Adyashanti and Francis Bennett Interview

Summary

Adyashanti and Francis Bennett explore Jesus and Buddha as complementary symbols of awakening: Buddha points toward transcendence, while Christ points toward embodied compassion and participation in life. They discuss how awakening can hold both inner freedom and genuine human pain without reducing truth to either-or.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can Buddhist and Christian teachings be understood together?
• What is the relationship between spiritual awakening and suffering?
• Can someone be inwardly free while experiencing grief, pain, or illness?
• How can spirituality help us engage with life rather than escape it?

Key takeaways

• Buddha represents transcendence, while Christ represents compassionate embodiment.
• Truth can hold seemingly opposite dimensions at the same time.
• Awakening does not eliminate inevitable human suffering.
• Spacious awareness can embrace grief without denying or suppressing it.
• True freedom gives us courage to participate fully in life.
• Stories and symbols can convey spiritual truths beyond formal doctrine.

Transcript

Rick: My name is Rick Archer, and I’m the creator and host of the interview show Buddha at the Gas Pump, which is an online video and podcast of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’m going to moderate tonight’s event with Adyashanti and Francis Bennett. The theme of the talk tonight will be the embrace of Jesus and Buddha.

I just discovered that my friend Francis, who I’ve been a dear friend of for years, is an artist. He painted that picture there. I didn’t know that. He’s a musician. He took ballet for 15 years. He’s, as Adyashanti said a minute ago, a Renaissance man. So it’s beautiful. I learned something new every day.

So I want to introduce the speakers briefly. Adyashanti is an American-born spiritual teacher devoted to serving the awakening of all beings. His teachings are an open invitation to stop, inquire, and recognize what is true and liberating at the core of all existence.

I’ll give a little bit longer introduction to Francis because you’re probably less familiar with him than you are with Adya. In 2010, while in the middle of a church service in his monastery in Montreal—and Francis lived in monasteries for the better part of 30 years, Trappist and Benedictine, in the United States, Canada, and Europe—he suddenly experienced what he has come to call a radical perceptual shift in consciousness, in which he discovered the ever-present presence of spacious, pure awareness.

He came to see that this awareness is actually the unchanging essence of who he really is and always has been: the Supreme Self talked about by many sages and saints from many spiritual traditions down through the ages. He also came to see simultaneously that this vast, infinite sense of presence at the center of his being, and at the center of the being of everyone else on the planet, is actually not at all separate from the presence of God, which he had been looking for during his many years as a monk and spiritual seeker.

Francis is now living a “new incarnation” as a spiritual teacher. He offers a blend of the Buddhist traditions he studied—he was an ordained Buddhist monk for two years—the contemplative Christian mystical tradition, which he lived during his many years in monastic life, as well as the Hindu Advaita Vedanta teaching of Sri Ramana Maharshi, who has had a profound influence on Francis.

So again, the theme of tonight’s talk is the embrace of Jesus and Buddha. I would like to ask Francis—first, he’s going to start with a chant, and then he’ll give us a synopsis of what is going to be discussed.

Taking refuge in our true nature

Francis: The chant that I want to share with you is one that I did when I was ordained in the Theravada Buddhist tradition. Every day, it was part of the regular chanting we did, and it’s called the Namo Tassa: homage to the enlightened one, the worthy one, the fully awakened one. Then we took refuge every day in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha.

Tonight we’re talking about Jesus and Buddha, the embrace of Jesus and Buddha. When we take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, we’re really taking refuge in our own true nature—not necessarily even the historical Buddha, Gautama, who lived in ancient India, but the Buddha nature within us, our own Christ nature, our own Buddha nature, which I think are really the same thing called by different names.

This is a little chant that I thought we’d start with, and maybe we’ll end with a Christian Gregorian chant just to round it out. The first one is the Namo Tassa and the refuge. So we can chant that.

[Chanting]

[Silence]

Rick: Do you want to tell us what that means, or should we just stay with the sound of it?

Francis: It means homage to the worthy one, the awakened one, the fully enlightened one. Then the refuge is, “I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the Dharma, I take refuge in the Sangha.”

So the Buddha, as I said, is our own true nature, the Buddha nature within all of us. The Dharma is the teaching of the enlightened ones, all those who have come to understand their true nature. And the Sangha is the community of enlightened ones, which includes all of us. So that’s the meaning of that.

Rick: Now, why don’t you give us just a synopsis? We may veer off in other directions, and I’ll be asking questions, you’ll be asking questions. But as you anticipate it, what do you feel like we’ll be covering tonight, or you would like to cover?

Francis: Well, I guess the desire to do this came out of my own experience of Buddha and Jesus. As Rick said, this is an icon. I painted icons in the monastery. This is not a very traditional one, of course, because it’s Buddha and Jesus together. It’s based on an icon of Saint Peter and Paul embracing. So I based the positions of the figures in the icon on that, but I made it Jesus and Buddha.

The reason I did that was because they’ve both been archetypes and symbols of awakening in my own life. My sense over time, as I’ve reflected on it and reflected on my own life journey, is that the Buddha, for me, in many ways represents the transcendent awakening—the awakening up and out of the merely human kind of identity that we usually primarily identify with. So the Buddha represents that transcendent movement up and out.

Then the Christ represents the immanent movement back down and into. So the Buddha transcends samsara, the cycle of birth and death in this phenomenal world. Then the Christ actually enters back into samsara, with a compassionate heart of mercy, acting in the world in altruistic, compassionate ways.

For me, both the Buddha and the Christ represent the full circle of awakening that has a transcendent movement and an immanent movement.

Both of them were really central figures in my life, and I feel a great love and appreciation for both of them. They’re both major teachers for me. Maybe you have something to say about that.

Adya: Well, I think one of the things that Francis and I share, from our different early religious orientations, is that part of Francis—even when he was in the monastery—was also doing some very intensive and serious Buddhist meditation practice with a number of really fantastic Buddhist teachers.

When I was in Buddhism, when I was a Zen student, I curiously enough found myself at some point naturally reaching out into the Christian mystics, because they were providing something—or I found something there—that I couldn’t find in a way that was obvious or resonated for me in Zen. For me, it was really the discovery of the spiritual heart. Of course, it is in Zen, but it’s in a sort of a different form.

Then it just snowballed from there. As I’ve often said, strangely enough, I actually came to understand a lot of the Buddhist teachings through the study of some of the Christian mystics. Often it goes the other way around. People are involved in Western religion and reach out to the East for something. I was in an Eastern religion and reaching out to the West to fill in what was, for me, a gap.

We’ve both had this experience. Francis, of course, was a Christian monk for about 30 years, and I was involved in my Zen practice. We both reached out into each other’s traditions for our own reasons. I think that’s also where we really meet. It’s part of what formed and informed our friendship: we both have such a profound love of both of these traditions that we both participated in with some depth.

Over the years we’ve known each other, we’ve talked about—and I think you’ll probably get into this, Rick, too—how I think that they symbolize, in almost a mythological sense, two different spiritual movements.

I think you said it very well: the traditional transcendent movement of Buddhism as a whole really is, even in the image of the Buddha in a seated meditation posture, telling us something central about that tradition.

Then, of course, in the Christian tradition, I also think of it as a down-and-in tradition, even though I sometimes find people find that a little bit confusing because a lot of Christian theology is very up and out, very transcendent. A lot of that is actually Greek philosophy, which informed it.

Whereas Jesus and his life and his teaching—the actual story itself—I think is a very embodied form of spirituality, a way to embrace the sorrows of the world. It’s almost like you overcome them by fully embracing them, fully diving in.

I think these two traditions hold places for each of us, individually, that are very close and very dear. I think they also hold, almost mythologically, different places in the greater story of spirituality.

Transcendence, embodiment, and suffering

Rick: I think, yes. You led into the question I was thinking of. I don’t have either a Christian or a Buddhist background; I have more of a, I guess you’d say, a Hindu one—the Shankaracharya tradition. But from my uninformed perspective, Buddhism seems to be about getting out of suffering once and for all.

Christianity seems to talk about suffering a lot. Some of the great Christian saints suffered terribly and didn’t even reveal that they were suffering. They actually almost seemed to say, “Bring it on. Give me more, because this somehow purifies me or helps me,” or something.

So would that relate to the up-and-out versus down-and-in thing that you were talking about, or not?

Francis: Well, like Adya just said, my sense is that actually both traditions have both the up and out and the down and in. Both have a transcendent aspect or dimension to their path, and both have an immanent, more embodied dimension.

In my mind and heart, the Buddha is more of an archetype of transcendence for me personally, and the Christ is more of an archetype of the immanent. It’s interesting, though, because I think the truth in general—truth with a capital T—is a subtle, nuanced reality. It’s a living reality. And it’s not just something that has a black-and-white flavor to it.

Often, if you state something as a truth, you can see the opposite side of that coin in some way. The whole truth has various dimensions to it, almost like different facets of a diamond that make up the whole diamond.

For me, this whole theme of Jesus and Buddha, the embrace of Jesus and Buddha, is essentially pointing to that reality, that Truth about truth. That Truth is not just a one-sided thing. It’s not an either/or kind of proposition. It’s always both/and. It’s always including something that seems paradoxically almost the opposite.

The more my own clarity and awakening unfolds, the more I see that over and over again. I just see that the truth is not one-dimensional. It’s three-dimensional at least, and maybe four- or five-dimensional. I don’t know. For me, the whole images of Jesus and Buddha are symbols of that.

