Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews, with spiritually awakening people. I believe that today’s guest is number 365, which means if I had done them every day of the year we would have done this for a whole year straight. Today’s guest is James Eaton. James is in the UK, in a place called Totnas. Is that the way you pronounce it, James?
James: Everyone says, Totnas but apparently, it’s supposed to be Totnes.
Rick: Okay Totnes, it almost sounds like it should be in Spain or something. In any case, I’ll just say a couple of quick, more general things before we get started. I just like to say every time when I do one of these interviews, that if you’ve never seen one of these before, there are, as I just said, a whole bunch of them and if you go to www.batgap.com and look under the past interviews menu, you’ll find them all organized and categorized in various ways. You can check out previous ones. This whole thing is made possible by the support of appreciative viewers and listeners and if you appreciate it and feel like supporting it, there’s a PayPal button on the site. So, let me properly introduce James. James Eaton lives in the UK. He’ll tell us his story about how he … well why don’t you just start telling It, James, because your little bio that you sent me is so sort of personal and informal that you might as well just tell the story of growing up, deep sense of dissatisfaction and so on. Let’s just start with that.
James: Yeah, it’s the classic tale Rick, just having that deep sense of dissatisfaction and from an early age, I kind of knew I was playing a game. I mean from a very early age, I remember always being very driven, but looking at the kind of adults around me I’m just wondering why are you pretending? Why is everyone pretending? But you see when I got to about nine or ten, I was pretending too. I sort of got into the game and somewhere I knew I was pretending, but you just can’t understand what’s going on there at such a young age.
Rick: Did you have a feeling like you were getting sucked into it, like blinders were being put over your eyes and you were trying to prevent that from happening?
James: Absolutely, I just found myself, rather than people say as you get older, everything expands and your options open, and I was feeling like the opposite was happening.
Rick: Shutting down. j ; Yeah, and what I was doing, was starting to play a role, like most of us seem to do, deep down feeling very insecure and wanting to kind of open up and be fully seen and expressed and all those wonderful things. But every time that kind of impetus would rise up, I was kind of shutting down and a fear of expressing myself and so there’s kind of inattention sort of building up.
Rick: Were any adults telling you that you shouldn’t be so expressive, or that you should put yourself in a box where you’re hearing that kind of advice from people?
James: Not in an explicit way, but I would say in my environment it was implicit.
Rick: Yeah.
James: So, what I started to do, was to be very clever. That was my way of kind of shielding this kind of inner insecurity and because I’m very driven, I always have been very driven, there was this willpower sort of pushing, and so that got behind whatever I was doing. I did very well in academic stuff at school for example. I got into music playing guitar, well that’s an interesting sort of sidetrack there, because I had a friend at school, and I remember going back to his house, and his brother was a musician, he came in with an acoustic guitar and he just kind of sat on the sofa and just started strumming it and straight away it was like, you get those moments where something starts jangling, it’s like whoa.
Rick: That was the coolest thing you’d ever seen.
James: Yeah, the coolest thing I’ve ever heard and ever seen, and that was like touching something far beyond this kind of being authentic character I was presenting. So, I kind of got really into guitar and that was like my outlet to find some sanity I guess. But I put my willpower behind that too, so it was a band and we used to play gigs and stuff. So that was me by the time I got to I guess 18, I had great results in exams, I got into a top university. It was like from the outside it was like “Yeah, this guy’s got it all going on.”
Rick: You went to Oxford and majored in mathematics it looks like.
James: That’s right, yeah that’s right, but if I’m honest beneath that surface, it was- I was a mess, very insecure, feeling shameful, guilty. It was like deficient, the classic selection of descriptions. But I went to university; I had a good time, I enjoyed it, but by then I was cottoning on to my game. I thought when I left, it was like “Well what do I do now, do I carry on playing my game and now I just carry on as in a career and all the rest of it, but just carry on the same pretense that I was putting up, or do I say “well hold on a second, I’m gonna look into This?”
Rick: Are we skipping? You got into being an actor and a school teacher?
James: Yeah, yeah, so that came a bit later. Basically, when I left Oxford I basically went on the dole. In England that means you sign on, you’re not working, you’re like income support.
Rick: Yeah, you’re no good freeloader.
James: Yeah, exactly. There’s a Cockney rhyming slang, it’s called the rock and roll, the dole, the rock and roll. I literally was on the rock and roll. Basically, me and a group of friends, we basically had a band and we were trying to get a record deal and do that whole thing. So that’s where I found myself and I did that for a few years, really putting the willpower behind It, and we had a certain amount of success but it didn’t go big style. And like a lot of these things, if they don’t progress, everything starts to kind of implode. So that kind of fell apart. I was living in Oxford at the time, so then I moved after that to London, and I was just a bit lost really, just working in bars and going out, partying, experimenting with life in all forms, in other bands, just kind of floating. And then that’s when I decided to go to drama school. Basically Rick, I was going through my list, I was going through my list like, what is going to solve this, whatever it is, how am I going to get through this?
Rick: Meanwhile, no inkling that spirituality might be.
James: No, not at this point, none at all. My only meeting with spirituality was, my mom’s a Christian, so I went to Sunday school. And like many people, the way it’s presented is just like another load of beliefs to take on, and the kind of real beauty in it was completely lost on me and it was just another, “No, thank you.” Yeah, really. Although I would say- all throughout my life I’ve always had this sense of something much greater, like many of us do, but just no way of kind of understanding it.
Rick: Yeah, you didn’t know what it was.
James: It was just nothing and no one and nothing around me to just kind of pick up on that glint in the eye, and just go, “Oh James, come maybe read this or look at this,” or just none of that really. So yeah, I was just left to my own devices. So, I did the rock and roll thing, then that didn’t work.
Rick: Just out of curiosity for kind of an irrelevant question, but what sort of rock were you doing? Were you like heavy metal or you more like folksy, bluesy kind of?
James: Yeah, melodic, melodic rock, yeah, harmonies, Beatlesy sort of, that kind of stuff, yeah, nice, crafted songs and harmonies and yeah.
Rick: Stuff I would have appreciated.
James: Yeah, it was around, I don’t know if you remember, this must have been in the the 90s I guess, yeah, 90s. So, we had this whole thing in the UK called Britpop. It was bands like Blur and Oasis and Suede and all these.
Rick: You got to move back about three decades, before I can really talk to you about the Beatles, the Who,
James: yeah, well I can appreciate that stuff too. Yeah, so it was that kind of music. So that didn’t provide the satisfaction I was looking for basically, ultimately, and so my next on my list was something I always sort of wondered about, was acting. So having no experience at all, I did a little bit, well actually I did do a music, I was in a musical when I was at Oxford. West Side Story actually.
Rick: Oh, was it? Oh cool.
James: I was Riff.
Rick: Ah, he was the shark or jet? He was the jet. Okay. When you’re a jet, you’re a jet, all the way, all that stuff.
Rick: You know who happens to live in Fairfield, who’s a friend of mine, is Richard Beamer who played Tony in the movie.
James: Tony, okay. rHe’s an old-time meditator and lives here in Iowa in our town.
James: Yeah, it’s a great movie, I love that, my favorite musical definitely. Yeah, so I auditioned, and I’m at a place called Lambdam, London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and was offered a place on their course, so I went and did that, and actually, that was the beginning, I think, of this journey. Yeah, because I mean to be a good actor, you have to be able to be vulnerable, in the moment, not planning everything and gripping on to your kind of conclusions that you’ve already made. So, in a way, I was hopeless, which was great because it kind of smashed me to pieces. It was like my attempt to present myself was being severely undermined. And by this time, I was about so, there were other people there that were a lot younger, like didn’t have such a hang-up, so they were really flying and it was like suddenly, from used to being sort of top of the class I was bottom.
Rick: The old fogey. Y
James: eah, old fogey but also really stuck in my ways. So that was a really great sort of introduction into sort of looking inward in a sense and seeing why am I being like this and starting to open, starting to be more vulnerable in the moment, not having to fix everything. And also, feeling, the kind of feelings of fear when they come up and not being kind of overridden by that, not shutting down when those feelings are coming up, but actually, meeting it and really expanding into it. So, these are invaluable things. I think everyone would really benefit actually from at least a year at drama school. It’s very challenging.
Rick: It must actually loosen you up a lot, because I know that you do all sorts of exercises to get out of your mold, to get out of your set way of functioning and to try on different personalities, so it must culture some kind of flexibility.
James: I think so, yeah. Improvising is, I mean, for most people that’s just terrifying. You’re standing in front of a group of people with no idea, you’re just saying yes, saying yes, to whatever’s happening. Yeah, so that was a really sort of mind opening experience for me and when I left drama school I actually was in the business for a few years and it was great actually because I had musical skills as well, that means I was sort of more employable. I used to do sort of rep work where you’d have a few plays, and a musical, so someone can play drums, guitar, sing, you can kind of save yourself two people, we can get two for the price of one for the price of two, but two for the price of one, certainly not one for the price of two. Yeah, so that was great, but I used to love the kind of heightened nature of it, going on stage, big audiences. But after a while I just, this same kind of feeling, this isn’t it, this is great but it’s not it, and whenever that used to come, I used to move on very quickly. I wouldn’t hang around sort of like relationships. Some people get a sense that it’s over and then it can take a sort of year or two to kind of fully admit that and move on, but I’ve always been very, as soon as I know, I know, and then it’s like, well, there’s no point in staying in this anymore, we’re just wasting each other’s time, so my kind of affair with the acting world sort of came to an End, and then I just thought, well, what am I going to do now, and then last thing on my list was, oh, I’ll just teach, I’ll be a teacher, a schoolteacher, so I retrained and then I went and worked in a inner city London school, so it’s a very challenging school, and I was teaching math. So, I went back to that, which is such a weird juxtaposition, we’ve got drama which is all about not knowing, freedom in the moment, vulnerability, and this sort of math which is this kind of logical structure. It’s kind of solid like a rock.
Rick: It’s good you’re exercising different faculties.
