WEBVTT

00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:25.000
[Music]

00:00:25.000 --> 00:00:29.000
Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer.

00:00:29.000 --> 00:00:33.000
Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations

00:00:33.000 --> 00:00:37.000
with spiritually awakening people. We've done just over 700 of them

00:00:37.000 --> 00:00:41.000
now, and if this is new to you and you'd like to check out previous ones,

00:00:41.000 --> 00:00:45.000
go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and look

00:00:45.000 --> 00:00:49.000
under the past interviews menu. While you're there at the site,

00:00:49.000 --> 00:00:53.000
poke around a little bit. We have a relatively new thing that I've been

00:00:53.000 --> 00:01:00.040
working a lot on this year, a BatGap AI chatbot that has over 40,000 documents loaded into

00:01:00.040 --> 00:01:04.260
it now and you can ask it all kinds of questions and have interesting philosophical conversations

00:01:04.260 --> 00:01:08.640
with it. It'll even tell you how to cook brown rice, but it'll also give you some spiritual

00:01:08.640 --> 00:01:13.620
tips at the end of that. All of this is made possible through the support of appreciative

00:01:13.620 --> 00:01:17.040
listeners and viewers, so if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there

00:01:17.040 --> 00:01:23.440
There are PayPal buttons on every page of the site and a page offering alternatives to PayPal.

00:01:23.440 --> 00:01:28.260
Also we have a team of volunteers who are doing various things, so if you'd like to

00:01:28.260 --> 00:01:30.640
help in some way, get in touch.

00:01:30.640 --> 00:01:34.740
My guest today is my friend Kimberly Teresa Lafferty.

00:01:34.740 --> 00:01:38.120
Like many of my good friends, I've never met her in person.

00:01:38.120 --> 00:01:39.960
This way it is these days.

00:01:39.960 --> 00:01:45.320
I met her through the Association for Spiritual Integrity, which Jack O'Keefe and Craig Holiday

00:01:45.320 --> 00:01:47.920
and I founded about five years ago.

00:01:47.920 --> 00:01:53.080
Kimberly is now on the board of directors of the ASI, and I've always been very impressed

00:01:53.080 --> 00:01:59.120
with her clarity and brightness and creativity and positivity and so on, as you'll see in

00:01:59.120 --> 00:02:00.520
a minute.

00:02:00.520 --> 00:02:05.440
Kimberly is a seasoned teacher practitioner specializing in constructive adult developmental

00:02:05.440 --> 00:02:09.200
psychology and Indo-Tibetan Buddhism.

00:02:09.200 --> 00:02:14.880
She completed over 12 years of intensive Indo-Tibetan study, including the required retreats.

00:02:14.880 --> 00:02:20.460
She leads both open and advanced adult educational cohorts, aligning developmental psychology

00:02:20.460 --> 00:02:21.940
and Buddhist theory.

00:02:21.940 --> 00:02:27.940
She co-leads with Terry O'Fallon the penultimate MindsEye year-long developmental course through

00:02:27.940 --> 00:02:30.180
Stages International.

00:02:30.180 --> 00:02:36.060
Kimberly is a wife and mother living in a remote valley of the North Cascades of North

00:02:36.060 --> 00:02:40.980
America, Washington State, which deeply impacts her worldview and practice.

00:02:40.980 --> 00:02:41.980
So Kimberly, welcome.

00:02:41.980 --> 00:02:42.980
Thanks, Rick.

00:02:42.980 --> 00:02:48.820
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

00:02:48.820 --> 00:02:52.840
And tell us about this place where you live. Oh, oh, it's fantastic

00:02:52.840 --> 00:03:00.660
I first discovered this place. It's called Mazama, Washington Mazama. You can google it and I discovered it

00:03:00.660 --> 00:03:02.740
25 years ago

00:03:02.740 --> 00:03:04.740
When I was a corporate refugee

00:03:04.740 --> 00:03:08.500
And really first seriously got on the spiritual path

00:03:09.460 --> 00:03:13.220
It was the most beautiful place I've ever been. I'd been for a weekend

00:03:13.220 --> 00:03:18.980
For a mountain bike race at the time. I was in my early 20s and it was extraordinary

00:03:18.980 --> 00:03:21.220
It was like living in a paradise

00:03:21.220 --> 00:03:28.420
But I had a life to lead and a spiritual path to follow so I had to leave the valley and just about

00:03:28.420 --> 00:03:30.100
Oh

00:03:30.100 --> 00:03:35.540
10 years ago or so. I was able to come back. So it's really a full circle time for me to

00:03:36.180 --> 00:03:41.780
live in this place, which is my chosen place once again. Forest is absolutely gorgeous.

00:03:41.780 --> 00:03:44.900
Yeah. So you and your family just live way out in the boondocks, right?

00:03:44.900 --> 00:03:50.180
Yeah. Surrounded by gazillion acres of forest and...

00:03:50.180 --> 00:03:54.900
Something like that. We definitely live at the end of the road. We're the last house in the

00:03:54.900 --> 00:04:00.180
northern end of the valley. Fortunately, culturally, there's a lot of extraordinary

00:04:00.180 --> 00:04:05.060
people here who have also made the choice to live here. There's good restaurants and a good

00:04:05.060 --> 00:04:10.660
bookstore and a nice art gallery and all the things that a post-post-modern girl could want also.

00:04:10.660 --> 00:04:16.180
So that's nice too. Wow, sounds great. Yeah, yeah. It's kind of like northern exposure or something.

00:04:16.180 --> 00:04:22.660
If you ever saw that show. Oh yeah. Would call yourself a corporate refugee. So you were kind of a

00:04:22.660 --> 00:04:28.820
Starbucks executive when you were in your 20s. Yeah, I was definitely on the executive track. I

00:04:29.380 --> 00:04:37.460
I graduated from undergrad university at 21 with student debt and needing to get a job and not

00:04:37.460 --> 00:04:42.820
sure what I was going to do. Starbucks was a very young company at the time. Gosh, I think there

00:04:42.820 --> 00:04:47.940
were less than 100 stores, if you can imagine. And it was a good job. And I sort of got caught

00:04:47.940 --> 00:04:53.220
in a good job. And it was a good company and was there for seven years. And it was wonderful,

00:04:53.220 --> 00:04:57.300
like nothing bad to say about. If you're going to do the corporate thing, it's a great place to do

00:04:57.300 --> 00:05:05.380
it. But there came a time I was 27 or 28 living in Boston, running a pretty good chunk of the

00:05:05.380 --> 00:05:10.980
operation out there. Had a fancy boyfriend, had a fancy salary, had a fancy apartment,

00:05:10.980 --> 00:05:15.780
and I was miserable. I was absolutely miserable. I'd done all the things you're supposed to do,

00:05:15.780 --> 00:05:20.660
and it wasn't working. And had a big spiritual experience, and that's what got me on the path.

00:05:20.660 --> 00:05:26.020
Tell us about that experience. You were miserable, so you started dancing,

00:05:26.020 --> 00:05:30.580
and then you went into some yoga poses or something and had a breakthrough.

00:05:30.580 --> 00:05:38.180
I did. I did. Spiritual experience is a first person experience. So when I'm talking about it,

00:05:38.180 --> 00:05:44.580
and I'm talking to you listeners, because I believe everybody's had profound experiences,

00:05:44.580 --> 00:05:52.500
even if maybe you've forgotten, but I was just in a low place. Again, I was 27, 28.

00:05:53.060 --> 00:06:00.900
Why wasn't I happy? I had the boyfriends I'd wanted. I was relatively attractive, it seemed.

00:06:00.900 --> 00:06:06.660
I was athletic. I had enough money, but why wasn't I happy? And I was really in a

00:06:06.660 --> 00:06:13.300
state of depression, although I didn't really know it at the time. And one day I just was

00:06:13.300 --> 00:06:21.140
miserable and I started to do a practice that I've been doing since I could walk, it feels like.

00:06:21.140 --> 00:06:27.700
I just was all by myself in my apartment and I started to dance. I put on some Annie DeFranco

00:06:27.700 --> 00:06:37.460
at once and I started to move and my mind, I was so miserable that I just let go. My mind dropped,

00:06:37.460 --> 00:06:45.060
my breath took over, my breath led the way and I found myself in what we call Pachimottanasana

00:06:45.060 --> 00:06:50.260
in Sanskrit. It's a forward fold. You're sitting on the ground, your legs are straight out in front

00:06:50.260 --> 00:06:56.820
of you and you're folded way down. Like touching your toes or nearly. Touching your toes and as

00:06:56.820 --> 00:07:02.340
I've said elsewhere I was a you know I was a pretty flexi girl but it was extremely blissful

00:07:02.340 --> 00:07:06.980
and extremely comfortable. It shouldn't have been that comfortable and I remember feeling like I had

00:07:06.980 --> 00:07:13.220
a choice to start thinking about why am I this comfortable? Why does this feel so good? Or just

00:07:13.220 --> 00:07:15.780
Let go and go for it. And I did

00:07:15.780 --> 00:07:21.540
My back actually started to undulate my breath got deeper and deeper

00:07:21.540 --> 00:07:23.460
slowed down

00:07:23.460 --> 00:07:25.460
and eventually stopped and

00:07:25.460 --> 00:07:34.260
The next thing I remember I was at the top of the ceiling looking down at my body and I had this

00:07:34.260 --> 00:07:38.420
sensation this sort of thought without thought or

00:07:39.060 --> 00:07:44.340
Words without word of am I safe like is it safe to leave can I park my body here?

00:07:44.340 --> 00:07:48.420
basically and leave and the feeling was yes, you can and

00:07:48.420 --> 00:07:53.300
I had what I believe as I said many people have had experiences like this

00:07:53.300 --> 00:07:56.180
Later, I learned we call it the clear light

00:07:56.180 --> 00:07:58.180
it was

00:07:58.180 --> 00:08:00.180
beyond time

00:08:00.180 --> 00:08:02.340
beyond space

00:08:02.340 --> 00:08:06.440
No thought no concept. We can only really use metaphors

00:08:06.440 --> 00:08:07.940
or

00:08:07.940 --> 00:08:16.340
words to try and point to this experience that is beyond words. It was exceedingly blissful

00:08:16.340 --> 00:08:24.260
and radiant and luminous and very aware and alive. Were you totally absorbed in that light or were

00:08:24.260 --> 00:08:30.340
you still observing your body down below you? At that point there was the light and there was me

00:08:30.340 --> 00:08:35.380
and there was no difference. And it wasn't me, it was everything. Now of course I wasn't using any

00:08:35.380 --> 00:08:41.220
of these words at the time. The next sensation I experienced was a sense of coming down.

00:08:41.220 --> 00:08:48.460
It was a very visceral sense of coming down back into my body. Again, my breath started

00:08:48.460 --> 00:08:53.580
up again. I realized I hadn't been breathing during that time. I had no idea how much time

00:08:53.580 --> 00:08:58.180
had passed because you're not in time. You know, I learned this later. Time is a relative

00:08:58.180 --> 00:09:04.700
thing. And again, breath slowly came out. My third eye was on fire. Like if you put your

00:09:04.700 --> 00:09:09.260
hand on my third eye. It was what we call the third eye here. It was hot. It was very, very

00:09:09.260 --> 00:09:15.780
hot to the touch. And I slowly came up and I grabbed my journal. I still have it, which

00:09:15.780 --> 00:09:21.780
is fantastic because we can look at it and do all sorts of analysis. I started to write

00:09:21.780 --> 00:09:27.300
down the implications of what I had seen, you know, these insights and tried to capture

00:09:27.300 --> 00:09:32.900
it. And I remember I wrote in my journal that the only words I could use to describe it,

00:09:32.900 --> 00:09:40.900
One is all things, all things you could possibly imagine, one is, and it's just orgasmic bliss.

00:09:40.900 --> 00:09:45.460
As if every existing thing in the universe was having an orgasmic experience.

00:09:45.460 --> 00:09:49.420
And orgasm is the only word I could find that was close to it.

00:09:49.420 --> 00:09:54.660
That completely otherworldly sort of beyond words blissful experience.

00:09:54.660 --> 00:10:02.420
And I had a series of insights and some precognitive notions about how I would use this experience

00:10:02.420 --> 00:10:09.620
It's almost like it was, well, very much was, it wasn't almost. I was in contact with a second

00:10:09.620 --> 00:10:16.660
person as a first person experiencer. I was in contact with what we think of as a spiritual

00:10:16.660 --> 00:10:22.980
company or I wasn't personifying them. I just called them the company. It was this deep,

00:10:22.980 --> 00:10:28.380
deep sense that I wasn't alone and none of us were alone. The insight was you're going to spend the

00:10:28.380 --> 00:10:33.580
rest of your life learning about this and teaching, teaching is the word I used,

00:10:33.580 --> 00:10:38.580
people how to experience this for themselves using yoga and Buddhism

00:10:38.580 --> 00:10:44.100
together, Tibetan Buddhism. Now the outside of a short little class in college, you

00:10:44.100 --> 00:10:47.820
know, I'd never studied Buddhism. I'd taken one or two yoga classes in my life.

00:10:47.820 --> 00:10:52.940
That was a real surprise for me. It was a very novel, especially those two together.

00:10:52.940 --> 00:11:00.940
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.

00:11:00.940 --> 00:11:06.940
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?"

00:11:06.940 --> 00:11:13.940
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.

00:11:13.940 --> 00:11:21.940
Yeah, definitely. You know, I didn't have the easiest childhood. It wasn't capital T traumatic

00:11:21.940 --> 00:11:26.900
like many people. We don't want to get into a thing of comparing our trauma, but I had

00:11:26.900 --> 00:11:32.020
divorced parents and a single mother. We didn't have a lot of money. You know, it was hard.

00:11:32.020 --> 00:11:39.300
It wasn't what you see on the TV. And the gift of experiences like that is we do start

00:11:39.300 --> 00:11:47.460
to question, "Why? Why am I me? Why do I look like this? Why was I born in Stanford, California in

00:11:47.460 --> 00:11:57.380
1970? Why is this my family? What am I doing?" And I've learned since then that those challenges,

00:11:57.380 --> 00:12:04.500
the struggles, the pain, the suffering that was evident in my family of origin and all around me,

00:12:04.500 --> 00:12:10.340
not just my family, you know, walk into a classroom and you experience this, really gave me the gift

00:12:10.340 --> 00:12:15.620
of developing deep inner resources. And I'm not talking about disassociation, I'm not, I'm talking

00:12:15.620 --> 00:12:22.020
about this in a very healthy way. I had to start to go within. And so from a young age, I did have

00:12:22.020 --> 00:12:28.100
what we might call spiritual experiences. Back then, I called it the Holy Spirit, because that

00:12:28.100 --> 00:12:32.820
was the framework that was offered to me, I was going to Catholic schools, but I developed a very

00:12:32.820 --> 00:12:40.180
strong inner confidence and inner resources where I could find what I needed by going

00:12:40.180 --> 00:12:46.220
within and then finding company, knowing that I was not alone and none of us are.

00:12:46.220 --> 00:12:49.920
I heard you say in one of your recordings that trauma has a purpose, that there's too

00:12:49.920 --> 00:12:54.140
much opportunity for growth in it for it to be an accident, which I think you were just

00:12:54.140 --> 00:12:55.660
saying basically.

00:12:55.660 --> 00:12:56.940
Yeah.

00:12:56.940 --> 00:13:01.220
Zooming out a little bit, I just see the whole universe as an opportunity for growth and

00:13:01.220 --> 00:13:05.940
nothing is an accident whatsoever. And that can seem rather harsh if you consider some of the

00:13:05.940 --> 00:13:10.900
things that happen to people. But if you zoom out enough, there's an evolutionary agenda.

00:13:10.900 --> 00:13:11.460
Dr. Debra Hixson

00:13:11.460 --> 00:13:18.660
Definitely. And the zooming out can be such a refuge and such a gift. We talk to or tracking

00:13:18.660 --> 00:13:23.220
at the Association for Spiritual Integrity, it comes up in a lot of our conversations,

00:13:23.220 --> 00:13:31.700
this line between trauma and transcendence, this line between pain and joy. And could they exist

00:13:31.700 --> 00:13:37.700
without the other? Those polarities? I'm not sure. Well, we can talk about that more. Now,

00:13:37.700 --> 00:13:42.980
this company you've mentioned, you seem to be alluding to like some kind of guardian angels,

00:13:42.980 --> 00:13:46.980
or some sort of subtle beings, or something or other. Is that what you're saying?

00:13:46.980 --> 00:13:53.860
I am. I am. Even now, all these years later, and all the decades of practice, and all the decades

00:13:53.860 --> 00:14:01.700
of study, I'm hesitant to put some cultural trappings around them. Mostly because I don't know.

00:14:01.700 --> 00:14:08.660
Do I mind my social construction? What I was exposed to? How Kimberly, with her history

00:14:09.380 --> 00:14:17.700
and her experiences. And we tend to make meaning out of these extraordinary experiences or spiritual

00:14:17.700 --> 00:14:26.020
experiences based on those things. That makes sense. My sense now is the company, the insight.

00:14:26.020 --> 00:14:34.820
When I ask, I get an answer. When I need help, it comes. You have to ask, people. You have to ask.

00:14:34.820 --> 00:14:40.980
Please remember this, you have to ask. But if you ask, you shall be answered. It might not come,

00:14:40.980 --> 00:14:45.860
likely won't come in the way you think it does. But my sense now, if I were to frame it, is

00:14:45.860 --> 00:14:54.500
it's where we all meet. It's all of our ultimate self. Because it's out of time, it feels in a way

00:14:54.500 --> 00:15:00.420
like it's my best future self. And that sounds like a contradiction. But the being that I am,

00:15:00.420 --> 00:15:06.420
and the being I am becoming, both at once. And when I say I, I mean all of us. You know,

00:15:06.420 --> 00:15:12.820
we're these human beings walking around having these spiritual experiences every day. And one

00:15:12.820 --> 00:15:17.220
thing I've seen is where ultimately, you know, we walk around as these relative people with

00:15:17.220 --> 00:15:23.140
social security numbers and we're sick or have this issue or this issue, but ultimately, it's

00:15:23.140 --> 00:15:29.220
where we all meet. So it's less individual and more collective, if that makes sense.

