it's going to save us all, but they all agree that it's more impactful than the invention of the printing press or just but any other human invention that has come along.

But there was one woman I was listening to in the podcast who felt like, you know, when you look at it, the problems confronting humanity are insurmountable.

I mean, there's so many things which we're not showing any sign of solving, which are only getting worse, and which we don't really seem to have the wisdom or the resources or the intelligence to solve.

And perhaps this will do it for us, because if we achieve what is called AGI, or artificial general intelligence, it would be like a country full of Einsteins, you know, geniuses, that level of intelligence to bring to bear on our various problems.

And it may well come up with things, and is already in some respects coming up with things that we are just not going to get otherwise.

So it could be nature's response to a dire situation that we've created for ourselves or that the trends of time have created.

And then there's something beyond that called a SI, artificial super intelligence, which will be that AI is recursively self-improving.

So it can just improve itself and it will just take off far beyond our comprehension or ability to control or contain.

And that's where it gets scary.

But this is actually where humanity is on the verge of this happening and very few people are aware of it.

And they don't know what's just around the corner.

So I don't know why I went on this rant, but I think it is significant.

I mean, people might watch this 20 years from now and think, "Wow, he was right." Not that I came up with this, I'm just listening to a podcast, but we didn't see this coming and it has totally rocked our world.

And I'm just hoping it rocks it for the better.

Anyway.

That's going to be how it's used.

Yeah, how it's used.

Which again, it's like with every other technology, nuclear technology or anything else, dynamite, anything we've invented, the power of the technology tends to vastly outstrip our wisdom and our intelligence and our maturity as human beings.

That actually comes back to what I think you and I have been motivated by all these years, which is to do something to help advance the spiritual maturity of humanity, each in our own way as best we can.

Because that alone is the ultimate fulcrum or influential point from which everything else is steered in one direction or another.

Some people always think, "Well, if we could just get a great leader to take over the nation and he'll set everything right." But how can he or she if hundreds of millions of people are just in a relatively low state of consciousness, the kind of influence one emanates from a low state of consciousness?

We're going to to have problems.

That's the only thing that's going to save us is change in consciousness.

Exactly.

Remember New Dimensions Radio?

There used to be a guy named Michael Palms and his wife Justine.

This is way back in the 80s.

It started on and they'd play it on NPR.

I used to love the show.

I think that he died, but I think she might still be doing it.

But He would start the show by saying, "It is only through a change in consciousness that the world will be changed." And I used to just say, "Yeah!" every time I heard that.

And that's what we need to do.

And the more people who realize it, and that's what motivates this show, that's what motivated me to become a meditation teacher when I was 21, that's what we need to do in order to assure the kind of vision you had from that tower comes about rather than some dire dystopian thing that might otherwise happen.

Yes.

Yes.

And it is possible.

I was listening, I can't remember the podcast, it was just all of a sudden appeared in my feed or something.

And this one woman was saying how, you know, religions and a lot of things think, you know, we have to suffer in order to grow.

And she said, but you know, the goal, well not the goal, but the evolution is to not to have to suffer first to grow, but to grow from, you know, from a different experience, you know, like the experience I had.

But to do it collectively, so that we, because with the suffering, if you know, we just keep creating it.

Yes, we do grow from suffering.

I'm not saying, in fact, I love that there's a phrase, Joseph Goldstein, "Don't waste your suffering.

Learn something from it." But I would just love to see us to create, not out of learning from suffering, like NATO came out of that horrific World War II, but can we create out of something positive that we cherish joy, you know?

And we do, some things we do, like Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, you know, "Ode to Joy." Marc Thiessen: "Ode to Joy." Dr.

Angela Brintliff: So we do, but he was exceptional.

Can it be more universal where, you know, we are at a place of awareness and consciousness that we create out of sharing joy.

Tom: Yeah.

Kim: More often than because, you know, situation is, you know, like, "We can't afford to feed everybody in the world." Well, we can.

We just have to change the damn budget.

Stop, you know, stop putting billions and billions and billions of dollars into, you know, warfare.

Tom: Yeah.

I mean, everything is possible, but we choose the wrong thing because we're crazy, you know, not personally, but the constant arms race and the constant killings over what, you know, that changes anyway, it's such a waste.

my argument with the powers that be, God.

But we have agency over that.

RM: Yeah.