James: Certainly was, yeah. So yeah, that was really great, I enjoyed that, I love the kids, the energy of the kids, that kind of vitality, and I actually enjoyed sort of presenting math in a way that I felt they could really connect with, because I think so many people have such bad experience of math, when they’re at school and I always hear it when people, when I was young, when I used to say oh yeah, I’m doing a math degree, they just go like, like I’d said a bad word, because most people’s experience is very bad, because I mean think about math, what you could do is just take something really simple, I don’t think, like say doing circles, like circumferences, pi times diameter, so the teacher comes in and they just write that on the board, and they just chuck out the textbooks and they go right do some problems, and it’s like well who’s learning anything there, it just feels like a complete waste of time, so I used to try and do things like if all the kids come in with tins and stuff, circular objects, draw around them and you have a bit of string and they kind of go around the circle with the string, measure it, then measure the diameter of that and you have a table on the board or something, everyone just fills in their values, and then you get them, well, you might just whisper to one kid, not announcing it, just but whisper, “Why don’t you divide them, see what you get,?” So, they divide it and they get this number three point something and they do it, what about that one, and do it again, then suddenly you just, as a teacher, you just stand back and you watch this kind of like wave going through the class, as they start realizing, they’re getting the same number over and over again, no matter what size the circle is, it’s the same number and it’s like what the hell’s going on, and then you get one of the kids to go up and like google it, three point whatever, what is this number, and then this pi symbol comes up on the screen, and then this one’s like, whoa, it’s like touching into something mysterious it’s even called a transcendental number, isn’t it?
Rick: Yeah, and while we’re on that point, I know that some mathematicians and others, have marveled at the fact that the universe somehow is mathematical, that we even understand mathematical laws and that they correlate with things in the physical universe. Have you ever thought about that? I mean, does it ever sort of evoke a sense of awe and wonder in you, or some sense of divine intelligence that’s orchestrating things in it that has given us this language that enables us to understand the universe from a certain angle?
James: Yeah, I mean we can get onto this as we go through- that’s a way of looking at it. And it certainly strikes you when you’re teaching this stuff, think ratios like the golden ratio and spirals, how spirals come out of that, and then you see it in sunflower patterns
Rick: And galaxies.
James: Yeah, exactly, it’s really fascinating, even in the helixical structure of the DNA there’s a kind of a ratio of the golden ratio in that. Even if you measure your digits, your fingers and your your arms, you can get a ratio there. In fact, I used to do a little lesson like that and I had on the internet you can find this like face made out of golden ratios and then you can put different famous faces behind it to see how they match up or not, as the case may be. And there is a strange kind of beauty when -there was a Russian model and her face almost matched it perfectly, and you look at the face, and it wasn’t like a sexy face or it was just there was something really sort of beautifully pure about it. Yeah, it was really something. So yeah, I mean it certainly can inspire that awe and wonder and I certainly saw that in the kids and I had it myself a bit when I was particularly at A-level math. I think university got so conceptual that I realized at university I wasn’t really a mathematician, you know what I mean? Especially there where I went, you start to meet people who really are geniuses and you’re like, okay, all right, okay. I can get this stuff, but I’m not on that level.
Rick: Both in terms of the genius and perhaps in terms of the nerd value.
James: Yeah, right.
Rick: I met Brian Josephson one time, the physicist, and he was such a genius, he got the Nobel Prize. He was such an odd character, just so eccentric, just kind of caught up in this world in his mind.
James: Yeah, amazing, yeah. Certainly, it was a few like that when I went to Oxford, definitely. So yeah, in the end the math, the teaching thing, the same thing happened. I just did it for three years and it is very exhausting as well. I take my hat off to teachers out there, absolutely total respect, because the energy that it sucks out of you, especially in those inner-city schools. Every second of the day you’re kind of on something, it’s just exhausting.
Rick: Yeah, just want to throw in here that there’s some nice programs where they’re teaching meditation to inner city school kids and getting incredible results, just huge reductions in violence and misbehavior things and dropouts and much better grades and all kinds of stuff, and it must be a lot easier on the teachers too.
James: Yeah, right. I used to find getting kids respect, was the best way of controlling classes, rather than these screaming teachers at the front of the class. It just doesn’t, especially in inner city schools because they’ll scream back at you, no problem. So yeah actually, there’s a great Chinese proverb, it’s something like “Tell me and I’ll forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I will always understand.”
Rick: That’s good.
James: Yeah, exactly. So that I mean that goes for the subject we’re talking about in terms of the sort of spiritual search as well for me. It’s too much telling, and too much taking it on the word of the teacher, and not enough involving.
Rick: Yeah, a lot of times there’s a very rigid hierarchy with the teacher up on a podium and everybody else sort of, “I’ll never be like him,”
James: Yeah, there can be that.
Rick: A number of teachers are trying to get around that now and make it much more egalitarian.
James: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, that’s basically what I was trying to do in the math teaching. And I’ll just tell you one very quick thing. I was doing Pythagoras theorem with a class once and I did a similar lesson where they would have squares that they fit together and when the certain squares would fit together you get a right angle triangle. So, this kid in the class, he worked it out and I said, “Oh great.” I think his name was Juha. So, we called it Juha’s theorem and he was so excited. He said, “Yeah, I got a theorem.” And then again, we looked it up on Google and it came up, “Oh, Pythagoras’s theorem.” He got really disappointed. He said, “Oh, he got there before me.” He was really disappointed. And then this is the best thing. I heard this kid at the back of class going, “Pythagoras? Bet he was bullied at school.”
Rick: That’s great.
James: Because you know they were imagining he was like a kid like them, in some other school in London probably. it’s so funny.
Rick: Was that Pythagoras or who was it that was reputed to have discovered some principle in mathematics or physics, when his body displaced the bathwater in the tub and he jumped out and ran through the streets naked shouting, “Eureka, I’ve found him!”
James: Yeah, maybe it was him, yeah. Yeah, there is some Pythagoras cup or something.
Rick: Might have been him.
James: Yeah, to be honest I’m so not sciencey, it’s really funny. We’re talking like this. Yeah, anyway, so in the end of the day I realized that that wasn’t it either for me, that wasn’t where I was going. So, it was like I I feel like I tried to fit myself into all these different boxes and I just didn’t fit basically. It was like, well okay. So, this is when I started to get the spiritual kind of direction coming in. It was actually towards the end of when I was acting. I did a show with a Shakespeare comedy of errors and I was Antipholous of Ephesus. I think and there’s an Antipholous of Syracuse so we’re like twins, and everyone mistakes us for each other. That’s how the comedy sort of happens. Anyway, he used to go off on a Wednesday, I think it was, after rehearsals and he used to go off very mysteriously and I said, “Where do you go?” and he wouldn’t tell me. And I actually followed him once and he ended up being this Gnostic group. Yeah, it was a Gnostic group based on Spanish. So that was my first kind of step into this. I didn’t last very long in that group because I ask a lot of questions and I’m not particularly reverent. I’ve always been like, “Okay I need to know this.” So yeah, I kind of get into trouble.
Rick: Good way to be actually.
James: I think so, yeah. And then after that I was in the Gurjeev group. I think it overlapped a bit. So that was where my first things started to open up for me. So, I was reading some of his books, going to this group.
Rick: Were you trying to do that self- remembering thing that those people are reputed to do, like keep checking in, “Am I here?”
James: Yeah, that kind of stuff. Yeah, and I don’t know if you know much about it, but there’s some very strange stuff that goes on in those groups, people speak very slowly.
Rick: Well yeah, I was a student of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and he said that when he first came to England, he met a bunch of Gurjeev people back in the 60s and they were all speaking like that. And he said, “Well, why are you talking like that?” And they said, “Well, we’re trying to remember the self.” And he said, “Well, why should you not be able to speak properly?” And they said, “Well, we were taught to sort of keep checking in and remembering.” So, he said, “No, no, no, no.” He said, “Self-realization is like taking a shower. You take a shower in the morning, you’re clean, you totally forget about it and it’s just there throughout the day. Thinking about it doesn’t help to retain it, forgetting about it doesn’t cause you to lose it, it’s just not on the basis of any kind of active attention like that.
James: Yeah, I think there’s ways like all these things, when the teacher dies you’ve got people interpreting the teaching and I think there’s a lot of judgment actually. I used to see you used to do the movements as well. The movements are fantastic, I love the movements, but you see people getting them wrong and then they’d be chastising themselves for getting it wrong. And it’s like, this is just judging yourself, and then judging yourself for judging yourself and all this kind of stuff. So, again I got into trouble and a bit of an altercation with a senior person. But I have to say, I think Gurjeph the man was a bit of a genius. I think he was so mischievous and my first big kind of awakening, I guess you’d call it, was- have you ever read that book, that massive book he wrote, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson? It’s this massive tome. It’s like a thousand and something pages and it’s so wildly crazy, it’s just so out there, these huge words Hector Parapashinok and I can’t remember, and it’s just so fantastical. But delivered in a kind of ‘this is the way it is,’ sort of thing. For someone like me just continually trying to get my head around it but it’s just so out there that you just can’t, you just can’t get your head around it. In the end it just breaks, the whole thing just breaks and then it’s like ‘ahhh’. Yeah, so that’s the first time when I really sort of realized that there’s a presence here, there’s a knowing here, that’s knowing these thoughts, that’s knowing these thoughts equally as the sound of this voice, as the colors of Rick on a screen. There’s a knowing and all those attributes are coming and going, shifting and changing, whereas this knowing is just shining always, there it is. So that was just like bombshell. And I remember my older brother actually came round, I was staying at my grandpa’s place. My grandpa, he wasn’t very well and he just moved into a home, and I was basically living in his old house, ripping it apart, like taking out the carpets, stripping the walls. I was literally in an environment where I was ripping everything out and funny enough that’s exactly what I was doing in the evening. I was just sitting reading books, spiritual books, and this massive Gurjapas, and just kind of ripping everything out internally, in the mind as well somehow. Yeah, and my brother came round to see me, and I just pulled, bent his ear off like a whole night talking about this incredible discovery. “Something knows thoughts, you’re not thoughts, there’s something before thoughts, there’s knowing thoughts.” And he’s like, “What’s happened to my brother?”
Rick: Yeah, you’re on drugs buddy?
James: Yeah, I said to him, “My life has changed. From now on my life has changed,” I just knew it. This discovery was the beginning of something completely different.” So, I still hadn’t found non-duality by this point.
Rick: But you were on to something.
James: Yeah, I was on to something but it felt incomplete because yes.
Rick: Someone just told us it was Archimedes who was the one in the bathtub.