00:15:29.220 --> 00:15:34.100
Yeah, a couple of thoughts. Firstly, what you were saying reminded me of that Bible verse of

00:15:34.100 --> 00:15:38.900
"seeking ye shall find, knocking the door shall be opened." Once you have the intention. I've seen

00:15:38.900 --> 00:15:43.860
that so many times. Sometimes people are literally, "I can't take it anymore," and they're on their

00:15:43.860 --> 00:15:50.820
knees praying, and then something happens. That's what happened to you. Yeah. Once the intention is

00:15:50.820 --> 00:15:54.580
sincere and ardent enough, "Okay, we hear you. We're coming."

00:15:55.860 --> 00:16:01.380
One of the messages I got, you know, when I sat up, it's wonderful to recall that experience too.

00:16:01.380 --> 00:16:06.500
So thank you for asking. It was probably the big one of my spiritual life.

00:16:06.500 --> 00:16:11.620
This extraordinary experience I had. I started to get these little messages and the first one was

00:16:11.620 --> 00:16:16.900
ask the question you have to ask. And I'm surprised even now how often I forget.

00:16:16.900 --> 00:16:20.740
We sort of feel lost in the woods sometimes, but we're not actually asking.

00:16:21.940 --> 00:16:26.900
And then the second one was pay attention, pay attention to what's happening, you know,

00:16:26.900 --> 00:16:33.060
develop these senses of attention to what's happening in the moment. And that's served me

00:16:33.060 --> 00:16:39.300
well since then. Another thing that comes to mind as you were describing this structure of the

00:16:39.300 --> 00:16:44.180
reality that we're talking about, you know, in terms of its universality, how it's our shared

00:16:44.180 --> 00:16:51.060
ground state, you could say, is that it is that, but it also arises in impulses, like the ocean,

00:16:51.060 --> 00:16:56.900
you know, all the waves have a common source in terms of their ocean-ness, but then they also

00:16:56.900 --> 00:17:01.140
have their individual wave expression, and there are other waves which might interact with them

00:17:01.140 --> 00:17:06.980
in some way. For me, it's always useful to have a multi-dimensional perspective and not ever say

00:17:06.980 --> 00:17:12.740
that it's all this or it's all that. Yes, agreed, agreed. And the wave and ocean metaphor is a

00:17:12.740 --> 00:17:22.340
wonderful one to feel into what I'm trying to use words to describe. I just plunged full-on

00:17:22.340 --> 00:17:26.340
into the ocean in that experience and came back down as the wave.

00:17:26.340 --> 00:17:33.460
Wave now realizing that you have an ocean aspect to you. You're not merely a wave.

00:17:33.460 --> 00:17:40.340
Right, but was I enlightened? Was I fully awakened? Was I even awakened? I'm not so sure.

00:17:40.340 --> 00:17:45.140
Those are tricky words. We'll get into them. I have to do the work. I have to do the work for that.

00:17:45.140 --> 00:17:50.740
So you came out of this experience and it was were you like, OMG, what just happened?

00:17:50.740 --> 00:17:57.380
What should I do now? It must have altered your trajectory and gotten you going on things that

00:17:57.380 --> 00:18:02.900
you wouldn't have anticipated getting into. Yes, it did indeed. You know, it took a few weeks,

00:18:02.900 --> 00:18:09.220
a couple months for me to take a sabbatical from my job just to name check Starbucks again. They

00:18:09.220 --> 00:18:12.440
They were extremely kind to me, extremely generous.

00:18:12.440 --> 00:18:15.540
They allowed me to take a two year sabbatical,

00:18:15.540 --> 00:18:17.780
which ended up being leaving for good.

00:18:17.780 --> 00:18:22.780
But I knew I needed to go find others who,

00:18:22.780 --> 00:18:26.720
I didn't need someone to explain it to me,

00:18:26.720 --> 00:18:30.220
but I knew, obviously, I was not the only person

00:18:30.220 --> 00:18:32.300
who had had experiences like this.

00:18:32.300 --> 00:18:34.520
Clearly, I was not special.

00:18:34.520 --> 00:18:36.240
That was obvious.

00:18:36.240 --> 00:18:37.460
I'm not putting myself down.

00:18:37.460 --> 00:18:38.980
It was just reality.

00:18:38.980 --> 00:18:41.940
Other people had obviously experienced things like this.

00:18:41.940 --> 00:18:43.580
This is before Google.

00:18:43.580 --> 00:18:48.900
So I couldn't Google, Oh, orgasmic bliss experience, leaving your body.

00:18:48.900 --> 00:18:50.900
That wasn't something that I could do at the time.

00:18:50.900 --> 00:18:55.780
And I had been given the message, go study Buddhism, go study yoga and Buddhism.

00:18:55.780 --> 00:19:00.660
So within a few months, I moved to the most beautiful place I'd ever been.

00:19:00.660 --> 00:19:05.460
I had enough money, thanks to my well-paying job to take a couple of years off.

00:19:06.020 --> 00:19:08.860
and I started to try and meditate.

00:19:08.860 --> 00:19:12.900
And I found, Sounds True was a pretty new

00:19:12.900 --> 00:19:14.560
publishing company at the time.

00:19:14.560 --> 00:19:17.460
Amazon, just in the past two years, had started to,

00:19:17.460 --> 00:19:19.460
they were just shipping books back then.

00:19:19.460 --> 00:19:20.940
- Yeah, it started with books.

00:19:20.940 --> 00:19:21.860
- It started with books.

00:19:21.860 --> 00:19:25.140
And I found Ken Wilber also at the same time.

00:19:25.140 --> 00:19:28.660
So I started to read Pema Chodron books,

00:19:28.660 --> 00:19:30.500
for your listeners who may know,

00:19:30.500 --> 00:19:32.020
the Tibetan Buddhist books.

00:19:32.020 --> 00:19:34.340
The Dalai Lama was a bestseller at the time.

00:19:34.340 --> 00:19:36.120
He had written "The Art of Happiness"

00:19:36.120 --> 00:19:38.020
I think the year before.

00:19:38.020 --> 00:19:39.300
So I started listening,

00:19:39.300 --> 00:19:42.100
and as soon as I started listening to Tibetan Buddhism,

00:19:42.100 --> 00:19:44.400
and at the same time digging into

00:19:44.400 --> 00:19:46.580
Ken Wilber's "Integral Philosophy,"

00:19:46.580 --> 00:19:51.220
those two domains, they knew what I was talking about.

00:19:51.220 --> 00:19:53.580
And that's what I wanted to learn.

00:19:53.580 --> 00:19:55.580
It was so similar to my experiences,

00:19:55.580 --> 00:19:59.420
many of the things that these two arenas were pointing out,

00:19:59.420 --> 00:20:02.060
that I just started devouring these books.

00:20:02.060 --> 00:20:04.100
I tried to figure out how to meditate.

00:20:04.100 --> 00:20:08.300
I continued to have what we call state experiences,

00:20:08.300 --> 00:20:13.300
temporary experiences that are novel and extraordinary,

00:20:13.300 --> 00:20:14.620
but I was still Kimberly.

00:20:14.620 --> 00:20:16.860
I was still everyday Kimberly

00:20:16.860 --> 00:20:19.300
and figuring out how to have a life.

00:20:19.300 --> 00:20:22.300
I met my partner who ended up being my partner

00:20:22.300 --> 00:20:23.580
for seven years at the time,

00:20:23.580 --> 00:20:26.540
somebody who also studied Tibetan Buddhism

00:20:26.540 --> 00:20:30.060
and Wilbur's work deeply out here in the middle of nowhere

00:20:30.060 --> 00:20:33.420
in this beautiful valley that I now live in again.

00:20:33.420 --> 00:20:37.340
And we went to Nepal and went to the Himalayas,

00:20:37.340 --> 00:20:39.700
and I studied at Khopan Monastery.

00:20:39.700 --> 00:20:43.620
I found the arena where people were talking

00:20:43.620 --> 00:20:45.380
about what I wanted to talk about

00:20:45.380 --> 00:20:48.260
and asking the questions that I wanted

00:20:48.260 --> 00:20:50.940
to figure out the answers to.

00:20:50.940 --> 00:20:52.540
That's how I got particularly

00:20:52.540 --> 00:20:55.100
into Tibetan Buddhism very deeply.

00:20:55.100 --> 00:20:56.180
And then it went from there.

00:20:56.180 --> 00:21:00.300
But at that point, I went full on as a Dharma,

00:21:00.300 --> 00:21:01.700
we won't call it a Dharma bum,

00:21:01.700 --> 00:21:06.700
but as a Dharma, which is the study of spiritual wisdom,

00:21:06.700 --> 00:21:09.820
particularly Indo-Tibetan Buddhism.

00:21:09.820 --> 00:21:12.980
It's not just Tibetan Buddhism, it's Indo-Tibetan Buddhism,

00:21:12.980 --> 00:21:16.620
and got very seriously aligned with the lineage

00:21:16.620 --> 00:21:19.620
of the Dalai Lama as my particular domain study.

00:21:19.620 --> 00:21:23.580
- And so I presume they had translators in this monastery

00:21:23.580 --> 00:21:25.740
and you were able to read.

00:21:25.740 --> 00:21:27.560
Did you learn any Tibetan?

00:21:27.560 --> 00:21:30.060
- Yes, I did learn some Tibetan.

00:21:30.060 --> 00:21:34.940
I never was one of those people who completely got into translating, but I learned enough

00:21:34.940 --> 00:21:36.420
to read it simply.

00:21:36.420 --> 00:21:42.420
I learned a pretty extensive vocabulary, which you just learn after studying the texts for

00:21:42.420 --> 00:21:43.420
so long.

00:21:43.420 --> 00:21:47.840
My journey into Indo-Tibetan Buddhism.

00:21:47.840 --> 00:21:53.580
So this was now, let's see, I went to Nepal in '99, 2000.

00:21:53.580 --> 00:21:55.720
I remember because we did a trek to Everest.

00:21:55.720 --> 00:22:02.240
we went up to Everest base camp right after a six week retreat outside of Kathmandu in

00:22:02.240 --> 00:22:03.240
Bodnath.

00:22:03.240 --> 00:22:08.600
If anybody of your listeners have been to Bodnath, it's an enclave just outside of Kathmandu

00:22:08.600 --> 00:22:11.840
where there are many beautiful Tibetan Buddhist monasteries.

00:22:11.840 --> 00:22:17.640
Yeah, it was 99-2000 because I remember we were in Namtse Bazar, which is a town on the

00:22:17.640 --> 00:22:20.560
way up to Everest on New Year's Eve, 99-2000.

00:22:20.560 --> 00:22:24.920
I remember that Rick, it was like the world was going to end or something when it turned

00:22:24.920 --> 00:22:26.920
Oh, Y2K, right.

00:22:26.920 --> 00:22:28.920
Y2K, that was it.

00:22:28.920 --> 00:22:30.920
Yeah, I was out there in the middle of the Himalayas when that happened.

00:22:30.920 --> 00:22:32.920
Everything was fine though, wasn't it?

00:22:32.920 --> 00:22:34.920
Yeah, it turned out okay.

00:22:34.920 --> 00:22:36.920
It turned out okay.

00:22:36.920 --> 00:22:38.920
And at the time I was studying with Rinpoches.

00:22:38.920 --> 00:22:40.920
I was studying with Lama Zopa Rinpoche,

00:22:40.920 --> 00:22:42.920
who's well known in certain circles.

00:22:42.920 --> 00:22:44.920
Studying with Tibetan Buddhists.

00:22:44.920 --> 00:22:46.920
And it was wonderful,

00:22:46.920 --> 00:22:48.920
and it was exciting.

00:22:48.920 --> 00:22:50.920
And then I started to meet the next generation,

00:22:50.920 --> 00:22:52.920
the first generation of Americans

00:22:52.920 --> 00:22:59.480
Americans and Westerners that had also gone to India and also gone to Tibet and learned

00:22:59.480 --> 00:23:05.280
the teachings and brought them back. And it was really when I found a community of Western

00:23:05.280 --> 00:23:11.080
educated first and second generation American, let's just say for lack of a better word,

00:23:11.080 --> 00:23:15.840
Tibetan Buddhists, that it really took off. I think if I had stayed, you know, you go

00:23:15.840 --> 00:23:21.280
to these temples, it's all in Tibetan, there's a lot of cultural trappings, it's all beautiful,

00:23:21.280 --> 00:23:23.160
But that's not what appealed to me.

00:23:23.160 --> 00:23:28.400
It was the application of the wisdom and how we can apply it to our modern life, while

00:23:28.400 --> 00:23:32.720
also integrating modernity and what we know about modernity at the same time.

00:23:32.720 --> 00:23:38.960
So I found some American teachers and communities and started to study very deeply for the next

00:23:38.960 --> 00:23:39.960
12 years.

00:23:39.960 --> 00:23:44.040
And a lot of retreats, started teaching about halfway through that, encouraged by my teachers

00:23:44.040 --> 00:23:45.040
to do so.

00:23:45.040 --> 00:23:47.520
So I heard you mention retreats.

00:23:47.520 --> 00:23:49.480
How much long retreat did you do?

00:23:49.480 --> 00:23:52.760
Did you do them in some kind of monastic setting or were you just doing them in your little

00:23:52.760 --> 00:23:55.360
cabin and on your own?

00:23:55.360 --> 00:23:58.120
What kind of experiences did you have on these long retreats?

00:23:58.120 --> 00:24:03.300
Well, if I added them up, it's years of solitary retreat.

00:24:03.300 --> 00:24:09.240
My traditional practice for doing solitary is I would do one to two, usually two, during

00:24:09.240 --> 00:24:13.400
this 12-year period, five to six weeks solitaries a year.

00:24:13.400 --> 00:24:16.720
So you go in for five to six weeks.

00:24:16.720 --> 00:24:20.300
These are what you call "lerams" or tantric retreats.

00:24:20.300 --> 00:24:26.380
Once you go through the Indo-Tibetan Buddhist study path and you do all of the purvakas

00:24:26.380 --> 00:24:34.440
and you have certain realizations, you enter the path of Vajrayana or the Diamond Way or

00:24:34.440 --> 00:24:35.440
Tantra.

00:24:35.440 --> 00:24:41.960
And when I say Tantra, people think all these things, it's not any of that, it's not Neo-Tantra,

00:24:41.960 --> 00:24:43.800
it's not what you Google.

00:24:43.800 --> 00:24:54.280
Vajrayana, Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Tantra, is an old, traditional, very well laid out path of practice.

00:24:54.280 --> 00:25:01.640
It has two different stages of it in my lineage, in the Anuttara Yoga Tantra lineage. There are deities,

00:25:01.640 --> 00:25:08.520
but when you enter that path and you get these tantric empowerments, you make a commitment to do

00:25:08.520 --> 00:25:13.720
a certain amount of solitary retreats. So I would go in and I did it in sometimes I did it in...

00:25:13.720 --> 00:25:17.960
Quick question. What does the word tantra itself mean if you translate it into English?

00:25:17.960 --> 00:25:20.760
It means thread. Yeah.

00:25:20.760 --> 00:25:21.880
Like sutra in Sanskrit.

00:25:21.880 --> 00:25:26.040
It means sutra. Yeah, it's another word for sutra. It means thread and it means

00:25:26.040 --> 00:25:30.280
lineage. It means lots of different things, right? The main thing that it means.

00:25:30.280 --> 00:25:35.960
So to do these retreats, did you have to get some kind of approval or certification from

00:25:35.960 --> 00:25:40.280
Teachers more experienced than yourself. I don't think most people would do this

00:25:40.280 --> 00:25:45.580
But if somebody without the proper training or understanding were to think I'm gonna do a six-month retreat

00:25:45.580 --> 00:25:50.720
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

00:25:50.720 --> 00:25:55.120
Yeah, have fun. It would either be really boring or really dangerous or somewhere in between

00:25:55.120 --> 00:26:01.400
Believe me. I've done some of these long things to six months here six months there and you get pretty nutty at times

00:26:01.400 --> 00:26:07.360
You know, you really need some kind of stabilization and people checking on you and things like that. Yes and

00:26:07.360 --> 00:26:13.180
stable psychology which perhaps will come to later the need for

00:26:13.180 --> 00:26:18.940
Modernity as well to give us the gifts of what we know of psychological wisdom

00:26:18.940 --> 00:26:19.540
Yes

00:26:19.540 --> 00:26:24.280
So these particular tantric retreats that I'm talking about I'm a Vajrayogini

00:26:24.440 --> 00:26:29.040
practitioner. Bhajagini is, if you think of it as like an archetype or a deity that you

00:26:29.040 --> 00:26:33.880
practice. And so it's very rigorous. You're not just going into a cabin and thinking about

00:26:33.880 --> 00:26:38.680
nothing. There's a ritual to go in, there's a ritual to go out. I would usually do it,

00:26:38.680 --> 00:26:44.800
I'd find an off-grid cabin somewhere and there are various places around mostly the Southwest

00:26:44.800 --> 00:26:51.440
that I did it. My first layaram again, that's a word that means to get ready to practice

00:26:51.440 --> 00:26:56.800
later stages of Tantra practice, which have to do with your working with your wind, what we call

00:26:56.800 --> 00:27:03.280
your winds, channels and drops, your subtle body, your energy body. You're doing very technical

00:27:03.280 --> 00:27:10.000
visualizations and practices, working with the inner energies of your inner body, right? And

00:27:10.000 --> 00:27:16.240
the mass of your inner body. So these Tantra retreats, you have a ritual that's like a 1500

00:27:16.240 --> 00:27:23.680
year old ritual to go in. You're meditating four times a day. It's a four-part retreat.

00:27:23.680 --> 00:27:30.640
You do a long meditation session before the sun rises, another before noon, a third before the

00:27:30.640 --> 00:27:35.840
sun sets, and a fourth before bed. You're doing yoga, you're eating very healthy, you're not

00:27:35.840 --> 00:27:40.480
seeing anybody, talking to anybody. I got to the point where I could hear the electricity,

00:27:40.480 --> 00:27:45.600
the sounds of just electricity in the walls, I could hear and would be disturbing. So I would

00:27:45.600 --> 00:27:49.040
I would usually do an off-grid cabin somewhere.

00:27:49.040 --> 00:27:50.680
There are many places if you know where to look.

