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[Music]

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Rick Archer � The Buddha at the Gas Pump

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Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump.

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My name is Rick Archer.

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Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening

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people.

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We've done nearly 700 of them now.

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If this is new to you and you'd like to check out some of the previous ones, go to www.BatGap.com

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and look under the �Past Interviews� menu.

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This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers, so if

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you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there are PayPal buttons on the site and

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there is a page which explains alternatives to PayPal.

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Also, as I mentioned in some recent interviews, we have an ongoing transcription project going

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on and I have a team of over 50 volunteers who have been helping to proofread the transcripts

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and there are a number of reasons why that is important.

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I won't go into them all right now, but just this last week,

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Nipun Mehta, who was on BatGap,

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offered to create a BatGap chatbot based on chat GPT-4,

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which if you're familiar with that,

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is a very powerful technology.

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And the core of it will be all these proofread transcripts.

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So we're in the process of getting,

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it's actually already working,

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but we won't make it public

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until we've uploaded more of the transcripts, but if you'd like to help proofread them,

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that's one thing that'll contribute too. Okay, my guest today is Bob Harwood. Bob lives down in

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Tennessee and has written a book called "Pouring Concrete, a Zen Path to the Kingdom of God,"

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which is sort of a paradoxical title in that the Zen people don't talk about God, but I guess Bob

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us. I read the whole book. The reason it's called "Pouring Concrete" is his profession for most of

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his life was that of a construction contractor and he poured a lot of concrete. And the book

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is rather concrete in the sense that it's very down-to-earth, which I found refreshing. Sometimes

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when I listen or read spiritual books, I space out a bit, you know, because they get kind of abstract

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and philosophical, but this was very well-written and very personal and very concrete, very down

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to earth, and I just found myself easily attending to every word. Very enjoyable book, and I felt an

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affinity with Bob. There's some things we both like to do, like ski and hike in the mountains,

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and so we've had a long phone conversation since I read the book in which we shared some tips and

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experiences on those pastimes, and Bob's actually heading out in a couple weeks to do some more of

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of it, some hiking in the mountains of Colorado. Anyway, I'm envious. All right,

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Bob, welcome. Glad to be here. Good to have you. One thing about you, Bob, that you'll

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notice as we go along, he's a very cheerful guy. He's not pasting a smile on

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his face. It's genuine, it comes from within. He's had a very significant

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spiritual awakening well over 20 years ago and it stuck with him and

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profoundly enhanced his life, which is, I think, ultimately what this is all about.

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So I think a lot of this conversation or interview will be about your personal journey, Bob,

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starting as far back as you'd like to start, and your zeal impressed me.

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There's a line in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras in which he says that the yogi who pursues

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enlightenment with vehement intensity tends to get it more quickly, and I think that would

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characterize your path at many stages of it.

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You went through things that are a lot more arduous than I ever went through and I was impressed with your perseverance

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Yep, that's for sure

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And so should I just start off telling how this all began yeah, I just start off

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Okay. So anyway, I grew up in a real fundamentalist Christian tradition

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Really was pretty serious about spirituality and religion growing up

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But when I went to college

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I really began to question all these beliefs and things that I've been culturally indoctrinated to believe

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Initially, the only questions that began were things like, "Is there really a God?"

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or "Have I been talking to myself in my head all these years?" and, you know, "What

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happens after we die? Where were we before we were born? Is there really a

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heaven or a hell?" Those kind of questions were the initial existential questions

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that I had no idea. You know, I was curious to know as a scientist, since I

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was majoring in science and took a lot of science courses, I was curious, could

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there be some sort of a direct experience of these things that would be

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indisputable, undoubtable, rather than just being told to believe in something?

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So those were the initial questions, but as soon as I started taking various

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college courses in logic and physics and so forth, other questions began to arise

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and I was just a really curious person. So, you know, when I was in a logics class,

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for example, and they talked about how we make decisions and the professor said,

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"Well, you know, you list the pros on one side and the cons on the other, and the longer

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list is how you make your decision."

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And I thought, intuitively, I knew that wasn't true, because there might be a hundred reasons

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not to do something and you still do it.

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So I thought, "There's something here deeper than logic going on," but I didn't know what

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it was.

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And that just was the beginning.

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Then when I got into the science courses and I began to read about quantum mechanics and

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the observer paradoxes and subatomic particles and all that, a whole bunch of new questions

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arose.

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I would ask the professors about this and they didn't have any clue what I was really asking.

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I was sort of like asking, "What is a subatomic particle really?"

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You know, if I could shrink myself down to the size of a subatomic particle, what would

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I see?

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And things like, "What could explain these observer paradoxes?"

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And I also wondered, "Where's the boundary between the macrocosmic world that Newtonian

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physics applies to and the quantum world that quantum mechanics applies to?"

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It looked to me like there was a smooth transition there.

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I didn't see any boundary.

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Those are the kind of questions that began to arise

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and a lot of them were just intuitive.

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So like so many college students,

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I thought, well, I'll take a philosophy course

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'cause I was a super optimist

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and I thought, it's just a matter of time

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before I figure this out.

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So I took a philosophy course

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and the philosophy course just gave me

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another 20 or 30 questions.

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It didn't answer any questions

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and yet it raised a whole bunch more.

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I came out of that course wondering,

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what is time really?

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What is space?

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What is matter?

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What is gravity or electricity, all these things?

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So when I came out of the philosophy course,

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I thought, well, I can't find any answers there.

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So I just kept thinking and thinking and thinking

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about all these questions.

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So I just, I became consumed with existential questions.

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Later I realized the intellect

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doesn't have the answer to any of this.

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The intellect only deals with what's known.

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And the kind of questions I was asking

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were things that are unknown.

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And I had no idea how you go about

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finding an answer to that.

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So kind of a funny story,

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I met my future wife on a blind date

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and she had taken a course in philosophy

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on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and a bunch of these guys,

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many of whom I had read about,

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but toward the end of the course,

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she got angry because she read about their lives

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and she went to her professor and she said,

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"Hey, I've been studying all these guys

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"and none of them live very happy lives."

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And the professor was cool.

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And he just said, "Oh, you need to take my course

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"in Eastern spirituality and religion."

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So she signed up for that.

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And she brought all these books home

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that neither one of us had ever seen before.

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The Tao Te Ching, the Dhammapada,

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The Way of Zen by Alan Watts,

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a whole bunch of these books.

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We started reading those books,

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and as we read about the Zen masters,

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and the Sufi masters, and the Taoist masters,

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the Hindu meditation masters,

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and all these different masters from the East,

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we realized that in a certain intuitive sense,

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that they were pointing to the same thing

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that Jesus Christ had been pointing to,

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but from a different cultural tradition.

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So as I read those books,

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and I read those books for nine years,

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and still never found a single answer,

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but I added like 50 or 100 more questions,

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Did you actually write all those questions down or did you keep them in your head somehow?

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It was just like, it was just unbelievable.

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Like I read about koans, you know, Zen has all these formal test questions.

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And I was familiar with at least 30 or 40 of them.

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And there's about 2,000 in most of the tradition.

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I didn't know the answer to any of them and had no idea how you'd ever figure out an answer

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to one of these.

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And so because I was familiar with those, and I read about enlightenment, and I read about

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all these unusual things that happen, particularly unusual experiences that people described when

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they would encounter a Zen master and had these huge breakthroughs. I had no idea what they were

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talking about. So the questions just kept multiplying. And really the important point is for

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20 years I thought about this stuff endlessly. And up to the age of 40 I was really optimistic. I

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thought sooner or later as a scientist I'm going to figure this all out. And yet at the age of 40

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for the first time I began to feel a little bit of depression because I thought here I am 40,

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I may die and I've never learned anything important. You know, everything I knew was

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trivial compared to what I wanted to know. So I was just consumed with all these questions.

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So I was really primed. At age 40, I had begun to intuit that I was suffering some business-related

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stress. I was worrying about customers and clients and projects and money and all this stuff and I was

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driving around all day long thinking about all this stuff and I'd begun to realize that

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the internal dialogue, this mind chatter that Zen people call monkey mind, it was just incessant.

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It was just constant.

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And I began to think, you know, I wonder if this internal dialogue is contributing to

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this stress I'm feeling.

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And of course, I didn't realize at that time, but it was really creating all the stress.

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So anyway, I was just really curious about that.

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And about that point, I lucked up.

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a new book came out and it mentioned what Zen people do, which is meditate.

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In this little book, it just said, if you want some peace of mind,

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do this simple little breath awareness exercise.

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And I had never really meditated or anything like that, but I read about it.

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And I thought, man, anything for a little peace of mind,

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a little freedom from this constant chatter in my head. So I decided, okay,

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even if it doesn't work,

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I'll walk around a Coliseum every day for one hour doing this breath awareness

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exercise, just counting breaths. And it was very frustrating because with a real monkey mind,

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I couldn't get past the count of three before, you know, I'd be lost in a train of thought somewhere.

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It was amazing. I only did it for probably maybe about 12 days. And one day I was driving through

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town. Here I am, I'm an architectural designer and general contractor. And I was driving through town

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and I saw a building I had never seen before. And it struck me as really strange. I thought,

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I've driven down this road a thousand times and I've never seen that building and it was a fairly unusual house

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And I thought I wonder if the little exercise I've been doing just for 10 or 11 days has caused me to see that house

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And man that really generates some curiosity. So then about two days later

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I thought I'm gonna walk through the countryside in the afternoon and just see if I can look without thinking

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Now I call that exercise ATA minus T, attending the actual minus thoughts. I never worked for it then, didn't know what I was doing.

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I didn't even think of it as a meditative exercise.

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But I just started walking down this country road and within a day or so

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I began to have all these memories from childhood come back. I was really surprised

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I began to remember the smell of flowers and all kinds of different stuff and

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it took about, oh maybe two days and I had a big realization.

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I thought, "My God, I've been living in my head for the last 10 or 15 years."

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Because when I would look at a tree, being a contractor, I would know that it's a red

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tree, I mean a red oak or a white oak or a maple or a poplar, whatever.

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I would think, "Oh, that tree's valuable or it's worthless.

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It might have so many hundred bored feet of lumber."

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I was just curious, "Is it possible to look at the world without thinking all that stuff?"

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I began to just shift attention again and again away from thoughts, just what could be

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seen.

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So that's what I did.

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And I continued doing both those little practices, an hour a day walking around the Coliseum

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doing one exercise.

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In the afternoon I'd walk through the countryside just looking and listening, seeing if I could

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just look because I became curious.

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What do little children see who haven't yet learned to think in terms of form and names

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and so forth?

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You know, can you look at what a tree is without naming it, without thinking about it, or without

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thinking about a conversation from last week or a fantasy about next week, that type thing.

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And so I just kept doing that.

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I think I did that for about two months.

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And then I think it was on the third month or maybe the fourth month, I decided to add

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an extra exercise at night, which is kind of a formal Zen practice of following the breath.

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We just really sit and just watch the breathing process.

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And that went on for maybe five months.

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And then one night I sat down to meditate and I fell into Nirvikalpa Samadhi.

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I didn't know what it was, but everything disappeared and all that remained was pure awareness.

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It was a very unusual experience.

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And when I came out of that state, I had no idea what it was.

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I didn't know what the name of it was.

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I just knew that everything had disappeared and all that remained was pure awareness.

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Do you have any idea how long you had been in it?

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Yes, I happened to have a clock in front of me.

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So when I came out of that, I thought, wow, I was in that state for about an hour and I

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wasn't there.

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So I just, I thought it was really unusual because there were a lot of somatic phenomena associated

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with it.

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You know, breathing slowed down to where it almost stopped.

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The body began to feel really cool as if it were being encased in a block of ice or something

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like that.

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And there was certain skin surface numbness phenomena that it literally, literally felt

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like almost the body became encased in a block of ice.

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And you could feel it, I could feel it unifying up to a certain point and then it's like an

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event arise and after that everything disappeared.

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All thoughts stopped, everything was gone except just pure awareness.

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It was an extremely blissful state.

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So anyway I sat down the next night to meditate.

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This time it happened just really fast.

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I just fell right into that state.

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That happened three nights in a row and then on the morning of the fourth morning I got

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up it was a work day on Monday I went to work.

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And I was talking to a guy in his office about 10 o'clock when his phone rang.

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And when the phone rang, it was like an electric shock went through the body and all of reality

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began to disintegrate.

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There's no real way to describe it, except that like when I was looking at my friend,

00:14:55.000 --> 00:14:57.880
it was really hard to hold the features of his face stable.

00:14:57.880 --> 00:15:02.480
Everything was beginning to come apart and it was coming alive in some strange way.

00:15:02.480 --> 00:15:06.240
And then that really scared me and I also felt this tremendous emotional thing start

00:15:06.240 --> 00:15:08.480
arising in the center of the body.

00:15:08.480 --> 00:15:12.500
I didn't know I was gonna start laughing or crying and so rather than be embarrassed

00:15:12.500 --> 00:15:14.500
I told the guy I need to go check on a project

00:15:14.500 --> 00:15:16.640
Rushed out of his office and got in the car

00:15:16.640 --> 00:15:20.680
And when I jumped in the car grabbed hold of steering wheel and this thought appeared

00:15:20.680 --> 00:15:23.480
Maybe reality is not what we think it is

00:15:23.480 --> 00:15:29.600
And as soon as that thought appeared I burst out laughing and I laughed non-stop for about five minutes

00:15:29.600 --> 00:15:33.680
And the thought just kept occurring maybe reality is not what we think it is

00:15:33.680 --> 00:15:36.880
So I drove over to a nearby project about a mile away

00:15:37.560 --> 00:15:41.700
When I got out of the car, it's like the whole world had come alive. I had been

00:15:41.700 --> 00:15:44.840
catapulted from one reality into another reality

00:15:44.840 --> 00:15:50.480
Very much like what Eckhart Tolle writes about after his big vortex thing when he woke up the next day

00:15:50.480 --> 00:15:52.680
it was like everything was just

00:15:52.680 --> 00:16:00.500
Unbelievable, and there was a first it was an out-of-body thing where consciousness went beyond the it was it wasn't inside or outside

00:16:00.500 --> 00:16:03.820
But it was out in front of the body somewhere up in the air above the body

00:16:03.820 --> 00:16:08.780
and it stayed that way a few minutes and then it came back inside the body and

00:16:08.780 --> 00:16:13.900
when I walked toward the house as soon as my foot hit the deck of the house man

00:16:13.900 --> 00:16:18.260
everything disintegrated and I could not remember my own name and it was just

00:16:18.260 --> 00:16:24.580
this incredible state of oneness. During that experience somehow the infinite was

00:16:24.580 --> 00:16:29.660
apprehended and it was clear that everything was totally unified and that

00:16:29.660 --> 00:16:34.540
everything was infinite and there was no such thing as birth or death. It was just all kinds

00:16:34.540 --> 00:16:40.460
of realizations that occurred as a result of this. But I was conscious and coherent. I went downstairs

00:16:40.460 --> 00:16:45.820
and told some workmen what to do about a gas pipe they were installing and the whole thing was

00:16:45.820 --> 00:16:50.700
striking me so funny that I had to cover my mouth from my hand because I was about to burst out

00:16:50.700 --> 00:16:55.580
laughing and I thought they'll all think I need to be carried off to an asylum or something.

00:16:55.580 --> 00:16:57.820
They'll think, you know, what's going on with him?

00:16:57.820 --> 00:17:01.580
And I'm thinking I'm supposed to be a business person, but I can't remember his own name.

00:17:01.580 --> 00:17:05.940
So at a certain point, it got really weird, even stranger.

00:17:05.940 --> 00:17:09.820
And I was looking at the superintendent and the middle part of his body just vanished.

00:17:09.820 --> 00:17:13.260
It was like I could see his head and I could see his feet, but there was nothing in the

00:17:13.260 --> 00:17:14.260
middle of his body.

00:17:14.260 --> 00:17:19.180
And I had to really concentrate to bring his body back into focus.

00:17:19.180 --> 00:17:20.540
And that really scared me.

00:17:20.540 --> 00:17:22.780
I turned around, looked at the wall, the same thing there.

00:17:22.780 --> 00:17:25.540
There was this big gap in the wall.

00:17:25.540 --> 00:17:28.780
Did you see what was on the other side of his body or you just couldn't see anything?

00:17:28.780 --> 00:17:33.700
No, I realized later when I read about, you know, schizophrenics have unusual things where

00:17:33.700 --> 00:17:36.100
there's all kind of weird perceptual stuff.

00:17:36.100 --> 00:17:39.860
I've read accounts where schizophrenics might be shaving and only see half their face.

00:17:39.860 --> 00:17:40.860
Right.

00:17:40.860 --> 00:17:43.660
When I read about that, I thought, "Oh, this was something perceptual that was happening

00:17:43.660 --> 00:17:46.100
from the standpoint of whatever was going on in the brain."

00:17:46.100 --> 00:17:48.700
Plus, there was a tremendous flood of endorphins.

00:17:48.700 --> 00:17:52.020
I mean, I didn't know it was possible to feel as good as I felt.

00:17:52.020 --> 00:17:53.940
It was as if the body had been injected

00:17:53.940 --> 00:17:55.940
with every good drug in the world.

00:17:55.940 --> 00:17:57.540
So anyway, that really frightened me

00:17:57.540 --> 00:17:59.460
'cause I thought I'm about to lose touch with reality.

00:17:59.460 --> 00:18:00.580
Totally, and I told the guys,

00:18:00.580 --> 00:18:02.340
"I gotta go check on a project."

00:18:02.340 --> 00:18:04.180
I rushed out of the house and jumped in the car.

00:18:04.180 --> 00:18:05.020
And when I got to the bottom of the mountain,

00:18:05.020 --> 00:18:07.760
I'm like, "Oh, oh, oh, I'm Bob the Builder."

00:18:07.760 --> 00:18:09.340
I remembered who I was.

00:18:09.340 --> 00:18:10.760
But as I started up the road, I thought,

00:18:10.760 --> 00:18:12.700
"Oh, everything's back to normal."

00:18:12.700 --> 00:18:14.540
But it wasn't back to normal.

00:18:14.540 --> 00:18:15.620
I looked over at a tree,

00:18:15.620 --> 00:18:18.780
and for the first time I realized what the difference was

00:18:18.780 --> 00:18:22.380
between what a tree is and the idea of a tree.