James: Archimedes. Of course.
Rick: Thank you, thank you Serge.
James: Thank you Serge.
Rick: Yeah, it was Serge that told us.
James: Yeah, so yeah, what was I saying now?
Rick: I’m so sorry. Yeah, you were, well, you were on to something. You realized that. Exactly. Yeah, you realized that there was this presence. You hadn’t quite glommed on to non-duality yet but yeah, there was a crack in the cosmic egg.
James: That’s it, that’s right. And so yeah, of course what happens because it’s life as it is starts to kind of creep back in again, doesn’t it? And this discovery suddenly is less clear than it was, or you rediscover it again and you rediscover it again. And then also I think I just felt like there’s just something else here, because I could still feel that incompleteness, that sense of more. But I think it’s really important this point, because I think a lot of people stop there. They get into this awareness thing and then they kind of- they think that’s it and they think, “Oh, I’ve just woken up, there’s this awareness here.” This is the first step on the ladder
Rick: Yeah, if you’ve watched many of my Interviews, you realize that there’s a kind of a perennial theme with me, which is that, well, it’s the old Zen saying that beginner’s mind and as Adyashanti says, “I consider myself to always be a beginner.” So, I don’t think there, personally I haven’t yet seen or come to understand how there could be a final step. It seems like there’s always, there’s a dimension of life that doesn’t change, but then one lives, and in the living there can be every fresh clarity, realization, depth, whatever.
James: I totally agree with that. When I say first step I mean, this is just the beginning of a journey, it’s not the end. And what I sort of later began to see, and became part of how I share this message, is that people actually get fixated on that and it becomes a concept, becomes another concept without even realizing it. They’re now conceptualizing awareness, and using it as a way of stepping out of life and kind of hiding from the kind of challenge and the messiness of what life offers. So it can actually become a bit of a false refuge as well.
Rick: Yeah, I heard you comment in one of your other interviews of going to non-duality meetings and seeing these people sitting in the back row who are sort of checked out, I mean they’ve gotten into a dissociative kind of state from dwelling on it this way without continuing to evolve.
James: Yeah, that’s a good point to make right now, because when I did discover non-duality because I was looking around now, I’ve got a voracious mind, when I get my teeth into something I’ll go And so sooner or later I came across non-duality and so, I was hearing these kind of slogans, like nothing to do, there’s nowhere to go, there’s nothing to get, and like people really selling me this stuff, like really believing it, and yet I could see that they were far from in a place where there is like being, having found that kind of fulfillment, do you know what I mean?
Rick: Well yeah,
James: What was driving me on was there’s something, this is unfulfilling.
Rick: Yeah, and my take on it is that they’ve glommed on to a concept, and they’ve gotten good at speaking those kinds of words, but when you contrast what they’re actually living and experiencing…
James: that’s what I mean, exactly,
Rick: yeah, with what’s possible then it’s kind of sad anyway.
James: Yeah, it’s very sad, but of course, it’s totally ironic as well because, the reason I brought that in was because I think the people that you were just mentioning that sometimes at the back of the road there, I mean these are the people that sometimes tell you this stuff, and it’s like they’ve got stuck in a rut here because they’re telling themselves there’s nothing to do, but what they’re actually doing is they’re suppressing a natural yearning to explore with the belief that there’s nothing to do, so, they’re actually doing nothing. So, you know without even realizing it they’re actually completely contradicting themselves.
Rick: I think if we analyze why they say that, it’s sort of a misappropriation of a different level of experience which they probably haven’t attained, but there is a level on which there’s nothing to do and nothing could be done, because there’s no doer and so on and so forth, but if that’s not the level on which you’re living then there’s a saying in the Gita which is, the dharma of another, brings danger. It’s not your dharma, it’s not your experience, and even if it were your experience on some level there’s nothing to do but on other levels there’s plenty to do and you’re going to be doing it.
James: Yeah, exactly, beautiful and I would totally agree. I mean all those phrases, it’s all true, of course it’s true, but exactly like you say, if it’s not true for you, then maybe there is something to explore. And I think that’s why what I try to bring with the way I speak about this, is that you can come in at it anywhere, you can come in at it at any level. So, I could be speaking to someone and just someone who’s never heard of any of this stuff and you’re just getting them to see that there’s something here that’s knowing thought. Just something little like that can be really profound for someone who’s never even looked into that, and then for someone else it might be completely different way of speaking. And there’s no qualms, there’s no worries about contradicting yourself, because it’s right for particular people at particular times, that’s just the way it is. So yeah, there’s nothing to do, it’s true.
Rick: That’s an important point. I interviewed this wonderful gentleman named Sri M a couple of days ago and he was saying about the trickiness of being a teacher in the sense that you might be talking to a hundred people, and yet the people in the room are at all different levels of understanding and development, and it’s sort of an art learning to speak in a way that’s appropriate to all those people. But he said to really get deeply into something you actually, really need to have a one-on-one because then you can kind of tune right into where that person is at and what they need.
James: That’s exactly what I do. I usually have a introduction on a group basis, so it’ll just be a kind of guided meditation type thing, just bringing people into that place, just easing and softening into being, and then from there I invite anyone who wants to come up, to come up, and then it’s like a one-on-one with an audience. So, it’s great actually because having the audience heightens the one-on- one.
Rick: It does, it creates a sort of ambience or spiritual field so to speak.
James: Yeah, and it kind of amplifies whatever the issue is. So, I realized there was more, so I wanted to explore more, so I started doing that. And I was living in, I don’t know if you know London, North London, Kentish Town, I had a flat in Kentish Town which is quite close to Hampstead, and Hampstead is where anyone really who comes to UK does non-duality meetings. So yeah, I was walking over to Heath all the time, going to see different, anyone who set foot in the country basically, I was there, lapping it up.
Rick: My only experience in London, this is just a funny story, I was on my way from Keele University where I had helped to start a teacher training course for TM teachers, and I was going back to Switzerland and I spent the night in London in the TM center there, and I was meditating in the morning and coming out of meditation I looked over and I saw this button on the table next to me and I thought, “I wonder what that does?” and I pushed it and this fire alarm went off. And the guy who was running the center totally lost his cool and was screaming and yelling, “We can’t get this thing to stop once you start it, why did you do that you son of a bitch?” That was my experience with London.
James: Well at least my partner, she did that on a massage course and they tried to charge her 200 quid sending off the fire alarm. She left the course.
Rick: That’s funny.
James: Disgusting.
Rick: Anyway, we’re having a very informal interview as you can tell here, all the little stories. But sorry to interrupt, you continue.
James: Yeah, so you know I started exploring different teachers, different books, different teachings in the non-duality sort of sphere.
Rick: Go around see Tony Parsons and Rupert Spira and Jeff Foster and those guys.
James: Yeah exactly. Actually, I didn’t see Jeff very much. I saw Tony a few times at the beginning, and then I just found myself sort of looking elsewhere and yeah, and Marnie, she was another one. And then Rupert, and you see the great thing Roger Linden as well, he did quite near me. But Marnie and Rupert, they were great because they became friends, and that to me is so Important, because all the bullshit just goes out the window. It’s nothing to do with any kind of pretensions or all that crap, it’s just gone. And I think that’s such a gift that someone in that position can give- is to just be a friend, we’re just friends. It’s really, really beautiful. Yeah. Actually, I remember going to see Rupert- this is probably 10 odd years ago. He used to be upstairs in this little back room in Collette House. I remember going once, and there must have been three people and I just remember we were sitting there and there’s this tube train, the tube lines just behind the window and just the tube going and the light just getting darker and darker and nobody could be bothered to put the light on. It was three of us and Rupert sitting there in his dark room. Yeah, it’s amazing, he’s so popular now, it’s wonderful.
Rick: Yeah, and rightfully so. He’s really clear and a very sweet guy and like you say, unpretentious, just a genuine human being. And his wife too is delightful.
James: Yeah, Ellen, beautiful. Yeah, I’d love to catch up with him again soon.
Rick: I’ll be seeing him in a week and a half.
James: Oh, say hi to me.
Rick: Oh yeah, At the Sands conference.
James: Yeah, since I’d moved down to Totnes I sort of don’t see anyone anymore, we’re just kind of living in the middle of nowhere and just disconnected from that. Yeah, so from exploring all those things then the other part of it started to open up and I think the way, how do we talk about this, I seem to have got into this pattern. I’m writing actually. I’m writing a book at the moment, and there’s this way in that I’ve sort of used, first of all, common sense. What does common sense say? So going back to the awareness thing, the common sense says you’re a person, physical person, you’ve got a name, a gender and all the rest of it, and you’ve got your past and your future to come and past memories and all that kind of stuff and that’s what you are, right? It’s simple, that’s common sense, easy. And yet if you just probe that a little bit further you say, well what you most essentially are, where’s that? And most people wouldn’t say, well it’s in your legs. If you lost your legs, you’d still feel like you were you somehow. So, most people kind of end up here, like what I most essentially are, is up here looking through two eyes.
Rick: Reminds me of the Cat Stevens song,
James: Which one?
Rick: Yeah, Moon Shadow. If I ever lost my legs.
James: I didn’t know he’d written a song about losing his legs.
Rick: Check it out, Moon Shadow, Cat Stevens.
James: Moon Shadow. Yeah, that’s the kind of common sense thing, but then you just start digging a little bit beneath that and you think, well let’s take the body, the body, the baby is born, I’ve got two kids and seeing them growing in the womb, well I didn’t see them growing in the womb, but seeing the womb growing and then the scanning pictures, all these incredibly intricate structures being grown, nobody does that, that’s just happening. You don’t kind of design the intricate structures of the lungs and stuff, thank God. It all just happens.
Rick: You don’t do it but some incredible intelligence is involved there.
James: But you see the same thing, the skin growing, the nails growing, the hair growing, everything, it’s all happening, the heart is beating, the breath. And yet, when we come down to it, out of all these sort of millions of processes, I don’t know, trillions of processes, God knows how many processes, there’s one that we say, oh no, I’m doing that, at least one anyway, which is thinking, I’m doing thinking, I am thinking, and it’s, interesting that, are you doing that? Can you find the function that does thinking?