You know, I used to be—I mean, I was raised an Irish Catholic. I entered a monastic life at a very young age. If you had come across me in my early twenties, I would have seemed very clear about what I believed and what I thought. I thought I pretty much had it figured out by the time I was twenty-three or twenty-four.

I’d gone to college. I had a degree in philosophy. I’d studied theology. I’d gone through my religious formation. I thought I had it all figured out. But the more deeply I went into this exploration of truth, the more I realized that I could say more about what I didn’t know than what I knew.

And so I think that this topic of Jesus and Buddha, in a way, is just a symbol. It’s like a mythic symbol, almost, you could say, of our own journey, which I think does involve a transcendent movement and a more embodied movement.

That’s why I thought it might be valuable to reflect on that and what that looks like in our lives, rather than just think about the historical Buddha and Jesus. How have we experienced that in our lives, this movement of transcendence and this movement of immanence?

Adya: Yeah. I think that these two sort of archetypes—because that’s how I kind of see them in a way—these two archetypes are, as all archetypes really are, pointing to lived realities within us.

We all, I think, resonate with different things at different points in our journey. What we resonate with actually tells us very much about where we are in our own unfolding, in our own journey.

I think one of the reasons we like this sort of subject is because, in both of these traditions, where one is a little weaker, the other is a little stronger. Where the other is a little bit weaker, the other one’s really strong, even to the point that the Buddhist teachings can read a bit like a doctor’s prescription. You know what I mean? They’re very, very precise, very well thought out, very repetitive.

There’s this whole way that it’s all laid out, which is actually quite beautiful in its own right. The thing that I’ve liked also about what I always just call the “Jesus story” is that stories themselves can live in us in ways that just straight doctrine cannot.

Everybody’s heard the story of Jesus, or they’ve heard the story of Buddha. These are just such well-known, iconic images. I think a story can convey things that a straight teaching cannot convey. It can bring things along, which I think is one of the things that, in our modern day, we’ve also forgotten.

We think, “Oh, a myth just means something that’s not true.” Like equating it with somebody telling you a lie—they’re telling you a myth. But they’re actually not. A myth is an encoded form of truth.

I think there’s a reason why either the Jesus story or the Buddhist story resonates with people, right? They touch something. That’s what these archetypal images do.

And like I said, I think they are corrective, almost. In Buddhism, you can get so much about the ending of suffering that you can actually start to make this mistake—I think most people do—which is that spirituality is about the elimination of all forms of suffering. And that’s just, number one, ridiculous. But that’s a very prevalent idea.

Rick: Speaking as someone who’s just recovering from a nasty flu.

Adya: Yeah, right. Right. And yet, we all have that instinct to, certainly at the very least, minimize the unnecessary suffering. I think that’s really what Buddha’s talking about: that there is this immensity of human suffering that is actually optional.

I think Jesus’ story confronts us with, “And there is also suffering that is not optional.”

Francis: That’s inevitable.

Adya: Inevitable. And if you’re going to jump in and play this game, you can’t really play it well and be in it in order to never suffer. Because to do that, sometimes we have to start closing either our minds down or our hearts down, and we have to start suppressing a little bit.

Then you have the balancing image of a Jesus who just sort of fearlessly throws himself into situations where he will suffer. You know what I mean? There’s no attempt not to suffer.

In fact, he doesn’t even really talk about the kingdom of heaven being a place where you’ll never, ever, ever, ever have anything remotely like a bad day again.

Francis: Probably that day on the cross was one of those times that wasn’t five-star.

Adya: No, certainly. I’ve often thought—I wonder if anybody… In fact, I’ve told rooms of people, I’ve questioned rooms of people, I’ve put this question out there: “If you could actually have whatever your version of total liberation is, except your life would look very much like Jesus’ life looked, how many people would sign up for that?”

(Laughter)

I think it’s kind of—there’s something humorous about it, but there’s also something that can get us to reflect and go, “What is my relationship to this whole thing?” Is that the end? Is that the be-all and end-all? Is that really what this is simply about, or is there something else?

Of course, I can see Jesus and the Buddha, by the way, both whispering in someone’s ear, “It’s also about love.” Or I can hear Buddha saying, “Don’t forget, it’s about compassion. It’s not only about you never having a bad day.”

It’s about what it means to have a realization that gives one the freedom and the confidence and the courage to throw oneself into life, rather than trying to look for an escape hatch from life.

Because those are two different kinds of freedom.

Francis: Yeah.

Adya: You know? There are two different qualities, I think, of freedom.

Rick: Francis was talking a minute ago about that. We are sort of—what did you use the word, multidimensional or multifaceted? Those paradoxical truths at different levels of reality can be lived simultaneously.

And in light of that, my former teacher was once being interviewed on the BBC alongside the abbot of Downside, a Christian abbot.

Francis: Basil Hume?

Rick: I don’t know who his name was.

Francis: He was the abbot of Downside.

Rick: This was back in the ’60s. My teacher proclaimed, “Christ never suffered.” And the abbot of Downside didn’t like the sound of that.

But what he meant was that, obviously, Christ’s body went through something horrific. But he said, if he was really Christ, if he was really established in the bliss of the Self and the universal spirit—whatever we want to call it—then it’s possible to be so established in that way that, despite what’s happening to the body, you’re untouched by it.

It’s being felt on some level, but simultaneously, on some other level, somehow one is not—that universal consciousness is not touched. Is there anything in your personal experience, either or both of you, like when you just had the flu? Was there some dimension that didn’t have the flu?

Adya: Yeah. Sure there is. And I say that casually because it’s just the background of my life. So I’m not going through having the flu and going, “Okay, now let me see if there’s a part of me that’s not—”

Rick: You wouldn’t have to think about it.

Adya: No, I wouldn’t. So it’s very, very sort of—not reflective. I mean, I’m not reflecting on all of it. If I do reflect on it, then sure, there’s always something that’s okay, that’s not affected.

But personally, I always hesitate. I always go, “Okay, hmm. Am I ready to—would I be ready to sign on to the statement that your teacher made?” I’m not so sure that I would.

Rick: Yeah.

Francis: Yeah.

Adya: I think a lot of it is a matter of degree. If you take the most enlightened person in the world and you tie one hand and pull it in a direction, tie the other one, and have two cars move in opposite directions, pulling them apart, I don’t know that the person is going to be sitting there in a state of nervo-corpus somati, with their body being torn to pieces, and be in a state where they’re very much untouched.

So I think these things can have a truth. They’re pointing to a truth—that there is something that’s always, always okay. And yet, I think Jesus would have definitely failed the test that your teacher gave him, because even contemplating what he was going to go through was enough to bring him to—

Francis: Drops of blood.

Adya: —to drops of blood and be in tears and be begging his disciples for their support. “Can you stay with me? Can you be with me? I’m just about to go through this terrible, terrible, terrible thing.”

So I think sometimes when I hear phrases—that’s a good example—I always try to ask, “Okay, what are they pointing toward? What’s the point that’s being tried and being made? And is it necessary to take this as completely and absolutely literal?”

As much as human beings would love to take it as completely and absolutely literal, because human beings are sort of hooked up not to want to suffer.

Rick: Yeah.

Adya: You know?

Rick: Well, for instance, when Ramana was dying of cancer and screaming in pain, his disciples were expressing their concern. And he—I don’t know verbatim what he said, but it was basically, “Don’t worry, I’m okay in here.”

Their external perception of him, and what they imagined they would be experiencing if they were going through what he was going through, were quite different from his subjective experience.

Adya: Yeah. It reminds me of what Shunryu Suzuki went through when he was dying of cancer. He was a Zen master who started San Francisco Zen Center.

At one point, when his cancer—which, as is often the case, had become very, very painful for him—and his students could see him struggling, although he tried to function right up to the very end, he told them something that corresponds to what you said, Rick.

When you see me suffer, don’t worry about me, because it’s only Buddha suffering.

I thought that was a really beautiful choice of words, because he wasn’t denying what he was experiencing, and it was very powerful, but it wasn’t causing him to fracture.

Francis: To deny or shut down.

Adya: To deny or to shut down, right. He could still be very much in touch with, “Yeah, this is… okay, this is Buddha suffering.”

🎵 Making room for heartbreak

Francis: I just recently had an interesting experience. I lost my brother. My brother died. We’re twins, and he was the last person in my immediate family. So that was a big deal for me. I never thought my brother would die in his fifties. It just wasn’t in my plan, my life plan, but it happened.

I remember talking to you the day he died and saying to Adya, “It’s funny. On one level, I am fine with this. He’s died, and I accept that, and that’s the way it is. And my heart is completely broken. Both are true, you know?”

It’s infinitely large, and it’s big enough to hold whatever comes.

I think the human intellect, the human mind, wants it to be either-or, doesn’t it? We want it to be either you’re completely untouched or you’re absolutely overwhelmed with suffering.

I think what it is, is that when we awaken, when we really come to understand who we really are on the deepest level, who we are on the level of the Christ, who we are on the level of the Buddha, we’re suddenly in a vast, spacious place. It’s infinitely large, and it’s big enough to hold whatever comes. It’s absolutely and unconditionally open. So whatever comes is embraced. Whatever comes is completely accepted, unconditionally.

And that, in the human experience, in case you hadn’t noticed, includes pain, sorrow, heartbreak, tragedy, disease, death—all those things.