00:18:22.380 --> 00:18:23.900
I didn't know it then until I happened

00:18:23.900 --> 00:18:25.140
to read about this later,

00:18:25.140 --> 00:18:28.660
but in Zen they call it passing through the gateless gate.

00:18:28.660 --> 00:18:32.260
You see through the illusion of thingness, of separateness.

00:18:32.260 --> 00:18:35.520
At any rate, the next three or four days were unbelievable.

00:18:35.520 --> 00:18:38.680
And I lost all interest in anything personal.

00:18:38.680 --> 00:18:41.020
I was ready to give away everything we owned.

00:18:41.020 --> 00:18:44.580
It was a big problem in my family.

00:18:44.580 --> 00:18:47.780
And I freaked out my wonderful wife

00:18:47.780 --> 00:18:50.820
because I sort of destroyed her security

00:18:50.820 --> 00:18:52.900
because I was ready to give away the company

00:18:52.900 --> 00:18:55.820
or at least share it with all the employees.

00:18:55.820 --> 00:18:57.940
You know, I lost interest in anything personal.

00:18:57.940 --> 00:19:00.240
All I wanted to do was go visit people in the hospital

00:19:00.240 --> 00:19:03.500
and send money anonymously to the people that needed it.

00:19:03.500 --> 00:19:05.620
And just, it was unbelievable.

00:19:05.620 --> 00:19:08.400
So that continued for like about three days.

00:19:08.400 --> 00:19:10.380
And then I began to think about it.

00:19:10.380 --> 00:19:11.500
- There was a thing, wasn't there?

00:19:11.500 --> 00:19:13.280
Where you said to your employees

00:19:13.280 --> 00:19:14.860
that you're gonna share the whole company with them

00:19:14.860 --> 00:19:17.580
and they all walked off and started another company.

00:19:17.580 --> 00:19:19.720
Was that that time or later on?

00:19:19.720 --> 00:19:22.480
- That was the third day I had this meeting.

00:19:22.480 --> 00:19:24.780
And it was funny because I didn't know this until later.

00:19:24.780 --> 00:19:27.160
My wife told me that while I was downstairs

00:19:27.160 --> 00:19:30.440
trying to talk them into like sharing all the profits

00:19:30.440 --> 00:19:32.400
of the company and being co-owners,

00:19:32.400 --> 00:19:34.240
she was upstairs reading about the Buddha

00:19:34.240 --> 00:19:36.160
having left his family and gone off.

00:19:36.160 --> 00:19:41.040
So it certainly was terrible from that standpoint.

00:19:41.040 --> 00:19:43.400
But all the employees, I guess they thought

00:19:43.400 --> 00:19:46.400
I was trying to pull a quick one or a scam or something,

00:19:46.400 --> 00:19:47.500
or they thought I went nuts.

00:19:47.500 --> 00:19:51.220
not sure what they thought, but they quickly quit and they formed their own

00:19:51.220 --> 00:19:54.980
company and left. And so our whole construction company came to an end and

00:19:54.980 --> 00:20:00.300
we had to shift over and use subcontractors and employees after that. So the whole

00:20:00.300 --> 00:20:04.700
story was kind of incredible. But then as I began thinking about this and trying to

00:20:04.700 --> 00:20:09.020
think how can I tell other people how to find this incredible state of being, this

00:20:09.020 --> 00:20:13.500
amazing way of not being the least bit concerned about yourself, the more I

00:20:13.500 --> 00:20:18.460
I thought about it, it began to dissipate. And that's when I became aware of what Asians

00:20:18.460 --> 00:20:23.820
call chi, the electrical energy that moves in the body. I could feel it. And it felt

00:20:23.820 --> 00:20:29.180
like some sort of a circuit was closing down. And my wife looked at me on the third day,

00:20:29.180 --> 00:20:34.460
I think it was, and she said, "Do you still feel the same?" And I thought, "No, that's

00:20:34.460 --> 00:20:40.780
sort of formalized, just quiet. It was beginning to build." I realized, "No, something's not

00:20:40.780 --> 00:20:47.340
same and it's like up to that point I was one with everything. I mean if I'm listening to a sound I

00:20:47.340 --> 00:20:53.260
was that sound but then as this thing began to close down I didn't know if I'd survive. It literally

00:20:53.260 --> 00:20:58.140
felt like the electrical circuitry in the body went nuts and I actually thought I was going to

00:20:58.140 --> 00:21:05.180
die on the fourth day. Were you sleeping during those days? Yeah, yeah I was sleeping. Yeah and when I woke up

00:21:05.180 --> 00:21:09.340
the fourth morning in this and I could feel all this strange electrical stuff happening the heart

00:21:09.340 --> 00:21:15.500
was going nuts. I actually told my wife, I said, "I think I'm going to die today. I hate that. I'm

00:21:15.500 --> 00:21:19.740
sorry that you have to deal with that." But I didn't take my notebooks to work. I went off to

00:21:19.740 --> 00:21:25.180
work thinking I wasn't going to make it. And I climbed this hill on one of these construction

00:21:25.180 --> 00:21:30.220
projects and heartbeats slowed down there. They seemed to come back to normal. It was almost like

00:21:30.220 --> 00:21:36.300
some sort of electrical circuit had shifted. And I came back to what I had previously regarded normal.

00:21:36.300 --> 00:21:40.940
But that wasn't very good because it literally felt like I'd fallen out of the kingdom of God

00:21:40.940 --> 00:21:46.860
back into this dead flat world of things again. And so anybody that's had that sort of thing happen,

00:21:46.860 --> 00:21:52.060
they just wanted to get back to that. So that really began the search from that point. But what

00:21:52.060 --> 00:21:58.380
was fascinating was that one event answered about seven of my existential questions without any doubt.

00:21:58.380 --> 00:22:04.300
And that made me realize probably everything else I want to know is somehow inside. And so I

00:22:04.300 --> 00:22:09.980
I concluded being a scientist that if I could just become sufficiently silent, that I could

00:22:09.980 --> 00:22:12.060
find out anything I wanted to know.

00:22:12.060 --> 00:22:15.940
And it turned out that was true, but it took quite a while before I found out everything

00:22:15.940 --> 00:22:20.620
else I wanted to know, because I still had dozens and dozens of other questions.

00:22:20.620 --> 00:22:25.360
And there was one koan that I had read about, the Mu Koans, very famous.

00:22:25.360 --> 00:22:28.860
And after that experience, I knew the answer to the Mu Koan.

00:22:28.860 --> 00:22:30.820
And I was-- Does the dog have Buddha nature?

00:22:30.820 --> 00:22:31.820
Is that the one?

00:22:31.820 --> 00:22:32.820
Right.

00:22:32.820 --> 00:22:33.820
That's the one.

00:22:33.820 --> 00:22:38.140
In fact, usually there are three or four cons associated with that.

00:22:38.140 --> 00:22:39.140
What is moo?

00:22:39.140 --> 00:22:41.340
Does a dog really have Buddha nature?

00:22:41.340 --> 00:22:42.340
Who was correct?

00:22:42.340 --> 00:22:46.180
Was it the Buddha or was it Zhou Xu, the guy that said a dog didn't have Buddha nature?

00:22:46.180 --> 00:22:48.380
There are a whole bunch of questions associated with it.

00:22:48.380 --> 00:22:52.220
It seems like if the answer is moo, it should be does a cow have Buddha nature would be

00:22:52.220 --> 00:22:56.780
a more appropriate question if the answer is moo, right?

00:22:56.780 --> 00:22:57.780
Absolutely.

00:22:57.780 --> 00:23:01.900
Yeah, that's right.

00:23:01.900 --> 00:23:05.900
But anyway, after that, the next several months were kind of interesting because our...

00:23:05.900 --> 00:23:08.100
Let me just ask you before you go ahead.

00:23:08.100 --> 00:23:12.540
Can you tell us what those seven questions were that God answered or just a few of them

00:23:12.540 --> 00:23:15.400
in that initial aha?

00:23:15.400 --> 00:23:18.140
One of my questions was, is there a God?

00:23:18.140 --> 00:23:23.740
What I realized was that the word God points to something that is absolutely incomprehensible,

00:23:23.740 --> 00:23:30.060
a level of intelligence, something so vast, the mind can't even begin to touch it.

00:23:30.060 --> 00:23:36.860
But I somehow or this body directly apprehended that in some phenomenal way.

00:23:36.860 --> 00:23:42.220
And there was no doubt after that, that there's this vast intelligent underlying everything

00:23:42.220 --> 00:23:44.060
that's running the whole show, really.

00:23:44.060 --> 00:23:47.020
So that was just one example, and there were many others.

00:23:47.020 --> 00:23:51.820
And so after that, I think the next several months, I kept walking around telling everybody,

00:23:51.820 --> 00:23:56.380
you need to meditate, you need to meditate, because you can't believe what will happen.

00:23:56.380 --> 00:24:00.940
What was really interesting during that next several months when I was telling everybody to meditate,

00:24:00.940 --> 00:24:06.460
I could not meditate. And that should have been a clue, you know, I'm not in control of what's

00:24:06.460 --> 00:24:10.860
happening here. But then I found there was a Zen group that was having silent retreats,

00:24:10.860 --> 00:24:14.700
and I hooked up with a group out of Providence, Rhode Island, but they were meeting in Lexington,

00:24:14.700 --> 00:24:20.220
Kentucky. So I went up for the first silent retreat. And I thought if I can just have some

00:24:20.220 --> 00:24:25.660
silence, this phenomenal thing will come back. You know, that's kind of a common misconception

00:24:25.660 --> 00:24:31.900
on this path. So I went off to the retreat and did this three days of silent sitting and

00:24:31.900 --> 00:24:38.540
had another fairly significant realization. I went to challenge the Zen teacher and got

00:24:38.540 --> 00:24:43.580
knocked on my butt, got hit with a Zen stick because I had another experience that made

00:24:43.580 --> 00:24:49.460
me think I'd become enlightened and he was a real good guy, really sharp and managed to

00:24:49.460 --> 00:24:55.340
disavow me of that idea with one good strike with a Zen stick. And that was kind of fascinating

00:24:55.340 --> 00:24:58.060
because I had read about these kinds of experiences

00:24:58.060 --> 00:24:59.820
in a lot of the Zen books.

00:24:59.820 --> 00:25:03.260
And after he did that, it so assaulted the ego

00:25:03.260 --> 00:25:05.020
that for the next day or so,

00:25:05.020 --> 00:25:08.940
it literally felt like steel bands that were crushing me.

00:25:08.940 --> 00:25:10.660
I could barely breathe.

00:25:10.660 --> 00:25:14.080
It was some sort of an internal thing that was going on.

00:25:14.080 --> 00:25:15.940
And that went on for about two days.

00:25:15.940 --> 00:25:18.020
And I thought, man, I don't know if I'll survive this.

00:25:18.020 --> 00:25:19.580
And then all of a sudden, boom,

00:25:19.580 --> 00:25:21.320
the bottom dropped out of the mind again

00:25:21.320 --> 00:25:23.300
and I had another realization.

00:25:23.300 --> 00:25:26.360
So after that, I began going on these retreats

00:25:26.360 --> 00:25:28.440
and I began meditating quite a bit,

00:25:28.440 --> 00:25:30.580
but mainly on, I would do these three days

00:25:30.580 --> 00:25:33.300
in silent meditation retreats.

00:25:33.300 --> 00:25:36.820
And as time went by, more of my questions got answered

00:25:36.820 --> 00:25:39.300
because in the Zen tradition I joined,

00:25:39.300 --> 00:25:42.260
you know, the two Zen traditions, Soto and Rinzai.

00:25:42.260 --> 00:25:44.300
And the one I happened to join was Rinzai

00:25:44.300 --> 00:25:46.220
and they use a lot of koans.

00:25:46.220 --> 00:25:49.500
And so they ask you these questions in an interview.

00:25:49.500 --> 00:25:52.020
And if you don't know the answer, that's your homework.

00:25:52.020 --> 00:25:57.860
go out and meditate and most of the simpler koans, it may take a few hours to see the answer.

00:25:57.860 --> 00:26:01.860
But once you begin to penetrate some of these, you realize that anything you want to know,

00:26:01.860 --> 00:26:06.980
if you contemplate it and then shift attention to the breath or whatever,

00:26:06.980 --> 00:26:12.260
all of a sudden the answer will just pop out. It's like an intuitive explosion. And then you

00:26:12.260 --> 00:26:17.140
understand how to respond, what the correct answer would be and how to interact with the guy.

00:26:17.780 --> 00:26:20.340
And I guess the correct answer isn't always verbal, right?

00:26:20.340 --> 00:26:25.780
The answer to what is the sound of one hand clapping, you're not going to necessarily be

00:26:25.780 --> 00:26:30.660
able to give a verbal answer to that, but you have some intuitive realization.

00:26:30.660 --> 00:26:35.540
That's right. You know, about a third of all koans are answered with a physical response.

00:26:35.540 --> 00:26:42.820
And Zen is really interested in letting the body instantaneously respond to these questions without

00:26:42.820 --> 00:26:48.100
thought. In fact, the first thing I was told when I went in for a Zen interview, the teacher said,

00:26:48.100 --> 00:26:53.700
"Leave your thinking mind at the door when you come in here." Because what they're interested in is a

00:26:53.700 --> 00:26:59.380
body response to these questions. You want to see through the koans at what underlies them and so

00:26:59.380 --> 00:27:05.140
forth. And what would be a typical body response? Well, like for example, one of the real simple

00:27:05.140 --> 00:27:08.980
ones they give people, they have some that are just sort of illustrative. You know, there's a

00:27:08.980 --> 00:27:10.780
There's a famous question like,

00:27:10.780 --> 00:27:13.060
how would you greet an enlightened woman

00:27:13.060 --> 00:27:14.500
if you met her on the path

00:27:14.500 --> 00:27:16.660
with neither words nor silence?

00:27:16.660 --> 00:27:17.980
All right, well, if you're thinking,

00:27:17.980 --> 00:27:19.300
you may not be able to answer that.

00:27:19.300 --> 00:27:21.980
If it worded differently, you'd know how to answer.

00:27:21.980 --> 00:27:24.960
So how do you greet a woman with neither words nor silence

00:27:24.960 --> 00:27:26.720
if you meet an enlightened woman?

00:27:26.720 --> 00:27:28.420
Well, there are two mind hooks in there.

00:27:28.420 --> 00:27:31.540
One, an enlightened woman, woo, enlightened woman.

00:27:31.540 --> 00:27:33.060
And the other one is how do you greet her

00:27:33.060 --> 00:27:35.060
with neither words nor silence?

00:27:35.060 --> 00:27:37.740
Well, if you're not thinking, you'll realize,

00:27:37.740 --> 00:27:41.800
Oh, you can wave, you can bow, you could blow or kiss,

00:27:41.800 --> 00:27:43.620
you could simulate a hug.

00:27:43.620 --> 00:27:45.760
There's dozens of ways you could greet somebody

00:27:45.760 --> 00:27:47.480
with neither words or silence.

00:27:47.480 --> 00:27:49.280
So they give you some of those just to show you

00:27:49.280 --> 00:27:52.180
there's simple answers to all these questions.

00:27:52.180 --> 00:27:55.440
And there's several famous, my grandfather used to love,

00:27:55.440 --> 00:27:58.020
he wasn't a Zen master, but when I grew up,

00:27:58.020 --> 00:28:00.200
he used to love riddles and he would ask people,

00:28:00.200 --> 00:28:03.200
he would say, "Oh, it's the bottom of the ninth inning

00:28:03.200 --> 00:28:05.560
"in a baseball game and the score's tied

00:28:05.560 --> 00:28:07.200
"and the bases are loaded

00:28:07.200 --> 00:28:12.320
batter hit a home run but not a man scored. Why? I read your book I know the answer.

00:28:12.320 --> 00:28:18.880
Yeah, so you know the answer. It was a ladies baseball team. That's right and so Zen has a

00:28:18.880 --> 00:28:23.360
lot of coins like that they just used to show you that there are simple answers to all these questions.

00:28:23.360 --> 00:28:28.640
Anyway I started going on the retreats and and more and more of my questions got resolved as

00:28:28.640 --> 00:28:35.200
I began to contemplate the issues I wanted to understand and somewhere along the line I really

00:28:35.200 --> 00:28:40.240
felt like, okay, because at first I was real competitive. I thought, oh, you know, it took

00:28:40.240 --> 00:28:45.920
Renzai two years to wake up. I can beat that. And then when that didn't happen, I thought, well,

00:28:45.920 --> 00:28:51.360
it took the boot of six years. I can beat that, you know. And after six years went by, I still

00:28:51.360 --> 00:28:56.800
didn't feel like I was there. Then I thought, okay, I better settle in here for the long run.

00:28:56.800 --> 00:29:02.320
So I just, I kept going on these retreats. And the reason I titled my book "Pouring Concrete"

00:29:02.320 --> 00:29:06.720
is I really became fixated on the idea of running off to a wilderness

00:29:06.720 --> 00:29:10.320
and spending some time in isolation. I thought if I could just go off to a

00:29:10.320 --> 00:29:13.360
mountaintop and become silent for a significant

00:29:13.360 --> 00:29:17.200
length of time, I'd find out everything I want to know.

00:29:17.200 --> 00:29:20.800
At this stage of the game were you driving your wife crazy with all this?

00:29:20.800 --> 00:29:26.000
She was having a hard time with this. What happened to this guy? It's amazing

00:29:26.000 --> 00:29:29.680
she's still with me. Well you kind of came around but you'll

00:29:29.680 --> 00:29:34.720
get to that. That's right. You know, she was always interested in existential stuff too. That's one of

00:29:34.720 --> 00:29:40.320
the things that attracted us. That's why we really found each other as soulmates. So she so fully

00:29:40.320 --> 00:29:44.960
respected the fact that the Buddha ran off that she just sort of assumed Bob would run off in the

00:29:44.960 --> 00:29:50.640
same way. But you know, my situation was different. You know, I love my wife and my child and I really

00:29:50.640 --> 00:29:54.720
enjoyed construction. You know, I didn't have the same reasons to run off to the wilderness that the

00:29:54.720 --> 00:29:58.320
the Buddha did, but I still was really captivated by that idea.

