[Music]
Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer.
Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations
with spiritually awakening people. We've done just over 700 of them
now, and if this is new to you and you'd like to check out previous ones,
go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and look
under the past interviews menu. While you're there at the site,
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My guest today is my friend Kimberly Teresa Lafferty.
Like many of my good friends, I've never met her in person.
This way it is these days.
I met her through the Association for Spiritual Integrity, which Jack O'Keefe and Craig Holiday
and I founded about five years ago.
Kimberly is now on the board of directors of the ASI, and I've always been very impressed
with her clarity and brightness and creativity and positivity and so on, as you'll see in
a minute.
Kimberly is a seasoned teacher practitioner specializing in constructive adult developmental
psychology and Indo-Tibetan Buddhism.
She completed over 12 years of intensive Indo-Tibetan study, including the required retreats.
She leads both open and advanced adult educational cohorts, aligning developmental psychology
and Buddhist theory.
She co-leads with Terry O'Fallon the penultimate MindsEye year-long developmental course through
Stages International.
Kimberly is a wife and mother living in a remote valley of the North Cascades of North
America, Washington State, which deeply impacts her worldview and practice.
So Kimberly, welcome.
Thanks, Rick.
This is going to be fun and welcome to all of you who are listening now and listening in the future. I'm glad you're here
And tell us about this place where you live. Oh, oh, it's fantastic
I first discovered this place. It's called Mazama, Washington Mazama. You can google it and I discovered it
25 years ago
When I was a corporate refugee
And really first seriously got on the spiritual path
It was the most beautiful place I've ever been. I'd been for a weekend
For a mountain bike race at the time. I was in my early 20s and it was extraordinary
It was like living in a paradise
But I had a life to lead and a spiritual path to follow so I had to leave the valley and just about
Oh
10 years ago or so. I was able to come back. So it's really a full circle time for me to
live in this place, which is my chosen place once again. Forest is absolutely gorgeous.
Yeah. So you and your family just live way out in the boondocks, right?
Yeah. Surrounded by gazillion acres of forest and...
Something like that. We definitely live at the end of the road. We're the last house in the
northern end of the valley. Fortunately, culturally, there's a lot of extraordinary
people here who have also made the choice to live here. There's good restaurants and a good
bookstore and a nice art gallery and all the things that a post-post-modern girl could want also.
So that's nice too. Wow, sounds great. Yeah, yeah. It's kind of like northern exposure or something.
If you ever saw that show. Oh yeah. Would call yourself a corporate refugee. So you were kind of a
Starbucks executive when you were in your 20s. Yeah, I was definitely on the executive track. I
I graduated from undergrad university at 21 with student debt and needing to get a job and not
sure what I was going to do. Starbucks was a very young company at the time. Gosh, I think there
were less than 100 stores, if you can imagine. And it was a good job. And I sort of got caught
in a good job. And it was a good company and was there for seven years. And it was wonderful,
like nothing bad to say about. If you're going to do the corporate thing, it's a great place to do
it. But there came a time I was 27 or 28 living in Boston, running a pretty good chunk of the
operation out there. Had a fancy boyfriend, had a fancy salary, had a fancy apartment,
and I was miserable. I was absolutely miserable. I'd done all the things you're supposed to do,
and it wasn't working. And had a big spiritual experience, and that's what got me on the path.
Tell us about that experience. You were miserable, so you started dancing,
and then you went into some yoga poses or something and had a breakthrough.
I did. I did. Spiritual experience is a first person experience. So when I'm talking about it,
and I'm talking to you listeners, because I believe everybody's had profound experiences,
even if maybe you've forgotten, but I was just in a low place. Again, I was 27, 28.
Why wasn't I happy? I had the boyfriends I'd wanted. I was relatively attractive, it seemed.
I was athletic. I had enough money, but why wasn't I happy? And I was really in a
state of depression, although I didn't really know it at the time. And one day I just was
miserable and I started to do a practice that I've been doing since I could walk, it feels like.
I just was all by myself in my apartment and I started to dance. I put on some Annie DeFranco
at once and I started to move and my mind, I was so miserable that I just let go. My mind dropped,
my breath took over, my breath led the way and I found myself in what we call Pachimottanasana
in Sanskrit. It's a forward fold. You're sitting on the ground, your legs are straight out in front
of you and you're folded way down. Like touching your toes or nearly. Touching your toes and as
I've said elsewhere I was a you know I was a pretty flexi girl but it was extremely blissful
and extremely comfortable. It shouldn't have been that comfortable and I remember feeling like I had
a choice to start thinking about why am I this comfortable? Why does this feel so good? Or just
Let go and go for it. And I did
My back actually started to undulate my breath got deeper and deeper
slowed down
and eventually stopped and
The next thing I remember I was at the top of the ceiling looking down at my body and I had this
sensation this sort of thought without thought or
Words without word of am I safe like is it safe to leave can I park my body here?
basically and leave and the feeling was yes, you can and
I had what I believe as I said many people have had experiences like this
Later, I learned we call it the clear light
it was
beyond time
beyond space
No thought no concept. We can only really use metaphors
or
words to try and point to this experience that is beyond words. It was exceedingly blissful
and radiant and luminous and very aware and alive. Were you totally absorbed in that light or were
you still observing your body down below you? At that point there was the light and there was me
and there was no difference. And it wasn't me, it was everything. Now of course I wasn't using any
of these words at the time. The next sensation I experienced was a sense of coming down.
It was a very visceral sense of coming down back into my body. Again, my breath started
up again. I realized I hadn't been breathing during that time. I had no idea how much time
had passed because you're not in time. You know, I learned this later. Time is a relative
thing. And again, breath slowly came out. My third eye was on fire. Like if you put your
hand on my third eye. It was what we call the third eye here. It was hot. It was very, very
hot to the touch. And I slowly came up and I grabbed my journal. I still have it, which
is fantastic because we can look at it and do all sorts of analysis. I started to write
down the implications of what I had seen, you know, these insights and tried to capture
it. And I remember I wrote in my journal that the only words I could use to describe it,
One is all things, all things you could possibly imagine, one is, and it's just orgasmic bliss.
As if every existing thing in the universe was having an orgasmic experience.
And orgasm is the only word I could find that was close to it.
That completely otherworldly sort of beyond words blissful experience.
And I had a series of insights and some precognitive notions about how I would use this experience
It's almost like it was, well, very much was, it wasn't almost. I was in contact with a second
person as a first person experiencer. I was in contact with what we think of as a spiritual
company or I wasn't personifying them. I just called them the company. It was this deep,
deep sense that I wasn't alone and none of us were alone. The insight was you're going to spend the
rest of your life learning about this and teaching, teaching is the word I used,
people how to experience this for themselves using yoga and Buddhism
together, Tibetan Buddhism. Now the outside of a short little class in college, you
know, I'd never studied Buddhism. I'd taken one or two yoga classes in my life.
That was a real surprise for me. It was a very novel, especially those two together.
I never heard of that at that point. This was 1997-98. I mean, there's a lot more to say about that, but that was the essence of it.
I remember you saying that even when you're a little girl like four years old, you'd have these questions like, "How did I get here?"
and "How come this guy is my father?" and you know, they were like asking all these deep questions, trying to make sense of your existence.
Yeah, definitely. You know, I didn't have the easiest childhood. It wasn't capital T traumatic
like many people. We don't want to get into a thing of comparing our trauma, but I had
divorced parents and a single mother. We didn't have a lot of money. You know, it was hard.
It wasn't what you see on the TV. And the gift of experiences like that is we do start
to question, "Why? Why am I me? Why do I look like this? Why was I born in Stanford, California in
1970? Why is this my family? What am I doing?" And I've learned since then that those challenges,
the struggles, the pain, the suffering that was evident in my family of origin and all around me,
not just my family, you know, walk into a classroom and you experience this, really gave me the gift
of developing deep inner resources. And I'm not talking about disassociation, I'm not, I'm talking
about this in a very healthy way. I had to start to go within. And so from a young age, I did have
what we might call spiritual experiences. Back then, I called it the Holy Spirit, because that
was the framework that was offered to me, I was going to Catholic schools, but I developed a very
strong inner confidence and inner resources where I could find what I needed by going
within and then finding company, knowing that I was not alone and none of us are.
I heard you say in one of your recordings that trauma has a purpose, that there's too
much opportunity for growth in it for it to be an accident, which I think you were just
saying basically.
Yeah.
Zooming out a little bit, I just see the whole universe as an opportunity for growth and
nothing is an accident whatsoever. And that can seem rather harsh if you consider some of the
things that happen to people. But if you zoom out enough, there's an evolutionary agenda.
Dr. Debra Hixson
Definitely. And the zooming out can be such a refuge and such a gift. We talk to or tracking
at the Association for Spiritual Integrity, it comes up in a lot of our conversations,
this line between trauma and transcendence, this line between pain and joy. And could they exist
without the other? Those polarities? I'm not sure. Well, we can talk about that more. Now,
this company you've mentioned, you seem to be alluding to like some kind of guardian angels,
or some sort of subtle beings, or something or other. Is that what you're saying?
I am. I am. Even now, all these years later, and all the decades of practice, and all the decades
of study, I'm hesitant to put some cultural trappings around them. Mostly because I don't know.
Do I mind my social construction? What I was exposed to? How Kimberly, with her history
and her experiences. And we tend to make meaning out of these extraordinary experiences or spiritual
experiences based on those things. That makes sense. My sense now is the company, the insight.
When I ask, I get an answer. When I need help, it comes. You have to ask, people. You have to ask.
Please remember this, you have to ask. But if you ask, you shall be answered. It might not come,
likely won't come in the way you think it does. But my sense now, if I were to frame it, is
it's where we all meet. It's all of our ultimate self. Because it's out of time, it feels in a way
like it's my best future self. And that sounds like a contradiction. But the being that I am,
and the being I am becoming, both at once. And when I say I, I mean all of us. You know,
we're these human beings walking around having these spiritual experiences every day. And one
thing I've seen is where ultimately, you know, we walk around as these relative people with
social security numbers and we're sick or have this issue or this issue, but ultimately, it's
where we all meet. So it's less individual and more collective, if that makes sense.