00:27:50.680 --> 00:27:53.160
Sometimes you just rent a little house somewhere.

00:27:53.160 --> 00:27:55.920
And you go in and it's very rigorous.

00:27:55.920 --> 00:27:58.280
You don't see anybody, you don't have books,

00:27:58.280 --> 00:28:00.300
you don't have your phone, you don't have your computer,

00:28:00.300 --> 00:28:01.140
but you're busy.

00:28:01.140 --> 00:28:04.040
- You have to go into town to buy food?

00:28:04.040 --> 00:28:06.000
- No, you don't see anybody.

00:28:06.000 --> 00:28:07.400
- How do you get your food?

00:28:07.400 --> 00:28:10.600
- Yeah, so you learn how long cauliflower lasts

00:28:10.600 --> 00:28:11.440
in a cabin.

00:28:11.440 --> 00:28:12.280
(laughing)

00:28:12.280 --> 00:28:14.200
In your cooler or your refrigerator

00:28:14.200 --> 00:28:19.120
you're unplugging for your meditation sessions. There's different ways to do it. What usually

00:28:19.120 --> 00:28:27.200
happens is you have a caretaker that does deliveries for you once a week or once every two weeks.

00:28:27.200 --> 00:28:32.800
Some people like to go on retreat and have people cook for them and deliver food. I didn't.

00:28:32.800 --> 00:28:37.000
That was way too distracting for me. I would start fantasizing about the person who was

00:28:37.000 --> 00:28:41.480
delivering food and leave them notes and leave them like it was completely distracting. So

00:28:41.480 --> 00:28:44.360
So I needed to be really on my own.

00:28:44.360 --> 00:28:46.320
There are places set up for it.

00:28:46.320 --> 00:28:52.160
There's a town called Preston, Colorado, which listeners, there's wonderful retreat places

00:28:52.160 --> 00:28:55.640
out there with caretakers that will give you deliveries.

00:28:55.640 --> 00:28:58.720
And there's always a system, you don't need, we're not silly, right?

00:28:58.720 --> 00:29:00.040
Let's not be silly.

00:29:00.040 --> 00:29:04.120
There's always a system where if you need help, if you're in danger, if you hurt yourself,

00:29:04.120 --> 00:29:05.980
there's a way to alert somebody.

00:29:05.980 --> 00:29:08.000
So that's always the case too.

00:29:08.000 --> 00:29:10.400
So what kind of experiences did you have on these things?

00:29:10.400 --> 00:29:14.360
I'm sure it wasn't about this experience or that experience.

00:29:14.360 --> 00:29:19.360
It was a higher, broader, more abiding purpose, but there must have been some interesting

00:29:19.360 --> 00:29:20.840
things along the way.

00:29:20.840 --> 00:29:23.320
Oh yeah, we can talk about the interesting things.

00:29:23.320 --> 00:29:28.440
Well, zooming out for a second, one thing I can say is over this course of 12 years

00:29:28.440 --> 00:29:32.440
as I was doing these retreats, I know that I grew.

00:29:32.440 --> 00:29:38.480
Kimberly, who has her personality and her parts and her shadows and her issues and her

00:29:38.480 --> 00:29:44.540
traumas. I know that it helped me grow up psychologically. I'm aware of that and I got that feedback

00:29:44.540 --> 00:29:50.100
that that was the case. So that's a good thing. In terms of the experiences, the first retreat

00:29:50.100 --> 00:29:55.000
I did, the first lay-around retreat, I'd done a lot of other solitaries at this point, but

00:29:55.000 --> 00:30:01.360
the first Tantric retreat I did where I went in, I was a new Vajrayogini practitioner.

00:30:01.360 --> 00:30:08.240
And Vajrayogini is this archetype of bliss. She's a feminine wisdom. She's what we call

00:30:08.240 --> 00:30:14.040
a bikini, she's considered the feminine Buddha of all the Buddhas, like the awakened feminine

00:30:14.040 --> 00:30:22.880
energy and that she uses desire and passion and love to awaken herself and help others

00:30:22.880 --> 00:30:29.760
awake, wake up and grow up both. She's very sexy and she's very alive. She's got these

00:30:29.760 --> 00:30:36.960
little teeth and she's considered semi-wrathful. She's not one of those wrathful deities like

00:30:36.960 --> 00:30:41.600
Kali where she's going to cut your head off or something. She's just a little bit wrathful.

00:30:41.600 --> 00:30:49.120
Perfect for me. Just very attracted. And you're calling on this, yes, second person deity,

00:30:49.120 --> 00:30:55.200
which the texts say actually exists, right? You can believe it or not out there, but they exist

00:30:55.200 --> 00:31:03.440
as actually a dimensional being in the world. They exist as the realization of bliss wisdom itself,

00:31:03.440 --> 00:31:10.400
and they exist as who we are becoming. In Tibetan Buddhist Tantra you take these energies and these

00:31:10.400 --> 00:31:14.480
archetypes and you absorb them into yourself and that's what people either love about it or don't

00:31:14.480 --> 00:31:19.360
love about it. You're taking these energies and you're bringing them into yourself so that you

00:31:19.360 --> 00:31:25.600
are becoming a deity yourself like that. An awakened being, not a deity like "oh i'm a goddess,

00:31:25.600 --> 00:31:31.840
i'm so great" nothing like that. It's this awakened love bliss wisdom. So I went on my first lay around

00:31:31.840 --> 00:31:38.320
My first retreat was Vajra Gini and by the way, she's red. She's the color red and the texts say

00:31:38.320 --> 00:31:44.720
that she's like light like she's shining in this sort of ruby red light. The texts say she's red

00:31:44.720 --> 00:31:49.040
because she's in love with you and love with all beings which is really sweet like she has a crush

00:31:49.040 --> 00:31:55.680
on you. My first retreat was at a cabin, a little cabin off grid in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

00:31:56.640 --> 00:32:00.960
My friend Brian kindly let me use his cabin.

00:32:00.960 --> 00:32:03.560
You had to hike in like a mile.

00:32:03.560 --> 00:32:07.000
And it was hiking in with my water and going back

00:32:07.000 --> 00:32:09.880
and getting another load of things and going back in.

00:32:09.880 --> 00:32:13.760
And I had just closed, it's called a sum boundary.

00:32:13.760 --> 00:32:16.160
I had just closed a boundary.

00:32:16.160 --> 00:32:17.800
It's an energetic boundary.

00:32:17.800 --> 00:32:19.400
Tibetan Buddhism, I say it often,

00:32:19.400 --> 00:32:23.040
it's a mashup of Indian Buddhism,

00:32:23.040 --> 00:32:30.320
Meeting bone shamanism, which was the religion of Tibet at the time like in a hill tribe

00:32:30.320 --> 00:32:32.900
religion, um, very shamanistic

00:32:32.900 --> 00:32:39.840
A lot of spirits and nature spirits and I love all that stuff. I grew up catholic. I love saints and

00:32:39.840 --> 00:32:42.400
incense and deities and

00:32:42.400 --> 00:32:45.440
Mysticism and I also grew up in the new age, right?

00:32:45.440 --> 00:32:47.840
So all of that stuff fit me very well

00:32:48.080 --> 00:32:53.220
But I went in and I closed my boundary where you walked the four corners you walk the four directions

00:32:53.220 --> 00:32:57.600
And you set this energetic boundary and you make offerings and you ask

00:32:57.600 --> 00:33:01.840
Any spirits inside or out right inside or out that are going to?

00:33:01.840 --> 00:33:04.880
Create obstacles in your retreat you ask them to leave

00:33:04.880 --> 00:33:09.540
And you ask your own yeah, you can think of them as guardian angels or ancestors

00:33:09.540 --> 00:33:14.400
My grandmothers are with me on these retreats both of them

00:33:15.280 --> 00:33:20.720
You asked them to support you and be there with you and I closed my retreat and I went back to my little

00:33:20.720 --> 00:33:23.120
Cabin, I still remember it so clearly

00:33:23.120 --> 00:33:25.600
And I looked up into the sky

00:33:25.600 --> 00:33:32.400
And there was this red fireball like bright red and I had just done these prayers to

00:33:32.400 --> 00:33:39.520
This red lady to be to teach me and to help me grow up and wake up in our secular language

00:33:39.520 --> 00:33:42.640
And there was this red fireball with my eyeballs

00:33:43.200 --> 00:33:47.200
I was totally sober, totally straight, not on anything.

00:33:47.200 --> 00:33:49.740
You know, I'm like, "Am I seeing what I'm seeing?"

00:33:49.740 --> 00:33:53.120
And it was quite large and right above my head,

00:33:53.120 --> 00:33:55.580
and it floated across the sky.

00:33:55.580 --> 00:33:57.540
And it was a little terrifying.

00:33:57.540 --> 00:33:59.000
It was a little terrifying.

00:33:59.000 --> 00:34:00.540
You know, in my body,

00:34:00.540 --> 00:34:04.380
I didn't start to spin stories about it,

00:34:04.380 --> 00:34:06.960
but I had just done this long ancient prayer

00:34:06.960 --> 00:34:08.720
to this red lady.

00:34:08.720 --> 00:34:11.960
I remember it was kind of getting close to bedtime,

00:34:11.960 --> 00:34:16.460
And I went inside and I kind of put myself to sleep, like, it's going to be okay.

00:34:16.460 --> 00:34:20.440
And I had amazing dreams that night.

00:34:20.440 --> 00:34:23.960
And that was one of the most powerful retreats, you know, the first one that I

00:34:23.960 --> 00:34:28.960
did, and there were other extraordinary experiences, anomalous experiences, which

00:34:28.960 --> 00:34:34.480
later became a field of study in the next era of my life after this particular era.

00:34:34.480 --> 00:34:39.100
I started to study extraordinary experiences and how we make meaning of

00:34:39.100 --> 00:34:42.780
them based in large part on the experiences that I've had.

00:34:42.780 --> 00:34:47.020
I remember you saying at one time you didn't set the boundaries properly or something and

00:34:47.020 --> 00:34:51.660
you kind of came under attack and the window shutters were flapping even though there was

00:34:51.660 --> 00:34:54.380
no wind and there was all this crazy stuff going on.

00:34:54.380 --> 00:34:58.580
Yeah, that was the second lay-around, the second retreat.

00:34:58.580 --> 00:35:07.180
And this one was in an old guardhouse on ancient Apache land that was fought over.

00:35:07.180 --> 00:35:15.420
very, very sad, tragic story of what happened to the Apache and what the American military

00:35:15.420 --> 00:35:20.380
did to them, of course, and their land. And this land was very bloody. There's a lot of

00:35:20.380 --> 00:35:27.420
blood shed on this land. This little stone guardhouse, 150 years old at least, was right

00:35:27.420 --> 00:35:32.220
by a spring. And the spring, this is in the Chiricahua Mountains, the spring was guarded.

00:35:32.220 --> 00:35:36.460
They had to guard the spring and keep, you know, keep it for the military and keep anybody

00:35:36.460 --> 00:35:42.580
else away from it. And I went in, it was just a little bed, you know, it was a tiny room.

00:35:42.580 --> 00:35:47.180
And I went in and I'd had such a good first retreat, and I'd had a lot of realizations

00:35:47.180 --> 00:35:53.020
and I could feel myself growing and I took a very Sapha Mark approach to this. I didn't

00:35:53.020 --> 00:35:57.980
do all of the rituals that you're supposed to do to protect yourself because even now

00:35:57.980 --> 00:36:03.020
my modern mind is like, oh, do I need to make those particular cakes you need to make in

00:36:03.020 --> 00:36:09.180
Tibetan Buddhism, you have to make these cakes and you make them out of bread and flour and milk.

00:36:09.180 --> 00:36:14.380
You know, imagine getting a bunch of Wonder Bread and tearing it up and putting stuff in there and

00:36:14.380 --> 00:36:19.340
forming it into certain things and then cutting up this processed cheese and sticking it on there

00:36:19.340 --> 00:36:23.660
with toothpicks. I was like, "Is this cultural trappings? I mean, do I really need to do this?

00:36:23.660 --> 00:36:29.820
I'm waking up and I'm growing." And I didn't take it very seriously because I was such a great

00:36:29.820 --> 00:36:36.300
practitioner and so advanced you see and I went to sleep that night and I had a dream I still see it

00:36:36.300 --> 00:36:42.460
so clearly in my mind where I was staying at some beach house and I left the sliding glass doors

00:36:42.460 --> 00:36:47.420
open like I literally left the doors open and I remember still can see his face I remember this

00:36:47.420 --> 00:36:52.060
if we think of it as sort of a demon-like creature like a scary looking monster-like creature was

00:36:52.060 --> 00:36:57.900
coming to the glass door and looking in and looking at me and I knew I was dreaming it was a lucid

00:36:57.900 --> 00:37:05.100
dream. And so I woke myself up in the dream and yes, there were papers flying all over the place.

00:37:05.100 --> 00:37:12.780
This old window was flapping open. I went outside, there's no wind, and I could hear again with my

00:37:12.780 --> 00:37:20.060
ears, with the five senses, not a meditative hearing, but a hear with my ears chanting.

00:37:20.060 --> 00:37:24.540
And you know, I might say it's Native American sounding chanting, I don't know,

00:37:24.540 --> 00:37:31.420
But that's how it sounded to me how I classified it deep chanting. I was afraid I wasn't scared

00:37:31.420 --> 00:37:34.100
But I knew it was a lesson to take things seriously

00:37:34.100 --> 00:37:39.980
And I went back inside and I did the mantras I was supposed to do and I purified things

00:37:39.980 --> 00:37:42.740
And the lesson there for me, it wasn't that oh

00:37:42.740 --> 00:37:45.740
You did it wrong. They're attacking you

00:37:45.740 --> 00:37:51.620
It's that the way we treat our practice our practices, you know, we say in Buddhism. It's empty

00:37:51.780 --> 00:37:57.500
It's empty of any self-existence of its own. It has no power from its own side to wake us up

00:37:57.500 --> 00:38:01.220
It has no power from its own side to harm us whatsoever

00:38:01.220 --> 00:38:08.020
But the way we treat our practice equates to the results we get and so if I take my practice

00:38:08.020 --> 00:38:14.540
Seriously, of course, I'm gonna get better results, right if I cut corners and think I'm so great and

00:38:15.220 --> 00:38:22.740
Lack humility and lack vigor and rigor in my practice and what kind of results am I gonna get?

00:38:22.740 --> 00:38:29.340
It's just like anything else like you're married. I'm married. Of course our quality of our relationship

00:38:29.340 --> 00:38:31.860
Depends on how we treat it

00:38:31.860 --> 00:38:39.220
If we treat our relationship with reverence and joy and honor, of course, we're gonna get better results

00:38:39.220 --> 00:38:45.060
So what I took from that lesson, it wasn't some oh, they're gonna hurt you or it was treat your practice

00:38:45.060 --> 00:38:50.580
Practice seriously. Do it well. And that's going to create the results that you get.

00:38:50.580 --> 00:38:55.860
Interesting. Yeah, I was on a six-month course one time led by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and we

00:38:55.860 --> 00:39:00.780
were in Biarritz, France at that point. And one day he said, "Keep your windows closed."

00:39:00.780 --> 00:39:03.900
And then when I went to bed that night, I thought, "I like fresh air. I'm going to leave my window

00:39:03.900 --> 00:39:07.780
open a little bit." And that night, I actually had some kind of dream where I was attacked

00:39:07.780 --> 00:39:12.900
by some kind of witch-like creature. And I started doing a Sanskrit puja in my mind and

00:39:12.900 --> 00:39:18.100
that kind of dispelled it. But I thought, okay, I'll put a little in those.

00:39:18.100 --> 00:39:23.860
Yeah. And also, I believe after all of these years, it's a multi dimensional universe.

00:39:23.860 --> 00:39:31.660
It's populated with many things known and unknown. And we are obviously not alone. Right?

00:39:31.660 --> 00:39:37.620
And that has proven to me in my own experience through the decades.

00:39:37.620 --> 00:39:41.980
Is there anything more you want to say about your whole Tibetan Buddhist area? You and I

00:39:41.980 --> 00:39:45.300
I could do an interview every day for a month and we wouldn't run out of things to talk

00:39:45.300 --> 00:39:46.300
about.

00:39:46.300 --> 00:39:49.860
But is there anything you want to say about this chapter before we move on to anomalous

00:39:49.860 --> 00:39:52.500
experiences and some other things?

00:39:52.500 --> 00:39:58.980
I know many of the listeners, Tibetan Buddhism, Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, for me is an absolutely

00:39:58.980 --> 00:40:03.180
precious, precious gift to humanity.

00:40:03.180 --> 00:40:08.180
It is the most complex spiritual technology that I'm aware of that we have.

00:40:08.180 --> 00:40:09.180
It was a whole culture.

00:40:09.180 --> 00:40:17.020
It was a whole social system devoted not to making money or devoted not to advancing technology

00:40:17.020 --> 00:40:22.180
as one of my teachers says, "Yeah, Tibet's technology didn't get much more advanced than

00:40:22.180 --> 00:40:23.180
yak butter."

00:40:23.180 --> 00:40:26.180
I think it was Ken Wilber is the one who said that.

00:40:26.180 --> 00:40:30.460
However, spiritual technology is the most advanced out there and I have found that to

00:40:30.460 --> 00:40:31.460
be true.

00:40:31.460 --> 00:40:38.540
So it is a precious gem that part of my mission is to preserve it, save it, and get the jewels

00:40:38.540 --> 00:40:45.820
because I feel like I got the jewels. It also, as Americans or Westerners, as, you know,

00:40:45.820 --> 00:40:52.380
not monks in a monastery somewhere, it needs updating and it needs integration with psychology

00:40:52.380 --> 00:40:59.020
and with the gifts and tools that we have now. And that's what I'd like to see because there can be

00:40:59.020 --> 00:41:05.500
abuses and there can be problems and we, many of us have heard of those. I certainly am not blind

00:41:05.500 --> 00:41:11.900
to the issues of Tibetan Buddhism with gurus who have not dealt with their shadows and I have my

00:41:11.900 --> 00:41:18.060
own stories. Again, that could be a whole other podcast about that. And yet, such precious

00:41:18.060 --> 00:41:26.220
opportunity for evolving and developing our waking up process. And for me, waking up and growing up

00:41:26.220 --> 00:41:32.060
are deeply intertwined. You may know the word "kavach" in Sanskrit, which means like an armor.