00:29:58.320 --> 00:30:02.080
If I could just leave all my everyday activities behind and go off to a

00:30:02.080 --> 00:30:04.800
wilderness, you know, I could wake up and get the

00:30:04.800 --> 00:30:08.480
whole thing. And one day I was pouring concrete. This is probably,

00:30:08.480 --> 00:30:11.920
I don't know, I've probably been meditating off and on for seven or eight years

00:30:11.920 --> 00:30:16.000
and I had that same thought I'd had dozens of times. I was pouring concrete

00:30:16.000 --> 00:30:18.480
and we took a break. I'm standing there beside the concrete

00:30:18.480 --> 00:30:21.360
truck in the shade, drinking a glass of water.

00:30:21.360 --> 00:30:24.400
Now, boy, if I didn't have to be doing this stupid construction work, I could be

00:30:24.400 --> 00:30:29.280
off on a mountain. Bam! And all of a sudden I saw how that thought separated me from the

00:30:29.280 --> 00:30:34.880
truth of what is. And I asked myself this really simple question. I love to ask seekers this one

00:30:34.880 --> 00:30:41.600
because it really cuts to the core. I asked myself what must I be doing this moment? Not tomorrow,

00:30:41.600 --> 00:30:47.280
not five minutes from now, this moment. And it was crystal clear I had to be pouring concrete.

00:30:47.280 --> 00:30:52.960
And I realized that that fantasy, that thought of running away from my responsibilities and

00:30:52.960 --> 00:31:00.480
from all the hassles involved with construction, was kind of an escapist thing. And as soon as I saw that,

00:31:00.480 --> 00:31:05.440
I thought, I have to be doing this. The Buddha needed to run off to the wilderness, but I got

00:31:05.440 --> 00:31:10.640
to be pouring concrete. That was a big deal, because that really led back to my family,

00:31:10.640 --> 00:31:16.080
back to ordinary life. And I realized if waking up was ever going to happen, it had to happen right

00:31:16.080 --> 00:31:20.960
there in the middle of pouring concrete and doing construction work, living a family life,

00:31:20.960 --> 00:31:27.920
being an ordinary guy, so forth. So that was really helpful and that was one of the unusual insights I

00:31:27.920 --> 00:31:33.360
had that really had to occur twice. About a week later I was getting a billing permit and it was

00:31:33.360 --> 00:31:38.080
one of those bureaucratic things at a government office and I was sitting there kind of bored

00:31:38.080 --> 00:31:41.680
waiting and I thought, "Oh man, if I didn't have to be sitting here getting a billing permit, I could

00:31:41.680 --> 00:31:48.880
be bam hit me again. Oh what have I got to be doing this moment?" It was crystal clear. So a lot of

00:31:48.880 --> 00:31:53.200
of times when I'm giving talks to people I'll say, "What must you be doing this

00:31:53.200 --> 00:31:57.360
moment?" and sometimes there'll be a moment of silence and someone will say, "I

00:31:57.360 --> 00:32:03.320
guess we've got to be sitting here listening to you." Exactly! What must I be

00:32:03.320 --> 00:32:07.760
doing this moment? You know, jabbering about non-duality or whatever. And so

00:32:07.760 --> 00:32:11.960
that was really helpful. That was one of the biggest insights I had. So anyway, I

00:32:11.960 --> 00:32:17.720
just continued doing all this and about, I guess it was about maybe eight or nine

00:32:17.720 --> 00:32:23.200
years into this Zen tradition and I was pretty involved with them. I was on a

00:32:23.200 --> 00:32:28.400
retreat one time and I thought to intensify the retreat, it was already pretty

00:32:28.400 --> 00:32:32.000
intense, you know you meditate eight hours a day on a Zen retreat, I thought

00:32:32.000 --> 00:32:35.440
every time there's a break in the retreat I'll go out and do this other

00:32:35.440 --> 00:32:39.600
little exercise and I now call ATA minus T. I walk up and down the street just

00:32:39.600 --> 00:32:43.520
looking and listening and so it did intensify the retreat but one of the odd

00:32:43.520 --> 00:32:48.880
things that happened afterwards I realized when I'm walking down the street just looking,

00:32:48.880 --> 00:32:53.680
I'm doing the same thing as if I'm sitting on a cushion watching the breath. The activity is no

00:32:53.680 --> 00:32:58.720
different. I'm shifting attention away from thoughts to what's happening right now. And

00:32:58.720 --> 00:33:04.400
once I realized that I began to lose interest in Zen because I thought, "Zen's kind of rigid,

00:33:04.400 --> 00:33:09.680
you know, they got all these rules, you got to sit a certain way in this posture and so forth and so

00:33:09.680 --> 00:33:11.320
and you can't say a word.

00:33:11.320 --> 00:33:13.360
It's kind of a militaristic type thing

00:33:13.360 --> 00:33:15.280
in the tradition that I was in.

00:33:15.280 --> 00:33:16.920
And so once I realized that,

00:33:16.920 --> 00:33:18.800
I thought I don't need to go on a retreat.

00:33:18.800 --> 00:33:20.440
I can do this driving my truck.

00:33:20.440 --> 00:33:22.520
I can do this hiking in the woods,

00:33:22.520 --> 00:33:23.980
anywhere I wanna go.

00:33:23.980 --> 00:33:26.640
I can keep shifting attention away from thoughts

00:33:26.640 --> 00:33:28.920
to just what can be seen or heard.

00:33:28.920 --> 00:33:32.280
And I think it's interesting in the Gospel of Thomas.

00:33:32.280 --> 00:33:34.480
The Gospel of Thomas is a Gnostic gospel,

00:33:34.480 --> 00:33:37.200
a little more mystical than the New Testament.

00:33:37.200 --> 00:33:40.360
In the New Testament, Jesus tells his disciples,

00:33:40.360 --> 00:33:42.360
"The kingdom of God is within you."

00:33:42.360 --> 00:33:45.000
But in the Gospel of Thomas, he tells his disciples,

00:33:45.000 --> 00:33:47.960
"The kingdom of God is both inside of you

00:33:47.960 --> 00:33:49.920
and it is outside of you."

00:33:49.920 --> 00:33:51.360
So what I realized was,

00:33:51.360 --> 00:33:53.520
it doesn't matter which direction you look.

00:33:53.520 --> 00:33:55.600
You can look within or you can look without.

00:33:55.600 --> 00:33:58.720
In my case, since I had spent 20 years thinking

00:33:58.720 --> 00:34:01.080
and I hadn't found any answers at all,

00:34:01.080 --> 00:34:03.760
I was just shifting attention again and again

00:34:03.760 --> 00:34:05.760
to just what's right in front of my eyes.

00:34:06.800 --> 00:34:08.960
what's right here in this present moment.

00:34:08.960 --> 00:34:11.360
And so that's what I began doing more and more.

00:34:11.360 --> 00:34:13.180
And I just continued doing that.

00:34:13.180 --> 00:34:14.960
So really after 15 years,

00:34:14.960 --> 00:34:16.920
every question I ever had had been answered.

00:34:16.920 --> 00:34:19.960
I didn't have any more questions, but I didn't feel free.

00:34:19.960 --> 00:34:21.880
And I even talked to my wife about it.

00:34:21.880 --> 00:34:22.880
I said, I don't understand.

00:34:22.880 --> 00:34:25.300
I don't have any more existential questions,

00:34:25.300 --> 00:34:26.840
but I don't feel free.

00:34:26.840 --> 00:34:31.200
And I didn't realize for about two more weeks why that was.

00:34:31.200 --> 00:34:34.280
That's because it was a me that didn't feel free.

00:34:34.280 --> 00:34:38.040
And so I went on a hiking trip to Colorado

00:34:38.040 --> 00:34:39.640
and I'd done this several times before,

00:34:39.640 --> 00:34:41.680
just 'cause like you, I like to climb mountains

00:34:41.680 --> 00:34:43.920
and hike these trails and so forth.

00:34:43.920 --> 00:34:46.040
I never was able to find anybody to go with me

00:34:46.040 --> 00:34:47.920
'cause I hike at a fairly fast pace.

00:34:47.920 --> 00:34:51.120
And most people that I went hiking with

00:34:51.120 --> 00:34:52.440
had a hard time keeping up.

00:34:52.440 --> 00:34:53.760
So I would just go by myself.

00:34:53.760 --> 00:34:54.720
- She got in touch with me.

00:34:54.720 --> 00:34:56.680
We could have talked philosophy while we hiked.

00:34:56.680 --> 00:34:57.880
- I had known you were available.

00:34:57.880 --> 00:34:58.960
I would have called you.

00:34:58.960 --> 00:35:00.160
(both laughing)

00:35:00.160 --> 00:35:02.980
So anyway, this other question had begun to arise.

00:35:02.980 --> 00:35:06.660
I had no more questions, but then one new question started to arise.

00:35:06.660 --> 00:35:12.300
I look back over the 15 years of doing all these meditative activities and so forth,

00:35:12.300 --> 00:35:16.540
and I realize there are these periods in which selfhood disappears.

00:35:16.540 --> 00:35:20.460
It happens in cosmic consciousness, it happens in deep samadhi.

00:35:20.460 --> 00:35:23.900
Many times I would get into the zone in which selfhood would fall away.

00:35:23.900 --> 00:35:26.460
I'd become so involved in some activity.

00:35:26.460 --> 00:35:30.780
Sometimes lots of elite sports people talk about being into the zone.

00:35:30.780 --> 00:35:32.260
It's almost mystical.

00:35:32.260 --> 00:35:35.940
And among mountain climbers, many of them have written these stories of these things that

00:35:35.940 --> 00:35:40.700
happen to them where they just seem to be able to do things that they couldn't ordinarily

00:35:40.700 --> 00:35:41.700
do.

00:35:41.700 --> 00:35:43.660
It's almost like something else takes over the body.

00:35:43.660 --> 00:35:47.260
I was one time playing a game of tennis with an FBI agent.

00:35:47.260 --> 00:35:51.500
We were big competitors and we just loved to smash the ball at each other.

00:35:51.500 --> 00:35:56.020
And one night I was at an indoor court playing that guy and we got to really slugging the

00:35:56.020 --> 00:36:00.540
ball at each other, just barely clearing it, just, you know, smashing it.

00:36:00.540 --> 00:36:04.620
And at a certain point, I began to know where he was going to hit the ball, even before I

00:36:04.620 --> 00:36:06.020
hit it to him.

00:36:06.020 --> 00:36:09.820
And I would hit the ball and be running to where I knew the ball was going to come.

00:36:09.820 --> 00:36:11.860
You know, you're not reflecting when that happens.

00:36:11.860 --> 00:36:15.380
It was only after the game was over and we sat down and these guys had been watching,

00:36:15.380 --> 00:36:19.340
they said, "God, that was unbelievable what you guys were doing."

00:36:19.340 --> 00:36:21.900
And I was thinking, "Yeah, I've never played that kind of tennis."

00:36:21.900 --> 00:36:23.740
But in a sense, it wasn't me playing it.

00:36:23.740 --> 00:36:24.740
Something else took over.

00:36:24.740 --> 00:36:27.300
And that was one time that happened early.

00:36:27.300 --> 00:36:29.260
It happened several times hiking in the mountains.

00:36:29.260 --> 00:36:31.900
I would be hiking up some steep something

00:36:31.900 --> 00:36:35.300
rather than I would get so focused on what I was doing

00:36:35.300 --> 00:36:36.940
that I would end up saying kind of a being

00:36:36.940 --> 00:36:38.340
in this own state.

00:36:38.340 --> 00:36:40.140
So then the question began to arise,

00:36:40.140 --> 00:36:43.780
well, I seem to oscillate between no self and self.

00:36:43.780 --> 00:36:48.500
And that became a real existential question.

00:36:48.500 --> 00:36:50.780
The way I formulated it was weird.

00:36:50.780 --> 00:36:54.020
I worded like this, how is it possible to stay

00:36:54.020 --> 00:36:57.260
in a unity conscious state of mind all the time?

00:36:57.260 --> 00:37:00.340
because I identified those momentary things

00:37:00.340 --> 00:37:02.180
as unity consciousness,

00:37:02.180 --> 00:37:04.360
because everything seemed to be one

00:37:04.360 --> 00:37:05.900
when I was in those kinds of states

00:37:05.900 --> 00:37:07.440
and selfhood wasn't there.

00:37:07.440 --> 00:37:09.340
Anyway, I'd been hiking about four days

00:37:09.340 --> 00:37:11.280
in the mountains doing this little exercise,

00:37:11.280 --> 00:37:13.900
you know, where I'm just looking and listening and so forth.

00:37:13.900 --> 00:37:17.100
And I was climbing Mount Aldabun, a mountain that you climb.

00:37:17.100 --> 00:37:19.100
And I got up above the tree line,

00:37:19.100 --> 00:37:20.900
and after about four days,

00:37:20.900 --> 00:37:23.860
and this has happened a lot of times on solo retreats,

00:37:23.860 --> 00:37:26.500
and I'm sure if you've been on solo retreats,

00:37:26.500 --> 00:37:31.460
know the same thing. The more you really are paying attention to what's happening and you're really

00:37:31.460 --> 00:37:37.140
looking at everything around you, there's a certain sense of communion and unity that begins to grow.

00:37:37.140 --> 00:37:43.380
You seem to be more one with what's happening. At any rate, I had this tremendously deep experience

00:37:43.380 --> 00:37:48.020
of gratitude, just overwhelming gratitude for everything that happened in my life, good,

00:37:48.020 --> 00:37:53.860
bad, or otherwise. And I sat down on a rock and actually I basically said a prayer, "Thank you,

00:37:53.860 --> 00:38:00.740
thank you, thank you for everything. And I got real emotional and I got up and never even went to the

00:38:00.740 --> 00:38:04.820
top of the mountain. I think that's the only time I never went to the summit. I turned around and

00:38:04.820 --> 00:38:09.780
came down. I knew I was feeling really good and there was this vague sense that something was

00:38:09.780 --> 00:38:16.020
missing. A few hours later I looked within and there was no longer within. There was no me. It

00:38:16.020 --> 00:38:21.540
was all gone. It was immediately obvious there had never been a Bob Harwood. The whole thing had just

00:38:21.540 --> 00:38:26.420
been a fictional story about a fictional person and there was still a body-mind organism,

00:38:26.420 --> 00:38:32.740
but there was no separate volitional entity inside the body doing anything or controlling

00:38:32.740 --> 00:38:38.820
anything or directing anything. And I was totally stunned because in the past, and I was one of those

00:38:38.820 --> 00:38:44.660
people that had a sense of selfhood, it was very hardcore. I would always sort of check inside to

00:38:44.660 --> 00:38:49.380
see what I thought about something or what do I feel about something and so forth. On that day,

00:38:49.380 --> 00:38:55.060
I looked in, there was nothing there. It was all gone, along with any sense of inside or outside.

00:38:55.060 --> 00:38:59.940
And it never changed after that. There was never again a boundary between inside and outside.

00:38:59.940 --> 00:39:07.220
Life just took on a flow after that. And so even though the body-mind organism is still there,

00:39:07.220 --> 00:39:12.100
there's no longer a sense of a little bitty, little guy in the head looking out of the eyes

00:39:12.100 --> 00:39:17.540
at a world that's out there. Everything, it was just a permanent sense of just being one with what

00:39:17.540 --> 00:39:22.300
is and that that ended the spiritual search but at the same time I saw that

00:39:22.300 --> 00:39:27.380
there was no within and there never had been a Bob Harwood I then realized that

00:39:27.380 --> 00:39:32.100
what I had seen 15 years earlier in the cosmic consciousness event that was what

00:39:32.100 --> 00:39:36.860
was doing everything and the way I worded at that time was the process of

00:39:36.860 --> 00:39:41.420
reality is what does everything. These days I use the term this you know

00:39:41.420 --> 00:39:46.940
Nisargadatta has a book that was titled I am that but for me this feels more

00:39:46.940 --> 00:39:53.340
intimate. So I always say I'm this, you know, and we're all this. And so once this

00:39:53.340 --> 00:39:57.980
sort of a realization occurs, you realize that every person you meet is you. The

00:39:57.980 --> 00:40:03.100
furthest star is you. There's no boundary anywhere. And so I love to ask people

00:40:03.100 --> 00:40:07.140
things like, "Well, how do you grow a single hair?" Nobody knows. "How do you see?

00:40:07.140 --> 00:40:11.260
How do you think? How does every blood cell in your body know where to go?" You're

00:40:11.260 --> 00:40:15.340
not doing that. Something much vaster and more incomprehensible is doing

00:40:15.340 --> 00:40:23.020
everything. And once that's seen, it really becomes amazingly freeing. From that point on,

00:40:23.020 --> 00:40:29.100
not only did I feel free, I knew I was free. That ended it. And it also resulted in sort of an

00:40:29.100 --> 00:40:34.940
emotional openness, extreme vulnerability, you might say. And I was thinking about this the

00:40:34.940 --> 00:40:41.500
other day because it's interesting that in the New Testament, in one place Jesus tells his disciples,

00:40:41.500 --> 00:40:49.500
He says, "What profit of the man if he gains the whole world, but he loses his very self?"

00:40:49.500 --> 00:40:55.580
Now, "very self" is not very clear. That's the King James interpretation. I'm not a Greek scholar,

00:40:55.580 --> 00:41:01.580
but in the New English Bible, it's slightly different. The line reads, "What profit the man

00:41:01.580 --> 00:41:07.900
if he gains the whole world, but he loses his true self?" That's clear. True self is what I'm

00:41:07.900 --> 00:41:13.740
calling this. We could, Bankai called it the unborn. Someone else might call it Brahman.

00:41:13.740 --> 00:41:19.180
We're talking about the infinite source, whatever word we want to use for that. And so once that's

00:41:19.180 --> 00:41:23.820
seen, it's the greatest thing ever. You know, it's such good news, you just want to tell everybody

00:41:23.820 --> 00:41:29.100
about it. But, you know, you learn only to talk about this with people that are interested.

00:41:29.100 --> 00:41:37.420
Good. A lot of good stuff in what you just said. So now, when you say I'm hungry, or you tell your

00:41:37.420 --> 00:41:43.220
your wife, "I love you," or let's say you whack your thumb with a hammer, isn't there

00:41:43.220 --> 00:41:49.660
still some sort of personal self, even if it's not the predominant thing? Isn't there some

00:41:49.660 --> 00:41:51.100
element of that in there?