I think we want it to be either-or. If you’re awakened, that’s not going to touch you at all. You’re going to be this stoical kind of person who rises above it all. That’s what this whole evening is really reflecting on: We need the transcendence. We need to find that place of spaciousness, but we also need to be open to everything that life puts on our plate, even when it’s difficult.

Losing my brother was, I think, the most difficult thing I’ve ever experienced. I think it was more difficult than the loss of my parents, because my parents were old, you know? I lost my parents. My mom—I was fifty when she died, and she was ninety-one. I expected to lose her. I didn’t expect my brother to die in his fifties. My dad also was in his late eighties.

Like you say, on one level, there was a place where I was at peace. There was a place where it was all fine. It was all okay. And on another level, my heart was completely broken. So I think both are true.

Adya: Yeah, that certainly corresponds to my experience.

Different maps, one reality

Rick: You were talking about stories a little while ago… Excuse me. We know that nothing much was written down about Jesus until several—I don’t know—fifty, one hundred, a couple hundred years after his death.

Francis: Eighty.

Rick: Pardon?

Francis: Not a couple hundred, but yeah.

Rick: Yeah, quite a while, at least a generation or two. I don’t know if the same is true of Buddha or not. And then, in terms of the actual scriptures, the canonical texts, it’s my understanding that there are many, many more than actually made it through all the screening cuts and all the edits and the Council of Nicaea and all that stuff.

So you wonder—and again, I don’t know if there’s a corollary to that in Buddhism—whether what we know of as Buddhism and Christianity has much resemblance to what they were actually teaching. And a little addendum to that question is: If you got Jesus and Buddha together in a room like your picture depicts, and maybe added Krishna and Muhammad and Zoroaster and a few others for good measure, would they all concur with one another? “Yeah, we’re all talking about the same thing.” Or would there be differences of opinion?

Adya: My guess is that there would be differences.

Rick: You think?

Adya: I’ve never bought into the idea that—I mean, we do this because, and it’s generally a good thing, conferences get made so contemplatives can come together, put their arms around each other, and have a kumbaya moment. “You know, you’re not as bad as we thought you were, and we’re much more alike than we are different.”

I think that is one of the beautiful things that happen when people who have done deep inner work get together. There often is this sort of recognition that there are more similarities than doctrine makes it seem like there are.

And yet, I think what sometimes gets lost in the rush to have a wonderful, unified moment is the beauty of diversity. The Buddha’s realization may have had somewhat different qualities than Jesus’ did. It may have had a lot of similarities, but there may have been some really important differences.

Certainly, on a level of personality and the way they lived their lives, there were profound differences. I mean, Buddha was basically setting up a spiritual elite. He was interested in monks and nuns and creating this thing. That’s kind of what he wanted to do.

Whereas Jesus was almost just the opposite. He was tearing down the walls of any kind of elite, including spiritual and religious elites. I think there was a difference in vision. They’re seeing something that’s a little bit complementary, definitely, but that’s one of the beauties of the different religions. They are reflecting different aspects of the same jewel.

Rick: Yeah. That last bit helped wrap it up. Because if spirituality is really about coming to understand what reality is, and not just about the social or monastic structures or the more manifest aspects of a teaching, then one would hope that fundamentally there was a concurrence.

You could have different maps of North America. You could have a topographical map and a road map and an aviation map and a map of all the gas pipelines or something. They each have their utility, and they serve different functions for different people and different circumstances, but they all actually refer to the same territory. They’re just bringing out different facets or bits of information about that very same territory.

Adya: I think they’re all in the same territory of consciousness.

Rick: Yeah.

Adya: They are all discovering the reality, the deeper realities, the deeper potentialities of consciousness. In that sense, I would agree that they’re all looking at the same thing. They’re all plunging into the same reality of consciousness.

And yet, there are obviously some very, very different orientations. It’s hard for me to hear Jesus come in and go, “Well, you know, folks, the world is an illusion. It’s unreal. It doesn’t really matter. Why get involved? Because what’s going to happen is going to happen no matter what you do. And what’s not going to happen is not going to happen no matter what you do.”

We hear that from a lot of other sages, which is a legitimate perspective, because that is a certain dimension of consciousness you can go to. Some people would bump into that and go, “Okay, that’s it. That is the ultimate state.”

I don’t necessarily think Jesus would come in and go, “Yes, that is the ultimate state.” I think he would have his own little different take, you know? They both may be sitting in California having a different take on it, however. That’s as much as I would certainly grant.

Rick: Let me just say one quick thing and then Francis, okay? Quick. There’s a quote that I heard you say years ago in some talk, which I really love, which points to this. Jesus said, “For the birds have their nests and the foxes have their holes, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”

That, to me, refers to what you’re saying here, which is that he had ultimately no fixed point of view, no rigid thing. It also refers to what you were saying about the different dimensions and different levels. You have to embrace them simultaneously and not fixate on any one, or else you end up with a lopsided or fundamentalistic perspective. I’m sorry for interrupting.

Francis: No, you didn’t interrupt.

Rick: You wanted to say something, so go ahead now, please.

Francis: Yeah. My sense is—I think at different points in my life, I have thought, at various times, that Christianity had the whole truth somehow. The whole truth could be found in this one religion that I had embraced and really dedicated myself to. That was where the truth lay.

Many people would say the same thing about Buddhism or Hinduism or Judaism or Islam or whatever. I’ve come to a point in my life where I no longer think any religion has the whole truth. I honestly do not.

I think that when we talk about the maps of consciousness somehow having to agree, we’re starting from this presumption that somehow or other these maps of consciousness are complete. My sense is that none of them are complete.

For myself, I needed Jesus. I really needed Jesus in my life. I needed what he symbolized. I needed that archetype to symbolize my own interior journey in a certain direction. I also needed Buddha. I needed the embrace of Jesus and Buddha.

I needed the embrace of Jesus and Buddha.

I think that part of the beauty of the embrace of Jesus and Buddha is that they’re both bringing different things to the table. For me, my spiritual journey was completed by embracing what Jesus represented for me and embracing what Buddha represented for me, and they didn’t represent the same thing at all.

They represented different aspects of the path of awakening. They represented different movements of it, both being perfectly valid, but, like you said earlier, I think both needing each other to balance each other out, which you often see in a married couple.

My mom and dad were like that. They were married for sixty-four years. My dad was this very masculine, very alpha-male type of guy, very much in control. My mom was a very feminine, very open, compassionate, loving person, and they got together.

The odd thing to me was that at the end of their lives, they had beautifully balanced each other out. At the end of my dad’s life, he was very open. He was very receptive. He was a good listener. He would ask you, “How are things going for you? What’s going on in your life?” And he’d sit there and just listen, seemingly passively.

And my mom became more of a go-getter, more directive, especially with my dad. They took on the polar-opposite characteristics that each of them somehow embodied. My mom got in touch with her own kind of what we would traditionally think of as masculine energy, and my dad with a kind of feminine, more receptive energy.

So I think that this embrace of Jesus and Buddha is like that. They each bring their own energy, and that doesn’t need to be exactly the same at all, you know?

Rick: You sent me some notes that you had been thinking about along these topics, and here’s one that relates to this, I think. You said, “Different masters meet the different needs of each age. There’s usually a resurgence or renewal of knowledge when society has become closed to truth.”

There’s a line that’s kind of like this in the Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna says, “When dharma is in decay and adharma flourishes, I take birth age after age.”

So it would seem that there’s a cycle of loss and revival of knowledge somehow, but each revival is not necessarily going to be identical, because each age is different.

It’s interesting now because we have communications and much clearer historical knowledge than most of these isolated cultures had one or two thousand years ago. So we’re able to make a stew of all kinds of ingredients that weren’t available in previous ages.

I suppose this could be confusing for some people, and maybe some people really need to stick to the straight and narrow of a particular teaching, but others might find it really enriching, as you did, to add various teachings to the mix.

Francis: You know, I was a monk of Gethsemani, which was the monastery of Thomas Merton, a very well-known spiritual writer who was very much a pioneer in the area of interspirituality, interspiritual dialogue, and interreligious dialogue. The whole time I was at Gethsemani, I was involved in that. There were Tibetan monks, Zen monks, and Hindu monks who came, and we would have what we called intermonastic dialogue.

And I think that… Where was I going with that now? Your…

Rick: Multiple teachings and mixing them.

Francis: Yeah.

Rick: Kind of like a bee going from one kind of flower to another.

Francis: What I found the most valuable, and I think Merton was a model in this for me, was that I went very, very deeply into one tradition, as deeply as I could. Then, after I was established in that, I noticed, interestingly to me, the parallels I found in different paths.

First of all, it was the parallels. Then, eventually, going into these other various paths, I found contrasts as well. It was all very rich, both understanding and discovering the parallels and understanding the contrasts, which helped me balance out in a way that I couldn’t have done if I had just stayed in one line.

I do think that there is a point there. That’s a good point: I think it’s good to take each of these traditions on their own terms and take them straight, you know, and really get a sense of what they’re about before we add to the mix.

Rick: Yeah.

Francis: And make… There’s a book called Stages of Faith that was often read. Some of you, if you come from any kind of seminary or clergy background, probably read Stages of Faith by Fowler. It’s a really popular book.

