[Music]
Rick Archer, BATGAP Interview #1
Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump.
My name is Rick Archer.
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My guest today is Carter Phipps.
Carter is the author of "Evolutionaries,"
which was published in 2012,
and co-author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller
"Conscious Leadership,"
with John Mackey and Steve McIntosh.
I've interviewed Steve.
He is co-founder of the Institute for Cultural Evolution,
which addresses political polarization
through focusing on the cultural roots
of America's challenges.
He hosts the Thinking Ahead podcast
and is a former award-winning journalist
and executive editor of What Is Enlightenment magazine.
And I will be linking to his website on his Backgap page.
That's carterphipps.com.
I used to subscribe to What Is Enlightenment magazine.
Today we're actually going to be talking a lot about what is enlightenment, and if we
have time we'll also talk about his book Evolutionaries, which I read or listened to the audio version
of in the last couple weeks and enjoyed tremendously.
As I listened to it I wished I'd had a photographic memory because there was so much good stuff
in there, so many interesting thoughts.
I mean you could make an interview out of every chapter.
This is a sampling, obviously we're not going to go on for days talking about all this.
We'll give you a taste for a couple of hours of what Carter has to say.
The thing that got me going on the idea of interviewing Carter was that he and I and
many others were speakers at a conference at Harvard Divinity School in April.
I was with the Association for Spiritual Integrity, we gave a presentation, and Carter gave a
presentation himself entitled "Mysticism and its Discontents. Does Spiritual Illumination
Create Its Own Intrinsic Blindness?" The presentation interested me because if you've
been watching BatGap interviews, you've often heard me lament about the situation of spiritual
teachers who are very inspiring in many ways, but then misbehave, in many cases more egregiously
than the ordinary person would. And it's confusing because traditionally we expect spiritual enlightenment
to confer some sort of saintliness upon a person and have them be exemplars of ideal
behavior and very often the opposite seems to be true. So, it's something I've been
pondering for a long time now and reading Carter's article and this upcoming conversation
we're going to have, I think, will help us gain greater clarity on that conundrum.
So Carter, where would you like to start?
Give us a nutshell version of the premise of your paper, and then we can pretty much
follow the logic of the paper as you laid it out, because it was very systematic.
But let's get us started.
Yeah, thanks for all that.
That's a big question.
I wrote it this year, but I've really been thinking about it for at least 10-12 years.
I thought about it. I think the, honestly, the very last retreat I did with my own teacher,
my own community, and that, you didn't speak about that, but that community eventually fell apart.
The very last retreat, I think some of these ideas really crystallized for me. And that was almost,
that was more than 10 years ago. Do you mind saying who your teacher was? Yeah,
sure. My teacher was, since I was really in my early twenties, I was in the Andrew Coen's
community. And that community was also the, What is Enlightenment, the magazine you spoke about,
was a project of many of us in that community and that became, you know, it was much more than
a vehicle for his teachings or that community's teachings or anything like that,
but it came out of that community. It was a great magazine. I liked it.
Yeah, yeah, it was fantastic. It was a wonderful, you know, that was its own
wonderful, beautiful journey that we went through creating that together and many of us who worked
on it. It was a beautiful, really enjoyed that process. And I think we were able to explore so
many nooks and crannies of the spiritual life. And it gave me, I think, a unique perspective,
because not only was I sort of practicing it very intensively in my own sort of spiritual
context or on communal context, but then we were interviewing people in every tradition.
We were interviewing contemporary teachers, Western and Eastern. We were talking about it,
discussing it. You know, the whole inquiry was I felt like I learned so much about just the history
of teachers and teachings and in all kinds of East meets West contexts.
And so that combined with my own experience in my own community with my own teacher all
mixed together.
And I just thought a lot about that question.
And I think it's almost even more profound than that because the magazine itself was started
from my own teacher's inquiry into what had happened with the teachers of the 70s and 80s.
many gurus of the 70s, 80s, whether we're talking about Trungpa or your own experience, I don't
know your experience with Maharishi and Dauphrey John and Rajneesh, all these different, you
know, Krishnamurti, there was these significant teachers, many of them who had gone through
these massive problems, ethical, complete messes, the communities had imploded, just
all kinds of stuff, Muktananda, all these teachers. And then in the wake of that was
our community sort of formed in the late 80s and early 90s, and I think the teacher was
very concerned about ethics and how we go about this living a spiritual life.
And yet, even despite that concern, that investigation, we were so, he himself fell prey to a lot of
messed up things that ultimately led to the implosion of our community over time.
So it made me think very deeply about those questions.
And I think the traditional way we see it is like someone has, well, people see in all
kinds of ways, but someone has a spiritual awakening and then they are corrupt.
And you know, and they were good, but then they become corrupt, power corrupts.
And while that's true, I felt like there, what I witnessed in my own experience and
in looking at the history of the last century, you know, at least century of sort of new
religious movements and new spiritual movements, it made me want to delve into the subtleties
of the way in which our experience of enlightenment itself and of non-duality and of deep mysticism
can illuminate, but it also can blind, right? It can also blind. And I think unless we start
to appreciate that, we are going to fall into lots of problems as we pursue these practices,
as we pursue teachers, as we pursue communities. And so I'm sort of really trying to kind of
help all of us to be much more awake and not put these things on pedestals that ultimately
will lead to massive crashes.
So people tend to like either are overly fawning, you know, just when they get into these mystical
experiences that these people know more than I do, this is incredible, this is all good,
or they can become cynical on the other side of it.
I'm trying to kind of walk a middle line here.
we engage these practices and even maybe these modalities of teachers and students while
being a lot more awake to the subtleties of the problems. And not just the students, but
the teachers too. And I think a lot of the problems are bound up in ideas we have about
enlightenment itself. Maybe that we need to really deeply question. So all of these things.
So I try to congeal or concentrate all of that into about 6,000 words, this paper. It
probably should be a book. It probably should be much more. But at least I got some of the
basic ideas down. Yeah, so when you start out the paper you outline initially
three possibilities with these teachers. One is that they had a genuine spiritual
attainment or realization but then fell prey to corruption or human weakness. The
second is that they were self-deluded and couldn't possibly have attained a
genuine awakening. And the third is that they were just outright frauds and took
advantage of people. And I suppose all three of those are possibilities or some
mixture of the three. But then a fourth which you lay out is that the blind spots that lead
to abuse in some cases are in fact dangers inherent in the awakened state, that they
may be an intrinsic feature of certain types of awakening. And that'll surprise people
because awakening by definition sounds like it should be an illumination which would shed
light on blind spots and help to eliminate them. But if we try to look for examples of
that being the case, or examples of it not being the case, it's a very questionable theory.
Yes, exactly. That's like the start of the papers, like maybe that's not true. Maybe
this idea that, and I'm not the first to point out that certain types of spiritual awakening
doesn't necessarily, you can have a profound awakening, mystical awakenings, and of course
it affects us, it changes us, it can be transformative, but it doesn't mean it transforms us to a
degree that it changes all of our psychological structures. It can illuminate a lot, but even
that illumination can blind us as it changes the nature of our attention, as it changes the nature
of our psyche, as it reveals certain truths and powerful experiences. It can also blind us to other
things. It can make us more focused on these things at the expense of these things. And if we just
accept that this is the way, the truth, and the light, and we think this is just revealing nothing,
this is nothing good, we will be blind to the ways in which this might delude us.
And of course, some of those won't show up very strongly initially, but over time,
they can be very profound and have huge effects. So, what I say is like, I was trying to understand
the complications and confusions that lie within the realizations we seek, that can come out of
of the realizations we see, not just the corruption we bring on our own.
I suppose one initial consideration is, like the Power to Live Your Magazine, what is enlightenment?
Some people seem to view enlightenment as like pregnancy, either you're pregnant or
you're not. Either you're enlightened or you're not. There aren't degrees of enlightenment.
Once you've got it, you've got it. There was one guy I interviewed, I remember, towards
the end of the interview I said, "So, you know, what seems to be on the horizon for you?
you see as the direction of the trajectory that you seem to be on.
He kind of looked at me with this puzzled look and basically said, "I'm done.
What more could there be?"
And I was kind of forehead smacking myself.
The fact that someone could relate to enlightenment as if it's the end of their personal evolution
and almost the end of like human striving and human development.
To me, it's like we've taken a wrong turn somewhere in the way we understand the nature of mystical
realization as some sort of pinnacle of human evolution.
I think we really have to question that, because that in and of itself, and it's very deep
in there for a lot of people, leads to all kinds of messes and problems and ways that
someone would say, "Ah, I'm done.
I don't have to grow anymore.
I'm done."
And I think that the subtleties of why we've drawn those conclusions need to be unpacked.
So let's try to define enlightenment. Why don't you give me your definition,
I'll give you mine, and we'll compare notes.
I don't have a definition. I spent 20 years doing a magazine. Someone could read those.
I mean, at least I spent like 15 years doing a magazine.
I'll give you mine.
Someone could read all those. It's way too complex and I don't have a particular definition.
Well, in my case, I hesitate to use the word because it has this superlative static connotation
that you've reached the mountaintop and you're perfect and all that. And I don't know if that's
even possible. One of my favorite quotes is from St. Teresa of Abala. She said that it appears
that God himself is on the journey. And so if she's right, then certainly we are on the journey.
I wrote a lot about enlightenment in the evolutionaries. A lot of what I wrote there,
I still adhere to, but I completely agree with you. Seeing it, and one of the things I've seen it as
an end state. It's a dangerous and tricky to draw either about oneself or the nature of that
realization itself. And it's delicate because the nature of non-duality, the nature of that,
what we call some traditionally kind of enlightenment, it has a, what I call in the
the paper, a fragrance of finality. There's a completion in it that makes it seem like
an end in a way, but that doesn't mean it's your end state. As I say, don't turn the ground
of being, this beautiful sense of beingness and completeness and fullness or emptiness
if it can be experienced. Don't turn the ground of being into the goal of becoming for you
or for me or for us.
And it can be beautiful and wondrous and we can appreciate what it is without turning
around and imagining that that represents some pinnacle of human evolution.
I think that's the really tricky danger that people get into.
And people fall for it, and I think it fucks up people's lives when they fall for it.
Yeah. If I were to use the word, I would probably include Ken Wilber's lines of development
model.
Wilber is very good at beginning the process, I think, of beginning to untangle some of
this.