00:41:33.100 --> 00:41:39.180
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

00:41:39.180 --> 00:41:42.060
There can also be a an irrustria coverage or a national

00:41:42.060 --> 00:41:49.100
armor in a sense that is created sort of by the coherence or the spiritual potency of the

00:41:49.100 --> 00:41:54.060
Collective consciousness of the people so one wonders. Well, what happened to the bet?

00:41:54.060 --> 00:41:59.580
There was there's some kind of corruption in there which caused them to be susceptible to the chinese

00:42:00.140 --> 00:42:05.980
invasion or was perhaps the Chinese invasion some kind of cosmic play to get them out of

00:42:05.980 --> 00:42:10.940
Tibetan more into the world so the rest of the world could partake of their wisdom?

00:42:10.940 --> 00:42:16.620
Yeah, I mean I've been educated, I've had education that is comparable to a Geshe.

00:42:16.620 --> 00:42:20.860
Geshe is like having two PhDs in Tibetan Buddhism and if

00:42:20.860 --> 00:42:25.980
1959 didn't happen, if diaspora didn't happen, I would have never had that opportunity.

00:42:26.860 --> 00:42:32.940
So what is it really, Rick? Is it true that they were corrupt or is it true that it was meant to be?

00:42:32.940 --> 00:42:39.260
Well, what functions? What's most effective? What is the best way we can see this

00:42:39.260 --> 00:42:45.820
that is the most true for us? And for me, I think I just answered that question. If the diaspora

00:42:45.820 --> 00:42:52.780
didn't happen, if my teacher didn't walk over the Himalayas and go into India and then start to

00:42:52.780 --> 00:42:58.780
spread this wisdom that was surrounded by the Himalayas and held secret for so long, I never

00:42:58.780 --> 00:43:05.820
would have had the opportunity or to find beings and people that could help me figure out and

00:43:05.820 --> 00:43:10.540
integrate that experience I had in Boston. Uh-huh, interesting. So thanks Mao Tse-Tung.

00:43:10.540 --> 00:43:16.220
Yeah. However you pronounce your name. Yeah, it's interesting. Sometimes there are these really

00:43:16.220 --> 00:43:21.740
horrible, catastrophic things that happen, but then the consequence is that humanity seems to

00:43:21.740 --> 00:43:24.740
to learn a lesson and something good comes out of it.

00:43:24.740 --> 00:43:25.740
Trauma to transcendence.

00:43:25.740 --> 00:43:26.740
Yeah.

00:43:26.740 --> 00:43:28.740
What's going on there?

00:43:28.740 --> 00:43:33.580
Okay, so, spiritual development from modern research and ancient tradition does waking

00:43:33.580 --> 00:43:35.660
up automatically grow us up?

00:43:35.660 --> 00:43:37.220
Is that what we want to talk about next?

00:43:37.220 --> 00:43:38.220
Sure, we could.

00:43:38.220 --> 00:43:42.500
Do states of consciousness and states of ego development intersect?

00:43:42.500 --> 00:43:46.820
And my answer to the first question is, sorry, I used to think that waking up automatically

00:43:46.820 --> 00:43:50.300
grew us up, but there's precious little evidence of it.

00:43:50.300 --> 00:43:57.300
Yes, well, I think the mistake that we make often is we have this extraordinary

00:43:57.300 --> 00:44:00.300
say unity experience, experience of oneness.

00:44:00.300 --> 00:44:02.300
And it can happen with children.

00:44:02.300 --> 00:44:07.300
Children have experiences of oneness maybe with a mountain or with

00:44:07.300 --> 00:44:09.300
swimming with dolphins.

00:44:09.300 --> 00:44:13.300
And adults too, right? We have these experiences with trees or in nature

00:44:13.300 --> 00:44:18.300
or maybe we take some substance and we feel in our being, in our body,

00:44:18.300 --> 00:44:22.220
our body, how our body is connected to everything and we are all one.

00:44:22.220 --> 00:44:26.500
And that's wonderful, right? It's glorious. It's a wonderful experience.

00:44:26.500 --> 00:44:31.700
And then later we start to wake up to the realization that

00:44:31.700 --> 00:44:33.700
we are socially constructed beings,

00:44:33.700 --> 00:44:38.420
that Rick is Rick and what he calls himself based

00:44:38.420 --> 00:44:39.940
on how he was raised,

00:44:39.940 --> 00:44:44.900
the content and context that you were exposed to as

00:44:44.900 --> 00:44:46.500
you were growing up your whole story,

00:44:46.620 --> 00:44:49.540
which I'd love to ask you all about sometime,

00:44:49.540 --> 00:44:52.620
that got you to France and got you into the Tian movement

00:44:52.620 --> 00:44:53.700
and all of these things.

00:44:53.700 --> 00:44:58.580
And we are constructed based on our exposure

00:44:58.580 --> 00:45:01.660
and experiences as we are growing up.

00:45:01.660 --> 00:45:04.920
And we start to see that we're also not that,

00:45:04.920 --> 00:45:08.660
that there's something perhaps below that or under that

00:45:08.660 --> 00:45:09.980
that is more our true nature.

00:45:09.980 --> 00:45:12.380
And we start to see that we can release

00:45:12.380 --> 00:45:14.980
the social constructions, we can release our context,

00:45:14.980 --> 00:45:18.660
we can release these beliefs of what we are.

00:45:18.660 --> 00:45:22.500
And that identity of self continues to grow.

00:45:22.500 --> 00:45:27.500
And eventually we begin to see that we are awareness itself.

00:45:27.500 --> 00:45:32.620
And we are aware of awareness that I am,

00:45:32.620 --> 00:45:36.820
you are, the you looking through your eyes into my eyes

00:45:36.820 --> 00:45:38.940
and me looking out through your eyes

00:45:38.940 --> 00:45:41.500
is this same awareness that we share

00:45:41.500 --> 00:45:44.120
and that everything I could possibly perceive

00:45:44.120 --> 00:45:49.960
you could possibly perceive in this room and listeners in the room you're sitting in, all

00:45:49.960 --> 00:45:57.360
that you perceive is arising in you, the big you, the capital Y you, not the little you

00:45:57.360 --> 00:46:03.400
with the social security number. Even say your name to yourself is arising in your awareness.

00:46:03.400 --> 00:46:10.360
And so we see, and this is where our study at Stages International and constructive developmental

00:46:10.360 --> 00:46:18.360
theory comes in, we can see from the science side, from the research side, how our identity of what

00:46:18.360 --> 00:46:26.840
we call ourselves evolves and grows through our lifespan and is tied to these continuals throughout

00:46:26.840 --> 00:46:32.200
our lifespan waking up experiences. So to answer your question, no, like spiritual teachers that

00:46:32.200 --> 00:46:36.680
go out and like, "Oh, I had this experience and now I'm fully enlightened." I don't quite believe

00:46:36.680 --> 00:46:42.600
there's a fully enlightened, personally. There's no end point. We have these experiences and then

00:46:42.600 --> 00:46:47.640
we come back down from them and almost always we're still the same person that we were.

00:46:47.640 --> 00:46:54.760
But those waking up experiences we're finding tend to be natural. They happen to virtually

00:46:54.760 --> 00:47:01.640
everybody. They might not call it that, but this developmental pattern we see of how our identity

00:47:01.640 --> 00:47:07.480
changes is something we all share as humans. No matter what our culture, no matter what our

00:47:07.480 --> 00:47:15.160
background, if we have educational opportunities, we can progress perhaps faster or farther,

00:47:15.160 --> 00:47:23.240
but there is this deep intersection we notice between waking up and change. Our identity

00:47:23.240 --> 00:47:30.280
continuously changes, like who you are today, Rick, and how you see the world and how you see yourself

00:47:30.280 --> 00:47:33.880
is obviously very different than when you were 10.

00:47:33.880 --> 00:47:36.380
And different, I would say, when you were 20.

00:47:36.380 --> 00:47:37.380
That's for sure.

00:47:37.380 --> 00:47:39.780
When you were 30, and on and on.

00:47:39.780 --> 00:47:41.480
Now, an interesting question is,

00:47:41.480 --> 00:47:46.780
let's say, if I had not been doing spiritual practice all those years,

00:47:46.780 --> 00:47:50.580
how different would I be than what I am now?

00:47:50.580 --> 00:47:53.780
I think I wouldn't even be alive, but presuming I had lived,

00:47:53.780 --> 00:47:56.280
I also think I would be very different.

00:47:56.280 --> 00:48:02.280
But some people argue that the growth that we experience through spiritual endeavors

00:48:02.280 --> 00:48:07.480
is just normal maturation and we're putting some kind of spin on it with all of our spiritual

00:48:07.480 --> 00:48:09.640
lingo that we've immersed ourselves in.

00:48:09.640 --> 00:48:12.760
- Mm-hmm, could be. You know, I could see that argument.

00:48:12.760 --> 00:48:16.520
- That would be an interesting area for scientific study if that could be measured somehow.

00:48:16.520 --> 00:48:23.480
- Yeah. Well, it's interesting. We find that there are certain things that are necessary

00:48:23.480 --> 00:48:31.920
but not sufficient for growth. And part of it is this cognitive maturity that happens

00:48:31.920 --> 00:48:36.160
in terms of subject-object, in terms of how we're seeing ourselves and how we see the

00:48:36.160 --> 00:48:43.040
world. The transformational process, I think, is of the, we'll call it identity or the ego,

00:48:43.040 --> 00:48:49.600
was explained very beautifully by the educator-scholar Robert Keegan, Bob Keegan, out of the Harvard

00:48:49.600 --> 00:48:55.280
School of Education. He's really a great leader in this field and he described the subject-object

00:48:55.280 --> 00:49:01.840
process. That transformation happens when what was previously hidden from us becomes an object

00:49:01.840 --> 00:49:07.760
of our awareness. What was previously subject becomes object and a new subject is replacing it.

00:49:07.760 --> 00:49:14.720
So that's a lot of fancy words for saying, let's say this, we're all going around looking at the

00:49:14.720 --> 00:49:20.520
world with a pair of colored glasses on that we're not aware that we're wearing.

00:49:20.520 --> 00:49:24.460
That's a metaphor for the subjective state of mind.

00:49:24.460 --> 00:49:28.920
The transformation process of our identity or in this case let's call it our ego.

00:49:28.920 --> 00:49:32.500
Now everybody when I'm saying ego it's not a negative thing.

00:49:32.500 --> 00:49:38.000
I'm using it as a neutral term so just think of it as a neutral term like identity.

00:49:38.000 --> 00:49:43.320
The transformational process is when we take off those glasses or maybe they fall off or

00:49:43.320 --> 00:49:45.460
or maybe someone takes them off and hands it to us.

00:49:45.460 --> 00:49:47.480
That's kind of the mystery of how that happens.

00:49:47.480 --> 00:49:50.860
But we take off those glasses and we look at them

00:49:50.860 --> 00:49:53.520
and we see, I've been seeing the world through this way.

00:49:53.520 --> 00:49:55.160
And now it's an object.

00:49:55.160 --> 00:49:57.900
And we have a new pair of glasses on that we can't see.

00:49:57.900 --> 00:49:59.840
And that's the subject object process.

00:49:59.840 --> 00:50:03.080
And as we continue to take off our glasses

00:50:03.080 --> 00:50:04.440
throughout our lifespan and see,

00:50:04.440 --> 00:50:06.600
oh, I've been seeing the world this way.

00:50:06.600 --> 00:50:08.720
We might not use those words.

00:50:08.720 --> 00:50:12.520
That's how we actually continue to evolve and grow.

00:50:12.520 --> 00:50:13.640
And that's very well tracked.

00:50:13.640 --> 00:50:17.480
And I encourage everybody to check out Stages International

00:50:17.480 --> 00:50:18.920
and the courses we're doing there.

00:50:18.920 --> 00:50:20.720
I'm not getting a kickback from that.

00:50:20.720 --> 00:50:24.160
It's not a financial benefit for me, nothing like that,

00:50:24.160 --> 00:50:27.440
but it really is the best developmental framework

00:50:27.440 --> 00:50:30.280
that I'm aware of that answers this question.

00:50:30.280 --> 00:50:32.600
And we're continuing to explore this question

00:50:32.600 --> 00:50:36.680
of how that waking up and growing up process intercepts.

00:50:36.680 --> 00:50:40.040
What is that process of evolution of our identity

00:50:40.040 --> 00:50:41.560
as we grow?

00:50:41.560 --> 00:50:45.600
I don't think we're anywhere near there yet, but it'd be interesting if all these stages

00:50:45.600 --> 00:50:51.300
of development that both psychology understands and spiritual traditions understand could be

00:50:51.300 --> 00:50:56.640
thoroughly mapped and correlated so that we can figure out how the language connects between

00:50:56.640 --> 00:51:02.380
different cultures that are actually describing the same thing, and also correlated with neurophysiological

00:51:02.380 --> 00:51:06.040
measures as waking, dreaming, and sleeping have been.

00:51:06.040 --> 00:51:07.040
Yes, indeed.

00:51:07.040 --> 00:51:10.880
And there are some fantastic maps out there.

00:51:10.880 --> 00:51:14.880
Whenever we do a map in these areas, it's like everybody has a way of, one of my teachers

00:51:14.880 --> 00:51:18.420
said sort of, cutting up reality and talking about it, right?

00:51:18.420 --> 00:51:22.580
The work of Ken Wilber has some beautiful maps that he's the great synthesizer and he

00:51:22.580 --> 00:51:27.040
puts all the different theoretical maps together so you can look and see, oh this map is measuring

00:51:27.040 --> 00:51:32.720
identity, this map is measuring spiritual intelligence, this map is measuring cognitive

00:51:32.720 --> 00:51:35.440
development, because they're all measuring different things.

00:51:35.440 --> 00:51:38.900
I love what you're talking about, neurobiology too.

00:51:38.900 --> 00:51:44.620
And these maps are really a matrix of consciousness, you know, how our consciousness evolves, how

00:51:44.620 --> 00:51:48.860
our consciousness develops, and that's really the research that we're doing.

00:51:48.860 --> 00:51:49.860
Great.

00:51:49.860 --> 00:51:54.160
Let me get a couple questions in here that people sent in.

00:51:54.160 --> 00:51:56.720
This is from Marty McConnell in Chicago.

00:51:56.720 --> 00:52:02.460
How do you reconcile or connect such an ancient practice as Buddhism with modern thinking,

00:52:02.460 --> 00:52:06.060
with science and technology and even therapeutic approaches?

00:52:06.060 --> 00:52:07.500
How do you connect the two?

00:52:07.500 --> 00:52:13.260
How do you reconcile and connect, juxtapose and harmonize this ancient knowledge that you've been

00:52:13.260 --> 00:52:19.820
studying with modern knowledge, which you've also been studying? Yeah, thanks, Marty. Because that is

00:52:19.820 --> 00:52:25.980
the work, the mission, the experiment of my life and what we're doing at the Confluence

00:52:25.980 --> 00:52:32.060
Experiences. We're looking at how we can bring together in a confluence these two great traditions

00:52:32.060 --> 00:52:39.100
of spirit and mind, of spirituality and psychology, how we're figuring it out. One thing is to

00:52:39.100 --> 00:52:47.420
release the nonsense, the cultural trappings or the parts of Buddhism that just don't function

00:52:47.420 --> 00:52:53.660
or work well in modernity and doing that very carefully and very cautiously. For example,

00:52:53.660 --> 00:53:01.500
the practice of Guru Yoga, the whole Guru thing. There's so much silliness in it and yet there's

00:53:01.500 --> 00:53:08.140
also a point for the ego having something, somebody to bend its knee to, to actually

00:53:08.140 --> 00:53:12.820
admit to our modern mind, our individualistic mind that thinks we have everything figured

00:53:12.820 --> 00:53:18.660
out that somebody else can teach me something, right? That itself is difficult for the modern

00:53:18.660 --> 00:53:24.340
mind. For example, Guru Yoga, how do you not throw out the baby with the bathwater, to

00:53:24.340 --> 00:53:31.040
use a common term, but yet let go of the cultural ridiculousness for us, right? The stuff that

00:53:31.040 --> 00:53:36.160
doesn't really apply anymore and keep the gold. You know, throw out the dross, keep the gold.

00:53:36.160 --> 00:53:40.800
And then psychology... Before you get off that point, I would say one of the biggest challenges

00:53:40.800 --> 00:53:48.160
there is on the guru's shoulders to have the maturity not to have all the adulation go to

00:53:48.160 --> 00:53:54.720
his head, which 95% of the time it seems to do, causing all kinds of problems. Yes, we'll get

00:53:54.720 --> 00:53:59.200
there, but this is a huge part of our mission and work at the Association for Spiritual Integrity is

00:53:59.200 --> 00:54:05.760
How do we help and support our spiritual teachers of multiple denominations or non-denominations

00:54:05.760 --> 00:54:12.000
to do that well? And a lot of teachers these days are trying to adopt a non-hierarchical

00:54:12.000 --> 00:54:15.680
approach, even in the way they arrange the chairs. And it's still obvious that they're

00:54:15.680 --> 00:54:20.080
kind of the leader, but there's an attempt to sort of say, "Hey, we're all in this together."

00:54:20.080 --> 00:54:26.160
Right. We could talk about it a lot. This is what we're experimenting with and doing at the

00:54:26.160 --> 00:54:32.800
confluence experience. I started a tantra group, a Vajrayana cohort. We're a year in. For the first

00:54:32.800 --> 00:54:39.360
time in 12 years, I started one. And there is a horizontal power structure in terms of, "I'm

00:54:39.360 --> 00:54:45.280
Kimberly. I'm vulnerable. I don't have anything to hide. I'll tell you about the argument I had

00:54:45.280 --> 00:54:51.920
this morning with my husband. I'm clearly doing shadow work. I'm there with you as a fellow

00:54:51.920 --> 00:55:00.240
spiritual aspirants. And yet, and yet, my job is to be the holder of that seat. My job as the lineage

00:55:00.240 --> 00:55:04.800
holder is when I am giving, say, a tantric empowerment, which I'm doing in a month,

00:55:04.800 --> 00:55:10.960
if I don't hold that as not Kimberly, it's not Kimberly holding it. If I don't take that seat,

00:55:10.960 --> 00:55:17.360
then I can't help anybody. And I didn't spend those 15, 20 years. What good was it? Right? So

00:55:17.360 --> 00:55:23.360
It's this flex flow between a horizontal power structure when it's appropriate.