That illustrates what I was just saying, which is that a certain ambient collective consciousness is going to percolate up into certain kinds of policies.

And you can't hope for better policies if you haven't changed that ambient state of collective consciousness, if you haven't raised it.

We're going to be bellicose, we're going to be greedy, we're going to let people starve and whatnot if we're coming from a low level of consciousness.

I think that the world could be a heaven, like you perhaps glimpsed in that vision, And the resources could easily be there.

You know, there's no reason for starvation in Sudan right now.

It's just these stupid warring factions that are depriving the people of food or Gaza or whatever.

The problems, well, let's put it this way.

You don't solve the problem on the level of the problem.

The problems are inevitable if we function as individuals or as a society from a relatively low level of consciousness.

If we could raise our collective consciousness sufficiently, then we would find everything on the surface changes dramatically and profoundly.

If we can't raise our collective level of consciousness, no amount of political or economic tinkering is going to improve the situation it never has.

Which is not to say it's not good to have the United Nations and to Doctors Without Borders and to try to make all these efforts But you know that alone isn't going to cut it if we don't take care of the foundation Which is what was it Thoreau said?

He said go ahead and build your castles in the air That's where they belong but now put foundations under them Yeah, that's beautiful.

Yeah, that's why I ended up doing mindfulness training, you know, becoming a teacher because I said, you know, that's the only way.

Yeah.

That's the only, and now when I see people who, you know, are in kind of that lower state of consciousness, that kind of unawareness consciousness, you know, I have sympathy for them because I was there myself at one point and it's true.

Usually we don't seek out spirituality or raising our consciousness unless something hits us over the head like an illness or a loss.

So I don't know.

So I would love, maybe A, I can figure out how to make it popular.

I don't know.

I don't know.

Maybe it would be nice if one of these video games was something that actually elevated people's consciousness.

Could you imagine?

All the gamers?

Well, there would have to be a market for them.

And if kids are not spiritually motivated...

No, no, no, no, no.

You gotta hide it in there.

You gotta sneak it in there.

Easter eggs, they call them.

You hide it in there.

Yeah, yeah.

You gotta be sneaky.

That's part of the game, baby.

That's one of the things.

when I could get on board with AI.

I'm at an age where I had to, I learned DOS and I learned this and I had to learn all these platforms and now I'm like, I can't handle one more new technology.

It's getting easier and easier.

I use it all day long intermittently.

Just give me somebody to talk to.

In fact, this software we're using to record this interview, when I'm done, it will have used our AI to automatically transcribe the whole interview to suggest excerpts that might be highlights that we could put up on YouTube.

It uses AI to correct the sound and make it much more balanced and rich as if you've recorded in a studio.

So it has all kinds of useful applications.

But like every other technology, if we don't raise collective consciousness, then I think the dystopian scenarios may play out, it could end up killing us all.

It's not going to just have a mind of its own, although some speculate that it will have this maternal instinct and take care of us and disarm us, but it's more likely if we are operating from a low level of consciousness, then this technology we have created will be very dangerous.

Well, the good news from my perspective is, having experienced these different experiences and guidance, it's okay if we're all dead.

We're everything anyway.

We can't go anywhere, there's nowhere to go.

I'm not going to be Karen O'Byrne, you know, blah, blah, blah, But I am part of the source, so there's no place to go.

So, you know, who knows?

I just want to be awake.

I say I want to be awake when I die.

I want to be aware when I die.

I'm very curious.

But knowing that I can't be separate from that which is my essence that created me.

I'm not the body.

We know that.

We're not.

So it takes the edge off.

What's horrible is the way we might end up doing that.

That's horrible.

But being extinct, even the human race being extinct, there's life everywhere.

Nathaniel It eventually will be.

I mean, in five billion is the sun's going to expand and the earth will become a molten blob and long before that happens there won't be any life here.

But you and I will still exist on some level in some way.

In what form or I don't know I'm very curious.

But having been formless, you know, that's not bad either.

But you know I feel that, you know, I'm in love with life, you know.

That's the other dimension of the spiritual journey, is falling in love with life.

And so I have that joy, and then I have the sorrow that it is often taken so lightly by people who inflict suffering for no reason.

So there is that, you know, it's holding that both, but I have a fondness for this form.

I have a fondness for the way we, you know, the sensual things the senses can do and just to be, think and speak and grow and read and create this beautiful music.

But love is at its core.