There’s a chapter in there where he talks about Sheila-ism. Sheila-ism, he said. There was this woman he met named Sheila, and he was interviewing her. He said, “What are your spiritual beliefs?” And she said, “Well, I started out a Christian in the Presbyterian Church, then I became a Baptist, then I became a Hindu, and then I became a Buddhist. I just threw it all in a pot and mixed it up really good. Then I came out with my own religion that I call Sheila-ism.” (Laughter) “Which is a mixture of all these things.”

Rick: How did that work for her?

Francis: Well, on one level, that’s fine. Whatever. If it works for you, God bless you. But on another level, it might be good for us to just take each of these things on their own, take what we find good, but don’t just make our own religion and mix it all up, you know?

Rick: There’s that old saying that it’s better to dig one deep well than ten shallow wells.

Francis: Right.

Rick: But then somebody said, “Well, how about using ten different tools to dig one deep well?” (Laughter)

Francis: Yeah. Okay, there you go.

Adya: Smart.

Francis: That’s Rick-ism.

Rick: Good shot.

Francis: Not Sheila-ism, Rick-ism.

Rick: Yeah.

Adya: I think there’s this really important thing in that because, in our own different ways, when we did borrow from other traditions—Francis, obviously, and even me—we really threw ourselves in. I didn’t read a couple of books on Christian mysticism. I read a couple of hundred and did many of the spiritual practices that were in those books.

So I think there is something that we all face nowadays. We all have so much exposure to a million and one teachings. There is always the danger. It is easy to lose yourself, lose your… I mean, this is all about discovering something here (points to heart), and sometimes, if we’re too much into this (hands circle the air around his head) at the same time, we can lose connection with what it’s really, really, really about.

And yet, we are in the world that we’re in, and we have lots of exposure to a lot of things. So I think that puts the responsibility back on each of us: if we’re serious about these things, there’s a time when we’re dabbling to see what’s there and what resonates. But when we’re serious, we really need to dive into it, so that we aren’t just creating something that fits us almost, because you can create something very easily that fits you in such a way that you’re nice and conveniently unchallenged.

When we’re serious, we really need to dive into it, so that we aren’t just creating something that fits us.

Francis: Absolutely.

Adya: Right? You’ve gotten rid of all the elements that challenge the ego and left the elements in that make it feel comfortable. So I think we’re all well served by making sure that any teaching we utilize, we do it with great honesty and depth.

Rick: Who was that playwright who wrote The Importance of Being Earnest?

Francis: Oh, right.

Rick: Anybody know?

(Audience calls out, “Oscar Wilde.”)

Rick: Oscar Wilde. That just came to mind. I was going to actually quote Nisargadatta, who said earnestness is really important. And then I thought, well, there’s a play by that name.

I think that might be something that would tie some of this together, because regardless of what you do, whether you’re sampling a smorgasbord a little bit or totally have the blinders on and are focused on one teaching or one tradition, I think earnestness is the key element for success.

Francis: Well, I think that earnestness is certainly a quality that you see in different ways in both Jesus and Buddha.

I think the important thing isn’t so much… You were talking earlier about the historical Jesus. There’s been a whole controversial focus for the last, oh, probably 80 years or more, on the historical Jesus. Who was the historical Jesus? I think, really, in all fairness, you could say the same thing about the Buddha.

You’ve got oral tradition. First, you’ve got the teacher who says certain things and gives a teaching. Then you’ve got an oral tradition of that which goes on for usually 50 to 100 years or more, and then they write it down. So between the words that came out of the mouth of Jesus or Buddha and the written-down tradition, there’s this passing down of oral stuff.

I know in a class that I took in seminary once, we had a thing where somebody started with a statement, and we had a circle of people. They whispered in the person’s ear next to them, and then they whispered in the next person’s ear, and we got around. Then we got to the end, and the person said, “Okay, what was the statement at the beginning?”

They said, you know, “The roses are red,” or whatever. Then the last person said, you know, “Red is…” “Red is blue,” or something. It just went around and lost something in the translation. And I think that, in a way, you know…

I had a little dialogue with—what’s that guy you interviewed who wrote a book about Jesus being a myth or something?

Rick: Oh, Tim Freke.

Francis: Yeah, Tim, Timothy Freke.

Rick: And Peter Gandy wrote it.

Francis: Yeah. It’s not a new idea. I mean, this has been thrashing around for a hundred years, like I say, and now they’re basically saying no, Jesus wasn’t even a historical person at all.

Rick: And he cited all sorts of references from other civilizations, Egyptian and all sorts of other things.

Francis: Right.

Rick: And there were a couple dozen different points in the Jesus story that are also in those traditional stories.

Francis: Yeah. And I think, you know, now most historians, most current academic work on this level, are saying no, there was a historical person named Jesus. Whether or not our attitudes and thoughts about him and impressions of him are accurate to the historical person is another question. We could say the same thing about the Buddha, I think.

But in a way, at this point, it doesn’t really matter. I think what they represent now is more about our own inner journey. You were talking about myth earlier, and Joseph Campbell wrote this book about myth and did a whole study on it. He talks about the “hero journey.” Buddha and Jesus are really representatives of the “hero journey.”

We’re all called to make the journey. We’re all called to embrace the kind of life that Jesus and Buddha embraced, and part of it, as you just said (looking at Adya), is to go all in.

Adya: Yeah.

Francis: You know, it really requires earnestness. It requires a kind of commitment that involves, like Jesus said, giving up everything and coming and following, and we don’t like to hear that sometimes.

Adya: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s part of the archetype, too. And also, not only that they were tremendously devoted and committed, but I think there’s something else—especially about these two characters—that resonates in the human heart.

I think it’s something about… They did something that’s very, very unusual to do, very rare, and both of them did it in their own ways. They definitely stepped off of the path well-trodden. They stepped out there where nobody else was going eventually, and there wasn’t a whole lot of signposts. There wasn’t a whole… Everything wasn’t really well-defined.

Not only did they come to their own spiritual liberation in their own right, but there’s also something that intuitively resonates for people without them even knowing it or being really conscious of it. It’s almost like, “Now there’s an actual autonomous human being. There’s somebody who’s not looking around going, ‘Do y’all like it? Is it okay if I’m this way? Does it fit into the program? Does it…’”

You know, they’re very autonomous human beings, which—true, deep autonomy—is not an easy thing to achieve.

Francis: Right.

Adya: And I think both of them are hallmarks of people who did that, and they did what it takes to do that. You know, you can’t just be following safely along in whatever herd you might be in. Autonomy is usually hard-won. You kind of have to scrape and claw your way to find out what’s really, really authentic within you, what’s really real, what’s really authentic.

I think that’s part of what resonates for people, too. They can feel that’s a kind of freedom. It’s not just an inner, “I feel really spacious and open and free,” as wonderful as that is, but it’s also a freedom to actually be who they are, come what may.

They both have their human missions in life: to be who I am, come what may, you know? I think that’s part of both of their characters that are actually very, very similar, you know?

Knowing and unknowing

Rick: I want to come back to the map metaphor for a minute. We had what we might call…

Francis: Pardon? The what metaphor?

Rick: Map metaphor.

Francis: Oh, math. Map, M-A-P.

Oh, map. Yeah, not math.

Rick: We had what we might call “Christian cartographers of consciousness.” We had Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross and maybe Meister Eckhart, who… I think Teresa wrote The Interior Castle, and she spoke of the seventh dwelling place, which was union of the soul with God.

It seems to me that from, again, an outside perspective on Christianity and Buddhism, the mystics in Christianity were much fewer and farther between than in Buddhism. Buddhism seemed to more explicitly delve straight into inner experience.

And yet, in Christianity, it’s all about God. There’s all this talk of God and experience of God, not just a concept or a belief. Whereas, to my understanding—correct me if I’m wrong—the Buddha hardly talked at all, if at all, about God, and God isn’t really mentioned in Buddhism.

So I wonder why that is. Is it possible that the tools of Buddhism were not capable of taking people to the experience? They stopped at a certain point and were not capable of taking people to the experience of God? Or is there some other reason for this discrepancy?

Adya: Well, as Buddha said, I’ll just get it started, and then I’ll be interested. As the Buddha said, on the whole issue of God, as a whole bunch of other things, I think he would put that in what he called the list of imponderables. Basically, as he defined what his spirituality was for him, it was about suffering and the alleviation of suffering.

He said there are a whole lot of things, a whole lot of metaphysical speculations that, according to him, were—he says, “This is what we’re about. All this metaphysical speculation isn’t going to serve this end.” So basically, “I’m not going to talk about it. And I won’t even entertain it, because it doesn’t have anything to do with the ending of suffering.” So that’s, I think, one of the reasons that he didn’t get into the question of God or any number of questions that are more metaphysical in nature.

Rick: But there have been many saints and traditions which talk of God-consciousness, and there are people who say that God has become a living experience. So one man’s metaphysics may be another man’s actual experience.

Adya: Right.

Rick: And so that’s why I was wondering whether Buddhism, or even the Buddha’s own experience, might have only gone so far, and that a richer, more nuanced, perhaps more highly evolved, if I can be so blasphemous, level of development would render God a living reality rather than just a metaphysical concept or belief.

Francis: You know, in the Christian mystical tradition, there are two contrasting approaches that are often talked about. The terms that are used are the “cataphatic,” which means the way of light, the way of affirmation, the way of definition, almost, you could say, and the “apophatic,” which is the way of darkness, the way of unknowing, the way of sort of darkness, you know.