Again, I hesitate to use the word, but in my understanding, or if someone deserves the
word enlightenment, they are very highly developed along all possible lines of development. Not
just the consciousness line, but the ethics line, and the compassion line, the heart,
the refinement of senses. All the better angels of our nature have blossomed fully in such
a person. But again, that's very rare. And I think what is often mistaken for enlightenment
is just the awakening to pure being, or the ground of being as you called it. And it can
be so intoxicating. And so, again, a more fruitful, I think more realistic way to think
about some of these things is, is it's like, you know, when someone's a math
prodigy or something, we don't necessarily think, well, they're also
going to be incredibly well developed emotionally. I'm sure that goes together.
No, it probably doesn't. You know, sometimes if you're overdeveloped in
one side of your intelligence or humanity, that's a beautiful thing.
You may be a genius in a certain area, but it may come at the expense of
something else probably likely does come at the expense of some other part of the
self and that's not a bad thing. We all represent these amalgamations and
sometimes if we have certain strengths in certain areas it goes together with
weaknesses and others but it's only when we think, "No, if I'm strong in this area
I must be strong everywhere. I must be, you know, I must have, I must not have
those weaknesses." That gets us in all kinds of trouble. Spiritual realization
in various forms, it can be the same way. People who have unusual capacities to
have powerful permanent or semi-permanent state experiences that maybe go together
with confusions or deficiencies and other areas of the self. Yeah, people did this
with Einstein. They wanted him to become president of Israel and they were asking
him all kinds of questions about areas that had nothing to do with physics
because they assumed he was just this uber genius who would be great at
everything. Yeah, exactly. And it doesn't mean he might not have wisdom. He might
have beautiful wisdom, but it doesn't mean we should put him on some kind of
universal pinnacle of evolution.
But when it comes to enlightenment though,
I was in the TM movement as you know,
and one of Maharishi's teachings was that
if you water the root, the whole tree will flourish.
And so basically just develop consciousness
and then all other aspects of life will be enhanced.
Yes.
And it really didn't pan out that way.
Maybe it did to some extent, yes,
but not to the extent he emphasized.
It became clear that one really needed to pay attention
to all these different aspects of life and try to behave ethically and try to take care of your
health both mental and physical and all that kind of stuff. There were people cheating in business
and ending up in jail who were big supporters of the TM movement and enthusiastic meditators.
It's like tapping into pure consciousness. It's not some magic button that brings perfection
to everything else. It is not indeed. Look, I think there's an embedded truth in what you're
saying. There is something so fundamental about awakening to consciousness without an object,
you know, the consciousness as the ground of being. There's something very fundamental to
non-duality experienced in a very deep way. It can be transformative and I say in the paper,
it can provide a sort of an evolutionary wind in your sails and that's a beautiful thing.
There's nothing wrong with that, that's beautiful. It's just when we start thinking that that's what
we need, that that's all we need, you know, we just focus on that, that the more powerful that
is, the less we need to worry about other stuff. And then you get into some dangerous things.
If people have psychological make-ups where they just want to avoid parts of themselves,
that becomes a very easy way to do it. You dive as deeply as you can into that and you
can avoid the rest of yourself. Of course, that will come out and that will be a mess.
So there's an embedded truth in that, but it's a dangerous truth if you see it without
in moderation.
Petey There's a historical mystique about it.
For instance, Valmiki, who wrote the Romana, was a highway robber and murderer, and he encountered
these sages and got inspired and sat and went into Samadhi for seven years or something
when he came out.
He was a saint.
Or Saul on the road to Damascus, he got zapped spiritually somehow and became the Apostle
Paul.
So, the people have undergone…
St. Francis of Assisi was kind of a creep, actually, and then he underwent a big transformation
and became a saint.
So, there's these instances where we see people's personalities apparently transformed in every
respect as a result of spiritual awakening. So, that's part of the storyline about what
enlightenment is or should be or could be.
Pete That's a beautiful thing. We can accept
that and acknowledge that and just that thought, the deep and rich and complex history of mystical
thought and all those ways, it's tremendously transformative and can be. And we can accept
that and honor that beauty without drawing these conclusions about the self and about perfection,
about the top of the mountain, and about finality, and about the end state of evolution,
all these kinds of things which then we really are getting into trouble. But we can accept all that
rich and varied beautiful history of mysticism and its transformative power. That's a great thing. So,
yeah, that is true. That's all true.
But then there are so many contemporary examples of that not being true.
Of people who have, you know, shocked it up the wazoo and they glow in the dark,
but they are sexually abusing women or drinking or whatever they're doing, alcoholics.
And there's a lot of examples in the past too. I don't think it's just contemporary.
I think there's probably, you know, we don't remember probably many of them,
but I think there's a long history of that.
But the tricky thing is I think our current thing would say, like,
You could make an argument that the last 50 years of East meets West mysticism in the West
would not only tell you that some people who have deep realizations can be
ethically challenged in all kinds of ways, it would almost tell you something more.
It would tend to imply that people who have some of the most powerful
capacities for mysticism and mystical states and be able to share those in some ways
seem to be more ethically challenged than the average person.
They seem to fall more prey to it.
And I think we have to be honest about that and say, "What does that mean?"
As I say in the paper, you would think we just had an unlucky run, you know, of unstable
narcissists that suddenly became spiritual teachers.
It was an accident, you know, I'm sure the next 50 years will produce all the pure-hearted.
No, I don't think that's true.
I think we have to be honest that there may be aspects of the psyche that are not necessarily
healthy or integrated that can result in very powerful mystical awakenings and that may
be a feature not a bug.
Yeah.
We can appreciate those people and say wow that's a beautiful thing without then saying
oh they must know everything about everything because that ain't true.
In fact it could be the opposite.
They could know a lot less about certain things.
I remember in the later days of my own teacher when he would teach retreats sometimes he would
get very deep into the ground of being and into kind of non-duality, into a
mystical states and he could transmit those. It was very powerful sometimes at
teaching those states of consciousness. But I used to feel sometimes, especially
in later days, because I think I was more awake to this, the more he would get into
that experience, the less he was able to speak in really intelligently about life.
The truths that seem real in that state would obscure his ability sometimes to speak intelligently
because enlightenment is the main thing. Those states of consciousness are beautiful and they
have their own power. It's like their own power and they're what's important and isn't just
experiencing that reveal the truth about everything else we need and like you said,
we just water that and everything else, the tree flowers, but I used to watch him. Sometimes when
he would get asked questions about other stuff, I feel like it was when he was more embedded and
focused on those states that he was less able to speak cogently, intelligently about issues in the
world. We were working on the magazine together or something, he might be able to speak, but when he
wasn't as much in that kind of state, you know, so I just think it's interesting. So we have to ask
these questions, we have to think critically, we can't abandon our criticism as we enter the
realms of mystical awakening, you know, we really need not to.
That reminds me of a friend of mine who's a professional guitar player and he said one time
he took a lot of psilocybin and he sat for hours and hours doing this guitar riff that he thought
was totally brilliant and then finally next day when he listened to the tape it was just totally
crap and he was just doing this stupid thing over and over again.
And we know that the opposite can happen too, right?
You might have just something brilliant come out and that's beautiful, or it might not
be that at all.
My teacher in this case, his brilliance about what enlightenment in its pure form might
be, might increase in those retreat environments, even as his ability to speak intelligently
and cogently about other aspects of life might decrease, you know?
So again, these are trade-offs in the human character.
And as I say, there are always trade-offs.
When we're dealing with a finite world of human evolution,
human psychology, there are always trade-offs
in a finite world, even when we are talking
about gateways to the infinite.
The infinite is not this world, right?
The infinite is that world.
And it's what a wonderful thing that we might be able
to become transparent or see infinity,
that the worlds might cross.
That's a beautiful thing, but let's not pretend
this world is infinite, that this world is perfect, or that this world that the end state of becoming
can be reached in any kind of human form. Let's not pretend those things. This is when we pretend
those things that we get into trouble. Yeah, which reminds me of something I always come
out with when I try to define enlightenment and that is that life is multi-dimensional.
There is a dimension which is perfect and in which in fact nothing has ever happened, you know,
It's pure, unmanifest being. And there is perhaps a level at which everything is also perfect in
the sense that it's all divine. Everything is just well and wisely put and God is orchestrating it.
And then there's another level which Vedanta refers to as Vyavaharika, which is the transactional
everyday reality in which things are obviously not perfect and we have wars and hunger and diseases
and all the problems. And my understanding is that as a human being evolves, they don't just burrow
down into the transcendent and hide out there, but they become multi-dimensional. They're able to
incorporate within the spectrum of their experience that full range that I just described,
and function on all levels simultaneously. Or as the case may be, there's a level which is
non-functional, so that might be there, the pure silence in which one feels I'm not doing anything,
but then more manifest levels in which one is very much engaged in a practical, sensible,
realistic way with the "real world." Yeah, exactly. I talked about my teacher in that case,
but I've had the experience of going deeply into meditation and you get into it more deeply and
it's like it becomes all you need, you know? And you just feel the world fall away and the
importance and conundrums of your life falls away and you just see, "Oh, this is
all I need. This is full. This is beautiful." And that's a beautiful state
to be able to get in. The fact that the world, the manifest world, could kind of
slowly shimmer and fall away from that state that you're cultivating, you know,
and as you go deeper and deeper into meditation. And that's a beautiful thing.
That doesn't mean the world's not important. No. That doesn't mean that
all that is unreal, that doesn't mean that this is all I need. And I just think it's
easy to draw conclusions. We can enjoy those beautiful and transformative experiences without
drawing a lot of conclusions about our experience or what we should be doing that aren't true.
Yeah. And I speak from experience in saying that you can get into a deep state like that
and wallow in it and enjoy it and all, but actually be quite dysfunctional in the world.
I mean, you wouldn't even want to try to drive a car.
No, no, exactly.
It's like doing a psychedelic check for a car.
It's a very disassociated state.
And that doesn't mean it's beautiful and transformative and powerful and even very real.
But it doesn't mean it's going to tell us about other dimensions of life that are also important.
Right. And I think the key here is integration.
We can dip into deep states, temporarily deep samadhis,
Samadhis, but if enlightenment means anything, it's a state in which that depth has been
integrated with practical life, such that you actually should become more capable, more
skillful.
