Anamika Borst Interview

Summary

Anamika Borst describes her movement from seeking enlightenment to recognizing awareness as the space in which all experience appears. The discussion explores Sri Aurobindo, non-duality, spiritual deconditioning, the loss of a separate self, and the tension between absolute oneness and ordinary human life.

Questions This Interview Explores

• What is enlightenment if it is not a permanent state of bliss?
• How can spiritual practice help loosen identification with thoughts, emotions, and the body?
• What happens when the sense of being a separate person begins to dissolve?
• Are human choices made by an individual self or by a larger intelligence?
• How can non-dual awareness remain grounded in everyday life and personal experience?

Key takeaways

• Enlightenment can mean dissolving mistaken ideas rather than reaching another state.
• Awareness remains clear even when depression, irritation, or pain appears.
• Deconditioning may unfold gradually without a clear sense of where it is leading.
• The separate person is experienced as a contraction formed by conditioning.
• When contraction falls away, fear, lack, and the need to attain something in the future diminish.
• Discernment can function without a separate individual standing behind it.
• Absolute oneness does not erase the diversity and intelligence expressed through life.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump!

❤️ Meeting at the conference

As you can see, we are at the Science & Non-duality Conference in San Jose, and I am with my friend Anamika Borst, who is Dutch but lives in Auroville, South India, where she works as a potter. Heroically, she flies all the way over here every year to attend this conference. I can’t believe how fresh she looks considering how much traveling she’s just done, although she stopped in Las Vegas for a couple of days.

Anamika: To do some gambling.

Rick: Did you do any?

Anamika: Yes.

Rick: Did you win any?

Anamika: No. I mean, after half an hour, I got so bored. I just let all the money go.

Rick: It’s called Loss Vegas for a reason.

Anamika: Loss Vegas. (laughing)

Rick: So I’ve known Anamika for several years, just from seeing her at conferences, and I felt like I had the impulse to sit down and have a conversation with you. So I am glad that you could come and do this.

Anamika has written a book called Life at Zero Distance. I read most of it on the plane coming out. I was kind of impressed. I don’t know what it is about Dutch people, but their English is so darn good. You and Bentinho—you hardly know that you are not Americans, though you have a little more of an accent than he does. But why do Dutch people speak such good English? Do they teach you in school?

Anamika: One of the reasons is that on Dutch television, when they show a movie, they have Dutch subtitles. So as a small child, you get the English sounds.

Rick: You’re reading the subtitles…

Anamika: Yes, so it kind of goes into your system. And of course, I have lived in India for 30 years.

Rick: Thirty years now. Why did you go there in the first place?

Anamika: I was looking for the meaning of life.

Rick: Did you find it?

Anamika: After 25 years, you find out that the meaning of life is life itself. But I didn’t know that at the time, so I was on a journey to find out.

🛤️ A spiritual journey in India

Rick: And what kind of stuff did you do in India on that journey? Were you in Osho’s ashram or something?

Anamika: I started in Nepal. Then I journeyed through Nepal and North India. On the way, you get to know Hinduism and Buddhism. I was in Bodhgaya. You start to perceive a little bit of what is meant by their religions and rituals. What I could see at that time was that they wanted to achieve enlightenment, and I thought at that time that it was going out of life.

Rick: Enlightenment?

Anamika: Enlightenment, yes.

Rick: You thought this was sort of an escape kind of thing.

Anamika: Yes. So it did not resonate at that time. It was only when I came in touch with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, who talk about the divinization of life, that it started to make sense why there is life on Earth. That’s why I kind of settled in Auroville and started my journey there.

Rick: I think that you’re the first person that I’ve interviewed who has any kind of familiarity with Sri Aurobindo. You found his teachings more meaningful than some other things you had encountered. So it might be useful to summarize them a little bit, since he is not alive and I can’t interview him. What is the gist of his teachings? I suppose his teachings are the foundation of Auroville itself; that’s why people have congregated there.

