70. Allan Morelock Transcript

Allan Morelock Interview

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week is Allan Morelock. And Allan lives in the Garden State of New Jersey. And I was introduced to him, I think, maybe your wife Gena got in touch with me at one point and said, “How would you like to interview my husband?” Allan has an association with the Waking Down group of whom I have interviewed quite a few people. But when you listen to this interview, as I have been listening to several of his other interviews, the scope of his experience is much broader than that. And there is a lot of diversity among the people who are associated with that group, so it is not like you are hearing the same story over and over again when you talk to them. In any case, thank you for this opportunity, Allan. And we have as much time as you want today, so we will go into your whole story. And I know from having listened to you tell it, it is a fascinating one.

Allan: Thank you, Rick. I better mention my friend Robert Ciccolini.

Rick: Oh, that’s right. It was Robert.

Allan: He contacted you originally.

Rick: That’s right. I forgot. Good. Well, thank you, Robert. So, where would you like to begin? You and I were just talking a minute ago about how it is kind of fascinating to hear people’s stories. Some people sort of poo-poo the idea of stories, “Oh, it is just a story.” But stories can be fascinating, and there is a lot of wisdom that can be gleaned from listening to them, and a lot of affinity that can be found in hearing what a person has gone through on their particular spiritual path, how it differs from and compares with our own.

Allan: Yeah, I love the stories. Sometimes I learn more from people’s stories than I do from their teaching. So, I think, let me just say one thing about that. I think there is generally three, I will paint three broad categories of people who are interested in spirituality. Not that that is the limit, but something that I have noticed. One is the yogi type. The yogi type will come to see everything as energy, everything as pure shakti. The other is more the pure jnani, who comes to see everything as brahman, everything as consciousness. And the third category, which is where I lean into more, is the bhakta, who sees everything as the play of God, everything as the lila of the divine. So, in the stories, the mystery hints at its own self through the stories of the people who live spiritual life, really everybody, but we are given the role of being spiritual types. Sometimes I think, “Oh, it would have been cool to be an NBA player,” but, you know, it is the role that came. This is what happened. We are given the role of spiritual types.

Rick: You may be a spiritual NBA player.

Allan: Yeah, the problem with the spiritual thing is the more you become what would seem to be championship material, the more you become aware that you are just completely ordinary, that everybody is very, very special, and at the same time, very, very ordinary.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, it is true. You read these accounts of people who have near-death experiences, you know, and they consider themselves to be just sort of totally ordinary people, and then they kind of have this sudden glimpse into how incredibly magical and vast and profound their life is, and how much they are loved, and just what an amazing thing life is. Then they come back into their ordinary life and often change permanently as a result of that experience.

Allan: Yeah, I am quite fond of those stories, actually, and my spiritual experience, as it has matured, tends to align, my interpretation tends to align more with some of those than it does with some of the dharmas of the world. I have listened to a lot of them, not extensively in terms of investigating any particular one, but the one lady who really stood out in my mind, her name is Nanci Danison. She is this lawyer out in Columbus, Ohio, and it was an amazing experience, and really reflects my own experience very well.

Rick: I am going to be interviewing a woman in a few weeks who was almost murdered, I mean, attacked and stabbed repeatedly with a knife, and she had an experience like that, just completely sort of went into this heavenly realm and felt nothing but love for her attacker, and it completely transformed her life. That is a bit of a tangent. So, as I recall in listening to one of your interviews, at a very early age, you had a sort of a realization that you were not just this little kid in Tennessee, that there was something more to your life, and you didn’t want to lose or forget that more profound or essential aspect of who you were.

Allan: Yeah, what that was, I was, there is no way to tell exactly the age, but probably three to four. The reason I came up with that age is, I grew up in a, we had a little cabin on the side of the mountain, four children, two adults, dogs, cows, pigs, chickens.

Rick: Moonshine still.

Allan: Yeah, there we, you could walk back in the mountains and occasionally find a still. We had no running water, we had no toilet, you know.

Rick: Wow.

Allan: You wanted to go to the bathroom, the bathroom was outside the house. We didn’t wear shoes except in the wintertime when it was really cold. We bought very little food because we had very little money. Anyhow, I was around the age of three or four, and my mother worked constantly, just keeping the house, keeping us alive. I got out by myself, a little child, and walked sort of up the hill behind the house towards the mountain. I was a couple hundred yards, three hundred yards away from the house, and I looked down on it, and I suddenly realized that this experience was causing me to lose the memory of my nature.

Rick: This experience of being a person, of life.

Allan: Yeah, there was something about being a human, or becoming human, that was erasing the memory of who I am, basically, my essential nature. And that memory flashed so profoundly into my, the beginnings of a mind, the formation, the mind was beginning to form, but the memory of my essential nature flashed so forward. It was a horrifying moment, really, it was just horrifying. I concluded that these creatures, humans, had kidnapped me. But it was so baffling, how could they have kidnapped me? How could this have happened? How did they capture me? But that was the only thing, I don’t think that particular concept formed at the time, but as the capacity to formulate concept came into the formative mind, that’s the concept that most captured what I went through. And I knew that I was a completely free, transcendent being, that there was no such thing as language, and the struggle to communicate through language, there was no restriction to movement. And this domain, this reality, this world, I somehow had gotten trapped into, is very dark and heavy and dense. There’s no, in the spiritual nature that I remember, there’s nothing that opposes light, so there’s no, there’s no, you just don’t have a contrast there. So in the midst of that intense shock, I took two vows. First of all, I vowed that no matter what these people did, no matter what this world imposed on me, I would never forget my nature. It was an intense, intense stand, vow that I took. And I took a second vow, which I pretty much forgot until 1990, in the summer of 1990. The second vow was that I would find my way back home.

Rick: How’d you do on the first vow?

Allan: Well, that was, yeah, so I never forgot that. It was never erased by the process of onset of mind and the…

Rick: You never forgot your vow, or you never forgot your nature?

Allan: Both of those.

Rick: Really? So you didn’t, you know, through all the teenage craziness and all, you managed to sort of retain your, some sort of self-realization?

Allan: Right, right. I was always aware of that. And it didn’t make my life easier or better. Actually, it made it worse in some ways, because I couldn’t find any reflection or justification of that in the world around me.

Rick: It felt like you didn’t fit in?

Allan: Well, that would be putting it mildly. Yeah. I never did. I didn’t form the natural bonds and connections that other people around me were forming.

Rick: A stranger in a strange land.

Allan: Yeah, some of that was there.

Rick: Yeah. Huh. So, okay, you’re in your early 60s, and you said it wasn’t until 1990 that you sort of rekindled your vow number two, I guess you said it was. So, take us through your life. I mean, covering quite a few decades there of adventures.

Allan: Yeah, there were a couple of things that happened along the way. One thing that, I mean, little things would happen that I couldn’t explain or understand. One day when I was a teenager, I just looked at my arm. And when I looked at my arm, I held out my hand, and I was just looking at my arm, and instead of seeing a human arm, I saw a stretch of stars and galaxies.

Rick: Wow. Huh.

Allan: Solar systems.

Rick: Interesting.

Allan: And I didn’t know what to make of it.

Rick: Just out of the blue.

Allan: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: You weren’t on LSD or anything.

Allan: No, I’d never heard of it. When I was, we were, my childhood was very innocent in some ways. We weren’t exposed to anything but alcohol, and alcohol never had any appeal to me. But there was always that drive for a higher thought, a higher connection. And I went through pretty much the same thing everybody does. The personality did come, it did develop, the whole mind and individuality took hold and took its toll. And all the pains and pressures that everybody goes through, confusion and all that. Then when I was 19, at the age of 19, I think I had a conflict with a girl that I, a high school girlfriend. I was really torn because I had this love for this woman, a young woman, and at the same time, something was compelling me to a higher thought, this transcendent search or spiritual seeking. So out of that conflict, a need for knowledge or transcendent spiritual seeking, and having love for this young female. Because I knew she wouldn’t, her interest was what I call picket fence reality. She had it all planned out. And in the midst of this, she decided to marry another man, which was emotionally devastating to me. I was sort of torn between these two worlds, so to speak. And I thought very intensely about this, and at that time I was having long hair and using pot. But I used pot and hallucinogens actually in a very single-minded way. I wanted knowledge. I wanted to penetrate this veil of the individuality in the mind. It was very clear to me. That’s why I was doing it. And my mother, she became kind of upset about the whole thing naturally, and she was the only, most of my family pretty much disowned me except for her. And one day she questioned me. She said, “What is it that you want?” And nobody had really asked me that, so I had to clarify it. And I thought to myself, “I want knowledge.” That’s what I came to, is I just want knowledge. And I had to go through a kind of investigation about– I’d been exposed to the writings of Castaneda, and there wasn’t much else to read. I mean, you could go in a bookstore in those days and two books on spirituality maybe. So I had to go through a process of sorting out what was really important. And that’s what I came down to, that I had to have knowledge at all costs. I threw everything into this risk, so to speak, of having knowledge. And I spent the next year or two kind of wearing myself out with hallucinogenic substances and marijuana. And I went into an intense depression, horrible, horrible, horrible depression. And I never used any drug that I perceived as addicting, like heroin or amphetamines. And then one day I picked up a book on meditation, and I tried to practice with almost no success. Then I saw a picture of Mahesh Yogi on the TM thing. That would have been ’72. I was in my early 20s, had a wife and a child at that time. And living this insane lifestyle. And I went to the introductory lecture, and I think the guy’s name was John Lyons. I’ve never heard of him since.

Rick: Oh, yeah, I know John Lyons.

Allan: Oh, great, great. I wonder where he is these days.

Rick: Last I knew he was out on the West Coast running – well, this was like 20 years ago I saw him out there. He had a burrito place called Juanito’s Burritos, and very delicious burritos.

Allan: Oh, wow. That’s great. So anyhow, I went to the introductory lecture, and he said, “Okay, to start this meditation you have to give up drugs.” I immediately dropped all drugs. Starting the TM practice began, I think it was in ’72, John Lyons. Actually, when John did the puja for initiation, he turned to give me the mantra and tried to get me to repeat the mantra. I couldn’t even repeat the mantra. I suppose it was some kind of samadhi. I had an awareness of myself, but I couldn’t connect with my body. I didn’t know. I couldn’t speak. I thought something was wrong. I thought I was failing the program.