00:55:23.360 --> 00:55:27.360
People hate the word, but it's not a power hierarchy.

00:55:27.360 --> 00:55:30.360
It's an experience hierarchy.

00:55:30.360 --> 00:55:32.360
Yeah, and kind of a knowledge-wisdom hierarchy.

00:55:32.360 --> 00:55:33.360
A knowledge-wisdom hierarchy.

00:55:33.360 --> 00:55:37.360
And then in our circle, I'm not making the business decisions.

00:55:37.360 --> 00:55:40.360
Somebody with more business experience is making the business decisions

00:55:40.360 --> 00:55:43.360
because they hold the seat in that case.

00:55:43.360 --> 00:55:47.880
Our AI expert in the field is making the AI decisions.

00:55:47.880 --> 00:55:53.840
So we're experimenting with this flex flow structure where when it's appropriate, it's

00:55:53.840 --> 00:55:54.840
horizontal.

00:55:54.840 --> 00:56:00.800
When it's appropriate, the person who has the most experience in that domain is the

00:56:00.800 --> 00:56:05.100
one who's leading us because then we're leaderless and you can't go very far.

00:56:05.100 --> 00:56:07.120
And that's the way the world works.

00:56:07.120 --> 00:56:11.700
You don't spend tens of thousands of dollars to go to university to study with a bunch

00:56:11.700 --> 00:56:15.540
of people that don't know any more than you do. The whole assumption is that these guys

00:56:15.540 --> 00:56:19.940
really know something and that's why I want to spend time in their presence. But then,

00:56:19.940 --> 00:56:24.340
on the other hand, it doesn't grant these professors the liberty to do whatever they

00:56:24.340 --> 00:56:28.800
want and to dismiss you if you question what they're doing. Like if they want to sleep

00:56:28.800 --> 00:56:34.220
with all their female students or something, their knowledge of physics does not excuse

00:56:34.220 --> 00:56:37.940
that kind of behavior. And I would say the same should be true of any kind of supposed

00:56:37.940 --> 00:56:42.340
spiritual attainment. Because you know, you and I have heard these stories about people saying,

00:56:42.340 --> 00:56:47.220
"Oh, I'm not sleeping with the women, it's God doing it, and I'm just an instrument of God and

00:56:47.220 --> 00:56:52.980
yada yada." Yeah, oh please, oh please. Just to get it on the tape, every spiritual teacher,

00:56:52.980 --> 00:56:57.540
so those of you out there, you want to progress spiritually, you want to increase your spiritual

00:56:57.540 --> 00:57:03.940
intelligence, your spiritual wisdom, have waking up experiences, wisdom, love, care, compassion.

00:57:04.660 --> 00:57:08.420
It's like learning anything else go find a community a teacher

00:57:08.420 --> 00:57:13.060
That help you learn and that teacher whoever it is or that community

00:57:13.060 --> 00:57:16.500
Should have some sort of feedback process

00:57:16.500 --> 00:57:19.060
Should be doing their own

00:57:19.060 --> 00:57:21.540
psychological shadow work therapeutic work

00:57:21.540 --> 00:57:25.300
Should also be a person be human

00:57:25.300 --> 00:57:27.860
You can be human and divine

00:57:27.860 --> 00:57:34.260
At the same time and that actually we all are and that's part of the path that we walk. Yeah

00:57:34.260 --> 00:57:40.760
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

00:57:40.760 --> 00:57:43.300
awakening and

00:57:43.300 --> 00:57:48.900
Behavior you can be an awakened drunkard you can be an awakened womanizer or whatever and I disagree

00:57:48.900 --> 00:57:53.380
Like in the beginning you were you starting to use the terms of awakening or enlightenment?

00:57:53.380 --> 00:57:57.500
Things like that a little bit and we both sort of got a little skittish when we use those words

00:57:57.500 --> 00:58:03.540
But if we're going to use them, then we shouldn't just be referring to some inner state of consciousness

00:58:03.540 --> 00:58:08.500
we should be referring to a holistic development that has somehow occurred in which you are

00:58:08.500 --> 00:58:14.420
really walking your talk and all the various purifications have taken place in whatever

00:58:14.420 --> 00:58:18.580
way that is understood. It's understood differently by different traditions, but most traditions

00:58:18.580 --> 00:58:24.060
do emphasize the importance of an ethical foundation and a real purification of one's

00:58:24.060 --> 00:58:29.660
whole mind-body system, emotional system, and shadow system, and all that other stuff,

00:58:29.660 --> 00:58:33.940
you're really going to be a fit reflector or receptacle for this higher consciousness.

00:58:33.940 --> 00:58:39.940
Yes, yes, you said it right. Two points I want to make about that. You can truly tell

00:58:39.940 --> 00:58:48.260
spiritual wisdom by behavior. It's about behavior. Does behavior change? And people, you go out,

00:58:48.260 --> 00:58:53.900
say you have some psychedelic experience, you have some awakening, whatever experience,

00:58:53.900 --> 00:59:01.260
your behavior change? It's all about am I kinder? Am I wiser to self and others? You're a person too.

00:59:01.260 --> 00:59:06.220
Am I kinder? Am I wiser? Am I more compassionate? Am I starting to take off those glasses

00:59:06.220 --> 00:59:12.700
and see with new eyes? The other thing, and this is very, very strong in the lineage of

00:59:12.700 --> 00:59:20.300
Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, the big goal is to see what we call emptiness, which has a lot of meanings in

00:59:20.300 --> 00:59:26.060
itself that is an evolving thing, or ultimate reality, or a satori, right, where you perceive,

00:59:26.060 --> 00:59:32.700
you pierce reality directly and see how reality functions for yourself. Nobody can tell you or

00:59:32.700 --> 00:59:38.220
tell you to believe it. It's not really a belief system. It's a path of practice where you see

00:59:38.220 --> 00:59:45.260
and experience realization for yourself. Yeah, it would be absurd to say, "I believe I'm holding a

00:59:45.260 --> 00:59:47.260
pen here. It's obvious.

00:59:47.260 --> 00:59:50.260
Exactly. So in the old

00:59:50.260 --> 00:59:53.260
reperche to my own lived

00:59:53.260 --> 00:59:56.260
experience of this, there's no disagreement. You know

00:59:56.260 --> 00:59:59.260
you've had a real experience of wisdom. You've had a

00:59:59.260 --> 01:00:02.260
real capital R realization. It's called a

01:00:02.260 --> 01:00:05.260
tokpa. It's an embodied realization like the

01:00:05.260 --> 01:00:08.260
real deal, awakening and whatever. If

01:00:08.260 --> 01:00:11.260
automatically, spontaneously

01:00:11.260 --> 01:00:14.260
naturally, your heart opens. And

01:00:14.260 --> 01:00:20.260
there's a, "Oh my gosh, I've got to change the way I do things. Oh my gosh, I want to

01:00:20.260 --> 01:00:25.840
care for other people. Oh my gosh, I want to be loving and more compassionate and more

01:00:25.840 --> 01:00:32.820
forgiving of selves and others." So if that compassionate side and experience doesn't

01:00:32.820 --> 01:00:39.380
immediately follow the wisdom side, then we're off base somewhere. The two go together like

01:00:39.380 --> 01:00:40.580
two wings of a bird.

01:00:40.580 --> 01:00:46.180
Yeah, now bring in the chakra model. I think that there could be awakenings in some chakra,

01:00:46.180 --> 01:00:50.260
maybe the head chakra or whatever, without a corresponding awakening in the heart chakra.

01:00:50.260 --> 01:00:55.220
So it can be a partial development or partial awakening. And some of these things can be very

01:00:55.220 --> 01:01:01.380
intoxicating and convincing. And you know, one can jump to all kinds of conclusions about one's

01:01:01.380 --> 01:01:07.220
state of development or completion. But that's why, as you said earlier, there is no end to it.

01:01:07.220 --> 01:01:12.820
I think we're all works in progress. It's like the word education. Are you educated? Yeah, I'm educated

01:01:12.820 --> 01:01:15.860
Could you be more educated? Of course, you know, I could always learn more

01:01:15.860 --> 01:01:19.860
Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah, that's really true

01:01:19.860 --> 01:01:26.260
And it's interesting too about the chakras because in my practice and in the tantric vajrayana practice that we do

01:01:26.260 --> 01:01:29.060
the you know very loosely you

01:01:29.060 --> 01:01:34.040
Develop wisdom cognitively and through embodied experience develop compassion

01:01:34.980 --> 01:01:40.740
start to change your behavior. And then once that foundation is laid, once the what we call shadow

01:01:40.740 --> 01:01:45.940
work is done, you know, once we've done a lot of healing of our early childhood stuff and the things

01:01:45.940 --> 01:01:50.580
that have happened in our life, and we've applied the psychological tools that we also have at our

01:01:50.580 --> 01:01:56.500
disposal, as modern complex humans, then you start to work with opening up those chakras,

01:01:56.500 --> 01:02:01.140
which are not pretty little flowers, they're choke points in our body. And this is the system,

01:02:01.140 --> 01:02:07.060
the technology of Tibetan Buddhism that we have an energetic subtle body and you start to work with

01:02:07.060 --> 01:02:13.460
shooting energy and opening energy up to open the heart, to ground and to open up different areas of

01:02:13.460 --> 01:02:18.660
our body. Good. The point you just made might relate to a question that Alyssa from New York

01:02:18.660 --> 01:02:24.340
State asked. In practicing both Western psychological development lines and a Tibetan

01:02:24.340 --> 01:02:29.620
Buddhist Vajrayana worldview, I struggle with the fact that a lot of Western developmental psychology

01:02:29.620 --> 01:02:35.660
models are defined by social, educational, economic norms, many of which I don't necessarily

01:02:35.660 --> 01:02:40.800
agree with, and more importantly, they are not uniform across cultures, versus the transcendent

01:02:40.800 --> 01:02:41.800
model of Buddhism.

01:02:41.800 --> 01:02:48.180
It's a great point. It's a great point, Alyssa. I mean, no doubt you could argue that these

01:02:48.180 --> 01:02:55.700
developmental models were created in the context of the frame of Western-educated, usually

01:02:55.700 --> 01:03:01.380
white people, you know, creating these models and doing these studies, mostly with Western

01:03:01.380 --> 01:03:07.060
educated white people, that is certainly true. And the social context and constructs that

01:03:07.060 --> 01:03:11.820
we have, that's relative reality. And that's what creates our relative reality. So fair

01:03:11.820 --> 01:03:19.460
point. On the other hand, there is so much data and research that is cross cultural that

01:03:19.460 --> 01:03:26.660
these human waves that we go through or stages or structures. You can think of it like rungs on a

01:03:26.660 --> 01:03:33.460
ladder or as one of my teachers more accurately defines it, it's like a balloon. Like we were

01:03:33.460 --> 01:03:38.180
talking about, Rick now is very different than he was in other areas of our life. Our growth is more

01:03:38.180 --> 01:03:45.540
like a balloon. And there is quite a lot of evidence that all humans all around the world

01:03:45.540 --> 01:03:53.540
go through these waves or structures of human becoming in a very similar way. They're deep

01:03:53.540 --> 01:04:00.900
features similar with surface structures that look different. And there really isn't argument in,

01:04:00.900 --> 01:04:06.820
again, yes, it's the academic world. It's going to have its own sort of rules and languages and

01:04:06.820 --> 01:04:11.700
ways of seeing, but there's been just literally dozens and dozens and dozens of studies that are

01:04:11.700 --> 01:04:19.780
cross-cultural that validate this data. Let me ask you a couple of questions from Rin Esser in Turkey.

01:04:19.780 --> 01:04:24.820
And Rin makes a point that she's a female because we wouldn't necessarily know that from the name.

01:04:24.820 --> 01:04:31.220
So first question, why does non-duality make so many people impractical in daily life as if

01:04:31.220 --> 01:04:36.900
in a vegetative state? It puts me in this space of non-thinking and being non-engaged with life.

01:04:36.900 --> 01:04:39.500
Oh, well stop doing it, girl.

01:04:39.500 --> 01:04:42.200
What a beautiful question and thank you for asking it.

01:04:42.200 --> 01:04:44.500
You know, non-duality is a big topic.

01:04:44.500 --> 01:04:47.600
There's a lot of things we can be non-dual with.

01:04:47.600 --> 01:04:50.800
Who's the looker? What's the object? What's the subject?

01:04:50.800 --> 01:04:53.600
But if anything is bringing you to that place,

01:04:53.600 --> 01:04:55.600
then I would try something else.

01:04:55.600 --> 01:04:57.800
Yeah, I would encourage you, Rin,

01:04:57.800 --> 01:05:00.000
to watch my interview with Jessica Eve.

01:05:00.000 --> 01:05:02.300
We talked about this at great length.

01:05:02.300 --> 01:05:03.800
And there's a verse in the Gita. It says,

01:05:03.800 --> 01:05:09.920
is Yoga Karma Sukhosalam. Yoga is skill in action. And yoga is non-duality. It's union.

01:05:09.920 --> 01:05:13.760
So if you're really experiencing non-duality, you should be actually more dynamic, more

01:05:13.760 --> 01:05:18.240
skillful, more effective in action. And if you're not, then something's missing.

01:05:18.240 --> 01:05:19.240
Yes.

01:05:19.240 --> 01:05:24.540
And here's a second one from the same person. What does it mean when you say you can find

01:05:24.540 --> 01:05:30.520
anything by going inside? As a non-awakened human, when I look inside for guidance, I

01:05:30.520 --> 01:05:34.440
I feel confused and not finding answers to my questions.

01:05:34.440 --> 01:05:37.720
What can I do to get clear guidance?

01:05:37.720 --> 01:05:39.160
- Thank you for that.

01:05:39.160 --> 01:05:42.840
I appreciate the opportunity to clarify that.

01:05:42.840 --> 01:05:44.560
So thank you for the question.

01:05:44.560 --> 01:05:46.600
Speaking of my personal lived experience,

01:05:46.600 --> 01:05:49.880
when I go inside, I find the cosmos.

01:05:49.880 --> 01:05:53.120
And by cosmos, I mean capital K Cosmos,

01:05:53.120 --> 01:05:55.320
which is beyond space and time.

01:05:55.320 --> 01:05:59.420
So by going inside, it's much more than my individuality.

01:05:59.420 --> 01:06:07.980
go inside to find the outside, then the two are not one. So, Ren, I would ask you to keep asking the

01:06:07.980 --> 01:06:13.420
questions, to find a teacher or a community that you can connect with, that you obviously have a

01:06:13.420 --> 01:06:17.980
lot of passion and desire, and the internet provides a lot of opportunity if you're not

01:06:17.980 --> 01:06:23.980
finding it in the town that you live, to, you know, connect with me, connect with others, to

01:06:23.980 --> 01:06:30.380
keep exploring this, you're not alone. You're not alone. That's what I want to tell you as well.

01:06:30.380 --> 01:06:36.220
Good. Okay, unless you have anything else at the tip of your tongue, let's start talking about

01:06:36.220 --> 01:06:41.580
anomalous or extraordinary experiences, which you've been researching a lot lately and very

01:06:41.580 --> 01:06:49.580
interested in. So anomalous experiences is just another way of saying extraordinary or out of the

01:06:49.580 --> 01:06:57.580
ordinary experiences. They're defined as in the literature, meaning in good, grounded

01:06:57.580 --> 01:07:02.620
psychological literature, different categories of anomalous experiences. You might find like

01:07:02.620 --> 01:07:08.700
that fireball I saw in the sky that one time, things like UFOs you see in the literature,

01:07:08.700 --> 01:07:14.860
or craft, or things that you see that seem to be outside of you. Other categories of anomalous

01:07:14.860 --> 01:07:20.620
experiences are around time and space, where we have maybe

01:07:20.620 --> 01:07:25.740
precognitive dreams, there's lots of good research on data on

01:07:25.740 --> 01:07:30.740
people having a dream where they see something in the future, and

01:07:30.740 --> 01:07:34.500
then it happens, maybe somebody dies, or there's a car crash.

01:07:34.500 --> 01:07:38.260
There's anomalous experiences around death is very common.

01:07:38.260 --> 01:07:42.860
Somebody close to you dies, and maybe you get a visitation, or

01:07:42.860 --> 01:07:48.060
you know the moment they die. You sit up in bed and you had no idea they were sick, you know they died.

01:07:48.060 --> 01:07:53.340
Or around extraordinary experiences, around near-death experiences, those who report near-death

01:07:53.340 --> 01:08:00.380
experiences. Lucid dreaming can be categorized as an anomalous experience. What we call non-human

01:08:00.380 --> 01:08:08.380
entities, people have encounters with beings that do not seem human. So this is not weird, people.

01:08:08.380 --> 01:08:14.860
This is part of our human story. If you look through our literature, through all of our humanities,

01:08:14.860 --> 01:08:20.860
it is riddled with these extraordinary experiences, which are not only mythic,

01:08:20.860 --> 01:08:26.140
they're not only story, right? Most of us, almost everybody I've ever sat down and talked to and

01:08:26.140 --> 01:08:31.580
really started to question have had something, an experience they can't explain. And so I explained

01:08:31.580 --> 01:08:37.660
a couple of them. Things that were non-ordinary, that were classified as extraordinary. And I've

01:08:37.660 --> 01:08:44.540
had them most of my life. So after my 12 years deeply studying Tibetan Buddhism, I had a calling,

01:08:44.540 --> 01:08:52.860
I had a deep call to that that era of my life was complete and that I had sort of gotten stuck. I

01:08:52.860 --> 01:08:59.340
plateaued in my own growth and development and I had a very clear vision and call. It was actually

01:08:59.340 --> 01:09:08.060
precognitive moment, which perhaps I can get to, where when I met my now husband and I saw

01:09:08.060 --> 01:09:15.100
that my future, the next era, was going to involve having a child, being a wife, and getting

01:09:15.100 --> 01:09:20.300
out of my precious little bubble and being out in the world. That was a big surprise to me. I did not

01:09:20.300 --> 01:09:24.860
expect that this was going to be the next era of my life. And during that time, I went back to

01:09:24.860 --> 01:09:32.300
graduate school, I got degrees in human development, I did long years of doctoral work, and I picked

01:09:32.300 --> 01:09:37.420
as my dissertation topic, I studied anomalous experiences and how we make meaning of them,

01:09:37.420 --> 01:09:43.180
because at the time, as a spiritual teacher I'd been for many years, I am the recipient

01:09:43.180 --> 01:09:48.620
of these stories. You have something really wild happen to you, who do you tell? People are going

01:09:48.620 --> 01:09:54.220
to think you're crazy, right? Well, I hear the stories. That's the gift I get of holding the

01:09:54.220 --> 01:09:57.780
the seed I do as a spiritual friend for people.

