Doc Roberts Interview

Summary:

Full transcript:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week is Doc Roberts from Durango, Colorado. Doc has an interesting story which you’ll hear. His awakening occurred in a way which most of us would probably choose to let this cup pass from me. He pretty much died and then he had an awakening, but I’ll let him tell the details. So Doc, welcome to the show.

Doc: Thank you.

Rick: Let’s start as we usually do with just a little biographical sketch. Where you’re from, what you do, things like that so people get a feeling of just your life in a relative sense. Then we’ll kind of get more into the whole meat of it.

Doc: Okay. Well, I live in Colorado outside Durango. I have a couple internet businesses that I run and I have two kids.

Rick: Making skis.

Doc: Making skis.

Rick: Skiboards.

Doc: Skiboards. I also have a vocational counseling website that I do and do some teaching and speaking around the area.

Rick: Vocational type teaching?

Doc: Yeah. Then I have two kids and live in the woods.

Rick: I’m envious. In fact, Doc told my wife about his circumstances and she went right in the other room and started looking on the internet at real estate in his town. So you learned TM years ago or something?

Doc: 1970.

Rick: 1970 and did it regularly for what? A decade or a couple decades?

Doc: A couple decades at least.

Rick: And you became a teacher also?

Doc: Teacher, governor.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: Yeah, once the whole process.

Rick: Governor means like an advanced teacher. And then, as you were doing all that, what was your orientation to spirituality? Did you feel like enlightenment is a million miles away? Were you having great experiences? Were you a seeker?

Doc: I was having typical experiences. I’ve been a seeker since I was five. Meditating. I started spontaneously meditating when I was five.

Rick: You would actually just sit and meditate?

Doc: Yeah. Up until I learned TM pretty much.

Rick: Wow. So pretty regular, like almost every day?

Doc: Yeah. I was actually in competitive roller skating. I was a national champion for many years. And part of the regimen was to practice eight hours a day. So I would just immediately go right into the transcendent for like eight hours. Not know what happened.

Rick: So you’d just be in the zone while you were practicing?

Doc: Yeah. For seven days a week.

Rick: Competitive means like dancing type or racing?

Doc: Figure skating.

Rick: Figure skating on roller skates?

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: Interesting. Jumping and twirling?

Doc: No. I did the circles on the floor. Just kind of intricate and very precise.

Rick: And it’s all very competitive and there’s national champions?

Doc: Yep.

Rick: Very interesting.

Doc: Just a little minute move and you’re out and they’re in.

Rick: So did you do like a type of meditation at all where you would sit and close your eyes and go deep? Or was it more like that your roller skating put you into a meditative kind of place?

Doc: It was meditation in action. More like Zen mindfulness.

Rick: And then what led you to decide to learn TM?

Doc: I saw a poster. They said, “Hey, for 35 bucks we’ll get you enlightened in five years.” And I signed up.

Rick: That was in Colorado also or somewhere else?

Doc: No. That was in Long Island.

Rick: I’m from there.

Doc: I was going to school there.

Rick: Yeah. I’m from Connecticut.

Doc: Oh, okay.

Rick: And so when you learned to meditate TM style, did it kind of like really knock your socks off? Or was it more like, “Hey, I’ve been doing this since I was five?”

Doc: No. It was definitely a clear transcending. It was very powerful for me. And I guess on another level I really knew this is it.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: This is what’s going to get me where I want to be. I knew there was always something that was missing, some kind of secret that these masters knew. I wanted to know what that was.

Rick: Yeah. And so you started meditating. Did you feel like you were kind of getting a glimpse of that?

Doc: Yeah. Yeah. Pretty periodically. You drop into the transcendent. You have those experiences and you come back into your daily life. I can’t wait to get back there again.

Rick: Yeah. But did you also feel over time that it was beginning to stick? In other words, it wasn’t like you went back to absolutely the way you had been when you got into daily life. Something of the transcendent was brought into activity?

Doc: Life was improving, I’d say. Life was getting a little bit, I wouldn’t say easier. It was more enlivened.

Rick: And you taught TM full time for a while?

Doc: Yep.

Rick: Whereabouts?

Doc: Florida.

Rick: My wife taught in Florida too, Daytona Beach. Around the Merv Wave.

Doc: Yeah, me too. St. Petersburg. I was there a couple of years and I went…

Rick: By the Merv Wave incidentally, I mean that in 1975 Maharishi Mahesh Yogi went on the Merv Griffin Show. And huge numbers of people started learning TM. 50,000 people a month lined up around the block. So it was called the Merv Wave.

Doc: Yep. That was a good time.

Rick: I was over in Switzerland with Maharishi at that point. I had already done a bunch of teaching. So then you were teaching full time and at a certain point you probably thought, “Well, I better get a life and get a job and start to hold down some responsibilities.” You got married?

Doc: Yeah. Well, first I went on the six-month course and after the six-month course I had to brainstorm to get my Master’s degree.

Rick: Six-month course, by the way, are these courses that TM teachers did where they would do long meditations for six months. Sometimes they put the courses back to back and be doing long meditations. By long, I mean pretty much all day long. For a year, year and a half some people did. So you did one of those.

Doc: Did one of those.

Rick: Then you got a Master’s degree.

Doc: I went to Amherst, then moved from there to Fairfield when they were just starting the community, starting to build the domes, that whole thing. But yeah, I had gone, let’s see, I can’t remember now if I went to college first or moved to Fairfield first then went to college, but either way I ended up going to college, starting a practice.

Rick: What did you do your Master’s degree in?

Doc: Vocational counseling.

Rick: Oh, okay. You moved to Fairfield, did a practice here in that?

Doc: I actually kind of started a practice here. So yeah, I guess I did it right after the six month course before I went to Amherst and came here.

Rick: And then what?

Doc: Then I was getting a little bit burned out on Fairfield and not having a wife and kids and a real life.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: So I went to–

Rick: You weren’t finding eligible candidates around here.

Doc: Yeah, so I went to California to start my private practice and seminars and then met my wife and then went from there. Eventually we moved to Colorado, which is where I wanted to be.

Rick: Yeah. And you went to Durango then?

Doc: Boulder.

Rick: Boulder, okay. And then eventually you moved down to Durango.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: Okay. Well, that was a quick survey. I’m sure there’s some interesting details along the way. And then, if it’s the next appropriate thing to tell in the story, I understand you had a health crisis.

Doc: Well, to backtrack just a bit, I was finishing my PhD. It was in psychology of human potential. And I was also starting a new business, which was something completely different.

Rick: So that’s why you called Doc. You have a PhD.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: Okay.

Doc: So I started a business with ski boards and that just started taking off, overcoming the house. And that was part of the decision to move to Bayfield for cheaper warehouse space.

Rick: You were building ski boards in your house, more or less?

Doc: No, but we were shipping. We were ordering. I was representing a lot of other companies. So we moved in 2001 there. And I’d say that was the beginning of the dark night of the soul.

Rick: And Bayfield is just a suburb of Durango.

Doc: Kind of. It’s 18 miles out of town.

Rick: 18 miles out of town. And ski boards, by the way, you can describe them better than I can.

Doc: Well, there’s two of them. They’re short. There’s almost no learning curve. They’re super fun right from the beginning. I call it instant skiing, instant fun.

Rick: So wider.

Doc: They’re a little bit wider than regular narrow skis. But they’re shorter, so most people that can stand on their feet without wobbling can get on these and start having fun.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: Without lessons.

Rick: And do even fairly advanced skiers enjoy them?

Doc: Yeah, they do.

Rick: Or they just rather go for the old kind, you know, regular board.

Doc: Well, they do. But then they find they can go through moguls like they never did before. They can go through trees that they couldn’t do. They can go on steep stuff. They go in powder.

Rick: That’s interesting.

Doc: So it opens up a whole new —

Rick: Yeah. I mean, I totally lose it when I get into some moguls. And I don’t ski that much, but when I get the chance, I’m good on smooth stuff. But in the moguls, it’s like, “Whoa!”

Doc: Yeah, these are — moguls are made for ski boards. You can play in them.

Rick: Cool.

Doc: You know, ride the sides and all that.

Rick: And you have a website like skiboards.com?

Doc: Skiboards.com, yeah.

Rick: Cool. Well, we’ll link to that from backgap.com also.

Doc: Cool.

Rick: Okay. So the Dark Knight. Dum de dum dum.

Doc: I don’t know if I need to go into too much detail.

Rick: No, you should. Let’s talk about —

Doc: It’s kind of like everybody else’s big Dark Knight. You know, the bad partner, you know, sent me reeling.

Rick: Bad partner means the marriage was —

Doc: No, I brought a partner into my business.

Rick: Oh, a business partner. I see.

Doc: Which was a disaster. At that point, my health was starting to get affected. My wife was starting to get a little bit annoyed with the company.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: The finances were kind of up and down. We had two young children at that point.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: So all of that, there’s just a lot of pressure. And then that kept building and building. And a few other things came, you know. Dog died, got disinherited by my father. Just, you know, pile it all on. Why not?