Anamika: It is very hard to give a summary of Sri Aurobindo’s teaching because he has written so much—so many books in so many directions. He is a scholar. He studied in England, and he has written on all kinds of subjects. But what I understand, because everybody understands it in their own way, is that it is about perfecting the human instruments—the mind, what he calls the vital, and the body—in order to be able to receive the Divine, so that the Divine will can divinize the body and divine life.

Rick: That’s great. So, in other words, the body is understood to be like a radio or something that could be tuned up to receive the signal more clearly and transmit it. Yeah, I like that. There are some teachings—perhaps you’re alluding to them—that are escapist and don’t take the body into consideration. What are you thinking?

Anamika: Well, that was when I was 24 years old. So after 20 years of absorbing the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, I came to see also that I did not find any resolution in their teachings.

Rick: What would you have expected a resolution to be? What kind of resolution were you looking for or anticipating?

Anamika: It has to do with having wrong ideas about what enlightenment is. I thought it was being transported to another level of bliss—constant bliss. And of course, this is always out of reach. If there is no teacher to tell you, and you’re only reading books, you kind of get stuck. I had to find another way. It is actually a dissolution of wrong ideas.

Rick: Are you implying that Sri Aurobindo’s teaching was wrong in some way?

Anamika: No.

Rick: Did it give you false expectations? Or was your understanding wrong, or what?

Anamika: I think it’s both ways.

Rick: Was something missing in his teachings?

Anamika: No, I cannot say that his teaching is wrong. It is just that my understanding of it is incomplete. Also, there was not a living teacher who could give me the answer.

He passed away in 1950. When he was alive, he was saying that there were half a dozen people living in the ashram with a Brahma realization, a realization of the Self. So it was not unfamiliar to him, and the way he related to disciples was direct; he could guide them.

Now, he passed away in 1950, and there are people summarizing his words in different ways. It gets a little vague, and there is not a person there who can help you clear the mist. So, in order for me to get resolution, I had to find it somewhere else.

Rick: So, in a way, it has gone the way most religions have gone. It was really vibrant and alive when the teacher was alive, and after the teacher dies, there is the party game where it gets passed from one person to the next. It gets more and more distorted and muddled, with different opinions about what the teacher actually said.

Anamika: There are reports about the teachings—summarizations.

Rick: Second- and third-hand.

Anamika: Yes. And even if it is direct, it is not recent anymore. You see, the teaching is alive. When it is uttered, it is alive, it is there, it is vibrant. But when it is the same teaching 50 years later, the words are still the same, but the vibrancy is gone.

The teaching is alive. When it is uttered, it is alive, it is there, it is vibrant.

Rick: So if you might have been there in 1950, it might have been a different story? You still live in Auroville, but it sounds like you’ve looked a bit elsewhere for the resolution you referred to.

Anamika: His teachings are excellent if you want to get to know the system—what you are. They help you to see that you’re not your thoughts. Sri Aurobindo says that thoughts come in. You don’t fabricate them in your own thought factory. They come in and they pass away.

It is the same with feelings and emotions. If you dive into the teaching, it helps you a lot to understand how the system works. In a way, by doing that, you become freer from old identifications. So it is excellent. But then, to get over the last hurdle—to see, “I am not the person, but I am that in which all appears”—there is nobody who tells you that. In the end, you can feel lost because you wonder, “What is happening? I don’t feel like a person, so what am I?” There is nobody to tell you that.

Rick: That realization started to dawn in your own experience, but there was nobody you could talk about it with.

Anamika: Actually, I thought something was wrong with me because I didn’t feel like a person. I did not have desires or opinions. I saw that everybody around me had them. Things started to become more fluid. It felt strange. It was not nice.

In order to feel some substance, I started swimming and doing aerobics so I could feel my sore muscles. Then there was still some substance where I could feel, “This is me,” because for the rest, I didn’t know. And the idea of Advaita—that you are the expanse, you are That—had not entered my framework.

Rick: So you thought there was something wrong with you.

Anamika: Yeah.

Rick: What precipitated that experience? I mean, were you doing some spiritual practices that caused it?

Anamika: Yes, 20 years of just watching yourself. I was saying, because I read from Sri Aurobindo in the very beginning when I came, “If you want to realize the Self, you can say, ‘I am not the mind, I am not the vital, I am not the body,’” and keep saying that.