Rick: So just the puja zapped you so much that you…

Allan: So anyhow, let’s see if we can fast forward through some of this. The TM era went on for about 12 years. I had a very – during much of that I had a very, very pure lifestyle, very dedicated to practice. Meditation was great. I had a number of very transcendent experiences. Even in that winter of ’72, ’73, I was at teacher training for a five-month program. In the break, we had a small group who were doing both programs. We were in the Punta Umbria, maybe, for the duration. The Mahesh Yogi went into seven days of silence and told us to do the same. At that point, my mind merged into Aum. And I saw clearly through direct experience that Aum is sourcing everything continuously. Creation and dissolution happen every moment, rather than only over whatever so many yugas it’s said to happen. It also happens, you could say, with every breath, although Aum and breath aren’t exactly the same. But I saw that directly, which was just the very beginning of what I was seeking in terms of knowledge. I went on through the development of a transcendent quality of awareness. And then I kind of started to migrate away from the TM program in the mid-80s. And consequently, there was a psychic opening then, and I knew way too much. I’d look at someone, and I would know their past lives. I would know the karmas that were involved with the problems they were dealing with. But I kind of looked at it and I said, “Well, it’s okay. It’s good stuff, but it’s not my destiny.” I didn’t force it away; I just didn’t give it a lot of value.

Rick: You could have made a profession of it if you wanted to.

Allan: Yeah, I could have kind of become a $25 psychic. Anyhow, it didn’t fulfill my quest. And I did a stint of rebirthing at that time to sort out. The transcendent was clear to me even then, but then there was this personal life that was going on. Okay, how do we get this thing to work out here? How do we get this human part to work out in relationship and family and all that? And rebirthing helped somewhat. Still, my quest was nowhere near satisfaction. Then around 19…

Rick: Let me interject a question here before you continue. You had said earlier that when you were 3 or 4, you had made this vow not to forget your true nature. And you said that you never really forgot it. And yet, you went through a whole phase of taking drugs for a few years. Did you take those drugs… I mean, even during the drug taking, did you not forget your true nature? And why were you taking the drugs? What were you hoping to gain from them that you hadn’t already gained in terms of knowing your true nature?

Allan: The memory of the nature was there.

Rick: Ah, just a sort of a taste of your flavor.

Allan: Not memory like remembering my mother’s maiden name, because I could forget that. This wasn’t that kind of memory. It was a memory that cannot be forgotten, no matter what happens.

Rick: But the full living of it wasn’t there, and that’s what you were looking for.

Allan: Yeah, the mature expression of it.

Rick: Okay. The imprint of it was there.

Allan: There was still a hard, demanding quality of personality, of individuality. It was hard and demanding. There was a mental construct that became a prison, so to speak.

Rick: Yeah.

Allan: It was an attempt to penetrate that, an attempt to bring the knowledge, a living knowledge, or a continual knowledge of that transcendent nature into play.

Rick: Right. And so your TM years ramped that up some, but still didn’t fulfill it.

Allan: Right, right.

Allan: It certainly brought clarity around the transcendent quality, but it didn’t do much for the personal life. It didn’t bring the kind of satisfaction either to the personal life or to the quest.

Rick: Right.

Allan: Then in about 1988 or so, Sai Baba came to me, and you could say dream or meditation or trance, whatever. It’s another dimension of being that this happens. And I found myself in something like a cave in the Himalayan mountains. And there was me and Sai Baba and a yogi.

Rick: The famous Sai Baba with the big hair that died recently.

Allan: Right, right. And then there was like a three-way non-verbal communication. And when I came out of that, what I understood was I would no longer have a yogi as my guru, but Sai Baba himself would be my guru. So from that time on, my relationship with Sai Baba intensified. And by 1990, I’d reached…

Rick: You never met him in person, this is all…

Allan: Yeah, and I’ll get to that.

Rick: In subtle, yeah.

Allan: In 1990, my desire or need for clarification had sort of reached a point of… another level of intensity, I guess you could say. And at that point in 1990, I could no longer… I just simply could no longer live. It wasn’t a state of depression, it was a state of just absolutely no interest. Like the desire for knowledge had ramped up even more. And finally, in the summer of 1990, I made a trip to India to meet Sai Baba in person. And I went alone. Going to India that time, to me, was like… I should have gone to… If I’d gone to another planet, it would have been easier to assimilate, I think, because I had no idea how completely different everything is in India. So I landed in Bombay and had to get my way over to Parthi, where Baba’s ashram is. And I go and I sit down in the space for darshan. I look over to my right, and who’s sitting there? Andy Reimer’s sitting there. Actually, somebody I knew. I’d known Andy pretty well. Anyhow…

Rick: Yeah, I knew him pretty well.

Allan: Yeah, yeah. Anyhow, there was a moment when Sai Baba walked into the space for darshan. And I immediately remembered the second vow that I would find my way home. And in that moment, I knew, I knew, I absolutely completely knew that that was home for me. In my relationship with Baba…

Rick: That what was home for you?

Allan: That presence. That presence that is presented through the form of Sai Baba.

Rick: And are you saying that the presence that is presented through Sai Baba was home, or the presence was home, and Sai Baba happened to be the presenter at that point?

Allan: I don’t know. It sounds the same to me.

Rick: Does it? I mean, because there are a lot of saints that could present that sort of presence. Yeah, yeah, there are. That’s true. That’s true. But for me, Baba presented it.

Rick: He was the channel.

Allan: Yeah, you could say that. Okay. So, that relationship continued to intensify over the next two years quite dramatically, and I began to attend bhajans, or, you know, and most Westerners call it kirtan, we call it bhajans. And that became the real process for me, was this bhajan and devotion to Baba.

Rick: Why don’t you explain what bhajans are, for those who may not know?

Allan: Bhajan is mostly Hindi or Sanskrit or certain other Indian languages, which are sung, devotional prayers. So, a leader sings a line, then the group repeats that line. It’s a form of prayer, really.

Rick: Had you given up your meditation practice at this point?

Allan: No, I still kept the practice. The mantra changed and eventually left altogether. Within a few years, the mantra changed. It just kind of happened naturally. I didn’t have much intention around it.

Rick: Okay.

Allan: But the practice, the sitting continued. I’ve always loved sitting in the quiet, and I still do. The purpose is a little different now. So the intensity of love for Baba continued, and then He began to appear to me in the form of Shirdi Sai Baba. He would come to me in meditation, any and all times, at night, in sleep, and so on.

Rick: And that was a Sai Baba who had lived a hundred years ago, or something like that?

Allan: Right, right. He was contemporary of Sri Ramakrishna, and I can say more about that maybe. But anyhow, Shirdi Baba began to appear to me, and sometimes would give instruction or teaching. And one night, I think it was in Guru Purnima 1992, Baba came as what we can say, “Sagun Brahman,” or Brahman with a form and with attributes, and taught me what, at the time, I didn’t understand what He was teaching me, but in retrospect, I see that He was teaching me pure Advaita.

Rick: Shirdi Sai Baba did this?

Allan: Right, right. He gave me these instructions, three terse sentencing expressions, which I would say were Mahavakyas, but they were in English. Then, in that same night …

Rick: Can you tell us what they were?

Allan: The three of those were, “I am the motivator of every act, I am the doer of all deeds, I am the enjoyer of the fruit of all acts.” And a fourth one came later, but I don’t want to talk about that here. But those four Mahavakyas became my practice from that point on. But anyhow, that same night, Baba came back, and the second time when he came, He was Nirgun Brahman, or Avyaktarupin Brahman or the Presence with no form. And what happened in that occasion was, Allan merged into that. Allan became that, and there was no more … Nothing but that perfection, ultimate perfection. So, somehow this form came back. The Allan reality returned. It took a few days for me to kind of adjust to that. But that was the knowledge I’d been seeking. That was what I was after. And then that practice and that devotional thing continued.

Rick: When the Allan came back after a few days, did you feel that that which you had been seeking was lost to any extent, or was it more of an integration so that that could become a living reality?

Allan: I’m sorry, I don’t quite understand the question.

Rick: Well, in other words, sometimes people have a profound merging like that, into universality or unboundedness or whatever, but then when they kind of start getting back into the nitty-gritty of their life, they lose that.

Allan: Oh yeah, you could say it was lost, in the context of what you’re saying, it was lost. But the certainty, the ground of being wasn’t lost. So, the kind of next step that unfolded was, my devotion for Sai Baba intensified. It kept getting more intense. I would think, “God, it can’t get any more intense,” but it did. It kept ramping up and up and up.

Rick: Which Sai Baba are you talking about here?

Allan: Well, they’re all the same to me, but Sai Baba, the Shirdi Sai Baba. And around his birthday time, I went into an enormous devotional kind of explosion in my relationship with him. And merged into him, not as that pure kind of limitless Brahman presence, but in a form of pure love. It came to me in a vision or meditation. This might have been in ’93, I don’t remember the exact year. But it came to me in form, and it was a process that went on for probably two or three hours. I don’t want to explain the whole thing here, but I’ve written about it in my autobiography, if I ever get that, because there’s a book. But at the culmination of that, there was just Sai Baba and myself, and we would touch each other. There was form, there was name, there was appearances. And the love intensified between us until everything dissolved except divine, pure ocean nectar of pure divine love. And around that time, the individuality of Allan collapsed. It was just gone. And I couldn’t relate from that standpoint anymore. The point of reference for my relating to the world and life around me was that I am the source of all life. I am pure existence. I could relate to myself from the standpoint of I am light, I am energy, I am fire. That was it. It was a difficult time for the people around me, because I had no sense of, “These are my children, these are not my children. This is my home, this is not my home.” I remember at one point I had to sign a check to pay sales tax. The idea of signing a name was just totally revolting to me. I was like, “Name? Form? What does that mean?” It didn’t mean anything to me.

Rick: So you were back in the States at this point?

Allan: Yeah, I was at home at that time. And I was actually working. Working wasn’t a problem. I entered a state of intense ecstasy, constant ecstasy, unimaginable ecstasy. So long as I was alone, there was nothing but divine ecstasy. It was just overwhelming.

Rick: What sort of job were you working at?

Allan: I had a lawn mowing service, so I was mowing lawns in the meantime.

Rick: So that’s nice and simple. You can just push a lawnmower.

Allan: Yeah, right. It didn’t require… But some of the things I did, looking back on it, were just crazy. Like what? I had the mind. I could roll down a set of concrete steps and have no injury whatsoever. Everything to me was humorous and fun. But I was in constant ecstasy. The only thing was, when I encountered other people, I felt their presence so deeply. I felt their pain and would be overwhelmed with their pain. I remember walking across someone’s lawn and got this pain in my shoulder. And I looked up and there was a broken limb in the tree. I felt everything so intensely. And I didn’t sleep. I had no interest in food. And then I reached a point where I realized I kind of had enough sense that this could not go on. It was so intense, it was burning out my body.

Rick: So you said that you weren’t sleeping and you weren’t eating. Do you mean literally no sleep, no food, and that’s why your body was dropping away?