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: So then it just didn’t work out with my wife and I. She left, and my health was starting to decline. The divorce wasn’t fun.

Rick: Do you feel like it was because of the stress of all these circumstances that your health was going under?

Doc: Yeah, definitely. All of that. The divorce, the business.

Rick: Yeah. Were you still meditating?

Doc: Kind of a little bit here and there.

Rick: But, yeah, it was coming at you so much that you sort of drifted away from that a little bit.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah. And so did it sort of reach a climax of some kind?

Doc: It did. It did about three and a half years ago, which is when we decided to break up. Then my health started going down a little bit. The business started having problems. I couldn’t keep up with the business. So more and more and more and more. And so pretty much I lost my wife. I almost lost my company. Spent all my money on the divorce, you know, the legal problems. And then most of my savings in the divorce went to her so I could keep the house for the kids. And then my health was declining rapidly to the point where my cardiologist one day said I had a blockage in my lung. And so he said, “Your heart is having trouble moving fluids.”

Rick: What kind of a blockage?

Doc: Blood clots.

Rick: Really?

Doc: In my lung.

Rick: And they couldn’t take them out?

Doc: They could.

Rick: Oh, okay.

Doc: So he said, “Here’s your options. You’ve got three options. You can either have a heart and lung transplant if you wait. You can get this experimental surgery in San Diego or you’re going to die.”

Rick: Right.

Doc: He said, “And that’s the…”

Rick: And wasn’t there a danger of these clots breaking loose and causing a stroke or something?

Doc: Well, they’re already in the lungs, but yeah, they could move and then really clot.

Rick: Clog something serious.

Doc: Yeah. But it was clogged enough that I just barely managed to get on a train, bought a one-way ticket, signed over everything, put it all on a trust for my kids. And when I got there, my friend drove me to the hospital and I gave her everything else that I had. My shoes, my money, my laptop. So I was essentially in the hospital alone.

Rick: Expecting never to come out.

Doc: Yeah, and the experimental surgery was fairly experimental, so I didn’t know whether I was going to make it or not. And then right before I even got in the operating room, I remember I was starting to have trouble breathing and then I just remembered my last breath and that was it.

Rick: Did you pass out or did they put some anesthesia on you?

Doc: No, there was no anesthesia. I hadn’t gotten to that point yet.

Rick: So you went out and you went unconscious and somehow they kind of kept you alive and started operating on you.

Doc: They tried the electric shocks. Yeah, that didn’t work, so then they had to massage my heart and bring me back.

Rick: Open your chest and massage it.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: Wow. So they brought you back.

Doc: Yeah, so heart massages…

Rick: But you didn’t know you were brought back. You were out of there.

Doc: Yeah, heart massages are pretty cool.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: Not many people get that.

Rick: Yeah, really. But were you having any kind of out of body experience or near death experience or anything like that or were you just gone?

Doc: No, it was pretty much… I didn’t get all the flashy stuff that everybody else got. I just went straight into what I knew was pure consciousness.

Rick: Oh, so you were conscious in a sort of unmanifest, non-specific, non-perceptual way. There was just consciousness there.

Doc: Yeah, there wasn’t me there. It was just consciousness, just eternal… You could call it a number of names, you know, love, peace, being.

Rick: Well, actually, at that time, while they were massaging your heart and all that stuff, was consciousness aware of itself or did you realize when you came out of the whole thing that consciousness had been awake throughout the ordeal?

Doc: It’s hard to say because when you’re kind of outside of time and space, you’re just there.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: And so you don’t know how… I mean, I didn’t know how long it just seemed like it was…

Rick: You’re just dwelling in that eternity.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah, and there was no thought saying, “Oh boy, this is fun.” It was just like…

Doc: There was no witness.

Rick: Right.

Doc: There was no me looking, “Wow, look at me. I’m in this state.”

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: It was only afterwards that I came back and I knew what had happened.

Rick: Yeah. So obviously the operation was successful or we wouldn’t be having this interview.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: Was it a long operation, do you know?

Doc: It was 12 hours.

Rick: 12 hours. And how long did it take you to come out of the anesthesia?

Doc: Two weeks. Well, they kept me in a coma for two weeks.

Rick: They kept you in a coma for two weeks.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: Okay. And as far as you know, that pure awareness was there during that two weeks?

Doc: I’m pretty sure.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: I can’t say for sure. I didn’t exist anymore.

Rick: Right. Just awareness.

Doc: Just awareness. That’s all there was.

Rick: So then you finally came out and…

Doc: At first I just remembered that experience. I think about the first thing that came to me was this… It was almost like a feeling of love just coming over me. And it was kind of not… It was not verbal. But it was, “Everything is okay. Everything is perfect. All is good. And everything that happens in life is for your highest.” So basically there’s no need to fear. There’s no need to be concerned. There’s no need to ever worry again.

Rick: It seems like even when you talk about that, you get a little emotional. You just feel moved by it.

Doc: Very moving, yeah.

Rick: Because you felt like a blessing or something?

Doc: I felt all the remnants of stress in my body just dissipate. Including my first chakra. No fear of survival. No fear of death any longer. Because I was dead.

Rick: Yeah. Done that.

Doc: Yeah. Done that. Not much to it. Fun to be back. Even though I was in the ICU, I just kept thinking, “Wow. I could just stay here the rest of my life and this would be really cool.”

Rick: So you came out and did you feel like a new man? Did you feel like you had undergone some kind of profound spiritual shift?

Doc: Not yet. I knew something had happened. I was kind of back. I heard this vibration or this noise that was coming. And finally I just started paying attention to it. And they were calling my name to bring me back to consciousness. And then it took probably a couple of days to learn how to write and walk and speak.

Rick: Because you had been so out of it.

Doc: Yeah. I was just getting used to all these different things. But it all felt new. It all felt like the first time. Like everything felt like the first time.

Rick: Not that you didn’t know how to do those things. You remembered how to speak. You remembered how to brush your teeth.

Doc: Yeah. The habits.

Rick: You knew people’s names and stuff. But you felt like it was all afresh.

Doc: Yeah. And then I was there.

Rick: So the conditioning had been wiped out. I mean the sort of ingrained habit pattern, calcified ways of seeing and thinking and feeling and doing had been erased.

Doc: Yeah. I’d say the hard drive was completely erased and then I was starting to reboot again. Little by little. I’ve got to say it was a great experience in the hospital. And I didn’t sleep much because they were kind of in every half hour or something.

Rick: Right.

Doc: That broke that habit. I didn’t even feel like I needed sleep anymore. And they told me it would take two months to get out. You know I’d be in there for two months. And within two weeks I was out.

Rick: Because you recuperated so fast.

Doc: I recuperated very fast. And they kept calling me Miracle Man because they didn’t understand that nobody had ever gone into the surgery and had died before they got into the operating room. A lot of people died in the operating room. And then the process was once they got my heart going again, then the surgery they’d stop your heart.

Rick: Intentionally.

Doc: Intentionally twice in a row.

Rick: To re-hook things.

Doc: Yeah. For 20 minutes each.

Rick: Wow. Had to be on a machine obviously.

Doc: Yeah. So yeah, I’m glad I wasn’t around watching all that. You know, those people that hover over their bodies and watch all this, it’s like all power to you. But I’m glad I didn’t.

Rick: So you got out of the hospital in two weeks, but were you still really weak and needing a wheelchair or anything like that?

Doc: I was weak. When I was in the hospital that two weeks they said, “Well if you start walking around you’ll probably recover a little quicker.” In their mind it’s walk around the hallway. In my mind I put all my equipment that was attached to me in a wheelchair and I was out the front door. Walking out in the parking lot, you know. Sitting on the bench. It was great.

Rick: Interesting. So then when you finally got out of there obviously you were free of equipment.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: And then what? I guess you had to buy another train ticket back to Durango.

Doc: I stayed at my friend’s for a couple of weeks just so I could kind of, I still couldn’t walk more than maybe a quarter of a block.

Rick: Right.

Doc: But then I started building my strength up and when I was ready I got on the train and went back. Got hit with my second dark night of the soul which was interesting.

Rick: Oh that’s interesting.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: In terms of again of external circumstances coming at you?

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: Oh, okay. Sometimes people say when they say dark night they mean there’s nothing particularly wrong on the outside but they just feel like crap on the inside, you know. And depression and everything is meaningless.

Doc: Yeah, that was the first one. The second one was more like, oh so you’re attached to this? Well let’s take that away, Rick.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: So that was about a year process and meanwhile I was starting to realize there was something different. When I got back home to my house I just was looking around going, oh this person lives in this house and oh yeah they’re interested in spiritual and psychology books. I could see them on the wall and oh they have two kids and have this business. And just kind of.