01:09:57.780 --> 01:09:59.500
And I knew I wasn't crazy.

01:09:59.500 --> 01:10:02.900
I knew other people weren't crazy, so I wanted to know.

01:10:02.900 --> 01:10:05.460
And my research is not about proving

01:10:05.460 --> 01:10:07.980
whether that red fireball was really up there,

01:10:07.980 --> 01:10:11.220
or proving whether there were really ghosts or spirits

01:10:11.220 --> 01:10:15.060
in my retreat cabin, or proving if you get a visitation

01:10:15.060 --> 01:10:17.380
from a being of light, whether it's real or not.

01:10:17.380 --> 01:10:18.940
I'm not interested in that.

01:10:18.940 --> 01:10:20.500
- It's also very problematic

01:10:20.500 --> 01:10:23.020
because this stuff is really hard to prove.

01:10:23.020 --> 01:10:28.760
Even if half the population say they have experienced these things, how do we know it's not hallucination?

01:10:28.760 --> 01:10:30.420
You know, how do we know they didn't dream it up?

01:10:30.420 --> 01:10:35.180
You can't prove it as easily as you can the fact that the earth is not flat, or something

01:10:35.180 --> 01:10:36.180
like that.

01:10:36.180 --> 01:10:37.180
Yeah, true.

01:10:37.180 --> 01:10:42.980
As I was digging into this research and into the modern Western psychological research,

01:10:42.980 --> 01:10:47.620
it was very clear there's good work being done, that the majority of people who report

01:10:47.620 --> 01:10:50.380
these types of experiences are sane.

01:10:50.380 --> 01:10:55.800
They don't display mental health issues other than our normal everyday mental health issues

01:10:55.800 --> 01:10:57.960
that we all have.

01:10:57.960 --> 01:11:02.920
These are normal, everyday functioning people in the world who, when you sit down and talk

01:11:02.920 --> 01:11:07.160
to them, most everybody has a story that they can't explain.

01:11:07.160 --> 01:11:13.040
And what happens when we have these experiences often is we go into a sort of ontological

01:11:13.040 --> 01:11:14.040
shock.

01:11:14.040 --> 01:11:16.440
Rick, maybe you have one that you can share with us.

01:11:16.440 --> 01:11:22.420
But you have it sort of out of the ordinary experience and ontological shock just means

01:11:22.420 --> 01:11:24.440
how do I make meaning of this?

01:11:24.440 --> 01:11:28.560
It's like the mind searches for how to frame this.

01:11:28.560 --> 01:11:29.560
What does this mean?

01:11:29.560 --> 01:11:31.900
What does this mean about reality?

01:11:31.900 --> 01:11:33.700
What does this mean about myself?

01:11:33.700 --> 01:11:38.180
And so I started to study the different types of anomalous experiences that people had and

01:11:38.180 --> 01:11:40.420
I listed some of them.

01:11:40.420 --> 01:11:45.380
And more importantly, I started to look at how the meaning making we make of it, like

01:11:45.380 --> 01:11:53.900
how it impacts us and how we frame it to ourselves tends to change as we grow, as we evolve in

01:11:53.900 --> 01:12:00.540
our child and our adult lifespan. You know, how we think of it when we're young becomes

01:12:00.540 --> 01:12:05.100
different than how we think of it now. And I started to really look at that because it's

01:12:05.100 --> 01:12:12.060
also a big part of our humanness, right, is these extraordinary experiences.

01:12:12.060 --> 01:12:16.260
And I can hear some people thinking, "Well, don't many different spiritual traditions

01:12:16.260 --> 01:12:20.720
and teachers say that such experiences are distractions and you shouldn't pay any attention

01:12:20.720 --> 01:12:21.720
to them?

01:12:21.720 --> 01:12:28.100
How come she's so into studying this stuff if it's a distraction, if it's a cul-de-sac?"

01:12:28.100 --> 01:12:30.300
Yeah, I can understand that.

01:12:30.300 --> 01:12:33.040
Well, it's part of our human gift.

01:12:33.040 --> 01:12:35.600
It's part of our human story.

01:12:35.600 --> 01:12:41.200
And I believe that these extraordinary experiences that we have give us big clues and indicators

01:12:41.200 --> 01:12:47.840
of where we're headed and where we're becoming in our human evolution. Because often there's

01:12:47.840 --> 01:12:55.840
signs from our future self, these experiences, these encounters that we have start to make

01:12:55.840 --> 01:13:02.720
more sense the more we mature and as we go. And that's something that I've definitely seen happen

01:13:02.720 --> 01:13:07.360
in this research that I've been doing. And the fact of the matter is people have them,

01:13:07.360 --> 01:13:14.720
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

01:13:14.720 --> 01:13:16.560
neglect of

01:13:16.560 --> 01:13:18.960
Something deeper and and more abiding

01:13:18.960 --> 01:13:24.880
but even if you're just going straight for that you're going to have these experiences along the way and

01:13:24.880 --> 01:13:29.440
I think on the one hand we could say maybe they're there to be enjoyed

01:13:29.440 --> 01:13:33.600
Or to teach us something like if you're driving to california

01:13:33.600 --> 01:13:37.920
you might want to stop and see the largest, world's largest ball of string or world's

01:13:37.920 --> 01:13:45.080
largest frying pan. Waldrug in western South Dakota, you see the signs for hundreds of miles

01:13:45.080 --> 01:13:51.280
before you get to it. So these things are not necessarily, and if they were mere distractions,

01:13:51.280 --> 01:13:56.520
why would they be discussed in such great detail in so much spiritual literature? Why

01:13:56.520 --> 01:14:02.200
would so many saints and sages have written autobiographies and described those experiences?

01:14:02.200 --> 01:14:08.960
Indeed, one of the main takeaways of the study and just listening to people's stories that

01:14:08.960 --> 01:14:15.080
relates to everything I've learned in my own spiritual work as well and also in the psychological

01:14:15.080 --> 01:14:20.680
work and study that I've done is we think consensus reality is so real.

01:14:20.680 --> 01:14:26.080
We think that the way we see things is exactly the way they are and my political view is

01:14:26.080 --> 01:14:29.120
true and yours is not true.

01:14:29.120 --> 01:14:31.680
We get so boxed in.

01:14:31.680 --> 01:14:35.240
It's almost like we're living in our own little phone booths of reality.

01:14:35.240 --> 01:14:39.440
And when these experiences happen, like the phone booths gets blown up.

01:14:39.440 --> 01:14:44.860
It's like, we start to see that this consensus belief system that we're

01:14:44.860 --> 01:14:49.780
operating in, that there's something more, something else is going on.

01:14:49.780 --> 01:14:51.440
And that's the why.

01:14:51.440 --> 01:14:55.680
It's a way, because these are experiences that so many people have had

01:14:55.680 --> 01:14:57.620
outside of any spiritual tradition.

01:14:57.620 --> 01:14:58.160
Right?

01:14:58.160 --> 01:15:00.820
These are mostly ordinary people living their life.

01:15:01.200 --> 01:15:04.280
They're not running off to Tibet or running off to the monastery.

01:15:04.280 --> 01:15:09.840
They are ordinary people living their life and something extraordinary happens to them.

01:15:09.840 --> 01:15:11.720
And so what is going on?

01:15:11.720 --> 01:15:15.280
You know, one of the, this question I've been asking since I was a little kid,

01:15:15.280 --> 01:15:16.400
who am I?

01:15:16.400 --> 01:15:17.840
What is real?

01:15:17.840 --> 01:15:19.520
Why are we here?

01:15:19.520 --> 01:15:25.800
I believe that by exploring these anomalous experiences, by taking them seriously and

01:15:25.800 --> 01:15:31.960
understanding that they're actually pretty normal, you know, that we can find a clue

01:15:31.960 --> 01:15:36.040
in our human story to answer those questions that I've been seeking since I was a kid.

01:15:36.040 --> 01:15:42.440
I thought of this as you were telling your initial experience in Boston, that sometimes these

01:15:42.440 --> 01:15:49.240
experiences are ways of God or whoever zapping us to create an imprint that we can't forget,

01:15:49.240 --> 01:15:53.400
and that is going to impel us to continue to search, kind of like Richard Dreyfus when he

01:15:53.400 --> 01:15:56.640
He was a telephone lineman in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

01:15:56.640 --> 01:16:00.840
He got zapped by the bright light from the UFO and then it was a brain implant.

01:16:00.840 --> 01:16:02.240
He couldn't forget it.

01:16:02.240 --> 01:16:08.080
He obsessed about it until he finally reached the goal that it had implanted in him.

01:16:08.080 --> 01:16:10.000
Yep, piling those potatoes.

01:16:10.000 --> 01:16:11.000
Yeah, right.

01:16:11.000 --> 01:16:12.000
This means something.

01:16:12.000 --> 01:16:13.000
This means something.

01:16:13.000 --> 01:16:21.880
Yes, I love the way you describe that, Rick, because that to me is more real than this getting

01:16:21.880 --> 01:16:27.220
up, going to work, arguing with your neighbor, arguing over politics, what is right, what

01:16:27.220 --> 01:16:34.560
is wrong. That to me is capital R real, right? And what is going on there? It's so universal,

01:16:34.560 --> 01:16:40.040
it's so steeped in who we were as humans and who we're becoming. That for me, it's like

01:16:40.040 --> 01:16:44.980
the golden fleece of wisdom. And we have a lot to learn.

01:16:44.980 --> 01:16:51.640
One of my biggest, earliest ontological shocks was the first time I took LSD when I was 17.

01:16:51.640 --> 01:16:55.240
And the main takeaway from it was that the shock,

01:16:55.240 --> 01:16:56.900
actually shocking realization

01:16:56.900 --> 01:16:58.480
that everyone saw the world differently.

01:16:58.480 --> 01:17:00.720
I always assumed everyone saw the same world.

01:17:00.720 --> 01:17:02.120
That morning after being up all night,

01:17:02.120 --> 01:17:04.320
we went into a donut shop and we're buying donuts.

01:17:04.320 --> 01:17:05.880
And I was just kind of like marveling

01:17:05.880 --> 01:17:08.080
at how I appeared to be seeing the world

01:17:08.080 --> 01:17:10.480
just compared to the women selling us the donuts.

01:17:10.480 --> 01:17:11.320
And I was thinking, wow,

01:17:11.320 --> 01:17:13.420
we're just all in different universes.

01:17:13.420 --> 01:17:15.720
And one thing I sometimes wonder

01:17:15.720 --> 01:17:17.040
and people have suggested this

01:17:17.040 --> 01:17:19.160
is that the psychedelic Renaissance

01:17:19.160 --> 01:17:25.320
seems to be taking place now as as untethered as many aspects of it are could be a kind of a

01:17:25.320 --> 01:17:32.600
collective jolt to enable lots of people to realize that there's more to life than meets the eye. And

01:17:32.600 --> 01:17:36.360
you know, I don't think it's any kind of ultimate solution. They're going to have to get on to more

01:17:36.360 --> 01:17:41.800
natural practices and so on, but it could be a sort of catalyst initially, which otherwise the

01:17:41.800 --> 01:17:46.760
millions of people who are doing that might not do in any other way. Indeed, yeah, I mean, we can

01:17:46.760 --> 01:17:52.920
certainly talk about that, that it is common and I did not include psychedelic experiences in my

01:17:52.920 --> 01:17:57.720
study because they're really a category of their own. So the experiences that I was codifying

01:17:57.720 --> 01:18:04.200
happened with a "normal state of mind" and more recently really been looking at the psychedelic

01:18:04.200 --> 01:18:10.600
renaissance as you say and what a gift it can be to have exactly the experience that you described,

01:18:10.600 --> 01:18:15.560
which is taking off those glasses individually and collectively and you looked and saw, wow,

01:18:16.120 --> 01:18:23.400
This is how I saw before and now I see differently. It can be very, very useful for that.

01:18:23.400 --> 01:18:28.280
And I believe that the psychedelic renaissance seems to be really doing a lot more good than

01:18:28.280 --> 01:18:36.200
harm right now. The danger of it is misuse just like everything else and using psychedelics as a

01:18:36.200 --> 01:18:42.280
path where this is how I'm going to have this experience instead of learning to do it myself.

01:18:43.240 --> 01:18:48.600
If you learn to do it yourself, you can replicate it. So I am pro psychedelics. I'm not saying I'm

01:18:48.600 --> 01:18:53.800
against psychedelics. I think the usefulness is very much there. And we need to be really cautious

01:18:53.800 --> 01:18:58.120
at the same time, just like anything, right? Anything can be abused. The other thing we see is

01:18:58.120 --> 01:19:04.840
with overuse of psychedelics, what we call the self can get dissolved and deconstructed and

01:19:04.840 --> 01:19:09.960
blown out again and again and again, so that the self can't quite coalesce. And by self,

01:19:09.960 --> 01:19:16.440
I mean, like your identity, your healthy persona, your healthy identity. So we want to make sure

01:19:16.440 --> 01:19:21.240
that we don't overuse it. It really is something that should be used as it was intended in our

01:19:21.240 --> 01:19:27.400
traditions, including the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, use of substances as a sacred,

01:19:27.400 --> 01:19:34.040
rare, precious opportunity that you do, you have an extraordinary experience like you did,

01:19:34.040 --> 01:19:39.720
and then you go integrate it. Yeah, some teachers say that it actually damages the subtle body in a

01:19:39.720 --> 01:19:44.680
a way. I think Carlos Castaneda's teacher, if he was a real person, and if that's a real

01:19:44.680 --> 01:19:51.640
story, said something similar. He kind of gave that to Carlos as a way to kickstart his journey,

01:19:51.640 --> 01:19:54.600
but then he said, "Okay, if you keep doing this, it's going to do you harm. Now you have

01:19:54.600 --> 01:19:56.160
to do it without."

01:19:56.160 --> 01:19:59.360
Yes, exactly right. That's exactly right.

01:19:59.360 --> 01:20:04.360
I hear stories of people who don't heed that warning and just going on and on with the stuff

01:20:04.360 --> 01:20:07.720
and who just get pretty out of it.

01:20:07.720 --> 01:20:08.720
Indeed.

01:20:08.720 --> 01:20:09.720
Okay, what next?

01:20:09.720 --> 01:20:12.640
You know what, we can talk about the ASI.

01:20:12.640 --> 01:20:15.560
We've alluded to some of that stuff, but let's say more.

01:20:15.560 --> 01:20:19.680
The Association for Spiritual Integrity I've been working with for two years.

01:20:19.680 --> 01:20:26.020
It's the first time in over a decade and a half that I was called to work with a nonprofit

01:20:26.020 --> 01:20:32.860
and work with an organization that is focused on supporting, educating, bringing conversation

01:20:32.860 --> 01:20:38.320
around spiritual work in the world, specifically how we support spiritual teachers, spiritual

01:20:38.320 --> 01:20:42.520
communities in the world. The importance of ethics, you know,

01:20:42.520 --> 01:20:48.560
really is about as we go forward as spiritual aspirants, where is

01:20:48.560 --> 01:20:52.120
the place of ethics in our practice individually and

01:20:52.120 --> 01:20:55.040
collectively do communities that we are involved with have

01:20:55.040 --> 01:21:00.120
ethical standards. The ASI we have ethical code that we

01:21:00.120 --> 01:21:05.200
encourage and ask our members to commit to individually, whether

01:21:05.200 --> 01:21:08.280
they're spiritual teachers or spiritual students, and then we

01:21:08.280 --> 01:21:11.780
have organizational codes of ethics as well.

01:21:11.780 --> 01:21:16.400
I want to just actually say that I'm the one who puts up the list of all the members and

01:21:16.400 --> 01:21:21.280
everything and we have, I think, quite a bit more than 600 individual members now and I

01:21:21.280 --> 01:21:25.040
think 32 or 33 organizational members.

01:21:25.040 --> 01:21:26.560
So it's growing.

01:21:26.560 --> 01:21:30.520
So what have you noticed in your years of work with ASI?

01:21:30.520 --> 01:21:34.560
What do you see are the sort of the best practices or the big problems out there that you're

01:21:34.560 --> 01:21:35.560
noticing?

01:21:35.560 --> 01:21:42.000
Well, the ASI started because I think it was the 2018 Science and Nonduality Conference.

01:21:42.000 --> 01:21:46.800
Jack O'Keefe, Craig Holliday, and I all gave talks on this similar topic, unbeknownst to

01:21:46.800 --> 01:21:47.800
one another.

01:21:47.800 --> 01:21:48.800
We hadn't coordinated them.

01:21:48.800 --> 01:21:55.880
Jack and Ellen Emmett attended my talk, among other people, and we got together for lunch

01:21:55.880 --> 01:21:57.120
afterwards.

01:21:57.120 --> 01:22:00.960
And over lunch, I don't know if it was Jack, it might have been Jack's idea, we decided

01:22:00.960 --> 01:22:06.800
we should start an organization, which originally we called the Association for Professional

01:22:06.800 --> 01:22:12.040
Spiritual Teachers, but I wanted to broaden it a bit and add the word "integrity."

01:22:12.040 --> 01:22:16.160
I like the term "spiritual integrity" because it doesn't exclude students, which I think

01:22:16.160 --> 01:22:20.480
are an important component in the whole thing.