Allan: I never went unconscious. I would lay down for maybe two hours a night. The rest of the night I would sip. And then a little bit I would eat. Normal food I could not eat. If it had been used in a puja or offered in something, then I could eat it. It was enjoyable. But I had no taste for food. Everything was like cardboard.

Rick: But you were doing a fairly high energy job mowing lawns. It was taking a lot of energy.

Allan: No, plenty of energy was there. Too much energy.

Rick: But you said your body was going to drop in a week, the rate you were going.

Allan: Well, it’s just that the energy was so intense, the body couldn’t tolerate it. There was an awareness that the body couldn’t tolerate it much longer. So the question then became, a number of questions came forward. One was, would the body continue? Would this life form continue? That became a question. And then there became a question, would there be an ego in the body? Would there not be an ego? Would it be dropped? And then there was a specific moment, or probably a couple of specific moments, when I said, “Well, okay. Either way, it’s fine.” But not a decision that… There was no person here to make that decision. There was no individuality. So there was an awareness of a decision, but then there was a leaving of that decision to God, to the mother. I sometimes just say the mother. Sometimes I say Baba. Sometimes I say Swami. Sometimes I say whatever. But I knew that life made the decision. So then, I have to cut… This part could be tedious to talk about. But how that decision was made, and the process that went through. There was a child who came. Anyhow, that decision got made, and the ecstasy diminished. The personal life came back.

Rick: A child came?

Allan: Yeah, literally a small child. I was working one day, and I met this little girl. She was maybe four or five years old. And she sort of pulled me back, pulled me back into the human context.

Rick: Was that the little girl who asked if she could help, and she said she didn’t need any money?

Allan: No, no. It was just… I met this small child. I was working, and we began to play with her toys, and pretend, her little pretend… At that time, I could relate really well with children. I couldn’t relate with adults at all, but children, I could play with them. I was like one of them. I was very much like a child. So I had this connection with her. That’s when the awareness took on the decision that I had to come back into this domain, and live in this domain. So then, for about the next 10 to 12 years, practices would come. Investigation would come. What is this? How to clarify, how to understand, how to conceptualize what was going on. And I read all the books. Nisargadatta, Ramana Maharshi, did some of those practices, until the practices became completely redundant. I began to develop an understanding of how individuality develops, what it means, what is the relationship of that to being, to the vaster being. There were several kind of awakenings or culminations in the knowledge. There was a point where, in meditation, I would experience or see, not with physical eyes, but I would see all of creation coming out of being. Everything would appear. Everything would arise. Entire gods, humans, animals, planets, everything would just arise out of being. And that reached a culmination somewhere around 2000, 2001. I was sitting once in that, when creation arose, a voice came and it said, “This is myself.” And it was my voice, not the voice that’s kind of inside our head as a mind, but a voice that had consumed everything, “This is myself.” I was pretty dysfunctional for a period after that. The next part of the journey, there’s a lot of other things I’m glossing over. The next part of the journey, in a way, I was like the Forrest Gump of spirituality. I was very innocent in so many ways. I would just be absorbed by devotion for God and these forms of God. I developed a very intimate, close relationship with another avatar in India, Narayani Amma. She’s not very well known in the West, but I met her when she was barely out of her teens. Anyhow, what happened after this kind of peak of yogic awakening, I had this, death came calling. I had several near-death experiences, not classical near-death experiences, but came very close to physically dying several times. But this one with the lung infection, at that time I was spending a lot of time in meditation, four, five, six hours a day. I was in solitude. My children were grown, my wife was deceased. So I went into the surgery, which was mandatory. It was apparently the only way of surviving this disease.

Rick: Did you pick it up in India, do you think, the disease?

Allan: That’s a long story. It has to do with a defect in my esophagus and lung infections. Anyhow, during the surgery I was unconscious, and I had this experience where I enter this big hall. I’m there, and there are some other people or beings, and they’re looking through books or whatever that’s explaining my life. And they’re kind of, “Well, okay, this guy’s good to go. He doesn’t need to go back.” I’m thinking, “Oh, wow, this is cool.” And then suddenly something appears in the distance, and this being, this form comes forward, slowly comes forward, and it turns out it was Shiva. But he was the ugliest, most ascetic form. I’ve never seen any picture of Shiva That portrayed him like this, hair and dirt and filth and ashes all over his body, matted. It was really, really ugly. But still it was Shiva, and that pure, infinite being was shining through somehow. I know it doesn’t sound logical, anyhow. He comes forward, and by this time he has everybody’s attention, and he just makes this little motion, ever so slight motion, and we all understood what he meant. Send the dude back. I keep unraveling the meaning of that, which many, many others similar, visions of Shiva, visions of Krishna, visions of Rama, some in dream meditations, some in real life. I keep unraveling the meaning and the significance. But I believe that was the point when I was set on the course of real embodiment. It’s as though Shiva said, “Okay, you found me in the transcendent. You found me in infinite love. You found me, but can you find me here? Can you find me where, in the most painful, difficult places of humanity? Can you find me here?” Then I came back into my, kind of left the meditation stage. I came back living and working in New Jersey. And at that time also I’d fallen and broken my back. I had a serious back injury, and I was marginally functional, carrying on everyday duties. I managed to go see Eckhart Tolle. Some of these pieces are really strange, but I went to see Eckhart Tolle, and to make a long story short, I couldn’t contact him personally. There were too many people there, but I wanted some contact with him. So later he came in the inner dimension, and we had this connection. And he took me somewhere. At that time, even though I was in all this trouble, s

Rick: iddhis were beginning to come into me. In this interaction with Eckhart Tolle in the other dimension, there was a decision that was made. A kind of decision was worked out. He took me and introduced me to some other beings, some other people, and I had no idea who it was until much later. So fast forward another…

Rick: So what kind of Sindhis were beginning to come into you?

Allan: I could just feel they were arising. I could sense they were arising. I could be aware of people at a distance and knew what was going on with them. I would enter states where I literally could hear the prayers of everybody. I would know what people were praying, what their heart’s desire was. I would sometimes find myself in another dimension, assisting people between lives, that kind of thing.

Rick: And you had had that kind of stuff earlier in your life, because you were saying, you had a stage where you could see people’s past lives and all that stuff.

Allan: Yeah, these kind of things would happen off and on.

Rick: It’s interesting because some people listen to all this, and some people prefer a very plain, vanilla, simple, direct form of spirituality. With a few very basic principles that they just adhere to and repeat over and over again. They listen to this kind of stuff and they think, “Whoa, what a lot of frills, complications, all this icing on the cake. Can’t we just keep it basic?” I think it’s a matter of preference and a matter of proclivity, but when you get right down to it, the universe is a fascinating, mysterious place. There is indeed all kinds of, there are all sorts of levels of reality. And like they say, each of us is just like the tip of the iceberg. It might seem imagination that Eckhart Tolle came to you and took you on some little cosmic tour, but it’s very possible, in my way of seeing things, that some deeper aspect of the reality of that man actually did that and interacted with your deeper reality and had experience. There wasn’t just an imagination or something.

Allan: I could say more about that. In some sense, is it imagination or is it real? I don’t know if you can ever separate real from imagination. I don’t think you can totally separate false from true. I don’t think they’re completely separable. Anyhow, so a series of events continued, and something else happened with Yogananda. Quite an amazing, amazing experience with Yogananda and what I call the inner dimension. And I was given a kind of, oh, shall we say, introductory or initiation into what’s called bodhisattva.

Rick: Bodhisattva?

Allan: By Yogananda.

Rick: OK, you going to elaborate on that a little bit?

Allan: Just briefly, he appeared to me… See, I had an experience of Yogi Satyam. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Yogi Satyam. I had heard rumors that Yogi Satyam was a reincarnation of Yogananda, and I had this amazing, intense love for Yogananda. So I thought, well, let me go meet him. I went to Canada and met him. And when he walked into the room, clearly to me it was Yogananda. And then afterwards, there was this probably two or three hour, maybe longer, cosmic interaction with me and Yogananda. And it’s as though, I mean, to try to convert what happened into linear concept and language, he sort of placed this garland around my neck and proclaimed that I was a bodhisattva. And I was like, OK, whatever this means, I don’t know. But it was an honor and a privilege.

Rick: What does it mean? I mean, I’ve heard the term, but what does it mean?

Allan: You know, I’m still figuring it out. I was given – I don’t want to go into details with this, but around that time, all through my life, I would kind of hear this cosmic voice, and about this time I was given a sort of cosmic mission to do with the cosmic mind. I don’t know if we’ll have time to go into that or not. Not necessary. But the next phase then comes along. I was invited to an introduction to Waking Down In Mutuality by Ted Strauss and his wife Hillary. I went because it was – well, first of all, I was about a mile from my house, maybe two miles, and some friends were there I hadn’t seen in a long time. I was not seeking anything. I didn’t want anything. But just, OK, I don’t watch TV. I don’t have anything else to do. Let me go. And so Ted talked for a while, and he talked about some of the principles of Waking Down. And when Hillary shared, I could feel her so deeply. I could feel her heart and this great love, you know, was moving. And so I started to take some interest in it, and I was driving one day. I remember exactly the time I was driving, and I suddenly realized these were the people – Samuel and Ted and some of the other teachers – were the people that Eckhart Tolle had introduced me to. If you go ask Eckhart about this, he would probably know nothing about it. So chalk it up to imagination, if you like. This is just my story. Then I became involved with Waking Down. And after nine months or so, that process, the recognition called second birth transpired. And when that second birth transpired for me, I literally saw, not with the physical eye, but some deep inner sense of things, consciousness fall. There’s this regal flow of consciousness, kind of from here, right into the heart center on the right side of the chest.

Rick: So is that how you would define your second birth? Was that flow of consciousness?

Allan: Well, in the inner dimension of it, yeah. The outer dimension was a little different.

Rick: Because you’ve been through so many awakenings and profound things, it almost would seem like second birth was kind of elementary compared to a lot you’ve been through. But you’re saying it was a…

Allan: Yeah, I know. But to me it was just the next step. It was a phase into embodiment. Because prior to that, you know what’s termed “witness consciousness” was there in me. It wasn’t a big deal, but for so many years I was always conscious. If you saw me sleeping in a room and you had a conversation, I would probably remember that conversation the next day.

Rick: Right, because you were conscious during sleep.

Allan: Yeah, in fact, if I were lying down, I wouldn’t know if I was sleeping or not unless thoughts came. If the thoughts came and they were sort of logical, then I would say, “Oh, I’m awake.” If they were like jumbled up dream images, then I would know, “Oh, okay, the body is sleeping.”

Rick: Yeah, but awareness continued. Well, you know, it does seem like you would be a candidate for something which would get you more embodied, because it seems like for years you’ve been just on the doorstep of death, because you’re so kind of detached from your body, ready to check out at any time.