00:41:51.100 --> 00:41:58.740
Sure. Yes, as a matter of fact, what really disappears is this false sense of identity

00:41:58.740 --> 00:42:03.860
that you're culturally conditioned to imagine. Yeah, there's still a body-mind, and there's

00:42:03.860 --> 00:42:10.180
obviously still some, you know that Bob Harwood is an entity, it has a

00:42:10.180 --> 00:42:13.700
conventional meaning, it's like a placeholder for what's here. But yeah

00:42:13.700 --> 00:42:18.620
there is that. It's just not the same. It's not like the past sense of selfhood.

00:42:18.620 --> 00:42:23.060
I have this good friend, I won't name her, but she's been on Batcaptain. She recently

00:42:23.060 --> 00:42:27.780
had a very serious car accident, which wasn't her fault, and has numerous broken

00:42:27.780 --> 00:42:31.660
bones and she's in the hospital even now. Just happened last Saturday and her

00:42:31.660 --> 00:42:36.380
partner sent an email out to a bunch of her friends explaining all the ordeals she's been

00:42:36.380 --> 00:42:38.660
through and is still going through.

00:42:38.660 --> 00:42:42.500
But at the end of the email he said, "But you know throughout all of this, she's had

00:42:42.500 --> 00:42:47.020
this" - I forget how he phrased it - "this sort of subtle smile on her face or glow in

00:42:47.020 --> 00:42:51.460
her eyes" or something like that, because she is a very self-realized person and has

00:42:51.460 --> 00:42:56.700
been saying the kinds of things you're saying about having transcended or lost a sense of

00:42:56.700 --> 00:43:01.980
of personal self, or at least a sense of personal self being the center point of life or the

00:43:01.980 --> 00:43:05.180
predominant aspect of one's experience.

00:43:05.180 --> 00:43:09.420
So even under this extreme ordeal, that apparently has abided.

00:43:09.420 --> 00:43:11.540
That's right.

00:43:11.540 --> 00:43:14.940
And it leads to a very simple way of life.

00:43:14.940 --> 00:43:19.680
It's very down to earth, it's very ordinary, nothing special about it.

00:43:19.680 --> 00:43:22.940
You do whatever needs to be done and then you do the next thing that needs to be done

00:43:22.940 --> 00:43:24.020
and so forth.

00:43:24.020 --> 00:43:27.860
So there's almost no reflection about the future or the past.

00:43:27.860 --> 00:43:32.760
And just because I did this little exercise for so long, and one reason I tell people

00:43:32.760 --> 00:43:35.620
about it, a lot of people don't like sitting on a cushion.

00:43:35.620 --> 00:43:37.800
They don't like formal meditation.

00:43:37.800 --> 00:43:40.440
And what I point out to them, you don't have to do that.

00:43:40.440 --> 00:43:44.700
You can do this driving along in your car, walking in the woods, anytime there's some

00:43:44.700 --> 00:43:49.180
free time, you can be shifting attention away from all these nonsense thoughts.

00:43:49.180 --> 00:43:53.180
As you do that, the mind becomes more and more silent.

00:43:53.180 --> 00:43:57.180
Pretty soon, you can have long periods of total silence

00:43:57.180 --> 00:44:01.180
and there's awareness of the silence without any comments about that.

00:44:01.180 --> 00:44:05.180
The mind can actually become totally silent, sort of like what Gary Weber

00:44:05.180 --> 00:44:09.180
has written about, Terry Stevens, and a whole bunch of other people.

00:44:09.180 --> 00:44:13.180
It happens all of a sudden, the mind just goes silent. I met a guy one time

00:44:13.180 --> 00:44:17.180
that it happened to him and that's what brought him to a non-duality retreat.

00:44:17.180 --> 00:44:22.780
He was so shocked by the fact that when his mind went silent, he could function 100% as

00:44:22.780 --> 00:44:23.780
well as he did before.

00:44:23.780 --> 00:44:27.780
In fact, he said, "I actually function more effectively in total silence than when the

00:44:27.780 --> 00:44:31.020
mind had been jabbering all the time."

00:44:31.020 --> 00:44:33.300
It's as simple as learning to speed read.

00:44:33.300 --> 00:44:36.220
You know, when somebody learns to speed read, you've got to break three habits.

00:44:36.220 --> 00:44:41.220
You have to break the habit of reading horizontally with your eyes across the page if you're in

00:44:41.220 --> 00:44:43.160
an English-speaking country.

00:44:43.160 --> 00:44:45.900
You have to then break the habit of sub-vocalization.

00:44:45.900 --> 00:44:49.580
And finally you have to break the habit of mentally saying the words in your head.

00:44:49.580 --> 00:44:53.620
And this is like that, it's that simple, but it does require some persistence.

00:44:53.620 --> 00:44:59.420
And so the mind can become extremely silent and you discover that 95% of all thinking

00:44:59.420 --> 00:45:00.860
is just an overlay.

00:45:00.860 --> 00:45:02.820
It's not necessary at all.

00:45:02.820 --> 00:45:06.980
So are you saying that 5% is still appropriate or necessary?

00:45:06.980 --> 00:45:11.660
Like you're planning a trip to Colorado, you got to figure out, okay, what flight am I

00:45:11.660 --> 00:45:14.740
going to take and how are we going to get a rental car?

00:45:14.740 --> 00:45:19.220
work things out. That's right and if you're a physicist or you're say a rocket scientist and

00:45:19.220 --> 00:45:24.660
you're designing something like you know I'm an architectural designer so thinking is appropriate

00:45:24.660 --> 00:45:30.260
there. I'm imagining spaces in my head of some future building that hasn't been built yet.

00:45:30.260 --> 00:45:36.340
That's the power of imagination. The problem is it's such a habit for most people. They have no

00:45:36.340 --> 00:45:41.540
freedom from that habit. The mind jerks them around. They're constantly thinking well I'll be

00:45:41.540 --> 00:45:46.420
happy when I do this or they're thinking about the future or they're regretting

00:45:46.420 --> 00:45:50.820
something about the past and they have all these habits. I'm comparing myself to

00:45:50.820 --> 00:45:56.180
the Joneses down here, those kind of habits. All that can fall away and then

00:45:56.180 --> 00:46:00.580
things are simple. I remember when I interviewed Gary Weber and later met him

00:46:00.580 --> 00:46:04.100
at the S.A.N.D. conference. I don't know if we ever quite resolved it because I was

00:46:04.100 --> 00:46:07.700
saying, "Well you're talking to me, therefore you're having thoughts."

00:46:07.700 --> 00:46:13.980
but because words are just an audible expression of a mental idea, so those mental ideas are

00:46:13.980 --> 00:46:14.980
there.

00:46:14.980 --> 00:46:19.380
But my idea of not having any thoughts anymore is not having five radio stations playing

00:46:19.380 --> 00:46:23.680
in your head at the same time, which is, you know, the way most people function.

00:46:23.680 --> 00:46:29.380
So much blah blah blah going on, and your mind just becoming simple and efficient in

00:46:29.380 --> 00:46:30.380
its functioning.

00:46:30.380 --> 00:46:31.380
That's right.

00:46:31.380 --> 00:46:35.060
In other words, for most people, the intellect is dominant.

00:46:35.060 --> 00:46:39.140
It's sort of like, rather than having the intellect as a master, it becomes a servant.

00:46:39.140 --> 00:46:40.820
It's just like a tool.

00:46:40.820 --> 00:46:43.460
If I'm going to design a new house, it's just like a tool.

00:46:43.460 --> 00:46:49.500
One of the reasons that humans are the dominant species on earth, unfortunately for the earth,

00:46:49.500 --> 00:46:52.340
is because we have this power of imagination.

00:46:52.340 --> 00:46:56.380
So it's a tremendous gift, but it can be a real curse.

00:46:56.380 --> 00:47:01.260
Because if you really believe these thoughts, you get jerked around by these thoughts.

00:47:01.260 --> 00:47:04.940
It's not just the thoughts, it's the attachment to the thoughts.

00:47:04.940 --> 00:47:10.100
That's one reason that most Zen people point to what they call non-abidance in the mind.

00:47:10.100 --> 00:47:14.220
In other words, thoughts occur, but like right now, I'm not thinking these thoughts up before

00:47:14.220 --> 00:47:15.220
they're spoken.

00:47:15.220 --> 00:47:18.900
No, it's spontaneously coming out, just like what I'm saying now.

00:47:18.900 --> 00:47:24.100
It's freedom from that habitual mindset that hasn't been investigated.

00:47:24.100 --> 00:47:29.580
There's a line in the Yoga Sutras, I think it's the second verse in the first chapter,

00:47:29.580 --> 00:47:33.660
Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind.

00:47:33.660 --> 00:47:37.860
You mentioned monkey mind earlier, so usually the mind is all chatty and agitated.

00:47:37.860 --> 00:47:45.060
So yoga, which means union, is the settling down or the cessation of those chittavrittis,

00:47:45.060 --> 00:47:47.980
those fluctuations of the mind.

00:47:47.980 --> 00:47:52.780
And some people misinterpret that to mean that you can't have an enlightened style of

00:47:52.780 --> 00:47:58.380
functioning unless you're in a quiescent state all the time, which is not possible to live

00:47:58.380 --> 00:47:59.380
that way.

00:47:59.380 --> 00:48:04.340
And so what you're describing, I believe, is a state in which you're doing stuff, you're

00:48:04.340 --> 00:48:08.260
climbing mountains, you're running a business, you're whatever, ballroom dancing, and yet

00:48:08.260 --> 00:48:13.020
the mind is no more agitated than it needs to be to perform those functions.

00:48:13.020 --> 00:48:16.780
It's just operating in, we could say, a state of maximum efficiency.

00:48:16.780 --> 00:48:19.100
That's right.

00:48:19.100 --> 00:48:23.100
Sometimes it's good to state these things so otherwise people, if they misunderstand

00:48:23.100 --> 00:48:26.660
what you're saying, they might feel that they could never attain it because they never do

00:48:26.660 --> 00:48:27.900
attain it.

00:48:27.900 --> 00:48:31.300
looking for something that they're not going to find because that's not what it is they're

00:48:31.300 --> 00:48:32.780
actually looking for.

00:48:32.780 --> 00:48:33.780
Right.

00:48:33.780 --> 00:48:36.060
And I used to call this little practice ATA.

00:48:36.060 --> 00:48:39.260
I tell people, if you don't like sitting on a cushion, do ATA.

00:48:39.260 --> 00:48:40.260
Attend the actual.

00:48:40.260 --> 00:48:43.340
I'd say, look, this is actual.

00:48:43.340 --> 00:48:45.660
Thinking that it's a hand is imaginary.

00:48:45.660 --> 00:48:49.980
When we say this is a hand, that statement's true and false at the same time.

00:48:49.980 --> 00:48:54.740
Yes, we can make the distinction that this is a hand, and that's true in that limited

00:48:54.740 --> 00:48:59.740
But whatever this is is also what this is and this is and this is and everything else is.

00:48:59.740 --> 00:49:01.740
There's no boundary here.

00:49:01.740 --> 00:49:03.740
And just for fun, I'll ask people sometimes,

00:49:03.740 --> 00:49:09.740
"If you don't believe this is true, get a magic marker and show me where a hand stops and a wrist begins."

00:49:09.740 --> 00:49:15.740
And as soon as they try to do it, they realize, "Oh, it's imaginary. All this stuff's imaginary.

00:49:15.740 --> 00:49:18.740
All these boundaries. There are no real boundaries anywhere."

00:49:18.740 --> 00:49:21.740
And that's why I tell people reality is non-dual.

00:49:21.740 --> 00:49:25.240
Imagination is the only place you'll find duality.

00:49:25.240 --> 00:49:28.240
But it serves a function to have these distinctions.

00:49:28.240 --> 00:49:31.740
If I say, "Hey Bob, please pass the salt."

00:49:31.740 --> 00:49:33.740
It's useful for you to know that,

00:49:33.740 --> 00:49:36.240
"Okay, this is the salt and it's not the pepper and he wants it,

00:49:36.240 --> 00:49:39.240
so I'm going to hand it over and here goes my hand."

00:49:39.240 --> 00:49:41.740
Exactly, and as we grow up,

00:49:41.740 --> 00:49:44.240
we're taught millions of distinctions

00:49:44.240 --> 00:49:46.740
and they're all internalized in the subconscious.

00:49:46.740 --> 00:49:48.740
So we already know all this stuff.

00:49:48.740 --> 00:49:50.740
You know that this is a glass.

00:49:50.740 --> 00:49:53.540
You know this is a hand without having to think about it.

00:49:53.540 --> 00:49:55.540
It's all internalized.

00:49:55.540 --> 00:49:57.740
So there's no real problem with that.

00:49:57.740 --> 00:50:01.340
I'm reminded of what you said a few minutes ago about the Gospel of Thomas.

00:50:01.340 --> 00:50:02.940
What was the phrase?

00:50:02.940 --> 00:50:07.640
He says the Kingdom of God is both inside of you and outside of you.

00:50:07.640 --> 00:50:08.940
He also says,

00:50:08.940 --> 00:50:13.440
"The kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, but men do not see it."

00:50:13.440 --> 00:50:16.340
And so, anyone who discovers

00:50:16.340 --> 00:50:19.040
what the term "true self" is pointing to

00:50:19.040 --> 00:50:24.400
It's going to be a pretty happy camper, because anybody who discovers that wouldn't trade

00:50:24.400 --> 00:50:26.520
that for all the money in the world.

00:50:26.520 --> 00:50:28.080
Let's think about that for a second.

00:50:28.080 --> 00:50:31.720
A lot of people believe the Kingdom of God is off in heaven someplace, and they're going

00:50:31.720 --> 00:50:33.660
to go there when they die.

00:50:33.660 --> 00:50:39.000
Some people believe that, "Okay, deep within me is this Kingdom of God, or transcendent

00:50:39.000 --> 00:50:41.040
field, and the world sucks.

00:50:41.040 --> 00:50:42.440
The world's not it."

00:50:42.440 --> 00:50:49.380
But if God is supposed to be omnipresent, then obviously God is within and without.

00:50:49.380 --> 00:50:54.500
And by God again, we mean this field of underlying or unifying intelligence that you alluded

00:50:54.500 --> 00:50:56.380
to earlier.

00:50:56.380 --> 00:50:57.780
So it's everywhere.

00:50:57.780 --> 00:51:03.340
Some people use the analogy of fish in water, feeling thirsty and looking for the water.

00:51:03.340 --> 00:51:04.340
It's everywhere.

00:51:04.340 --> 00:51:08.860
And if we don't see it everywhere, it's just that we're not perhaps seeing it clearly yet.

00:51:08.860 --> 00:51:14.620
Yeah, it requires kind of intuitive shift. It's like if you meet somebody who is

00:51:14.620 --> 00:51:18.580
searching for their glasses and they're wearing their glasses. You tell them, "Hey,

00:51:18.580 --> 00:51:21.580
what you're looking for is what you're looking through, you know, you're wearing

00:51:21.580 --> 00:51:27.220
glasses." Everybody has this. Everybody already is this. It's just a matter of

00:51:27.220 --> 00:51:31.900
waking up to it. It requires an intuitive shift. So I love this one quote. I don't

00:51:31.900 --> 00:51:34.900
know whether it's an accurate quote by Einstein. Someone questioned that. It's

00:51:34.900 --> 00:51:38.820
listed on the Internet many places, but Einstein has a quote that goes something

00:51:38.820 --> 00:51:45.500
like this, I think 99 times and find nothing. I stop thinking, swim in silence

00:51:45.500 --> 00:51:49.820
and the truth comes to me and I don't know how or why. And what he's really

00:51:49.820 --> 00:51:53.940
referring to what we call Eureka events in the field of science or math. And

00:51:53.940 --> 00:51:58.560
they're just dozens of those examples, you know, the benzene ring, the double

00:51:58.560 --> 00:52:04.140
helix, relativity theory, the French mathematician Henri Poincare, whatever

00:52:04.140 --> 00:52:09.820
name was, he was struggling with some mathematical issue and he had struggled for days and he

00:52:09.820 --> 00:52:11.820
finally said, "I'm going to take a break."

00:52:11.820 --> 00:52:15.180
He takes a break, maybe goes to the zoo or something, late that afternoon he's getting

00:52:15.180 --> 00:52:16.980
ready to get on a bus, bam!

00:52:16.980 --> 00:52:19.340
The whole solution is there, complete.

00:52:19.340 --> 00:52:24.940
So the way I sort of describe it, the intellect is like the intelligence of a flea riding

00:52:24.940 --> 00:52:26.300
on the back of an elephant.

00:52:26.300 --> 00:52:30.900
The big mainframe that's running the whole show is vast.

00:52:30.900 --> 00:52:35.140
And so what's really happening when we have these existential questions, we're actually

00:52:35.140 --> 00:52:37.940
trying to access this deeper level of intelligence.

00:52:37.940 --> 00:52:38.940
It's already there.

00:52:38.940 --> 00:52:42.720
We're just so used to trying to think up the answer.

00:52:42.720 --> 00:52:46.060
And really the intellect only deals with images, ideas, and symbols.

00:52:46.060 --> 00:52:47.060
Nothing else.

00:52:47.060 --> 00:52:50.540
And what we're looking for in an existential question, we're looking for something the

00:52:50.540 --> 00:52:51.780
intellect can't touch.

00:52:51.780 --> 00:52:53.620
It's beyond the intellect.

00:52:53.620 --> 00:52:58.580
That's why Nisargadatta told a seeker one time, he said, "To find the truth, you must

00:52:58.580 --> 00:53:05.140
go beyond the mind. Well, by mind he meant intellect. So if you're just looking, that's

00:53:05.140 --> 00:53:10.980
beyond the mind. If you're just listening, it's beyond the mind. If you're contemplating,

00:53:10.980 --> 00:53:15.380
in other words, all these meditative activities, and there are just dozens of them, I experimented

00:53:15.380 --> 00:53:20.480
with lots and lots of them, in each case, basically you're shifting attention away from

00:53:20.480 --> 00:53:27.380
thoughts to something that's present and happening now, to what's actual. And so at some point

00:53:27.380 --> 00:53:30.760
I was on some sort of a non-duality meeting

00:53:30.760 --> 00:53:33.320
and somebody challenged me about this ATA

00:53:33.320 --> 00:53:35.440
and they said, "Well, aren't thoughts actual?"