Rick: So you start reassembling your…

Doc: Yeah, so for probably, I don’t know, the first year I kept thinking well I must be a walk in or something. I must be, you know, something’s not the same anymore.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: And so, you know, now I understand that awakening was there. I guess you could call it the awakened one took over.

Rick: Yeah, the self with a capital S.

Doc: Yeah, so I wasn’t, the small me wasn’t there anymore. So everything was different and yet everything.

Rick: The small me wasn’t there at all or? Well, the bigger me that predominates.

Doc: The habits were there.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: Same habits, same thought patterns, same, you know, responses.

Rick: Right.

Doc: But somehow I could just see them as a veil.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: And all the time I kept feeling, especially for the first year, that wherever I was looking I could just see, like kind of in this movie Twister when they have a tornado coming and it comes through the drive-in theater. And everybody’s watching this movie and all of a sudden the screen cracks. And as the tornado comes through, that’s what it felt like. It felt like, wow, any moment this whole thing could crack apart and there’d be what’s the only thing there is, is being.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: You’d be sitting right there.

Rick: So you kind of felt like everything was just a sort of a facade or a?

Doc: Like a movie.

Rick: Like a movie, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It didn’t have the same kind of reality that it once had had.

Doc: No, not that there aren’t thoughts that have come over the last two years that have grabbed me for a while.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: And, you know, I kind of got sucked in and I had to, you know, deal with those. But there’s a certain, I hate to use the word detachment because it sounds.

Rick: Cold.

Doc: Cold, yeah.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: But there was a certain like, oh, okay, well here’s a bill from the IRS for $6,000. And I’m like, okay, you know, I really don’t want this.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: I would have the thought patterns come up. And then it’s like, you know, I just dealt with it.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: And I moved on.

Rick: So in other words, things don’t have the gravity they used to have. They don’t have the capacity to grip you as they once did.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah. And even though they might grip momentarily, they can’t keep a grip.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: Now in the beginning, of course, it was coming at me. And I’d go, oh, well, you know, like for probably the first three months I was just sitting on the deck listening to the birds. Just like, oh, you know, this is, I just want to do this. So I’d get a bill, a couple of bills would come in, and I’d just throw them in a box. For about three months. And then finally people started calling. And then some lady called. She said, well, you owe this much money for the hospital bill. And they said, if you don’t pay it today, you know, we’re going to —

Rick: Take your heart out.

Doc: Well, we’re going to call the credit bureau and it’s going to ruin your credit.

Rick: Did you have insurance, health insurance?

Doc: I did, but there were a lot of bills that didn’t get paid.

Rick: Still a lot of bills, sure.

Doc: So I remember myself going, you know, just for a moment, it was like, oh, my credit. And then it was like, and I just kind of relaxed and I just said to her, okay. So my credit went down and it was like, wow, what a relief. Now I don’t have to think about it. I’ve thought about that my whole life. You know, like, oh, I better watch out, I better, you know. And it’s like, oh, well, that’s gone. So it was kind of like that for the first year. Meanwhile, I was trying to figure out what had really happened. Because I remember calling some people, especially John Macy and a few other people, and just saying, I came here in October trying to get in touch with people who might know what was happening. And I remember all of them saying, well, that’s awakening. I’m like, that can’t be awakening. That doesn’t sound like cosmic consciousness. That doesn’t sound like unity or GC or all the things that I imagined it should be. But the message kept coming back, simplest form of awareness. And it was kind of like, well, what did you think simple awareness was?

Rick: Right.

Doc: You know, some big thing.

Rick: So you didn’t have some concept of it.

Doc: And so all of a sudden it hit me and it was like, oh, this is it. That’s it. And even though everything felt like it had changed completely, nothing had changed. Everything was the same. So it was a kind of strange duality. But that sense of, you know, am I awake? And then I’d start doubting. And it’s like, well, no, this can’t be it. And I’d go back and forth for a while. And then eventually it just kind of seeped in. I’d say it probably took a year before I finally just like, yeah, this is it.

Rick: Were you reading any of your old spiritual books to see if what they said jibed with what you were experiencing?

Doc: You know, it’s funny. It’s a good question because when I looked at all my spiritual books, I couldn’t bear to pick them up. There’s only one that I hadn’t read, which is Jack Kornfield’s book. I think it’s…

Rick: After the Ecstasy, the Laundry.

Doc: Yeah, yeah. That’s what it was. I found myself flipping through all the chapters until about halfway through or so, until it finally started making sense to me. And then about a month, I think about a couple months later, I went to visit my friend in Boulder. And he was really into Adyashanti. And so he was running late. And I found his book, Emptiness Dancing. I started reading that with tears flowing out of my eyes because it was like, oh my God, this guy knows, you know, he knows my experience. So I got kind of turned on to Adyashanti and maybe a couple of his books. But other than that, no, I couldn’t find any books that I really related to anymore.

Rick: But you kind of felt that talking to people who were awake was helping you more than books.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: Okay. And did you find some of those elsewhere or mostly in Fairfield?

Doc: Fairfield, but also even though my friend had been following Adyashanti and they gave me a tape to listen to on the way back to Durango, which was The End of Your World.

Rick: Right.

Doc: And all the, you know, what the process of awakening really is and all the things that are going to probably hit you afterwards. And all of that was making sense.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: So more and more it was kind of seeping in.

Rick: Right.

Doc: You know, that this is what it was. And definitely I related to the cosmic joke. As soon as I got it, it’s like, what?

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: That’s it? This is it? You know, and I remembered like, well, I had this since I was a kid. You know, I used to know that was it.

Rick: You knew what it was.

Doc: Yeah. So I laughed for a really long time when I kind of got that.

Rick: And you had it when you were a kid, but obviously you kind of got mired in the pressures of the world and the, you know, the responsibilities and the dramas to the point where you pretty much forgot it.

Doc: Yeah. You totally lose it.

Rick: Yeah. And then this kind of crisis reminded you or, you know, enabled it to come to the surface again.

Doc: I know it kind of sounds extreme to die, to get, you know, awakened, but for me it was much more of a blessing because I have a very analytical mind.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: If I had been, you know, meditating and then it kind of, you know, dawned on me, I’d totally doubt it.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: It would be too subtle. This was like night and day.

Rick: Dying anywhere.

Doc: Died, came back, different person.

Rick: I guess we could modify the saying in your case to say, you know, whatever sinks your boat. [Laughter]

Doc: Yeah. Whatever works.

Rick: Yeah. Huh. So really it’s a, you know, sort of the confidence in it is relatively new for you. Just a year or so maybe, sounds like.

Doc: Yeah. It’s, my anniversary was, of the old me dying was July 24th. And July 25th was my rebirth.

Rick: Of what year?

Doc: 2008.

Rick: Oh, and that’s when you had the operation or that was like a year after the operation?

Doc: No, July 24th, 2008 is when I actually died.

Rick: Physically.

Doc: And then the operation coming through it was July 25th when I actually, I call that when I woke up.

Rick: So that’s really only two years ago.

Doc: It’s just barely two years.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. Okay. It’s funny, I just had my, July 25th is my anniversary of learning to meditate.

Doc: Oh.

Rick: And I was 18, so that just happened for us.

Doc: Huh.

Rick: Yeah. Um, so, uh, and so now I get the sense that your business is doing okay again.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: Actually, um, everything is kind of turned around.

Rick: Everything’s kind of coming back together.

Doc: Well, you know the funny thing is that.

Rick: Credit score is going up? [Laughter]

Doc: Oh, I don’t know about that. And I don’t really care.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: But it seemed like, um, you know something in not being attached to the outcome.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: Everything just kind of flows however it’s going to flow.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: And it seems like it’s always beneficial and I remember those words when I first came to consciousness. That everything is perfect. There’s nothing to be concerned about. Nothing to worry about. Um, it’s, it’s, it’s, you’re loved.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: And you’re always, and it’s always for your highest good. So then all the things that were starting to come at me and continue to come at me, I see it as a blessing.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: Even though I would say, well I don’t like this. Can it come this way?

Rick: Right.

Doc: You know, but still it comes how it comes. I see it as a blessing, yeah. Yeah, but there’s something in that lack of attachment, um, that makes it so much more easy.

Rick: Yeah. Well, there’s so many sayings both, you know, in contemporary culture and in ancient literature like, you know, let go and let God.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: You know, seek ye first the kingdom of God and all else shall be added unto thee.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: Um, the Gita says, uh, you know, what is it, be not attached to the fruits of action, you know, and, and, uh, all sorts of things like that. Um, so it’s every, every culture has, has realized this.

Doc: Right.

Rick: And, uh, I think what people often do is they try to just adopt an attitude of that. And maybe that helps a little bit, but, you know, what, you know, what you’re experiencing is, you know, in a really sort of deep visceral sense, um, you know, being grounded in a state of non-attachment or a state of consciousness which by its very nature is not attached to phenomena. And therefore you’re kind of in a place where, I’m putting words in your mouth, but you’re kind of in a place where you, you can allow things to just flow freely. In fact, you probably don’t have a heck of a lot of choice.