Both of those paths—again, we keep coming back to this—are kind of complementary things that both work together. In the life of a human being, in the spiritual journey of any of us, there are times in our life when the revelation that’s given to us, the clarity that comes to us, is absolutely clear. It’s absolutely affirming. We can state very definitely, “I know this to be true. I see this. It seems true. It feels true. It’s true when I put it into practice. It works for me,” and so on. That’s the way of light.

Then there are other times, other seasons in our spiritual journey, which are darkness—the path of darkness, the path of unknowing—where we know through unknowing. That’s a theme that arises again and again in the Christian contemplative tradition: this path of unknowing, that God, what we call God, that mystery that some of us call God, is absolutely beyond any concept. It’s absolutely beyond any definition.

In the fourteenth-century classic The Cloud of Unknowing, he says, “All we can do is sit before this reality with a blind stirring of love.” We can come to it, we can contemplate it, but we can’t grasp it. We can’t define it. We can’t get ahold of it and say, “Here it is,” you know?

I think there are times in our life when we do need clarity. We do need definite, affirming principles or statements about the spiritual reality we’ve seen. And then there are other times when that just doesn’t do the trick. We have to admit, “Okay, this is in the realm of unknowing. This is beyond the conceptual, intellectual, doctrinal level.” Does that make sense?

So I think you need both. Again, it keeps recurring tonight, but it’s not “one is true and one is false.” In Buddhism, he’s not affirming the word “God,” and he’s not talking about God, but he talks about Nibbana. He talks about the deathless, Nirvana. He talks about the cessation of suffering.

So in Christianity, they might say, “Oh, the reality you’re looking for is this God, this spiritual reality.” Whereas the Buddha says, “No, it’s the end of suffering.” So he’s defining it, but in a negative way, you see, rather than in a positive way.

I’m not so sure that the truth they’re pointing to is absolutely mutually exclusive, nor am I sure it’s absolutely the same thing. But I think there’s probably—

Rick: But it may be stages.

Adya: Who we’re talking about, too, you know, because there are clearly some very advanced Christian mystics who are still in a relational relationship with God. Then there are Christian mystics who themselves have gone right beyond any relation.

Rick: To union.

Adya: What’s that?

Rick: To union with God.

Adya: Yeah. Beyond union.

Rick: Yeah.

Francis: Eckhart.

Adya: Meister Eckhart makes that very, very clear: “This is not union. This is beyond union. This is beyond God.” He went so far as to say, of God, “I am the cause,” as a way of trying to be as clear as he could. No—I mean, that’s a statement that would get most people in your church today to blush quite hard if someone said that.

Rick: It got people killed.

Adya: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: Yeah.

Adya: Well, he had the good sense to die before they could kill him for it. You know what I mean?

Francis: He was posthumously excommunicated.

Adya: Right. He was excommunicated and then kind of re-embraced.

Francis: He was, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah.

Miracles and the main point

Rick: We’ll take questions pretty soon. I know a lot of you probably have questions. I was riding down with a friend, and we were talking in the car. He has a lot of study of Christianity and degrees and doctorates and all that stuff. He said, “What evidence do we have that Jesus was actually self-realized? The terminology is not used in the Bible.”

So can we safely assume that he was self-realized in the way that we’re describing here, or the way the Buddha might have described it, although he didn’t use that term? Or could he have been some other type of being altogether who wasn’t enlightened in the conventional sense? Any thoughts? Or is that too speculative to even consider?

Adya: Right. I mean, if we’re going to speculate, the first thing we have to admit is that we actually know very little about either one of these two people. Buddhism has as much mythology around the Buddha’s life as Christianity does around Jesus’s life.

I think at the end of the day, at least for me, the question is, number one, how far am I going to speculate on something that I literally can never know? If I can’t know, what am I wasting my time with, do you know?

And even more than that, I think at the end of the day, what’s important to us is: Is this teaching useful? In what way is this really useful for me? Because I can’t actually know. I can’t sit down and talk to the historical Jesus or the historical Buddha and try to rank them on the hierarchy of realization. I’m not even so sure it’s that relevant.

Rick: Yeah, it kind of seems like a dumb question in retrospect.

Adya: No, I’m not saying it’s—

Rick: No offense to my friend.

Francis: You could say the same thing about anybody today who’s living today.

Adya: Yeah. Any teacher, anybody—me, or Adya, or Ramana, or anybody, living or dead—you could say, “Well, how do we know that this person is realized? How do we know that this person is enlightened?”

Jesus himself had at least a saying that’s attributed to Jesus, since we’re going this historical-critical route, where he says, “By their fruits, you will know them.”

Rick: Yes.

Francis: My sense is that anything we do, any teaching we follow, any practice we do, any teacher we listen to, we can judge the value of it based on what fruit it bears. Does it help me to become more loving, more compassionate, more wise, more understanding, or not? And that’s a pretty simple breakdown, you know?

Rick: And he also said things that really seem to point to his subjective realization, his experience of realization, such as, “I and my Father are one,” and “Whatsoever you do unto the least of these, you do unto me.” Things like that kind of unity of experience.

What about the whole issue of miracles? I mean, miracles play a big role in the Bible. There’s all kinds of stuff. I don’t know a whole lot about Buddhism, but as I understand it, all kinds of amazing things were attributed to the Buddha as well.

Do you think this is just embellishment that took place over time, or do you think that these beings were at a level at which they were actually capable of doing such things? Were they doing it, I don’t know, to impress or to convince people that they had something extraordinary? What would you care to say about that topic?

Francis: You know, often in the Gospel accounts of Jesus doing miracles, he would heal somebody of something, and then he would say, “Don’t tell anybody. Just keep this to yourself,” you know, “Keep it on the down low. Let’s not advertise this.”

My own sense is—and this is also based on my own experience, frankly—that whenever anybody comes into a sense of realization, a sense of clarity about life, it opens us up to different dimensions. It opens us up to a whole new reality, which I think often does include what many people would term miracles.

On the other hand, that attitude Jesus had—I get that. I understand it, because my own sense is just like what the Buddhists said about what’s really necessary, what’s really helpful. I look at miracles and siddhis and things like that. You know, they are real. I mean, I think there’s no doubt about it. They are definitely real. They happen in the lives of realized beings.

Are they really that important? I would say no. I don’t think they’re that important. I think they’re almost like side effects of awakening rather than the main thing.

The Buddha has a beautiful passage in one of the Pali scriptures where he says, “See this huge forest with all these leaves.” He was at some big deer-park forest where he had a vihara dwelling amongst the trees. “See this big forest, O monks”—he’s always addressing the monks—“all the leaves on all these trees are all leaves. They’re all alive. They’re all valid as leaves. But see the leaves in the palm of my hand.”

He said, “This is like the teachings and the truths that exist in the world. They’re as countless as the leaves on the trees. But what you need to awaken is equal to the number of leaves in the palm of my hand.” So you don’t need all that stuff to awaken, and the most important thing is: Wake up.

Rick: Yeah.

Adya: I know the Christian tradition puts an emphasis on this, the Buddhist tradition puts a heavy emphasis on it, and most esoteric traditions put an emphasis on it when it comes to spiritual powers, siddhis, clairvoyance, and the many things that can come as part of the package.

They’ve all had this very traditional attitude, which is basically, “Don’t pay any attention.” If it shows up, it shows up. Fine. But don’t get involved. We’re not trying to create magicians here.

There’s a reason for that, because when those sorts of powers start to come online, if we grasp at them and it starts to become about that, we actually stunt our development. We will stop right there. We may stop in a pretty extraordinary place, but that’ll be it.

I think that’s the reason why. Sure, these things can happen, but the consensus across world religions has been—

Francis: Don’t make a big deal.

Adya: Don’t make a big deal—a really big deal about it.

Rick: Jesus said, “Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven,” right, “and then all else shall be added unto thee.” My teacher used to use this analogy of “capture the fort.”

There’s this big territory. It has all kinds of diamond mines and gold mines and things like that. You might want to go out and start exploring those and mining for gold, but if you don’t own the territory, you’re on shaky ground. So capture the fort, and then see what’s what.

Adya: That’s what I liked, what drew me to Zen when I first got into it, because in its traditional sense, it’s the hot and narrow pursuit of enlightenment, and that’s pretty much it, with very few consolation prizes along the way, you know?

Francis: Except getting hit by a stick.

Adya: Except getting hit by sticks, if that’s what does it for you. You know, hey, it worked for me.

But when we’re going into—or when we’re doing—any sort of contemplative practice, what we’re engaging in is the vast potentiality of human consciousness, which is extraordinary. Because it’s extraordinary, it can be easy to get a little sidetracked into the little cul-de-sac of potentiality. It’s not that any of those are inherently wrong. It’s just that if you really want the ultimate truth, then that’s where the counsel comes: Don’t waste too much time in the cul-de-sacs.

Francis: There’s a beautiful story in the Gospels called “the story of the transfiguration,” where Jesus is with the disciples on a mountain, and suddenly Moses and Elijah appear in a vision of light. Jesus is communing with Moses and Elijah, and all their garments are as white as snow. They’re shining like the sun, and the disciples are beholding this amazing sight.

Peter, who was this brash guy who was always making funny suggestions—and a lot like many of us, or at least like me—says to Jesus, “Oh, Lord, it’s good that we are here. Let us build tents, one for Moses, one for Elijah, and one for you, and we’ll just stay here the rest of our lives.”