01:22:20.480 --> 01:22:26.600
So issues I've seen, obviously it almost seems like the norm rather than the exception

01:22:26.600 --> 01:22:32.100
that spiritual teachers from the East are ethically compromised. They perhaps were raised in an

01:22:32.100 --> 01:22:38.080
ashram, didn't have any kind of shadow work or psychological work or training, and assumed

01:22:38.080 --> 01:22:44.480
certain things perhaps about their own development, which when they got into a Western culture,

01:22:44.480 --> 01:22:48.800
just crumbled. They discovered they had all kinds of drives and impulses they didn't realize

01:22:48.800 --> 01:22:53.720
they had. I'm just conjecturing about their inner motivations. But personally, I feel

01:22:53.720 --> 01:22:59.980
that spirituality is the hope of the world. It's the most fundamental thing that a person

01:22:59.980 --> 01:23:05.640
can experience, and if it can be experienced more broadly, more collectively, it will be

01:23:05.640 --> 01:23:11.860
the most pivotal or fundamental thing to bring about change in the world. And therefore,

01:23:11.860 --> 01:23:18.280
when I see so many spiritual teachers violating basic ethical codes that you shouldn't even

01:23:18.280 --> 01:23:23.460
violate if you're a teenager, much less an adult, much less a spiritual teacher, I feel

01:23:23.460 --> 01:23:31.340
it sabotages the whole enterprise of spiritual awakening in the world, and it also disillusions

01:23:31.340 --> 01:23:37.220
spiritual seekers. I know instances of people committing suicide, they were so disillusioned,

01:23:37.220 --> 01:23:41.700
or at least getting off the spiritual path because they decide that it's a whole, it's

01:23:41.700 --> 01:23:46.140
a bunch of bunk if their teacher could behave this way. And I think that's tragic, both for

01:23:46.140 --> 01:23:51.300
them and again, for the whole world. And so that's a bit of a long answer, but that's

01:23:51.300 --> 01:23:52.300
my orientation.

01:23:52.300 --> 01:23:59.020
Yeah, we've done some. And thank you. Thank you for starting the ASI because I feel like

01:23:59.020 --> 01:24:03.580
we're growing quickly, we're evolving quickly, and we're also only just beginning. And if

01:24:03.580 --> 01:24:08.260
you hadn't had that lunch at the time, we wouldn't be seated here. So I want to thank

01:24:08.260 --> 01:24:10.300
the past you for doing that.

01:24:10.300 --> 01:24:14.260
And especially I think we should thank Jack who has been, this thing wouldn't have gotten

01:24:14.260 --> 01:24:17.980
off the ground without her. She's like this dynamo, Jack O'Keefe.

01:24:17.980 --> 01:24:18.980
Jack O'Keefe.

01:24:18.980 --> 01:24:20.780
We all acknowledge her as the leader of it.

01:24:20.780 --> 01:24:25.420
Yeah, we love you Jack. Thank you. Keep doing the good work. We've done some developmental

01:24:25.420 --> 01:24:29.180
psychological sort of a psychometric assessments on

01:24:29.180 --> 01:24:31.580
spiritual teachers

01:24:31.580 --> 01:24:34.940
A lot of spiritual teachers out there and the vast majority of them

01:24:34.940 --> 01:24:39.660
I'm speaking very generally here speaking as a spiritual teacher myself

01:24:39.660 --> 01:24:42.780
They're not as advanced as they think they are, you know

01:24:42.780 --> 01:24:47.100
Developmentally just to sum it up and someone might say who are we to judge?

01:24:47.580 --> 01:24:54.060
Perhaps you could answer that question, but personally my attitude is it's much safer to underestimate your level of advancement

01:24:54.060 --> 01:24:58.460
Consider yourself a beginner because compared to what is possible. We all are

01:24:58.460 --> 01:25:05.260
Absolutely. And again spiritual teachers what we want to encourage what we want to educate in ourselves and others

01:25:05.260 --> 01:25:10.480
Is to keep doing the work any spiritual teacher should also have a therapeutic

01:25:10.480 --> 01:25:14.860
Process or practice at some point in their life. They should also have shadow work

01:25:14.940 --> 01:25:20.700
They should have peer review and peer feedback. And if that's not happening, then there's a real

01:25:20.700 --> 01:25:26.940
danger to get stuck, to get developmentally stuck, to not think you need to grow. And that's where

01:25:26.940 --> 01:25:32.060
problems start to come in. So that's what we want to avoid. And we have peer groups in the ASI,

01:25:32.060 --> 01:25:39.580
don't we? We do. We have peer groups in the ASI, which is something we're going through a pilot

01:25:39.580 --> 01:25:44.740
it with. We put dozens and dozens of people through and look forward to launching that

01:25:44.740 --> 01:25:50.840
in a wider scale and our membership probably in the next 18 months or so. I myself am involved

01:25:50.840 --> 01:25:57.260
in a peer group of other spiritual like teachers. It is we're on year two. It is one of the

01:25:57.260 --> 01:26:03.300
most precious areas of my own development where I can show up with other spiritual teachers

01:26:03.300 --> 01:26:09.180
or leaders in their field and talk about things that you can't talk about elsewhere. To share

01:26:09.180 --> 01:26:16.300
issues that you have as a teacher thematically, individually, collectively, and that's a precious

01:26:16.300 --> 01:26:22.940
opportunity. Who was it? I think it was Kant who said, "You know you're in modernity when you don't

01:26:22.940 --> 01:26:27.500
want to be caught praying. You don't want someone to walk in the room and catch you praying."

01:26:27.500 --> 01:26:33.340
Modernity is thrown out sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for not so good reasons,

01:26:33.340 --> 01:26:38.060
are religious traditions because there has been a lot of nonsense. There is a lot of abuse.

01:26:38.620 --> 01:26:44.780
We acknowledge this. And yet, these spiritual traditions are this precious, as I started

01:26:44.780 --> 01:26:52.140
this call, gift of humanity. And life without a spiritual life, at least for me and for many of

01:26:52.140 --> 01:26:58.780
us, is flat. It's flat land. What's the meaning? What's the purpose? Is it just to eat more? To

01:26:58.780 --> 01:27:03.260
have another great vacation? I mean, I love good food. I love vacations. Don't get me wrong.

01:27:03.260 --> 01:27:07.340
He who dies with the most toys wins, right?

01:27:07.340 --> 01:27:12.020
Right. I mean, I wish it worked. I wish it worked. But after you

01:27:12.020 --> 01:27:15.540
get to the point and the great classic text, the Heart Sutra,

01:27:15.540 --> 01:27:18.380
which is something that I'm going to be teaching publicly the

01:27:18.380 --> 01:27:23.500
first weekend in May. So I'm inviting anybody to come check

01:27:23.500 --> 01:27:26.500
that course out if they'd like it outlines it's just one of the

01:27:26.500 --> 01:27:30.940
great classic texts of Buddhism, perhaps the classic texts, it's

01:27:30.940 --> 01:27:34.340
the most taught, it's the most quoted, it's the most

01:27:34.340 --> 01:27:36.140
misunderstood is the most

01:27:36.140 --> 01:27:37.820
mysterious. I mean, it sounds

01:27:37.820 --> 01:27:38.700
like an acid trip.

01:27:38.700 --> 01:27:40.300
How does it go? Is there isn't

01:27:40.300 --> 01:27:41.540
there like one verse that is

01:27:41.540 --> 01:27:45.060
most famous from the form? Yeah,

01:27:45.060 --> 01:27:46.900
what the heck does that mean?

01:27:46.900 --> 01:27:48.460
Well, fortunately, due to the

01:27:48.460 --> 01:27:51.020
kindness of my teachers, I got a

01:27:51.020 --> 01:27:52.620
word by word understanding and

01:27:52.620 --> 01:27:54.900
translation and teaching on what

01:27:54.900 --> 01:27:56.260
it means. And when you dig into

01:27:56.260 --> 01:27:58.580
it, it's profound. And not only

01:27:58.580 --> 01:28:00.300
is it profound in terms of

01:28:00.300 --> 01:28:02.140
everyday application to your

01:28:02.140 --> 01:28:06.420
life, but it lays out the path of practice, how to actually

01:28:06.420 --> 01:28:10.980
practice. So it's this gem of spirituality is and I agree with

01:28:10.980 --> 01:28:13.700
you. It doesn't have to be a tradition. It doesn't have to be

01:28:13.700 --> 01:28:17.220
Buddhism, but a human life without our spiritual life, what

01:28:17.220 --> 01:28:20.860
kind of human life isn't. And so for example, the heart sutra

01:28:20.860 --> 01:28:25.040
leaves out these milestones and the steps of how to practice and

01:28:25.040 --> 01:28:30.580
the first step, the way to even begin to step on the path and

01:28:30.580 --> 01:28:36.020
start your spiritual journey is you realize that you want to, you realize that you have to, that

01:28:36.020 --> 01:28:41.620
there's something more than having the most toys and dine, then getting that next promotion, then

01:28:41.620 --> 01:28:45.780
making more money, then getting the boyfriend. It's like what happened to me in Boston. That

01:28:45.780 --> 01:28:53.140
blessing, what's happening in Boston. If I wish this worked, I wish the fancy apartment and fancy

01:28:53.140 --> 01:28:59.060
boyfriend and the fancy... It'd be great if it did, but there's something missing. And that first step

01:28:59.060 --> 01:29:03.940
is yeah, Nyingjun in Tibetan is renunciation, is to get serious about the spiritual path.

01:29:03.940 --> 01:29:08.260
And the Heart Sutra lays that out, lays that out very, very clearly how to do that.

01:29:08.260 --> 01:29:09.140
And that's really beautiful.

01:29:09.140 --> 01:29:15.780
- I did a panel discussion with Mukti, who's Adyashanti's wife, and Francis Bennett and

01:29:15.780 --> 01:29:20.660
Locke Kelly at one of the S.A.N.D. conferences, all about the Heart Sutra. So people can find

01:29:20.660 --> 01:29:25.780
that on Batgap if they want. But what you're saying here is very important because this

01:29:25.780 --> 01:29:33.940
spiritual stuff is real and it actually is like if we want to use the ocean analogy again,

01:29:33.940 --> 01:29:38.340
the apartment and the boyfriend and the money and the this and the that, those are the waves and

01:29:38.340 --> 01:29:43.940
there's nothing wrong with waves, but we're missing out on the whole ocean beneath the waves

01:29:43.940 --> 01:29:51.700
if we don't probe into this deeper reality that spirituality enables us to probe and therefore

01:29:51.700 --> 01:29:56.740
we're unfulfilled. Yes, yes, yes. And we have to see it for ourselves. Nobody can tell us.

01:29:56.740 --> 01:30:01.380
No. It's not a belief. It's not like, "Oh, I believe it or I don't believe it."

01:30:01.380 --> 01:30:08.980
Our mind, our hearts, are the nature of the ocean already. But until we see that for ourselves,

01:30:08.980 --> 01:30:15.060
you know, until we experience that for ourselves, it's just an idea, right? It's just a belief.

01:30:15.060 --> 01:30:20.500
Once we do experience that for ourselves, everything changes. Everything changes.

01:30:20.500 --> 01:30:25.780
one of the descriptions of Brahman or ultimate reality, one of its attributes is said to be

01:30:25.780 --> 01:30:31.220
bliss. And it's said that any happiness we derive from outer circumstances is just sort of a

01:30:31.220 --> 01:30:37.060
reflection of that inner bliss bouncing off the outer thing, the way the moon reflects sunlight

01:30:37.060 --> 01:30:43.460
to us at night. And that's why it can't really be that illuminating as the direct cognition of that

01:30:43.460 --> 01:30:46.980
bliss is, after which then everything is seen as that.

01:30:46.980 --> 01:30:54.380
That's right. Yes, after which everything is seen as that and we practice we figure out how our behavior

01:30:54.380 --> 01:31:02.380
Creates more bliss and more happiness for ourself and others and how it does it we figure out how to be a better wave

01:31:02.380 --> 01:31:08.700
So to speak how to be the most evolved relative another word for the wave is a relative self

01:31:08.700 --> 01:31:11.380
Relative reality we are walking around

01:31:11.980 --> 01:31:18.460
minds and bodies and social security numbers, and that too can evolve. That's the growing up part.

01:31:18.460 --> 01:31:23.740
We're not stuck in these phone booths. We can blast out and evolve and become something

01:31:23.740 --> 01:31:28.860
extraordinary because we see the claims of say, example, Tibetan Buddhism and also yoga,

01:31:28.860 --> 01:31:34.620
like Patajali's Yoga Sutra, I've studied deeply, deeply, deeply, and it lays out a path of practice

01:31:34.620 --> 01:31:38.700
about how we can evolve our minds, evolve our bodies into something else.

01:31:39.260 --> 01:31:45.260
You know, obviously a lot of people when they think of spirituality, they think of monks in caves.

01:31:45.260 --> 01:31:50.300
And, you know, basic attitude of the monk is apparently, "Well, the world sucks and I don't

01:31:50.300 --> 01:31:54.620
want anything to do with it, so I'm just going to stay in this cave and marinate in my inner

01:31:54.620 --> 01:32:01.660
experience." But there's a cool verse in the Gita which goes, "Contact with Brahman is infinite joy."

01:32:01.660 --> 01:32:06.300
And we could use the analogy of lying still in a bathtub and it doesn't feel that warm,

01:32:06.300 --> 01:32:12.300
or sloshing around a bit and all of a sudden you feel the warmth. So if one is able to access that

01:32:12.300 --> 01:32:19.180
inner reality and engage in an ordinary life, you know, like you were doing, then that life

01:32:19.180 --> 01:32:23.820
serves as something to slosh up the bathtub with. It stirs up the bliss.

01:32:23.820 --> 01:32:28.940
And actually you end up with something that's more than the sum of its parts.

01:32:28.940 --> 01:32:32.860
More fulfillment than you would have just sitting with your eyes closed in a cave,

01:32:32.860 --> 01:32:38.860
or just engaging in the world without experiencing the inner reality, somehow the two together you get 200%.

01:32:38.860 --> 01:32:42.460
Oh yes, you preach yes, yes, and yes again.

01:32:42.460 --> 01:32:47.900
And that is what you just define Tantra in my word, that's my Tantra and my path.

01:32:47.900 --> 01:32:51.820
And what we're doing in our Tantric communities that the confluence experiences,

01:32:51.820 --> 01:32:57.100
coming together in community and supporting each other to slosh around in that bathtub.

01:32:57.100 --> 01:33:04.220
and to be in the world yet be infused with wisdom and bliss and kindness and care and compassion

01:33:04.220 --> 01:33:09.980
and to live fully alive lives as spiritual human beings in this world. Doing our gifts,

01:33:09.980 --> 01:33:15.500
you know, the topic path is about stepping into your gifts, finding your deepest callings,

01:33:15.500 --> 01:33:21.020
stepping into your power and using it for good. And you're not only infused with the bliss,

01:33:21.020 --> 01:33:26.020
but you infuse it into the world as an infusion tool.

01:33:26.020 --> 01:33:27.540
As you move through your life,

01:33:27.540 --> 01:33:30.940
you kind of radiate that kind of influence.

01:33:30.940 --> 01:33:32.580
When I was a kid, I saw this thing

01:33:32.580 --> 01:33:34.740
where they had a whole room full of mousetraps

01:33:34.740 --> 01:33:36.820
with ping pong balls on the mousetraps.

01:33:36.820 --> 01:33:38.860
And they just kind of set off one of the mousetraps

01:33:38.860 --> 01:33:40.940
and then ping pong ball flew, set off another one,

01:33:40.940 --> 01:33:42.540
that set off others, and it's the whole next thing,

01:33:42.540 --> 01:33:44.100
you know, the whole room was popping.

01:33:44.100 --> 01:33:47.580
So I think that we have this influence on everyone

01:33:47.580 --> 01:33:48.540
and it's mutual.

01:33:48.540 --> 01:33:53.260
and the more people begin to exude the kind of influence we're talking about here,

01:33:53.260 --> 01:33:56.220
the more exponentially it will grow.

01:33:56.220 --> 01:34:00.780
That's gorgeous. Yeah. One of the terms I use for that is mutual enactment.

01:34:00.780 --> 01:34:08.140
You know, each moment we are mutually unfolding reality. We are mutually enacting reality.

01:34:08.140 --> 01:34:11.740
The great Buddhist scholar we were talking about him earlier, perhaps before the call,

01:34:11.740 --> 01:34:15.100
Robert Thurman. Did you say you did a call with him once?

01:34:15.100 --> 01:34:18.620
I've done two in-person interviews with him at the S.A.N.D. conference.

01:34:18.620 --> 01:34:20.460
Same idea, he had a beautiful metaphor.

01:34:20.460 --> 01:34:27.660
I just started laughing. He went into this thing about DMT suppositories

01:34:27.660 --> 01:34:29.180
on my first interview with him.

01:34:29.180 --> 01:34:30.620
That's good. Okay.

01:34:30.620 --> 01:34:36.380
Well, this is another bath. We're bringing it back to the bath because somehow it's all

01:34:36.380 --> 01:34:41.260
connected with the suppositories. But his metaphor was it's like bubbles in a bath.

01:34:41.260 --> 01:34:44.620
you know, you're in a bath and it's full of bubbles and one bubble lights up.

01:34:44.620 --> 01:34:48.300
What happens to the bubbles around it? Yeah, they all light up.

01:34:48.300 --> 01:34:54.940
Right. So yeah, similar analogy. So that's the why. We want our human lives to be full of meaning,

01:34:54.940 --> 01:35:01.020
to be full of depth, to step into our greatest gifts and our greatest power. And sometimes these

01:35:01.020 --> 01:35:05.740
spiritual experiences happen out of nowhere. Like I described what happened to me in Boston,

01:35:05.740 --> 01:35:11.820
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

01:35:11.820 --> 01:35:14.060
Has come from practice

01:35:14.060 --> 01:35:16.860
You know come from putting my attention on it

01:35:16.860 --> 01:35:21.740
Taking it seriously not just kind of sitting around waiting for things to change or evolve

01:35:21.740 --> 01:35:28.700
Taking it seriously and that's what I really encourage your listeners to do is get on a path of practice

01:35:28.700 --> 01:35:32.540
It doesn't have to be mine. It doesn't have to be what you were raised with

01:35:33.100 --> 01:35:36.460
It doesn't even have to look like a traditional spiritual thing, but find

01:35:36.460 --> 01:35:43.260
really what you want to learn spiritually in a community that you want to learn with because we are

01:35:43.260 --> 01:35:48.540
harmed in relationship and we are healed in relationship, right? We want to be in a

01:35:48.540 --> 01:35:53.340
relationship with perhaps a lineage and a community that really suits us.