Rick: So it is a kind of self-inquiry.

Anamika: Yeah. I had been doing that for years, but I had no idea what the result would be. It was becoming more and more transparent, but without any idea of where this could lead.

Deconditioning and the opening of space

Rick: What was it like? Would you be working on a pot all day long, working through this?

Anamika: Not so much as a practice, but sometimes it would just come up and repeat itself. It would be especially helpful in difficult situations, like when the body is very sick and there is pain. There is a tendency to contract with it. If you keep saying that there is some space coming and that it is okay, that it is just happening, then something opens.

Or with a psychological problem, you go into the emotion, and then you keep saying that.

Then you feel space.

Rick: That space started to open up in you, and you were doing physical things to keep yourself grounded and to feel like a person still.

Anamika: Trying not to go nuts.

Rick: Well, sometimes people do get nuts when they go through these transitions. It destabilizes people sometimes. Scott Kiloby, who was going to be here, and I were going to have a talk about the fact that, in his experience, all these people are coming to him with various kinds of issues and problems because of focusing on non-dual teachings.

There is not ultimately something wrong with non-dual teachings, but people were misapplying the teaching or a particular stage of the teachings. It has caused some severe dissociations and other kinds of problems. We may have talked about that, but unfortunately, his mother just died, so he had to leave.

Anamika: Then I got in touch with the Internet. In 2006, I did not know what was happening. But at that time, I discovered non-duality teachers who were my age and spoke my language, because I had been surrounded by wise old Indian men, holy men. Of course, I could never relate to them because it was out of my league.

Rick: Different culture.

You would think that you would have been Indianized after 30 years in India. But maybe you are always around Westerners.

Anamika: No, it’s more that in the Indian culture, the reference to the guru is immense. You’re never at the same level. So to put myself at the same level as the teachers is already very non-Indian.

Rick: So you were starting to tune into people who are your peers.

Anamika: And they were saying what I thought. I thought, “Wow, what they’re saying is making sense.” For the first time, I was really listening, and I thought, “I know what they’re talking about. It’s already here.” I couldn’t believe it was so simple. I could see it’s here.

This is why I asked Leo Hartung for a meeting in Holland. He said, “Yes, this is it,” and somehow it just opened up. It became clear.

Rick: In a stable way?

Anamika: Yes.

Rick: Although I saw some references in your book that sometimes it gets foggy and sometimes it gets dull, and yet that’s still the reality.

Anamika: Everything is seen in clarity.

Rick: Even if it gets clouded over. Does it ever get clouded over?

Anamika: This is not how I would say things. It is not clouded over, because the clouding over is seen in clarity. You see, everything just appears in what you are, whatever it is. If there is irritation or depression, it is seen in clarity, and there is no identification. It just comes and goes. It’s like it visits, and then it leaves.

Everything just appears in what you are, whatever it is.

Rick: In your case, I feel like it’s real.

In some cases, when I hear people talk this way, I feel they’ve read too many books. It is not really their experience. They repeat these words, but it has not become an experiential reality for them. Maybe that is the kind of people Scott was referring to—people who get into trouble when they drum those concepts into their heads, but it has not become a living reality.

Anamika: I think deconditioning has to take place in order for it to become true for you. This deconditioning had taken place without my really knowing what it was all about. So when the penny dropped, it became clear. Everything was in place.

Rick: Some people do it the other way around. They indulge in trying to understand the kind of things you’re saying, but the deconditioning has not taken place.

Anamika: But in a way, nobody is doing anything, because I didn’t choose to do this. I didn’t even know what I was doing.

Rick: But you were doing something.

Anamika: But not intentionally. I didn’t do things with the intention of achieving this.

Rick: You did not know what the outcome was going to be.

Anamika: I had no idea.

Rick: But you were a spiritual aspirant for 30 years. You had this desire, this motivation, this drive. And you were doing what you were saying earlier, about questioning your thoughts, or whatever you said. So there was this kind of engine that…

Anamika: But it’s not something that I did. It was there. And people who get in touch with non-duality and start questioning in their own way, on their own level, can also only do what they are doing. And maybe if they get destabilized, it’s something in them that wants them to continue the deconditioning process. This is all a natural flow of things.