Rick: Well, that’s an interesting question. There’s this whole free will issue and obviously, there’s certain things that we don’t do, we don’t beat our heart, we don’t, we don’t do a lot of, we don’t run our liver or anything like that, but we do seem to be able to raise our hand or not raise our hand or speak or not speak. And physiologists talk about the what is it, the autonomic and the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems or something. So, and a lot of people try to argue that the things that we seem to have control over are actually just as automatic and beyond our control as the heartbeat and the liver function. So, what’s your take on that whole deal?
James: Well, my take ultimately is to go right beyond all of that, maybe we’ll come to that, I’m just trying to sort of walk in because, it certainly feels like you choose thoughts, but then if you look for some whatever it is that’s choosing the thought, all you ever find is another thought. So, what’s choosing that thought? You just keep finding another thought, so the thought is just arising, it’s literally just, try and find now, find a function, some function that’s doing thinking. If you have a good look, it’s just you just find another thought, where does that come from? So all I’m doing there is just trying to loosen up the sort of conclusion of common sense, and what some people then do, is they grab hold of science, like, right, science will help me out here, but then of course, our prevailing sort of materialist science will actually confirm that there isn’t anyone doing that, there’s no, it’s a kind of neurophysiological system.
Rick: But just to play devil’s advocate for a second, let’s say somebody’s listening to this interview and they feel like, “All right, well I made the choice to listen to this interview, and you guys are talking about this, is there anyone doing it? So right now, I’m going to make the choice to leave this interview and go out for a walk, or maybe I’ll decide to stay here, but either way it’s my choice.” And so, there is, I perceive that there is a somebody who, although I can’t quite put my finger on what it is, but there is something that enables me to choose to do this or that.
James: Yeah, so the thought that arises, “I’m going to press stop on this interview and I’m going to go and walk my dog,” there’s a thought arising.
Rick: Where does it come from?
James: Yeah, where does it come? It’s the same question. It doesn’t matter what the thought is, I’m going to raise my hand. Yeah, so where did the thought come? I’m going to raise my hand. These are just ways of loosening up the certitudes that we have, and if you try and grab hold of science to back your case it does the opposite. Science is basically saying that we’re sort of an organic machine basically, it’s just like a software program that’s just updating, it’s got its hardwired DNA structure, that comes from your parents. You didn’t choose your parents either, and it’s sculpted by environment and you don’t choose that, so it’s like the whole thing is just an upgrading system. This is what science would say. I mean that’s actually quite useful for people on this path because it starts to, like I was saying, just kind of loosen things up a bit, but when I really sort of got that it still felt like, well no, whatever’s here, there’s a freedom here, there is a freedom here that that doesn’t speak to, so that’s when we go into this first-hand experiencing, this is the key, this is the sort of beautiful way into exploring this whole area of non-duality spirituality, first-hand, direct, actual experience. So we can do that, like we were speaking earlier about realizing that sounds and sensations and thoughts and feelings are all moving and changing and shifting, but this knowing of that, is always present. Here it is, always shining. So that’s the kind of key I then took into this next step of exploring. So, you could say we’ve looked at the subject, the me, and we’ve seen that what we thought was a subject, is actually thoughts, feelings and sensations that are arising. So, the real ultimate subject is this knowing, if you like, this presence. So now what I then like to do is turn it around. So now let’s look at the object, because this is the sort of contradiction that I found myself in. Okay, I’m this presence, I can’t find where it begins or ends even, and yet this world, still feels like it’s outside. So, like, this computer and Rick’s over there in America and we’re having this conversation, so, all of that stuff is still there. So we get this kind of weird contradiction, and that’s why I think for me it felt incomplete. So, then we look at the object, we turn, well let’s really look at this object, what is this? And I think this is where most people find it most challenging actually, because what we’re doing is we’re seeing that all we ever experience is like a virtual reality. So, if I say that sometimes people go, “Whoa!” so we walk in gently. So common sense says, like we were just saying, what you most essentially are is behind here looking through eyes at the world, but just to look at that for a second, what we’re believing there is that these eyes are windows, and that there’s a sort of entity behind Them, looking through windows at what’s out there. But then you could really play devil’s advocate with that, you say, “Well how is this little entity in the head, how is that seeing?” If it’s just looking through windows, you get into this infinite regress, you need a little entity inside the head of the little entity that looks through its eyes, it looks through these eyes, and you just keep going back. It just doesn’t make sense.
Rick: What if you do it this way? What if you say, “All right, what you are is consciousness, and there’s a – I’ll just state it this way and you can rebut it – but there’s a physical apparatus, a mechanics of perception involving senses and so on, and then there are objects of experience, objects of the senses. And so, you have a threefold structure, you have perceiver consciousness, mechanics of perception, and objects of perception. And the perceiver obviously can’t perceive himself because to do so he’d have to be an object and step apart from himself, and there you get the infinite regress. But he, so to speak, I’m saying he, it’s not a he, can perceive other things. They can fall, like images falling on a movie screen, screen can’t perceive itself but images can fall on the screen and give rise to experience. Does that sort of fit with what you’re saying or would you like to refute that?
James: So that’s a nice model and if that works for you go for it, but I found that that kind of model didn’t work for me. There’s still a feeling of separateness that that evokes, and actually, in a way the screen does know itself, it does know itself, you can get down to that screen knowing itself.
Rick: You can but isn’t it different than the way you know a cup or something because the screen is itself, it can’t sort of become two things in order to know itself.
James: Yeah, but where this is leading is that there is no cup, there’s only itself, that’s where we’re going.
Rick: So that which appears to be a cup and a pen and a tree and so on, it’s all just consciousness.
James: Yeah, that’s where it’s leading. So just going back to that, because we leave that common sense thing behind, and this is really mind-blowing because then people go into, like let’s do science again like we did before, and what you start to realize is what the scientific position is, which nobody really realizes, I don’t think people really think about it, is that okay all this sensory data from the outside is being picked up and coming into the physical system, but it’s all being fed into the brain and the brain is dark and there’s no sound or light in a brain. So, I think we have this idea that we’re streaming all this light into the head and just but it’s not true.
Rick: The brain is interpreting it.
James: Yeah, it’s just electrical signals, Electrochemical signals feeding into the brain, where this utter fucking miracle happens, where this explosion of this theater, this cinematic rich experience happens. So, I mean this is mind-boggling because what it means, is that what you’re seeing now, everyone who’s watching this, wherever they are in the world, what they’re seeing now, is not a real physical reality, it’s a kind of collection of perceptions and if we’re sticking with the scientific view it’s a projection of being created by the brain in the mind.
Rick: Yeah, here’s an interesting question, not to throw you off track, but let’s say you’re looking at a tree and there’s also a bird looking at the tree and there’s a dog looking at the tree and maybe a squirrel or something, and each of them Obviously, if you think about it, is seeing a very different tree because they have very different perceptual apparatus and ways of interpreting what they perceive. So, who sees the real tree?
James: Who sees the real tree? Yeah, right.
Rick: And you could have a thousand people looking at the tree and they’re all seeing slightly differently.
James: Yeah, I like it.
Rick: And so what is the tree exactly if no one actually sees it as it is? Does it have a reality that sort of stands alone in and of itself that is perfect and everybody has some kind of degree of appreciation of that but not the actual thing?
James: Yeah, right, so that’s a philosophical question because nobody can actually answer that. So, this is the wonderful thing. Nobody can step outside of their first-person experience to objectively experience a material world out there to say what that tree actually is. And I mean that’s an extraordinary thing to realize because what it’s basically saying is that the concept of reality that we share conventionally is a concept, it’s a philosophy, it’s not a kind of actual experience. And this is really like mind-blowing.
Rick: And yet we don’t want to say that we’re all each creating our own Reality, because there’s an agreement to a certain extent between all the different realities. The squirrel obviously sees some sort of tree, the same as we do, he climbs it, we watch it, the bird can fly up and land in it, so they’re all identifying an object that’s apparently there, and we could die and they could still be engaging with the tree. So, there’s some sort of existence to the tree that seems to be independent of anyone’s perception of it.
James: So, we can get to that because these are big questions. I just want to just pause here at the moment because I think it’s really something that certainly in my kind of Journey, was really profound. So, for example if you’re sitting watching this now, or like for us now, as you sort of move your head around like this, it seems completely obvious that you’re moving your head around. But what we’re saying is that because your experience is virtual, it’s being recreated, what you’re experiencing is the movement of colors, that gives an as-if impression, even the little sort of clicks in your neck. If you’re walking down the street and you’re feeling the sort of tingling sensations in your feet and you feel your feet touching the ground, and you look around and you see people walking, your smells and the cars going by- it’s all being recreated out of perceptions. This is really, really important to kind of understand with this whole process, I think. So, in terms of distance, like the Distance, for example, you look at a star, trillions of kilometers away in the sky at night and it seems that far away, but your brain isn’t bigger than the universe. You couldn’t possibly house that distance inside your brain. So it’s an appearance, it’s the appearance of distance, just like as I move my hand in and out of this screen now it looks like it gets closer and bigger and further away, but from the point of view of your computer screen right now, this just colors. So this is fundamental, right? Because if you don’t start to kind of feel into this, then you’ll always have this sense of separateness between the knowing presence and what’s appearing.
Rick: So, I think I was about to ask you, so what’s the practical value of this philosophical discussion we’re having? And you just sort of said it, that if you can really feel into this, then you can begin to sense the unity of things.
James: Exactly, because now I’m looking at my hand, right? So now we’ve been talking about computer screens and things, but it’s true of my hand too. This is colors with sensation that create this experience, yeah? And so, you’re inside your actual body and your thoughts, everything. So it’s all appearing, it’s all like a perceptual cocktail if you like. So yeah, our conventional view is that that’s a representation of what’s out there, but like we just said that can never be experienced. So, we’ve got to be careful here because for me this whole journey is about, it’s not about replacing beliefs with new ones, it’s just about kind of unpicking things. So, from there, we don’t now come to the conclusion that there is no “out there,” but neither do we come to the conclusion- it’s like you’re not now shifting all your eggs into a different basket, if you like. We just don’t know, so we’re coming into this innocence, this childlike innocence. All we know is a direct experience, this right now.
Rick: Now a little while ago you said “Well it looks like I’m looking at a cup or I’m looking at a tree”, but really, it’s all consciousness interacting with itself.