00:53:35.440 --> 00:53:37.680
I thought about it, I said, "Yeah, thoughts are actual."

00:53:37.680 --> 00:53:40.040
So I realized I need to make a distinction.

00:53:40.040 --> 00:53:42.420
Mindfulness would be ATA plus two

00:53:42.420 --> 00:53:45.160
because when we do mindfulness meditation,

00:53:45.160 --> 00:53:47.860
you're sort of standing back and you're watching everything.

00:53:47.860 --> 00:53:51.020
Thoughts, feelings, the exterior, well, everything.

00:53:51.020 --> 00:53:52.960
All right, but thoughts are sticky.

00:53:52.960 --> 00:53:55.000
And so people do mindfulness

00:53:55.000 --> 00:53:57.080
and they wake up 10 minutes later

00:53:57.080 --> 00:53:58.720
following some thought train.

00:53:58.720 --> 00:54:01.640
In my case, what I'm talking about, ATA minus T,

00:54:01.640 --> 00:54:03.640
just forget thoughts altogether.

00:54:03.640 --> 00:54:05.640
Just shift attention away from thoughts

00:54:05.640 --> 00:54:07.280
to what you can see, hear,

00:54:07.280 --> 00:54:09.720
and interact with the world like a little child does.

00:54:09.720 --> 00:54:12.200
You know, little children, everything's direct.

00:54:12.200 --> 00:54:14.800
They're operating directly through their senses.

00:54:14.800 --> 00:54:16.480
And so it's actually a little bit simpler.

00:54:16.480 --> 00:54:18.880
If you sit, let's just say you close your eyes

00:54:18.880 --> 00:54:20.840
and you sit and you listen to a particular sound,

00:54:20.840 --> 00:54:22.240
it can be an ambient sound

00:54:22.240 --> 00:54:26.000
or there's a white noise sound that we call universal sound

00:54:26.000 --> 00:54:28.800
that's always there once you become aware of it.

00:54:28.800 --> 00:54:30.480
You can focus on that.

00:54:30.480 --> 00:54:32.820
But if you just listen to a sound,

00:54:32.820 --> 00:54:35.480
it's much simpler to hold your attention on that

00:54:35.480 --> 00:54:36.640
than something visually,

00:54:36.640 --> 00:54:39.020
because we have so many visual associations.

00:54:39.020 --> 00:54:41.120
So it's just two different approaches.

00:54:41.120 --> 00:54:45.080
I just think the ATA minus T is so much more effective

00:54:45.080 --> 00:54:46.280
because it's not special.

00:54:46.280 --> 00:54:48.880
Nobody's gonna get attached to that activity.

00:54:48.880 --> 00:54:52.080
You know, a lot of Zen people get really attached to hard sittings.

00:54:52.080 --> 00:54:54.080
They're like spiritual athletes.

00:54:54.080 --> 00:54:57.080
But this is not special. This is just ordinary.

00:54:57.080 --> 00:55:01.080
All you're doing is just shifting attention to what you can see or hear or feel.

00:55:01.080 --> 00:55:03.580
Would you remind us what the letters stand for again?

00:55:03.580 --> 00:55:06.580
Attending the actual minus thought.

00:55:06.580 --> 00:55:09.580
Attending the actual minus thought.

00:55:09.580 --> 00:55:14.580
It reminds me of Jesus saying, "Except you be as little children, you shall not enter the kingdom."

00:55:14.580 --> 00:55:19.540
because they're innocent, they're simple, they're not over-intellectualizing about stuff.

00:55:19.540 --> 00:55:26.420
But one question is, can an adult who has gotten him or herself deeply conditioned over decades

00:55:26.420 --> 00:55:33.780
and is full of samskaras, impressions, stresses, unwind all that? You know, can they actually

00:55:33.780 --> 00:55:39.300
get back to the innocence of a child? Yes. Yeah, the bottom line is yes. It just takes

00:55:39.300 --> 00:55:43.780
persistence. Must take a while. I really think that's why Jesus taught two parables about

00:55:43.780 --> 00:55:49.220
persistence. And even Rumi wrote some poems about persistence. I think Rumi has a poem somewhere,

00:55:49.220 --> 00:55:54.260
and he says, "If you keep knocking on the door to God long enough, God is forced to answer."

00:55:54.260 --> 00:56:01.780
That's pretty heavy duty. No, it's true. I've talked to so many people who, once they made a

00:56:01.780 --> 00:56:07.460
sincere, earnest, entreaty of some sort, a response came. God hears you.

00:56:08.740 --> 00:56:15.300
Yeah, a sincere prayer is really powerful. I've read many cases of people that were sort of on

00:56:15.300 --> 00:56:20.900
their last leg and they prayed a really sincere prayer and it's amazingly often answered.

00:56:20.900 --> 00:56:26.100
What was that line from William Blake about cleansing the windows of perception and then

00:56:26.100 --> 00:56:31.140
seeing everything as infinity or something? How's that go? Infinity in a wildflower,

00:56:31.140 --> 00:56:34.820
eternity in an hour, but there's something about cleansing the windows of perception.

00:56:34.820 --> 00:56:40.740
Yeah, it's like if the windows of perception were clear, everything would be seen as it

00:56:40.740 --> 00:56:41.740
is infinite.

00:56:41.740 --> 00:56:44.260
There you go, that's what I was getting at.

00:56:44.260 --> 00:56:46.940
Let's consider what that really means, cleansing the windows of perception.

00:56:46.940 --> 00:56:50.220
I think it's a neurophysiological thing.

00:56:50.220 --> 00:56:56.300
Conditioning is a neurophysiological phenomenon that actually involves probably chemical or

00:56:56.300 --> 00:57:02.820
structural things in the nervous system, both the gross and subtle nervous systems, and

00:57:02.820 --> 00:57:07.260
cleansing it, that's what all these practices are about, you know, yogic practices, Buddhist

00:57:07.260 --> 00:57:12.500
practices to restructure your neurophysiology, gross and subtle again, because there's a

00:57:12.500 --> 00:57:18.980
subtle physiology, and to enable it to eventually be restored, or if it's never had it, to

00:57:18.980 --> 00:57:24.060
be purified to the extent that you can function as a pure mirror.

00:57:24.060 --> 00:57:28.180
There's a line like that in the Bible too, about seeing through a glass darkly, and then

00:57:28.180 --> 00:57:29.660
eventually clearly.

00:57:29.660 --> 00:57:35.780
So we're like a nervous system, a body encumbered with a lot of conditioning and stresses and

00:57:35.780 --> 00:57:37.060
impressions, some scars.

00:57:37.060 --> 00:57:41.580
It's like a muddy glass, it can't pass the sunlight through very clearly.

00:57:41.580 --> 00:57:46.940
And so this practice you're describing and I think many other practices are intended to

00:57:46.940 --> 00:57:52.780
not only alter the mind's functioning in some way, but to actually alter the whole mind-body

00:57:52.780 --> 00:57:53.780
system.

00:57:53.780 --> 00:57:54.780
That's right.

00:57:54.780 --> 00:57:59.060
As a matter of fact, we're right on the verge of more and more being found out about this

00:57:59.060 --> 00:58:02.140
because I think it's Poland's book,

00:58:02.140 --> 00:58:04.320
How to Change Your Mind, I don't know if you've read that.

00:58:04.320 --> 00:58:05.940
- I interviewed him about it.

00:58:05.940 --> 00:58:06.780
- Okay, great.

00:58:06.780 --> 00:58:07.600
- Yeah.

00:58:07.600 --> 00:58:09.140
- I missed that one.

00:58:09.140 --> 00:58:11.540
But you know, in there he talks about how brain scientists

00:58:11.540 --> 00:58:13.740
now refer to self-referential network

00:58:13.740 --> 00:58:15.940
as the default mode neural network.

00:58:15.940 --> 00:58:18.460
'Cause when you think self-referentially,

00:58:18.460 --> 00:58:20.620
a certain part of the brain lights up.

00:58:20.620 --> 00:58:23.500
And they now know that the brain has plasticity.

00:58:23.500 --> 00:58:25.780
And if you do these meditative activities,

00:58:25.780 --> 00:58:27.500
whatever they are, they could be Tibetan,

00:58:27.500 --> 00:58:30.420
in any of these activities, Christian mysticism,

00:58:30.420 --> 00:58:33.140
same thing, you're essentially altering

00:58:33.140 --> 00:58:35.100
the way the brain functions.

00:58:35.100 --> 00:58:37.500
And I actually think that probably what's happening,

00:58:37.500 --> 00:58:40.380
I think about people like Jill Bolte-Taylor,

00:58:40.380 --> 00:58:43.380
who shifted back and forth between these two hemispheres.

00:58:43.380 --> 00:58:45.140
That's the way she describes it.

00:58:45.140 --> 00:58:48.540
You know, one hemisphere seemed to be holistic, oneness.

00:58:48.540 --> 00:58:50.460
And then the other was she's back to like

00:58:50.460 --> 00:58:52.580
parts and pieces, you know.

00:58:52.580 --> 00:58:54.980
And as you do these various activities,

00:58:54.980 --> 00:58:56.360
and I don't even call them practices

00:58:56.360 --> 00:58:59.520
because there's a whole negative connotation to practices,

00:58:59.520 --> 00:59:00.920
especially in the Zen tradition

00:59:00.920 --> 00:59:03.760
because Zen really emphasizes practice,

00:59:03.760 --> 00:59:05.320
but you can't practice your way

00:59:05.320 --> 00:59:07.320
to being what you already are.

00:59:07.320 --> 00:59:08.560
- Yes and no.

00:59:08.560 --> 00:59:11.400
Coco Gauff probably was born with the potential

00:59:11.400 --> 00:59:13.020
to be a great tennis player,

00:59:13.020 --> 00:59:14.680
but she's had to do a lot of practice

00:59:14.680 --> 00:59:16.560
to get to the level where she can play

00:59:16.560 --> 00:59:18.400
at that professional level.

00:59:18.400 --> 00:59:22.640
I don't like to compare sports to spirituality,

00:59:22.640 --> 00:59:26.040
but there are some practices which are downright sadistic,

00:59:26.040 --> 00:59:30.000
making people sit there where their knees are in agony and they're being yelled at if they

00:59:30.000 --> 00:59:32.840
move a little bit and stuff like that.

00:59:32.840 --> 00:59:36.320
And there are different kinds of practices which have different kinds of effects, but

00:59:36.320 --> 00:59:38.800
I think certain practices can be very beneficial.

00:59:38.800 --> 00:59:44.160
I mean, I've been doing a practice for 55 years and I totally enjoy it and it's been

00:59:44.160 --> 00:59:45.160
good.

00:59:45.160 --> 00:59:48.520
So I'm just not an anti-practice guy.

00:59:48.520 --> 00:59:50.800
Some people are really anti-practice, others are not.

00:59:50.800 --> 00:59:54.560
I've just started calling it an activity because it eliminates that whole issue.

00:59:54.560 --> 00:59:59.160
There are so many other examples in life where if you want to get good at it, piano, anything

00:59:59.160 --> 01:00:01.000
else, you have to practice.

01:00:01.000 --> 01:00:05.900
And it's not like spirituality is a skill, but as we've been discussing, as with piano

01:00:05.900 --> 01:00:11.880
or tennis or many other things, there is some kind of neurophysiological training and reconfiguration

01:00:11.880 --> 01:00:16.800
that takes place through doing an effective practice that eventually enables you to just

01:00:16.800 --> 01:00:19.840
function spontaneously that way all the time.

01:00:19.840 --> 01:00:25.960
George Gershwin or any great expert in anything can sit down and do it quite extemporaneously

01:00:25.960 --> 01:00:27.680
once they've mastered it.

01:00:27.680 --> 01:00:28.680
Right.

01:00:28.680 --> 01:00:29.680
No argument.

01:00:29.680 --> 01:00:30.680
What next?

01:00:30.680 --> 01:00:33.640
So you had that big breakthrough on Mount Audubon.

01:00:33.640 --> 01:00:37.480
By the way, did you see airplane coulure when you were climbing Mount Audubon?

01:00:37.480 --> 01:00:38.480
No.

01:00:38.480 --> 01:00:41.840
It's this thing which you see as you're climbing that mountain where an airplane crashed into

01:00:41.840 --> 01:00:45.520
the side of the mountain over there and the wreckage of it is still there.

01:00:45.520 --> 01:00:49.120
It was when I went, I think it was still covered by some snow, but it's there.

01:00:49.120 --> 01:00:54.160
Anyway, so you had this big breakthrough climbing Mount Audubon and as I recall from your book,

01:00:54.160 --> 01:01:00.560
you were never the same since. That's right. Yeah, because once you realize that you're not

01:01:00.560 --> 01:01:06.960
a separate volitional entity doing all this, there's a relaxation. Everything's just unfolding.

01:01:06.960 --> 01:01:12.560
There's just total acceptance of that. There's no resistance. So it's sort of like you just do

01:01:12.560 --> 01:01:16.480
do whatever you have to do. I mean, you still have your interests, your proclivities, your

01:01:16.480 --> 01:01:23.160
talents, whatever, and you just continue to do that. But so many things just fall away.

01:01:23.160 --> 01:01:26.000
Whole patterns of thought fall away, as a matter of fact.

01:01:26.000 --> 01:01:29.240
Would you say you have more energy because you're not burning up a lot of energy with

01:01:29.240 --> 01:01:33.640
extraneous mentation and worry and stuff?

01:01:33.640 --> 01:01:38.600
Yeah, to some degree that's true because I think I read somewhere thinking takes 20%

01:01:38.600 --> 01:01:41.280
of all the oxygen just to think.

01:01:41.280 --> 01:01:43.080
- The brain burns a lot of glucose.

01:01:43.080 --> 01:01:45.880
- Yeah, there's a lot of energy there, a lot of glucose.

01:01:45.880 --> 01:01:47.840
So yeah, there's some degree of that,

01:01:47.840 --> 01:01:50.420
but basically it's just a more relaxed attitude

01:01:50.420 --> 01:01:51.600
toward everything.

01:01:51.600 --> 01:01:54.680
And then you want to share what you found.

01:01:54.680 --> 01:01:56.360
You know, anybody that's found this,

01:01:56.360 --> 01:01:58.480
everybody I know in the non-duality field

01:01:58.480 --> 01:02:01.080
that has found this wants to share it with others.

01:02:01.080 --> 01:02:03.280
And there's a natural inclination to want to help others

01:02:03.280 --> 01:02:06.520
because many people, when they read the New Testament

01:02:06.520 --> 01:02:08.520
and Jesus says, "Treat your neighbor as yourself,"

01:02:08.520 --> 01:02:10.440
they don't realize he's being literal.

01:02:10.440 --> 01:02:16.880
These are not figurative. Your neighbor is yourself. You naturally want to help. It's

01:02:16.880 --> 01:02:22.880
just an automatic response. You're happy and you'd like for everybody else to be happy.

01:02:22.880 --> 01:02:28.720
Yeah, of course there's a dark side to that in terms of people proselytizing and browbeating

01:02:28.720 --> 01:02:34.120
people and telling them they're going to hell if they don't do what they do and so on. And

01:02:34.120 --> 01:02:39.400
that perhaps could be a perverted aspect of that very same drive or tendency to want to

01:02:39.400 --> 01:02:45.760
help others. I also think that is a kind of a symptom of insecurity, of not being

01:02:45.760 --> 01:02:51.160
confident in what you're talking about. So you somehow think you'll gain greater

01:02:51.160 --> 01:02:56.880
confidence by converting others to your perspective. But I think compassion is the

01:02:56.880 --> 01:03:01.880
bright side of it, where you've realized how beautiful life can be and you see

01:03:01.880 --> 01:03:06.680
people suffering and you realize they could see the beauty in it as you do and

01:03:06.680 --> 01:03:08.320
and you want to help them see it.

01:03:08.320 --> 01:03:09.680
- That's right, that's right.

01:03:09.680 --> 01:03:12.600
And then also, you read about this a lot in Zen,

01:03:12.600 --> 01:03:14.480
for example, when people have these huge

01:03:14.480 --> 01:03:17.600
breakthrough experiences, there's a lot of euphoria

01:03:17.600 --> 01:03:19.720
and there's what we call the stink of Zen.

01:03:19.720 --> 01:03:20.540
- Right.

01:03:20.540 --> 01:03:22.480
- You come out of that and you feel, you know,

01:03:22.480 --> 01:03:24.120
the ego wants to grab hold of that

01:03:24.120 --> 01:03:25.960
and take possession of that.

01:03:25.960 --> 01:03:28.920
And that's a fairly common phenomenon you see.

01:03:28.920 --> 01:03:31.280
But that usually wears away pretty quickly.

01:03:31.280 --> 01:03:34.020
That didn't happen on the final thing.

01:03:34.020 --> 01:03:38.700
did on some of those earlier realizations. But you don't feel special in any way

01:03:38.700 --> 01:03:42.620
because you see the same thing in everyone. You realize everybody has this

01:03:42.620 --> 01:03:46.620
and it's right in front of everybody's eyes if they could just see it. Yeah I

01:03:46.620 --> 01:03:49.900
think you and I talked about this on that phone call we had when I was out

01:03:49.900 --> 01:03:55.140
walking in the woods about this thing of Zen and how there's often a little bit

01:03:55.140 --> 01:04:00.060
of an obnoxious quality that sometimes dawns when a person initially has a

01:04:00.060 --> 01:04:04.940
a realization and wants to tell the world about it, and also perhaps jumps to the conclusion

01:04:04.940 --> 01:04:10.540
that they are finished or that there's no further need for them to become more mature

01:04:10.540 --> 01:04:14.180
or more refined in their personality or things like that.

01:04:14.180 --> 01:04:18.300
They end up getting into trouble and giving other people a lot of grief.

01:04:18.300 --> 01:04:21.420
Yeah, and there doesn't seem to be any bottom to this.

01:04:21.420 --> 01:04:28.140
In other words, I'm free, I'm happy, I love life and everything that happens, and yet I

01:04:28.140 --> 01:04:33.620
I know that this continues to unfold however it unfolds and realizations can continue to

01:04:33.620 --> 01:04:34.620
occur.