Yeah, a couple of thoughts. Firstly, what you were saying reminded me of that Bible verse of
"seeking ye shall find, knocking the door shall be opened." Once you have the intention. I've seen
that so many times. Sometimes people are literally, "I can't take it anymore," and they're on their
knees praying, and then something happens. That's what happened to you. Yeah. Once the intention is
sincere and ardent enough, "Okay, we hear you. We're coming."
One of the messages I got, you know, when I sat up, it's wonderful to recall that experience too.
So thank you for asking. It was probably the big one of my spiritual life.
This extraordinary experience I had. I started to get these little messages and the first one was
ask the question you have to ask. And I'm surprised even now how often I forget.
We sort of feel lost in the woods sometimes, but we're not actually asking.
And then the second one was pay attention, pay attention to what's happening, you know,
develop these senses of attention to what's happening in the moment. And that's served me
well since then. Another thing that comes to mind as you were describing this structure of the
reality that we're talking about, you know, in terms of its universality, how it's our shared
ground state, you could say, is that it is that, but it also arises in impulses, like the ocean,
you know, all the waves have a common source in terms of their ocean-ness, but then they also
have their individual wave expression, and there are other waves which might interact with them
in some way. For me, it's always useful to have a multi-dimensional perspective and not ever say
that it's all this or it's all that. Yes, agreed, agreed. And the wave and ocean metaphor is a
wonderful one to feel into what I'm trying to use words to describe. I just plunged full-on
into the ocean in that experience and came back down as the wave.
Wave now realizing that you have an ocean aspect to you. You're not merely a wave.
Right, but was I enlightened? Was I fully awakened? Was I even awakened? I'm not so sure.
Those are tricky words. We'll get into them. I have to do the work. I have to do the work for that.
So you came out of this experience and it was were you like, OMG, what just happened?
What should I do now? It must have altered your trajectory and gotten you going on things that
you wouldn't have anticipated getting into. Yes, it did indeed. You know, it took a few weeks,
a couple months for me to take a sabbatical from my job just to name check Starbucks again. They
They were extremely kind to me, extremely generous.
They allowed me to take a two year sabbatical,
which ended up being leaving for good.
But I knew I needed to go find others who,
I didn't need someone to explain it to me,
but I knew, obviously, I was not the only person
who had had experiences like this.
Clearly, I was not special.
That was obvious.
I'm not putting myself down.
It was just reality.
Other people had obviously experienced things like this.
This is before Google.
So I couldn't Google, Oh, orgasmic bliss experience, leaving your body.
That wasn't something that I could do at the time.
And I had been given the message, go study Buddhism, go study yoga and Buddhism.
So within a few months, I moved to the most beautiful place I'd ever been.
I had enough money, thanks to my well-paying job to take a couple of years off.
and I started to try and meditate.
And I found, Sounds True was a pretty new
publishing company at the time.
Amazon, just in the past two years, had started to,
they were just shipping books back then.
- Yeah, it started with books.
- It started with books.
And I found Ken Wilber also at the same time.
So I started to read Pema Chodron books,
for your listeners who may know,
the Tibetan Buddhist books.
The Dalai Lama was a bestseller at the time.
He had written "The Art of Happiness"
I think the year before.
So I started listening,
and as soon as I started listening to Tibetan Buddhism,
and at the same time digging into
Ken Wilber's "Integral Philosophy,"
those two domains, they knew what I was talking about.
And that's what I wanted to learn.
It was so similar to my experiences,
many of the things that these two arenas were pointing out,
that I just started devouring these books.
I tried to figure out how to meditate.
I continued to have what we call state experiences,
temporary experiences that are novel and extraordinary,
but I was still Kimberly.
I was still everyday Kimberly
and figuring out how to have a life.
I met my partner who ended up being my partner
for seven years at the time,
somebody who also studied Tibetan Buddhism
and Wilbur's work deeply out here in the middle of nowhere
in this beautiful valley that I now live in again.
And we went to Nepal and went to the Himalayas,
and I studied at Khopan Monastery.
I found the arena where people were talking
about what I wanted to talk about
and asking the questions that I wanted
to figure out the answers to.
That's how I got particularly
into Tibetan Buddhism very deeply.
And then it went from there.
But at that point, I went full on as a Dharma,
we won't call it a Dharma bum,
but as a Dharma, which is the study of spiritual wisdom,
particularly Indo-Tibetan Buddhism.
It's not just Tibetan Buddhism, it's Indo-Tibetan Buddhism,
and got very seriously aligned with the lineage
of the Dalai Lama as my particular domain study.
- And so I presume they had translators in this monastery
and you were able to read.
Did you learn any Tibetan?
- Yes, I did learn some Tibetan.
I never was one of those people who completely got into translating, but I learned enough
to read it simply.
I learned a pretty extensive vocabulary, which you just learn after studying the texts for
so long.
My journey into Indo-Tibetan Buddhism.
So this was now, let's see, I went to Nepal in '99, 2000.
I remember because we did a trek to Everest.
we went up to Everest base camp right after a six week retreat outside of Kathmandu in
Bodnath.
If anybody of your listeners have been to Bodnath, it's an enclave just outside of Kathmandu
where there are many beautiful Tibetan Buddhist monasteries.
Yeah, it was 99-2000 because I remember we were in Namtse Bazar, which is a town on the
way up to Everest on New Year's Eve, 99-2000.
I remember that Rick, it was like the world was going to end or something when it turned
Oh, Y2K, right.
Y2K, that was it.
Yeah, I was out there in the middle of the Himalayas when that happened.
Everything was fine though, wasn't it?
Yeah, it turned out okay.
It turned out okay.
And at the time I was studying with Rinpoches.
I was studying with Lama Zopa Rinpoche,
who's well known in certain circles.
Studying with Tibetan Buddhists.
And it was wonderful,
and it was exciting.
And then I started to meet the next generation,
the first generation of Americans
Americans and Westerners that had also gone to India and also gone to Tibet and learned
the teachings and brought them back. And it was really when I found a community of Western
educated first and second generation American, let's just say for lack of a better word,
Tibetan Buddhists, that it really took off. I think if I had stayed, you know, you go
to these temples, it's all in Tibetan, there's a lot of cultural trappings, it's all beautiful,
But that's not what appealed to me.
It was the application of the wisdom and how we can apply it to our modern life, while
also integrating modernity and what we know about modernity at the same time.
So I found some American teachers and communities and started to study very deeply for the next
12 years.
And a lot of retreats, started teaching about halfway through that, encouraged by my teachers
to do so.
So I heard you mention retreats.
How much long retreat did you do?
Did you do them in some kind of monastic setting or were you just doing them in your little
cabin and on your own?
What kind of experiences did you have on these long retreats?
Well, if I added them up, it's years of solitary retreat.
My traditional practice for doing solitary is I would do one to two, usually two, during
this 12-year period, five to six weeks solitaries a year.
So you go in for five to six weeks.
These are what you call "lerams" or tantric retreats.
Once you go through the Indo-Tibetan Buddhist study path and you do all of the purvakas
and you have certain realizations, you enter the path of Vajrayana or the Diamond Way or
Tantra.
And when I say Tantra, people think all these things, it's not any of that, it's not Neo-Tantra,
it's not what you Google.
Vajrayana, Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Tantra, is an old, traditional, very well laid out path of practice.
It has two different stages of it in my lineage, in the Anuttara Yoga Tantra lineage. There are deities,
but when you enter that path and you get these tantric empowerments, you make a commitment to do
a certain amount of solitary retreats. So I would go in and I did it in sometimes I did it in...
Quick question. What does the word tantra itself mean if you translate it into English?
It means thread. Yeah.
Like sutra in Sanskrit.
It means sutra. Yeah, it's another word for sutra. It means thread and it means
lineage. It means lots of different things, right? The main thing that it means.
So to do these retreats, did you have to get some kind of approval or certification from
Teachers more experienced than yourself. I don't think most people would do this
But if somebody without the proper training or understanding were to think I'm gonna do a six-month retreat
I'll just go sit in a little hut someplace and do this on my own. I don't know if that would go too well
Yeah, have fun. It would either be really boring or really dangerous or somewhere in between
Believe me. I've done some of these long things to six months here six months there and you get pretty nutty at times
You know, you really need some kind of stabilization and people checking on you and things like that. Yes and
stable psychology which perhaps will come to later the need for
Modernity as well to give us the gifts of what we know of psychological wisdom
Yes
So these particular tantric retreats that I'm talking about I'm a Vajrayogini
practitioner. Bhajagini is, if you think of it as like an archetype or a deity that you
practice. And so it's very rigorous. You're not just going into a cabin and thinking about
nothing. There's a ritual to go in, there's a ritual to go out. I would usually do it,
I'd find an off-grid cabin somewhere and there are various places around mostly the Southwest
that I did it. My first layaram again, that's a word that means to get ready to practice
later stages of Tantra practice, which have to do with your working with your wind, what we call
your winds, channels and drops, your subtle body, your energy body. You're doing very technical
visualizations and practices, working with the inner energies of your inner body, right? And
the mass of your inner body. So these Tantra retreats, you have a ritual that's like a 1500
year old ritual to go in. You're meditating four times a day. It's a four-part retreat.
You do a long meditation session before the sun rises, another before noon, a third before the
sun sets, and a fourth before bed. You're doing yoga, you're eating very healthy, you're not
seeing anybody, talking to anybody. I got to the point where I could hear the electricity,
the sounds of just electricity in the walls, I could hear and would be disturbing. So I would
I would usually do an off-grid cabin somewhere.
There are many places if you know where to look.
Sometimes you just rent a little house somewhere.
And you go in and it's very rigorous.
You don't see anybody, you don't have books,
you don't have your phone, you don't have your computer,
but you're busy.