Doc: No, I, I wouldn’t say you do. And I think, um, Adyashanti is very, is, is right that after awakening, um, that the stakes are higher. And those things that you’ve been putting off, avoiding, not working on within yourself, they come at you a lot faster.

Rick: Yeah, a lot of people say that too, you know, that, um, if you haven’t done your, your house cleaning, so to speak, you’re going to have to do it after awakening. In fact, some teachers, some teachers say you better try to do as much of it as possible before because, you know, you’re not going to want to have to deal with the deluge of it that’s going to come at you afterwards if you haven’t done it before.

Doc: Right, right. Although there is a little bit of a, you know, it’s nice to have that stuff come at you when you’re feeling bliss.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: As opposed to feeling like you’re suffering.

Rick: It’s true. I mean, you have the capacity to handle it much more readily.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, I, I like the analogy of, you know, if you tried to dissolve a, a spoonful of mud in a glass of water, it wouldn’t go so well. But if you took that same mud and threw it in an ocean, you know, it’s gone.

Doc: Right.

Rick: You don’t see it any place.

Doc: And there is a true sense of, it’s odd, you know, awakening kind of has this connotation. But for me, I just feel awake so that everything I look at, I can make quicker decisions.

Rick: Ah.

Doc: And I can just look at it, look at what, what matters, what doesn’t matter. I, I went when I got back to Bayfield, I had a retail shop as well. And, and I went in there and within like one minute, it was like, no, I’m done with this.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: And, and it was done.

Rick: Right.

Doc: Even though I had been in that shop for seven years. Um, and there’s also a crystal clarity about time. Um, how valuable it is.

Rick: Um.

Doc: And how, how close, you know, I guess you could call it awakening, I could also call it death.

Rick: Right.

Doc: It’s like right here.

Rick: Oh, yeah.

Doc: I’m in the abundance and that veil between life and death is so thin.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: You know, to me it felt like, well, if I just close my eyes, I’m in death.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: You know, I’m, I, it’s that, that close. So, so that sense of time, um, where I want to put my attention, what I want to have in terms of my time, the quality of life, um, has dramatically improved actually.

Rick: Yeah. Amma, the hugging saint, it always says that, you know, our next breath could be our last. She doesn’t mean that in a morbid sense, she’s not trying to scare people, but she says we should be like a bird that’s perched on a twig and ready to just fly anytime the twig breaks. And, uh, you know, and that in itself, those metaphors kind of imply non-attachment.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: Sort of, uh, freedom and spontaneity and, and all.

Doc: I, I have, you know, certainly in my life, on my spiritual path, embraced all, you know, Those teachings and tried to, you know, emulate them.

Rick: Try to live by them, right.

Doc: And yeah, live by them and all the kind of, I wouldn’t call them rules, but they’re, you know, certain paradigms that you have to follow. And it, it, it really, you know, it’s like, well, do it or don’t do it, but it’s not really going to make any difference until you awaken and then you understand, oh, attachment. Well.

Rick: Right. It’s an important point because a lot of times, perhaps more often than not, uh, descriptions of this state are mistaken as prescriptions for attaining it. You know, and people read books or they hear teachers and, you know, the, this kind of state is described and then they try to, as you said, emulate, they try to sort of be that way or act that way. And, uh, you know, to, and it’s putting the cart before the horse, I think.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: Um, you know, and it, it may actually be, may actually be detrimental, um, counterproductive. I don’t know. Um, I mean, there’s something to be said for having one’s attention on this kind of thing and remembering it and all, but ultimately, you know, so it’s not one should just sort of forget it all and just drive truck and that’s it. But, uh, you know, like you yourself did spiritual practices for 20 years or something before you had this critical juncture.

Doc: Let’s see, yeah.

Rick: More than 20.

Doc: Well, since I was five, so.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: More than five.

Rick: Yeah. And, uh, and if you hadn’t done that, I suspect the outcome would have been different. You may very well not have had that awakening that you had as it came through the surgery. Although there are exceptions to everything.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: And, and some people probably would have had it, but.

Doc: Who knows. All I can say is I was so stubborn that it probably took death to wake me up.

Rick: Yeah. Well, it was the final sort of prying loose.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: You’d been chipping away at it for a long time.

Doc: You know, I’ve always heard that, you know, really what allows awakening to, to dawn is letting go. Yeah. Of, of your ego. Letting go of, well, I let go of everything.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: Everything was gone.

Rick: And you couldn’t have done it voluntarily, I guess. I mean, you couldn’t have, if someone had said to you a few weeks before your, your crisis, you know, okay, just let go, you know, you would have said, well, how I can’t, you know, or you would have tried and not been able to do it. So it’s not so much a volitional thing. And that, again, you hear people talking like that, you know, oh, just let go. Don’t be attached. Blah, blah, blah.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: And it must be, it either must frustrate people or it must sort of put them into a kind of a manipulative state where they’re, they’re trying to let go or making a mood of letting go and, you know, saying, oh, or making, making themselves kind of aloof in their personality. Like, oh, I don’t really care about anything.

Doc: Yeah. Yeah.

Rick: And nothing matters and, and all that stuff.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: But it’s, it’s kind of like painting the roses red, you know, Alice in Wonderland thing. It’s not red roses. It’s painted roses.

Doc: Right.

Rick: The roses have to be red from the inside naturally.

Doc: I had a lot of people when my health was starting to go down, you know, remind me of the Abraham teachings. And, and, you know, if you change your vibration, then you’ll get a different result. And, and it obviously didn’t work. But to me, looking back now, I go, that’s just ego manipulation.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: It’s just the spiritual ego has got a hold of you and it’s like, well, look at me. I’m so pious. I’m so, you know, spiritual. I’m so, and that’s no different than just the regular ego.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: It’s just, it’s the same, although it’s more elusive because you feel like, well, now I’m spiritual now.

Rick: Right. Oh.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: That’s a good point. So none of that happened.

Doc: And when people ask me, they say, well, um, was it because you had the right vibration and you know, no, it wasn’t what I was thinking. It was like my thoughts are just whatever they are, you know, it wasn’t my thoughts. It wasn’t, if anything, there was a deep, deep knowingness that I wasn’t in touch with that everything was okay. And that’s when I came back out, that was the message that I got.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: From myself, I guess.

Rick: Yeah. And because it had been such a, uh, such a breaking of boundaries for you to have gone through that. I mean, it just, and, and as we, as we’ve been saying, you had been preparing the ground for that for decades, but it was the final kind of breakthrough.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: And after that I was out in the parking lot in my hospital gown, bare feet, because I didn’t have any shoes, didn’t have any money, didn’t have anything, just, yeah.

Rick: Huh.

Doc: Glad to be alive and glad to be out in the sun.

Rick: I kind of, a little while ago as we were talking, and you were talking about the sort of transformation you underwent and how, um, you know, you had a lot of stuff hit the fan after your awakening that you had to deal with. It sort of made me think of the world at large because I sort of feel like the whole of humanity is kind of on a larger scale following the same trajectory as an individual does in a way, as they go through their individual spiritual unfoldment. And, uh, you know, all, the whole thing of working stuff out and purification and, and so on, and, and that if there is a mass awakening, if there is a sort of a dramatic shift in the entire global consciousness, which many people feel is very much underway, then it will be good to have worked out a lot of stuff before it hits because otherwise it could be too cataclysmic to have to work it out abruptly, you know, and people who aren’t at all prepared for that shift would find it sort of difficult to weather. Um, and I think, you know, in large part that’s what a lot of the spiritual teachers who’ve been around for, for decades now, uh, coming from India to the West or wherever, have been doing, uh, whether explicitly or not, they, they’ve been, um, kind of preparing the ground, you know, preparing the way for, uh, this transition that we’re about to undergo or that we’re in the midst of undergoing. And you know, that may be wishful thinking and so on, but you know, there’s certainly a lot of people who think that that’s what’s happening.

Doc: I, I, yeah, I mean, I, well, it’s hard for me to say, but I, I would say yes.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: There is a lot happening. I see more people, um, awakening. So, um, something’s happening, because there’s more awakening now than there probably has been in the whole history of humankind.

Rick: Yeah. One of my guests a few months ago used the example of the Buddha and saying it was as though he had to, he had to pierce through a very thick membrane to get his awakening, you know, because there, there was just so much inertia. And now so many people have pierced that membrane that it’s a lot thinner and a lot easier to pierce. And that, you know, a lot of people are awakening much more readily now than ever before.

Doc: Yeah. Although, um, I, I know some people that are, have, I, I would say they’ve awakened, but they don’t know it. They don’t even know what awakening is.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: Um, so, you know, tapes like this really help people to understand, oh, that’s what happened to me.