Allan: Yeah, that’s true. And even in the midst of that, I still had certain personal problems, dark sides that I couldn’t justify. So when Waking Down came, I knew this was for me, somehow I knew it. I also realized, it became very clear to me that I needed help in order to make that transition into embodiment. It was a tedious, difficult, fairly difficult process. Anyhow, about that time, the second birth period, some other things happened that broadened the maturity here, broadened the understanding of what human nature, God, and life is all about. Incidentally, Sai Baba came in my dream at that time, and He made a statement like something like this. I mean, this isn’t in language, but He made a statement something like this, “So you’ve finished the yoga bhai.” And I said, “Swami, you know more than I do.” Then He made this quick motion, He actually shook hands with me, He wouldn’t allow me to do pada namaskar. So He kind of shook hands with me and He made this motion, “We have work to do, let’s get busy here,” and He goes off with me in a huff. So, the other thing that happened then, which…

Rick: Finishing the yoga bhav means…

Allan: Well, you know, it’s an ongoing discovery for me what it means. I think He was acknowledging that what we seek to achieve through yogic practices, that seeking was no longer there.

Rick: What does the word “Bhav” or “Bhava” mean?

Allan: “Bhava” is like a feeling, but more than just feeling.

Rick: Like a mood.

Allan: Yeah, but a deep mood. In Sanskrit there’s a phrase, “Yad Bhavam Tad Bhavati.” We translate it in English, it means, “As you feel, so is it.” But it’s not a feeling you can change, at will. “As you feel, so is it.” Like that. “Yad Bhavam Tad Bhavati.” So anyhow, the other thing that happened then was that the soul itself revealed itself within me. You know, I could say, “I saw the soul” is mumbo-jumbo, but there was an experience, a direct experience of the soul itself.

Rick: And what was that? I mean, you say these things, they’re like little teasers, but you’ve got to actually explain what the experience was.

Allan: Well, see, the problem is that when I try to explain it, I can get lost in that.

Rick: And words are so inadequate, too.

Allan: Oh, God, yeah. But, you know, and then I came out of that, and I’m like, I do this search on webs and books, “Has anybody else experienced the soul?” And I find these kind of trivial statements like, “The soul is in your body,” and “The soul migrates from birth to birth.” It just didn’t pan out with my experience of soul. So my experience showed me, and I’m going to say this for me, I’m assuming this for everybody else, but who knows? I try not to extrapolate my experience beyond my experience. To me, soul is neither pure transcendent, like the witnessing consciousness piece, neither is it form, but it contains both of those, and it has, let’s say, an element of individuality, but from the standpoint of soul, individuality is a dot.

Rick: Is a what?

Allan: It’s like a dot.

Rick: A dot.

Allan: It’s a small, small thing. Right. An important thing, but it doesn’t convey what the soul is like.

Rick: Could you say that it’s sort of like an interface between universality and individuality, sort of a seed form of individuality?

Allan: You could say that. What I understand about it now is that the soul… I draw one analogy, and analogies are never the whole picture. It’s just one little piece. An analogy to me would be like the electricity in your house compared to the generator. So you have a generator that has to be outside the house. You don’t want the generator inside the house, because the generator is massive and generates a great deal of power. What you want in the house is you want the effect of the generator. You want the electricity in your wall. So the soul is the generator that’s outside the house, and from the soul, the soul does not enter the body. The soul force projects the body, the force of the soul. The generator doesn’t come in your house. The effect of the generator comes in your house, and the effect of the generator is electricity. It’s power. It’s energy. It turns on your lights. It turns on your air conditioning. It turns on your heat. It does everything in your house, because that’s how it functions. So the body…

Rick: But if the generator were in your house, it would probably blow out all your circuits.

Allan: First of all, you wouldn’t want to live in a generator. Like that, if you brought the soul into the body, the body couldn’t sustain it.

Rick: In its full force, yeah.

Allan: It would be like 220, not even 220, those high voltage wires that run.

Rick: Yeah, 11,000 volts or whatever. If you plugged your house into that, what would happen?

Rick: Fry it.

Allan: It would fry it, it would fry everything. So from my understanding from the experience is that from the soul, forms get generated, and the soul, back into the soul, but that center of the soul energy is on the right side of the chest. And that’s where consciousness through the soul force connects into this.

Rick: I think Ramana Maharshi said something along those lines.

Allan: Yeah, something like that he talked about. But I never found anybody who talks about the soul. I found one book that talked about the soul, but some of the things that he was saying were too academic for my experience. So here’s what I began to understand, is that from the soul projects form. And so you have individual forms, and you have many other functions of the soul. And through that I began to understand why when I was a teenager I could look at my arm and see stars and planets, because another function that comes from this soul has to do with how stars and planets interact. Another function that comes from the soul that sometimes bleeds through into this mind is working in what I call the death room, where people transition from lifetimes and all that.

Rick: So hang on a second. So you’re saying that when you say this soul, you mean your particular soul, one of its functions is the formation of stars and planets and working in the death room. Is that what you’re saying?

Allan: Yeah, they’re very different functions. So I think that everybody has, from the soul, these things happen.

Rick: And so you’re saying that different souls have different roles, different jobs, and your particular soul has the jobs that you just mentioned?

Allan: There’s a couple of functions that… Sometimes it bleeds through into this conscious mind. It’s very mysterious. But what happened after Waking Down in the beginning of the embodiment process is that the actual soul function seemed to change a little bit. So that embodiment actually has an empowerment that’s more than just on the surface. It runs really deep. That’s what I want to say. That’s my experience. There’s an empowerment that runs really deep and enables soul force to… It all sounds so linear and logical, but it’s not. It’s just beyond all that. But there is an empowerment that seems to transpire into the soul force itself.

Rick: I’m trying to grasp what you’re saying. So you’re saying that the… I know that all we can hope to do is have tastes of it, you know? And those tastes can give people a little springboard for an intuitive sense of what you’re saying. But I think what you’re saying here is that… Actually, maybe I should have you reiterate it one more time, because you did that better than my rehashing of it. But it sounds like an important point, so I think it would be worth hitting one more time.

Allan: Which part?

Rick: Well, just the embodiment. I sense that you’re saying that the embodiment somehow is enabling the innate purpose or function of your soul to do its thing more effectively in the world. Is that what you’re saying? Or did I totally miss it?

Allan: Well, something like that. I think there’s an empowerment from embodiment. There’s an empowerment from embodiment that feeds into the soul, and therefore into the other functions of the soul force. The soul itself is vast and rich and complex.

Rick: So we might say, perhaps – tell me if I’m getting closer – that without embodiment, the soul can be… it’s much more transcendental or detached or far removed from the nitty-gritty of life. But with embodiment, more of the full force of the soul can be brought to bear in your life. Sort of like your generator analogy. Without embodiment, the generator is outside the house, and some of the power from it is trickling into the house and powering things. But somehow, with embodiment, the house is upgraded to be able to utilize much more of the capacity of the generator.

Allan: The only thing is, I don’t know if it has that much to do with individuality. I think it has more to do with something bigger, a bigger context of our lives. We tend to be quite focused on me and mine, from the standpoint of the personality and the mind, our individuality. But the soul force is more interested in, more intent on a much bigger picture.

Rick: But how does the soul force express itself other than through individuality?

Allan: Oh God, there are so many possibilities.

Rick: Are you talking of soul force as an individual consideration? Like I have my soul force and you have your soul force, and everybody has theirs? Or are you talking of soul force here in a more universal context?

Allan: Both of those, really.

Rick: Okay. All right, so carry on.

Allan: Okay, yeah, I mean, we could spend a lot of time talking about that. And much of it is just extrapolation from a brief experience, a few brief experiences, trying to organize it into an understanding.

Rick: Right.

Allan: So certain parts of wisdom, we just organize them into tidbits.

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

Allan: There’s a bit of defilement that goes on there.

Rick: Yeah, we’re just grasping at straws.

Allan: What I’m excited about is that no matter how high we fly spiritually, embodiment still has something really beautiful to contribute. And I don’t want to discredit anyone else. Some people have an awakening experience, and there’s no more individuality, there’s no more person there. I really honor that, but I also want to give voice to and value to having someone be home, having a person there. To me, it’s like an ocean. And what we refer to as ego and mind are like fish in the ocean. So you’ve got a whale in the ocean, you know, the ocean’s a pretty big place. There could be thousands of whales in the ocean. It doesn’t really harm the ocean. As far as I can tell, whales don’t do any damage to the ocean. So whether or not there’s an ego here, an individuality, being, the vastness of being, it’s not disturbed by that. It’s just like ice cubes in a glass of water on a hot sunny day. On a hot sunny day, there’s nothing like ice cubes in your glass of water.

Rick: And both the water and the ice cubes are the same stuff.

Allan: Absolutely same stuff. See, that’s all clear to me. And due to the education that came here, I began to see how individuality arises, how what we call ego arises. And I had a kind of wisdom or a depth of acceptance around that came.

Rick: I think some of the people you were referring to a minute ago, who say, “Well, there is no individuality, there is no ego, there is no person here,” they would tend to say that if there is a person, if there is an individuality, then you haven’t quite got it yet.

Allan: Yeah, beautiful. I don’t argue with anyone. I mean, that’s their wisdom. Beautiful, profound, great. To me it’s like, let’s say you have a painting in your house there. Do you have something you can look at?

Rick: Sure. Right now I’m looking at a photograph of the Grand Canyon.

Allan: Let’s say there is a hawk. And let’s say it’s painted. Maybe it’s a Rembrandt. Whoever, a great artist, has created that rendition of the Grand Canyon with a hawk, and you can see his feathers, and you can see his beak, and you can even catch his eyes. Okay, you can look at that and say, “Oh, it’s just paper and paint. It’s nothing. Just a piece of paper with some paint on it. There’s no hawk there, there’s no Grand Canyon there.” Is that true or not?

Rick: Yes and no.

Allan: Yeah, it’s absolutely true. There’s no Grand Canyon there, there’s no hawk there. So when you look at this person, any person, you can say, “Oh, it’s just the play of consciousness. It’s just the canvas here is Shiva consciousness. There’s a canvas here, a blank sheet of infinite white paper, Shiva consciousness.”

Rick: And you can say, “Oh, that’s all that’s real, that’s all that’s significant.”