I have several poems but I just want to read one short one.

Nathaniel Sure, while you're looking for that up, I'll just make a comment, which is you had fondness for your old minivan.

It was a great minivan but you probably don't have that minivan anymore.

You have something new.

But, you know, so at some point we won't have these bodies, and at a certain point we'll probably begin to feel like, "Eh, it's time to trade this one in." You know, it's getting pretty rickety.

But then, you know, there will be a new beginning.

- Yeah, right, that's like nature, right?

Everything is recycled.

- Yep.

- Everything is.

But this is a poem I wrote.

I didn't write poetry at all.

And I went to a new moon meditation that, oh, good Lord, Alex Gray at his sacred chapel of mirrors.

You know Alex Gray?

- I know his art, you know, that amazing psychedelic art.

- Yes, so he had a place in New York City, sacred Chapel of Mirrors.

And so my friend and I had never been, we went, but it was the night before Halloween and we didn't realize that.

And so everybody was dressed up in costume waiting to get into this building because in the floor above Alex Gray's place, they were doing one of those fright night things where they go out and scare you, you go through a maze.

- Oh, right, haunted house kind of thing.

So while we were meditating, we keep hearing this, "Ahh!" You know, and all this.

While we're meditating, right, it was so funny because before that they had the nice music playing and they got us in it and then all this hell broke loose upstairs.

So this is the poem.

He invited everybody to be creative because he's a creative guy.

He said, "Just, you know, take a piece of paper and you can write a song or you can make a drawing or do whatever." And this is what I came up with, this is what I mean by, you know, just grace appears, you know.

I'm like, I never wrote a poem, but this is, it's called, it's a poem for celebrating the wholeness of life.

What great fun, this heaven, this hell.

Creation made of my shadow, made of my soul, creation both of light and form, reflections of the whole, seductive illusion, love is at its core.

I cannot stay sad or be sorry when it is life that I adore." Very nice.

That's nice.

So it's fun to create, you know, this is what we're offered, you know, this existence.

And I just encourage, like you said, if you're feeling the call or you want to have some of these experiences, get clear about what it is you want.

Just right now.

My motive for doing what I did 20 years ago is different from my motive now.

whatever it be clear to yourself and then take the next step just take the next step it's so much easier now the internet has so much free stuff and with you know zoom you know if you live in a place where there aren't many teachers you can do it online and then I would still recommend you do something in person when you get a chance because there's nothing like that being with another group of people.

There's nothing quite as wonderful.

Yeah.

That was a nice poem.

Yeah, I couldn't believe it.

And I read it.

I read it to the whole group.

I couldn't believe that either because I was, believe it or not, pretty shy.

And I was like, I said, "Nope, I created it.

I'm going to read it." And I did.

Risk putting yourself out there.

Be vulnerable.

When you think about if we were the microcosm of God, if we're like man is made in God's image, if what that means is that we're kind of like little mini-gods in our own individual lives that are reflecting certain qualities that God the totality has, which I think we are, then all the dramas of our life are kind of reflective or representative of the dramas of the universe itself.

And we honor great dramatists like Shakespeare, not for just writing comedies, but also for writing tragedies.

We find them all entertaining.

Well, I like to say, I think it's in one of my, "God loves a good story." Very good, yeah.

Nice.

I can talk a little bit about the very, very, very, at least in my life, and I think it's universal self-compassion.

So even though I had gone through all these wonderful experiences and studied with Don Miguel and studied with Aracelante and became a minister, there came a time in 2003 when like all these things happened, you know, my brother died, I lost my job, I had a problem with something with the congregation that didn't work out the way, and I kind of fell into this funk and I couldn't understand because, you know, I don't really get depressed, I was just feeling so caught, caught in just like malaise and just doing self-destructive things that I thought I had given up.

And one morning I was waking up and as I was waking up I heard my own voice.

I could tell, I know what my voice is.

And it was just so awful.

It was just saying, "Ugh," you know, it was saying, "You should have known better.

Look at you now or something, something to that, just nasty.

And I was like, I can't believe I'm still doing this, that this is still here, but I guess everything had to be that bad for it to come back.

And I didn't know how to get, I just didn't, because everything was bad.

I didn't know how to turn it around.

You know, it was so strong and that stuck.

But I happened to hear a podcast by, she wrote a book called "Inner Bonding," Margaret Paul, and you can type "inner bonding" into Google and she has this whole website.