- You have to go into town to buy food?
- No, you don't see anybody.
- How do you get your food?
- Yeah, so you learn how long cauliflower lasts
in a cabin.
(laughing)
In your cooler or your refrigerator
you're unplugging for your meditation sessions. There's different ways to do it. What usually
happens is you have a caretaker that does deliveries for you once a week or once every two weeks.
Some people like to go on retreat and have people cook for them and deliver food. I didn't.
That was way too distracting for me. I would start fantasizing about the person who was
delivering food and leave them notes and leave them like it was completely distracting. So
So I needed to be really on my own.
There are places set up for it.
There's a town called Preston, Colorado, which listeners, there's wonderful retreat places
out there with caretakers that will give you deliveries.
And there's always a system, you don't need, we're not silly, right?
Let's not be silly.
There's always a system where if you need help, if you're in danger, if you hurt yourself,
there's a way to alert somebody.
So that's always the case too.
So what kind of experiences did you have on these things?
I'm sure it wasn't about this experience or that experience.
It was a higher, broader, more abiding purpose, but there must have been some interesting
things along the way.
Oh yeah, we can talk about the interesting things.
Well, zooming out for a second, one thing I can say is over this course of 12 years
as I was doing these retreats, I know that I grew.
Kimberly, who has her personality and her parts and her shadows and her issues and her
traumas. I know that it helped me grow up psychologically. I'm aware of that and I got that feedback
that that was the case. So that's a good thing. In terms of the experiences, the first retreat
I did, the first lay-around retreat, I'd done a lot of other solitaries at this point, but
the first Tantric retreat I did where I went in, I was a new Vajrayogini practitioner.
And Vajrayogini is this archetype of bliss. She's a feminine wisdom. She's what we call
a bikini, she's considered the feminine Buddha of all the Buddhas, like the awakened feminine
energy and that she uses desire and passion and love to awaken herself and help others
awake, wake up and grow up both. She's very sexy and she's very alive. She's got these
little teeth and she's considered semi-wrathful. She's not one of those wrathful deities like
Kali where she's going to cut your head off or something. She's just a little bit wrathful.
Perfect for me. Just very attracted. And you're calling on this, yes, second person deity,
which the texts say actually exists, right? You can believe it or not out there, but they exist
as actually a dimensional being in the world. They exist as the realization of bliss wisdom itself,
and they exist as who we are becoming. In Tibetan Buddhist Tantra you take these energies and these
archetypes and you absorb them into yourself and that's what people either love about it or don't
love about it. You're taking these energies and you're bringing them into yourself so that you
are becoming a deity yourself like that. An awakened being, not a deity like "oh i'm a goddess,
i'm so great" nothing like that. It's this awakened love bliss wisdom. So I went on my first lay around
My first retreat was Vajra Gini and by the way, she's red. She's the color red and the texts say
that she's like light like she's shining in this sort of ruby red light. The texts say she's red
because she's in love with you and love with all beings which is really sweet like she has a crush
on you. My first retreat was at a cabin, a little cabin off grid in the Sierra Nevada mountains.
My friend Brian kindly let me use his cabin.
You had to hike in like a mile.
And it was hiking in with my water and going back
and getting another load of things and going back in.
And I had just closed, it's called a sum boundary.
I had just closed a boundary.
It's an energetic boundary.
Tibetan Buddhism, I say it often,
it's a mashup of Indian Buddhism,
Meeting bone shamanism, which was the religion of Tibet at the time like in a hill tribe
religion, um, very shamanistic
A lot of spirits and nature spirits and I love all that stuff. I grew up catholic. I love saints and
incense and deities and
Mysticism and I also grew up in the new age, right?
So all of that stuff fit me very well
But I went in and I closed my boundary where you walked the four corners you walk the four directions
And you set this energetic boundary and you make offerings and you ask
Any spirits inside or out right inside or out that are going to?
Create obstacles in your retreat you ask them to leave
And you ask your own yeah, you can think of them as guardian angels or ancestors
My grandmothers are with me on these retreats both of them
You asked them to support you and be there with you and I closed my retreat and I went back to my little
Cabin, I still remember it so clearly
And I looked up into the sky
And there was this red fireball like bright red and I had just done these prayers to
This red lady to be to teach me and to help me grow up and wake up in our secular language
And there was this red fireball with my eyeballs
I was totally sober, totally straight, not on anything.
You know, I'm like, "Am I seeing what I'm seeing?"
And it was quite large and right above my head,
and it floated across the sky.
And it was a little terrifying.
It was a little terrifying.
You know, in my body,
I didn't start to spin stories about it,
but I had just done this long ancient prayer
to this red lady.
I remember it was kind of getting close to bedtime,
And I went inside and I kind of put myself to sleep, like, it's going to be okay.
And I had amazing dreams that night.
And that was one of the most powerful retreats, you know, the first one that I
did, and there were other extraordinary experiences, anomalous experiences, which
later became a field of study in the next era of my life after this particular era.
I started to study extraordinary experiences and how we make meaning of
them based in large part on the experiences that I've had.
I remember you saying at one time you didn't set the boundaries properly or something and
you kind of came under attack and the window shutters were flapping even though there was
no wind and there was all this crazy stuff going on.
Yeah, that was the second lay-around, the second retreat.
And this one was in an old guardhouse on ancient Apache land that was fought over.
very, very sad, tragic story of what happened to the Apache and what the American military
did to them, of course, and their land. And this land was very bloody. There's a lot of
blood shed on this land. This little stone guardhouse, 150 years old at least, was right
by a spring. And the spring, this is in the Chiricahua Mountains, the spring was guarded.
They had to guard the spring and keep, you know, keep it for the military and keep anybody
else away from it. And I went in, it was just a little bed, you know, it was a tiny room.
And I went in and I'd had such a good first retreat, and I'd had a lot of realizations
and I could feel myself growing and I took a very Sapha Mark approach to this. I didn't
do all of the rituals that you're supposed to do to protect yourself because even now
my modern mind is like, oh, do I need to make those particular cakes you need to make in
Tibetan Buddhism, you have to make these cakes and you make them out of bread and flour and milk.
You know, imagine getting a bunch of Wonder Bread and tearing it up and putting stuff in there and
forming it into certain things and then cutting up this processed cheese and sticking it on there
with toothpicks. I was like, "Is this cultural trappings? I mean, do I really need to do this?
I'm waking up and I'm growing." And I didn't take it very seriously because I was such a great
practitioner and so advanced you see and I went to sleep that night and I had a dream I still see it
so clearly in my mind where I was staying at some beach house and I left the sliding glass doors
open like I literally left the doors open and I remember still can see his face I remember this
if we think of it as sort of a demon-like creature like a scary looking monster-like creature was
coming to the glass door and looking in and looking at me and I knew I was dreaming it was a lucid
dream. And so I woke myself up in the dream and yes, there were papers flying all over the place.
This old window was flapping open. I went outside, there's no wind, and I could hear again with my
ears, with the five senses, not a meditative hearing, but a hear with my ears chanting.
And you know, I might say it's Native American sounding chanting, I don't know,
But that's how it sounded to me how I classified it deep chanting. I was afraid I wasn't scared
But I knew it was a lesson to take things seriously
And I went back inside and I did the mantras I was supposed to do and I purified things
And the lesson there for me, it wasn't that oh
You did it wrong. They're attacking you
It's that the way we treat our practice our practices, you know, we say in Buddhism. It's empty
It's empty of any self-existence of its own. It has no power from its own side to wake us up
It has no power from its own side to harm us whatsoever
But the way we treat our practice equates to the results we get and so if I take my practice
Seriously, of course, I'm gonna get better results, right if I cut corners and think I'm so great and
Lack humility and lack vigor and rigor in my practice and what kind of results am I gonna get?
It's just like anything else like you're married. I'm married. Of course our quality of our relationship
Depends on how we treat it
If we treat our relationship with reverence and joy and honor, of course, we're gonna get better results
So what I took from that lesson, it wasn't some oh, they're gonna hurt you or it was treat your practice
Practice seriously. Do it well. And that's going to create the results that you get.
Interesting. Yeah, I was on a six-month course one time led by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and we
were in Biarritz, France at that point. And one day he said, "Keep your windows closed."
And then when I went to bed that night, I thought, "I like fresh air. I'm going to leave my window
open a little bit." And that night, I actually had some kind of dream where I was attacked
by some kind of witch-like creature. And I started doing a Sanskrit puja in my mind and
that kind of dispelled it. But I thought, okay, I'll put a little in those.
Yeah. And also, I believe after all of these years, it's a multi dimensional universe.
It's populated with many things known and unknown. And we are obviously not alone. Right?
And that has proven to me in my own experience through the decades.
Is there anything more you want to say about your whole Tibetan Buddhist area? You and I
I could do an interview every day for a month and we wouldn't run out of things to talk
about.
But is there anything you want to say about this chapter before we move on to anomalous
experiences and some other things?
I know many of the listeners, Tibetan Buddhism, Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, for me is an absolutely
precious, precious gift to humanity.
It is the most complex spiritual technology that I'm aware of that we have.
It was a whole culture.
It was a whole social system devoted not to making money or devoted not to advancing technology
as one of my teachers says, "Yeah, Tibet's technology didn't get much more advanced than
yak butter."
I think it was Ken Wilber is the one who said that.
However, spiritual technology is the most advanced out there and I have found that to
be true.
So it is a precious gem that part of my mission is to preserve it, save it, and get the jewels
because I feel like I got the jewels. It also, as Americans or Westerners, as, you know,
not monks in a monastery somewhere, it needs updating and it needs integration with psychology
and with the gifts and tools that we have now. And that's what I'd like to see because there can be
abuses and there can be problems and we, many of us have heard of those. I certainly am not blind
to the issues of Tibetan Buddhism with gurus who have not dealt with their shadows and I have my
own stories. Again, that could be a whole other podcast about that. And yet, such precious
opportunity for evolving and developing our waking up process. And for me, waking up and growing up
are deeply intertwined. You may know the word "kavach" in Sanskrit, which means like an armor.
it's said that there's perhaps an individual coverage which we're kind of just talking about in terms of your preparation for that retreat and
There can also be a an irrustria coverage or a national
armor in a sense that is created sort of by the coherence or the spiritual potency of the
Collective consciousness of the people so one wonders. Well, what happened to the bet?