Allan: And on that canvas, Shakti, the ink, Shakti is the ink, creates an Allan and a Rick and history and people and all that. And we can say, “Oh, it’s just nothing but paint and canvas. There’s nothing real there.” But how does the creator feel about that? How does the great Shakti, the mother, who’s putting the images on the canvas, feel about that? I looked at the history of Waking Down In Mutuality. Here’s what I began to discover. The yogis came from India. Mahesh Yogi came from India. I’m going to tell you some other, I don’t want to go into that whole story. You’re pretty familiar with it. And what did we get with TM? We got mantras. And look at those mantras. They’re all the names of Devi. I don’t want to talk about the mantras, but you know what mantra you were given, And you go into the history of it, it’s the name of Devi. It’s the name of the mother. So we go on worshipping, in a sense, or praising, or whatever, these names of Devi. And then, kind of historically, what happens is you have the onset of Narayana Anna, Ammaji, Sri Ma, Karunamayi. You have these human living forms of the Devi come onto the stage. And I’ve had a lot of experiences, a lot of involvement with all of those forms. Oh God, so many great experiences. And then, to me, historically, the next step is embodiment, which is a kind of investigation of the details of Devi’s ornaments. Humans, to me, beings, life forms are the ornaments on Devi. I could talk more about that in my experience. But when I was making that transition more from transcendent to embodiment, I would literally see, not with these eyes, but I would constantly see Devi creating everything. I’d go into a kind of ecstatic trance, or whatever. But I would see Devi, the Divine Mother, creating everything. She’s simultaneously making concrete hard, and flowers soft, and children beautiful, and snakes doing their thing. I would see her just doing everything simultaneously. And I’d be absorbed just in this ecstatic love of her. So now, to me, embodiment is like, “Okay, let’s investigate the details of her creation.” So the Allan that’s here, the person that’s here, the ego that’s here, I don’t know if there’s an ego here or not. To me, it doesn’t really matter. I’m aware of the One Creator, the One Created Matrix, creating everything. So if there’s an ego here, she’s creating that. If there’s no ego here, then she’s just not bothering putting an ego here at the time. It doesn’t matter to me. What really matters to me is, “What can I give back?” Whether it’s an ego giving it back, or in the final ground of being, it’s only herself giving back. I’m kind of indifferent to that whole discussion. I watch some of your recordings and interviews with people in whom apparently there is no person. I enjoy those, and I enjoy the ones with a person, too. I don’t need to correct anybody.

Rick: Yeah, I’m kind of mellowing out on that topic myself. It’s sort of like I realize that the different ways of expressing it and experiencing it are just part of the variety of the garden of life, and that it’s appropriate for different people to have these different orientations. It’s sort of silly to say, “Well, this one’s right, and this one’s wrong, and this one’s more complete than the other.” They all have their place.

Allan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think one other thing that’s really profound is just the dawning of so much wisdom, so many people awakening into the uniqueness of their wisdom. I also want to say that I think awakening is a moment-to-moment, day-to-day process. It’s fully organic, fully alive. There are transitions that have happened here. You can say, “That’s an awakening. That’s an awakening.” But there’s a constant arising of everything, a constant arising of life and the mystery, and an ongoing exploration of what that means. I think the mystery, it’s the nature of the mystery to always be one step ahead. And wherever we arrive in our exploration and awakening, the mystery immediately embraces that and then moves on into a deeper exploration. So for me, the embodiment part is here. You know, we were going to Manhattan. I was doing a sitting in Manhattan recently, and on the way we stopped and picked up a quick bite of food. And the gal serving the food, I just looked at her, and she had a body like mine, very slender. And immediately I realized something. I have a very slim body. I could not gain weight no matter what I did. I can’t gain weight. I’ve tried. And yet I could not teach someone how to lose weight. I am a master at being thin, but I can’t teach it. There’s no way I could teach someone to be thin, but I’m a master at it.

Rick: Just your natural makeup.

Allan: It’s just there naturally, but I’m a master at it. There’s no discipline for me to control my eating habits at all. What we are given to teach is, I think, what we’re learning, what we need to learn. So, you know, become designated a teacher in Waking Down In Mutuality. I think it’s because that’s the part I need to learn is embodiment. What does embodiment mean? What does that really mean to fully live with the awareness of the transcendent wisdom, but to live everyday life? And a lot of that entails the arising and meeting of what we can call shadow or difficult parts of our lives. I think many of us who journeyed into the transcendent search and long meditation and all that were driven by an attempt to escape what it feels like to be human, what it feels like to be trapped in these bodies. Just as when I was a child, I took a vow to get out of this place no matter what it took. I think that’s indicative of how we all kind of live in the spiritual quest. Maybe not all. Let’s say a large portion. I don’t know about all. But being human is, to the extent especially that we have an intuition or a memory of our spiritual nature, we’re driven to get to that as a means to escape this. Reintegrating or relearning this human part, bringing it on board so to speak, I think has a lot to do with the transition that we’re going through as a planet, as a species. From my viewpoint, Waking Down In Mutuality is one of the great tools of how to educate the human being into a more sustainable version of life. We can call it coming of the new age or maybe it’s the Sat Yuga. I don’t know about all that. But this is what I sense about it. You see, let me tell one story to help clarify what I’m talking about. I was in Mexico, oh, when was that? Maybe 2002 I was in Mexico and my daughter was married to a Mexican. We were visiting her in-laws. And they had a little compound there and they had these birds. I think they were called pachichis. They looked like a little duck. So they had captured these wild birds and they lived in the compound. I asked them how did they get those wild birds to stay there. So what happened, they caught one of them and clipped his wings so he couldn’t fly. And other ones came and joined. So all these pachichis were living in captivity. I meditated on that. Why would these birds give up their freedom to live in captivity? And it occurred to me that they came there because they loved their own. They wanted to be with their own species. And I realized out of that that all beings intuit. We all have an intuition that we’re something great. There’s something great about us, something profound. In a sense we intuit that we are the infinite being. And the birds don’t have individuality. They don’t have, like we do, a conceptual. See I speak about something, not ego, but I speak about something I call a conceptual paradigm of identity. That way I’m trying to be more descriptive of what I mean than ego. Because who knows what ego means? You could give a half a thousand definitions. The birds don’t have a conceptual paradigm of identity. They have an identity with species. You want to be with your own species. It means they love themselves. It means they intuit there’s something great about themselves. So we as humans have that same haunting intuition. But it’s captivated by our conceptual paradigm of identity. I’m white, I’m Christian, I’m Caucasian, I’m vegetarian. Whatever identity has come. See when a child is born, he doesn’t come out saying I’m Hindu or I’m Muslim or I’m Christian. He doesn’t even say I’m black or white or… none of that’s there. That’s all learned conceptual paradigm of identity. So our sense of our infinitude is caught in that. And so we keep on trying to validate that infinite intuition in the context of individuality. So we become overly competitive. We want to prove it by becoming great musicians or great athletes or very wealthy. So what happens post second birth or post any kind of awakening, I’ll talk about our awakening, second birth awakening, is our life is no longer about trying to discover or validate our sense of our infinity within the conceptual paradigm of identity. So the life itself becomes more of a quest for service to all beings. Because we know that any time we serve anyone, we’re serving ourselves. We know that any time we contribute to anyone, we’re contributing to ourselves. So long as one is lost in the conceptual paradigm of identity, it’s all about how can I improve my conceptual paradigm here? How can I be bigger or better or stronger? Which has to do with another topic I call the otherness. There’s this film, there’s this barrier of otherness that kind of governs the life of a person pre-awakening. And once that threshold of awakening is broached, the otherness is like a membrane. There’s this other being, there’s this other person. How do we negotiate that membrane? Pre-awakening, the membrane creates enormous fear and enormous reactivity and protection. And so the human race has kind of lived on the momentum of how to interact with that membrane of otherness, how to behave, how to relate, how to connect. And much of the animalistic behavior, which is primarily mate with it or kill it. There’s like two really primal things. So all that is bleeding into how humans behave. It’s much more complex than that. We’ve kind of evolved this primitive understanding of God as the ultimate alpha male. We either have to please him, find our way into his domain and behave properly to stay in his ultimate alpha male protection. And so all these pieces are kind of feeding into the momentum of human behavior. So what Waking Down In Mutuality brings to that momentum and the kind of guiding and governing of that, the flow of momentum to a more awakened and might and living, human living being is that we as individuals become the laboratory for that experiment. We give ourselves to it. So, and that doesn’t work by splitting off the personality, the whole personhood, the paradigm of identity, ego and the mind. Splitting that off and saying, “Oh, I’m not that. That has nothing to do with me.” That is absolutely true. At the depth, the whole personal realm has nothing to do with my essence. You see, I’m wearing a blue shirt, for example. And you say, “Okay, I’ve got a blue shirt on.” Where does the shirt exist?

Rick: You’re asking me?

Allan: Well, anybody. Where does the shirt exist? The shirt exists in the realm of concept and functionality. This color is kind of a, I don’t know, navy blue or something. That color does not feel the touch of shirt. Color doesn’t know anything about shirt. So my transcendent awakeness does not feel the touch of my personality. Just the way the color on the shirt isn’t affected by buttons and which part of my body is covered. Blue color has nothing to do with it. It doesn’t feel it. It doesn’t have anything to do with it. So if my sense of myself, my sense of subjectivity, in the case of the shirt, is only about the color, then I don’t care about the shirt. The shirt has nothing to do. So if my sense of subjectivity, my sense of myself, can be completely embedded in the transcendent quality that doesn’t feel the touch of the personality, great, fine. But what we’re about is bringing that realization alongside, “Well, let’s have the color here. Let’s also have the shirt here. Let’s see, how can we optimize the shirt?” But this work of embodiment is only done, I shouldn’t say it’s only done, it’s done in our school by being all of it in simultaneity. Accepting and sensing, very clearly sensing, our infinite, transcendent, untouched nature, unborn, undying nature. And also kind of equally balancing that with our humanness, with all of its, you know, it’s anger, all these things, anger, greed, lust, envy, fear, they’re all there. But when we live, we become like the living laboratory for the transcendent to find itself there. Like that image I had of Shiva being this horrible-looking ascetic. It’s as though that great transcendent wants to investigate, not that it wants to investigate, but there’s a certain kind of curiosity that it just says, “Oh, God, what’s going on there? What is that horrible part that I tried so hard to avoid? What’s it really like?” So when I first went after the second birth, I would get these waves of being lost in some of the horrible places that I’d hated so much in my life. But what would happen is somehow they would slowly and tediously become integrated. This is what I mean by the laboratory that we become for life. You know, all the Indian sages, including Mahesh Yogi, talk about when we attain something spiritually, that brings forward our generations of our lineage, generations of our family. So there are pieces of my behavior and my thinking and my fears and my angers and blah, blah, blah, that are kind of in my lineage. So we begin to tease apart what are the real meanings of karma, what are the real meanings of these behaviors.

Rick: And Christ said something about the sins of the fathers or inherited by the son, or some such thing.

Allan: Yeah, something about sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on the edge.