But what it is, is it's basically reparenting yourself.

that voice comes from a source that is set up when we're children.

And I thought I had dealt with all of that, but apparently not, because it came back in force when I felt that I had failed, you know, in certain ways.

And that's what I like about the mindfulness training because the two wings of mindfulness is awareness and compassion.

Tara Brach really teaches very well about self-compassion and that's why when I do the Leda Meditation, when it comes to the part you know "may all beings" because you're supposed to start out "may I be this" you know "may you be this and then may all beings.

But what I found is people like me and a lot of people have a lot of trouble saying, "May I be happy.

May I be safe." And then I realized somehow growing up, I felt not really worthy of either happiness or safety or for some, that was really deep in there that somehow I was undeserving of that no matter what I did.

So now when I do the meta, I say, "As I am one of all beings." Because I never had problems saying, "May all beings be happy.

May all beings...

I want all beings to..." Because what a wonderful place it would be.

Happy people don't go around doing what some people do.

But when it came to me, I hit that resistance.

There was a belief, "You don't do that.

You don't wish that for yourself.

So I said, as I am one of all beings, we have to include ourselves in our compassion for others.

And often we don't.

We kind of close our heart to ourselves, we abandon ourselves when certain conditions are there.

And I wanted to just let people know that there are ways to come out of that kind of not of, you know, trance of unworthiness is what Tara Brach calls it.

And it's a lot in the Western world.

And I don't know if it's, you know, different religions or the way we raise our children or something or the competitiveness, I'm not sure.

But that can be a real hindrance, but there is a way out of that, and I encourage everybody to, you know, I've done sermons on it, but if you sense something like that that's holding you back, you know, please reach out.

You know, like I said, you can go to inner bonding, but it is a very damaging thing on a spiritual journey if we have expectations of what we should be doing and we have a setback.

It can be detrimental to further growth and it's painful.

It's very painful.

So I learned through suffering, but I had been exposed through other spiritual traditions to seek help.

I recognized what it was.

I knew it wasn't truth, but it still affected me.

It was still kind of in there.

So I just want to say how important on the journey, it's so much better when we have self-compassion, true self-compassion.

So I just wanted to say that.

Well, a question came in that's related to what you're saying.

This is from Kenny Hogan, I hope I pronounce it correctly, in Scotland.

And he asks, "It seems that grace sometimes can give people a nudge, sometimes cause physical or personal disturbance to stop them in their tracks, forcing them to refocus their attention away from their conditioned state of being.

Should we be fearful of grace or simply accept that grace is redirecting our life from a higher perspective?" Nice question.

Yes, thank you.

Yes, I would firmly say we don't need to fear grace.

We are always held in grace, even though it doesn't seem like it.

And it has to do with the conversation we had before.

We're in this form now, but we have an internal beingness to us.

And we don't know how long this beingness will go on or what form it will take.

But grace is here to, like you said, guide or nudge, because grace maybe a vision of something better for us.

But we often don't pay attention until it's like in our face and kind of scary.

We get comfortable, I get comfortable.

I was very comfortable in my life before I had all this, went on this journey.

And sometimes we need to get kind of kicked, not kicked around, but we need an interruption and it's hard for us to interrupt ourselves.

So grace steps in.

Yeah.

And one way of understanding grace is that we're not alone.

I've interviewed a number of people who actually perceive the celestial beings or guardian angels or those kinds of entities that are, they say, more numerous than we are, actually, and that are constantly interacting with us in ways that we don't perceive, but which nonetheless influence us.

And so I think there is, as I said earlier, an evolutionary trajectory to the universe, And as all the sayings go, God loves us.

And sometimes your mother loves you, but sometimes she needs to scrub behind your ear with a washcloth because you've got some dirt there.

And we scream and cry and resist.

But I think there's definitely some kind of higher intelligence, however you want to understand that helps to guide our growth and our evolution and even to steer the course of our life in terms of going towards certain things and away from other things and so on.

And we can ignore it but the more we ignore it the more likely we are to get scrubbed with that raspy washcloth.

Yeah, and what I found, the more I paid attention and was clear in my own yearnings, I noticed that like that's how, you know, I only met, found the four agreements because somebody handed me a flyer on my way to lunch, you know, in New York City, you know, in the year 2000, it was the year 2000.

You know, back then the internet wasn't like it was.

That's how you found out about something.