There was there's some kind of corruption in there which caused them to be susceptible to the chinese
invasion or was perhaps the Chinese invasion some kind of cosmic play to get them out of
Tibetan more into the world so the rest of the world could partake of their wisdom?
Yeah, I mean I've been educated, I've had education that is comparable to a Geshe.
Geshe is like having two PhDs in Tibetan Buddhism and if
1959 didn't happen, if diaspora didn't happen, I would have never had that opportunity.
So what is it really, Rick? Is it true that they were corrupt or is it true that it was meant to be?
Well, what functions? What's most effective? What is the best way we can see this
that is the most true for us? And for me, I think I just answered that question. If the diaspora
didn't happen, if my teacher didn't walk over the Himalayas and go into India and then start to
spread this wisdom that was surrounded by the Himalayas and held secret for so long, I never
would have had the opportunity or to find beings and people that could help me figure out and
integrate that experience I had in Boston. Uh-huh, interesting. So thanks Mao Tse-Tung.
Yeah. However you pronounce your name. Yeah, it's interesting. Sometimes there are these really
horrible, catastrophic things that happen, but then the consequence is that humanity seems to
to learn a lesson and something good comes out of it.
Trauma to transcendence.
Yeah.
What's going on there?
Okay, so, spiritual development from modern research and ancient tradition does waking
up automatically grow us up?
Is that what we want to talk about next?
Sure, we could.
Do states of consciousness and states of ego development intersect?
And my answer to the first question is, sorry, I used to think that waking up automatically
grew us up, but there's precious little evidence of it.
Yes, well, I think the mistake that we make often is we have this extraordinary
say unity experience, experience of oneness.
And it can happen with children.
Children have experiences of oneness maybe with a mountain or with
swimming with dolphins.
And adults too, right? We have these experiences with trees or in nature
or maybe we take some substance and we feel in our being, in our body,
our body, how our body is connected to everything and we are all one.
And that's wonderful, right? It's glorious. It's a wonderful experience.
And then later we start to wake up to the realization that
we are socially constructed beings,
that Rick is Rick and what he calls himself based
on how he was raised,
the content and context that you were exposed to as
you were growing up your whole story,
which I'd love to ask you all about sometime,
that got you to France and got you into the Tian movement
and all of these things.
And we are constructed based on our exposure
and experiences as we are growing up.
And we start to see that we're also not that,
that there's something perhaps below that or under that
that is more our true nature.
And we start to see that we can release
the social constructions, we can release our context,
we can release these beliefs of what we are.
And that identity of self continues to grow.
And eventually we begin to see that we are awareness itself.
And we are aware of awareness that I am,
you are, the you looking through your eyes into my eyes
and me looking out through your eyes
is this same awareness that we share
and that everything I could possibly perceive
you could possibly perceive in this room and listeners in the room you're sitting in, all
that you perceive is arising in you, the big you, the capital Y you, not the little you
with the social security number. Even say your name to yourself is arising in your awareness.
And so we see, and this is where our study at Stages International and constructive developmental
theory comes in, we can see from the science side, from the research side, how our identity of what
we call ourselves evolves and grows through our lifespan and is tied to these continuals throughout
our lifespan waking up experiences. So to answer your question, no, like spiritual teachers that
go out and like, "Oh, I had this experience and now I'm fully enlightened." I don't quite believe
there's a fully enlightened, personally. There's no end point. We have these experiences and then
we come back down from them and almost always we're still the same person that we were.
But those waking up experiences we're finding tend to be natural. They happen to virtually
everybody. They might not call it that, but this developmental pattern we see of how our identity
changes is something we all share as humans. No matter what our culture, no matter what our
background, if we have educational opportunities, we can progress perhaps faster or farther,
but there is this deep intersection we notice between waking up and change. Our identity
continuously changes, like who you are today, Rick, and how you see the world and how you see yourself
is obviously very different than when you were 10.
And different, I would say, when you were 20.
That's for sure.
When you were 30, and on and on.
Now, an interesting question is,
let's say, if I had not been doing spiritual practice all those years,
how different would I be than what I am now?
I think I wouldn't even be alive, but presuming I had lived,
I also think I would be very different.
But some people argue that the growth that we experience through spiritual endeavors
is just normal maturation and we're putting some kind of spin on it with all of our spiritual
lingo that we've immersed ourselves in.
- Mm-hmm, could be. You know, I could see that argument.
- That would be an interesting area for scientific study if that could be measured somehow.
- Yeah. Well, it's interesting. We find that there are certain things that are necessary
but not sufficient for growth. And part of it is this cognitive maturity that happens
in terms of subject-object, in terms of how we're seeing ourselves and how we see the
world. The transformational process, I think, is of the, we'll call it identity or the ego,
was explained very beautifully by the educator-scholar Robert Keegan, Bob Keegan, out of the Harvard
School of Education. He's really a great leader in this field and he described the subject-object
process. That transformation happens when what was previously hidden from us becomes an object
of our awareness. What was previously subject becomes object and a new subject is replacing it.
So that's a lot of fancy words for saying, let's say this, we're all going around looking at the
world with a pair of colored glasses on that we're not aware that we're wearing.
That's a metaphor for the subjective state of mind.
The transformation process of our identity or in this case let's call it our ego.
Now everybody when I'm saying ego it's not a negative thing.
I'm using it as a neutral term so just think of it as a neutral term like identity.
The transformational process is when we take off those glasses or maybe they fall off or
or maybe someone takes them off and hands it to us.
That's kind of the mystery of how that happens.
But we take off those glasses and we look at them
and we see, I've been seeing the world through this way.
And now it's an object.
And we have a new pair of glasses on that we can't see.
And that's the subject object process.
And as we continue to take off our glasses
throughout our lifespan and see,
oh, I've been seeing the world this way.
We might not use those words.
That's how we actually continue to evolve and grow.
And that's very well tracked.
And I encourage everybody to check out Stages International
and the courses we're doing there.
I'm not getting a kickback from that.
It's not a financial benefit for me, nothing like that,
but it really is the best developmental framework
that I'm aware of that answers this question.
And we're continuing to explore this question
of how that waking up and growing up process intercepts.
What is that process of evolution of our identity
as we grow?
I don't think we're anywhere near there yet, but it'd be interesting if all these stages
of development that both psychology understands and spiritual traditions understand could be
thoroughly mapped and correlated so that we can figure out how the language connects between
different cultures that are actually describing the same thing, and also correlated with neurophysiological
measures as waking, dreaming, and sleeping have been.
Yes, indeed.
And there are some fantastic maps out there.
Whenever we do a map in these areas, it's like everybody has a way of, one of my teachers
said sort of, cutting up reality and talking about it, right?
The work of Ken Wilber has some beautiful maps that he's the great synthesizer and he
puts all the different theoretical maps together so you can look and see, oh this map is measuring
identity, this map is measuring spiritual intelligence, this map is measuring cognitive
development, because they're all measuring different things.
I love what you're talking about, neurobiology too.
And these maps are really a matrix of consciousness, you know, how our consciousness evolves, how
our consciousness develops, and that's really the research that we're doing.
Great.
Let me get a couple questions in here that people sent in.
This is from Marty McConnell in Chicago.
How do you reconcile or connect such an ancient practice as Buddhism with modern thinking,
with science and technology and even therapeutic approaches?
How do you connect the two?
How do you reconcile and connect, juxtapose and harmonize this ancient knowledge that you've been
studying with modern knowledge, which you've also been studying? Yeah, thanks, Marty. Because that is
the work, the mission, the experiment of my life and what we're doing at the Confluence
Experiences. We're looking at how we can bring together in a confluence these two great traditions
of spirit and mind, of spirituality and psychology, how we're figuring it out. One thing is to
release the nonsense, the cultural trappings or the parts of Buddhism that just don't function
or work well in modernity and doing that very carefully and very cautiously. For example,
the practice of Guru Yoga, the whole Guru thing. There's so much silliness in it and yet there's
also a point for the ego having something, somebody to bend its knee to, to actually
admit to our modern mind, our individualistic mind that thinks we have everything figured
out that somebody else can teach me something, right? That itself is difficult for the modern
mind. For example, Guru Yoga, how do you not throw out the baby with the bathwater, to
use a common term, but yet let go of the cultural ridiculousness for us, right? The stuff that
doesn't really apply anymore and keep the gold. You know, throw out the dross, keep the gold.
And then psychology... Before you get off that point, I would say one of the biggest challenges
there is on the guru's shoulders to have the maturity not to have all the adulation go to
his head, which 95% of the time it seems to do, causing all kinds of problems. Yes, we'll get
there, but this is a huge part of our mission and work at the Association for Spiritual Integrity is
How do we help and support our spiritual teachers of multiple denominations or non-denominations
to do that well? And a lot of teachers these days are trying to adopt a non-hierarchical
approach, even in the way they arrange the chairs. And it's still obvious that they're
kind of the leader, but there's an attempt to sort of say, "Hey, we're all in this together."
Right. We could talk about it a lot. This is what we're experimenting with and doing at the
confluence experience. I started a tantra group, a Vajrayana cohort. We're a year in. For the first
time in 12 years, I started one. And there is a horizontal power structure in terms of, "I'm
Kimberly. I'm vulnerable. I don't have anything to hide. I'll tell you about the argument I had
this morning with my husband. I'm clearly doing shadow work. I'm there with you as a fellow
spiritual aspirants. And yet, and yet, my job is to be the holder of that seat. My job as the lineage
holder is when I am giving, say, a tantric empowerment, which I'm doing in a month,
if I don't hold that as not Kimberly, it's not Kimberly holding it. If I don't take that seat,
then I can't help anybody. And I didn't spend those 15, 20 years. What good was it? Right? So
It's this flex flow between a horizontal power structure when it's appropriate.