Choice and choicelessness

Rick: So you’re saying that whatever anybody does is in a natural flow of things.

Anamika: Yes, because we never have any choice in what we are doing. I didn’t choose to go to India. I had no choice. I was forced to go. I tried not to go. At that time, I thought India was a scary country. I had to go. I had no choice. And then, what you meet on the way—you have no choice. That I ended up in Auroville was because I met this guy. And this is true with everybody.

Rick: I know a lot of people say this—that there are no choices.

Anamika: It doesn’t mean that if somebody says, “This guy could have done it like this or like that,” or “He should have,” that that movement could not also be an impulse in the direction he needed to hear.

Rick: Or somebody says, “Would you like chocolate or vanilla?” You think, “Hmm, I think I’ll take chocolate.” You appear to be making a choice. Now, maybe on some level it’s automatic—you’re not the chooser, and there’s no choice being made. But I think there’s some value in being true to your experience and not trying to assume a different dharma than the one you’re living at the time.

There are a lot of people who, again, pay lip service to this notion of choicelessness, but who actually are living in a state where they appear to be making choices, to themselves. They think, “Well, I’ve decided to do this instead of that.” So again, I don’t find the distinction clear. Am I? No?

Anamika: For me, anyway, all the choices we make are informed by our past already, and then it just pops up. It’s in a way already clear. There’s already a preference for either chocolate or vanilla. And you may be born with this particular disposition.

Rick: You know, one of the qualities of spiritual development that non-duality teachers like Shankara talk about in Crest Jewel of Discrimination—as I understand it, discrimination is a kind of fine faculty of discernment—which sounds to me like choice in a way. It’s a kind of parsing out of the real from the unreal, and the ability to entertain very subtle considerations in order to establish awakening.

It’s like a faculty that’s being used, like the faculty of speech, the faculty of sight, or the faculty of hearing. It’s a faculty. Isn’t there a choosing faculty, a deciding faculty?

Anamika: It could be called that. But I don’t know if there’s a person behind it doing it. I can see from my own experience, following the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, that there’s nobody there telling you what to do. You have to find out everything by yourself.

What they say a lot is to listen to your inner voice, your true voice. And then, when you try to do that, you have your instincts and your desires. You have to learn—you have to learn to discern. What comes up now? Is it real or is it true? What are the consequences? You find out. “No, no, better not. Better follow another.” This is discernment.

But it’s an impulse for truth already. And what is that? That’s only the divine wanting to find itself.

Rick: Exactly. It’s like an innate impulse in life that motivates us.

Anamika: Yes, that wants already to become more true, to go to the light, or whatever you may want to call it.

Rick: So we are wired that way.

Anamika: At least in some, it appears more clearly than in others.

Rick: So you’re kind of saying that there’s no chooser, but there is choice. There is a choosing faculty. There is a functional faculty that is deciding, discriminating, and discerning, but there is no inner seed of an entity that is doing that.

Anamika: There is not somebody standing there…

Rick: Like puppets…

Anamika: …going to decide.

Life after the contraction falls away

Rick: And so, how is your life now as a result of this resolution, using that word that you used in the beginning, as compared to how it was?

Anamika: There is a contraction that has disappeared.

Rick: A contraction? What do you mean by that?

Anamika: I would say that the person, as it perceives itself, is an energetic contraction that is formed by habits of thought patterns and habits that are energetically established. That’s how we kind of move through life. It has been confirmed by our parents: “You’re like this, you’re like that,” and you believe it. It becomes a pattern.

Rick: It’s conditioning. You’re referring to conditioning…

Anamika: Conditioning, which is felt energetically as a contraction.

Rick: So, in other words, another word for contraction would be a constriction, like handcuffs can restrain you. They talk about the binding influence of actions. You’re bound. You’re constricted. You’re strained. You’re contracted. The ocean is squeezed into a drop.

Anamika: Yes, so if that kind of thing falls away, life is more at ease, more relaxed. The sense of lack is gone. The sense of something missing is gone.