01:35:53.340 --> 01:35:57.500
So there is a plethora of opportunities out there now in this world.

01:35:57.900 --> 01:36:03.020
on the resources on backgap there. I don't know how many hundreds you have of different types of

01:36:03.020 --> 01:36:07.660
opportunities to study, but find what really calls you and don't waste the time.

01:36:07.660 --> 01:36:13.980
Yeah, and don't be a dilettante. If something doesn't seem to be working, move on, but also

01:36:13.980 --> 01:36:19.340
don't feel honor bound to stay with something that isn't working. So in other words, you don't want

01:36:19.340 --> 01:36:23.500
to flit about, but you have to take things seriously, but there's no harm in sort of

01:36:23.500 --> 01:36:27.180
of moving around a little bit until you find what really works for you.

01:36:27.180 --> 01:36:28.180
Absolutely.

01:36:28.180 --> 01:36:29.180
Absolutely.

01:36:29.180 --> 01:36:30.180
Yeah, check it out.

01:36:30.180 --> 01:36:31.180
You know, I agree completely.

01:36:31.180 --> 01:36:39.580
And even for me, the path of my spiritual practice and my work and particularly Tantra,

01:36:39.580 --> 01:36:43.900
I use the metaphor of Tantra, you know, it can be dangerous.

01:36:43.900 --> 01:36:48.700
You know, you're doing things like working with power and working with energies in your

01:36:48.700 --> 01:36:52.640
body and working with being in the world.

01:36:52.640 --> 01:36:57.600
It sort of felt like making my way across a minefield at times, especially with these ancient

01:36:57.600 --> 01:36:59.960
old ideas and traditions.

01:36:59.960 --> 01:37:01.840
But I made my way across that minefield.

01:37:01.840 --> 01:37:03.480
Luckily, I didn't get blown up.

01:37:03.480 --> 01:37:05.280
Some people did get hurt.

01:37:05.280 --> 01:37:09.520
You had a friend who died in a kind of a conclusion thing.

01:37:09.520 --> 01:37:12.240
And you know, we've heard the term spiritual emergencies.

01:37:12.240 --> 01:37:16.200
And we often get contacted for people whose kundalini has gone haywire, and they can't

01:37:16.200 --> 01:37:19.560
hold down a job anymore, and they're living with their parents.

01:37:19.560 --> 01:37:21.360
So safety first.

01:37:21.360 --> 01:37:25.060
That's always a good proviso.

01:37:25.060 --> 01:37:27.920
But on the other hand, it's a journey that we must take.

01:37:27.920 --> 01:37:33.200
I mean, you know, if Frodo just wanted to stay safe in the Shire, then that whole story wouldn't

01:37:33.200 --> 01:37:34.200
have happened.

01:37:34.200 --> 01:37:37.400
Sometimes you have to just go out and do it.

01:37:37.400 --> 01:37:39.080
Oh yeah, but it's true.

01:37:39.080 --> 01:37:41.040
No, the hero's journey isn't easy, right?

01:37:41.040 --> 01:37:42.040
You've got the dragon.

01:37:42.040 --> 01:37:45.120
And I made it across the minefield and I got the gold.

01:37:45.120 --> 01:37:50.120
And it wasn't without mistakes and it wasn't without issues, but I got the gold and that's

01:37:50.120 --> 01:37:51.240
That's what the journey takes.

01:37:51.240 --> 01:37:54.240
It takes walking this path of practice.

01:37:54.240 --> 01:37:57.800
Which is still not to say that something could happen, you know, you still have to be like

01:37:57.800 --> 01:38:03.280
Padmasambhava said, you know, view as vast as the sky, karma as fine as a grain of barley

01:38:03.280 --> 01:38:04.280
flour.

01:38:04.280 --> 01:38:09.960
We have to be on our toes because we're never beyond the possibility of making some kind

01:38:09.960 --> 01:38:10.960
of error.

01:38:10.960 --> 01:38:11.960
Absolutely.

01:38:11.960 --> 01:38:12.960
Yeah.

01:38:12.960 --> 01:38:17.000
And then there's the dangerous spiritual bypassing where we use our spirituality to bypass psychological

01:38:17.000 --> 01:38:23.720
work that we need to do, which is why we always, and I've learned in the past 25-30 years to

01:38:23.720 --> 01:38:29.720
pair the spiritual work with the psychological grounding. And so now I don't do one without

01:38:29.720 --> 01:38:35.720
the other. They're both like the key to the work we do with the Confluence Experience and

01:38:35.720 --> 01:38:37.400
my real mission and my calling.

01:38:37.400 --> 01:38:40.760
That's great. Have you said as much about that as you wanted to say?

01:38:40.760 --> 01:38:45.720
Well, what else do I want to say about that? If you're interested in the work,

01:38:45.720 --> 01:38:48.480
you can check out the website. As I mentioned,

01:38:48.480 --> 01:38:50.920
I am teaching the heart Sutra in early may.

01:38:50.920 --> 01:38:54.520
I'd love people to come and give feedback and reflections and learn what they

01:38:54.520 --> 01:38:55.360
can about that.

01:38:55.360 --> 01:39:00.400
There are other traditions out there and find one that appeals to you

01:39:00.400 --> 01:39:03.480
and always look my friends who are listening,

01:39:03.480 --> 01:39:08.400
look for that psychological grounding as well in any spiritual endeavor that you

01:39:08.400 --> 01:39:10.720
do in any spiritual work that you do.

01:39:10.720 --> 01:39:13.600
When you're doing psychological work,

01:39:13.640 --> 01:39:20.200
make sure that you include spiritual work as well, however that means for you. Whatever kind of

01:39:20.200 --> 01:39:27.000
calling you particularly have to spiritual work, grounded as well. Calling you have to psychological

01:39:27.000 --> 01:39:32.200
work, fine. Where you're headed, where you're going. You know, spirituality is like about our future,

01:39:32.200 --> 01:39:37.880
right? It's about what happens after we die. It's about where we're headed. Psychological work is

01:39:37.880 --> 01:39:44.680
more about our past, where we came from and how we were constructed. And when we do both of those

01:39:44.680 --> 01:39:51.480
together, we really are in that magic spot. How does a person find a good therapist to work with

01:39:51.480 --> 01:39:55.880
that understands the spiritual dimension? Yeah, it's exactly what you said about the

01:39:55.880 --> 01:40:02.200
spiritual life. You've got to check out a few. Most therapists will give you a freebie. They'll

01:40:02.200 --> 01:40:09.400
talk to you or go to one session, ask them the hard questions, interview them. They're not all the same.

01:40:09.400 --> 01:40:14.600
Transpersonal therapists are certainly out there. I mean, I have people I can recommend.

01:40:14.600 --> 01:40:20.600
If anybody wants to reach out to me individually, there's certainly amazing psychotherapists I know

01:40:20.600 --> 01:40:24.760
that include the spiritual work as well. I'd be happy to provide lists for people.

01:40:24.760 --> 01:40:30.920
Yeah, you can contact you. I'll have your website stuff on your page. And there is the whole category

01:40:30.920 --> 01:40:36.680
on the categorical index page on BatGap of psychologists and therapists too, people like John Prendergast

01:40:36.680 --> 01:40:37.680
and many others.

01:40:37.680 --> 01:40:40.520
Another thing I wanted to throw in here, we have a little bit more time, this kind of

01:40:40.520 --> 01:40:43.000
loops back to something we were saying.

01:40:43.000 --> 01:40:47.920
I think that it's easy to get depressed or discouraged when you see what's going on in

01:40:47.920 --> 01:40:54.100
the world with so many things, climate change and politics and Gaza and Ukraine and so many

01:40:54.100 --> 01:40:58.160
other things, fentanyl and potential for nuclear war.

01:40:58.160 --> 01:41:02.180
And if all you know about the world is what you get on the news, I don't blame you for

01:41:02.180 --> 01:41:03.180
being depressed.

01:41:03.180 --> 01:41:06.720
But, you know, as I was saying earlier, and as you and I have been saying for the last

01:41:06.720 --> 01:41:10.540
two hours, there's a deeper reality underlying all this.

01:41:10.540 --> 01:41:16.220
And I think that the key to resolving all these manifestations of incoherence in collective

01:41:16.220 --> 01:41:21.480
consciousness is to create coherence in collective consciousness, which spirituality does, first

01:41:21.480 --> 01:41:25.160
for the individual and through individuals for the collective.

01:41:25.160 --> 01:41:31.800
And that's been my most fundamental motivation since I was in my 20s, or early 20s, and one

01:41:31.800 --> 01:41:38.680
of the most fundamental motivations for starting Batgap is to somehow propagate the understanding

01:41:38.680 --> 01:41:44.800
and popularity of spiritual practice so that it can have an impact on the world.

01:41:44.800 --> 01:41:49.480
Because it's touch and go, we could blow ourselves up, there could be catastrophic climate change.

01:41:49.480 --> 01:41:53.840
I just read an article the other day that there's some ice shifting in Antarctica that if it

01:41:53.840 --> 01:41:58.400
breaks loose could raise sea levels by five meters, which would pretty much inundate hundreds of

01:41:58.400 --> 01:42:03.040
millions of people in coastal cities around the world. I don't know if spirituality can stop that,

01:42:03.040 --> 01:42:09.200
but it could at least help us deal with the, well, possibly get sensible about changing

01:42:09.200 --> 01:42:16.880
our influence on the climate. And also if we do face huge societal catastrophes, to do so with

01:42:16.880 --> 01:42:23.120
greater sanity and with greater mutual support rather than every man for himself. Thank you.

01:42:23.120 --> 01:42:26.960
Yeah, and I do believe that spiritual, in my experience,

01:42:26.960 --> 01:42:30.680
the spiritual and psychological growth and development,

01:42:30.680 --> 01:42:33.400
if we all grew up our ethics,

01:42:33.400 --> 01:42:35.760
if we grew up our spiritual wisdom,

01:42:35.760 --> 01:42:40.040
if we continue to grow our psychological health

01:42:40.040 --> 01:42:42.760
and heal our traumas and transform them

01:42:42.760 --> 01:42:45.440
into transcendent experiences,

01:42:45.440 --> 01:42:49.560
we would have the capacity to meet this meta-crisis

01:42:49.560 --> 01:42:51.640
that we have, this crisis of crisis,

01:42:51.640 --> 01:42:54.320
these multiple crises that we have.

01:42:54.320 --> 01:42:56.640
There's a fantastic developmental researcher

01:42:56.640 --> 01:43:00.040
who used the stages model, Gail Hojaka.

01:43:00.040 --> 01:43:02.640
She did studies on climate change

01:43:02.640 --> 01:43:05.240
and how people perceive climate change

01:43:05.240 --> 01:43:07.680
as they evolve through these stages of development

01:43:07.680 --> 01:43:08.960
I'm talking about.

01:43:08.960 --> 01:43:10.800
And she found in the most mature,

01:43:10.800 --> 01:43:13.560
I'm speaking this just in my language,

01:43:13.560 --> 01:43:16.940
so forgive me Gail, she would say it more gracefully.

01:43:16.940 --> 01:43:21.280
But as our wisdom grows, as our cognition

01:43:21.280 --> 01:43:29.520
our development and our identity evolves, the despair lessens. Creativity comes in, creative solutions.

01:43:29.520 --> 01:43:36.800
We are no longer paralyzed by this meta-crisis that we're facing. It's easy to be paralyzed by it. I

01:43:36.800 --> 01:43:43.040
feel it. I understand it. What could we possibly do to address these issues? It's depressing.

01:43:43.040 --> 01:43:48.560
I take a lot of news breaks because it's so depressing. We find if we can evolve this,

01:43:48.560 --> 01:43:53.840
grow up and waking up as I'm talking about it. We can do our work to grow ourselves psychologically

01:43:53.840 --> 01:44:00.320
and spiritually. Amazing insight, creativity, reduction of despair is actually what we're

01:44:00.320 --> 01:44:04.800
seeing in the data. Irene and I are always wrestling over the TV remote because I want

01:44:04.800 --> 01:44:09.040
to watch this news story. No, no, I can't stand it. Let's fast forward. Let's mute it.

01:44:09.040 --> 01:44:15.280
The pace of change is continuing to accelerate and AI is coming along. That's going to accelerate

01:44:15.280 --> 01:44:21.280
things exponentially even more. So in a way Darwin was right, survival of the fittest

01:44:21.280 --> 01:44:26.800
is the law of nature. If a donkey is carrying a load that's too heavy, you either have to

01:44:26.800 --> 01:44:30.800
lighten the load or strengthen the donkey. And I don't know if we're going to be able

01:44:30.800 --> 01:44:37.040
to lighten the load in terms of the onslaught of change that the world is experiencing and

01:44:37.040 --> 01:44:43.360
is going to experience. So we have to be fittest, so to speak. We have to strengthen our individual

01:44:43.360 --> 01:44:44.360
donkey.

01:44:44.360 --> 01:44:45.640
Get those muscles.

01:44:45.640 --> 01:44:48.920
Yeah, you know, then you can meet the challenges.

01:44:48.920 --> 01:44:52.920
At least you have more capacity to meet whatever life brings your way.

01:44:52.920 --> 01:44:56.280
Yes, and I'm optimistic because of it.

01:44:56.280 --> 01:45:02.520
I'm optimistic that we could, oh good, you know, that we can build the muscles of these donkeys

01:45:02.520 --> 01:45:04.360
through the work that we're doing here.

01:45:04.360 --> 01:45:09.880
And as humans, who are humans having a spiritual experience every day, I believe,

01:45:10.440 --> 01:45:15.320
find the answers to these and save our human condition and human story as we go forward.

01:45:15.320 --> 01:45:21.000
By saying we're optimistic, I don't think we're saying, at least I'm not saying, that there aren't

01:45:21.000 --> 01:45:26.520
going to be some difficult situations as there currently are and will continue to be. But we've

01:45:26.520 --> 01:45:31.320
got a good hand of cards here that the other players aren't seeing in that we realize there is

01:45:31.320 --> 01:45:37.240
this spiritual dimension, which is not something that those who are worried about world problems

01:45:37.240 --> 01:45:42.080
generally are counting on to make any kind of difference, but I think it is making a

01:45:42.080 --> 01:45:47.600
difference and will continue to make an even greater one as more and more people participate

01:45:47.600 --> 01:45:49.080
in exploring it.

01:45:49.080 --> 01:45:56.080
Absolutely. I mean, I have learned that we can literally recreate our reality, not the

01:45:56.080 --> 01:46:01.960
way we think, not the way we tend to think of it, but through mutual enactment together

01:46:01.960 --> 01:46:05.560
individually and collectively, we can change things very quickly.

01:46:05.560 --> 01:46:13.320
Yeah, good. I'll let you have the last word in that and having said that. Okay, so I will be putting

01:46:13.320 --> 01:46:19.320
up a page on Bath Gap and it will have your website and any other contact information you

01:46:19.320 --> 01:46:24.040
want me to put up there. And obviously you're starting a course in the beginning of May,

01:46:24.040 --> 01:46:29.240
did you say? I did, yeah. We'll be doing a weekend retreat on the Heart Sutra, which outlines the

01:46:29.240 --> 01:46:35.560
the path of practice goes into these deep esoteric topics in a very pragmatic way.

01:46:35.560 --> 01:46:36.560
Online retreat, right?

01:46:36.560 --> 01:46:37.560
Online?

01:46:37.560 --> 01:46:38.560
It's an online retreat.

01:46:38.560 --> 01:46:39.560
Yeah, first weekend in May.

01:46:39.560 --> 01:46:40.560
Everyone's invited.

01:46:40.560 --> 01:46:41.560
Yeah.

01:46:41.560 --> 01:46:46.140
And of course, here we are, and this is, what is this, February of 2024, and people might

01:46:46.140 --> 01:46:50.480
be watching this five years from now, but hopefully you'll still be doing good stuff,

01:46:50.480 --> 01:46:54.680
and people can just go to your website and see what you're up to, probably get on some

01:46:54.680 --> 01:46:56.200
kind of mailing list.

01:46:56.200 --> 01:46:57.200
Absolutely.

01:46:57.200 --> 01:46:58.200
Please do.

01:46:58.200 --> 01:46:59.200
Please do.

01:46:59.200 --> 01:47:04.400
Great. Well, thanks, Kimberly. And I'm glad that we'll continue to be seeing each other and interacting

01:47:04.400 --> 01:47:08.240
through the ASI, you know, which otherwise is like, "Oh, we're finishing the interview. I'll

01:47:08.240 --> 01:47:12.640
never talk to Kimberly again." But we'll have our little monthly things and we'll stay in touch.

01:47:12.640 --> 01:47:15.360
Well, to be continued. Thanks, Rick.

01:47:15.360 --> 01:47:20.800
Thanks. And thanks to those who've been listening or watching. And my next interview is going to be

01:47:20.800 --> 01:47:26.000
a doctor named Neil Theis. He's actually some kind of a kidney doctor, but I met him at the

01:47:26.000 --> 01:47:31.840
Sand Conference and boy I wish we still had those Sand Conferences. Those were so much fun. They

01:47:31.840 --> 01:47:37.360
were such great get-togethers. Anyway, he's a wonderful guy, interesting person, and that'll

01:47:37.360 --> 01:47:42.480
be the next one. So if you go to the BatGap website, you can sign up to be notified of each

01:47:42.480 --> 01:47:46.480
new interview that's posted. You can subscribe to the YouTube channel to get notifications.

01:47:46.480 --> 01:47:50.800
Check it out. You know, if you haven't been there before, check out the website and see

01:47:50.800 --> 01:47:55.520
what we've got. I even have a humor page where there's many, many funny spiritual cartoons.

01:47:55.520 --> 01:48:01.920
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.

01:48:01.920 --> 01:48:04.560
Well, we're all doing what we can as the Beatles sang.

01:48:04.560 --> 01:48:08.660
Yeah. All right. Thanks, Kimberly. All right. Thank you.

01:48:08.660 --> 01:48:33.860
[Music]