James: Yes, that’s where we’re going. That needs some clarification.
James: Yeah, so that’s where we’re going now. So now we’ve broken down the subject into pure knowing, consciousness, whatever word we use, and now we’ve broken down the object into this kind of softening, into just a play of sensation, a play of thoughts, feelings, like mind stuff if you like.
Rick: Well the object is a mind stuff and thoughts and feelings as far as our perception of it is concerned, but what I was kind of getting at before is the object doesn’t really depend or does it, really depend upon our perception for its existence? The moon has been doing just fine, Even before there were human beings that could really perceive it.
James: Yeah, it’s a great question, but the thing is, I think you’ll see where I’m going.
Rick: Okay.
James: I don’t want to jump in and answer that because in the question itself there’s stuff in there, so, by answering it I’m kind of…
Rick: So you’re unfolding this as you go along?
James: Yeah, I’m agreeing to the premise of the question. It’s a bit like what we were saying earlier, so, I could answer that but it wouldn’t be right, my answer, because it would be giving validity to certain assumptions in the question. So if we just now bring these seeming two together, so there’s this knowing presence and then there’s this cocktail of perception. So what we can then do is maybe with eyes closed, it might be easier, but just take maybe a sound. Sound is sometimes the easiest thing to play with, maybe the sound of my voice if there’s some traffic nearby or a clock ticking or whatever, and we’re going to go with direct experience, so that means letting all of our assumptions, all of them, every single one, just drop away, so you don’t even know what this is. You have no idea what this sound is right now, or where it is or when it’s going to begin or end. So, without any of those assumptions or predictions there’s just sound spontaneously appearing now, and it has this quality, here it is, spontaneously appearing and it’s being known by this presence. So, the first question to look at here is, is there a gap between these seeming two? Now if we go into our concepts then suddenly I’m a person sitting here on a chair and the sound is a meter or half a meter away from me and there’s the gap, but if we come back into this first-person experience again, now this consciousness, I can’t say where it is, it’s certainly not here between my eyes, that’s a sensation, that’s a sensation that is being experienced by this knowing presence. So, this knowing, that I can’t point to and I can’t say where it begins or ends, is there a gap between that and this spontaneously arising sound that I know nothing about? Where do I start my measurement? Do I start it here, from between my eyes? That’s a sensation, that’s not where I presence am. So, you try this, is there some kind of boundary between the two? Where does knowing end and sound begin? [Music] So, for me I was playing with this stuff and then for some reason it just broke open and it became utterly clear that this knowing and this sound are indivisible. The knowing is being the sound and we can play with that with all the different kind of sense doorways if you like, you can play with sensation, you can play with with smell, taste, movement, the sense of movement, and even image, open eyes, colors, even colors, you can see that this, the presence of knowing those colors is being those colors. So, in a sense there’s nothing looking, there’s nothing looking, there’s what is sort of shimmering, shining as it is. So, this is the step from being that awareness, to actually being what’s happening, the experience itself, and we could call this experience, we could call this love, because it’s that coming together of seeming separate things, seeing that it’s only, well it’s just what it is, wholeness being what it is.
Rick: You want to continue or should I ask a question?
James: No, yeah, go for it.
Rick: Well a couple thoughts come to mind. One is in terms of your own experience, when you’re talking like this and leading people through a logic like this, it’s kind of lively in the experience, but I’ll just ask you personally first. Is this sort of way of seeing things spontaneous, living reality for you throughout the day and night? Or is it something more -you kind of psych yourself into when you’re thinking this way?
James: Well the way I see it, being Consciousness, it kind of shape shifts in sort of generally, three different ways. It can come into being a focus, as if it’s a person and it can soften out as a sort of witnessing presence like we were just talking about, like this stuff is happening and it’s being observed, or it can go into being the whole experience. So that movement can always shift and change. So, the idea of trying to hold on to some particular state, it seems to just disappear.
Rick: No, I’m not saying hold on, I’m just saying.
James: Yeah, yeah.
Rick: No, I like that though, kind of the zoom lens analogy, you can zoom in, zoom out according to the circumstances and the need. I
James: t’s infinite, you can do what it wants, it’s like all the doors are open, why limit yourself?
Rick: Yeah. But then a second question is, you know how in the case of near-death experiences some materialists will say, “Well it’s just the brain getting deprived of oxygen, and that’s why you’re seeing a tunnel of light and all that stuff. And similarly, someone might say, “Well yeah, you’re sort of going through this analysis and you’re gaining a sense of oneness, but that’s really just sort of a subjective experience, and does that really correlate, or are you actually getting a kind of a peep into the oneness of reality as it is?”
James: Yeah, that’s what it seems like.
Rick: Yeah, okay
James: I don’t want to get stuck here because again, this is like another step, I know there are no steps, but you can realize what we’re talking about here, and then again, your life doesn’t change, or maybe it does initially, and there’s a kind of like a honeymoon, whoa, wow, wow, and then you start to see that, okay, the old patterns are still coming back, so what was it? And this can be a really hard place to be, because it’s like, , what was all that about, you know, these realizations have dropped in, but I’m still left as the same idiot I was, or whatever it might be, it’s like I’m still frustrated in the same ways and fall into the same patterns. And again, this is …
Rick: Does this open up a kind of a dimension of fulfillment?
James: Exactly, that’s what I’m talking about. So, there is that fulfillment, but the patterns still come back basically, and people can get stuck there. So just like they can get stuck with the awareness, they can get stuck here and then they start appealing to the nothing to do thing again, yeah, and say, okay, I’ve seen it, I’ve seen it, there’s nothing to do, and they just carry on suffering basically. So, my invitation is, no, come on, let’s keep going, let’s keep going, let’s not give up, let’s keep going. And this is where for me the most interesting part begins, because it’s the psychological side, it’s almost like for me non-duality is the reverse of most other paths. A lot of other paths you get stuck into the psychology, you start looking at your patterns and start, , doing all that stuff. And then the sort of hope is, one day when I’m totally pure, I might realize wholeness or something. So, what I love about non-duality is it just turns the whole thing around and it says, no, you can realize what you are right now. It’s abundantly available always and forever, it always has been. And then the invitation is when you start to realize that, the way I see it, is you have the most extraordinarily powerful tool, if you like, to now really go deeply into all of that messy stuff, because you know what you are. So, I’ll share a bit of my experience, but I’ll tell you if I’d have met what I’ve met, without knowing what I am, God knows what would have happened really, really.
Rick: Here’s an analogy I like to use for that, which is that let’s say you have a handful of mud and you want to dissolve it, but you only have a cup of water, you throw the mud in the cup of water and it’s just all mud. But if you have an ocean to throw it in, you throw it in the ocean and it just dissolves. So, what you’re saying is this gives you the capacity for processing stuff much more elegantly and efficiently.
James: Much more elegantly and efficiently, yeah, absolutely. No question about it, no question about it.
Rick: Yeah, and it inevitably does process, doesn’t it? I mean, once this opening takes place the evolutionary process, if we want to call it that, continues and it’s like, “All right, now it’s time for some house cleaning.”
James: , yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so maybe another image here. I’ve got this table I’ve drawn up for my book that I’m quite proud about.
Rick: And incidentally we talked about you singing a song or two here or there, so if we get to a point in this discussion where you feel like taking a break and singing a song, particularly if it relates to what we’re talking about, just let’s do.
James: Okay, great. Maybe now?
Rick: Oh yeah, okay, you’re all tuned up and ready to go?
James: It’d be a nice kind of side track, yeah?
Rick: Yeah, just get out of our heads for a minute if that’s where we are.
James: I always love that, “get out of our heads,” because it’s got such bad connotations or it’s seen as madness, but actually, it’s sanity in a sense. (sings) All hopes, all dreams, falling apart at the seams. Belief, control, it’s the end of pretending to know. Maybe is what is, all become meaningless. And this lifelong quest, dissolving into emptiness. Losing it all, losing it all, losing it all, again. Those eyes meet these, and the mind it just falls to its knees. And this heart breaks in love with all it creates. No gripe, no grip, it’s all free to just be as it is. And this heart sings, there’s nothing and everything. Losing it all, losing it all, losing it all, again. Open another door, it’s not what you’re looking for. There is nowhere to go, to not know. Losing it all, losing it all, losing it all, again. And again, and again, losing it all, again. (guitar music)
Rick: Nice. I was playing drums quietly as you were doing that. I used to play the drums. It’s funny, there was one little line in there where you said, “No grip.” And it reminded me of the experience I had when I was a teenager, where we’re on LSD, walking along in the middle of the night, and the sun was rising, we’re walking down the street, and this friend of mine said, “You know, there’s no grip. “There’s no grip.” He just kept saying that. And it’s like, ’cause everything was sort of flowing and changing and all. And I always thought if I ever talked to him again, I’d say, “Well, yeah, on that level, there’s no grip, but there is a level which doesn’t change, which is stable, and which gives coherence and a foundation to the ever-changing world.”
James: Yeah, so there’s the paradox, isn’t it? –
Rick: Yeah. – There’s the paradox.
James: I’m just going to take this out for a second, because I lost the other one.
Rick: Sure, yeah.
James: There you go, back again.
Rick: Good.
James: Yeah. So, I like to use the songs in the retreats. We do a lot of guided meditation, and you take things, go deeper into the mind, so, everything starts to loosen and open up. And then sometimes I like to cheekily slip in a song, so that kind of blows the heart open as well.
Rick: Yeah, it does, it does. It sort of creates a balance.
James: Yeah. Yeah, sowe were getting into this. So now, in the play of our life, we go through the experience we go through. So, right from very young, we have this full, I like to call it a second birth. It’s like when you’re around sort of 18 months, where you’ve, I’ve seen it with my own children, it’s like, there’s this magical world, a bit like what we’re describing in a sense, but you actually don’t have any concepts at all. What I’m talking about is you still retain your concepts, but you see through them. So, they’re downgraded from beliefs to just useful play things. Whereas as a kid, you don’t even have that, it’s just experience. And then it’s just kind of like wondrousness, and everyone’s providing everything for you. So, it’s like a kind of magic world in a sense. And then there’s this big fall, which is when we become a psychological self. So, we start to take on the concepts of our culture and our environment. And we seem to lose this openness, this sense of wholeness. And I actually think, I’ve seen it with my two boys, this kind of rage that we go through,
Rick: the terrible twos.