Rick: I want to interject a question here, which is, do you feel that people can get stuck, and as you look around, do you see people kind of getting stuck in this kind of transcendent perspective without entering into the embodiment stage? That’s the first part of the question. The second part is, how does Waking Down actually get people more embodied?

Allan: Can people get stuck? You know, I had this friend who had a boy, and this boy would have these incredible experiences. And one time he gave his father, I think he said it went on for 45 minutes. The boy was about 7 years old, and he gave his father this 45-minute lecture on all the different stages of awakening, and many people who would have what we call moksha, but they would just kind of be stuck in a kind of, almost like a limbo zone. It could go on for many, many years, thousands of years. They’re just kind of stuck in this place. I don’t know. The whole thing is so complex and so rich. Even if you try to define the word “awakening” or “enlightenment” stages, you’ll have a thousand different explanations, a thousand different versions. I think in spirituality, first of all, it’s more profound and it’s more powerful. Stay with the question. In the question there’s openness, there’s aliveness, there’s power. And the question is like, “Oh, okay, it’s dead.” It’s done. You know, questions are kind of… answers are not the answer. That’s one of my little quotes.

Rick: I guess there’s some people… I mean, from a Waking Down perspective, it’s an evolutionary stage, beyond just transcendent realization. Whereas some people feel like it’s… from their perspective, they feel like it’s more of a cop-out or an indulgence in… or a reinforcement of that which typifies ignorance, and that it’s therefore not an evolutionary stage, quite the opposite.

Allan: Well, my take on it is, “Yeah, they’re absolutely right. We’re absolutely right, and they’re absolutely right.” So for me, there’s no conflict. I just see… to me it’s just the mother. It’s just the mother doing what she’s doing. She is completely capricious, and she’s completely organized at the same time. It’s beyond the human mind to figure it out. But we cannot not try. We cannot keep trying to figure it out and understand it. So it’s in the game, it’s in the contest of trying to figure it out that we evolve. So whoever’s taking that position, whoever’s taking this position, beautiful! You know, we talked about Baba, and I’m realizing you have a lot of viewers who have hatred and antagonism and bitterness toward Baba, by whatever reasons.

Rick: Well, it’s not that they have a hatred, it’s just that there’s some pretty substantial evidence that he did some stuff that is not, you know, considered very kosher by our cultural standards, and perhaps even his.

Allan: See, to me, Sai Baba is the living form of the totality. He is the living presence of that which gives life to everything. So, sure, he’s also there for those who need to relate or are driven to relate or are compelled to relate for whatever reason, whether it’s karma or desire, I don’t know, but a way to relate to life through these kind of feelings and senses. It’s not that… and I’m only talking about him as a sideline because that’s life. That’s life. I went through some work with Santo Daime after awakening, and I began to understand how…

Rick: What is that?

Allan: Santo Daime is a form of ayahuasca. Oh, okay. What happened for me, it took me into… it’s like my life became flipped inside out, and all the… inside our life, it’s compact. There’s so much packed in there, and so compact that we really can’t sense it all. So what happened for me with the Daime is like the whole thing just became inside out, and the minutia could be revealed of what compels this person to do this, how the individuality is constructed. And I began to realize that the source of all of life is… It’s like an explosion. It’s like a volcanic explosion of power that is enormous, beyond enormous, and the creation of a solar system, creation of a galaxy, is a minutia that arises in the enormity of the source itself. And there’s nothing within the essential substance of the source, there’s nothing that compels it to be good or pretty or ornate. It’s just poof! In fact, one of the points in my journey, which was about three and a half years ago, I was sleeping one night, and while sleeping, I don’t know what to say, a deeper part of myself sat up and began to meditate. And when that deeper part sat up to meditate, immediately, it’s beginning from the point of… You could say it’s beginning from nirvikalpa samadhi. It’s not going there, but it’s just beginning from there. And from that point, a deep, profound sense of awareness that sits in my depth… I’m trying to put words on that. I’ve journeyed, so to speak, into the Godhead. What’s there is so profound and so enormous, so vast. Even these words are just…poof! They tarnish the experience in a way, because it’s something that’s totally unspeakable. My sense is that that’s our source. The soul comes out of the Godhead. In some unexplainable, mysterious manner, the soul comes out. And the soul has a kind of mysterious fear of its immortality. There’s no words, but to try to point at something, the soul has a kind of fear of its immortality, which is the dawning of love. And so from the soul come forms. Form of a human, form of an animal, all kinds of forms come out. Explorations into the attainment of a point of perspective. And so the human form seems to be a great, great opportunity to form perspective. And when I had that experience, and even to say I had an experience is kind of crazy talking. When that phase of taking in a realization arose, I wrote a line that’s called “A Fish Found Swimming in the Volcano.” And to move into the presence of the divine, it would be like swimming in a volcano. Everything is dissolved. And so living in this human form, with all the threats and all the uncertainties, the greatest uncertainty is the Godhead. It’s completely uncertain. There’s no form, there’s no definition.

Rick: It’s a field of all possibilities.

Allan: Oh, definitely, and all possibilities. So there’s nothing within its essence to contrive that what comes out should look a certain way or should be good. Everything.

Rick: So I guess you started on this whole theme just now, for the last 5-10 minutes, as an explanation of the paradox of someone like Sai Baba. I’m not sure if paradox is right. And there have been others. I mean, Saniel’s teacher, Adi Da, it’s a crazy wisdom thing. I have a little bit of a hard time not being judgmental when you begin to look into some of the things that he actually did. But I can take my judgments with a grain of salt and admit that I don’t necessarily have the ultimate big picture. But on the other hand, there’s a caution perhaps that the crazy wisdom theme can be used as justification for anything by anybody. And it gets a little bit… Sometimes you have to sort of establish some kind of moral boundaries.

Allan: Sure, sure. Well, I don’t think there’s much value in going into that.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, I don’t mean to introduce that as a tangent, but it did seem to be the underlying… the springboard which got you going for the last 10 minutes with this whole explanation of how unpredictable and all possibilities the Godhead is.

Allan: I had a vision once, a dream vision. I entered this place where Baba was a teacher. What I would see is that everybody has a project that they’re working on. And Baba would be behind them to one side, and he’s guiding them in their project. And it came to this one character who’s sort of a relative of mine. This guy hates Baba so much. He’d come into my house, he couldn’t stand to look at Swami’s pictures. He just intensely hated Baba. And when I looked at what’s going on, this guy had a project. His project was to prove all the bad things about Baba. Who was behind him, helping him? Baba was there. Baba was standing there helping this guy prove that Sai Baba is a fraud, that Sai Baba is evil, all these things. Baba was helping him. Baba is that… his consciousness is merged into that infinite presence. So if somebody is finding out all bad things about Baba, how is he doing it? Through his exploration. There’s a power behind that exploration. There’s something behind the intelligence that’s guiding. That force that’s guiding the discovery and the exploration, that force is, to me, in my experience, that is Sai Baba. So if someone has the experience or the exploration, there’s a force that’s guiding it.

Rick: Well, there are a number of characters in the Vedic literature who hated Krishna with a vengeance, and they’re the ones who got enlightened most quickly, because of the intensity of their focus on him.

Allan: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Shishupala hated Krishna intensely. No, who was it? Rukmini?

Rick: Or then there was Ravana with Rama, same thing.

Allan: When Ravana came down, before Ravana came down to be the enemy of Sri Ram, he was, the legend goes, he was the gatekeeper for Vishnu. And when he said, “OK, you want to go down and participate in this event?” Ravana said, “Yeah, I’ll go down, if you insist.” But he said, “I want to be Ram’s enemy.” He said, “I want to be his worst enemy, because if I go down, as his devotee, I’ll think about him once in a while, and I’ll say prayers to him. But if I go down as his enemy, I’ll think about nothing but him.”

Rick: (Laughter) Yeah.

Allan: There’s so many layers and layers within this realm and this expression. So much beauty and so much depth and so much to explore. Yeah, Shishupala hated Krishna more than anything. When Shishupala first offended Krishna, Krishna started to avenge his threat. And Shishupala’s mother prayed, “Oh, Krishna, this is my son. Don’t harm my son. Please don’t harm my son. I know he’s a little rowdy here, but he’s my son. You have to protect him.” Krishna said, “OK, I’ll forgive him 1,000 times. I will give him 1,000 times he can do me wrong. After 1,000, it’s over.” And that day when Krishna was being praised in court, all the people were there and they were praising Krishna. And Shishupala jumped up and he couldn’t take it anymore. He hated Krishna. Krishna had stolen Shishupala’s wife. On the day of their marriage, that night, Krishna came and took his wife. So Shishupala had plenty of cause to hate Krishna. And so when Krishna was there in the court, Shishupala threw some little bit of anger and denounced Krishna. They were serving food and they had these silver trays. Krishna took one of the trays and chopped off, threw it, cut off Shishupala’s head. And a few rishis were there, I don’t know, two or three rishis were there, who had the spiritual sight. And they saw Shishupala, when the blood ran out, Shishupala’s spirit entered Krishna’s feet and reached Krishna.

Rick: Yeah, interesting.

Allan: It is so mysterious and so vast.

Rick: Of course, a lot of these stories may be metaphorical, but they are nonetheless very instructive. A lot of those Vedic stories are like that. They are so paradoxical and they stretch you. They stretch you out so that you can’t really lock into a polarized perspective. You keep swinging back and forth between these extremes.

Allan: Yeah, exactly. There is this story, when the Kauravas were all dead, and the Pandavas finally died. When the Pandavas went to heaven, the Kauravas were already there. They were sitting there waiting on them.

Rick: Yeah, and you just should have said, “What are these guys doing here? I want to be with my brothers.” And they said, “Well, you got to go to hell.”

Allan: Yeah, he was the Dharmaraj. He was the king of righteousness. But he had to go down to hell because when they killed that… What was his name?

Rick: Ghatotkacha. He told the white lie about the elephant.

Rick: Yeah, the one warrior nobody could kill.

Allan: And Krishna said, “Oh, we’ll kill the elephant.”

Rick: Yeah, and then he announced that Ghatotkacha was dead. And everyone thought that he referred to the guy, but he was actually referring to the elephant. So it was like this white lie that enabled him to…

Allan: Yeah, and he even said the elephant, but he said it in a whisper.

Rick: Yeah, Ghatotkacha, the elephant, is dead. Yeah, interesting. So getting back to you, have you brought us up to the present? I mean, we’ve gone through this chronology of your spiritual unfoldment. And if we have brought you up to the present, then what’s on your horizon?

Allan: Well, in some sense I have no idea what’s coming next. About a year and a half ago, yeah, about a year and a half ago, I had–let me back up just a little bit more. This vision of the source of Godhood came, and at about the same time I became aware of the– should we say the termination date of this form. I know how much more time is left here.