Rick: Yeah. Well, that was one of my, one of my motivations in doing this show, uh, is that, you know, I live in a town where several thousand people have been meditating for decades. And, uh, I think there are a lot of people walking around who have, for all intensive purposes, awakened. But there’s, like you said, there’s a sort of an ingrained habit way of thinking and acting and seeing the world. And they’re not all going to have open heart surgery. So, uh, you know, if some, if somehow hearing person after person after person tell their story, if they can recognize something in, in, in each person’s story, or maybe in one person’s story that resonates with them, maybe it will trigger a realization. You know, maybe they’ll feel like, oh, you know, he’s talking about what I actually have. And I didn’t realize that what I have is that, that I was looking for. And he didn’t realize it either. And then after a year of, you know, sorting things out, he did realize it. So, hey, you know, uh, maybe I’ve got something here. You know, maybe these 40 years of meditation have actually paid off and I don’t have to sort of give up and just feel like it’s never going to happen for me.

Doc: I think there is definitely a knowledge component.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: And almost, and almost when you just get this little twist in your knowledge and you go, oh, that’s what that is.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: That’s what that means. That’s what unity consciousness is. You know, I didn’t know that’s what it was.

Rick: I was listening to a lecture just the other night by Jerry Jarvis, who is one of the founders of the TM movement, and he was saying that experience leads to knowledge, but knowledge leads to enlightenment.

Doc: Yeah. That makes total sense.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: Because you can have the experience. Anyway, I, yeah, I definitely find that at this point, it’s not like there’s going to be more awakening. But what I’m going through now is this process of understanding what’s already taken place.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: And watching these clouds come over, you know, the velcro thoughts that Adyashanti calls them, that grab me and then I can kind of look at them so that the sun comes back out. So there’s times when those things will come, but with a lot more clarity.

Rick: Yeah. Let’s pause for a second. We’re going to change tapes, I think. We just took a little break. My name is Rick Archer. I’m talking with Doc Roberts from Durango, Colorado, Skiboards.com, who had a rather dramatic awakening a couple of years ago, dramatic in the sense that it occurred, I don’t know if we can say as a result of, but somehow or other in conjunction with open heart surgery and almost dying and so on.

Doc: Well, it was actually open lung surgery.

Rick: Open lung surgery. Well, they also had to massage your heart.

Doc: To get me back to life, yeah. The surgery was actually to clear the blockage in my lungs.

Rick: So they hadn’t actually been planning on massaging your heart or even getting at your heart, but they had to to keep you alive.

Doc: Yeah. They said that I was the only one that arrived that was dead before I got to the operation.

Rick: Wow.

Doc: And they said of all of those, I was the least likely to survive the operation.

Rick: Kind of like the high school kid who’s least likely to succeed.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: And you made it.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: That’s great. It’s sort of like you really took it right down to the wire, didn’t you?

Doc: I certainly did. Got it right down to the, like, taking my last breath.

Rick: Yeah. Amazing. Interesting story. So, what have we, is there any kind of particularly interesting area that we haven’t covered yet that, you know, has been in the back of your mind, that you usually talk about with people when you talk about this stuff?

Doc: Well, in the beginning I did when I came here. I just couldn’t help but talk about it.

Rick: Here to Fairfield.

Doc: Yeah. And then I was starting to get the third degree. It’s like, well, do you witness sleep?

Rick: Right.

Doc: And I was like, oh, no, I’m not witnessing sleep, so maybe this isn’t it. So that was kind of leading to the doubt.

Rick: Well, you witness open heart surgery and open lung surgery. Well, I mean, that consciousness was there during that surgery, you know?

Doc: Yeah, but I mean, I wasn’t, like, watching myself, you know, being operated on.

Rick: Yeah, but I don’t think that’s what really is meant by witnessing sleep, you know, because witnessing sleep in that sense would mean that there’s some little guy up here looking at something else over here.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: So there’s sensory activity going on.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: Perhaps even intellectual or mental activity. Whereas in the truer sense of the term, I think witnessing sleep just means that, what you said, consciousness awake to itself.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: Irrespective of, you know, any awareness of body or anything else. It’s not a functional, perceptual kind of thing. It’s more of a much more kind of grounded, ground state sort of awareness.

Doc: Yeah. Well, I was a little bit confused, obviously, too, with my TM background.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: Thinking, oh, well, witnessing means, you know, I’ve had dreams where I, like, watch myself dreaming.

Rick: Yeah, like lucid dreaming.

Doc: Yeah, and I figured that. But then eventually, you know, it was actually only a little while, and then I just, like, realized, it’s like, well, wait a minute. When I was, you know, dead, I was fully alive. I was conscious.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: There was a consciousness there.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: And when I sleep, it’s still there.

Rick: Right.

Doc: And I’m like, I’m watching myself sleeping, and gosh, I’m glad I don’t.

Rick: So there you go. You witnessed sleep. Congratulations. Put that one to rest.

Doc: So then, but then what I really noticed was there’s this ongoing, continuous sense of bliss.

Rick: Yes.

Doc: No matter what else is happening, there’s always this bliss. Bliss to fall asleep. Bliss to wake up.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: And it’s not a whoop-de-doo, you know, three cups of coffee, ya-ya kind of bliss.

Doc: No.

Rick: It’s a quieter thing.

Doc: Yeah. Subtle, but you just feel it in your body.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: Even when the going gets rough?

Doc: Yeah. Yeah. Well, there may be times when you’re driving and you’re like, you know, in a tight situation, I may not notice it.

Rick: Right. You’re just like focusing on that.

Doc: Focusing on whatever I need to.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: Yeah. But it’s always there if I just want to relax into it.

Rick: Yeah. I sometimes like to use the analogy of, you know, both with consciousness or with even with bliss, of like, you know, if there were a tone playing, and this is just an analogy, not any kind of literal thing, if there were a tone playing, you know, generally speaking you wouldn’t be sort of listening to the tone all the time because you’d be attending to whatever you’re doing, you’d get used to the tone.

Doc: Right.

Rick: But if you chose to at any point you could listen, oh yeah, sure, there’s a tone, it’s there all the time, you know, this continual frequency or whatever. And again, it’s just an analogy, I’m not suggesting that in an awakened state you hear some kind of tone, but similar idea, I mean there’s this ground state of awareness, bliss, and so on, and it’s not like you’re just kind of, you know, walking around oohing and aahing all day long or wallowing in it, but it’s there, it’s kind of the background or foundation of whatever else is going on.

Doc: Now there was about two months after my operation, when I got back, that I had one of these, you know, what I would just call these zapper dreams. And this man walked up to me in my dream and he held my hand and he looked at my eyes and he said, “Be careful.”

Rick: Who was the man?

Doc: And as soon as I woke up, the name Adyashanti. I knew it was Adyashanti.

Rick: Did it look like him with his shaved head?

Doc: I didn’t know Adyashanti, I didn’t know who he was. So it was like, that’s why it really stuck, because if it was Maharishi or any of the other, I’d go, “Oh, well that’s just old stuff.” But this was new, this was like very real. And so immediately, of course, I woke up and I went, “Well, who’s he? He can’t be a spiritual teacher, doesn’t he know? There’s nothing to be concerned about, you don’t have to be careful.” But I got it. And so when I was skiing in the trees one day, I was noticing that I was just feeling all unbounded with absolutely no fear of death. And then the words came back, it’s like, “Be careful.” Because to me it was like, “Well, I could run into this tree and die and nothing would change.”

Rick: End up like Sonny Bono.

Doc: Yeah, what would matter? So I took that, yeah. And so I’ve had a couple of dreams like that where they just kind of zap me. And it shakes me up a bit when I wake up.

Rick: And if I were to interpret that, I would say that awake people are a fairly valuable commodity in today’s world. They can play a significant role, even if it’s not a big famous public role. But just having such people around in greater and greater numbers I think helps the whole shift to take place. So we don’t want you to go knocking your brains out against the tree or anything.

Doc: Well, the other thing was, it was kind of like, “Well, I’ve already been dead. I know what dead is like.” You know, it’s cool and everything, but there’s not much going on there. This is much more interesting.

Rick: At least at the stage you were at. Who knows what happens.

Doc: I don’t know, but there’s more interesting here. There’s more stuff to do.

Rick: You can ski and do stuff.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: You said something interesting a while back where you said that you’re not going to get any more awake, but maybe your knowledge will grow or something like that. Do you sort of feel though that there could actually be, like if you think of yourself as a reflector that is reflecting consciousness, could there be a clarification still of the reflector where reflection got brighter or clearer?

Doc: Yeah. That’s what I would say. I’d probably use the word enlivening.

Rick: Right.

Doc: It’s not like I can get more awakening.

Rick: Well, it’s not like consciousness itself is going to change, but your ability to appreciate or live it.

Doc: Yes.

Rick: Yeah. Kind of like the sun is just going to be the sun, but the mirror could be cleaned and then it would reflect the sun more brightly or something.

Doc: Yeah. So now I see things that come to me, good or bad, as those things that I want to look at and be with and process because it’s going to bring more of that, the joy of awakening.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: It’s going to open that up more.