Jesus says, “No, Peter, that’s not the idea. We’ve got to go down the mountain, back into the valley, and face life.”

I think that’s often what happens with those kinds of things: We can become so enamored of the fascinating quality of powers, healing, visions, and so on that we can get really sidetracked and, like you say, be in a cul-de-sac and not move forward at all.

🕊️ The divine feminine and spiritual balance

Rick: Jesus and Buddha were obviously both men. Buddha set up monasteries full of men, and Christ’s twelve apostles were men. Of course, there was Mary Magdalene and Jesus’s mother, and so on and so forth. To this day, the Catholic Church doesn’t allow women to be priests.

I think it would be interesting to touch upon the whole issue of the divine feminine and the importance of greater balance between the feminine and the masculine in the world, and perhaps the necessity of something more than these old traditions had to offer, if they’re really as male-dominated as they seem. Any comments about all that?

Adya: Sure, I’ll take a shot at it. You’re welcome to fill in.

Both of these people, for their time and in their culture, were pretty free-thinking when it came to men and women. They both had women—Buddha certainly did. I often thought, what was the appeal, for God’s sake, of going around and saying “Nirvana,” which basically means cessation, okay, “that’s your big payoff,” and “No-self is your doctrine”? I used to think, “Now, how did this catch on?”

Historically, a big part of the reason that it caught on is because he was one of the very few people who spoke out against the caste system. It’s basically, you can become what you make of your life. You don’t need to be defined by the role you’ve been given, or your gender, or anything else. For its day, that was quite extraordinary.

Jesus had some quite extraordinary relationships with women in the Bible. One of my favorite parts of the whole Jesus story is when Mary Magdalene comes in at that dinner table, and she’s weeping at Jesus’s feet and basically falling apart. She gets chastised by the main guy who was there: “How dare you do this?” Boy, did Jesus have some harsh words for him. He immediately stopped the whole proceeding and had a very harsh rebuke.

In that sense, I think they both were certainly far advanced of their day in how they related to women.

One other, slightly different entry point for me is that, when I said my Christianity helped me in a very significant way, it really was the feminine aspect. Zen, in its traditional sense, is a very masculine religious setup. There’s a beauty to go with that starkness and all the rest.

My mother used to call it “Buddha boot camp.” Every time I’d go off to retreat, she’d say, “You’re going off to Buddha boot camp,” because it very much is like a boot camp, almost.

Curiously enough, the thing that was initially the most transformative part of reaching into Christianity was when I found that little diary from St. Thérèse of Lisieux. She was a saint, a woman saint, who died very young, I think in her twenties.

Francis: Twenty-three.

Adya: Twenty-three. She was over-the-top pious and had a huge love of Jesus. When I looked back sometimes, I thought, “Well, what did I see there?” because it’s almost from a different time.

Something about the age at which I encountered that diary she had written shortly before she died—and the fact that she was a woman, I think, was a really important part, too—and the way she talked about it, how relational and warm it was, and almost childlike in the simplicity with which she approached her relationship with Christ, really captured me.

I literally felt—I was about twenty-three or twenty-four years old—like I was fifteen years old in my first romantic love affair. And it was with this dead saint, from a tradition that wasn’t my own.

Francis: She was cute, though.

Adya: Yeah, she was. Yeah, she was pretty hot.

There was something about it. It was a very feminine approach, and it literally just lit my heart on fire. The effect was like what you feel with your first love affair. You just walk around in this intense, emotional, open environment of love and intimacy. That’s the effect it had on me, and that was a really feminine—very much a feminine—effect for me. It was very, very important.

So I had this intimate relationship with a dead saint for about a year. It burned very, very hot, and then, when the heart was really open, that moved on. Then that openness was mine, and I could start to see it: “Oh, the Bodhisattva of compassion. Okay, now I can start to relate.” Before, I couldn’t.

I think I needed a very strong feminine view of all this that woke up something that just wasn’t happening any other way. So I think—

Rick: Incidentally, when Francis and I first proposed that I moderate this discussion, the organizer said, “Do we really want three middle-aged, middle-class white guys on stage?”

“We should have a woman be the moderator.”

I said, “Yes, I agree, but I would like to bring this discussion to tens of thousands of people, not just to a couple of hundred. For that reason, I’d really like to moderate it and get it on my show.”

We went back and forth, but it was a point well taken. I think at the SAND Conference this has been an issue, too. In contemporary nondual spirituality, there seems to be a bit of a predominance of male teachers.

What we try to do with BATGAP is really make it fifty-fifty now. Okay, we had a man; let’s have a woman, and keep it balanced, because some of the most enlightened people I know happen to be women. I really think we should do what we can to dispel the stereotype, if there is one, that it’s a male-oriented kind of thing.

Adya: Yeah. And women—I mean, somebody who can’t do all the little math in my head right now—but I think I’ve asked more women than men to teach. At the very least, it would be equal, and I think there are still more women I’ve asked to teach. There’s not a particular reason for that, but there is an observation that I definitely have seen: Women bring something different to the table. They just bring something different to the table. It’s really, really important, and I think really, really necessary.

I think that’s one of the things that’s heartening about the current time. Yes, we need more really talented women spiritual teachers out there, but it’s growing, I think, quite rapidly. I think it’s very, very important, just because they—not that all women have the same perspective, any more than all men have the same perspective—but there’s something that’s definitely different that they tend to bring to the table and embody.

🕊️ Guilt, conscience, and spiritual autonomy

Rick: Let’s open it up for questions. Somebody has a mic, and Ben has a mic.

Audience Member: I’m so glad I have both of you in a room together to ask a question. In my experience, I started my spiritual journey in Christianity. I grew up in a household, went on a mission trip, and was a very good church kid for a long time.

One of the main things that drove me out of that into a more open, integrated spirituality—which I seek now—is guilt. Since I have Adya and I have you, Francis, I just want to know your perspective on guilt and Christianity, because it has a big name in that religion, and then your perspective, Adya, as well, on the role that it plays in our life and our spiritual journey.

Rick: That guilt plays? Okay.

Francis: My own sense, to be honest with you, is that the grass always looks greener on the other side of the fence, you know? It’s an old adage, but I think there’s a lot of truth to it.

When I was a Buddhist monk for a couple of years, I traveled a little bit in Southeast Asia. We seem to think—we in the West have been raised with Judeo-Christian ethics and sensibilities, and many of us have gone to churches or synagogues or whatever—and we very much rejected that in some ways.

A lot of people are turning to the East and rejecting the West, with a perception that guilt was a big part of their heritage. Perhaps it was, and that’s something that I would never deny if that was a person’s experience. That wasn’t my experience, frankly, but it was many people’s experience.

But the thing is, I think Christianity has no corner on the market of guilt. All the religions have that pretty well covered, including Buddhism, including Hinduism, and all of them.

A lot of times in the West, we romanticize the East and think, “Oh, they’ve got it all figured out, and they’re all walking around enlightened.” But go to the East, you know. I would invite you. I went to Buddhist countries and found all the kinds of things—all the kinds of aberrations that we find in Christian churches, including guilt and weird ideas about sexuality and all that. They’re all alive and well in Southeast Asian Buddhist culture.

I think it is true that we do need to get to a point in our lives where we can really look at the spiritual heritage we’ve been given, the things we’ve been taught, and really say, “This is helpful. This is not so helpful. This I can embrace. This I think I need to let go of.” Be honest about it, let go of it, and move on. Does that make some sense?

Audience Member: Yeah, it does. Yeah.

Adya: Yeah. I mean, obviously, Francis and I have talked about this before, as we both admittedly got kind of lucky in our religious formation. Like I said, you didn’t end up with a big guilt complex growing up Catholic, like some do, and I didn’t grow up with a whole heck of a lot of organized religion anyway, until I started my own quest.

However, I grew up in a family—although I absolutely love my root family and feel extremely lucky to be part of it—where part of the underlying family dynamics was guilt. Not in the same sense that you might think about it if you come from the traditional idea of the Catholic guilty person or something, but just this undercurrent that wasn’t spoken. Even when I was very young, I could see, “Oh, I can see how guilt actually has everybody,” even at a subtle level. I could see from a very young age how it played itself out.

At a certain point in my early teens, I don’t know how I did this. Even my mother has asked me, because she’s like, “How did you escape the guilt thing? How did you do it?” And I go, “I don’t know.” But at about 13, I just looked and thought, “That doesn’t work very well.” (laughter) “That’s just a lot of energy churning away at feeling bad.” Somehow, I don’t know why, that was enough for me. It just disconnected me from unhealthy guilt.

You know, I do think that there is, however, a conscience that we have, which is a very good thing in our own journey: to find a conscience that is not culturally manufactured. Because you can have a conscience that actually belongs to your culture rather than to you. I think we also do have a conscience. It’s that North Pole thing inside of ourselves that, the quieter we get and the more we listen, is one of the things we have to account for, because it will hold us to its own standard of our integrity and our honesty.

I think that version of it can feel good and empowering, because we want to have that resource of truth and integrity. We want to have something inside of us letting us know when we start to lose our way. You know, we really need that.