01:04:34.620 --> 01:04:40.940
I read the other day that Hakuin who was a famous Zen master around 1800, after he had

01:04:40.940 --> 01:04:44.380
attained enlightenment in the Zen tradition they call it Satori.

01:04:44.380 --> 01:04:48.940
He said that a few years later his deepest Satori occurred when he heard the sound of

01:04:48.940 --> 01:04:51.940
falling snow when he was meditating one night.

01:04:51.940 --> 01:04:54.620
And that tells me that there's no end to the depth.

01:04:54.620 --> 01:05:00.620
Yeah, I'm just looking for, I had this thing for Nisargadatta, let me see if I can find it.

01:05:00.620 --> 01:05:05.500
He says, "Forget I am that, I've realized so much more since then, it's so much deeper."

01:05:05.500 --> 01:05:10.780
That's right. It is kind of a deepening process, it appears to be never-ending.

01:05:10.780 --> 01:05:15.980
Yeah. I was interviewing a guy one time and I said something like that towards the end of the

01:05:15.980 --> 01:05:19.580
interview. I was like, "Okay, well, what's the next horizon for you? Where does this seem to

01:05:19.580 --> 01:05:22.300
to be going, he was looking at me like, "What are you crazy?

01:05:22.300 --> 01:05:23.300
There's no more.

01:05:23.300 --> 01:05:24.300
This is it."

01:05:24.300 --> 01:05:27.260
So, I think that there are many stages of the game.

01:05:27.260 --> 01:05:31.940
I've heard Adyashanti talk about this too, where there are many stages of awakening which

01:05:31.940 --> 01:05:39.980
are so enticing or enjoyable or they feel so complete that you can easily conclude that

01:05:39.980 --> 01:05:44.260
they are complete and that there couldn't be anything more and that you're done.

01:05:44.260 --> 01:05:49.920
Yeah, and he also talks about sort of an intellectual enlightenment, a heart enlightenment, a gut

01:05:49.920 --> 01:05:50.920
enlightenment.

01:05:50.920 --> 01:05:53.420
He frequently talks about that, and I think that's true.

01:05:53.420 --> 01:05:56.820
It just seems to go deeper and deeper and deeper as one proceeds.

01:05:56.820 --> 01:05:57.820
Yeah.

01:05:57.820 --> 01:06:03.060
Okay, I often emphasize this point in interviews, and maybe I talk about it too much, but I

01:06:03.060 --> 01:06:04.060
think it is important.

01:06:04.060 --> 01:06:09.300
In fact, I was having a discussion with some friends the other day about what enlightenment

01:06:09.300 --> 01:06:10.300
is.

01:06:10.300 --> 01:06:14.860
of course, I've had many such discussions, but it's clear that there isn't in the popular

01:06:14.860 --> 01:06:22.140
spiritual culture a clear, agreed upon definition of what it is. People have all kinds of different

01:06:22.140 --> 01:06:27.180
ideas, and so it's a little bit like a Tower of Babel situation where we're using the same words,

01:06:27.180 --> 01:06:30.460
but saying and hearing different things.

01:06:30.460 --> 01:06:35.900
That's right. Yeah, if somebody said, "Oh, you're supposed to be enlightened," I would say, "No,

01:06:35.900 --> 01:06:39.500
I was just lucky enough to find all the answers to my existential questions."

01:06:39.500 --> 01:06:45.500
No one that sees into this thinks that they're a teacher because you can't teach this.

01:06:45.500 --> 01:06:47.500
All you can really do is just sort of point.

01:06:47.500 --> 01:06:49.500
And I recommend that people experiment.

01:06:49.500 --> 01:06:53.500
You know, I experimented with 20 or 30 different meditative activities

01:06:53.500 --> 01:06:55.500
and find out what you resonate with.

01:06:55.500 --> 01:07:01.500
You know, trust yourself 100% because each human is the authority about themselves.

01:07:01.500 --> 01:07:05.500
And it doesn't matter what somebody else tells you, what do you resonate with?

01:07:05.500 --> 01:07:07.500
What approach feels good to you?

01:07:07.500 --> 01:07:11.820
feels good to you. The reason I like to tell people at ATA-T is there are a lot of people

01:07:11.820 --> 01:07:17.860
that hate sitting on a cushion. You know, they just don't like either leg pain or the

01:07:17.860 --> 01:07:22.740
back pain or just having to sit motionless, whatever. And I say, forget it. Go for a walk

01:07:22.740 --> 01:07:25.780
in the woods. Go to the park. Watch the ducks on the pond.

01:07:25.780 --> 01:07:29.780
I have one of those little bench things, you know, where you put your legs underneath, you're

01:07:29.780 --> 01:07:35.260
kind of kneeling, but your butt is on the bench and some of the weight is on your knees and

01:07:35.260 --> 01:07:37.620
you don't have a back rest, you just sit like that.

01:07:37.620 --> 01:07:38.660
- Much more comfortable.

01:07:38.660 --> 01:07:40.300
- Yeah, and sometimes I'll sit on that.

01:07:40.300 --> 01:07:41.980
Sometimes I can go a whole hour sitting on that.

01:07:41.980 --> 01:07:44.020
Other times after 15 minutes, I think,

01:07:44.020 --> 01:07:45.840
eh, I'd be more comfortable on the bed.

01:07:45.840 --> 01:07:48.700
So I get up and sit on the bed, lean back.

01:07:48.700 --> 01:07:50.420
But I do think there's something to be said

01:07:50.420 --> 01:07:53.500
for comfort and not straining.

01:07:53.500 --> 01:07:55.460
I interviewed a guy, Jeff Carrera,

01:07:55.460 --> 01:07:57.120
about a month ago or more.

01:07:57.120 --> 01:07:59.140
And he was talking about how he was,

01:07:59.140 --> 01:08:01.160
when he was with Andrew Cohen's group,

01:08:01.160 --> 01:08:03.580
they did these marathon retreats

01:08:03.580 --> 01:08:05.160
where they'd go from like four in the morning

01:08:05.160 --> 01:08:10.160
ten at night, meditating most of the time, and he had a tendency to fall asleep.

01:08:10.160 --> 01:08:14.740
And the people who had a tendency to fall asleep sat in a circle so they could slap each other

01:08:14.740 --> 01:08:16.880
if they noticed the other guys were falling asleep.

01:08:16.880 --> 01:08:20.000
And he said it was sometimes like popcorn with all the slapping taking place.

01:08:20.000 --> 01:08:22.760
I thought, "Ah, it sounds like torture."

01:08:22.760 --> 01:08:26.860
If you're that tired, why don't you just take a nap and, you know, wake up and meditate

01:08:26.860 --> 01:08:28.560
some more when you're fresh.

01:08:28.560 --> 01:08:29.560
That's right.

01:08:29.560 --> 01:08:31.600
Nisargadatta talked about this one time.

01:08:31.600 --> 01:08:35.640
And he was talking to somebody, he said, "You didn't get into this mess overnight."

01:08:35.640 --> 01:08:38.360
And what he was talking about, you didn't get in the mess of thinking you're separate

01:08:38.360 --> 01:08:40.020
from everything overnight.

01:08:40.020 --> 01:08:41.640
And I happened to be reading, and I think it's-

01:08:41.640 --> 01:08:44.800
- You're not gonna get out of it overnight, I think he was probably implying.

01:08:44.800 --> 01:08:47.960
- Yeah, well, in the Gospel of Thomas, it's really interesting.

01:08:47.960 --> 01:08:50.020
Jesus has a parable about this.

01:08:50.020 --> 01:08:54.520
It doesn't specifically say exactly that's what this is pointing to, but I think it is.

01:08:54.520 --> 01:08:56.600
He tells his disciples about a parable.

01:08:56.600 --> 01:09:01.360
He says this woman buys a big jar of meal, puts it on her shoulder and starts walking

01:09:01.360 --> 01:09:07.200
home and the jar of meals springs a little bitty leak and the grain gradually spills out on the

01:09:07.200 --> 01:09:11.040
road behind him but she's not aware of what's happening and he said when she gets to the home

01:09:11.040 --> 01:09:15.920
and she sets the jar down she's surprised to find that it's empty and I think what he's saying by

01:09:15.920 --> 01:09:21.840
that is we get into this mess of thinking we're separate very gradually from childhood to adulthood

01:09:21.840 --> 01:09:27.280
we don't realize how we're shifting from a direct interaction with reality to this simulation of

01:09:27.280 --> 01:09:32.640
of reality because really the intellect creates a meta-reality out of images and ideas and

01:09:32.640 --> 01:09:37.760
symbols and it happens so gradually and we're so unconscious of what's happening we don't

01:09:37.760 --> 01:09:41.280
really realize until we're lost in our heads.

01:09:41.280 --> 01:09:45.720
We've left reality behind and now we're reacting with this, interacting with this meta-reality

01:09:45.720 --> 01:09:47.720
that the mind has created.

01:09:47.720 --> 01:09:52.160
And that actually has a flip side to it which like to relate it to your experience, you're

01:09:52.160 --> 01:09:56.160
doing all this intense practice and going to Zen retreats and stuff for a number of

01:09:56.160 --> 01:10:00.840
of years and then finally you're hiking up Mount Audubon and you had this big shift.

01:10:00.840 --> 01:10:05.800
Well I think probably at that point your grain had finally all spilled out, your meal.

01:10:05.800 --> 01:10:06.800
Or emptied out.

01:10:06.800 --> 01:10:11.520
Yeah, but it's incremental so you don't notice a big contrast.

01:10:11.520 --> 01:10:17.080
If you could somehow jump from a year back or a year ahead you would notice this big contrast

01:10:17.080 --> 01:10:22.800
but instead it's moment by moment, day by day so we just don't notice the change as it

01:10:22.800 --> 01:10:23.800
takes place.

01:10:23.800 --> 01:10:27.400
just like when you measure a kid's height and you put them up against the wall and make a mark.

01:10:27.400 --> 01:10:31.480
You don't see them getting taller from day to day, but every time grandma visits and you do that,

01:10:31.480 --> 01:10:33.800
"Oh, he's grown another inch." That's right.

01:10:33.800 --> 01:10:42.680
So, can you define or describe, we're on the theme of there's no end to it, it goes deeper and deeper,

01:10:42.680 --> 01:10:48.840
can you define or describe the kind of growth that you have undergone since your shift on Mount

01:10:48.840 --> 01:10:54.440
Autobahn? Well, one of the things that happened, I had a little minor realization, you know, I had

01:10:54.440 --> 01:11:01.720
practiced so often and so long shifting attention away from thoughts that at a certain point a year

01:11:01.720 --> 01:11:07.160
or so later it dawned on me it doesn't matter whether the mind talks or doesn't talk. I had

01:11:07.160 --> 01:11:14.600
made a concerted effort to have a fairly silent mind and the more silent it became these intuitive

01:11:14.600 --> 01:11:19.320
jumps, you know, these intuitive insights would occur. But at a certain point, it doesn't matter

01:11:19.320 --> 01:11:27.000
because there's no me doing this. I'm being lived by a vaster intelligence. And so it no longer

01:11:27.000 --> 01:11:32.120
matter. And those type of small realizations can continue. In other words, you could relax and

01:11:32.120 --> 01:11:36.920
stop meddling with your mind. Yes, let it do what it's going to do. That's right. And at the same

01:11:36.920 --> 01:11:43.240
time, who knows, I didn't meditate at all formally for 20 years after this happened. But lately,

01:11:43.240 --> 01:11:49.720
I've actually been drawn to like just sit and stare at the woods. It's strange. That's the

01:11:49.720 --> 01:11:54.920
way it's unfolding. You just relax and accept whatever's happening, whatever it is.

01:11:54.920 --> 01:12:00.120
Yeah, and I assume it would be different for different people. There's no prescription that

01:12:00.120 --> 01:12:04.760
people should be feverishly taking notes about here to do it the way you did it. It's going to

01:12:04.760 --> 01:12:08.440
be a little different for every person. Yeah, there's certain commonalities. I've

01:12:08.440 --> 01:12:11.140
I've talked to Tess Hughes and a whole bunch of different people.

01:12:11.140 --> 01:12:15.380
I probably know 25 people that I would consider free.

01:12:15.380 --> 01:12:19.460
And every story is slightly different, but there are some commonalities.

01:12:19.460 --> 01:12:22.960
Certain things that I've experienced, they've experienced, and some things that are completely

01:12:22.960 --> 01:12:24.480
off the wall.

01:12:24.480 --> 01:12:28.620
So each story is really different because we're just all such unique human beings, and how

01:12:28.620 --> 01:12:30.420
it unfolds is different.

01:12:30.420 --> 01:12:31.420
Yeah.

01:12:31.420 --> 01:12:38.340
But would you say among these 25 people that a common denominator is this sense of being

01:12:38.340 --> 01:12:42.260
in tune with that underlying intelligence that orchestrates the universe?

01:12:42.260 --> 01:12:49.860
Yes. And having it orchestrate your life? Right. And each person sometimes will talk about this

01:12:49.860 --> 01:12:53.060
in different ways. Like I like to tell people, because a lot of times people wonder, well,

01:12:53.060 --> 01:12:56.980
am I meditating correctly? And I like to tell people, you can't make a mistake,

01:12:56.980 --> 01:13:03.060
because who you think you are isn't what's doing this. And people look back in the past,

01:13:03.060 --> 01:13:07.380
they'll say, well, I had a choice between A and B, and I made the wrong choice. No, you didn't.

01:13:07.380 --> 01:13:10.020
At that time you did exactly what you had to do.

01:13:10.020 --> 01:13:13.060
And you can always check that by simply asking yourself,

01:13:13.060 --> 01:13:14.900
"What must I be doing this moment?"

01:13:14.900 --> 01:13:18.100
You'll always find out you're doing exactly what you have to be doing.

01:13:18.100 --> 01:13:19.860
This is how it unfolds.

01:13:19.860 --> 01:13:25.380
Some people have found that helpful because it takes you away from abstraction

01:13:25.380 --> 01:13:27.700
to what's right here, right now.

01:13:27.700 --> 01:13:28.260
- Yeah.

01:13:28.260 --> 01:13:32.420
When you look at your past and you think of dumb things you did

01:13:32.420 --> 01:13:33.860
when you were a teenager or something,

01:13:34.500 --> 01:13:40.660
Do you find yourself thinking that now in retrospect that you can't beat yourself up for having done

01:13:40.660 --> 01:13:44.740
those dumb things because you only did what you could do? You had no choice at that point.

01:13:44.740 --> 01:13:48.900
Exactly. And mainly I point that out because there are a lot of people that wonder,

01:13:48.900 --> 01:13:54.660
well, am I doing the right meditative activity? And I'm saying just find out what resonates with

01:13:54.660 --> 01:13:58.340
you and see what you're doing this moment. You know, what is it?

01:13:58.340 --> 01:14:02.580
I think that's good advice and see if it's bearing fruit, you know, see if you see,

01:14:02.580 --> 01:14:07.540
if you feel like you're getting some benefit out of it. Yeah, I mean, I met people that would go on

01:14:07.540 --> 01:14:14.180
retreats and they would fast. If that helps, find out, try. I'm laughing because I went through a

01:14:14.180 --> 01:14:18.900
fanatical fasting phase on a six-month retreat and I really messed myself up. You know, the

01:14:18.900 --> 01:14:24.180
instruction was fast for three days, so I did it for weeks and I just really threw myself out of

01:14:24.180 --> 01:14:31.540
balance. It's crazy. But anyway, the way I feel now, let me see if you feel this way, is okay,

01:14:31.540 --> 01:14:36.980
past is past, I can't critique it, I did the best I could do. But now in the present, there

01:14:36.980 --> 01:14:41.100
is a sense of everything is running on automatic, but there's also a sense of discernment, you

01:14:41.100 --> 01:14:45.420
know, "Oh, a little bit, go this way or go that way." And in terms of the free will and

01:14:45.420 --> 01:14:50.500
determinism thing, I kind of feel like, in a sense, both are true. And we do, in the

01:14:50.500 --> 01:14:56.860
present, have some latitude, some free will, with which to direct our... even if it's only

01:14:56.860 --> 01:15:01.840
a matter of allowing ourself to be guided as opposed to being obstinate and trying to push

01:15:01.840 --> 01:15:06.500
in the opposite direction of the way the divine river is flowing. But there does seem to be

01:15:06.500 --> 01:15:09.380
some choice, at least for me. Do you get that?

01:15:09.380 --> 01:15:11.740
No, I don't feel there's any choice.

01:15:11.740 --> 01:15:12.740
None whatsoever.

01:15:12.740 --> 01:15:19.060
None whatsoever. I'm happy with that. I'm satisfied with that. It just unfolds however

01:15:19.060 --> 01:15:21.420
it unfolds, so there's no problem.

01:15:21.420 --> 01:15:26.880
So if you have a couple of different options of do this or do that, I don't know, go to

01:15:26.880 --> 01:15:30.760
see Barbie or go see Oppenheimer or some other decision.

01:15:30.760 --> 01:15:35.240
Is there some sort of process you go through where you're making up your mind, do I want

01:15:35.240 --> 01:15:37.360
to go to Colorado or Montana?

01:15:37.360 --> 01:15:42.120
Or do you find yourself just automatically booking the plane ticket to some place and

01:15:42.120 --> 01:15:44.400
that's the place you're supposed to go?

01:15:44.400 --> 01:15:47.400
Well, anytime I'm going to the mountains, I'm a happy camper.

01:15:47.400 --> 01:15:48.400
I love the mountains.

01:15:48.400 --> 01:15:51.040
So I really wouldn't care what mountains I go to,

01:15:51.040 --> 01:15:52.560
but I love the ones in Colorado

01:15:52.560 --> 01:15:54.160
'cause they're really fun to climb.

01:15:54.160 --> 01:15:55.780
And I've climbed a lot of them.

01:15:55.780 --> 01:15:59.000
But no, there's no real abstract thought about it.

01:15:59.000 --> 01:16:00.420
All right, it's sort of like,

01:16:00.420 --> 01:16:03.560
I just almost always know exactly what I wanna do.

01:16:03.560 --> 01:16:05.800
But that's been true ever since I was very young.

01:16:05.800 --> 01:16:07.860
And I was really lucky that I had parents

01:16:07.860 --> 01:16:10.240
that just supported whatever I was interested in.