Rick: Do you have a sense that whatever comes to you is what’s meant to come to you and that there’s some lesson inherent in it or some knowledge?

Doc: I do know there’s a flow and my desire is to be in that flow because that’s the most joyous.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: It’s just kind of moving in this current. Now, the other part of me is, of course, the business person that says, “Well, but if it doesn’t go the way I want it to, then I’ll need to do this.”

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: And so there’s a little bit of conflict there, but I know ultimately what is true is that there’s always that flow and it’s similar to the birds and the butterflies and everything else in creation. They’re all celebrating, always, just being the joy of being alive. It’s only us humans walking around going, “Well, as soon as I get this, then I’ll be happy.”

Rick: Right.

Doc: So letting go of that is interesting. I’m going to go on a little bit here because with money, I noticed it particularly because there’s this, you know, well, you’ve got to have a plan or you need to do some things to make money. Or I need to accumulate it, you know, have more in savings so then I’ll feel, well, the interesting thing is the divine flow is all about now.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: And so to let go into that is trust. Now, before I was trying to trust. Now I know what trust is and I know what the surrender is. But it doesn’t look like, you know, “Oh, well, then you’re going to have all this, you know, all these things coming to you all the time.” It looks like, “Here’s what you need now.”

Rick: Yeah. And the things may or may not come.

Doc: Yeah, and they may or may not come.

Rick: Probably if you’re tending more fully to the now, they have a better chance of coming. Like you said, you know, you walked into your retail store and you thought, “I’m done with this.”

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: Now, if you’d hung on to the retail store because of some intellectual reason why you ought to hang on to it or something, it could have, you know, could have ruined you or something or it could have wasted a lot of money and time and energy and distracted you from the thing which could be more lucrative.

Doc: Yeah. So there is a wisdom there. And that trust and surrender, I mean, those are kind of really overused words. So they don’t capture the true essence of what it means to just let go into the flow.

Rick: Yeah. Now, obviously, you know, you’re running a business and sometimes you’re faced with challenging situations. You know, you must sort of have to really kind of apply yourself and, you know, weigh alternatives and make a tough decision and so on. Or is it not that way?

Doc: No, no. It’s still that way. But there is a underlying sense of flow.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: When something will just come at the right time.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: And then it’s a matter of recognizing it.

Rick: Right.

Doc: I don’t always recognize it. To me, I ask for it in sets of three. So if something comes, I’ll listen. If it comes the second time, I’ll go, “Oh, huh, so maybe something’s going on here.” And the third time, it’s like, “Okay, that’s what I need to do.”

Rick: I see.

Doc: That’s my direction. Yeah.

Rick: You don’t wait to be hit over the head with a hammer. You say, “Okay, three hints.”

Doc: I already did that.

Rick: Yeah, you did that. Well, you know, the guy I interviewed last week, Chuck Hillig, had this beautiful interpretation of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” you know, that song. And we can maybe go through it just briefly, but, you know, “Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream.” There’s the flow. But “Row, row, row your boat” implies that you’re not just sitting in the boat, letting the stream take you wherever it will, you know, running into some branches off on the side or something. You’re actually–there is some direction. There is some initiative. But it’s gently, you know. You’re not forcing it. You’re not, you know, breaking your arms, paddling, or going against the current or anything else.

Doc: Right.

Rick: Yeah. You’re maybe steering around a rock here and, you know, guiding yourself there. But there’s a sort of a–there’s a verse from the Vedas, which I just–it just came to mind, which was, “Be easy to us with gentle effort.” Pretty much says the same thing. So, but the word “gentle,” you know, and yet, effort. You know, it’s not like we’re just lying there with our mouth open waiting for food to fall into it. There has to be some effort.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: But if you’re kind of in tune with that flow, then it can be gentle, and it can be easy.

Doc: Unless your mind is saying something else. And that’s where the fine line is, because your mind could be going, “Well, yeah, but I don’t know if that’s going to work out,” or, “I don’t know if this, you know, or maybe I should be doing this.” And all that stuff, it’s still the old habits are there. So you can hear the voices. Although, I’ve got to say, I’m relieved that I don’t have as much thoughts as I used to, because they were constant.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: But there is still that kind of thing where it’s, you know, it can pull you. “Oh, well, you better do this,” or, “You better, you know, you better do this.” And so that process, I think, at least for me, is one of just relaxing more and more into it.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: And not necessarily liking what’s coming. I can still say, “Well, I don’t really like this challenge.” But I know that it’s right.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: I know that’s what I need. So it’s different. There’s a feeling of grace or love. It kind of permeates everything.

Rick: Yeah. Interesting. I hope you live a long time, because I think it’s such an adventure. It’s fun to see how life unfolds when you’re in this kind of flow thing, you know?

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: I mean, every day is a joy, pretty much. But, you know, even if, I mean, I think this way myself, you know, I wouldn’t mind living to be 90 or 100 or something, just to see how it continues to develop. But on the other hand, if I die tomorrow, no biggie. You know, you kind of take the long view, and, you know, if that’s what’s meant to happen, then it’ll still be interesting. It’ll still be an adventure.

Doc: Yeah. I mean, it’s nice to actually live life the way I used to in my mind think you should live life, which is, you know, you only have this moment.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: And you don’t know what’s coming next. And I feel like I wander sometimes in a world where everybody’s all caught up in some day. And they’re kind of, you know, you can almost see them living in their future plans and their schemes and their illusions of, you know, “Well, what am I going to do next?” And, you know, “As soon as I get here, then I’m going to have this.”

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: And missing life.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: And that’s only happening here.

Rick: That’s what guys like Eckhart Tolle are so good at reminding people of. And, you know, for some people, as we were saying earlier, it might not be so practical because they’re really not living it, and it becomes kind of a mental game. But I think for a lot of people, it can definitely shift them to a certain extent, or even a great extent, into actually living that way, you know? I mean, there are many ways of going about it. There’s an analogy that if you pull the leg of a table, the other legs will come along and the whole table will come along. Or you can pull a different leg and you get the same result. So there are so many things we can do, practices, you know, knowledge, different ways of going about it that can facilitate this kind of understanding and experience. And I think people naturally gravitate toward the thing that’s going to work for them, you know?

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: And then they’ll leave that and gravitate toward something else.

Doc: I think awakening is always unique.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: You know, it just comes in many different forms.

Rick: It really does.

Doc: I remember Carlos Castaneda and his, you know, the teachings of Don Juan. And one of them that I remember was that, you know, live your life as if death is right on your shoulder.

Rick: Yeah, I remember that. Yeah, in fact, I wrote that quote down at one point.

Doc: Yeah. Yeah. And I, for the longest time, was in, well, I’d say the first six months after surgery, my kids have a game called Bugdom. And it’s this little bug that goes through and does stuff. But there’s a bee that always follows this bug around. It doesn’t do anything, but it’s always there. And that’s what awakening felt like to me. It’s like, well, there’s this thing that’s always there.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: It never goes away. But here I am doing this or doing this, but there it is. And it just kind of reminded me of that, because that was kind of the thing. It’s kind of like, well, you can project into the future and you can think of all these things. And then you can think of some memory in the past. But there’s something about being right in the present moment that’s very different from the experience of the future or the past.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: And whatever else is present in this present moment is what it is. That’s it. So, that kind of thought always stuck with me, too. It’s like, yeah, there’s something here in the present that doesn’t exist anywhere else.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: And being in that, that simple form of awareness, there’s always that presence that’s there.

Rick: True. Someone was quoting Eckhart Tolle today about him saying something about, you know, people say the Romans lived 2,000 years ago. The Romans didn’t live 2,000 years ago. The Romans lived in the now, you know? Just like we live in the now.

Doc: Right.

Rick: No one lived 2,000 years ago. You can sort of look at it like that, but ultimately time is a concept to measure eternity. And it’s only ever the now.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: Which is interesting in the context of this discussion, because you’re a living example of that. You’re actually living that. That’s your daily experience, your moment to moment, you know, constant experience.

Doc: Back to that idea of knowledge, I went to a group, it was about two months after I got back from surgery, there was a little group in Durango called the Consciousness Circle. And there’s about 25 people there, all in a circle. And the facilitator said, “Okay, why don’t we just go around the circle and just share what you do to stay in the present.” And it kind of went around, and I waited, and then it came to me. I was like, I didn’t know what to say.

Rick: You didn’t do anything.

Doc: What else would I do? Where else would I go?

Rick: What could you do to get out of the present?

Doc: Right. And it astounded me, and it astounded kind of everybody else, because they’re all saying, “Well, I meditate,” or “I breathe,” or all this stuff. It was like, huh. And it dawned on me, it was like, wow. Something’s changed here. That was still when I was kind of going through what’s happened.

Rick: Well, do you still meditate and stuff like that at all?

Doc: I do when I feel a need for rest. A lot of times I feel sitting on my deck, just sitting there with my eyes open and just watching the birds and the deer and all that. It feels to me the same. But I’m able to take it all in this way. With my eyes closed, I’m kind of missing some things. So, it’s kind of whatever strikes me.