But what we really don’t need is this big cultural baggage of guilt that some people—quite a few folks—carry. I think it’s one of the things that is also heavy in this culture. Not having traveled around the East, I’m not so sure. But it’s not just a Christian thing. I mean, I’ve done this for 20 years, and I find guilt runs rampant everywhere. If you’re a Christian, you have it in a Christian context. If you’re an atheist, then you feel guilty in an atheist context. Nobody has a complete exemption from it.

I think if anybody feels that, sometimes it is good, before you even try to get rid of it, to step back into yourself and just see, “Okay, how does this really work for me? Is this really working, or what part of this does work and is tied in with my own innate sense of truthfulness and integrity? And what part of this really doesn’t work? It just disempowers me and makes me always doubt myself.”

Curiously enough, I read many years ago somewhere that Ramana said, “The last thing to go is doubt.” I think a lot of people get guilt going around doubts. The two kinds of things can really swirl together. I thought it was really interesting that he’d said, “The last thing to go is doubt,” because I think it has to do with finding our real autonomy.

You know, as I like to think, I think one of the most important jobs of a spiritual teacher is to immediately begin helping anybody who’s with them to see what they can trust in themselves and what’s not so trustworthy in themselves. Because basically, then you’re empowering somebody. The teacher isn’t just used as the sole reference for what’s true or real or useful; the teacher is actually helping you find that out within yourself.

The teacher isn’t just used as the sole reference for what’s true or real or useful; the teacher is actually helping you find that out within yourself.

I think it’s one of the very first things that really should be happening. However, I often find that it’s the last thing that does happen.

Rick: If at all.

Adya: If at all. Right, because it can be very alluring for the teacher to just remain as the sole repository of truth, you know? It’s a very alluring illusion.

Rick: I’ve actually noticed that sometimes, when people leave a spiritual organization that they’ve been in for years or decades, they have an awakening shortly thereafter. They’re able to drop a lot of baggage or something, or reassess their deeply ingrained assumptions that they had taken for granted for so many years. Just that little bit of liberation on that level triggers a deeper realization in consciousness.

Adya: That’s an interesting perspective.

Rick: Yeah. Want to say anything, Francis, or should we take another question?

Francis: Let’s take another question.

Rick: Thanks.

🩺 Working with illness and acceptance

Audience Member: Hi, I’m scared. When you first started talking, I’m trying to turn the page there. We were talking about suffering and some suffering being optional, and that the richness of life also involves actually feeling suffering of a different nature than optional suffering. That was my understanding of what you said, and that it gives a broad range of experience, tied in with there not being black and white, but an embracing of every color that you spoke of early on.

The topic went into acceptance, and being in acceptance of what is coming, of what is. On a personal note, I am struggling with a disease that I’m having to both witness and not want to be in acceptance of, because my outcome is inevitable. I’m fighting, but also trying to hold the acceptance of “this is” at the same time. I’m trying to find that path of being in acceptance and fighting it at the same time. Is that clear, the question?

Adya: It is to me.

Audience Member: Okay, can you help me with that?

Adya: Well, number one, I can sympathize with you because I have my own sort of disease, I guess they would say, that causes pain, as people know. So I’m pretty much in pain most of the time, to some degree. It just varies during the day from a little bit to catastrophic. It’s a very good and ruthless teacher.

Talk about starting to inquire about what is optional and not optional suffering. What it has really shown me is the absolute necessity of not going into time. That may sound abstract, but by that I mean, whenever we’re dealing with difficulty, one of the things that can make it so difficult is that we’re in time, like, “Oh, God, can I survive this tomorrow?” and “Will I have this forever?”

So we take pain and then, through our mind—which is usually fear, fear of our pain and how long it might last—we go into this secondary narrative. That’s optional. That’s the good news. That whole movement of suffering is optional.

It may take some real awareness and some real practice to work with that narrative stream, which I think always begins with realizing where it comes from. So many of our painful narrative ways of talking to ourselves come out of fear. Like I said, “How long will this last?” “Will I ever get over this?”

To me, acceptance is also not something I think of in terms of time, like, “I’ll accept this, and that means it’ll be this way forever.” It just means, “No, right now, in this moment, what feels better: to fight what I’m experiencing or to accept it?” Just right now.

And if I accept it, does that mean I can’t still try to treat it or help myself? No. You can still treat it and do everything you can for your body or whatever it might be. You can still do all of that while, at each moment, having that almost become its own kind of practice: “Each moment, I can either accept this moment and what it entails as it is, and I can see what that feels like to do that, or I can go into my fearful thoughts about that.”

Then you really start to see. When you have something physical that you’re dealing with, it takes the abstraction out of it. You see very quickly if you’re starting to go into a spin around your physical discomfort or if the discomfort is accepted. Like, “Yes, okay, this is it.”

That’s what I’ve seen. I may be making it sound overly simplistic, but I think this is actually the level at which it can be worked with, and worked with very, very effectively, to really make that discrimination between pain and the suffering that my mind is imposing upon me because it’s spinning and scaring itself.

Audience Member: Can I reflect back?

Adya: Yeah, of course.

Audience Member: Thank you, sir. I think you said—or how I heard it was—that to be in the moment and to hold a center while watching the abstraction of the mind traveling toward fear, and still maintaining a course of treatment for what the ailment may be.

Adya: Yeah.

Audience Member: But don’t spice it with the mind’s abstractions.

Adya: Basically, that’s the key.

Audience Member: Got it.

Adya: Because our minds like security, right? They like knowing what’s going to come, as long as what we think is going to come is good. So that’s the way they’re hooked up to security, survival—all those kinds of instincts are part of the structure of the mind.

However, even though that is the structure of the mind, the mind can actually be shown that there’s a whole different way to relate with challenge, with difficulty, with discomfort.

Audience Member: Yeah.

Adya: Again, I always think, take this all as a question rather than something you’re trying to impose upon yourself. In other words, you could go, “Okay, I heard Adya just say I’m going to try to be in the moment with what’s happening,” and you’re trying to be, and it hurts, and you’re trying to impose this idea, and it’s like, “Oh, crap, I’ve heard it a million times and it’s not working.” All that kind of stuff can easily happen.

Rather than even approaching it that way, flip it over and approach it like a question. “I wonder what would happen right now. Let me find out if I could accept my discomfort—let’s say, physical discomfort—just right now, just for a moment, 30 seconds. I can change if I want to, but what would it be like if I were to just accept this moment? Can I accept this moment the way it is?”

You see, it’s a question. Then you’re involved. You’re right there. The question is actually leading you in, rather than an idea you’re trying to impose upon yourself called “Be in the moment.” Right? Instead, you’re like, “Let me see what it’s like to be in the moment for me right now.”

I just find it makes it much easier to deal with, to approach all this stuff, when you approach it with a little bit of curiosity.

Francis: My own sense, too, is that in my life and in my teaching, surrender is the primary practice for me. I really think it is. I think meditation, in a way, is a preparation for surrender because meditation, as I often call it, is “surrender on a cushion.” It’s learning to just be with what is in a very controlled environment. But surrender takes that out into the world, into situations where we’ve been told, “Okay, I have a disease I have to deal with. I have this situation that I don’t particularly like or find pleasant.”

I think that there’s a lot of misunderstanding about the practice of surrender. Many times, we feel—again, it’s the mind’s tendency to be this either-or kind of thing—that either you’re absolutely, completely resigned to what happens in some very extremely passive way, or you’re fighting for all your worth and opposing what is in some really aggressive sense.

I think the reality of it is more, as the Buddha would say, a middle path between those two extremes. It’s where we say, “Okay.” We start with a ground of absolute acceptance. We start with this ground of surrender. And the wonderful thing about it is that we don’t have to work ourselves up into surrender. We don’t have to somehow manufacture it.

When I do a guided meditation on surrender, which I often do with people, the words that I ask people to repeat as a way of accessing something along these lines are, “There’s a place in my heart that allows this. There’s a place in my heart that accepts this.” If we go deep enough, there’s a place in my heart that even loves this, simply because it is—not because of any quality it holds or anything.

If we can turn within and find that place in our heart, we can bring that to our engagement with life. That doesn’t mean at all that we’re passive. It doesn’t mean that we don’t treat the illness. It doesn’t mean we don’t respond. In fact, we respond from this ground of absolute, unconditional openness and acceptance.

Then the response is extremely skillful, because it’s no longer motivated by this sort of desperate thing: “This should not be.” There’s this ground that says, “Yes, this is not pleasant. I don’t like it, but it is, and therefore maybe I should do this.” Again, just like an experiment: “What would it be like if I did that?”

It’s finding that razor’s edge that we can walk, where there’s this ground of surrender and then there’s action that arises out of that ground.

I think it’s not this either-or thing. Either we’re completely surrendered and utterly passive, and we just lay down and let life roll over us like a steamroller, or we’re aggressively fighting life at every turn. It’s finding that razor’s edge that we can walk, where there’s this ground of surrender and then there’s action that arises out of that ground. It’s particularly skillful, but it may be very active. It may be very decisive. It may be very strong action. Does that make some sense?

Audience Member: That’s very clear. Thank you.

Francis: Good.

Rick: Who has questions?

No endpoint to the infinite

Craig: I have a question, Rick.

Rick: Oh, sorry. Hi, Craig.

Craig: Hi. So I have a question for Francis as my friend and Adya as my teacher. Through a number of years, as a child, I always had this deep connection with Jesus. Even as I walked in here this evening, I felt this descent of grace, this huge love in my heart. Through meeting you, Adya, I was able to keep that connection all the way up through the unitive state. But at some point, I found, when you guided me beyond the unitive state, that this deep connection with grace began to fall away, and it’s something I haven’t quite reconciled yet.