01:16:10.240 --> 01:16:11.760
Some people aren't that lucky.

01:16:11.760 --> 01:16:13.120
- No, I'd say most people.

01:16:13.120 --> 01:16:14.520
Most people are probably thinking,

01:16:14.520 --> 01:16:16.720
"Wow, as they hear you say this,

01:16:16.720 --> 01:16:20.960
I wish that were the way my life worked because I have all these issues and things I need

01:16:20.960 --> 01:16:23.400
to figure out and it's complicated.

01:16:23.400 --> 01:16:25.400
I'm not doing what I want to be doing.

01:16:25.400 --> 01:16:29.160
I'm stuck in some job that I don't like.

01:16:29.160 --> 01:16:32.800
That's the very kind of thought that creates all the problems.

01:16:32.800 --> 01:16:36.320
And really, even a personal coin, that's kind of a personal coin.

01:16:36.320 --> 01:16:40.760
Let's say you've got somebody who's trying to decide, "Well, should I keep this high-paying

01:16:40.760 --> 01:16:46.700
job that I don't enjoy or should I take this lower-paying job that I would really enjoy?"

01:16:46.700 --> 01:16:49.260
And really that's an existential question.

01:16:49.260 --> 01:16:51.540
And you can use the same approach.

01:16:51.540 --> 01:16:53.820
And so when Einstein's talking about,

01:16:53.820 --> 01:16:55.140
if he's the guy that said that,

01:16:55.140 --> 01:16:55.980
I think there are a lot of us

01:16:55.980 --> 01:16:57.940
that would say the very same thing.

01:16:57.940 --> 01:17:01.100
If you explicitly state what you wanna know

01:17:01.100 --> 01:17:02.300
and you mull it over,

01:17:02.300 --> 01:17:05.240
then shift attention away from that entirely.

01:17:05.240 --> 01:17:09.420
Bam, intuition will very often just pop out with the answer

01:17:09.420 --> 01:17:12.500
because this intuitive thing is sort of like grace.

01:17:12.500 --> 01:17:14.600
I can't think of any other word.

01:17:14.600 --> 01:17:19.480
almost all the realizations, you can't ascribe it to anything other than just grace.

01:17:19.480 --> 01:17:21.000
But it's an intuitive breakthrough.

01:17:21.000 --> 01:17:27.040
It's sort of like this deeper level of intelligence reveals the answer if you really want to know.

01:17:27.040 --> 01:17:29.040
And that will apply to even a personal koans.

01:17:29.040 --> 01:17:32.440
You know, should I marry this person or not marry this person?

01:17:32.440 --> 01:17:35.840
All those kind of questions are also susceptible to this.

01:17:35.840 --> 01:17:40.240
There's a thing in the yoga sutra is called Sanyama, and it's a practice where you focus

01:17:40.240 --> 01:17:45.200
on something, but then you relax your focus and fall back into the transcendent and then

01:17:45.200 --> 01:17:46.200
a result pops out.

01:17:46.200 --> 01:17:47.200
That's right.

01:17:47.200 --> 01:17:52.340
I remember hearing this scientist named Itzhak Bentov speak at a conference in 1970.

01:17:52.340 --> 01:17:57.520
He was later killed in that DC-10 crash in Chicago, but he was an inventor.

01:17:57.520 --> 01:18:03.280
He would invent all kinds of, I don't know, artificial heart contraptions, different medical

01:18:03.280 --> 01:18:05.500
and other kinds of contraptions.

01:18:05.500 --> 01:18:10.180
And he said his practice was to just really focus on the thing and focus and focus and

01:18:10.180 --> 01:18:14.860
try to figure it out and then just forget it and kind of relax whether in meditation

01:18:14.860 --> 01:18:17.220
or whatever but just relax from it.

01:18:17.220 --> 01:18:21.060
And then he said, boom, the solution would just pop out of his intuition, it would just

01:18:21.060 --> 01:18:22.060
rise up.

01:18:22.060 --> 01:18:25.980
That's right, because if you have something you really want to know the answer to, the

01:18:25.980 --> 01:18:30.940
question might be intellectual, but it's also in the subconscious.

01:18:30.940 --> 01:18:35.740
If you really want to know the answer to this, and it's not available in the intellect, because

01:18:35.740 --> 01:18:39.780
the intellect only deals with what's known, and what you're looking for is what's unknown.

01:18:39.780 --> 01:18:44.540
So in a certain sense, and I don't know whether this is, it's simply that the answer is already

01:18:44.540 --> 01:18:50.460
there and it just pops out once you sort of relax, or whether this deeper level of intelligence

01:18:50.460 --> 01:18:55.420
goes to work, going deeper and deeper and deeper to get the answer to what you're wondering

01:18:55.420 --> 01:18:56.420
about.

01:18:56.420 --> 01:18:57.420
I'm not sure which.

01:18:57.420 --> 01:19:04.420
I actually had a case where I had a specific question that was like a personal koan and I felt like I had to resolve it.

01:19:04.420 --> 01:19:09.420
And I was so used to resolving so many of these others that I thought, "This has got to be resolved."

01:19:09.420 --> 01:19:16.420
And I sat down on a Saturday morning, thought about the issue, and then just shifted attention to Universal Sound.

01:19:16.420 --> 01:19:18.420
That's what I was listening to at that time.

01:19:18.420 --> 01:19:23.420
It took about four hours, and all of a sudden, bam! The answer was crystal clear.

01:19:23.420 --> 01:19:28.660
and it just popped out. There was never any doubt. And I've had that happen so many times

01:19:28.660 --> 01:19:32.820
after a while you develop confidence in that. That anything you want to know you can find

01:19:32.820 --> 01:19:33.820
out.

01:19:33.820 --> 01:19:38.220
Yeah, this is an interesting topic actually. Sometimes that field of underlying intelligence

01:19:38.220 --> 01:19:43.980
is referred to as a kind of a home of all knowledge or a field of all possibilities,

01:19:43.980 --> 01:19:50.020
that kind of phrase. And obviously our individual intellect and mind are not a field of all

01:19:50.020 --> 01:19:54.180
possibilities and from all knowledge, you know, they're isolated, they're localized,

01:19:54.180 --> 01:20:02.580
but they can be used as a sort of a tool to evoke from that universal field specific results

01:20:02.580 --> 01:20:08.100
that we want to have. Like you just said, that decision you had to make, or Dr. Benthoff's

01:20:08.100 --> 01:20:13.860
inventing practice, or a thing Einstein said. We could probably find hundreds of examples of

01:20:13.860 --> 01:20:19.300
inventors and scientists and poets and musicians throughout history that were aware of this

01:20:19.300 --> 01:20:27.700
phenomenon. So that's interesting, it sort of adds a practical value or a practical layer to this whole

01:20:27.700 --> 01:20:32.900
process of spiritual awakening. It's not just about contentment and freedom and all that,

01:20:32.900 --> 01:20:40.420
it's actually about being able to know things and achieve specific things in life which we might

01:20:40.420 --> 01:20:45.540
otherwise not be able to. Any questions come in, Armin? Let me look and see what...

01:20:47.140 --> 01:20:52.420
question from Mohan Rao in Cookville, Tennessee. It's your town, you must know this guy.

01:20:52.420 --> 01:20:57.700
When I tell people that you didn't make that mistake, since there are no mistakes,

01:20:57.700 --> 01:21:01.700
they think I'm crazy. Can you elaborate on there are no mistakes?

01:21:01.700 --> 01:21:06.820
Yeah, Mo's great. He's a good friend. He teaches meditation here in town.

01:21:06.820 --> 01:21:10.340
I think I'm aware of him. Or maybe he's asked questions on Batgap before,

01:21:10.340 --> 01:21:12.260
or maybe we were on Facebook together.

01:21:12.980 --> 01:21:18.340
Yeah, so what I realized was reality simply unfolds however it unfolds.

01:21:18.340 --> 01:21:25.220
And our normal inclination is to look at what we've done and think about whether we made the

01:21:25.220 --> 01:21:30.820
right decision or the wrong decision and so forth. But all that's based upon the idea that there's a

01:21:30.820 --> 01:21:36.260
separate volitional entity that's doing this. And when you realize there's not, when you realize

01:21:36.260 --> 01:21:43.940
is just how this vast incomprehensible cosmos is unfolding, it just takes away that whole

01:21:43.940 --> 01:21:49.860
issue entirely. So in other words, you can't possibly make a mistake. I don't know how to

01:21:49.860 --> 01:21:55.540
explain that clearer than that in the sense that who you think you are is not what's doing

01:21:55.540 --> 01:22:02.820
everything. It's sort of like asking, "Can God make a mistake?" No. God just unfolds however it unfolds.

01:22:02.820 --> 01:22:10.500
call it true self, source, Brahman, whatever we want to call it. What is? What is just manifest,

01:22:10.500 --> 01:22:16.260
however it manifests. And as humans, we have this intellect that makes us think that we're making

01:22:16.260 --> 01:22:22.820
these various decisions rationally or logically or whatever. And who we think we are is not what's

01:22:22.820 --> 01:22:28.340
doing it. It's happening at a far deeper level. And that's one reason I give people all kind of

01:22:28.340 --> 01:22:32.780
little experiments to do and one of the ones I use a lot of times is Alan Watts

01:22:32.780 --> 01:22:37.260
wrote an essay years ago he said when you make a fist and you open your hand

01:22:37.260 --> 01:22:42.860
it's like a verb was masquerading as a noun all right well I like that example

01:22:42.860 --> 01:22:49.020
and so I'll say okay look watch this a fist appears it disappears a fist comes

01:22:49.020 --> 01:22:54.220
into existence it goes out of existence a fist is born and a fist dies

01:22:54.220 --> 01:22:59.620
Everything's like that, but we're the process of that whole thing. So it's sort

01:22:59.620 --> 01:23:03.420
of like an existential question I would ask somebody is where did the fist go?

01:23:03.420 --> 01:23:08.260
And that always reminds me of Ramana Maharshi who supposedly was asked on his

01:23:08.260 --> 01:23:14.460
deathbed, "Master are you leaving us?" and he said, "Where could I possibly go?" If you

01:23:14.460 --> 01:23:19.820
really get this, you realize the fist is still here, even if it doesn't appear

01:23:19.820 --> 01:23:22.340
that way now. Everything's like that.

01:23:22.340 --> 01:23:28.220
It kind of reminds me of Ramakrishna when he was on his deathbed and everyone was lamenting

01:23:28.220 --> 01:23:35.380
about how much pain he was in because of his cancer. And some guy came to him and he said,

01:23:35.380 --> 01:23:41.100
"But sir, I see that you are in bliss." And he said, "Ha ha, the rascal has found me out."

01:23:41.100 --> 01:23:43.480
(laughing)

01:23:43.480 --> 01:23:44.320
- Exactly.

01:23:44.320 --> 01:23:47.960
Yeah, and Ramakrishna's another good one

01:23:47.960 --> 01:23:51.320
because he was for me with a wide range of religions.

01:23:51.320 --> 01:23:53.600
And he's pretty famous for saying,

01:23:53.600 --> 01:23:56.400
all these pathways lead to exactly the same thing.

01:23:56.400 --> 01:23:57.720
It doesn't matter whether it's Christian,

01:23:57.720 --> 01:24:00.360
Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, you name it.

01:24:00.360 --> 01:24:02.080
And I didn't even know there was a Ramakrishna

01:24:02.080 --> 01:24:03.880
before Ramakrishna.

01:24:03.880 --> 01:24:06.380
There was another older Ramakrishna

01:24:06.380 --> 01:24:08.080
and they were all pointing the same thing.

01:24:08.080 --> 01:24:10.120
They were all saying exactly the same thing.

01:24:10.120 --> 01:24:16.280
Oh yeah, I'm sure that on some galaxy far, far away, there are spiritual people saying

01:24:16.280 --> 01:24:17.780
the very same thing.

01:24:17.780 --> 01:24:22.100
And then there are also, you know, religions killing each other, believing that theirs

01:24:22.100 --> 01:24:24.380
is the only true one in the whole universe.

01:24:24.380 --> 01:24:28.040
And I think these are universal.

01:24:28.040 --> 01:24:29.540
You're talking about you never make a mistake.

01:24:29.540 --> 01:24:31.220
Do you ever apologize for anything?

01:24:31.220 --> 01:24:32.460
Yeah, I do.

01:24:32.460 --> 01:24:37.880
I apologize anytime that I feel like I've done something that might have hurt somebody's

01:24:37.880 --> 01:24:43.680
feelings or something like that, I'm aware that I couldn't have done anything different

01:24:43.680 --> 01:24:46.960
and I know that they have to respond, whatever.

01:24:46.960 --> 01:24:50.640
But if I've said something that hurt somebody's feelings and I've become aware of that, then

01:24:50.640 --> 01:24:52.960
yeah, sure, that's part of being human.

01:24:52.960 --> 01:24:58.040
Yeah, it's like maybe you screwed up but you're aware that you couldn't help but screw up

01:24:58.040 --> 01:25:00.160
because that's the way it rolled at that point.

01:25:00.160 --> 01:25:01.160
That's right.

01:25:01.160 --> 01:25:03.160
And so you apologize for having done that.

01:25:03.160 --> 01:25:04.160
Yeah.

01:25:04.160 --> 01:25:08.420
There is a little bit of a sticky wicket here though, and that is that sometimes people

01:25:08.420 --> 01:25:14.220
who have had some kind of spiritual realization get too cock sure of themselves in terms of

01:25:14.220 --> 01:25:20.760
their inability to make mistakes or their being guided by God and so on, and maybe they're

01:25:20.760 --> 01:25:24.900
like seducing all their female disciples or something, and then when it's discovered,

01:25:24.900 --> 01:25:26.380
they say, "Oh, I wasn't doing that.

01:25:26.380 --> 01:25:28.300
That was just God."

01:25:28.300 --> 01:25:34.860
So there's a need to also be a little bit practical and down to earth and apply some real world

01:25:34.860 --> 01:25:37.100
values to our behavior.

01:25:37.100 --> 01:25:42.200
That's right and the more deeply you see into this, the less special you feel.

01:25:42.200 --> 01:25:46.780
And the more you realize that everybody you're interacting with, they're all part of the

01:25:46.780 --> 01:25:53.940
same vast field of being, unfolding and manifesting however it's unfolding.

01:25:53.940 --> 01:25:56.940
And there's really no way to predict what will happen next.

01:25:56.940 --> 01:26:01.540
And to a certain degree, one develops a comfort in not knowing.

01:26:01.540 --> 01:26:02.540
That's true.

01:26:02.540 --> 01:26:08.540
In a way, it makes life more entertaining because it's like a really good movie where, you know,

01:26:08.540 --> 01:26:11.180
you don't want to know the outcome and you can't know the outcome.

01:26:11.180 --> 01:26:12.700
And you're just thinking, "Where is this going?

01:26:12.700 --> 01:26:13.700
This is so fascinating."

01:26:13.700 --> 01:26:19.260
And then you kind of appreciate the intelligence with which everything is orchestrated.

01:26:19.260 --> 01:26:23.720
And sometimes after a while you realize, "Okay, at a certain point I thought this should happen.

01:26:23.720 --> 01:26:28.320
Now I see that that has happened, and now I can kind of see how that was so much better

01:26:28.320 --> 01:26:34.000
or appropriate to have happened than the thing that I was thinking might happen.

01:26:34.000 --> 01:26:35.000
It's cool.

01:26:35.000 --> 01:26:39.040
Maybe I'm describing something much more complicated than the way your mind works, but that's the

01:26:39.040 --> 01:26:40.040
way I see it sometimes.

01:26:40.040 --> 01:26:44.520
Well, I once wrote a newspaper article, and I used to write newspaper articles in the local

01:26:44.520 --> 01:26:47.980
newspaper mainly about mystical Christianity.

01:26:47.980 --> 01:26:54.980
And just for fun, I said, "Okay, let's imagine that God said, 'You can create the heaven

01:26:54.980 --> 01:26:58.900
that you want to live in, but you have to live in it forever.

01:26:58.900 --> 01:26:59.900
What would you create?'"

01:26:59.900 --> 01:27:04.020
And what I was trying to point out was, even if you like to play golf, sooner or later

01:27:04.020 --> 01:27:06.320
you'll get tired of playing golf.

01:27:06.320 --> 01:27:11.580
If you really look deeply into the issue, this is the reality you would create, because

01:27:11.580 --> 01:27:13.500
it's totally unknowable.

01:27:13.500 --> 01:27:18.180
It's mysterious and it's entertaining and one of the things that we don't talk too much

01:27:18.180 --> 01:27:24.160
about in spiritual circle is joy de vivre, you know, just the sheer joy of living and

01:27:24.160 --> 01:27:27.060
finding out what's going to happen tomorrow morning.

01:27:27.060 --> 01:27:28.160
Who knows?

01:27:28.160 --> 01:27:32.740
When you live in that happy state of not knowing, maybe we can put it that way, it's really

01:27:32.740 --> 01:27:33.740
fun.

01:27:33.740 --> 01:27:34.740
It is.

01:27:34.740 --> 01:27:35.740
It's endlessly entertaining.

01:27:35.740 --> 01:27:39.920
I think that playful aspect is missing sometimes.

01:27:39.920 --> 01:27:43.600
There was a whole phase where you read Suzanne Siegel's book about eight times.

01:27:43.600 --> 01:27:44.600
Oh, I know.

01:27:44.600 --> 01:27:45.600
And that's interesting.

01:27:45.600 --> 01:27:47.280
We can talk about that a little bit.

01:27:47.280 --> 01:27:51.320
And there was this whole phase where your wife was getting really unhappy because of

01:27:51.320 --> 01:27:54.040
your fanaticism, I guess we could say.

01:27:54.040 --> 01:27:55.040
Absolutely.

01:27:55.040 --> 01:27:58.800
And then that all kind of resolved itself and she really got into Gangaji for a while.

01:27:58.800 --> 01:28:01.600
I mean, there's some interesting bits in your book about your journey.

01:28:01.600 --> 01:28:02.600
Well, yeah.

01:28:02.600 --> 01:28:06.440
The first time he went to hear Gangaji speak, it was kind of a mind blower.

01:28:06.440 --> 01:28:08.760
I'd been in the Zen tradition.