Rick: Fear maybe is gone?

Anamika: Fear is gone. The idea of something to get in the future is gone. There is peace with what is, whatever it is.

There is peace with what is, whatever it is.

Rick: Living in the present, peace with what is.

Anamika: Yes. Even if it is being ill and lying on the floor in your bathroom, there is still total acceptance of what is. And it can be felt as something exquisite. To feel the pain—if you take away the labels of pain and just feel it, it’s beautiful.

Rick: No preferences?

Anamika: If you ask me now, I say no. But if you ask me, “Do you want this or that?” choice comes up.

Rick: There is a preference.

If you lie on the bathroom floor, ill, and I say, “Would you like to stay on the floor for the next 10 years, or would you like to get healthy and be up and about?” you would probably say, “Off the floor, please!”

Anamika: No, because you can’t help that there’s a natural tendency toward moving toward health. Then it pops up: “Oh, maybe I could do this.” So then you get up.

Rick: Get up, take some tea, whatever. There’s a natural tendency. We do have preferences.

One way to look at it—let’s see if you agree with this—we do what we can to improve our lives, like you came here, something you like to do, and so on. But the Gita actually says: “You have control over the actions alone, never over their fruits. Do not be motivated by the fruits of action, nor attach yourself to inaction.” So you do what you can, but you’re not attached to the outcome. Does that resonate with you?

Anamika: I would not even say that. The “you” is not there, because even that is only Oneness appearing as all these forms.

Rick: But you are one of these forms. It is a part of what you are, but it’s a form.

Anamika: Yes, everything is form. It’s just happening. And there isn’t anywhere a separate something deciding or doing. There’s only Oneness appearing as everything.

Oneness and the diversity of life

Rick: So it’s Oneness deciding. Look! The Oneness in the bird decides to leave this tree. The Oneness in the ant decides to crawl over there.

Anamika: It’s just happening. I don’t know whether there’s any decision there. You see, there’s a natural intelligence. Of course, it’s not just “blurb, Oneness,” because if you just look at the human body, how this is functioning—my God! And who’s doing that?

Rick: Right, and if you had to do it, you’d be dead in a few seconds. Even one of its functions, digestion, for instance—if you had to manage that, phew!

So there’s this sort of intelligence that runs the show.

Anamika: It’s only Oneness appearing in all these amazing differentiations of things. It’s not all the same Oneness. See, just differences of faces, of textures—nothing’s ever the same.

Rick: So would you say it’s the same Oneness appearing as your face, my face, their faces…

Anamika: …and the table and the book, the sounds and the blue sky.

Rick: But you know, I mean, how about this? On this sort of absolute level of things, there’s just this Oneness, right? And then it rises up, as you say, as tables, people, books, and sky, and all those things. But those things have certain qualities, tendencies, and functioning capacities.

Anamika: Of course, just for the play of life. And then in humans, they appear sometimes as if they are separate and can decide, but it’s also only Oneness appearing like that.

Rick: For instance, the notion of reincarnation—there’s some valid understanding of the way things work. There’s something which inhabits one body after another that progresses in an evolutionary course. You can boil all those bodies, the whole span of it, down to nothingness, to Oneness, but still, on the manifest level, that has to be taken into consideration. There is some kind of something that is Anamika. And that was Anamika, the soldier in a past life, and that will be Anamika, the scientist in a next life, if there’s a next life. Do you buy into that whole thing, or does it seem theoretical to you? Or nonsense to you?

Anamika: I don’t know. I wouldn’t know.

Rick: But if it is true, and many traditions—some of the countries where you live—say it’s true…

Anamika: Still, I wouldn’t know.

Rick: Someone might know.

Anamika: Is it true? Will you ever know? These are ideas about something. How will we ever know? The only thing we ever know is this.

Rick: Well, the guys who wrote these books in the first place and came up with all these ideas may have known. They may not be blind speculations. They may have had the cognitive ability to actually experience the mechanics of the stuff.

Anamika: They may have known, but how will we ever know?

Rick: We may know, too.