Rick: Yes. Do you ever feel like you might ever be a teacher of some sort? Like, have a little group and start talking to them or anything? Do you ever feel that impulse?

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: Do you?

Doc: I started a satsang in Durango, and then just got busy and stopped it. Yeah, I get pulled in that direction.

Rick: How was that going when you had it?

Doc: Good. People were sharing their experiences, and they were getting this idea of what awakening is. So it was good. It’s a very strong community of, what would you say, more interest in other spiritual things.

Rick: Yeah. Eclectic.

Doc: Because there’s nothing in the ego for awakening. It’s not like you get a big bang or a check. Nothing really changes. But yet everything changes. But there’s no real, at least when you do past life regression, you get this experience. And you go, “Wow, I’ve had this experience.” Some payoff.

Rick: Yeah. So in other words, there’s nothing, a specific package of content that you get to write down or hang on your wall or write a book about or something. It’s just presence.

Doc: I do feel like the ego in the beginning, my ego, or what I would call my emotion of my ego, that momentum, would be like, “Wow, look at me. I’m awake. You should like me more.”

Rick: In other words, your ego was kind of getting a buzz out of the thing.

Doc: Yeah, trying to grab hold of that, “Okay, well, wow, look at us now.” But it obviously just didn’t stick. It was kind of humorous. Okay, so woop de dooh!

Rick: Some people get quite carried away with that. I don’t know if they’re awake or not, but some people get really carried away with the notion that they are special and should be revered. And start adding suffixes to their names and whatnot.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: It can be a pitfall. I’ve been reading this really cool book called Halfway Up the Mountain, The Error of Premature Claims to Enlightenment by Mariana Caplan. She kind of itemizes it in 500 pages of this book. It goes through all the different pitfalls that one can get into.

Doc: Well that spiritual seeker, my biggest confirmation of awakening was, I think it was John that asked me,

Rick: John Macey?

Doc: Yeah, he said, “Well, how are you? Do you feel like you need to be doing some things? Are you seeking?” And I realized, “No, I’m not seeking anymore.” What a relief. As I was in agony my whole life seeking this thing, wanting to have this realization, and all the courses, and all the meditating, and all the discipline, and all the stuff that I was doing, and it’s like all that energy that I was putting there is now available to me. I no longer just, “Where am I going to go?”

Rick: Plus all the money for all those courses.

Doc: Exactly. “Where am I going to go? I don’t have that looking for something anymore.”

Rick: Right. And you know that too is sometimes espoused as a prescription, “Stop seeking.”

Doc: Right, right.

Rick: And then people think, “Alright, I’m giving up. I’m not going to seek anymore.” “Good golly, is this all there is to it? I really wish we could get back, but I’m not going to seek.”

Doc: Yeah, and I’ve heard that too. And had I heard that now, before, I would have thought, “Okay, well then I’ll just stop meditating and I’ll just stop looking for it.” But meanwhile there’s this little manipulation going on, and it’s like, “Well, maybe this will work.”

Rick: Yeah, right. That in itself becomes a form of seeking. I’m really not seeking. Boy, I am so not seeking.

Doc: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: But obviously you stop seeking because you found. And that’s the time to stop seeking. Otherwise, seek if you feel like seeking. Practice things, do things, meditate, do yoga, whatever you feel inclined to do. And if and when you reach a stage at which that no longer feels appropriate, you’ll know it. I’m not speaking of you specifically, but people in general will know it.

Doc: Yeah, they will, one way or the other.

Rick: I just think it can be a misguidance kind of thing to sort of just as a blanket teaching say, “Okay, everybody, stop seeking. Give up the search.” That’s appropriate at a certain stage. And there are in fact stages.

Doc: Yeah, well, I mean there’s that illusion that it’s just around the corner. And that is false. It’s not around the corner. It’s always right here, always now. So in that sense, as long as there’s that need or that grasping or that trying to meditate the next time because it’s going to get closer, then you’re caught in that illusion. And so in that sense, it’s like letting go or just saying, “Well, I’m not going to seek anymore.” The true meaning is just be. Here you are.

Rick: Yeah, that’s the other side of it, which is that one can get stuck in a rut where they’re always chasing the carrot, always looking for what’s around the corner. Where with just a little bit of turning back and settling into what’s here now, they can be content. So it’s kind of like so many other things. It’s a paradox. There’s everything to be said for seeking and striving and being diligent about that. There’s everything to be said for just fully appreciating and living in the present moment. And the two are not opposed to one another. You can be content and yet be doing things which will deepen your experience and deepen your knowledge.

Doc: Well, there’s certainly a paradox. And that feeling of living with paradox is something you can, at least for me, can get used to.

Rick: Absolutely.

Doc: But it doesn’t go away. It’s still the paradox. It’s like, “Oh, well, I could do this stuff or I could not do this stuff.”

Rick: I was listening to a lecture by Deepak Chopra the other day and he quoted Nisargadatta as saying, “The best measure of enlightenment is the degree to which you’re comfortable with paradox, uncertainty and ambiguity.” I love that.

Doc: I like the phrase “delightful confusion.”

Rick: Yeah, that’s a good one too.

Doc: Because you’re delighted and you’re blissful and yet how could you possibly understand any of this? What’s the world? What’s awakening? What’s life? How did all this get here? That’s beyond the mind. The mind can’t grasp that. So it’s always got to be that sense of the unknown or the mystery of life. For me, embracing that mystery has become a real joy. Not knowing. Not asking even questions at times. I don’t really care to know. I just want to see what comes next.

Rick: Yeah, that’s good.

Doc: So it’s certainly the best entertainment in town. I highly recommend it. Just maybe not do it the way I did it.

Rick: No. People all have their ways of doing it. There’s certainly plenty of options available for anybody who wants to investigate more deeply into this kind of thing. There’s no end of books and courses and teachers and teachings. I think we just follow our hearts and seek out the thing which is most effective for us. One size does not fit all.

Doc: Yeah, and it’s certainly worth everything to have it.

Rick: Yeah, absolutely. It’s been the biggest deal, the highest ideal of every culture for thousands of years. And yet, it’s not like fireworks going off. Some people have that impression that if somebody is enlightened or awake, they couldn’t walk into a coffee shop without blowing everybody away by their mere presence.

Doc: Right.

Rick: And they must be two feet off the ground and just this awesome person. I don’t think it always shows up like that.

Doc: I’ve had conversations with some people that are very, very spiritual and have read all the books. And then they’ll see me get angry over something. And they go, “Oh, well, that’s not awakening.” Because you’re supposed to just always be peaceful and blissful, but you still have a personality.

Rick: Have these people been people who’ve been into TM?

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: Well, boy, they never spent much time around Maharishi then.

Doc: I know.

Rick: Because he used to really blow his stack.

Doc: Yeah, you have your personality. And however that reacts, it reacts. I don’t see that as a flaw. It’s just the way you are. Something happens and you respond a certain way.

Rick: It’s an emotion.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: And what you probably experience is you don’t stay angry for three days.

Doc: No. Yeah, that’s true suffering.

Rick: Yeah. There’s that old saying in the Vedic literature again. It’s like line on stone, line on water, line on sand, line on different substances. You make a line and in some of them it really etches in deep and stays there. In others it just goes away.

Doc: Right.

Rick: The enlightened person is supposed to be more like a line on air where you can pass your arm through it. There is an impression, but no remnant.

Doc: Yeah. So that’s hard for people to understand, I would say, is that sense of you’re supposed to look a certain way, be a certain way, be always blissful.

Rick: And it’s a traditional question. I mean, five thousand years ago, Arjuna asked Lord Krishna, “What is an enlightened man like? How does he walk? How does he sit? How does he act?”

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: And Krishna basically said, “He sits united.” He didn’t give any external criteria so much that you could use to authoritatively define it. It was more like more internal. The senses are not attached, things like that. Not attached to the fruits of action. It’s an inner condition.

Doc: Yeah. Both inner and outer, I suppose.

Rick: Yeah. But everything is in the eye of the beholder.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: And so, as Christ said, He often used to use the phrase, “Those who have the eyes to see it.”

Doc: Yeah. And what does that mean? I know in the beginning days I was asking people, “What is it? What is it?” And talking to all these people and sharing my experience. And now I don’t really feel the need to do that anymore. There’s no…

Rick: You felt like you need to run around and tell everybody about it?

Doc: Yeah. Mostly because I was trying to figure it out for me, what happened to me. And now I rarely talk about it except when I’m here in Fairfield.

Rick: Right. Where everybody talks about it all the time.

Doc: Yeah. There’s a common understanding and it doesn’t shake things up. But in general in my life, I don’t talk to my kids about it. They ask me what death is like. I explain that to them.

Rick: Well, maybe the novelty sort of wore off too. I mean, you kind of came to terms with it, adjusted to it. You got your own understanding sort of sorted out.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: So it’s not… You’re not so obsessed with it as you were in the beginning.