But if you worked in New York, you never took a flyer, otherwise you'd have 10 flyers in your hand by the time you got back from lunch.

But I happened to take that flyer, and then I actually looked at it, and the book intrigued me.

So in my mind, that was grace too, because what were the chances?

And then when I went to see him talk in the city on the pew, because it was in a church, a lot of times they do these talks in the churches because it's cheaper, I guess, to rent out.

There was a flyer for Omega which I had never heard of that he was going to be doing something in that July.

But if I hadn't gone, I never, who knows?

My whole life could have been ended up being Yeah.

You know, so even grace when it doesn't look like it's loving, I think you're very right that it's nudging us in a direction.

Yeah, I really think so.

Pay attention.

That's what I, that's the thing about mindfulness.

Boy, when you start paying attention, you know, instead of just paying attention to the thoughts thoughts that go around and around and around.

When you really start paying attention, the opportunities are there.

Very good point.

So we should start wrapping it up.

Is there anything you do that people can interact with?

Like, do you do Zoom meetings or anything like that?

Well, what I'm going to be doing is, what I thought of, you know, because I've done the inviting the grace in, so you can always subscribe on Substacks.

I'll put a link to your Substack thing on your About That page.

And you'll get that free every Sunday, those quotes, and you know, you can, and it's going to be more interactive come probably in January, once I get the chat going.

What I really, the one thing I really would have liked when I was going through this was to have, just to be able to talk to somebody, to articulate what was happening to me with someone who had been there and just have them listen and maybe like nudge me in a certain direction or this direction or whatever.

I just, even though I had a teacher, she had a lot of students, they don't have a lot of time.

So I'm offering, you know, kind of one-on-one conversations and perhaps mentoring.

So you can always go to KarenOBurn.com and put in your name, your email, and what you're interested in perhaps having a conversation about.

I can contact you and we can have a brief Zoom thing and see, you know, if there's anything within the conversation that can be helpful or provide some clarity.

Or maybe you just need to articulate what's happening.

And like I said, even if you write it down, if you don't do anything like a conversation, I think that accelerates everything.

When you can articulate it.

Because if we just keep it in our head, going like this, and so there's that.

And then also, if somebody already has a group and they'd like me to come and speak or speak over Zoom, I have a lot of different, over the 20 years, a lot of, and I have mindfulness workshops and all different relations, mindfulness and relationships and things like that.

R.

Ok, so I'll put a link to KarenOBurn.com on your BatGap page and people can click on that to get there.

K.

Yeah, and if they want to contact me, but I'm keeping it loose.

I don't want to put it in a box, you know, I've recreated what I do many, many times.

And I want to be in the flow.

I just want to help people who are at the point where they're just not playing around.

R.

They're serious.

K.

Yeah.

R.

Yeah.

Personally, what are you most curious or passionate about exploring next, spiritually or socially?

Anything in particular that is on your horizon?

Well, kind of what we talked about, I want to explore how we can create from being in an alignment with that, with source.

To be open to not having to suffer to grow.

You know, finding ways of shifting the perception enough.

And I'm also very interested in the end of life.

I've done a lot of funerals and...

Spoken at them.

Yeah, you know, presided.

Presided, right.

And there's a sacredness to that and I'm interested in exploring what does this mean?

Life after death?

Not so much about that, but maybe helping people transition and giving them comfort.

Because I have a firm belief that nothing will be lost when we die.

The body, but nothing that is held precious by source will be lost.

So to kind of, I don't know, maybe that's a calling, call them death doers, but I'm not sure that that's more the physical.

That's good.

We have a whole category on .gat.

Well, firstly, we have a categorical index that you can go to under interviews, and there's a whole category for near-death experiences, other side, that kind of stuff.

I think it's really useful.

The reason I do those kinds of interviews, and I've been reading books about that kind of thing for a long time, that I have a feeling that it really helps a person to understand that there is...

just to watch interviews with people who've had near-death experiences who are talking about this kind of thing, it expands your perspective and can totally change your attitude about dying and can prevent suicide and things like that.

I mean, there are people who think, "Okay, I'll just kill myself and that'll be the end of me and all my problems will be solved." And then they do that and they think, "Uh-oh, it didn't work out that way.

Here I am still and my problems apparently are going to be worse because I did that." So it can really impact your life to have an understanding of this kind of thing.

Yeah, it is.