People hate the word, but it's not a power hierarchy.
It's an experience hierarchy.
Yeah, and kind of a knowledge-wisdom hierarchy.
A knowledge-wisdom hierarchy.
And then in our circle, I'm not making the business decisions.
Somebody with more business experience is making the business decisions
because they hold the seat in that case.
Our AI expert in the field is making the AI decisions.
So we're experimenting with this flex flow structure where when it's appropriate, it's
horizontal.
When it's appropriate, the person who has the most experience in that domain is the
one who's leading us because then we're leaderless and you can't go very far.
And that's the way the world works.
You don't spend tens of thousands of dollars to go to university to study with a bunch
of people that don't know any more than you do. The whole assumption is that these guys
really know something and that's why I want to spend time in their presence. But then,
on the other hand, it doesn't grant these professors the liberty to do whatever they
want and to dismiss you if you question what they're doing. Like if they want to sleep
with all their female students or something, their knowledge of physics does not excuse
that kind of behavior. And I would say the same should be true of any kind of supposed
spiritual attainment. Because you know, you and I have heard these stories about people saying,
"Oh, I'm not sleeping with the women, it's God doing it, and I'm just an instrument of God and
yada yada." Yeah, oh please, oh please. Just to get it on the tape, every spiritual teacher,
so those of you out there, you want to progress spiritually, you want to increase your spiritual
intelligence, your spiritual wisdom, have waking up experiences, wisdom, love, care, compassion.
It's like learning anything else go find a community a teacher
That help you learn and that teacher whoever it is or that community
Should have some sort of feedback process
Should be doing their own
psychological shadow work therapeutic work
Should also be a person be human
You can be human and divine
At the same time and that actually we all are and that's part of the path that we walk. Yeah
And just one more point to throw in here is that I've had people actually argue with me that there is no correlation between
awakening and
Behavior you can be an awakened drunkard you can be an awakened womanizer or whatever and I disagree
Like in the beginning you were you starting to use the terms of awakening or enlightenment?
Things like that a little bit and we both sort of got a little skittish when we use those words
But if we're going to use them, then we shouldn't just be referring to some inner state of consciousness
we should be referring to a holistic development that has somehow occurred in which you are
really walking your talk and all the various purifications have taken place in whatever
way that is understood. It's understood differently by different traditions, but most traditions
do emphasize the importance of an ethical foundation and a real purification of one's
whole mind-body system, emotional system, and shadow system, and all that other stuff,
you're really going to be a fit reflector or receptacle for this higher consciousness.
Yes, yes, you said it right. Two points I want to make about that. You can truly tell
spiritual wisdom by behavior. It's about behavior. Does behavior change? And people, you go out,
say you have some psychedelic experience, you have some awakening, whatever experience,
your behavior change? It's all about am I kinder? Am I wiser to self and others? You're a person too.
Am I kinder? Am I wiser? Am I more compassionate? Am I starting to take off those glasses
and see with new eyes? The other thing, and this is very, very strong in the lineage of
Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, the big goal is to see what we call emptiness, which has a lot of meanings in
itself that is an evolving thing, or ultimate reality, or a satori, right, where you perceive,
you pierce reality directly and see how reality functions for yourself. Nobody can tell you or
tell you to believe it. It's not really a belief system. It's a path of practice where you see
and experience realization for yourself. Yeah, it would be absurd to say, "I believe I'm holding a
pen here. It's obvious.
Exactly. So in the old
reperche to my own lived
experience of this, there's no disagreement. You know
you've had a real experience of wisdom. You've had a
real capital R realization. It's called a
tokpa. It's an embodied realization like the
real deal, awakening and whatever. If
automatically, spontaneously
naturally, your heart opens. And
there's a, "Oh my gosh, I've got to change the way I do things. Oh my gosh, I want to
care for other people. Oh my gosh, I want to be loving and more compassionate and more
forgiving of selves and others." So if that compassionate side and experience doesn't
immediately follow the wisdom side, then we're off base somewhere. The two go together like
two wings of a bird.
Yeah, now bring in the chakra model. I think that there could be awakenings in some chakra,
maybe the head chakra or whatever, without a corresponding awakening in the heart chakra.
So it can be a partial development or partial awakening. And some of these things can be very
intoxicating and convincing. And you know, one can jump to all kinds of conclusions about one's
state of development or completion. But that's why, as you said earlier, there is no end to it.
I think we're all works in progress. It's like the word education. Are you educated? Yeah, I'm educated
Could you be more educated? Of course, you know, I could always learn more
Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah, that's really true
And it's interesting too about the chakras because in my practice and in the tantric vajrayana practice that we do
the you know very loosely you
Develop wisdom cognitively and through embodied experience develop compassion
start to change your behavior. And then once that foundation is laid, once the what we call shadow
work is done, you know, once we've done a lot of healing of our early childhood stuff and the things
that have happened in our life, and we've applied the psychological tools that we also have at our
disposal, as modern complex humans, then you start to work with opening up those chakras,
which are not pretty little flowers, they're choke points in our body. And this is the system,
the technology of Tibetan Buddhism that we have an energetic subtle body and you start to work with
shooting energy and opening energy up to open the heart, to ground and to open up different areas of
our body. Good. The point you just made might relate to a question that Alyssa from New York
State asked. In practicing both Western psychological development lines and a Tibetan
Buddhist Vajrayana worldview, I struggle with the fact that a lot of Western developmental psychology
models are defined by social, educational, economic norms, many of which I don't necessarily
agree with, and more importantly, they are not uniform across cultures, versus the transcendent
model of Buddhism.
It's a great point. It's a great point, Alyssa. I mean, no doubt you could argue that these
developmental models were created in the context of the frame of Western-educated, usually
white people, you know, creating these models and doing these studies, mostly with Western
educated white people, that is certainly true. And the social context and constructs that
we have, that's relative reality. And that's what creates our relative reality. So fair
point. On the other hand, there is so much data and research that is cross cultural that
these human waves that we go through or stages or structures. You can think of it like rungs on a
ladder or as one of my teachers more accurately defines it, it's like a balloon. Like we were
talking about, Rick now is very different than he was in other areas of our life. Our growth is more
like a balloon. And there is quite a lot of evidence that all humans all around the world
go through these waves or structures of human becoming in a very similar way. They're deep
features similar with surface structures that look different. And there really isn't argument in,
again, yes, it's the academic world. It's going to have its own sort of rules and languages and
ways of seeing, but there's been just literally dozens and dozens and dozens of studies that are
cross-cultural that validate this data. Let me ask you a couple of questions from Rin Esser in Turkey.
And Rin makes a point that she's a female because we wouldn't necessarily know that from the name.
So first question, why does non-duality make so many people impractical in daily life as if
in a vegetative state? It puts me in this space of non-thinking and being non-engaged with life.
Oh, well stop doing it, girl.
What a beautiful question and thank you for asking it.
You know, non-duality is a big topic.
There's a lot of things we can be non-dual with.
Who's the looker? What's the object? What's the subject?
But if anything is bringing you to that place,
then I would try something else.
Yeah, I would encourage you, Rin,
to watch my interview with Jessica Eve.
We talked about this at great length.
And there's a verse in the Gita. It says,
is Yoga Karma Sukhosalam. Yoga is skill in action. And yoga is non-duality. It's union.
So if you're really experiencing non-duality, you should be actually more dynamic, more
skillful, more effective in action. And if you're not, then something's missing.
Yes.
And here's a second one from the same person. What does it mean when you say you can find
anything by going inside? As a non-awakened human, when I look inside for guidance, I
I feel confused and not finding answers to my questions.
What can I do to get clear guidance?
- Thank you for that.
I appreciate the opportunity to clarify that.
So thank you for the question.
Speaking of my personal lived experience,
when I go inside, I find the cosmos.
And by cosmos, I mean capital K Cosmos,
which is beyond space and time.
So by going inside, it's much more than my individuality.
go inside to find the outside, then the two are not one. So, Ren, I would ask you to keep asking the
questions, to find a teacher or a community that you can connect with, that you obviously have a
lot of passion and desire, and the internet provides a lot of opportunity if you're not
finding it in the town that you live, to, you know, connect with me, connect with others, to
keep exploring this, you're not alone. You're not alone. That's what I want to tell you as well.
Good. Okay, unless you have anything else at the tip of your tongue, let's start talking about
anomalous or extraordinary experiences, which you've been researching a lot lately and very
interested in. So anomalous experiences is just another way of saying extraordinary or out of the
ordinary experiences. They're defined as in the literature, meaning in good, grounded
psychological literature, different categories of anomalous experiences. You might find like
that fireball I saw in the sky that one time, things like UFOs you see in the literature,
or craft, or things that you see that seem to be outside of you. Other categories of anomalous
experiences are around time and space, where we have maybe
precognitive dreams, there's lots of good research on data on
people having a dream where they see something in the future, and
then it happens, maybe somebody dies, or there's a car crash.
There's anomalous experiences around death is very common.
Somebody close to you dies, and maybe you get a visitation, or
you know the moment they die. You sit up in bed and you had no idea they were sick, you know they died.
Or around extraordinary experiences, around near-death experiences, those who report near-death
experiences. Lucid dreaming can be categorized as an anomalous experience. What we call non-human
entities, people have encounters with beings that do not seem human. So this is not weird, people.