Doc: Yeah. I’m… what did you say? Anchored in it, I guess?

Rick: Yeah. More grounded and settled.

Doc: And enjoying the unfolding. So the words start to break down, I notice, a lot. I can’t quite pinpoint. It’s kind of like I could say, “I’m awakened.” Well, that would be true, except I’m not really here.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: So there’s just awakening.

Rick: Right.

Doc: And I was just… this life, for me, was just added on to it. That’s how it felt when I came back. I was already there, and then there was like, “Oh, well, let’s add this experience of Doc Roberts.” You know, “Let’s see how it works through this vehicle.”

Rick: This guy, yeah.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: A line from the incredible string band, “Light that is one, though the lamps be many.”

Doc: Yeah. Nice.

Rick: Yeah, well, I sort of have that feeling now that I always get at about this point in the interview, where we could sit here and just continue to chit-chat like this for the next hour or two, but people might get a little bored after a while. So I go, “Okay, this guy’s not going to say anything new.” So, you know, unless you think of… Unless you have anything in mind that we really ought to have covered that we haven’t, maybe we should wrap it up.

Doc: Unless you want to get into our discussion of past lives and whether they really exist or not. It’s probably not. Well, I had another one of those dreams. And in the dream, this voice–maybe not even a voice of knowing came. It’s like, “There aren’t any past lives. There’s no such thing as past lives.” But it was in the sense of, “I continue from life to life.” Because from the perspective of the absolute consciousness, pure consciousness, there’s, you know, a being is formed. And they may pull all these various experiences. That being comes into this life and remembers a time in Egypt or whatever. But that wasn’t him there. That was just a time in Egypt. So you pull all this together. And you could say, “Oh, that was my past life.” But there’s no “my” past life. There was a past life. And that shook me a lot because I always had that concept ingrained. And then I realized the truth of it is–the truth of it is– it’s the ego side of saying, “Oh, well, I was a king in Egypt.” Or, “In this life, I have this problem because last life, you know, this happened.” And when you pull the “my” out of it, you just realize you’re here with these experiences. You know, it seemed like they were some other time. But that wasn’t me. But they all form who I am in this life and probably set me up for certain experiences. But when I die, I’m gone. You know, Doc Roberts, I’m done. I’m not going to be there in the next life figuring it all out again. Because there’s only one thing, and that’s pure consciousness.

Rick: Yeah. Well, you know, let me play devil’s advocate to that. This is interesting the way you put it. There’s only one thing, pure consciousness. But we do acknowledge manifest existence. We live in it. And we have a physical body. If we break our leg, we go and have that taken care of. And many people say we also have, there’s said to be these different koshas or sheaths, which are like the Russian dolls, like subtler and subtler aspects of our manifest existence. And the innermost one, close to but not exactly at the level of pure consciousness, is supposed to be the jiva or the kernel or the soul or essence of what we are as a manifest expression. And, you know, I don’t know, I guess you’re saying that that sort of individuated expression is completely like a drop into the ocean when one dies, and all the molecules get mingled with all the other molecules, and then maybe some evaporation takes place and more drops come out, and maybe it contains some of the original molecules from that first drop, but it’s a totally unique drop. It’s not like the same first drop that got evaporated and came out and formed another cloud.

Doc: Right. Now I can’t say, I mean, obviously, I don’t know. I know less now than I’ve ever known.

Rick: Right. So it’s just based on this dream that you’re sort of thinking of it.

Doc: I can recognize that sense of shaking, you know, that the whole me starts to shake. It’s like something gets broken loose.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: And for me, that resonated as truth. And I realized I didn’t like it, but I realized that, you know, that was my experience when I was in death for two weeks and came back, and I was in pure consciousness for two weeks.

Rick: Yeah. But, you know, it’s like you came back with a memory of, you know, your apartment and your books and your kids and your ex-wife and your business and all that stuff. You didn’t come back as me, you came back as you. So there was something, and you could say it’s just because of your particular nervous system and the impressions in your particular brain, which are eventually going to turn to dust, and then all that stuff will be gone. But, you know, there could also be, I’m saying, I’m postulating, a subtler structure, which doesn’t get destroyed when the body gets destroyed, and which actually retains those specific impressions in a sort of discreet way, and that subtle structure then goes and occupies another physical body. And so you get some kid that, you know, can play piano brilliantly at the age of five or speak German or something like that, you know.

Doc: Right.

Rick: Where did that come from? I mean, maybe it just got, you know, drawn out of the ocean with a particular bucket of, okay, here’s the Mozart experience, now you can play like this, even though this particular soul, you know, as an entity, never existed. I mean, it didn’t exist specifically before. But it could also be, it seems to me, that, you know, we’re all sort of progressing as, I don’t know, I’m starting to think…

Doc: I would like to think your way, you know, that, yes, we do continue from life to life. This came along and just like, oh, and I recognize that there’s some truth there. And probably it’s a combination of both.

Rick: It could be one of those paradox things.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: You know, knowledge is different in different states of consciousness, on one level that’s true, on one level this is true, and even though they’re paradoxically, you know, opposed, they also, in the larger context, all fit happily together.

Doc: I mean, I do know that Doc Roberts, in this unique configuration, is not going to be here again.

Rick: No. I mean, you might be born as a woman next time that you’re born again.

Doc: Right.

Rick: And, you know, with maybe some proclivities from this life retained, but who knows? I mean, they say that there’s two kinds of karma. There’s prarabdha karma and sanchita karma. And prarabdha karma is supposed to be like this huge mountain range of karma. And sanchita is like supposed to be this bucket that we take from the mountain range when we take birth. And that’s what kind of, you know, motivates or animates this particular life. But I don’t know if we each have our own mountain range or each have our own huge load of prarabdha karma, or if it’s a kind of communal thing that we take a bucket from. It’s all very speculative. I mean, in my mind at least. The people who have written books about this stuff and put it down as scripture, I don’t know if they were just good speculators like we’re doing now, or if they really knew it with some kind of certainty due to the depth of their insight. I don’t know.

Doc: I don’t know either. All I know is it’s interesting getting used to not knowing.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: Because before I always had to know.

Rick: Yeah. It’s fun to play with.

Doc: Yeah.

Rick: But if you expect to kind of resolve anything… And I mean, there are some people in this world that hang on so tightly to belief as though it were absolute truth. You know, whether they’re willing to blow themselves up for it or blow other people up, because they’re so certain that this is the way it is.

Doc: Yeah. And I would like to think, “Okay, well I continue body to body.” And as I hear so many people say, “Well, if I don’t get it right this life, I’ll just get it right the next life.”

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: And so, kind of, almost in a sense, allows them to not be here.

Rick: Yeah. And there’s also the whole thing of sort of justice and mercy. And, you know, if somebody is a mass murderer in this life, do they get off scot-free? Or do they have to sort of face the consequences? And if a child is born with some terrible disease, you know, how could there be a compassionate God who would allow that to happen? And isn’t that the consequence of them being the mass murderer last time, you know? But, I don’t know. You know, who knows? It’s all just speculation.

Doc: Right.

Rick: I mean, I’m sure people listening to this have all played with these ideas before. And I guess all we’re saying to conclude is just that you just can’t be… Awakening is, in a way, it’s not stepping into adamant certainty about things. It’s adjusting to being comfortable with uncertainty.

Doc: Just being here now.

Rick: Just being.

Doc: That’s it. And nobody knows what’s coming next.

Rick: Yeah.

Doc: So, it’s enjoying whatever comes next.

Rick: Yeah. Good. Well, it’s a good time to stop because I’m getting too talkative. I don’t like it when I talk more than the guest does.

Doc: Right.

Rick: So, thanks, Doc. Yeah. It’s really been fun. And, God willing, this camera that we were using for the first time will have worked. And we’ll get a good interview out of this.

Doc: That would be nice.

Rick: In any case, you recorded it. So, we’ll have it in audio, if nothing else.

Doc: Yeah. Hopefully.

Rick: Yeah. So, this has been Buddha at the Gas Pump. My guest has been Doc Roberts. Wasn’t there some gunslinger or something named Doc Roberts?

Doc: Doc Holiday.

Rick: Doc Holiday, right. And, you live in Durango, you know?

Doc: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: And, we will be doing one of these every week for the foreseeable futures. And there are about 30 of them now archived on batgap.com. Podcast, YouTube channel, and all kinds of things you can do. So, check that out, batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P. And we’ll have Doc’s page up shortly. And there’ll be links to his business. But you don’t have a website about yourself. You just have your business.

Doc: I have a website, vocationalawakening.com, and I have a blog up there.

Rick: Cool.

Doc: I talk about awakening, I also talk about how to find your true vocation.

Rick: Oh, good. So, we’ll link to all that so people can read about it if they want to. So, thanks. And we’ll see you next time.

Doc: Yeah, thank you.

Rick: Yeah. [Music]