I mean, there's a verse in the Gita which says, "Yoga is skill in action.
It's not a withdrawal or an escape."
So if managed properly, if one becomes fully integrated, one can have one's cake and eat
it too.
deep in the transcendent and fully engaged in activity in a more effective way than if
one didn't have that transcendent dimension.
Yes, I generally agree, although I think there's a myth in there though that we want to be
careful.
Again, it's like life is complex.
There's a lot of ways of focus.
There's a lot of trade-offs we make as we focus on this part of life or this part of
life.
And I think sometimes people get the idea that this experience I had in meditation that
now the goal is to bring that into the rest of my life somehow. Like I should be in this
beautific or buddhistic state as I go through life and they almost like judge themselves against that
state. And I just think that gets into very tricky territory because it doesn't mean like you said,
we can integrate some of the insights and beauty of that state. It can be transformative on its own
terms, but if we're trying to hold on to something and if our integration isn't like with our
hands free, if it's trying to fit all these worlds together that are actually in polarities
with each other, that gets challenging. I think sometimes people forget the goal is
to be...
I totally agree.
...that can be dangerous.
I agree. It's not something you hold on to. If it's really integrated, you don't think
about it. It's like you take a shower in the morning, you're clean throughout the day without
remembering the shower. So whatever benefits accrue from this deep immersion should be
spontaneously if they're there at all, but they're not enhanced by some conscious attempt
to retain them as you go through your day.
Or to judge yourself against that state just because you're not.
And look, if you're a Thich Nhat Hanh or a saint in that coma, maybe that's your path
and that's fine.
But for many of us, we're going to be engaged in the world in all kinds of ways that retaining
some beatific state is not, not only is it not possible, it shouldn't be the way we think
about the goal of our own practice.
We could take an example of getting a good night's sleep.
You just feel better throughout the day because you've had one.
And the same would be true of deep immersion in being.
Let's say you do it with meditation or something.
Throughout the day, you don't have to think about the fact that you had that experience
in the morning or whatever, but the experience permeates or enhances your functionality.
The mind-body system has been a little bit more fine-tuned by virtue of it.
You agree?
I agree.
Good.
kind of touched on this, but we can touch on it a bit more. Is mystical attainment seen as an end
state? Is there such a thing as an end state? I write about this in evolutionaries, you know,
a lot of traditional teachings, there's this extraordinary in human history, the discovery
of this transcendence, of transcendent realm, of transcendent consciousness, that plays a huge role,
I would argue, in the Axial Age of that era of human history in which all the religions formed.
that discovery of transcendence is this powerful, beautiful thing. But in so many of those traditional
religious contexts, that becomes what is real, and the world becomes sort of unreal. Whether it's,
you know, heaven is real, and this is sort of unreal, or this is Maya, or every tradition has
their own version of that's real, and this is unreal, you know. And there's some mitigating
traditions in there, but I would say that, count me on someone who believes that that may be real,
but this is also real. This is an illusion. This matters. And there's different ways in which the
Aurobindo, the great Indian saint, has some beautiful ways of talking about the dangers,
he calls it the refusal of the ascetic. When you imagine in the overwhelming power of the
mystical realization that this world is not real. So, there's all kinds of ways in which
mystical realization is so powerful, it can be deluding. And I would argue that's one of the
ways it can be deluding. It's like the embedded truth that you can experience can blind you to
another truth that's not part of that experience. The delusion is embedded in the truth itself.
And so I think one of the delusions that can be embedded in deep mystical experience is that sense
that part of the beauty of it is the sense of finality. As I talked about that completion,
that fullness, a nothing missingness. But that nothing missingness is about consciousness,
not about Carter. It's not about Rick. But it can be easily flip over into I'm something is finished
about me. And I think there's been a whole mythology of what enlightenment is, the top
of the mountain, the pinnacle of evolution, whatever it is in the East meets West, progressive
spiritual world, this mythos that I very much came of age with. And I think that I began to realize
at a certain point that mythos about enlightenment being that this is a school and that's how you
graduate, you know, all these various things. I'm not saying there's no truths embedded in there.
I'm just saying that there's some fundamental mythos that that's the goal of human becoming,
is to merge with that. And when you do that, that's it. There's something complete about
that. When we start thinking about that attainment and realization as an end state of our personal
becoming or our collective becoming, instead of this ground, not goal. Ground is beautiful
and powerful. It can help us with our own evolution and human evolution. Ground is beautiful,
But to turn it into a goal is a very dangerous thing to do in this world, in this time, in
this evolutionary context of this manifest universe.
That's a very dangerous thing to do.
I think, but it's very, very, very, and can I say very tempting for people to do that.
Well, you know, there's a small fraction of people, I think, who are probably maybe naturally
cut out to be recluses.
It's very small.
But there are kind of a disproportionate number of scriptures which have a recluse emphasis,
such as the Ashtavakra Gita, the Mandukya Upanishad, and various other texts which do
keep denigrating the world as illusion and involvement in it as some kind of a fool's
errand.
And I think that if people who are not naturally cut out to be recluses dwell on those kinds
of teachings excessively, it can really skew their psychology and cause a rather disinterested
nihilistic mindset to develop. I think the neo-Advaita world is guilty of that to a great
extent.
Yeah, they're guilty of several of these elements.
In my own case, when I was in my early 20s, Maharishi began advocating living a monastic
lifestyle if you were really gung-ho. He was going to set up this group of monks that would
spend a lot of time with around him and be celibate and all that. And so, I was really
gung-ho, natural-born fanatic. So, I signed up for that and did that for 15 years or so.
And so, one tended to psych oneself into this attitude that the world sucks and I don't
want to be involved in it and it's not real and all this stuff. And it was just sort of
a self-brainwashing process.
Yeah. It's brainwashing that is, I would say, is supported by a deep and rich history of
religious thought, but there's a lot of support out there if you want to find
people who are going to help you do that. Look, if someone needs to be a
monk, that's great. That can be a beautiful path in and of itself. That's
fine. I've got nothing wrong with that, but like you're saying, sometimes we have
to recognize that can come along with a whole set of presumptions about the self
and the world that I think we probably want to be very careful before we just
embrace without careful consideration. I don't think it's most people's dharma.
That's true, I think.
And, you know, better is death in one's own dharma than the dharma of another, as they say.
I shaved my head at 22 and became celibate for a while, too.
I didn't call myself a monk necessarily, but my mother did.
So maybe that qualifies.
I know the renunciate path. I understand what that is like.
And I didn't do it in a permanent way, but I did it for a period of time.
And, yeah, so.
Okay, so mystical enlightenment is an end state.
And then of course there are examples of the Buddha and people like that who we have always revered as somebody who finally reached the goal
Wouldn't that be nice? I?
Mean who knows what was going on with the Buddha?
I mean we could talk about that for a long time
But I mean he was obviously a beautiful extraordinary
Religious teacher and had this incredible effect on the history and so we can acknowledge all that without
Being careful about the conclusions we draw 2,500 years later about what was his personal state?
Yeah, you know if you live in a culture where a bad cavity in your tooth could end up killing you and there are all kinds
Of other difficulties it might be really alluring to get off the wheel and never be reincarnated again
I mean if you live 2,500 years ago. I'm sure that could be very appealing to in its own way
Yeah, if you're Christian in Roman times, and you know you're watching all your people. I'm sure martyrdom. Yeah, you know these are
History's complex and there are these…
Yeah, you want to go to heaven for all eternity and just get out of this difficult world.
So, I think the tendency to view enlightenment as an end state might, to a certain extent,
be based upon how content one is, you know? If your life is difficult and you're suffering,
you want to break out of this and be free of that. And I used to feel that way very strongly,
and over the years, contentment grew to the point where that was no longer an issue. It's like,
I'm happy just living out whatever my destiny is, no matter how many lifetimes it involves
or anything else, because it's all sort of in service of the divine. This desire to sort of
reach some terminus point and be finished, just dissolved. Yeah, that's an interesting question
of itself, right? Like in the mythology of enlightenment, you know, you have to want to
be enlightened so bad. I remember my teacher was very focused on that in his own life. He's an
example that, you know, the intention to be free, to be enlightened, you know, you have to want it,
you know, in the traditions, right? More than a drowning man dying of thirst, or sorry,
water, right? Yeah, sorry, drowning man, you know, desert dying from thirst,
the drowning man dying for air, whatever it is, you know, there's all these kind of
those traditions. And that's, but then you think, okay, interesting, what kind of psychology
wants to get out of their own psychological state so bad. Now, in the tradition, you have,
you say, well, it's the kind of psychology that has such a burning to be awakened,
that that's part of their karma and that's just that's because they're so developed over lifetimes
of whatever, who knows. There's whole mythologies about that. But there's also types of psychology
that there's a reason they want to get into a different state of being because they're not
very unhappy with their own psychological state. And that also can play a massive role, I would
suggest, and the impact and the nature of our seeking path. And we have to be aware of that.
we can't just pretend that our deep understanding of modern psychology and the complexities of
modern psychology is not relevant here. And I would agree with that, but I would also say that
there could be cases where a person is psychologically healthy but just has a vehement
desire for enlightenment. Definitely. There are all kinds of reasons for people to be seeking and
they're complex and confusing and they can be based on this or that and so I'm not in any way
by pointing out that it may not always be this entirely pure experience of intention for
the sake of merging with God, I don't mean to say that it can be healthy at times, it
can be all kinds of things. I'm just saying we have to kind of look with open eyes at
some of the mythos of enlightenment that we've been given and say, okay, there's obviously
some deep, relevant truths embedded in there, but it may not be as simple as the picture
that we imagined.
Yeah.
Okay, good.
So, your next major point is, how does mystical awakening blind as well as illuminate?
And you give four examples.
So, let's get into those four examples.
First, if we start with the presumption that we have a limited awareness or capacity for
attention in our individual psyches, then we might think of spiritual illumination as a
light or spotlight that brings the background of an always already present consciousness
into the foreground.
Questions about life and the world that cry out for complex ethical considerations might
seem unimportant, irrelevant, already resolved when seen through the eyes of the fullness
of the core of self.
So in other words, someone might brush off and say, "Oh, the world is an illusion."
I was actually at a sand conference and some guy got up, David Loy, you probably know David,
got up on the mic and challenged a well-known spiritual teacher about climate change and
the fate of the ecology.
And the guy just brushed him off.