I have listened to different ones.

Sounds True had a whole thing too.

Yeah, So that, because maybe if we had a more expansive view of existence, we wouldn't be wasting our time destroying each other, you know?

[Laughter] - Yeah, that too.

- I'm not sure, but I just wanted to say just one other thing is, you know, who or what we identify as makes all the difference.

So you were just saying that.

If somebody believes, "Well, this is it, you know, I'm here and this body is me, this is it, when I die, that's that," we're going to act a different way.

If we identify as part of source where there's something afterwards, we can't be separated from it.

You know, how is that going to be to be not separate without form?

So that is a thing that next stage of consciousness that I'm kind of like really interested in is how not to identify how we do now because there is such a pull of gravity for identity and how we identify, we create that.

Makes all the difference.

So that's part of consciousness too, but that's like one part of it, but it fascinates me, the difference it can make on how we identify.

It really can.

That's what we are.

I appreciate this more and more, how even understanding has a profound impact on your whole perspective and your whole orientation to life.

And that's why it's good to keep culturing and understanding, reading things and listening to things and so on.

Keep exploring, you know, keep learning.

It makes life more interesting and can really enhance it.

Thank you very much.

Is there any final quote or nugget that you want to leave people with?

It could even be something you already said, but is there any kind of closing statement you'd like to make?

Okay, so when I had that vision of just the white lines and there was space in between, they don't actually touch, that's because everything is a relationship.

Because in the no self, kind of getting into the no self, but there's nothing really there.

It's all about relationships.

And so when I was thinking that, it came to me, I said, "Yeah, you know, which you know God is love, essence of creation is love, love wanted to love and so that's why there was the big bang in us.

Because it wanted to have a relationship.

Yeah, I think that's beautiful.

Duality is within non-duality and to me I was like, "I love that so much better, the big bang," and it's also kind of risque, but what came out of it, the universe, us, stars, everything, because there's a relationship and it also matches the words I was giving that Code Project.

I am awareness that allows the sun to be aware of the moon.

We think we're the only things that have consciousness.

We don't know.

I don't like the word "have consciousness." I think everything is consciousness and things reflect consciousness to varying degrees.

They don't possess it, but they reflect it.

And you and I ultimately have the same consciousness, but we each are reflecting it differently, and the plant behind you is reflecting it in a different way, and so on.

And consciousness is not just plain vanilla consciousness, it's also imbued with intelligence.

It's that intelligence which is orchestrating every of the trillions of cells in our bodies and in those plants so on.

It's like those things.

I understand what you're saying, but I'm just saying we don't know whether there's intelligent consciousness within the sun.

The sun is a servant to the galaxy.

We don't know whether there's consciousness there or not.

I think there's consciousness everywhere.

Yeah, well...

Every rock, everything.

Most fundamentally, it's there.

Yeah.

that was kind of what I experienced, but I'm talking like the sun being conscious of itself, I guess.

Rick Yeah.

Some people, well, you mentioned you had watched my interview with Richard Lawrence a few weeks ago, maybe, and he was talking about how in his organization, they believe that there is life on every planet.

It's just not gross biological life, which obviously couldn't live on Venus or someplace like that, But at subtler levels, there's life, beings, who live on Mars, Venus, the Sun, every place.

And this kind of mirrors what other ancient traditions talked about when they regarded the—it seems like primitive that we think, "Oh, they thought the Sun was a god." But no, there's something more profound than that, that they may have been realizing, which is that this fusion reaction that we call the sun, on a subtle level, there's an intelligence that is embodied in that phenomenon.

Thank you for saying that, because that's kind of what I was getting at, but I couldn't quite articulate it.

Yeah.

I don't know why those particular words came to me.

I never would have.

But then when I heard it, I was like, "Yeah, that's beautiful." That's good.

That was one of the things that jumped at me in your book, was that phrase when you said it.

I thought, "Yeah, I love that." All righty, well let's wrap it up.

Thanks a lot, Karen.

Good to meet you, and stay in touch.

Thanks to those who have been listening or watching.

Some interesting interviews coming up, including Swami Sarvabhiyananda in December, one of my favorite dudes.

I always love talking to him and listening to him, and I've been taking classes from him for years.

And if you'd like to be notified when new interviews are posted, You can sign up for our email list.

There's a link at the bottom of every page on batgap.com.

All right.

Thanks, everybody.

Thank you.