In my experience, I tend to go back and forth between feeling, in a sense, this great nothingness and the great experience of being in a place of non-reflection, where everything is here, is this, and there’s no more. That will happen, say, for a season or a period of time. And then there’ll be this other thing that comes forward in a different season: again, this descent of grace and this open-hearted love throughout my experience.

It’s interesting, too, because I can have a whole season of this experience of no-self, but when I go forward and teach and meet with another, this grace pours through me. There’s this transmission and this great sense of joy and happiness in my heart: “Oh, yes, I’m so happy to have this again.” And then I wake up the next morning and there’s this experience of almost nothingness.

So my question to you, Francis, and to you, Adya, as my teacher, is: at some point, did these two reconcile? Did it fall into one or the other? Or is there also a possibility—I think we have this assumption that no-self, cessation, nirvana is actually the end of the journey—but is there something that perhaps is beyond that, too, where the two come together?

Adya: Oh, I see.

Well, there’s always something beyond. I can no longer relate to ends of journeys. “I’ve got to the end of the infinite.” I’m not even sure what that would possibly mean.

But I think there’s something that you spoke of that caught my attention. Because we are, like every other part of nature, human beings also have our seasons. I don’t mean just in the big sense that we usually think of. I’ve certainly noticed, and continue to notice, that there are these seasons internally that I’ll go through. They’re almost predictable, now that I’ve gotten to know them. It’s as if certain elements of reality are highlighted.

Sometimes it’s emptiness and no-self that’s highlighted. Then other times, a much richer, more intimate closeness starts to be highlighted. So, at least to begin with, I think this undulating seasons thing we have is very natural. It’s a very natural thing.

I think that the more we mature, there are certain elements that do start to come together. But there are also certain pleasant things that we outgrow. When I was talking about how I felt when I discovered St. Teresa, how important and absolutely vital that was for me—and yet I couldn’t get that experience now if someone put a gun to my head. I would have no way to recreate it because it was way too relational, in a certain sense.

Not that I’m not relational, but it was just a different quality, as beautiful as it was. It’s not that the love has disappeared. It’s just continued to grow and change. In the same way that we won’t throw our life in reverse and go back to a previous experience—I never had a high school love affair, but you know what I’m talking about—the point isn’t to continue to go back to those really, really pleasant places.

There are points in our own realization where, in the same way that seeing the world with some of the old eyes we might have seen it with at a certain point is no longer optional, it simply doesn’t work for us. We almost can’t get back to seeing life in a way we might have seen it before.

I think even in the realms of spiritual experience, there are experiences that we either leave behind or that mature so much that they look very, very different—almost unrecognizable from how they began. So, of course, if it was only emptiness and you never had any intimacy of the heart, then that would be lopsided.

Craig: Yes. And beyond it just being a pleasant experience, what I’m speaking about more is the direct experience of divinity flooding into you as you. It’s not always some pleasant, blissful love affair, like you were speaking about. It’s a very deep and profound personal relationship with the divine.

Because what I’m experiencing is, yes, absolutely a personal God and, yes, absolutely a completely non-personal, non-relational experience with God—almost like you were saying that God disappears. There have been times when I could almost curse the fact that I met you and say—excuse my language—“What the fuck happened to my relationship with God for it to disappear so deeply?”

But then, like I was saying, sometimes I’ll go to teach or I’ll meet with someone, and then this thing comes through.

Adya: Yes.

Craig: And then the heart lights up again, and there’s a sense of, “Oh, yes.” So the question is, in your direct experience, if you come to a place where it completely falls away, is it appropriate to think of either-or, this or that, or is it more a matter of remaining open and seeing what happens?

Adya: I would always choose remaining open and seeing what happens.

If I was to tell you totally, completely honestly, I’m in no way capable of having a personal relationship with a God. It’s gone. It hasn’t been here for a long, long, long, long time. Something better took its place. I’m not saying that that’s necessarily a loss. That’s as honest as I could be about it.

Francis: I feel like I have both.

Craig: And see, pardon me, Francis, but that’s what’s deeply interesting to me. Oftentimes, if I follow this path to the end, it seems to take one there. And there seems to be the assumption that that is the final resting place.

But then I’m also curious if nirvana, if cessation, is the final resting place, or if that continues to deepen in a way like you’re describing—that it becomes deeply more profound and inclusive instead of either-or, and that there isn’t a loss there.

Francis: I think it does.

Craig: It becomes deeply more profound and inclusive instead of either-or.

Adya: Yeah.

Yeah. For me, what replaced that relational aspect with God, let’s say—not that I don’t have a problem having a relational aspect with you right now, or with my wife; I don’t mean to imply that—but I do think that it’s much healthier if we just forget about ultimate endpoints.

It’s one of the biggest stumbling blocks in all of spirituality, that the infinite is going to be indicated by some definitive sort of endpoint, which I don’t think it is. But my experience, however, is that the relational emotion, let’s say, like love, or even the experience now, is just that…

My favorite way of putting it goes back a long way, to a guy named Dogen, a famous Zen teacher who talked about it as an absolute intimacy with the 10,000 things. And to me, there’s almost like an intimacy that’s… How do you even talk about a feeling of tremendous intimacy, which is a grace? It’s the experience of a kind of grace, isn’t it, that’s not relational in that way, but nonetheless is very profound, very intimate, very close, with no distance—not hanging out in just interstices of emptiness. It’s not any of that.

I do think everything comes together at a little higher level, although we definitely go through periods, I think, of sometimes losing that more personal kind of experience, even with the divine. Do you know? And again, not that we’re making it a goal to do that. I’ve just seen this trajectory over so many people, I can’t even count them anymore.

And at any point, yes, you could stop at the emptiness of no-self and put down a camp and go, “Well, that’s it.” It sounds like the test, you know what I mean? But I think, if we don’t use all the outside references to tell us everything, we have this intuitive sense, do we not? When there seems to be just an inherent something that doesn’t feel complete, or there’s another door that could just maybe open, open up somewhere inside?

I think we can feel these things, and we can sense when some other door is opening. Anyway, I don’t want to… We’re probably running out of time, I don’t know. It’s a big subject. It’s a really, really—

Craig: That’s where my heart goes, to that place where there isn’t an endpoint. But it seems like sometimes colleagues, friends, or fellow teachers try to press that: “Oh, no-self is the endpoint.” And to me, when I hear that, and in my direct experience, it just seems as if it’s missing something or it’s not fully inclusive.

I would think I’m working against that bias of, “Oh, yes, endpoint.” But to me, there’s always been this sense of ever evolving into God forever and ever and ever.

Adya: Yeah.

Craig: Contrary to what folks around me have been saying or pushing, so thank you for leaving it. It’s much safer, much more real. Yeah. And also, there’s always the whole other subject of a lot of what I hear when I hear folks talk or even teach about no-self. A lot of it just does not ring true to me. To be totally honest, it just does not ring true.

I’m not saying it’s not all true, by any stretch of the imagination. But, you know, those intuitions that we have, again, like, “Hmm, does that feel complete to me? Does that feel like it’s holding a sort of integral place in me?” Or does there seem to be some way of having landed, or claimed a sort of inner territory, and that’s it, you know? I’ve arrived, all that kind of stuff, which is antithetical, I think, to all this.

And that’s why it hurts so much: within me, there’s always a sense that to claim an endpoint is to deny the evolutionary nature of God.

Adya: Yeah.

Craig: To deny the movement of life. And it seems to hurt when my mind tries to go there and say, “Oh, do I have to land here or there?”

Adya: Yeah. Yeah.

Closing with chant

Rick: Well, evolution may not have an endpoint, but I believe this meeting will have one, and we’ve just about reached it. So it would be fun to sit here for another hour and take more questions, but I’m afraid we can’t. I’m sure they have to close the church up and everything.

So I want to thank you all for coming and thank our wonderful speakers for being here. At the risk of… Well, any short final comments or anything? Oh, Francis, you were going to chant something at the end, a Christian chant. That’d be a nice way to end it.

Francis: Okay, yeah. This chant we chanted every night before we went to bed in the monastery. And it’s a hymn to the Divine Mother, which in our case was Mary, but it doesn’t have to be Mary. It could be any divine mother you like, and you can put that in.

I’ll just do it in Latin, and you can just feel the energy of it. You don’t necessarily have to know the words or what it’s saying. I always thought the monastic life could be a very masculine place sometimes, especially in the Trappists, which were very rigorous and independent, and into suffering and the hard, ascetic kind of qualities.

But then, at the end of the day, we’d sing this hymn to the Holy Mother, and it had a kind of soft, feminine feel to it. So we started out with a Buddhist chant. The whole thing was the embrace of Jesus and Buddha. So maybe we’ll end with this Christian chant to the Divine Mother, and it might be a nice way to end our evening.

Francis:Salve Regina, Mater Misericordiae, Vita, dulcedo et spes nostra, salve.
Ad te clamamus, exsules filii Evae.

Ad te suspiramus, gementes et flentes in hac lacrimarum valle.
Eia ergo, advocata nostra.

Illos tuos misericordes oculos ad nos converte.

Et Iesum, benedictum fructum ventris tui, nobis post hoc exsilium ostende.

O clemens, o pia, o dulcis Virgo Maria.