This is part of our human story. If you look through our literature, through all of our humanities,
it is riddled with these extraordinary experiences, which are not only mythic,
they're not only story, right? Most of us, almost everybody I've ever sat down and talked to and
really started to question have had something, an experience they can't explain. And so I explained
a couple of them. Things that were non-ordinary, that were classified as extraordinary. And I've
had them most of my life. So after my 12 years deeply studying Tibetan Buddhism, I had a calling,
I had a deep call to that that era of my life was complete and that I had sort of gotten stuck. I
plateaued in my own growth and development and I had a very clear vision and call. It was actually
precognitive moment, which perhaps I can get to, where when I met my now husband and I saw
that my future, the next era, was going to involve having a child, being a wife, and getting
out of my precious little bubble and being out in the world. That was a big surprise to me. I did not
expect that this was going to be the next era of my life. And during that time, I went back to
graduate school, I got degrees in human development, I did long years of doctoral work, and I picked
as my dissertation topic, I studied anomalous experiences and how we make meaning of them,
because at the time, as a spiritual teacher I'd been for many years, I am the recipient
of these stories. You have something really wild happen to you, who do you tell? People are going
to think you're crazy, right? Well, I hear the stories. That's the gift I get of holding the
the seed I do as a spiritual friend for people.
And I knew I wasn't crazy.
I knew other people weren't crazy, so I wanted to know.
And my research is not about proving
whether that red fireball was really up there,
or proving whether there were really ghosts or spirits
in my retreat cabin, or proving if you get a visitation
from a being of light, whether it's real or not.
I'm not interested in that.
- It's also very problematic
because this stuff is really hard to prove.
Even if half the population say they have experienced these things, how do we know it's not hallucination?
You know, how do we know they didn't dream it up?
You can't prove it as easily as you can the fact that the earth is not flat, or something
like that.
Yeah, true.
As I was digging into this research and into the modern Western psychological research,
it was very clear there's good work being done, that the majority of people who report
these types of experiences are sane.
They don't display mental health issues other than our normal everyday mental health issues
that we all have.
These are normal, everyday functioning people in the world who, when you sit down and talk
to them, most everybody has a story that they can't explain.
And what happens when we have these experiences often is we go into a sort of ontological
shock.
Rick, maybe you have one that you can share with us.
But you have it sort of out of the ordinary experience and ontological shock just means
how do I make meaning of this?
It's like the mind searches for how to frame this.
What does this mean?
What does this mean about reality?
What does this mean about myself?
And so I started to study the different types of anomalous experiences that people had and
I listed some of them.
And more importantly, I started to look at how the meaning making we make of it, like
how it impacts us and how we frame it to ourselves tends to change as we grow, as we evolve in
our child and our adult lifespan. You know, how we think of it when we're young becomes
different than how we think of it now. And I started to really look at that because it's
also a big part of our humanness, right, is these extraordinary experiences.
And I can hear some people thinking, "Well, don't many different spiritual traditions
and teachers say that such experiences are distractions and you shouldn't pay any attention
to them?
How come she's so into studying this stuff if it's a distraction, if it's a cul-de-sac?"
Yeah, I can understand that.
Well, it's part of our human gift.
It's part of our human story.
And I believe that these extraordinary experiences that we have give us big clues and indicators
of where we're headed and where we're becoming in our human evolution. Because often there's
signs from our future self, these experiences, these encounters that we have start to make
more sense the more we mature and as we go. And that's something that I've definitely seen happen
in this research that I've been doing. And the fact of the matter is people have them,
You're going to have them even if you're not seeking them. I mean, obviously I think you can get obsessed with stuff like this and start seeking it to the
neglect of
Something deeper and and more abiding
but even if you're just going straight for that you're going to have these experiences along the way and
I think on the one hand we could say maybe they're there to be enjoyed
Or to teach us something like if you're driving to california
you might want to stop and see the largest, world's largest ball of string or world's
largest frying pan. Waldrug in western South Dakota, you see the signs for hundreds of miles
before you get to it. So these things are not necessarily, and if they were mere distractions,
why would they be discussed in such great detail in so much spiritual literature? Why
would so many saints and sages have written autobiographies and described those experiences?
Indeed, one of the main takeaways of the study and just listening to people's stories that
relates to everything I've learned in my own spiritual work as well and also in the psychological
work and study that I've done is we think consensus reality is so real.
We think that the way we see things is exactly the way they are and my political view is
true and yours is not true.
We get so boxed in.
It's almost like we're living in our own little phone booths of reality.
And when these experiences happen, like the phone booths gets blown up.
It's like, we start to see that this consensus belief system that we're
operating in, that there's something more, something else is going on.
And that's the why.
It's a way, because these are experiences that so many people have had
outside of any spiritual tradition.
Right?
These are mostly ordinary people living their life.
They're not running off to Tibet or running off to the monastery.
They are ordinary people living their life and something extraordinary happens to them.
And so what is going on?
You know, one of the, this question I've been asking since I was a little kid,
who am I?
What is real?
Why are we here?
I believe that by exploring these anomalous experiences, by taking them seriously and
understanding that they're actually pretty normal, you know, that we can find a clue
in our human story to answer those questions that I've been seeking since I was a kid.
I thought of this as you were telling your initial experience in Boston, that sometimes these
experiences are ways of God or whoever zapping us to create an imprint that we can't forget,
and that is going to impel us to continue to search, kind of like Richard Dreyfus when he
He was a telephone lineman in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
He got zapped by the bright light from the UFO and then it was a brain implant.
He couldn't forget it.
He obsessed about it until he finally reached the goal that it had implanted in him.
Yep, piling those potatoes.
Yeah, right.
This means something.
Yes, I love the way you describe that, Rick, because that to me is more real than this getting
up, going to work, arguing with your neighbor, arguing over politics, what is right, what
is wrong. That to me is capital R real, right? And what is going on there? It's so universal,
it's so steeped in who we were as humans and who we're becoming. That for me, it's like
the golden fleece of wisdom. And we have a lot to learn.
One of my biggest, earliest ontological shocks was the first time I took LSD when I was 17.
And the main takeaway from it was that the shock,
actually shocking realization
that everyone saw the world differently.
I always assumed everyone saw the same world.
That morning after being up all night,
we went into a donut shop and we're buying donuts.
And I was just kind of like marveling
at how I appeared to be seeing the world
just compared to the women selling us the donuts.
And I was thinking, wow,
we're just all in different universes.
And one thing I sometimes wonder
and people have suggested this
is that the psychedelic Renaissance
seems to be taking place now as as untethered as many aspects of it are could be a kind of a
collective jolt to enable lots of people to realize that there's more to life than meets the eye. And
you know, I don't think it's any kind of ultimate solution. They're going to have to get on to more
natural practices and so on, but it could be a sort of catalyst initially, which otherwise the
millions of people who are doing that might not do in any other way. Indeed, yeah, I mean, we can
certainly talk about that, that it is common and I did not include psychedelic experiences in my
study because they're really a category of their own. So the experiences that I was codifying
happened with a "normal state of mind" and more recently really been looking at the psychedelic
renaissance as you say and what a gift it can be to have exactly the experience that you described,
which is taking off those glasses individually and collectively and you looked and saw, wow,
This is how I saw before and now I see differently. It can be very, very useful for that.
And I believe that the psychedelic renaissance seems to be really doing a lot more good than
harm right now. The danger of it is misuse just like everything else and using psychedelics as a
path where this is how I'm going to have this experience instead of learning to do it myself.
If you learn to do it yourself, you can replicate it. So I am pro psychedelics. I'm not saying I'm
against psychedelics. I think the usefulness is very much there. And we need to be really cautious
at the same time, just like anything, right? Anything can be abused. The other thing we see is
with overuse of psychedelics, what we call the self can get dissolved and deconstructed and
blown out again and again and again, so that the self can't quite coalesce. And by self,
I mean, like your identity, your healthy persona, your healthy identity. So we want to make sure
that we don't overuse it. It really is something that should be used as it was intended in our
traditions, including the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, use of substances as a sacred,
rare, precious opportunity that you do, you have an extraordinary experience like you did,
and then you go integrate it. Yeah, some teachers say that it actually damages the subtle body in a
a way. I think Carlos Castaneda's teacher, if he was a real person, and if that's a real
story, said something similar. He kind of gave that to Carlos as a way to kickstart his journey,
but then he said, "Okay, if you keep doing this, it's going to do you harm. Now you have
to do it without."
Yes, exactly right. That's exactly right.
I hear stories of people who don't heed that warning and just going on and on with the stuff
and who just get pretty out of it.
Indeed.
Okay, what next?
You know what, we can talk about the ASI.
We've alluded to some of that stuff, but let's say more.
The Association for Spiritual Integrity I've been working with for two years.
It's the first time in over a decade and a half that I was called to work with a nonprofit
and work with an organization that is focused on supporting, educating, bringing conversation
around spiritual work in the world, specifically how we support spiritual teachers, spiritual
communities in the world. The importance of ethics, you know,
really is about as we go forward as spiritual aspirants, where is
the place of ethics in our practice individually and
collectively do communities that we are involved with have
ethical standards. The ASI we have ethical code that we
encourage and ask our members to commit to individually, whether
they're spiritual teachers or spiritual students, and then we
have organizational codes of ethics as well.
I want to just actually say that I'm the one who puts up the list of all the members and
everything and we have, I think, quite a bit more than 600 individual members now and I
think 32 or 33 organizational members.
So it's growing.
So what have you noticed in your years of work with ASI?
What do you see are the sort of the best practices or the big problems out there that you're
noticing?
Well, the ASI started because I think it was the 2018 Science and Nonduality Conference.
Jack O'Keefe, Craig Holliday, and I all gave talks on this similar topic, unbeknownst to
one another.
We hadn't coordinated them.
Jack and Ellen Emmett attended my talk, among other people, and we got together for lunch
afterwards.
And over lunch, I don't know if it was Jack, it might have been Jack's idea, we decided
we should start an organization, which originally we called the Association for Professional
Spiritual Teachers, but I wanted to broaden it a bit and add the word "integrity."
I like the term "spiritual integrity" because it doesn't exclude students, which I think
are an important component in the whole thing.