He said, "The world is like a speck of dust, doesn't matter what happens to it."
So there's a perfect example of that.
What a wonderful...
I'm tempted to just point out the absurdity that someone could...
Is this a beautiful thing that someone could experience this and come to that conclusion?
We have to be honest about that.
That conclusion, it's not a bug of mystical awakening, it can be a feature of it, unless
we're very awake.
And it seems like some of the great spiritual luminaries that we respect from throughout
history were very concerned about people's material, physical welfare as well as their
spiritual welfare.
So they would try to feed people and house people and clothe people and just take care
them on material levels as well as their spiritual needs.
I think, you know, in a more traditional culture, what you do is you have the realization and
then the action in the world is to sort of mitigate suffering.
That's a beautiful mix, that's fine.
But I think we have to realize that in, at least in the way I understand human culture
and the nature of cultural evolution, which is its own massive thing, mitigating suffering
is not our only accountability to human culture and to the world. Helping this all move forward,
helping the culture evolve. I see that as a huge part of what we're also potentially here to do.
Not just mitigating suffering so we can all go be in heaven together, you know,
or whatever that looks like. Mitigating suffering is its own beautiful thing,
but I don't think it's enough.
- One thing I like about you, and if one looks at your website, you have all these essays on
contemporary issues, like even in the intro I read, you're focusing on political polarization
and things like that, and you have essays on climate change and other issues. So, personally,
I respect a person's spirituality more if it makes them more engaged in such things rather
than less engaged, more passionate about solving relative problems. Not that we all need to become
specialists in all the technologies that would be involved in solving all the world's problems,
but at least we can be supportive of those efforts and see them as important rather than brushing them off as some kind of maya.
Yeah, that has been an important part of my own journey, I think, is realizing that culture and consciousness,
and that's all, are connected, you know. And the evolution of consciousness is not just the realization of consciousness without an object,
or pure consciousness, the way that you said. It's the evolution of consciousness and culture connected together
That part of the way we evolve culture and the external parts of cultures
We involve the interior the internal parts of culture and part of the internal parts of culture is in it
Is it the internal parts of us and the cultural structures we share together and the agreement?
Spaces that we share together and so you start to realize that my own efforts to evolve myself
Not just to experience transcendence as we've been talking about but to evolve in all kinds of ways
psychologically intellectually cognitively
emotionally and the ways in which we share those evolutionary spaces with others is
Connected to the evolution of this whole thing, you know in terms of the evolution of culture as a whole
And so you start to link up those and it becomes much more than just doing good works or something like that
You know just mitigating suffering which are beautiful
But it becomes a part of this larger enterprise that we're all
Participating in and sharing and that's the evolutionary point that I really try to get out in evolutionaries. Yeah
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean a healthy, green, thriving forest is comprised of healthy, green,
thriving individual trees. And if each individual tree is sick and stunted and has pine bark
beetles or whatever they're called, all that kind of stuff, then the whole forest is not
going to look very good. So I mean, that's a good analogy, but I think for society, its
overall quality is dependent upon the quality of all eight billion of our lives, all of their
aspects.
I probably should confess that in 2013 when the community I was part of ended and in 2011
I think the magazine I was part of ended.
Because of the difficulty of that era in my life, I didn't really want to write at that
time about spirituality.
You know, I'd written a lot about spirituality, I'd written a lot and I'd been so immersed
in those worlds for a long time that I wanted to write about other things.
And so some of that was just because I wanted to write about other things and I was, I got
really interested in culture and I'm fascinated by cultural evolution in all kinds of ways.
So I wanted to write about all those. It's only this year that really I came back to
write and also I wanted to give myself time to let the dust settle of the intensity of
those last periods and in my own, you know, everything that happened in that last era
of our community. And I didn't really want to write about spirituality for a while. So
this is my first effort to come back and start to re-engage some of those. Some of the things
that I thought back then, but I didn't really want to put down for a while.
Okay.
Then your next point under the major topic of how does mystical awakening blind as well
as illuminate is we may be much less inclined to look at ourselves and our own conclusions
with the critical eye of an outsider.
In other words, this awakening may liberate us from unhealthy self-doubt, even while diminishing
our ability for healthy self-criticism.
I think that's a good one, and I can think of so many examples of that where they buy
into their own myth that's built up about them in terms of their perfection, their infallibility,
and their students try to get in tune with their thinking, but don't dare give them critical
feedback, and they don't want critical feedback, and students are shown the door if they offer
critical feedback, and so it becomes this sort of unhealthy dynamic in which, you know,
The emperor has no clothes, but no one dares to say it.
Yeah, exactly.
And there can be, you know, very gross versions of that, but there can be subtle versions
of that too, which can still have profound effects.
Again, it's like this awakening may liberate us from unhealthy self-doubt.
That gives you confidence and kind of an inner strength.
You're not walking around thinking, "Oh, I'm so I'm worthless."
We all can have a neurotic self-doubt and self-criticism and our super ego can be very
strong in ways that don't allow us to be liberated, kind of express our natural gifts and talents.
And one of the things about certain types of awakening is they can liberate that and you can
find confidence in that. And the confidence that flows from awakening can be very beautiful and
powerful and attractive. We all want that kind of confidence. We all want the confidence that's
free of self-concern. But free of self-concern has its own challenges. That has its own problems
because you don't want to compro... it can be very easy in several ways. You don't want to compromise
that confidence in order to question oneself in the ways maybe you need to in order to be the
healthy integrated psyche that we all need to be. We all have to question ourselves and that can be
very uncomfortable and it can prick at the confidence bubble and none of us want the
confidence bubble pricked. Least of all someone who's has it very strongly, who's had a very
powerful awakening, that can be a big part of it. It can diminish our ability for healthy
self-criticism and that's a real thing. I saw that with my own teacher, no doubt, but
you can see it with a lot of other teachers as well. It wasn't just him. I think it's
very common.
A related facet of this is that one of the characteristics of enlightenment is sometimes
said to be spontaneous right action, where whatever you're doing is completely in line
with cosmic intelligence or divine intelligence, whatever you want to call it. And I've seen
examples of people who buy into that with regard to their own behavior and who, for instance, are
seducing a series of women in their sangha. And when it finally comes to light, they say, "Well,
I wasn't doing it. God was doing it." You know, I'm just in tune with the divine, you know,
I'm not responsible. It sounds absurd, but this is literally the alibi somebody gave.
It sounds absurd, but how do people come to that conclusion?
Well, I think we can see that the experience that something else is acting through you
can be very compelling to people who have deep mystical states or the capacity to access those states.
That experience that my motive is pure can be very compelling
and combined with the lack of self-doubt and confidence,
That can be a very compelling experience.
We had a little back and forth in the email about this, but the history of religious thought, you know, is like
pure motive is a very dangerous concept.
And when people experience themselves having pure motive...
Define pure motive.
Well, like the experience that I'm doing this only for the best reasons,
I'm doing this for completely altruistic reasons,
I'm doing this because spirit is working through me,
I'm doing this because I'm just acting on my intuition which comes from a higher source,
All of that, now all of those can be in any given moment.
Maybe if something is acting through us in some beautiful way, maybe we are in touch with something else.
But to assume that that means that we are just this empty vessel,
that therefore whatever that motive happens to be must be good,
is a very tricky, dangerous concept in something that is a lot of religious history.
You know, like, as I often say, the history of religious thought is also cultural,
thinking of a history, culture, evolution, it's not why bad people do bad things.
It's why people who think they're doing the good things do bad things. That's the challenge.
And that goes way back in history. There was times, of course, when we thought burning someone at the
stake, they came up with the reasons why that was good in service of God. We look at that as an
absurdity today. But I think the way sometimes people relate to their own intuitions, and again,
can be beautiful expressions of being in touch with something beyond us. But in what you're talking
about, it doesn't excuse anything. The experience of pure motive can be very deluding. And if you
have a teacher or a realizer who is convinced that whatever their own instincts are, is an
expression of pure motive, that's not a good recipe for human behavior. And if he is surrounded by
students who have bought into that idea and who condone anything he does because they figure
he's cosmic and it might seem crazy to me, but what do I know? I'm ignorant and so I'm
just going to go along with it. That's a recipe for disaster. This would be a good time to
throw in one of my favorite quotes from Padmasambhava. He said, "Although my awareness is as vast
as the sky, my attention to karma is as fine as a grain of barley flour." And my video
editor, Angel, said I should elaborate on that quote because she says, I think she thinks
a lot of people misunderstand it, but basically he's saying, "Okay, I'm really cosmic, but
I have to be very careful about my behavior every moment. I have to be on my toes, self-scrutinizing,
not taking anything for granted, just being precise or impeccable as Don Juan Matus would
say."
Yeah. I think that we all have strengths and weaknesses in our character. And sometimes
Certain types of awakening can illuminate those strengths in a beautiful way, but they won't
necessarily get rid of the weaknesses. And again, all of this is to say that's not a problem.
It's a problem if we think it will. That's when it becomes a big problem. And of course,
if people are going out and doing horrible, gross, ethical, sleeping with a lot of women,
gross, ethical behavior, we can say, "Okay, that's wrong." But I wanted to also point out
Now, these mistakes can occur in a lot of subtle ways as well, and they can subtly cause all
kinds of problems.
But they aren't maybe just gross ethical abuses, but they can cause massive problems nonetheless
just in the subtleties of these issues.
>> Ryan: I think actually the more you advance spiritually, the subtler it gets, and the
more fine-tuned you have to be in discerning those subtleties.
>> Tim: Yeah, I think I say here, I say, you know, being somewhat undistracted by one's
own problems and neurosis, and aware of consciousness as a foundation of being is a powerful, wonderful
quality. But even a hint of that quality can be like a moth to a flame for anyone with
significant narcissistic tendencies or anyone troubled by neurotically low self-esteem.
The freedom to not worry about oneself, to be released to a large degree from self-doubt,
To be unburdened, at least partially, from the inner critic of the super-ego, and to
have others affirm you as such, can prove a difficult prize to handle with care for those
who deeply crave the freedom of self-confidence, either because they have too much of it, or
because they deeply lack it.
So for either of those, that can be a problem.
So that was kind of my point in that there.
I forget who said it, but some well-known person in the spiritual community, maybe it was in
the context of something in the Association for Spiritual Integrity, suggested that a
disproportionately large percentage of spiritual teachers have narcissistic tendencies.