Rick: You do?

Allan: Yeah.

Rick: You’re pretty sure about that?

Allan: Things are always subject to change.

Allan: Right.

Rick: You want to tell us, or is it a secret? No, no, no, I don’t want to talk about that.

Rick: Can I buy a life insurance policy on you or something?

Allan: Yeah, I’ve thought about that. Anyhow, what arose out of that, it’s kind of like the vision of the Godhead and a kind of clarification of how much time is here, helped me to relax into some more shadowy parts of the personhood. It’s kind of like they put you in prison. You want to at least know when you’re going to get out of the prison. So I felt like it was like the mother of the universe said, “Okay, son, you’re going to go deeper into the shadows, but here’s the final date.” So will the body actually perish at that time? So far it seems to be the case. Anyhow, there’s also an awareness of the next birth that’s developing here.

Rick: Which I presume you don’t want to talk about either.

Allan: Well, I don’t have much a sense of it yet. There’s some sense of it, some sense of who the mother will be, that kind of thing is there.

Rick: Interesting.

Allan: I think this is partly so that the consciousness could relax more deeply into the embodied part, like a deeper stage of embodiment. My partner Gena has really been instrumental in that, kind of deepening into the personality, the part that we think is spirituality, that is all about overcoming, deeper relaxing into that. So about a year and a half ago, well I had become a mentor in the Waking Down In Mutuality School, probably six, seven years ago. About a year and a half ago, a group formed in South Jersey, and they wanted to get together and have meetings, and they asked me to come down and sit with them as an official mentor in the work. Slowly it became obvious there that a more teacher role was coming forward. And then about that same time period, somewhere around the wintertime, some mysterious being or presence came to me. I can’t say it was a… it wasn’t like a person, but it was a presence, it had a being, not an individuality, but a being presence came into my awareness. And I kind of turned to this presence like, “Well, who are you? What’s this all about?” And the presence said, “I’m the supervisor of spiritual teachers.” And then gave me some instructions.

Rick: For whom? For the planet? For New Jersey?

Allan: I didn’t have the liberty of asking any questions. The presence pretty much made it clear, “You don’t ask questions here, son. You just follow, you just listen.” So I suppose those are just some of the things that happened so that the teacher role came forward. And if you ask me what do I have to teach, I’m like, “I really don’t know anything to teach. I don’t know what I would teach if I were going to teach.” But there seems to be a capacity here to, as I listen to people, and my role is a lot more about listening and receiving people than it is about teaching or giving something. But as I listen and feel and meet people, there seems to be a capacity to notice where the person is skipping over something that’s usually difficult. And what I sense is necessary for the forward movement of awakening is simply relaxing into that feeling, into that place.

Rick: Into the things that they are skipping, you mean? Yeah. What I notice is people tend to gloss over it, and I kind of feel it in my body. It’s like a feeling in my body when they’re glossing over something.

Rick: It seems like you’ve had that tendency all along. I mean, back in your youth you were tuning in to people’s past lives, and also this has been a theme with you.

Allan: Well, this is a little different.

Rick: But something along the same lines, in a way. You’re able to really tune in on people.

Allan: Sometimes, yeah. I don’t want to say I can do it. I would say it happens. It happens. It’s an aptitude. You know, by God’s grace.

Rick: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Allan: It’s really all about grace. Let me just give another kind of my viewpoint and my context for this thing. Back in the ’90s, when I was in that kind of ecstatic awakening, I remember once my mother-in-law, who was this little Italian lady, almost 90 years old, and she asked somebody to pick up some cereal, Cheerios or Corn Flakes, whatever she wanted. And they brought the wrong box of cereal. It wasn’t Cheerios, it was Corn Flakes, or whatever. And she just became totally upset. The wrong cereal. And I’m watching this, and I’m thinking, “Here is God. Here is infinite being, totally upset over Corn Flakes.” And as I digested that over a period of time, in my sense of who we are, I realized how to be a human takes enormous concentration. It’s like you’re compacting the sun itself into a little clay container. It takes enormous concentration.

Rick: Squeezing the ocean into a drop.

Allan: Yeah. And so most schools of awakening – and I’m not making a statement, I’m just giving a pointer about what Waking Down is, or how it works. So most schools of awakening are about developing further concentration in that concentration, becoming concentrated on the mantra, becoming concentrated on an exploration. So how Waking Down really works is, we have a capacity to relax out of that concentration. It’s the relaxation that enables the forwarding, enables the next step forward. It’s just relaxing into how it is, right here and now. And so in a sense, it does lower the bar of awakening. It makes awakening more available. It makes it a more treadable process. And this awakening is an awakening, in my interpretation and experience, it’s an awakening from which we make a real contribution to all of life. It’s not about splitting off from life. It’s not about denying life, but it’s about inviting the infinite into life, just how it is, right here and now. I think it comes as a kind of culmination of spiritual seeking, or some kind of intention has been there, whether we call it spiritual seeking or not.

Rick: For you, you mean, it’s a culmination?

Allan: I think in general, yeah.

Rick: For anyone who participates, it tends to be?

Allan: I think so, yeah. And again, for me, it comes down to what can I contribute. It’s not like I’ve achieved enlightenment and I want to enlighten someone else. Nothing like that. It’s more like, in my process, in my journey, the anxiety, the kind of suffering that was there in the early years, and the way I was helped and nurtured and guided and loved by so many. I gave you a list of the mahatmas and avatars I’ve been with. It’s a long, long resume. Now it’s like, okay, can I give something back? Can I offer something back? Not out of having achieved something great, but just out of a sense of just profound fulfillment here, a sense of just deep, profound well-being. Not at the expense of the human self, but right with the human self, which is very paradoxical. Waking Down In Mutuality is very much about holding a contained paradox, and being in just that pressure. And it’s an ongoing pressure. It’s an ongoing experience. It’s organic and alive.

Rick: I think it’s kind of natural to… maybe this doesn’t really touch the profundity of what you’re saying, but it’s kind of natural to want to give something back. It’s like a little kid comes home from school, first day, and his little sister says, “What did you learn?” He said, “Well, I learned A, and I learned B, and I learned C.” “And let me teach them to you, okay, A, B, C.” And she said, “Well, what more?” And he said, “Well, I’ll tell you tomorrow.” And he goes to school, and the next day he learns D, E, F. So it’s kind of an innate tendency, I think we all have. And we’re all sort of input-output machines, absorbing and sharing.

Allan: Yeah, that’s a good… It relates to what I was saying earlier about something that I’ve completely mastered I can’t teach. I’ve completely mastered something I couldn’t teach it.

Rick: And the teacher always learns more than the student, so it’s actually the process of teaching is a learning process.

Allan: Yeah, a teacher has to be a student, I think. I don’t want to make that an absolute, I’m sure there’s some teachers…

Rick: But it’s a tendency, it’s the way it tends to be.

Allan: Well, it’s what I’m finding for myself right now, for sure. I can only teach what I’m learning, what I’m exploring. And so many times in the sittings, people will be having a process, and I’m just there with them in their investigation, and the discovery comes. And it’s as fresh to me, maybe in some ways more profound to me than it is to them, but it’s just as fresh to me. It’s not like, “Oh, I know this, and I’m going to teach you.” But it’s just like, “Okay, I’m here with you, now let’s investigate.” And there’s a discovery that comes. Something opens up. And it might… There is a kind of cosmic feel for things that’s here. I don’t want to say I have it, it’s just here. There’s a cosmic feel for things. So what I feel, that feeling, it’s like when the people come to the sittings, and the shift comes for them, that relaxation into their profound understanding a deeper layer of their understanding, the next step for them, when that step comes, I feel like this vibration through the whole human being. You know, like, okay, this guy Osama bin Laden was recently terminated. And they showed on the news, they were showing some guy out in, I don’t know, Kentucky or somewhere, he armed himself with an AK-47, he was going to go over and take out bin Laden. He was training himself and all that. Okay, one of our people goes over and kills one of those people. What happens? Oh, some of those people have to come back and kill some of these people. On and on it goes. That’s the field of karma. So what happens when, in these sittings, a person who has this commitment, this willingness to live in embodied awakening, when a person comes into that, and there’s a relaxation out of the tension between spirit and matter, and there’s a relaxation that kind of balances, something opens up. That vibration is felt through all of humanity on a subtle level. So there’s no retaliation, none. There can’t be any retaliation, because it’s a coming into balance. So by doing this so-called inner work, it becomes an offering to all humanity. And this is what I see as our contribution, in the Christian analogy, we have our little stick, we’re helping to hold up the mountain. We’re just offering ourselves, we’re offering our lives, we’re offering what we are. Okay, Mother, what’s the next step for us?

Rick: Do you feel that in your case, there may… I mean, you’ve been through so many things over the years, you know, I mean, drugs, and TM, and Sai Baba, and all these, I’m skipping, you know, a hundred different things that you’ve been through. Do you feel like five years from now, it might be, presuming you’re still alive, it might be possible that, you know, Waking Down, the stage that you’ll talk about in retrospect? Or does this have a sense of more of a finality to it?

Allan: I feel like, at this point in my life, I’m primarily in a… I’m reluctant to use the word “teaching”, but we have to use some word here. I feel like I’m in a teaching phase.

Rick: Yeah.

Allan: It’s very simple to me. I’m really a pretty simple person on the mundane world. I’m a very simple person. Waking Down In Mutuality is the best tool I know of right now. If tomorrow I find a better tool, I’ll go with that.

Rick: Sure.

Allan: It’s not that I’m committed to Waking Down dharma. In fact, the Waking Down dharma is periphery to me. What’s really important to me is who comes into my orbit, who shows up, and how… how can I serve? How can I love more deeply, more profoundly? Not just as from the standpoint of having realized spirit or whatever. How can I just hear him now? And if the guy… It doesn’t have to be anything complex. Somebody comes to my front door and wants a cup of water, I give them a cup of water. That’s it. Somebody comes to my door and they want to find the next step of awakening, I give my guts, I give my heart.

Rick: Yeah. It’s interesting.

Allan: And I don’t… In the most altruistic sense, I don’t have a preference. Cup of water, God-realization. What’s the preference?

Rick: Whatever is needed.

Allan: Well, yeah. What chance do I have to give back? So to me, Waking Down In Mutuality is not… The dharma is important, but that’s not the most important part. The most important part is what’s in the hearts of the people who come here. And again, many people come here to teach this, some people come to learn from this. I’m a perpetual student, and to me, awakening is a perpetual exploration, definitely not a destination.

Rick: Right. And Waking Down is like a tool. It’s a tool. We started this interview, I was using Skype 5.1, and I was having problems, and I upgraded to Skype 5.2, and I was having more problems, and I downgraded to Skype 4.2. And it’s not about using Skype here, it’s about having a conversation with you, and Skype is the medium. And so you’re saying Waking Down is a convenient or an effective tool for you.