01:28:08.760 --> 01:28:13.600
And I had sort of a model of reality, you know, from the Zen tradition, you know, you meditate

01:28:13.600 --> 01:28:15.920
and such and such and such.

01:28:15.920 --> 01:28:20.760
And when I first heard her, for one thing, I realized it was a whole different attitude

01:28:20.760 --> 01:28:25.080
about the people that were there, and a much more relaxed attitude for one thing, which

01:28:25.080 --> 01:28:26.080
I liked.

01:28:26.080 --> 01:28:31.160
And as she talked, the first time I heard her speak, I thought, where is she coming from?

01:28:31.160 --> 01:28:33.560
It just seemed like she was all over the place.

01:28:33.560 --> 01:28:37.640
But then the more I listened to her, I realized, oh, yeah, she's pointing to exactly the same

01:28:37.640 --> 01:28:38.640
thing.

01:28:38.640 --> 01:28:45.480
free. And the words are alive. And Muji, I've watched so many of these folks and talked to

01:28:45.480 --> 01:28:49.640
so many of them and friends with a lot of them that they're all pointing the same way

01:28:49.640 --> 01:28:50.640
in different ways.

01:28:50.640 --> 01:28:53.640
Yeah, Gangaji is a southern girl.

01:28:53.640 --> 01:28:55.640
Yeah, Mississippi I think.

01:28:55.640 --> 01:29:02.480
Mississippi, right. Okay, so here's another question. This is from Edgar Selms. Can you

01:29:02.480 --> 01:29:07.160
please elaborate more on the practice of listening to the universal sound? What is it and how

01:29:07.160 --> 01:29:09.080
How do you recognize it?

01:29:09.080 --> 01:29:11.040
- Yeah, that's kind of interesting.

01:29:11.040 --> 01:29:11.880
I don't know what it is.

01:29:11.880 --> 01:29:13.560
There's probably some technical name for it.

01:29:13.560 --> 01:29:16.800
It's not tinnitus, 'cause it's not objectionable.

01:29:16.800 --> 01:29:18.760
But once you become aware of it,

01:29:18.760 --> 01:29:20.240
and I've talked to a lot of meditators,

01:29:20.240 --> 01:29:23.960
most people who meditate have heard this and are aware of it.

01:29:23.960 --> 01:29:26.400
A good friend of my wife had never heard of it,

01:29:26.400 --> 01:29:28.020
and Carol told her about it.

01:29:28.020 --> 01:29:29.400
And several days later, she said,

01:29:29.400 --> 01:29:31.040
"Oh, now I know what you're talking about.

01:29:31.040 --> 01:29:31.880
"I heard it."

01:29:31.880 --> 01:29:34.000
It's like sort of a white noise,

01:29:34.000 --> 01:29:35.480
or maybe like a distant feeling.

01:29:35.480 --> 01:29:37.440
- Is it the blood rushing in the ears or something?

01:29:37.440 --> 01:29:39.000
Like you hear when you're underwater?

01:29:39.000 --> 01:29:39.840
- Well, I don't know.

01:29:39.840 --> 01:29:41.020
I've heard scientists talk about it.

01:29:41.020 --> 01:29:43.020
Maybe it's neurons firing in the brain.

01:29:43.020 --> 01:29:45.880
I don't know what it is, but like I can hear it right now.

01:29:45.880 --> 01:29:47.140
I can hear it any time.

01:29:47.140 --> 01:29:49.700
Once you're aware of it, it's there all the time.

01:29:49.700 --> 01:29:51.340
And what's kind of neat is,

01:29:51.340 --> 01:29:53.800
I mean, you can listen to it driving down the road.

01:29:53.800 --> 01:29:55.940
You can listen to it sitting in a chair.

01:29:55.940 --> 01:29:56.780
It doesn't really matter.

01:29:56.780 --> 01:29:58.400
It's there all the time in the background.

01:29:58.400 --> 01:30:02.000
And once you become aware of it, then you can pick up on it.

01:30:02.000 --> 01:30:03.260
- Is it like an ohm sound?

01:30:03.260 --> 01:30:08.460
sometimes said to be universal sound? It's really more like a white noise machine.

01:30:08.460 --> 01:30:14.860
Okay, like a hiss. And you can use that as a focus. I mean, it doesn't have to be that. Sometimes

01:30:14.860 --> 01:30:19.900
I used to sit in an easy chair and listen to the sound of the hissing gas logs beside me.

01:30:19.900 --> 01:30:24.460
And sometimes maybe the hum of a refrigerator in the other room. If I'm outside, I might be

01:30:24.460 --> 01:30:29.820
listening to birds or whatever ambient sounds are there in the environment. But because the

01:30:29.820 --> 01:30:32.300
So universal sound is always there.

01:30:32.300 --> 01:30:34.620
That's a really strong thing that you can focus on

01:30:34.620 --> 01:30:36.340
if you're interested in doing that.

01:30:36.340 --> 01:30:38.500
- Can you hear it even if there's music playing or something

01:30:38.500 --> 01:30:40.660
or does it have to be quiet to hear it?

01:30:40.660 --> 01:30:42.380
- No, you can hear it anytime.

01:30:42.380 --> 01:30:44.340
Normally your attention doesn't go there

01:30:44.340 --> 01:30:46.620
unless you just happen to be listening for it.

01:30:46.620 --> 01:30:47.460
- Yeah.

01:30:47.460 --> 01:30:48.940
- But as soon as you turn your attention in that direction,

01:30:48.940 --> 01:30:50.980
you immediately hear it.

01:30:50.980 --> 01:30:51.940
- I wonder what it is.

01:30:51.940 --> 01:30:53.820
Do you think it's something that you're actually hearing

01:30:53.820 --> 01:30:55.180
with your ears?

01:30:55.180 --> 01:30:57.740
Would you hear it if you were, would a deaf person hear it?

01:30:57.740 --> 01:30:59.300
- Well, that's a good question.

01:30:59.300 --> 01:31:01.620
Yeah, I have no idea.

01:31:01.620 --> 01:31:04.260
Like if you were in a soundproof room, would you hear it?

01:31:04.260 --> 01:31:09.220
Oh, I think it's something that's coming from the body.

01:31:09.220 --> 01:31:10.220
Oh, from the body.

01:31:10.220 --> 01:31:14.140
So, it could actually be blood rushing through the cochlea or something like that.

01:31:14.140 --> 01:31:15.740
It could be something like that.

01:31:15.740 --> 01:31:19.500
Or it could be, for all I know, it could be neurons firing or electrical connections or

01:31:19.500 --> 01:31:20.500
something.

01:31:20.500 --> 01:31:21.500
I don't know.

01:31:21.500 --> 01:31:22.500
Interesting.

01:31:22.500 --> 01:31:24.340
In fact, I probably ought to read about that just to find out if there's any scientific

01:31:24.340 --> 01:31:26.940
thought about that.

01:31:26.940 --> 01:31:30.520
alluded to the difficulties you had in your marriage for a while there because

01:31:30.520 --> 01:31:36.500
you were such a fanatic. I don't mean to be critical, you're just so gung-ho, so

01:31:36.500 --> 01:31:40.220
zealous. This is probably something a lot of people can relate to either in terms

01:31:40.220 --> 01:31:45.420
of a marriage or family relations or anything else. When they get on the

01:31:45.420 --> 01:31:49.540
spiritual path, one of my sisters learned to meditate when she was in high school

01:31:49.540 --> 01:31:52.060
and she stopped pretty soon because she said she didn't want to be different

01:31:52.060 --> 01:31:55.700
from her friends. In my case I dropped all my friends once I learned to

01:31:55.700 --> 01:31:59.540
Medicaid because they were obviously intent on continuing to take drugs and I

01:31:59.540 --> 01:32:04.380
wasn't. So sometimes you have to part ways with people, it's in your best

01:32:04.380 --> 01:32:08.580
interest to do so. Other times I think you really don't want to and shouldn't

01:32:08.580 --> 01:32:15.460
and maybe there's something wrong with your flexibility or selfishness. I'm not

01:32:15.460 --> 01:32:19.260
saying you specifically Bob, I'm saying I've seen people who are so into their

01:32:19.260 --> 01:32:23.380
spirituality that they're really getting quite selfish about it and are not

01:32:23.380 --> 01:32:27.100
concerned about other people very much because they're so concerned about their

01:32:27.100 --> 01:32:33.620
routine and their this and that and the other thing. Well as I mentioned that day

01:32:33.620 --> 01:32:37.460
we talked on the phone I really feel like it's luck of the draw. You know some

01:32:37.460 --> 01:32:41.260
people are just really lucky to find somebody they want to be with all the

01:32:41.260 --> 01:32:46.220
time in the case of a husband-wife type thing or husband-husband or wife-wife it

01:32:46.220 --> 01:32:49.660
doesn't really matter. So there's a certain amount of luck involved then I

01:32:49.660 --> 01:32:57.500
I guess. It's really rare for people to age and have common interest as you age and for

01:32:57.500 --> 01:33:03.980
one person not to veer off in some other direction and so forth. If it's really a deep cosmic

01:33:03.980 --> 01:33:09.780
love, let's call it agape, then I think I heard Byron Katie talk about this one time.

01:33:09.780 --> 01:33:15.580
It's sort of like if your partner decided to leave, you would want them to be happy.

01:33:15.580 --> 01:33:20.460
If it meant they would be happy with somebody else, you would be in favor of that.

01:33:20.460 --> 01:33:21.460
You would bless that.

01:33:21.460 --> 01:33:22.980
There would be no jealousy.

01:33:22.980 --> 01:33:26.500
There would be no acrimony about it.

01:33:26.500 --> 01:33:30.060
It would be whatever makes you happy will make me happy.

01:33:30.060 --> 01:33:33.180
You can never destroy my feelings for you.

01:33:33.180 --> 01:33:35.660
And if it's that kind of relationship, that's lucky.

01:33:35.660 --> 01:33:40.340
I think there was a story in the Tale of Two Cities by Dickens of this guy who was in love

01:33:40.340 --> 01:33:43.460
with this woman, but she was married to somebody else.

01:33:43.460 --> 01:33:48.940
And he loved her so much that when her husband was going to go to the guillotine, this guy

01:33:48.940 --> 01:33:54.380
arranged for him to go, himself to go instead, so this woman wouldn't be heartbroken by the

01:33:54.380 --> 01:33:55.900
loss of her husband.

01:33:55.900 --> 01:33:56.900
That's selfless love.

01:33:56.900 --> 01:33:57.900
That's it.

01:33:57.900 --> 01:34:00.260
That sums it up right there.

01:34:00.260 --> 01:34:06.020
But I think there is something to be said for patience, tolerance, compromise, especially

01:34:06.020 --> 01:34:07.020
the word patience.

01:34:07.020 --> 01:34:13.340
I've heard various respected spiritual teachers say that patience is so important on the spiritual

01:34:13.340 --> 01:34:20.980
path and one can become really kind of annoying if one is seriously lacking in that quality

01:34:20.980 --> 01:34:26.820
because one disrespects the kind of cosmic orchestration of life and wants things to

01:34:26.820 --> 01:34:31.540
be different than they naturally are and they want it to be different now than they actually

01:34:31.540 --> 01:34:36.060
are not realizing that if they just go with the flow things will go the way they're supposed

01:34:36.060 --> 01:34:40.780
to go and everything will work out ultimately.

01:34:40.780 --> 01:34:42.780
Is there anything else that we can talk about?

01:34:42.780 --> 01:34:44.780
No, we've covered a lot of territory.

01:34:44.780 --> 01:34:46.780
Okay, good.

01:34:46.780 --> 01:34:50.780
I do recommend your book. Is it on Amazon? I guess it's on Amazon.

01:34:50.780 --> 01:34:54.780
It is. The Tatt Foundation is getting ready to reissue that in paperback form.

01:34:54.780 --> 01:34:59.780
And I've included some additional information there that sort of explains about ATA-T,

01:34:59.780 --> 01:35:02.780
how to find answers to existential questions.

01:35:02.780 --> 01:35:06.780
I put some addenda at the back of the book, along with an epilogue,

01:35:06.780 --> 01:35:11.500
and then made a few minor changes, you know, just update the book.

01:35:11.500 --> 01:35:12.700
When's that coming out?

01:35:12.700 --> 01:35:18.220
It should be very shortly. I heard from them two days ago and I think within the next week or so,

01:35:18.220 --> 01:35:19.740
it very well may be on Amazon.

01:35:19.740 --> 01:35:24.860
Oh, so by the time people hear this, they can probably pre-order it even on Amazon.

01:35:24.860 --> 01:35:28.540
And that'll be the paperback. So those of you listening, if you go to buy the book and you

01:35:28.540 --> 01:35:32.460
don't see the paperback available yet, just wait a few days and it'll probably show up there.

01:35:32.460 --> 01:35:37.420
Yeah, and it'll also be an e-book edition because postage overseas has really gotten expensive.

01:35:37.420 --> 01:35:42.220
The only copy that's available right now, the original paperback edition sold out and the

01:35:42.220 --> 01:35:47.420
hardback copy, I mailed a copy to Australia. It was like, I don't know, $33 to mail it.

01:35:47.420 --> 01:35:48.060
More than the book.

01:35:48.060 --> 01:35:51.820
You know, if somebody's in Australia and wants to download an e-book edition,

01:35:51.820 --> 01:35:52.780
that's what we really need.

01:35:52.780 --> 01:35:59.020
I'm also a big fan of audio books, you know, if you can get it on Audible, that's fun. You

01:35:59.020 --> 01:36:03.020
You should read it yourself in your lovely southern accent.

01:36:03.020 --> 01:36:08.020
Well, I searched everywhere for all the computers trying to find the copy of that other book,

01:36:08.020 --> 01:36:12.020
the one about the path to Christ consciousness. I can't find the computer.

01:36:12.020 --> 01:36:19.020
I had to open up a hard drive trying to find where that file is, but, you know, that was written in 1998 or something.

01:36:19.020 --> 01:36:24.020
I don't know whether I ever kept that computer, and I'm afraid I threw away all the disks that it might have been on.

01:36:24.020 --> 01:36:30.060
One thing we might do with this chatbot that I talked about is upload authors, people I've

01:36:30.060 --> 01:36:34.720
interviewed upload their books to it, which wouldn't mean that people could just download

01:36:34.720 --> 01:36:38.420
the whole book or anything like that or read the whole book online, but it would mean that

01:36:38.420 --> 01:36:44.700
the body of all the information in that book, if somebody asked a question, it might contribute

01:36:44.700 --> 01:36:48.420
to the answer that the artificial intelligence gives.

01:36:48.420 --> 01:36:52.120
So I'm just sending that as a teaser to people because if I end up with hundreds of books

01:36:52.120 --> 01:36:58.920
like this as part of its knowledge base. It'll be a really rich repository of wisdom and it'll

01:36:58.920 --> 01:37:04.040
be really useful for people to engage with. So I might be asking you for permission to

01:37:04.040 --> 01:37:06.120
upload your book at some point. Sure.

01:37:06.120 --> 01:37:13.560
Okay, do you do stuff that people can connect with? Do you have webinars or do you teach

01:37:13.560 --> 01:37:18.520
retreats or anything like that? Periodically we'll give presentations at chat retreats,

01:37:18.520 --> 01:37:23.080
participate in some zoom calls, you know, non-duality zoom calls, that type thing.

01:37:23.080 --> 01:37:27.480
Yeah. Anybody that's interested in non-duality, I'm pretty much in talking to them.

01:37:27.480 --> 01:37:32.600
Can people just call you? That could get out of hand. Could they email you? Do you want me to,

01:37:32.600 --> 01:37:39.080
like, put your email on there? Yeah, they could email bobh@usit.net.

01:37:39.080 --> 01:37:42.920
Okay, I'll put that on your BatGap page, and if people want to get in touch, they can do that.

01:37:42.920 --> 01:37:45.560
And you don't have a website, right? No.

01:37:45.560 --> 01:37:48.360
But you do have a Facebook page, but I don't know if you do much with it.

01:37:48.360 --> 01:37:49.560
I don't have a Facebook.

01:37:49.560 --> 01:37:52.360
Oh, you do actually. I found one, but it's pretty stagnant.

01:37:52.360 --> 01:37:55.320
I didn't remember having a Facebook page.

01:37:55.320 --> 01:37:59.400
Yeah, I think I sent you a friend request, but it didn't look like there's been much going on there.

01:37:59.400 --> 01:38:02.840
Okay, good. So I'll put your email address on your BoutGap page,

01:38:02.840 --> 01:38:06.760
and if people want to get in touch, they can. And if it gets to be a bit overwhelming,

01:38:06.760 --> 01:38:10.840
it might be a bit of a deluge at first, but after a few weeks, it'll taper off.

01:38:10.840 --> 01:38:11.320
Sure.

01:38:11.320 --> 01:38:15.480
All right, well, thanks, Bob. It's lovely talking to you and getting to know you better.

01:38:15.480 --> 01:38:19.640
I hope we get a chance to have an adventure together sometime.

01:38:19.640 --> 01:38:20.600
Sounds great.

01:38:20.600 --> 01:38:21.720
A mountainous place.

01:38:21.720 --> 01:38:25.640
Absolutely. Yeah, you've got me interested in going to Glacier now. I'm ready to go.

01:38:25.640 --> 01:38:29.800
Oh, Glacier is so gorgeous. It's really a cut above Colorado,

01:38:29.800 --> 01:38:33.000
in my opinion, in terms of the beauty and the wildness of it.

01:38:33.000 --> 01:38:33.640
That'd be great.

01:38:33.640 --> 01:38:39.560
Okay, and so for those listening or watching, this has been another interview, as you know,

01:38:39.560 --> 01:38:46.680
and the next one is with a lovely Irish woman named Lorna Byrne, who has been seeing angels

01:38:46.680 --> 01:38:52.680
all of her life since childhood. It's really a beautiful gift, and I've listened to two of her

01:38:52.680 --> 01:38:59.320
books already, and now I'm listening to her YouTube videos, and I have a lot of questions for her. So,

01:38:59.320 --> 01:39:03.800
next week is going to be all about angels. If you don't believe in angels, check it out anyway.

01:39:03.800 --> 01:39:07.080
I think you'll learn a thing or two. Thanks, Bob.

01:39:07.080 --> 01:39:11.640
Thank you, enjoy. Talk to you later.

01:39:11.640 --> 01:39:34.320
Thank you.