James: Yeah, I think it’s like, “What the fuck’s happened?” It’s like really going crazy. It’s like absolutely mad. Like what’s been lost this fall? And of course, most people don’t, we don’t understand that. So, when we see our little kid rolling around the floor going crazy, we kind of project forward to seeing a 16 year old, kind of burning houses and, and we try and shut it down. But actually, this is rage that wants to express. And I think in a sense, this is where it all begins, because in losing wholeness in that sense, there can be a sense of inadequacy, like why has this happened to me? And then when we try and then suppress the rage that comes from it, it’s like a confirmation. Oh, sorry, something’s just happened.
Rick: That’s a good analysis. I’ve never heard that before, but it makes a lot of sense to me. I bet you.
James: You still got me, you can still hear me.
Rick: I hear you. I’ll bet you that’s what’s really happening with kids at that age,
James: I think so.
Rick: is they’re just sort of reacting to the extreme shutting down that they have experienced considering. And especially if you have a sort of more esoteric view that we come, we’re born into this life from some in-between state that’s very unbounded and free and vast, and then we kind of come down into the earth plane and it’s very dense and constricted. And, there must definitely be a reaction to that frustration.
James: Yeah, absolutely. There is a way of maybe soothing that process, but I think it’s inevitable. It doesn’t matter how enlightened your parents are, you’re still going to have to go through that. And what I mean by that is, like I would figure my youngest, sometimes he’s three now, but when he was two, sometimes he’d go into one of these rages, for an hour and a half. And I would just sit close to him, make sure he didn’t headbutt anything or didn’t hurt himself. And it was just amazing. After about an hour and a half he would burn out. And then at one time he just stopped, he’d look at me and go, “Oh, dad, can I have a glass of water.” It’s just like done, it’s gone.
Rick: Interesting.
James: He just needed to get it out.
Rick: Yeah.
James: And if it’s suppressed and it’s pushed down then all that energy is stuck in there, you know.
Rick: So what you did there sounds like the right thing to have done. Maybe you could elaborate on that as a father, as a parent.
James: Yeah, I mean, I think…
Rick: Would you say helping the child to feel secure and loved and…
James: I know I wasn’t doing anything. I was just…
Rick: But your presence.
James: Yeah, making sure that he didn’t hurt himself because he’s like rattling around on the floor.
Rick: And you’re sitting there.
James: Yeah, and just holding it, just holding the space basically. Classic, holding the space.
Rick: Whereas if kids get yelled at or abandoned or shut in a room by themselves or something at that stage, it could be quite the opposite of what they need.
James: Yeah, and I don’t mean this as a judgment on anyone, because everyone just does the best that they can do. But maybe if we knew that was what was going on, maybe we’d look at it in a different way. It doesn’t mean our child is going to become some kind of crazy monster when they’re older. They’re just working out this utter rage at what’s happened. But as I say, even if you have this, even if it’s managed in a nice way, and I think there’s certain natural ways that that’s done anyway, like peekaboo, things like that. These games are kind of universal all over the world. It’s like, is the world still there when I open my eyes again? And you’re just kind of testing it. And like every dad knows, kids love being chased. You pretend to be the ogre, the baby thief, and then they run off. And it’s like a way of playing with, “No one’s going to abduct me and run off with me.” It’s okay. Being this separate little thing, it’s okay.” So, it’s fascinating, all this stuff, when you look into it. But in my experience, the conditioning comes in. It’s the environmental, the national, all that conditioning, it comes in. And so here we are, deep down, because of this primary trauma, in a sense, feeling somehow not enough. And then the conditioning comes in and we hide it. We just want to hide it. We just want to build a defense structure around it. So that’s all the beliefs we have, and our looks, how beautiful or ugly we are, how clever or stupid we are, all that stuff, and the roles we play. Mine was to try and be superior, to try and hide this inner discontent. But you see, this is where my little thing comes in, because it’s never enough, Rick, is it? I mean, you can’t do that, because underlying all of it is insecurity, because you know you’re playing a game. So, we’re always trying to escape that discomfort. And so how do we do that? We do it by craving things, whether it’s money, people, lovers, houses, spiritual enlightenment. It’s the same thing, craving or clinging onto what makes us feel safe, or just plain resisting, judging, pushing people away, whatever, that we don’t like or that threatens our sense of self, or just plain escaping, you know, shopping, compulsively shopping.
Rick: I guess one way of explaining it is that we crave fulfillment, the mind wants happiness. And the Upanishads and scriptures like that say that there’s really one source of happiness, and that’s within. The self is a repository of all fulfillments, and that fulfillment we derive from external Objects, is a reflection of that, but it’s not that. It’s like the moon reflects the light of the sun. And so, we go chasing after all these reflections, but they can never be adequate because they’re not the primary source. And if you can find the primary source, then firstly you find that happiness, to put it in simple terms, but secondly your whole relationship to objects changes and they no longer have the sort of compelling quality that they once had, because they’ve been eclipsed by something much brighter, so to speak.
James: Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, but of course if you’ve not been exposed to those teachings, or you don’t know anything about those teachings, what you do is what happened to me – you get stuck in a cycle. So maybe this is going to do it, and then maybe there’s a temporary reprieve, but then you’re back in discomfort again, as a separate me. And you just go round and round and round. I have a friend who killed himself in his early 20s, and he just found no way out of that loop. And so, every time you go round you get a bit more depressed or a bit more disillusioned, and then if you’ve got no other avenue out of that, I mean where do you go? Maybe you just, like some people, just convince themselves that life’s just a bit shit, life’s just boring. Or a friend of mine told me the other day, a kid, grandchild or something, was complaining that they were bored, and his dad’s response was, “Life’s boring! Get used to it!”
Rick: There’s a saying, “Life sucks, then you die.”
James: Exactly. Maybe you convince yourself of that and you just carry on going round and round the wheel. You go and see the football game, have a bit of a buzz on the weekend, go back to your daily grind, and you think that’s just what it is, and you just wait until you die basically.
Rick: Yeah, well I think the more people can hear that that’s not all there is, the better off we’ll all be. And all the great teachers throughout history have tried to tell people that, “Hey, I’ve discovered something great here and you’ve got to check this out,” putting it in contemporary terms, because life is so much more than you realize, and it’s a shame to just squander it on trifles, when there’s this vast ocean of fulfillment that’s right there, as close as your nose.
James: Yeah, I was just thinking when you were saying that, this is where religion is supposed to step in. But of course, all we know is it just becomes another part of the wheel, the cycle. Now you have a religious belief, that’s part of your identity.
Rick: Well I think they all started out with someone who actually was having that experience and talking about it, and then over the centuries they get objectified and they lose the inner core, and then they’re like a body that’s lost its spirit, it’s rotting.
James: Yeah, it’s all there, it’s all there. Like you keep quoting the Upanishads, but it’s all there in the New Testament. When you know what you’re looking for you can find it.
Rick: It jumps right out at you.
James: Yeah, absolutely, yeah, of course.
Rick: There’s a question that came in from Mark Peters in Santa Clara, California. Mark often sends in good questions. This is related to what we were saying earlier. He said, “Why do you think that sight is the primary driver of the imagined sense of self, the sense that I peer out from behind my eyes? Can you speculate as to why don’t people experience that self as existing primarily in the mouth, the nose, the ears, or fingers? Even the language around apprehension is almost exclusively sight driven. Oh, now I see the truth.”
James: Yeah, yeah, it’s definitely the stickiest sense.
Rick: It’s the most predominant.
James: Yeah, it’s the predominant sense, the one we rely on most of all.
Rick: Yeah, for a blind person maybe it would be hearing.
James: Maybe, maybe. It would be an interesting thing to explore, but certainly with the people I work with, seeing is always the catch.
Rick: Yeah.
James: It’s like they can really, even the sense of movement, smell, taste, yeah, it’s all happening. It’s like literally this presence is being that, and as soon as they open their eyes, it’s like, “Zzzz, here I am again, here looking out.” But what also adds to that conviction is, nice that it came up right now actually, is where we’re going, because there’s a sort of density that these patterns that we’re talking about, we’re coming to, they sort of create a density physically which seems to bring a kind of center into the experience. And that married to the sort of perceptual field that seems focused here creates that conviction that we’re in this little fragment of the experience exclusively. Look, for example, I just had an idea. I’m just going to pick this camera up. This room is a bit of a mess.
Rick: Show it around.
James: Here I go, show you around, right? So, look, what’s happening? You’re not moving.
Rick: Right.
James: But if you were sitting in an IMAX cinema right now, as that moves like that, it would be as if you were turning your head. But you, the screen, you haven’t moved, you haven’t turned anywhere. You’re just what you are, like what you always were. And all the colors dance to give the “as if” experience of moving your head. So actually, the visual is exactly the same as all the other sort of sense doorways, if you like. We call it sense doorways, why not? Yeah, but I think the stickiness is because we’re so used to interpreting in that way, and this density of the body that brings in a kind of extra conviction. So good question.
Rick: Yeah, a couple little tidbits on that question. It is said that sight is the most predominant sense, and that’s why people close their eyes when they meditate. And also, it’s said that all the senses have subtler levels to them, like you can have subtle visual perceptions or subtle auditory perceptions and so on. And it’s said that we’re more familiar with the subtler aspects of the sense of hearing, most of us, then we are with the subtler aspects of other senses. And that’s what thoughts are. Thoughts are actually a sound, but a subtler aspect of … using the very same sense with which we hear external sounds, we hear thoughts, so to speak, in the mind. We’re picking up on a subtler aspect of the sense of hearing, and that’s why the use of a mantra is often used in different traditions for transcending the senses altogether, because we’re already at a subtler level if we’re thinking a thought, and we can pick it up from there and drop down all the way. Just a little tidbit.
James: Nice.
Rick: Here’s a question for you from a student of yours. He says, “James is my teacher and of course I feel that he is the best.” This guy’s going to get extra prasad or something.
James: Who’s that?
Rick: Jitendra Bell from Devon asks, “Could you say something about the fine line between a healthy earnestness and longing to come home to one’s true nature?”
James: Yeah, that’s a great question.
Rick: That’s the first part of the question, contrasting that with a willful, “I’m going to get this, damn it,” that kind of attitude.