So issues I've seen, obviously it almost seems like the norm rather than the exception
that spiritual teachers from the East are ethically compromised. They perhaps were raised in an
ashram, didn't have any kind of shadow work or psychological work or training, and assumed
certain things perhaps about their own development, which when they got into a Western culture,
just crumbled. They discovered they had all kinds of drives and impulses they didn't realize
they had. I'm just conjecturing about their inner motivations. But personally, I feel
that spirituality is the hope of the world. It's the most fundamental thing that a person
can experience, and if it can be experienced more broadly, more collectively, it will be
the most pivotal or fundamental thing to bring about change in the world. And therefore,
when I see so many spiritual teachers violating basic ethical codes that you shouldn't even
violate if you're a teenager, much less an adult, much less a spiritual teacher, I feel
it sabotages the whole enterprise of spiritual awakening in the world, and it also disillusions
spiritual seekers. I know instances of people committing suicide, they were so disillusioned,
or at least getting off the spiritual path because they decide that it's a whole, it's
a bunch of bunk if their teacher could behave this way. And I think that's tragic, both for
them and again, for the whole world. And so that's a bit of a long answer, but that's
my orientation.
Yeah, we've done some. And thank you. Thank you for starting the ASI because I feel like
we're growing quickly, we're evolving quickly, and we're also only just beginning. And if
you hadn't had that lunch at the time, we wouldn't be seated here. So I want to thank
the past you for doing that.
And especially I think we should thank Jack who has been, this thing wouldn't have gotten
off the ground without her. She's like this dynamo, Jack O'Keefe.
Jack O'Keefe.
We all acknowledge her as the leader of it.
Yeah, we love you Jack. Thank you. Keep doing the good work. We've done some developmental
psychological sort of a psychometric assessments on
spiritual teachers
A lot of spiritual teachers out there and the vast majority of them
I'm speaking very generally here speaking as a spiritual teacher myself
They're not as advanced as they think they are, you know
Developmentally just to sum it up and someone might say who are we to judge?
Perhaps you could answer that question, but personally my attitude is it's much safer to underestimate your level of advancement
Consider yourself a beginner because compared to what is possible. We all are
Absolutely. And again spiritual teachers what we want to encourage what we want to educate in ourselves and others
Is to keep doing the work any spiritual teacher should also have a therapeutic
Process or practice at some point in their life. They should also have shadow work
They should have peer review and peer feedback. And if that's not happening, then there's a real
danger to get stuck, to get developmentally stuck, to not think you need to grow. And that's where
problems start to come in. So that's what we want to avoid. And we have peer groups in the ASI,
don't we? We do. We have peer groups in the ASI, which is something we're going through a pilot
it with. We put dozens and dozens of people through and look forward to launching that
in a wider scale and our membership probably in the next 18 months or so. I myself am involved
in a peer group of other spiritual like teachers. It is we're on year two. It is one of the
most precious areas of my own development where I can show up with other spiritual teachers
or leaders in their field and talk about things that you can't talk about elsewhere. To share
issues that you have as a teacher thematically, individually, collectively, and that's a precious
opportunity. Who was it? I think it was Kant who said, "You know you're in modernity when you don't
want to be caught praying. You don't want someone to walk in the room and catch you praying."
Modernity is thrown out sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for not so good reasons,
are religious traditions because there has been a lot of nonsense. There is a lot of abuse.
We acknowledge this. And yet, these spiritual traditions are this precious, as I started
this call, gift of humanity. And life without a spiritual life, at least for me and for many of
us, is flat. It's flat land. What's the meaning? What's the purpose? Is it just to eat more? To
have another great vacation? I mean, I love good food. I love vacations. Don't get me wrong.
He who dies with the most toys wins, right?
Right. I mean, I wish it worked. I wish it worked. But after you
get to the point and the great classic text, the Heart Sutra,
which is something that I'm going to be teaching publicly the
first weekend in May. So I'm inviting anybody to come check
that course out if they'd like it outlines it's just one of the
great classic texts of Buddhism, perhaps the classic texts, it's
the most taught, it's the most quoted, it's the most
misunderstood is the most
mysterious. I mean, it sounds
like an acid trip.
How does it go? Is there isn't
there like one verse that is
most famous from the form? Yeah,
what the heck does that mean?
Well, fortunately, due to the
kindness of my teachers, I got a
word by word understanding and
translation and teaching on what
it means. And when you dig into
it, it's profound. And not only
is it profound in terms of
everyday application to your
life, but it lays out the path of practice, how to actually
practice. So it's this gem of spirituality is and I agree with
you. It doesn't have to be a tradition. It doesn't have to be
Buddhism, but a human life without our spiritual life, what
kind of human life isn't. And so for example, the heart sutra
leaves out these milestones and the steps of how to practice and
the first step, the way to even begin to step on the path and
start your spiritual journey is you realize that you want to, you realize that you have to, that
there's something more than having the most toys and dine, then getting that next promotion, then
making more money, then getting the boyfriend. It's like what happened to me in Boston. That
blessing, what's happening in Boston. If I wish this worked, I wish the fancy apartment and fancy
boyfriend and the fancy... It'd be great if it did, but there's something missing. And that first step
is yeah, Nyingjun in Tibetan is renunciation, is to get serious about the spiritual path.
And the Heart Sutra lays that out, lays that out very, very clearly how to do that.
And that's really beautiful.
- I did a panel discussion with Mukti, who's Adyashanti's wife, and Francis Bennett and
Locke Kelly at one of the S.A.N.D. conferences, all about the Heart Sutra. So people can find
that on Batgap if they want. But what you're saying here is very important because this
spiritual stuff is real and it actually is like if we want to use the ocean analogy again,
the apartment and the boyfriend and the money and the this and the that, those are the waves and
there's nothing wrong with waves, but we're missing out on the whole ocean beneath the waves
if we don't probe into this deeper reality that spirituality enables us to probe and therefore
we're unfulfilled. Yes, yes, yes. And we have to see it for ourselves. Nobody can tell us.
No. It's not a belief. It's not like, "Oh, I believe it or I don't believe it."
Our mind, our hearts, are the nature of the ocean already. But until we see that for ourselves,
you know, until we experience that for ourselves, it's just an idea, right? It's just a belief.
Once we do experience that for ourselves, everything changes. Everything changes.
one of the descriptions of Brahman or ultimate reality, one of its attributes is said to be
bliss. And it's said that any happiness we derive from outer circumstances is just sort of a
reflection of that inner bliss bouncing off the outer thing, the way the moon reflects sunlight
to us at night. And that's why it can't really be that illuminating as the direct cognition of that
bliss is, after which then everything is seen as that.
That's right. Yes, after which everything is seen as that and we practice we figure out how our behavior
Creates more bliss and more happiness for ourself and others and how it does it we figure out how to be a better wave
So to speak how to be the most evolved relative another word for the wave is a relative self
Relative reality we are walking around
minds and bodies and social security numbers, and that too can evolve. That's the growing up part.
We're not stuck in these phone booths. We can blast out and evolve and become something
extraordinary because we see the claims of say, example, Tibetan Buddhism and also yoga,
like Patajali's Yoga Sutra, I've studied deeply, deeply, deeply, and it lays out a path of practice
about how we can evolve our minds, evolve our bodies into something else.
You know, obviously a lot of people when they think of spirituality, they think of monks in caves.
And, you know, basic attitude of the monk is apparently, "Well, the world sucks and I don't
want anything to do with it, so I'm just going to stay in this cave and marinate in my inner
experience." But there's a cool verse in the Gita which goes, "Contact with Brahman is infinite joy."
And we could use the analogy of lying still in a bathtub and it doesn't feel that warm,
or sloshing around a bit and all of a sudden you feel the warmth. So if one is able to access that
inner reality and engage in an ordinary life, you know, like you were doing, then that life
serves as something to slosh up the bathtub with. It stirs up the bliss.
And actually you end up with something that's more than the sum of its parts.
More fulfillment than you would have just sitting with your eyes closed in a cave,
or just engaging in the world without experiencing the inner reality, somehow the two together you get 200%.
Oh yes, you preach yes, yes, and yes again.
And that is what you just define Tantra in my word, that's my Tantra and my path.
And what we're doing in our Tantric communities that the confluence experiences,
coming together in community and supporting each other to slosh around in that bathtub.
and to be in the world yet be infused with wisdom and bliss and kindness and care and compassion
and to live fully alive lives as spiritual human beings in this world. Doing our gifts,
you know, the topic path is about stepping into your gifts, finding your deepest callings,
stepping into your power and using it for good. And you're not only infused with the bliss,
but you infuse it into the world as an infusion tool.
As you move through your life,
you kind of radiate that kind of influence.
When I was a kid, I saw this thing
where they had a whole room full of mousetraps
with ping pong balls on the mousetraps.
And they just kind of set off one of the mousetraps
and then ping pong ball flew, set off another one,
that set off others, and it's the whole next thing,
you know, the whole room was popping.
So I think that we have this influence on everyone
and it's mutual.
and the more people begin to exude the kind of influence we're talking about here,
the more exponentially it will grow.
That's gorgeous. Yeah. One of the terms I use for that is mutual enactment.
You know, each moment we are mutually unfolding reality. We are mutually enacting reality.
The great Buddhist scholar we were talking about him earlier, perhaps before the call,
Robert Thurman. Did you say you did a call with him once?
I've done two in-person interviews with him at the S.A.N.D. conference.
Same idea, he had a beautiful metaphor.
I just started laughing. He went into this thing about DMT suppositories
on my first interview with him.
That's good. Okay.
Well, this is another bath. We're bringing it back to the bath because somehow it's all
connected with the suppositories. But his metaphor was it's like bubbles in a bath.
you know, you're in a bath and it's full of bubbles and one bubble lights up.
What happens to the bubbles around it? Yeah, they all light up.