Somehow people with that sort of syndrome are attracted to the profession.
Yeah, that's interesting in and of itself.
We should ask why that seems to be true.
Well, you know, such people like sitting in front of audiences and being showered with
praise and adulation.
Yeah, it's a danger of the position, I guess.
And even if you have a seed quality of such tendencies, it can sprout, it can be nourished
when you step into a teaching role.
Yeah, you know, I saw it in some of my own fellow students.
Again, these get into some subtleties there, sometimes are hard to explain.
But sometimes the students who would look best initially were ones who had the ability to
be undivided in life, to have a certain kind of confidence.
It can be a very attractive thing.
You know, narcissists can sometimes do that, right?
That's why the charisma of the narcissist, right?
It's the confidence in that, the undividedness.
That is a very attractive, can be attractive quality.
And I think that you add mystical awakening to that, and that's a tricky, potentially
toxic brew. There's a spectrum of people who have various forms of self-doubt and various
forms of neurosis and I think that basic point is tricky. And I think sometimes, especially
when we are less mature and we have a less, maybe mature understanding of life and people
as we get older, I think we are a little more attracted to that, at least I was, a little
more attracted to that, that kind of confidence instead of the kind of confidence that comes
from wisdom and deeper integration and a more complex understanding of the self and life
experience. There's a different kind of confidence that comes from all that. It's not as thin
and as brittle and ultimately I think it's a better kind of confidence, but nevertheless
that is very attractive to people.
Well, you can think of religious fundamentalists or political fundamentalists or whoever who
are just adamant about their opinions. They're very confident. They speak for it. There's
There's no nuance, no self-reflection, no wiggle room, no compromise.
It's just like, you know, my way or the highway.
Yeah, God, these are tricky questions, you know, because sometimes people like that might
be more prone to types of spiritual experience.
Question came in from my friend Linda Weber, who may be your friend also because she lives
in Boulder.
She says, "It seems like, quote, what it means, end quote, is that absolutely no one can get
away from being a human being.
We must never separate spirituality from the rest of life on earth.
Do you agree?
Do I agree?
Yes, I agree.
I absolutely agree.
Yeah, I absolutely agree.
As long as we're here, this is what we're dealing with.
And that fully includes that some people, there are mystics in India, they've gone into
that world and they're going to sit by on a mountaintop or in a cave or whatever.
Ramana Maharshi sat in a cave for 15 years, whatever, and he went deep into that experience.
I'm not saying that doesn't have its own magnificence and beauty, but that's very rare.
that's the path for someone, you know.
And we're part of this culture and part of this world.
Everyone's listening to this.
Yeah.
We're always part of the world, whatever we're doing.
You know, we're part of this culture.
We're part of this larger evolutionary process
and trying to draw a harsh line
between the spiritual and the manifest world.
Yeah, anyway.
- The next point under how does mystical awakening blind
as well as illuminate is something
I think we've already covered.
Maybe we don't want to talk more about it, but it's a domain creep.
Assuming that someone is an expert in things that they're not expert in,
simply because they have this spiritual realization and a certain aura about them.
Yeah, this is a little more obvious thing. I think people do this in all areas.
Sometimes when people become a super expert in any one area,
they suddenly feel a lot more confidence about everything else, and that's not always bad.
A lot of our public intellectuals are public intellectuals because,
Because, like you said, with Einstein, they had a breakthrough in one area, and then we
asked them about everything else.
And you know, maybe there is wisdom there, but it doesn't mean they know about everything
else.
This is like doubly or triply or ten times true in the spiritual world, because it's
so foundational.
Like understanding that that experience of being is so foundational to being human, that
then the temptation, I think we really know a lot about all the other areas of life, because
we can see clearly now, the clouds have gone and it's incredibly tempting. And you see
spiritual teachers sometimes all the time just opining on all this stuff. You're just
like, "Are you kidding me?" I mean, it's like, it just seems to go with the territory.
Of course, we all opine a bunch of stuff all the time, but I guarantee you, they feel a
lot more confident about it. Suddenly, like, they have a special knowledge. And you just
see this all the freaking time and it's just like it's a funny thing but it
speaks to the deluding nature of what are even authentic realizations. It's
something to be aware of. As I say here, whatever the confidence that is derived
from mystical attainment, it's like it can't be contained, it overflows its
boundaries, you know, it can't be contained and again that's the
experience. I think we can judge that that's the reality of the experience
because everyone seems to do it but we can all have a little bit of awareness
of that, even maybe, and if we can all start to culturally have a slightly different relationship
to all that, maybe even those people who have those experiences will have a different relationship
to it, you know.
Pete I'll tell you a funny story.
In the summer of '76, I was in New Jersey, because there was a court case there where
the TM movement was trying to teach in the schools, and the Christians were opposing
it, so it had gone to court.
And so, Maharishi sent a small group of us to live in New Jersey, five of us, and John
Gray of the Mars-Venus books was one of them, I was another, and we were living in this house.
So we set up this conference thing, and there was this physicist who was in the TM movement
named Larry Domash, and he was supposed to speak, but the lawyers who were fighting the
court case decided that he shouldn't speak because it would entangle the university or
something if he got up and spoke.
So Johnny Gray gets up and gives this talk about physics for, it must have gone on for
45 minutes or an hour and it was complete gobbledygook. I was just sitting there like I was the emcee
of the thing and I should have just gotten one of those hooks and pulled him, but it
was very embarrassing and he was going on and on full of confidence. He was a very confident
guy and he had deep experiences and all. Sorry, Johnny, you're probably not listening to this,
but that was an example of that kind of thing. He just felt like he could do it.
Yeah, and I say that like I sometimes I feel like I'm trying to take people's candy away,
But it doesn't mean that spiritual illumination or experiences or awakenings can liberate
us in the sense that it can't liberate our ability to maybe have insights into our lives
or other people's lives or culture.
It's not that it can't do that.
It's just that so often people can't leave it at that.
You know, they just have to opine on everything under the sun, like with incredible confidence.
I think the history of mystics statements about the world and the nature of it may be true
if you're meditating in a cave.
You know, I remember reading about Eckhart Tolle, when the power of now came out, I remember
reading, you know, of course, the power now is a beautiful expression of a certain type
of mysticism and there's an authenticity to his awakening.
But it doesn't mean he knows about evolution, you know, it doesn't mean he's thought deeply
about the nature of life in so many other ways.
I remember reading some of the statements he made. It was just like, "Oh my God." You know, it's like...
Anyway, so...
Well, you wouldn't want him to perform...
It doesn't mean he's not authentic. It doesn't mean he doesn't have things to offer.
But you wouldn't want him to perform brain surgery on you or land a jumbo jet that you
happen to be a passenger in.
Indeed.
So, here's another point. We need to stop treating mystical truths, even the most beautiful
and sublime, as beyond the scope of well-intentioned and respectful analysis. It does not deny or
or denude their glory to look at their revealed wisdom with a careful, critical eye.
I like that one.
Oh man.
Sometimes I write better than I speak, so I'll leave it at that.
Well, the reason I like it is that I feel that there's some mutual benefit to be had
between an interface between science and spirituality.
Spirituality could use more of the empirical, rigorous thinking of science, and science
could use more of the depth of spirituality and stop being so materialistic in its orientation.
One of the reasons I wanted to write about this subject is because I kind of had a unique
catbird seat in my role as the editor of that magazine because we were trying to analyze all
these questions and we were trying to have, you know, we didn't always succeed, but we were trying
to have like look at all these things with a critical eye. But many people who look at spiritual
realizations or mystical realizations with a critical eye or doing it from outside.
So it's like you have these outside people who are critical and have certain views of it,
or you have people who are inside the church, and they're more just accepting of it all.
We were inside the church, but then trying to look at it critically as well. So looking at
it critically but sympathetically, and I think trying to find that balance is something we need
to do a lot more. Look at all the elements inside our own church with a critical eye and not just
defended against the outside critics. We tried to do that in the magazine, and that's what
I want to do here. And I think until we can do that, we're not going to have the cultural
impact on spiritual seeking that will help mitigate a lot of the various disasters that
have happened.
Pete And that ties in with science too, because
true scientists welcome criticism. I mean, the whole point of publishing a paper is for
your peers to try to pick it apart and see if they can do so. And you tell them exactly
how you conducted the experiment and, you know, they can use the same equipment if they want
to and either confirm or refute your hypothesis. And that's how knowledge progresses.
This is something that wasn't as true in the traditional world, I think, but in the modern
world, religion, but in the modern world, that's a gift of modernity. That kind of open-ended
criticism, self-criticism. That's a gift of modernity. It doesn't denude the beauty
of those things to be able to be critical. And that's a gift of the modern world
and we should take that forward. One interesting thing is back in Shankara's
day, public debates were very much a part of the scene. People with different
philosophical viewpoints would get up on a stage and debate one another and it
would be like a sporting event. And very often the tradition was that whoever won
the debate, however that was judged, the other guy would become his disciple.
I remember that. I know. I've been told those stories too. I always wondered if that really
happened quite like that. I mean, I know that's the myth. But there was a tradition of debate.
In some of those high traditions in the Indian subcontinent, there were obviously periods
of cultural fluorescence that gave rise to some beautiful things like that.
I think I was saying to you before we started recording that I wish we could do that more
in our society, not only in spirituality perhaps, but with issues like climate change and gun
control and abortion and all these things.
Let the opposing parties, rather than just shouting from their respective siloed positions,
get up on a stage with proper moderation and the opportunity to speak at length to present
their issue, and then put it on CNN and Fox News and all the others, and let the public
watch it and hear both sides.
I think that would be really healthy.
Dave Good.
Okay, finally, a fourth way in which mystical awakening can both illuminate and blind has
to do with the quality of presence we often associate with realizers.
I think that's kind of a big one because there are some awakened people who walk into a room
and it hits you like a blast furnace, you feel it.
And you think, "Whoa, I've never met a person who could have that kind of influence, you
know, just walking into a room."