James: Yeah, so this is great. This is a great question. So, this is where we’re heading. So just like you’ve just been saying, Rick, the way out of this cycle for me, is the way we talk about it in our meetings, is just stop. Just stop. Stop the kind of endless wheel, just stop and we just explore, just as we’ve been doing throughout this interview � first the subject, then the object. We just explore. And then that leads us into this starting to recognize the patterns that we play in life, where these patterns are happening, what’s going on. And if you’re in a relationship or kids, it’s great seeing your patterns, Christ. All your buttons get pushed; everything comes up. And then what you can start to do is you’re tracing it back, like what’s at the root of this? And what you discover – we go to the beach a lot around here, which is quite close to the sea, and there’s a nice analogy. You get these sea anemones, and they’re stuck to the rock, and it’s like this solid kind of splodge of stuff. And then all these tentacles kind of reaching out from there. And so, I see these patterns are like those tentacles, and if you go back -and this is what actually the guided meditations can help with -you’re sort of going into deeper layers of the mind, you can get back to these energetic knots in the mind. So, this is where you discover that guilty, shameful, totally deficient kind of child, if you like. It’s like an energetic holding somewhere in the mind, but also mirrored physically in the body, so you’ll find it physically in the body. So, this is where, like we were just saying, the beauty of what you’ve realized, this presence, is just there, just shining, welcoming, if you like. We could use whatever words. Lovingly welcoming that belief system, that energetic contraction, that holding, to come home, back into wholeness. It’s just welcomed in. And that sounds easy to say, but often with so much resistance to even seeing that contraction, because it’s like being found out, it’s like being revealed. So, what happened for me was, even after all the things we’ve talked about, even after seeing that very clearly, doing this, just kind of seeing patterns, just dropping back, just for the love of it, dropping back deeply, coming to that, really facing that energetic contraction. And this is where that question comes in. I found myself at one point -it’s funny now, I used to actually visually see a shivering child, almost like a …
Rick: Kind of your inner child, so to speak?
James: Yeah, like a fetus almost, like this kind of terrified thing. And I knew it was like a portal into the real depths, and I found myself one day just going like in the meditations, voice came, “Show me! Show me! Show me!”
Rick: Sounds like that two-year-old there.
James: Yeah, but it was this really strong kind of drive, it was that drive that I’d had my whole life. And bizarrely, it did show me, and what it showed me was that drive. It was that drive that was in a way like Newton’s third law, action-reaction, what you push, pushes back. And it was that drive, like, “Show me! Show me!” And it showed me, “Ah, that’s it. That’s what I’m still clinging on to. That’s what’s energizing that knot.” And in seeing that, it was just like a softening, just an allowing for it to be however it wanted to be. And then things opened up. I could go further there.
Rick: I find there’s an interesting balance that one learns to strike between earnestness and surrender. Patanjali in his Yoga Sutras talks about yogis with vehement intensity, being those who realize most quickly, and yet that could lead a person to struggle and strain, and be very unnatural and beat oneself over the head, figuratively speaking. And yet, the crowd that we were talking about earlier, who say, “Ah, there’s nothing to do,” they could sit around forever waiting for something to happen. So, there’s a kind of a balancing act that one, I say, kind of develops into, at least in my own experience. I’m just totally enthusiastic about this stuff. My wife will tell you, it’s all I think about. I read books about it all the time. I interview people. I just love it. And yet, I have no sense whatsoever, although I used to, of “I’ve got to have this or I’ll die.” There’s not sort of a trying to break down the gates of heaven kind of …
James: Well, that’s the difference.
Rick: Yeah, it’s more like really enjoying the ride here, and I love it, and I’m enjoying the scenery and totally eager and interested, and yet at the same time, I’m not in the driver’s seat, and so I’m just relaxing and enjoying the ride.
James: Yeah, great. You’re in your zone.
Rick: Yeah, if that’s a good metaphor.
James: Rick, you’re in your zone.
Rick: Yeah. So, there’s a balance, and people who are struggling and straining, maybe lighten up a bit. Go see a movie, listen to some music. People who are doing nothing, better do something. Read a book, get focused, go to a Satsang. There’s some kind of a mixture you can find.
James: Yeah, well, I would say you have to keep struggling and straining until you fundamentally realize it’s not getting you anywhere.
Rick: Maybe that, yeah.
James: Yeah, that’s the way I see it. You can’t advise. Maybe you could suggest something, but we have to see it for ourselves. We have to realize it for ourselves. I think people have probably been telling me for years, “James, you’re so driven.”
Rick: “Just lighten up, dude.”
James: “Yeah, come on, just loosen up.” But I couldn’t hear it because I had to be driven in my mind, because drive was how I did.
Rick: Are you driven now in some way, shape, or form?
James: Yes. I’m a bit like you, Rick, in that I love this stuff, and I love meeting people and holding meetings, retreats. I love music, playing songs. Yeah, and actually in a way, this is where it leads, actually, because when you can drop, I call this cycle we’re talking about, the cycle of reactivity. So, when you’re not functioning in that way anymore, when you’re not living a reactive life – and most of us are living reactive lives, so everything we’re doing, the motivation is to escape that discomfort often. And so, when that’s not an issue anymore, then you have the opportunity to actually authentically act. So, you’re not driven by reactivity, and so then the stuff you’re doing, the stuff I’m doing, it can really blossom, because it’s not being restrained by this kind of knot in the psyche.
Rick: Yeah, it’s not being done out of a sense of emptiness or lack.
James: Exactly, it’s just celebration.
Rick: Yeah, it’s being done out of a sense of fullness, and
James: yeah, celebration –
Rick: yeah, celebration, best word.
James: Yeah, celebrating the joy, the wonder, joy and wonder of being.
Rick: Yeah.
James: Yeah, I just want to add a little bit to what I just said then, because I don’t really talk about experiences very much, because I think it can be so misleading, and I certainly had seen that when I was really voraciously seeking, and people would go on talking forever about this awakening experience. But I think it’s worth just mentioning something here, because when I saw through that pattern, what opened up was quite extraordinary. It was like, people who may be going through this or have been through it, it might be nice for them to hear, it was just like demonic destruction, like just devastation.
Rick: What was?
James: I get a lot of images when I’m sitting, and just like crazy demons kind of ripping people apart, and planets, and just like total, utter devastation.
Rick: Sounds like the 11th chapter of the Bhagavad Gita.
James: Oh right, okay, I must read it. But like hell realms or something, it’s almost like all the repressed stuff in the mind just going, “Pffft!” And this is what I mean about knowing what you are, it’s like the smiling Buddha, you just sit there and it all just does whatever it wants to do, but I mean, Christ is full-on.
Rick: That’s what confronted him before his enlightenment actually, the Buddha, all these sorts of demons and wild stuff was coming at him and he was just sitting there like a rock, “I’m not going to let this sway me.”
James: Yeah, and going back to what we were saying earlier, if you had done it the other way around, that would just be so terrible. There’s no way you could stay with that, you would just run off, you’d think you’d gone mad and just check yourself into the nearest sanatorium.
Rick: People do.
James: Yeah, absolutely, good point.
Rick: Yeah, so how do you support yourself? Are you a full-time spiritual teacher or do you have some kind of …
James: I am now, yeah.
Rick: Got enough activity with that?
James: Just about, just about scraping it at the moment.
Rick: You look well-fed, you’re not starving to death, got a few mouths to feed there.
James: Yeah, no, it’s good, it’s going well. But just to finish that off, it’s never finished, this is an endless deepening like we were saying earlier. So even after that experience, and actually after that there was a kind of bit of a collective suffering thing, tapping into some greater suffering.
Rick: People go through that, they feel like, “I’ve worked through my stuff, now I seem to be processing the world”.
James: Something like that, I don’t know what was going on there. And then lots of biblical images like Jesus on the cross, and then the last layer for me was just fucking rage, like really vicious rage. I like this image of a metal fist, a huge metal fist just like pounding.
Rick: Were you expressing it overtly or were you just sort of processing it inwardly?
James: No, no, I was just sitting there, it was all going on in the mind. And that was the message, “Why hast thou forsaken me?” It’s like, “Why the fuck?” And then of course that’s when everything just, for me it was just light, it was just nothing but light, and the sense of being – this is interesting as well – being embraced by the Father. So, whether that’s because in my own life there’s a sense of needing to be embraced, loved by my own father, and then Presence being the miracle it is, it kind of mirrors what’s needed somehow. But that was the kind of … where it finished.
Rick: Yeah, so this is interesting. I had kind of glossed over this during most of the interview because it sounded like you were just going to non-duality meetings and sort of working through this in your mind, but it sounds like you really went through an inner meditative cooking process, in which you actually sat there and didn’t get dissuaded by all the stuff that was coming up, but plowed through it, burned through it, and eventually broke through into the clear.
James: Yeah, and all of that happened after the non-duality stuff, you see. That’s why it’s really important to make that point. So, you can see the reality of experience, the nature of reality, and you keep going. Then you go down into those depths. And what was really beautiful actually, after that had happened, I could see that drive pattern occasionally sort of fade in, like trying to reassert itself. And it’s almost like a stick. I could see if you pick any of it up, any of the pattern up, you get the whole enchilada, as they say, you get the knot and everything. And this is really interesting because what happens is the love, the love of being what you are, is so strong that you lose the taste for picking up the pattern. You just lose the taste. It’s like sugar in your tea. So, you have two lumps and you go down to one, and then you go down to none, and you get used to it, and it’s like, “Yes, this is what I like.” And someone you haven’t seen for a while gives you a cup with two sugars in it and you’re like, “Ahh, thank you.” You just lose the taste for it. And I think that’s … so it comes from love, not from this.
Rick: So in that metaphor you’re saying you lose the taste for old patterns of reacting and behaving and so on and so forth.
James: Yeah, and the important thing is to say, I’m not saying it’s done. It’s a done deal. It’s like, “That’s it, end of story.” I think that’s a really big misnomer. I know there’s always … who knows? It’s an infinite mind, you know? Anything can happen. It could pop up as anything, you know? It could be anything. So, it’s just another idea, “Oh, it’s done,” another idea, it’s another idea.