Right. So yeah, similar analogy. So that's the why. We want our human lives to be full of meaning,
to be full of depth, to step into our greatest gifts and our greatest power. And sometimes these
spiritual experiences happen out of nowhere. Like I described what happened to me in Boston,
Right. It was like a blessing and it came out of nowhere. But the rest of the any sort of progress that I've done
Has come from practice
You know come from putting my attention on it
Taking it seriously not just kind of sitting around waiting for things to change or evolve
Taking it seriously and that's what I really encourage your listeners to do is get on a path of practice
It doesn't have to be mine. It doesn't have to be what you were raised with
It doesn't even have to look like a traditional spiritual thing, but find
really what you want to learn spiritually in a community that you want to learn with because we are
harmed in relationship and we are healed in relationship, right? We want to be in a
relationship with perhaps a lineage and a community that really suits us.
So there is a plethora of opportunities out there now in this world.
on the resources on backgap there. I don't know how many hundreds you have of different types of
opportunities to study, but find what really calls you and don't waste the time.
Yeah, and don't be a dilettante. If something doesn't seem to be working, move on, but also
don't feel honor bound to stay with something that isn't working. So in other words, you don't want
to flit about, but you have to take things seriously, but there's no harm in sort of
of moving around a little bit until you find what really works for you.
Absolutely.
Yeah, check it out.
You know, I agree completely.
And even for me, the path of my spiritual practice and my work and particularly Tantra,
I use the metaphor of Tantra, you know, it can be dangerous.
You know, you're doing things like working with power and working with energies in your
body and working with being in the world.
It sort of felt like making my way across a minefield at times, especially with these ancient
old ideas and traditions.
But I made my way across that minefield.
Luckily, I didn't get blown up.
Some people did get hurt.
You had a friend who died in a kind of a conclusion thing.
And you know, we've heard the term spiritual emergencies.
And we often get contacted for people whose kundalini has gone haywire, and they can't
hold down a job anymore, and they're living with their parents.
So safety first.
That's always a good proviso.
But on the other hand, it's a journey that we must take.
I mean, you know, if Frodo just wanted to stay safe in the Shire, then that whole story wouldn't
have happened.
Sometimes you have to just go out and do it.
Oh yeah, but it's true.
No, the hero's journey isn't easy, right?
You've got the dragon.
And I made it across the minefield and I got the gold.
And it wasn't without mistakes and it wasn't without issues, but I got the gold and that's
That's what the journey takes.
It takes walking this path of practice.
Which is still not to say that something could happen, you know, you still have to be like
Padmasambhava said, you know, view as vast as the sky, karma as fine as a grain of barley
flour.
We have to be on our toes because we're never beyond the possibility of making some kind
of error.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And then there's the dangerous spiritual bypassing where we use our spirituality to bypass psychological
work that we need to do, which is why we always, and I've learned in the past 25-30 years to
pair the spiritual work with the psychological grounding. And so now I don't do one without
the other. They're both like the key to the work we do with the Confluence Experience and
my real mission and my calling.
That's great. Have you said as much about that as you wanted to say?
Well, what else do I want to say about that? If you're interested in the work,
you can check out the website. As I mentioned,
I am teaching the heart Sutra in early may.
I'd love people to come and give feedback and reflections and learn what they
can about that.
There are other traditions out there and find one that appeals to you
and always look my friends who are listening,
look for that psychological grounding as well in any spiritual endeavor that you
do in any spiritual work that you do.
When you're doing psychological work,
make sure that you include spiritual work as well, however that means for you. Whatever kind of
calling you particularly have to spiritual work, grounded as well. Calling you have to psychological
work, fine. Where you're headed, where you're going. You know, spirituality is like about our future,
right? It's about what happens after we die. It's about where we're headed. Psychological work is
more about our past, where we came from and how we were constructed. And when we do both of those
together, we really are in that magic spot. How does a person find a good therapist to work with
that understands the spiritual dimension? Yeah, it's exactly what you said about the
spiritual life. You've got to check out a few. Most therapists will give you a freebie. They'll
talk to you or go to one session, ask them the hard questions, interview them. They're not all the same.
Transpersonal therapists are certainly out there. I mean, I have people I can recommend.
If anybody wants to reach out to me individually, there's certainly amazing psychotherapists I know
that include the spiritual work as well. I'd be happy to provide lists for people.
Yeah, you can contact you. I'll have your website stuff on your page. And there is the whole category
on the categorical index page on BatGap of psychologists and therapists too, people like John Prendergast
and many others.
Another thing I wanted to throw in here, we have a little bit more time, this kind of
loops back to something we were saying.
I think that it's easy to get depressed or discouraged when you see what's going on in
the world with so many things, climate change and politics and Gaza and Ukraine and so many
other things, fentanyl and potential for nuclear war.
And if all you know about the world is what you get on the news, I don't blame you for
being depressed.
But, you know, as I was saying earlier, and as you and I have been saying for the last
two hours, there's a deeper reality underlying all this.
And I think that the key to resolving all these manifestations of incoherence in collective
consciousness is to create coherence in collective consciousness, which spirituality does, first
for the individual and through individuals for the collective.
And that's been my most fundamental motivation since I was in my 20s, or early 20s, and one
of the most fundamental motivations for starting Batgap is to somehow propagate the understanding
and popularity of spiritual practice so that it can have an impact on the world.
Because it's touch and go, we could blow ourselves up, there could be catastrophic climate change.
I just read an article the other day that there's some ice shifting in Antarctica that if it
breaks loose could raise sea levels by five meters, which would pretty much inundate hundreds of
millions of people in coastal cities around the world. I don't know if spirituality can stop that,
but it could at least help us deal with the, well, possibly get sensible about changing
our influence on the climate. And also if we do face huge societal catastrophes, to do so with
greater sanity and with greater mutual support rather than every man for himself. Thank you.
Yeah, and I do believe that spiritual, in my experience,
the spiritual and psychological growth and development,
if we all grew up our ethics,
if we grew up our spiritual wisdom,
if we continue to grow our psychological health
and heal our traumas and transform them
into transcendent experiences,
we would have the capacity to meet this meta-crisis
that we have, this crisis of crisis,
these multiple crises that we have.
There's a fantastic developmental researcher
who used the stages model, Gail Hojaka.
She did studies on climate change
and how people perceive climate change
as they evolve through these stages of development
I'm talking about.
And she found in the most mature,
I'm speaking this just in my language,
so forgive me Gail, she would say it more gracefully.
But as our wisdom grows, as our cognition
our development and our identity evolves, the despair lessens. Creativity comes in, creative solutions.
We are no longer paralyzed by this meta-crisis that we're facing. It's easy to be paralyzed by it. I
feel it. I understand it. What could we possibly do to address these issues? It's depressing.
I take a lot of news breaks because it's so depressing. We find if we can evolve this,
grow up and waking up as I'm talking about it. We can do our work to grow ourselves psychologically
and spiritually. Amazing insight, creativity, reduction of despair is actually what we're
seeing in the data. Irene and I are always wrestling over the TV remote because I want
to watch this news story. No, no, I can't stand it. Let's fast forward. Let's mute it.
The pace of change is continuing to accelerate and AI is coming along. That's going to accelerate
things exponentially even more. So in a way Darwin was right, survival of the fittest
is the law of nature. If a donkey is carrying a load that's too heavy, you either have to
lighten the load or strengthen the donkey. And I don't know if we're going to be able
to lighten the load in terms of the onslaught of change that the world is experiencing and
is going to experience. So we have to be fittest, so to speak. We have to strengthen our individual
donkey.
Get those muscles.
Yeah, you know, then you can meet the challenges.
At least you have more capacity to meet whatever life brings your way.
Yes, and I'm optimistic because of it.
I'm optimistic that we could, oh good, you know, that we can build the muscles of these donkeys
through the work that we're doing here.
And as humans, who are humans having a spiritual experience every day, I believe,
find the answers to these and save our human condition and human story as we go forward.
By saying we're optimistic, I don't think we're saying, at least I'm not saying, that there aren't
going to be some difficult situations as there currently are and will continue to be. But we've
got a good hand of cards here that the other players aren't seeing in that we realize there is
this spiritual dimension, which is not something that those who are worried about world problems
generally are counting on to make any kind of difference, but I think it is making a
difference and will continue to make an even greater one as more and more people participate
in exploring it.
Absolutely. I mean, I have learned that we can literally recreate our reality, not the
way we think, not the way we tend to think of it, but through mutual enactment together
individually and collectively, we can change things very quickly.
Yeah, good. I'll let you have the last word in that and having said that. Okay, so I will be putting
up a page on Bath Gap and it will have your website and any other contact information you
want me to put up there. And obviously you're starting a course in the beginning of May,
did you say? I did, yeah. We'll be doing a weekend retreat on the Heart Sutra, which outlines the
the path of practice goes into these deep esoteric topics in a very pragmatic way.
Online retreat, right?
Online?
It's an online retreat.
Yeah, first weekend in May.
Everyone's invited.
Yeah.
And of course, here we are, and this is, what is this, February of 2024, and people might
be watching this five years from now, but hopefully you'll still be doing good stuff,
and people can just go to your website and see what you're up to, probably get on some
kind of mailing list.
Absolutely.
Please do.
Great. Well, thanks, Kimberly. And I'm glad that we'll continue to be seeing each other and interacting
through the ASI, you know, which otherwise is like, "Oh, we're finishing the interview. I'll
never talk to Kimberly again." But we'll have our little monthly things and we'll stay in touch.
Well, to be continued. Thanks, Rick.
Thanks. And thanks to those who've been listening or watching. And my next interview is going to be
a doctor named Neil Theis. He's actually some kind of a kidney doctor, but I met him at the
Sand Conference and boy I wish we still had those Sand Conferences. Those were so much fun. They
were such great get-togethers. Anyway, he's a wonderful guy, interesting person, and that'll
be the next one. So if you go to the BatGap website, you can sign up to be notified of each
new interview that's posted. You can subscribe to the YouTube channel to get notifications.
Check it out. You know, if you haven't been there before, check out the website and see
what we've got. I even have a humor page where there's many, many funny spiritual cartoons.
That's the best part. Thank you so much for your work through the years and bringing this into the world, Rick. Thank you so much.
Well, we're all doing what we can as the Beatles sang.
Yeah. All right. Thanks, Kimberly. All right. Thank you.
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