And then one thing leads to the next, and anything that they say must be true because obviously
they're awesome. Yeah, and again here I was trying to make the point that this sweetness and innocence
and loving presence can be a powerful and delightful quality that may naturally arise as we inhabit the
less distracted inner universe and as consciousness becomes more transparent the depths of being
become more transparent to the self. That's a beautiful quality but that can have its own
downside. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, I'm just saying we should be awake to the problems that that
can lead to. And I saw this in people, I saw this in my own teacher, it can lead us to become more
convinced by the truth of what arises in our experience. It's a subtle point, but even as we
become less caught up in the passing of thoughts and feelings in our mind's eye and in our inner
world and we become even more present in the now. Everyone wants to be in the present moment,
right? Well, that has its own challenges. You become more present. You also can be more convinced
of the, if you have an insight, well, the reality of that insight. It didn't arise from my thinking
mind, you know, it arose from the, it's, it's authenticity, the intuition, the ability to focus
on your immediate little universe can be enhanced in ways that allow you to become more convinced
of the reality of what arises in it and of your convictions and conclusions.
Even as we become less attached to the passing of thoughts and feelings in our minds and
eyes, we may become more attached to the perceived relevance of the insights that flow from our
inner intuitions.
Again, that isn't always a bad thing.
It can be a really good thing.
It can be beautiful, but it can definitely be deluding and lead us astray and make us
much more confident in the quality and truth of those inner intuitions than we really have
any right being.
Ken Wilberg talks about this, the myth of the given, the idea that what is given to
our inner experience is real.
And that can be a very powerful, I think that can be enhanced by spiritual awakening, not
diminished.
Yeah, just to dwell on that a little bit more.
So there have been teachers obviously like Muktananda and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi himself
and others who really have some Shakti power.
You get in their immediate presence and your whole consciousness shifts.
That can be a real eye-opener for people who've never experienced anything like that, that
someone could have such a remarkable influence.
And it tends to make you attribute all kinds of other credibility to that person.
who radiates that kind of influence must be so wise in every other respect and worthy
of listening to or obeying and serving and so on.
Yeah.
It's intoxicating.
You don't want to be in the presence of such a person.
I've seen people practically kill themselves driving like madmen trying to get close to
Marci's car and things like that.
Yeah, it can be very intoxicating, very beautiful.
That can be a beautiful experience.
And again, not a bad, it's a beautiful, beautiful thing.
You know, my own teacher at times could have this kind of vulnerability that could be very
intoxicating and beautiful, you know, could be very powerful.
And you know, that vulnerability is something that you often don't see in people and it
can also be an expression of it.
But then I also saw at times, like, I saw how he could become very convinced of things
were in his immediate presence and he would then start to discount other forms of knowledge
that were really important to the situation.
And in discounting those other forms of knowledge, he made some big mistakes about people, about
how he responded to things, because of a certain type of vulnerability.
It's for a good reason, but those are some big mistakes because he was convinced of something
because it was very real to him in that moment.
And then I saw his ability to not be accountable to a previous experience, because you know
that's in the past.
What was real now is what was important.
And it made him less able, and not just with him, I saw this with other people, less able
to be accountable.
Not more able to be accountable and responsible to all of the choices he'd made, but less
able to be accountable to the choices he made.
And you see this with other teachers too.
you know, in my trying to understand enlightenment reading about other teachers and other people's
experience, you can see this as well.
So these are delicate and complex questions, you know, again, we're talking about deep
polarities and trade-offs in the human psyche that are often in the service of some beautiful
things and we should acknowledge that and appreciate that.
But don't pretend that it doesn't come with real world consequences and trade-offs.
And the more we can all be aware of that, the better we will do if we just pretend,
Well, he must know because look at the vulnerability, look at that presence.
Therefore that must be true.
Well, maybe not.
This next one is really juicy.
Does enlightenment select for psychological instability?
Sometimes I've wondered, does spiritual pursuit make you crazy or are crazy people attracted
to spiritual pursuits?
Maybe both.
Yeah, maybe both.
I think we have to be a little bit aware of that.
You start out by mentioning that trauma and some forms of abuse, including sexual abuse,
can be a catalyst or set the stage for a personality or psyche to have a propensity for spiritual,
mystical, and paranormal experiences.
The same is true with near-death experiences and psychedelics and a number of things that
sort of disrupt our normal state of functioning in a rather abrupt way.
My cat has been sleeping here next to me for a while and just...
Oh, your famous cat.
I heard about your cat in your book.
That's another cat, actually.
That cat died a couple of years ago.
Oh yeah, that was a long time ago.
That was a cat I had for 17 years, very close to that cat.
That cat was my companion through a lot of my spiritual life.
And I sort of honor-- that cat was a wonderful companion.
Yeah, so this is tricky.
And all these are tricky and subtle, and this even more so.
And I want to acknowledge that these are complex issues.
I don't want to pin anyone in any particular situation.
But I think we have to answer the question.
As some people have pointed out, and I know this at a certain point in my spiritual life,
that some people who are most prone to... people made the connection, I think, between
certain types of trauma, maybe, as a child, or certain types of tendencies toward paranormal
experiences, borderline issues, or you're able to slip into other states of consciousness.
I talk about, we can imagine how it might work.
It seems that when normal ego or self-structures become dislodged or some type of trauma forces
the self to protect itself by retreating into other parts of the internal universe, the
doorway might open to another reality.
It's like, "Oh, I'm not so focused on the manifest world, the physical universe.
I'm going to retreat into this other dimension a little bit."
And that might open the doorway, and so we might be more familiar with other dimensions
or other things that are happening.
And so that might open us up to paranormal experiences or certain types of that.
I think that can happen.
Some people survive a lightning strike, wake up to find a paranormal doorway open.
Some have near death experiences and find they're more prone to spiritual states or paranormal
experiences.
So I think the same kind of thing can work in spiritual states of consciousness.
And I saw this with different be like, sometimes people who are maybe had a little less of
an integrated sense of self could have very profound spiritual experiences as if their
self-structure was a little more loose, you know, they could have lots of experiences,
a little more maybe a stable integrated self-structure, but they could flip over into lots of different
experiences.
They could also flip into very profound states of consciousness and they might be more prone,
more vulnerable to those states of consciousness.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
That can be a wonderful thing.
I'm not in any way saying that that is a bad thing. It could be a beautiful thing.
But I think we have to realize that there might be types of psychological traces in the character
that make us more prone to mystical experiences and make us more prone to those experiences
becoming semi-permanent or permanent. And I think this is a whole area to be investigated and we
should be curious about. So again, that's not to impugn anyone who has those experiences,
because that can be a wonderful thing. It's just, there's this mythos that the person most prone to
enlightenment experiences is the most highly evolved person and they're right on the edge
there and they're just going to flip over into that enlightenment experiences because their karma
has taken them to this point. Well, no, that may not be true at all. And I think we need to
reevaluate all this a little bit. And I just think it could be the opposite of that. And the sense
that people who have a lot of trauma also might be very prone. And again, I'm not saying that's a
bad thing. I'm just saying it can be a good thing. We have to look at all this honestly
and look at our own self-structures and other people's self-structures. And when we see someone
who's in an altered state of consciousness or seems to have some access to some deeper realization,
they may have a beautiful gift to share, but that gift may not have to do with a healthy,
integrated sense of self. So I just think these are complex questions and we need to ask them,
but we need not be overly simplistic about these kind of mythologies that we've been raised with.
I forget who said it, maybe many people have said it, but I've heard it said that you have
to develop a healthy ego before you can transcend your ego. So that was Jack Engler, right?
Might have been, I don't know. I think he's wrong. Maybe that's ideal,
but I think the opposite happens for a lot of people.
right. But if we employ the principle of safety first, I think it's good advice because there
have been so many train wrecks among spiritual practitioners. I participated in long courses,
you know, three months, six months of long meditation and, you know, there were a lot
of freakouts. There were some suicides. It was quite a scene at times. And I myself,
I became very kooky and weird and disintegrated and idiosyncratic and obsessive and all kinds
of stuff.
And it took a long period of time afterwards to stabilize and integrate what had been experienced.
I did a lot of long retreats.
You know, I have this unique ability.
We all did.
Watching hundreds of people do deep spiritual retreats and work and watch their experiences
and watch their personalities, how long those experiences lasted, how they lasted, how they
integrated them, what types of self tended to have what types of experience. I mean,
I got a chance to just have this incredible laboratory and watch all this happen as well
as my relationship with my own teacher. So I think these are all really interesting and
open questions. The simplistic narrative of some linear path up to the top of the mountain
is sort of absurd. In a sophisticated, psychological, informed world, we have to ask all these questions
about the nature of realization and the nature of what it means.
And I use an example, I use Eckhart Tolle and Byron Katie are two examples of teachers,
obviously people have gotten a lot of value out of their teaching.
I'm not saying there's not real value in the way they teach or something, right?
You know, I haven't read in a while their stories.
They both had some kind of breakdown before they had a breakdown.
They both had a breakdown.
Yeah.
Byron Katie was in some kind of halfway house or something and Eckhart Tolle was contemplating
suicide.
suicidal ideation was part of the vehicle for their awakening.
Again, that doesn't mean their awakening doesn't have value.
It just means that the self-structure that had that awakening might not be the
self-structure we want to aspire to either. Maybe it was right for them. I'm
glad that that happened to them. I'm glad that they're able to turn
those issues that they have into something that is valuable.
But it doesn't mean they represent the pinnacle of human evolution of the self.
I mean, come on, you know.
No, I don't think it means that people have to be on the verge of psychological breakdown
in order to be eligible for a spiritual breakthrough.
As a matter of fact, I think it can be gone about in such a way that, well, responsible
spiritual teachers these days, and also responsible psychedelic therapists, screen people pretty
carefully before letting them get involved.
Because if they're unstable to begin with, the last thing they need is one meditation
retreat or, you know, psychedelics or something. It can really put them over the edge. And I think
one way of looking at it is, you know, we all have our conditioning, and many people are just
deeply conditioned. You know, the impressions are very deeply ingrained, and they're pretty well
locked into their personality, and they don't even contemplate spirituality. But if we're going
to transition from that condition to an enlightened state, there's a whole lot of internal
reconfiguration that's going to have to take place. A whole lot of purification and elimination
of some scars and modification of the nervous system and whatever may be going on with the
chakras and all that stuff, a whole makeover has to take place. And that can be very disruptive
when you're going through the process of it. So, I think the key thing is to find ways,
maybe different teachers have found them to different degrees of success, of facilitating
all that transformation without causing damage or without causing psychological instability
or breakdown.
There is going to be some instability, I think.