Rick: I’ve told this joke before. My friend Francis Bennett likes to say, “How do you know you’re done? Did someone stick a fork in you?” But I think this point you’re making is an interesting one in that what you’re saying essentially in a nutshell, to reiterate, is that an awakening happens and then it’s as if the vehicle within which that awakening happens, the old vehicle is no longer quite adequate to support it, and so the vehicle has to be cleaned and has to be transformed and has to be purged of all kinds of stuff that no longer belongs there in this more awakened state. So, all that stuff has to get blown out and it can be pretty intense.
James: Yeah, yeah, although the vehicle thing is a bit … it’s a tricky one, isn’t it? Because then we’re back into consciousness is in here.
Rick: Yeah, but I mean whatever this is, it’s being lived through a nervous system, through a psyche, through a human mechanism. It’s somehow supporting this experience. Consciousness exists irrespective of the mechanism. It’s always existed, it’s the eternal foundation of the universe, but if it’s going to be a living reality, then it’s a living reality through a person. And when we talk about progress, we’re not talking about consciousness progressing, we’re talking about the capacity to live it progressing, and that may necessitate a lot of transformation.
James: Yeah, I hear you completely, but where this is taking me is …
Rick: Well, there’s a question someone asked, but I don’t want to take you off track.
James: Yeah, I mean it’s similar to the questions you were saying before about lots of different … like the fox and the squirrel looking at the tree and the person looking at the tree. So, I had that classic question, and it’s an obvious question really, if you’re saying this is all an appearance and there’s no experience of a material external reality that this is representing, then you can get yourself into this kind of area where you’re verging on solipsism now. It’s like, “There’s only this.” So, Rick is just colors and sounds. And so, this is like, “Whoa, where’s this going?” So, I found myself looking into that really deeply, and what it seems to come down to is for me the guiding light is always direct experience. We think direct experience is saying, “Oh, Rick’s just colors and sounds. He hasn’t got thoughts because I’m not directly experiencing them.” But what we’re doing there is not direct experience. We’re still conceptualizing. We’re still talking about Ricks and James’s, even though we might think now they’re not material things, they’re kind of consciousness things, but we’re still piecing up life into bits.
Rick: It seems like we’re also placing our perceptual angle at the center of the universe, as if the existence of everything else depends upon whether or not we perceive it.
James: Yeah, yeah. So, then people talk about this. What I’m doing is taking thought right to the end here. So, it goes back to the similar question before when the guy was talking about the perceptual field. If we’re actually true to direct experience, then we’re not cutting out things anymore. So, what creates the seeming perceptual field, if we’re not cutting those things out, there’s not a this and a that placed here in relation to this,we’re kind of dissolving that overlay. What we’re left with we could say is, appearing colors, appearing sounds, sensations, thoughts, feelings. So, I’m not putting any labels on them as things. Stay with me. But then you could say even those things I’ve just said, like colors, sounds, those are labels. So, if we let go of those labels too, we could say there’s one appearance appearing.
Rick: And even appearance is a label.
James: Exactly, because then you have to go to the concept of a somewhere else where the appearance appears from and disappears too. So, in the end that falls apart. All you’re left with is pure consciousness, like being, is-ness, whatever you want. And when you’re at that point none of these questions can arise, because the question of others can only arise out of the conviction of a myself. So, without stepping into any of those conceptualizations, here you are. What’s left is you, capital Y-you that is, presence, being. And there’s a real beauty in that, because even to call it presence of course is now to label it, so then that’s already putting a circle around it. So, you’re just left with just like speechless in wonder at what is. Now then we can dance. If you want to put a model on it, go for it, enjoy it, put a model on it, like all the models we were just speaking about earlier. This is where it led for me. It’s like, go for it, big time, come up with a really great model, just go for it. And it happens that the conventional model that we live by has big flaws, and the big flaws are that we immediately see ourselves as separate little units rather than this global consciousness. So, you could play with that, you could try and introduce a completely new world model into a new paradigm. Just like we talk about the earth is flat, the earth is spherical, the sun moves around the earth, no, the earth moves around the sun. These huge paradigm shifts that have happened throughout history.
Rick: But they didn’t happen overnight.
James: Didn’t happen overnight, absolutely.
Rick: People were burned at the stake for trying to introduce them, so these things take a while.
James: Absolutely. But the point that I want to make is, they’re models, and that’s beautiful and that’s wonderful, and we can play with that, but as soon as we start to invest, and that model gets upgraded to a belief, then we’re going to find ourselves back in the same position again.
Rick: Yeah, I think the safeguard is be true to your own experience and don’t settle for beliefs, and if something is presented that you aren’t experiencing, take it as a hypothesis, which means something interesting to explore and you’ll see whether it works out or not. But if you start hanging on believing things that you don’t actually experience, then that has created a whole lot of trouble over the years for humanity.
James: Absolutely. That’s going back to that Chinese proverb that’s right at the start, you know? It’s like, “You’ve got to involve me, I have to see it, I have to see it.”
Rick: Yeah, and we should add that all the great religious leaders throughout history and spiritual leaders, they didn’t care what you believed, they wanted you to experience what they were experiencing, not believe what they were saying. They wanted you to have the experience they were having.
James: Yeah, and if you follow your actual experience right to the end, that’s where you end up. And then to say anything about it is, “As soon as I speak, I’m going into a model,” and that’s okay, that’s beautiful. Look at the conversation, the rich conversation we can have, playing with these ideas and concepts and exchanging them. And the baby, the pre-second birth psychological self-baby, can’t do that. So, it’s part of the game, if you like, part of the play, part of the celebration.
Rick: Let me hit you with another question that David Pinney from Wales sent in, and then maybe you could sing another song and then we’ll wrap it up because we’re getting down to about two hours or so. So, if there’s anything else you want to say that you haven’t said, say it also before you sing the song. David says, “The phrase ‘awareness of awareness’ always baffles me. I see it as potentially leading to an infinite regress. Do you see this phrase as having any useful content?”
James: Yeah, I think it’s useful for people to rest. We were talking right at the beginning when you start to realize that there’s a knowing or awareness here, it’s knowing sounds, sensations, thoughts. And what often happens is when we say, “Be aware of the awareness,” people start looking for something because that’s what they’re used to doing, looking for something. But of course, you’ll never find it as something because it is always aware of the something. So, it’s actually, funny enough, the cessation of that movement of looking and the kind of resting, the softening, the easing, and just kind of dropping into what’s already here, what you already are, that you don’t need to look out to see because you already are it. So, I actually prefer the word ‘knowing’ because it’s like knowing is what you are, you are knowing. Knowing is the substance of what you are, so it doesn’t need something to step outside itself to look in on itself. So, there is no need for infinite regress because the substance of knowing is knowing, so it’s knowing, it’s doing knowing. But this is the real tricky thing because we’re so conditioned into focusing. Be aware of awareness, let’s focus into awareness, it’s the opposite, it’s a relaxation.
Rick: It’s a relaxing in, yes. I think this also has pertinence to Ramana Maharshi’s self-inquiry thing. A lot of people hear that, and they start, “Alright, who am I? Where am I?” And you get this whole inner searching thing, looking for a something, whereas I think really, what he might have advocated was just what you described, a sort of a relaxing in where the subject-object split can just dissolve in presence or in wholeness. Do you want to take us out with another song? Whether it be ukulele or guitar?
James: Yeah, let’s mix it up, let’s have a bit of ukulele. We might do a rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” like we were doing before.
Rick: Yeah, before the interview we were singing that, “Hawaiian guys, somewhere over the rainbow.”
James: Yeah, this one is kind of related to what we were just talking about in terms of going in. (James strums ukulele) When your heart is breaking, and your world is shaking. When you want to run a million miles away. When your ground is crumbling, with every step you’re stumbling. When you’ve got nothing left to hold on to. Just feel, just feel it all coming on. When you feel it so deeply and open completely, you’re home again, as the love that you’ve been longing for. When all you see is madness. When all you feel is sadness. When you don’t believe in anything anymore. When the pain is aching, and your body is shaking. When you don’t see a reason for living anymore. Just feel, just feel it all coming on. When you feel it so deeply and open completely, you’re home again, as the love that you’ve been longing for. Just feel it coming on. When you feel it so deeply, and open completely, you’re home again. When all you feel is sadness. When all you feel is sadness. When you feel it so deeply and open completely, you’re home again. You’re home again, as the love you’ve been longing for.
Rick: That was nice.
James: Thanks Rick.
Rick: I really enjoyed it. And I really enjoyed this whole interview. It’s kind of like I feel like we’re old buddies or something. We’re having this casual conversation.
James: Yeah, I feel the same way.
Rick: It’s great.
James: That’s the funny thing with this stuff, isn’t it? I go all over the place and it’s always familiar.
Rick: Yeah, yeah.
James: Always.
Rick: It’s a nice thing. Okay, so let me wrap it up then. So, I’ve been speaking with James Eaton and apologies to those who … I noticed some message came in, “Hey, was this only 14 minutes long?” So, somebody didn’t pick up the streaming again after it got interrupted, but the whole thing will be on the web soon, within a week or so, with all the glitches edited out. And if you want to get in touch with James, I’ll be putting a page up for him on backgap.com, as I always do, with links to his website and whatever else he wants me to link to. And in addition to doing stuff locally there in the UK, do you do Skype sessions with people all over the world and stuff?
James: I do actually, yeah. You can go to the website and find out about that and connect up.
Rick: Okay, good. People can do that.
James: I do meetings and retreats in parts of Europe as well, if you’re in Europe. I haven’t been to the States yet, but maybe someday, I don’t know.
Rick: Yeah, following Rupert’s footsteps, you’ll be over him. So good. So next week I will be interviewing one of the founders of Findhorn, or is it pronounced “Findhorn,” I think because it’s Findhorn.
James: Ah, I’m there next week.
Rick: Are you? You’re going to talk up there or something?
James: Yeah, I’ve got a three-day retreat.
Rick: Oh, cool. Yeah, I’m embarrassed to say the guy’s name has slipped my mind at the moment, although I had it on the tip of my tongue. But anyway, I’ll be interviewing him next week. After that I’ll be going off to the Science and Non-Duality Conference and doing a bunch of things with Adyashanti and others, and those will all be going up on Batgap as well. So, thanks for listening or watching, and we’ll see you next week. Thanks James.
James: Thanks.
Rick: Talk to you later.
James: Cheers.