Allan: And I don’t want to kind of tarnish the value of the dharma, and teaching what Saniel Bonder has put together. It’s quite amazing how he’s put this together. And the other people who present the dharma, like Krishna and C.C. Leigh, Ted Strauss, they’re the ones who write the dharma, record it and document it. My hat’s off to them. They just do amazing, incredible work. Very, very important. And the most important part is the lives of people who come into the work. How can we be a presence that enables them to find their next step? That’s the bottom line. Can we serve in such a way, can we present this in such a way that whoever comes finds their next step? Hey, and if somebody comes here and their next step is away from the human part into some transcendent realization of no-self, God bless them. That’s what I’m here for. That’s their next step. I’d do my best to serve them in that direction. I don’t have a demand what their next step is.

Rick: Right. It’s not for you to say.

Allan: Yeah, I’m just there, and can I help? Can I give them a little hand-holding on how they find their next step? Sometimes I need hand-holding myself still.

Rick: Yeah. A number of times during this interview you’ve said something which has brought you almost to tears, and it’s evoked a feeling. I have friends who say they can barely go to a movie because their hearts are so melted that they’ll make fools of themselves sobbing in the movie theater. Has this always been your nature, or have you gotten this way more as a result of…

Allan: I think it’s worse now. I can definitely relate with Ramana. You know the guys in India? There’s a group of people who enact the plays. I can’t think of their names, but they put on a particular costume and they act out some of the plays from life. Like Krishna Leela, or the Leelas. I’ve actually seen a couple of them. They’re really amazing. But these guys would come to Ramana sometimes and they’d act these things out. And Ramana would… if he tried to tell a story from one of their lives, he couldn’t do it. He would break up. At some point he was just lost in tears of bliss. He couldn’t continue talking. And he would say, “I don’t know how in the world these guys can do that.” Papaji was very similar. Papaji said, “If I could teach devotion, I would teach devotion, but it can’t be taught, so I teach what we call Advaita.”

Rick: Interesting. I’ve heard the same about Nisargadatta. He taught Advaita, but he had a very strong bhakti side to him.

Allan: Yeah, he said, “The people who think they know come to my talks. The people who really know come to the bhajan.”

Rick: Tim Conway mentioned that too.

Allan: Yeah, that’s beautiful.

Rick: Good. Well…

Allan: If I could sing, I probably would just spend my time singing bhajan and leaving kirtan, but I can’t sing. I can’t sing at all. I’m relegated to this world.

Rick: And you know, even Shankara, we’re speaking of devotion here, he was… you generally thought of the father of Advaita, he was quoted as having said, “The intellect imagines duality for the sake of devotion.” And he was a great devotee. I mean, he wrote all these beautiful devotional songs and verses.

Allan: Yeah, and the Bhajagovindam came towards the end of his life, when it was all about the bhajans. And he saw that intellectual guy studying grammar. You know, there’s an interesting thing with Shankara. I kind of like to look at the whole history of spirituality, and just get like a thumbnail look at it. You see, Adi Shankaracharya came at a time when Brahmanism was falling in India. If you kind of look at this whole thing historically, the Western civilization came out of… came from where? Socrates and Plato. That was the origin of Western civilization as we know it. I think that… I think there was an avatar there. Anyhow, so they had a student named Aristotle. Aristotle had a student named Alexander. And so Alexander was the first great world conqueror. And in that time, Brahmanism in India, Brahmanism was just small kingdoms all over the country, and each had their own sect and their own religion, their own way of worshipping. And deep in that array of Brahmanism was hidden Advaita Vedanta. But nobody understood it. It was beyond anyone’s understanding. But because of the conquering skills that had developed through Alexander, Brahmanism was falling because it was very easy to come in and conquer each of these little kingdoms one at a time. And one of the great kings, I can’t think of his name, I’m not that good with history, but this great king saw what was happening.

Rick: Ashoka?

Allan: I think it was Ashoka. Yeah. He began to organize the country into a single religion. Now that single religion didn’t really grasp Advaita. And so a woman, I can’t think of her name, had a dream one night. And Shiva appeared in her dream and said, “I’m coming in your womb. I’m going to take birth in your lineage.” That was Adi Shankaracharya. So Shankaracharya’s mission was to…

Rick: Actually, I think, as I recall the story, she was told, “Well, you can have many sons who will live long lives, but will be sort of mediocre guys, or you can have one great son who will live a short life.” And she said, “I’ll go for the great son.”

Allan: That’s a little different version than I heard, but it kind of comes down to the same thing. So Adi Shankaracharya set the stage for the, shall we say, the survival of Advaita, Advaita Vedanta. Veda means knowledge, Anta means the end of knowledge, which is Advaita, the realization of complete oneness, complete non-duality. Now, something interesting happened in Shankara’s life. During the debate, I don’t remember, you may remember the details more than I do, but there was this argument, “Well, how would you know about…” This kind of argument towards him was, “How would you know about this because you’re a monk? You’ve never lived a normal… the way we live as householders and all that.” And he said, “Okay, well, I’ll test the waters here.” So he went out and he found some, I think Prince or somebody, who was about to die. And he took that guy’s body and then he lived the life of a householder with women and all that. And he came back and he said, “Well, I can argue now because I’ve had this experience. Here’s my take on it. And everybody can argue with me who wants to, I don’t mind.” That was the origin of Waking Down In Mutuality.

Rick: Huh. Interesting.

Allan: Here’s why I say that. If Adi Shankaracharya, if Advaita were perfectly true, why did he do that? Completely unnecessary if Advaita were in itself completely, absolutely, perfectly the truth. Nothing else is needed. You wouldn’t have needed to take that journey into another man’s body and experience the human, you know, the non-monk side of things. Okay, now if you look at Advaita, and really look at it, if somebody is completely Advaita, they won’t say anything. How could they speak? Okay, you say, “Well, speaking happens.” I mean, I know Papaji sometimes said, “Well, the silent spoke.” But isn’t that duality?

Rick: Yeah, you have to make it with duality to speak.

Allan: Yeah, so there’s a… Even if you give a little bit of space for duality, that opens the door for embodiment. That’s just my version. I don’t need any believers or converts about it.

Rick: That’s an interesting thought. I never thought of it that way.

Allan: The things that I see, and that I like, they give me a thrill because I kind of grasp the whole unraveling of life and the journey here on the adventure of being.

Rick: Yeah, cool. Well, I think we’ve set some kind of record here in terms of the length of this particular interview. That’s fine. I don’t mind. I like the long ones. Some people say they like that too. They say, “Boy, it’s really nice hearing you in an interview where there’s no sort of time limit because you can just really relax and get into it.” Do you feel like there’s anything that’s really important to you that you haven’t had a chance to say?

Allan: Well, the thing that I hope would come across in my conversation is not so much what I know. I’m not a very intelligent person. I don’t really know much, but I love a lot, I hope.

Rick: Yeah.

Allan: I would hope that comes through.

Rick: It does come through very much, at least as far as I can see. I mean, you are an intelligent person, and you have a broad range of experience, and you’re very articulate and all, but your heart is very much in evidence as well.

Allan: Just one thing I’d like to say about spiritual practice. I know sometimes that question comes up. To me, the great spiritual practice is gratitude. It’s a spiritual practice that any beginner, the simplest beginner in spirituality can pick up is gratitude. Find something to be grateful for. Write down something to be grateful for. Just start to practice gratitude. And no matter how, I would say, advanced one is, there should be gratitude. And at any stage of the game, it’s a… Gratitude to me is the one thing that’s both a practice, a practicable thing, and the nature of realization itself. For example, witnessing as a… the witnessing element, the sense of no individuality, that can be a stage on the way, but it’s not really a good practice.

Rick: It’s not a practice at all, is it? It’s more like a state.

Allan: I wouldn’t recommend it, you know. I don’t recommend it as a practice.

Rick: Yeah, I’m not sure if it’s something you can do. It’s something you either live or don’t live.

Allan: Right, it either happens or doesn’t. What I’m saying is, so many spiritual practices that are designed around trying to replicate the quality of enlightenment, don’t work.

Rick: Yeah, exactly. A description is taken as a prescription, and one attempts to mimic the quality of the enlightened state.

Allan: Yeah, but gratitude is something that is both practicable and the nature of… To me, awakening… I like to think of awakening in this way. The earmark of awakening should be an inner state of gratitude. There should be an inner state of gratitude. I’m not calling it gratitude, but essentially it’ll be like that. Just be like a living exuberance, a living sense of the enormity, the vastness, the mystery of life. So, inner state of gratitude, the expression, the outward movement of that, I would say is benevolence, kindness. To me, these really define awakening more broadly, and at the same time more succinctly, than anything else I’ve come up with.

Rick: I think those are great criteria, you know? I mean, you can talk about all sorts of subjective states that a person might be experiencing, but if those qualities are not there, then you question what the value of it is. That’s a point that my wife often brings up. She says, “I don’t really care about all these abstract, subjective things that people say. I want to see how is it actually manifesting in their lives.”

Allan: Beautiful.

Rick: Yeah. Great. Well, I think that the people of Somerset, New Jersey, would be surprised if they knew who was really cutting their grass. [laughs] So, thanks, Allan, and I think this has been great. I’ll probably end up splitting it up into a couple of segments, because I think YouTube might have a limit on how long a video can be that you put up, but that’s okay. This has been really enjoyable, and I think people will get a lot out of it. If people want to be in touch with you, as usual, I will have a link to your website on batgap.com. They can get in touch and do whatever they can do with you, especially if they are around the New Jersey area, they might be able to get together with you. Speaking to those who… Thanks to your friend, what was his name, Robert?

Allan: Robert Ciccolini.

Rick: Yeah, for setting this up. And speaking to those who are watching, since there are a variety of ways of watching, you might have stumbled across this on YouTube, or been sent an audio file by somebody. If you go to batgap.com, which is an acronym for Buddha at the Gas Pump, you will see all of the interviews I’ve done archived there. This is, I think, interview number 70. You can subscribe to an email newsletter to be notified of new ones as they come out. So, thanks, Allan. It’s been great.

Allan: Thank you, Rick. I really appreciate what you do. I love your shows. Thank you. Have you listened to many of them?

Allan: When I get a chance.

Rick: You can do what I do, you can get an iPod and listen to them while you cut the grass.

Allan: I haven’t reached that stage of civilization yet. In fact, I bought myself an electric lawnmower recently because it’s nice and quiet and I can listen to my headphones without having to blast the volume too high.

Allan: Okay.

Rick: Alrighty. So, thank you all. Thank you, Allan. And we’ll see you next time. Namaste.