On a long course, you're kind of like jello that hasn't molded and you could mold into
the wrong shape if you're not careful.
But we're talking about a radical transformation of our mind-body system and of our nervous
system of our subtle body and that can easily tip over into psychological instability and
it has to be handled very carefully.
All development and evolution involves, I think, some level of instability with what came before.
So that is its own challenge, you know, independent of what I, sort of, the point I was trying.
That's its own challenge.
I think that's true individually and culturally, too.
One of the great challenges of cultural evolution is, right, is like we want to imagine utopias
and how we should be, should or should be. The challenge is not challenges to evolve culturally
in ways that make things better without making them worse at the same time. Because there's,
you know, the history of like trying to make things better has a lot of making things a lot
worse at the same time, you know, sometimes much more worse than you made them better, you know.
And yet we still have to try to move things forward. And in terms of the evolution of the
self, I think it's the same thing. Inevitably, we try to reach for when you try to reach beyond,
you're introducing instability to the system. And inevitably that has its own challenges,
and we have to be kind of be ready for those and understand those.
That's a good point. In fact, the cultural thing is a nice analogy, if not an actual
example of the point I was trying to make, which is that, let's say we can envision a much more
ideal society than the one we live in, in which we don't have all this environmental degradation,
and agriculture is done in a holistic and organic and wholesome way, and medical systems are
much more enlightened, and all sorts of things.
But as it is now, we have deeply entrenched, multi-billion dollar industries representing
all these areas who are not going to just turn on a dime.
So how do we get from here to there?
Let's say that it's inevitable we're going to get there.
Do those industries have to collapse and does it have to be economic upheaval and unemployment
and a depression and all that?
Or is there a way of going from here to there in a much more willing and conscious way in
which things can evolve?
But you see what people tend to do is they tend to resist.
The fossil fuel industries have known for decades that their product was going to create
the kind of disaster we're now beginning to experience, but they were looking at the next
quarterly bottom line and didn't want to change. I'm getting off on a bit of a rant here.
I think when we talk about cultural evolution, one of the things I talk about in evolutionaries
is that it's easy to imagine perfect worlds and then we try to enact them. And unless we
understand where we came from, unless we understand more about how we where we've come from, it's easy
for those imagined perfect worlds to cause all kinds of problems in the getting from here to
there. And utopias don't have a very good history in terms of enacting cultural evolution. Quite
the opposite, they can fuck it up. As I often say, we need more evolution, less revolution.
Often the revolution is, sometimes people reach for revolution when they've lost faith
in the evolutionary process, that we can move things forward. We can't just make the world
anew, you know, we have to work with what we've got. Without being trapped or stuck
in history, we have to work with what we've got to continue to evolve, but we can't just
remake the world anew. And I think that's true of individual evolution, that's true
of cultural evolution. And there's this idea I love in cultural evolution called the adjacent
possible, which is it comes from an evolutionary theorist named Stuart Kauffman, which means
that what is possible in our evolutionary moment that's adjacent to the space we're
in right now, like as an individual or as a collective, as a culture, what's in our adjacent
possible.
You know, as I often say, for me to go bench press 500 pounds is not in my adjacent possible.
You know, it's not adjacent to where I am right now.
Maybe in the future I could do that, way in the future.
But there are certain types of evolution or change that are in my adjacent possible.
So understanding the difference between the adjacent possible and some imagined future
is critical to successful development, both individually and culturally.
So that's an important thing when we really want to care.
We really care about evolution and not just imagining some future that we may or may not
be able to achieve and may cause a disaster in the meantime.
Yeah, I interviewed Rhonda Byrne who did The Secret, and at one point towards the beginning
of the interview I said, "So you mean if I want to play basketball as well as LeBron James,
despite the fact that I'm in my 70s and I'm only 5'10", if I want it bad enough, could I have it?
And she was kind of like going into her thing, you know, "Yeah, yeah, if you want it bad enough."
I didn't say it, but I was going to say, "Well, that's what gives the secret a bad name."
Anyway, there's a question from Irene, a statement, "Perhaps it is more the surrender
than the imbalance that brings about the awakening. The extreme hardships bring one to a state of
complete surrender which often precludes profound awakenings, precedes perhaps profound awakenings.
That surrender can happen from things other than hardships and bring about the same results,
such as a fervent yearning for God or years of meditation or service to others, etc. But I guess
what she's saying is whatever can bring about the appropriate degree of surrender could be a trigger
I think that's what Byron Cavier Eckhart Tolle would say in that situation.
And I think it's true in some sense, but it doesn't change my point.
Okay. I have this friend named Rob McCutcheon who I sent you an email about the other day.
And he read your paper and he was a professor at a university in the Pacific Northwest.
He was at one time, Marshan Heshiogi's personal secretary back in the early 70s and got rather
disillusioned.
He still maintains a belief that enlightenment could actually resolve all problems of the
ego and make us better at dealing with life's vicissitudes.
So he disagreed with some of the premises of your paper, and maybe I could go through
them and you could comment a little bit.
I think he disagreed with the entire premise of my paper.
Yeah, pretty much.
idealistically if we could see examples of enlightenment that in our current time which
live up to the historical hype we could agree with all these things but the proof of the
pudding is in the eating.
We need to realize that in a psychologically sophisticated world in which we understand
the nature of the personality much better, in a world in which we understand the nature
of the cultural evolution, the cultural forces that are impacting our self-structure, evolutionary
psychology. There's so many elements of knowledge that we understand now. We need to appreciate
that the idea of some perfect enlightenment as the pinnacle of human evolution and the top of
the mountain is absurd prima facie. It's just absurd. It doesn't mean there's not tremendous
beauty and power and awesome realizations that can be transformative and can put the wind in
the sails of our personal and collective evolution. It's beautiful, but the idea of the kind of
perfect enlightened figure who only acts out of spirit or something. That's a kind of a myth
that we need to put aside so we can deal with the beauty of awakening on its own terms and
all the benefits of it and all the power of it. Yeah, my next guest on Bat Gap is a guy named Bob
Harwood and I just finished listening to his book. He went through years and years and years of really
intense seeking and long Zen retreats and things like that. And he eventually, like 25 years ago
or so, had a profound spiritual breakthrough that has abided ever since and feels like his life is
just an effortless flow and he has no problems. But that is not to say that he doesn't have many
human emotions and, you know, might get angry or this or that or the other thing. I think it's
just a matter of understanding what is meant by this idea of perfection. Jesus said, "Be ye therefore
perfect." If God is running the universe, then the universe is perfect, but still, asteroids crash into
inhabited planets and stars blow up and all kinds of violent stuff happens, which in the big picture,
I guess, is perfect. But it doesn't seem perfect to those who are suffering the consequences.
Yeah, I mean, I guess if we define perfection in some totally zoomed out way, we could say
it's all perfection, you know, and that's, that's okay, we can do, we can say that.
But as long as we zoom back in a little bit, and we're talking about the actual development
of the human character and soul and culture over millennia, and the nature of personality
and self structures and psychological structures, perfections, it's kind of a silly concept.
It doesn't mean that people can have beautiful awakenings like your friends and express those
in beautiful ways.
That doesn't mean they can be a beautiful expression of a human being.
And that's awesome.
That's fine.
I don't have any disagreement with that.
But I think if we start assuming, wow, even everything fundamentally I do is an expression
of spirit and I'm just an empty vessel.
None of us are empty vessels.
We all bring stuff to the party.
That's a beautiful thing.
But if we think we're just empty vessels, and this is not being refracted through the
strengths and weaknesses and inevitable imperfections of our human character, then we're deluded.
It doesn't mean that we're not expressing spirit in some beautiful way, and maybe a
profound way.
Yeah.
I also want to mention an essay that a friend of mine named Jerry Freeman wrote, which I
sent to you, called "Why There Are No Perfect Teachers."
He made some interesting points, but you know, a lot of times people say that they've totally
lost all sense of a personal self.
We were talking about this earlier and that everything they do is just sort of on automatic.
Jerry contends, and actually has some scriptural references to back it up, that no matter how
enlightened a person may be, there must remain a kernel of individuality.
That as long as you have a human body, there must remain some sense of the little me.
It might be more abstract and not be experienced as the center of one's being, but it has to
be there if you want to actually function as a human being.
At least that's the way it seems to me.
Do you agree with that?
Yeah, if we want to do anything in the world, you need a self and a personality and a self-structure
and you need this whole body-mind thing.
People might be able to get into states where they're so focused on some transcendent sense
of self that it seems to overwhelm them and it seems to be all that is, I am that.
And maybe, maybe for Ramana Maharshi, you're just living in a cave for 15 years, maybe
that sense of the personal world and the personal self-structure becomes so small relative to
that.
But anytime we get up and do anything and talk and think and any, it's refracted through
this self-structure, inevitably.
So, understanding the nature of that kind of self-structure and the way it might refract
something like that is rather important, much more important than pretending it's irrelevant.
Yeah, and with Ramana, when he was dying of cancer, for instance, pain was being experienced
in that body.
In some sense.
I mean, Ramana had all kinds, I mean, he had all kinds of ideas about culture, and were
they accurate?
Well, from his point of view, he expressed a certain point of view with great integrity
and beauty, right?
Does that mean that's the point of view we all should embrace? No.
Do I agree with him on all that? No.
He thought his cow was enlightened, right? I mean, that was kind of part of his thing.
Okay, whatever, maybe.
It doesn't diminish the majesty of these realizers to be critical or to say that doesn't make any sense.
Or to say that they didn't know everything about everything.
It seems funny to even say that, but people actually think stuff like that.
My spiritual hero is Sri Aurobindo, who lived at the same time as Ramana Maharishi and had
a whole different vision of what the spiritual life was than Ramana.
But that doesn't mean I don't appreciate Ramana.
I wrote about Ramana in my book.
He's a beautiful expression of mysticism and enlightenment, not one that's available to
most people and not one that most people are going to pursue.
But we can honor that without putting him on almost an absurd pedestal.
We can put him on a beautiful pedestal.
We don't have to pretend that therefore every word that drops out of his lips is some magical
incantation of truth about the nature of reality in all its forms for all time.
There's a term in Vedanta called Leysa Vidya, which means faint remains of ignorance.
And it's said that you actually need that in order to attain Brahman.
And here's a quote, "What Leysa Vidya does is create a separation in the state of unity,
And it is this separation that is responsible for the emergence of Brahman, Brahman being
the whole, which is more than the collection of parts.
So unless unity is in parts, that wholeness of Brahman will not be created.
There's a verse from the Brahma Sutras which goes, "But only those former karmas whose
effects have not yet begun are destroyed by knowledge."
And what that means is that those actions whose effects have begun and whose results
have been half enjoyed are not destroyed by the knowledge of enlightenment.
And those are the very karmas to which there is due the present state of existence in which
the knowledge of Brahman arises.
That's a direct quote from Shankara.
So in other words, these people are saying that we actually need imperfections in order
to attain and live a high state of realization, which might be called Brahman consciousness,
And that actually we're going to retain some of those imperfections as long as we have
a body.
And that will be reflected in certain behaviors which may not seem ideal, even though we are
presumably enlightened.
I think in a very traditional mystical context, of which Sankara was, I think that's probably
a way of trying to capture some of these truths in maybe that limited frame.
I think we can do better today because we have a lot more understanding.
It doesn't mean there's not profound truth there, but I think we can fill in some of those
elements.
At least we can add to that knowledge because of our understanding of psychology, because
of our understanding of culture in ways that maybe they didn't have access to.
It doesn't mean there aren't some profound truths there, but I just think we can add to
those.
Yeah, always.
I don't think there ever will come a time at which we cannot add to what we know or experience.
What's the cat's name?
This is Piper.
I have some old videos in which cats are walking in front of me.
Aww, I love cats.
Me too.
So, let's make some grand, sweeping, overarching concluding points.
I've written a lot of different things over the years and I just think I wanted to make
this statement and maybe I'll expand on this paper.
This paper probably needs a lot more expansion, ultimately, but I wanted to get down some thoughts.
I got the opportunity to be very close to my own teacher and watch him over 20 years, but
to look at the history of mysticism and to interview and engage with communities and
mystical teachers and mystics in every tradition and over a period of a long period of time,
it was just a very unusual opportunity to be inside something I loved.
That point in my life, I was so committed to that world to try to understand it.
I think to be able to then step back and ask hard questions about some of the myths that
I grew up with in these worlds, and that a lot of people still hold on to, that don't
really make sense, and that have caused a lot of human suffering, because teachers and
students held to them, and they don't really withstand a lot of careful scrutiny.
And we can do that from a position of cynicism, or of like, "This is all not as important
as I once thought it was."
Or we can do that from a position of appreciation and love for a lot of these types of practices
and types of seeking and types of communal engagements that can be very profound, but
they need a serious dose of questioning a lot of conclusions.
You know, when I was 22, maybe I would just say, "No, I'm going to do this.
I'm going to learn the hard way everything. Of course, a lot of people are going to do that.
That's fine. But I do think the myths that surround the modern postmodern idea of enlightenment and
mysticism are pernicious and strong and need to be questioned as maybe some embedded truths,
but also very partial truths and maybe important truths, but not complete and whole and entire
truths. That was the purpose of the paper, to kind of push that forward, open up that question,
and to get inside these. We need to pursue this. I hope maybe at some point I'll write about it more,
but I saw how relatively subtle distinctions and problems and confusions caused a lot of
human suffering. It's more than just so-and-so was a bad person and did bad things. These are
good people who tried hard to do the right thing and did really messed up things because of these
confusions. So that's what we gotta pursue. That's really good. I just want to say from my
own experience, most of the people listening to this show, I would say, are spiritual seekers or
aspirants. They're interested in the topic, obviously, or they wouldn't be listening.
And I interact with a lot of people. I see examples of people being blindly enamored
of and obedient to spiritual teachers, and then eventually getting disillusioned and becoming
cynical and losing interest in the spiritual endeavor altogether. And in my own case,
I have been through both those phases, but these days I'm as gung-ho as I ever was about
spirituality, which is very gung-ho. I mean, it's my primary focus in life, and I would say that
it's genuine, it's worth pursuing, and keep on truckin'. And at the same time, all the stuff you
said about using your intellect, being discriminating, questioning, and don't take things on faith.
Anything that's worth its merit should be testable and questionable, and any teacher
who's worth his salt should be open to testing and questioning, and happy to answer skeptical
questions and open to constructive criticism and so on. So we can be mature about all this
stuff and not be bug-eyed cult zombies who just go along with the group think.
authentic, beautiful, genuine realizations can contain within them don't remove the
possibility of mistakes and problematic views. Sometimes people say, "I know it's authentic,
therefore then I can kind of release my certain types of maybe critical awareness." No, it can
be beautifully authentic, but that doesn't mean that we all don't have to be awake still and very
aware of what's happening and the nature of human personality. I'm not saying it's all a zero sum,
but great strengths in any area often come with significant weaknesses and that tendency of the
human personality doesn't end at this doorway of mysticism, quite the opposite. It can be also true
there. Yeah, so in a very real sense the spiritual path is a razor's edge and you have to tread it
very carefully and continually scrutinize yourself, your teacher, the teachings, and not to be
shooting down everything. I mean a lot of it can...
Yeah, always suspicious or anything.
Yeah, no, not like that. Again, any teacher or teaching that is genuine is open to scrutiny.
And a good teacher, I think, will welcome scrutiny. And a good teaching can stand up
to scrutiny.
Well, I hope that's true. I mean, I think there's a lot of authentic teachers that aren't
probably as open to scrutiny as they should be.
Right.
That's the challenge.
You know, I think that can be true.
You know, that, so, you know.
Yeah.
Not that you want to sit in the audience and badger the teacher constantly.
This is not about being overly critical or cynical or suspicious or anything like that.
We're trying to walk that line.
Right.
But if something unhealthy starts to crop up, you see the teacher selling dirt from the
ground that he walked on or something like that, or having his feet kissed or something.
There's a lot of ways that I suppose that these kinds of things can manifest in gross ways
that we all probably should be awake to.
Some of us gave our teachers way too much latitude.
Myself, I fully confess that I did.
And it's incremental.
It creeps up on you.
It's the old frog in the heating water thing.
And that's why you need scrutiny at every step of the way.
Because if you sit there and keep excusing it, then you end up excusing more and more
egregious violations.
And things can be subtle.
those subtle problems and mistakes can be profound. The best way to inoculate ourselves against maybe
some of the more grosser abuses of this kind of thing is for the whole culture around these kinds
of pursuits to evolve, the whole conversation to evolve. And I feel like the more that can happen,
the better off we'll all be. And ultimately, you know, that's kind of what I was trying to help
maybe, inject another element into this whole conversation that we're having and that you're
pursuing in this podcast. You know, there's always dangers when we get involved in extreme pursuits.
That's just part of it. But that goes with it. But I think the best way to maybe mitigate
against some of those dangers is to uplevel the whole culture around it.
Yeah. I'm not trying to have the last word here, but I just keep having ideas.
when you mention culture, it brings me back to why I think spirituality is important in the larger
sense. It's not just for personal edification, it's critical for the evolution of society and
for the survival of the human race. I think we really need a dose of the best of what spirituality
has to offer in order to continue as a species. Yeah, I think that there are gifts in these
dimensions, you know, again, we've been mostly talking about like the idea of
enlightenment and mysticism and non-duality and there are so many
expressions of spirituality and the religious impulse that go well beyond
that, that aren't just that, and so I don't mean to limit it to that, but there
are tremendous gifts to be had in these pursuits and I think those gifts will be
much more significant and useful if they come with less of the mistakes and
burdens and disasters that they have come with in some form.
And the way to do that is not to reject them altogether or to pretend that that's not true.
It's to face into that and continue to evolve how we think about these areas of life and
how we relate to them so that we'll all be better.
It's a little bit like, you know, I've got an interest in psychedelics recently.
You see, you know, the conversation around psychedelics that continues to, I think, evolve.
It's very different than it was in 1965.
And I think that probably helps all kinds of people have better experiences.
It doesn't inoculate any chain, you know, it's still challenging.
It can be dangerous.
It can be all kinds of things.
But as the conversations evolved, that's probably helped evolve people's experience of engaging
in those modalities.
And the same in this area.
I think ideally it would.
Yeah.
As George Harrison saying, with every mistake, we must surely be learning.
I think that he expressed in that that beauty of hope, fear that it might not be true.
Surely, let's hope.
We all must hope for that.
Well, thanks Carter.
I really enjoyed not only this conversation, but the last couple of weeks of reading your
book and thinking about the things you have to say.
It's been a lot of fun.
If people have enjoyed this interview, what do you have to offer?
Anything in a public sense?
Do you do retreats or webinars or you have a podcast?
I don't really do a lot of teaching, but if I do at some point in the future, I have a
mailing list at CarterPhipps.com and I do writings.
I have a think tank that I'm part of.
I'm probably going to do more of my own writing going forward.
And who knows, maybe I'll do some kind of group things or teaching things or maybe I
will at some point, but I don't really do much of that.
I don't do any of that now really.
But you can always get my list.
I have a podcast, you know, you can see whatever the latest I'm doing.
If you get on that list, you'll find out about it.
Well, we'll just all wait for the emergence of Sri Sri Carter Phipps and on the G.
Yes, exactly.
[Laughter]
Coming on clouds of glory.
Trailing clouds of glory. Do we come from God who is our home, right? Isn't that Wordsworth?
Oh, yeah, there you go. I knew that clouds of glory was in there somewhere.
Yeah, that's Wordsworth. Good.
So, thanks a lot. And thanks to those who've been listening or watching. And as I mentioned,
my next guest is a fellow named Bob Harwood, who wrote a book called Pouring Concrete,
because that's what he has done for a living. He's a construction contractor who at the same time
was an avid spiritual seeker and it paid off for him. I don't know if he's retired,
he may still be pouring concrete. No, he's 80 years old, I think he stopped pouring it.
But it's a great story and it was a really down-to-earth book. I didn't space out in
the slightest while listening to it because he has very interesting examples. So, those of you who
are relatively new to BatGap. If you want to visit the website, there's a lot there. You can just
explore the menus and you'll see what's there, but there's an audio podcast you can sign up for and
various ways of accessing past interviews. There's a quotes collection, there's transcripts of most of
the interviews, all kinds of things. So just check it out and appreciate your participation.
Thanks Carter. Thanks so much. Thanks for taking the time to really deeply explore
subject matter. I appreciate that. A lot of fun. Talk to you later.
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