Anamika: These are only ideas we have about it. And it could be like this; we could discuss it. It might be like this, and we could discuss it. And we may never know, because the only thing which is ever true is only this, which is here now.

Rick: Right now, yes. I guess what I am getting at is to caution against the tendency to say, “It’s only this,” because any time you use the word “only” or “just”—absolute conversation-stopper words—it seems to me not necessarily to be the full picture. It doesn’t take into account the paradoxes of life.

One way of looking at it is that it sort of overemphasizes the absolute value of life to the neglect of the relative. And perhaps the bigger reality includes both, and includes all kinds of things that are really quite paradoxical and contradictory to one another.

I ran into this a lot, which is why I’m talking about it.

Anamika: I know. For me, there’s this appearing as everything. As everything. And if you say, the absolute and the relative, already… they are only concepts happening in this. It’s not a contradiction; this is everything.

Rick: And everything includes absolute and relative. Everything includes the plain vanilla Oneness and the rich, diverse multiplicity.

A moment of recognition

Good, okay. Since you’ve had this resolution…

Anamika: It was in 2009, I think.

Rick: Is it so precise that you could put a date on it? Or is it more around that period when things kind of came together?

Anamika: No, I met Leo Hartung in Holland. I asked him, “Is it this?” He said, “Yes, this is it.” And that was it.

Rick: That was it. So it could have been June 30th, 2009, or…

Anamika: But I forgot the date. It was 2009. It was May or June.

Rick: Was this abrupt?

Anamika: It was just… (breathing a sigh of relief) That was it. There was no real big thing around it.

Rick: And so since then, has there been any sense of further enfoldment toward… or, you know, maturation, deepening, or clarifying?

Anamika: This writing of these texts on a blog was definitely a way of integration, because in Auroville there are not many people you can talk about this with. Otherwise, it stays a little unmanifest. So if you write about it, it becomes more there. It’s part of the integration, I felt.

Rick: And to this day, you have the sense—you were here a year ago—you have the sense that in the past year I’ve integrated, or I’ve changed… there’s been some kind of further…

Anamika: What I can see happening is that I’ve been conditioned from childhood onward, up to some years ago, to rather hide, to be more shy.

Rick: Hide? Now you’re kind of less so?

Anamika: The tendency has been like that, finding it difficult to talk in groups or to talk in general. And I see now that there is a tendency to override the conditioning because it feels like a limitation, something which is no longer appropriate, so… that I see happening. Talking…

Rick: Feeling bolder, more confident.

Anamika: Yeah…

Rick: Okay, that’s good.

About the book and its purpose

A couple of people have been sitting here listening to this. Do you guys have any questions or reactions to what she’s been saying? Do you have anything, Francis? No? Okay, I thought maybe you would.

So you want to tell people a little bit about what’s in this book?

Anamika: This book… You probably know Jerry Katz?

Rick: Sure.

Anamika: He was sometimes publishing a text in his Nonduality Highlights, and I think it was in April or May when he said, “Why don’t you put it into a book?”

Rick: Were these things posted on Jerry’s site? Is that what these are?

Anamika: It’s on a blog. Jerry was sometimes taking one post and putting it in the Nonduality Highlights.

Rick: You were putting it on your blog, and he would lift some of the things and send them around.

Anamika: Yes, he would choose one text and take it for his highlights.

Rick: Sometimes I subscribe to that.

Anamika: Then I was not so convinced. I was not thinking it was good enough. I was writing more for myself. And then there were some other friends who were encouraging me, and I still thought, you know, why write a book? I don’t know how to do that. And then a friend offered to do it. A good friend, Cecilia. She’s excellent. She designed the book. You know Cecilia, Didier Weiss’s wife? Of course… She did an excellent job of putting it all together. I just saw it happening.

Rick: Very nice.

Anamika: And maybe what I would like to mention also is that all the profit is going to an old-age home in Pondicherry. A good friend, Albert… he started this because he was so moved by the plight of old people living on the streets who don’t have any family or friends, and who are slowly dying, so he opened this home for 25 people. Then Albert had an accident two years ago, suffered brain damage, and died last year. Since he passed away, the funds have been slowly drying up.

Rick: So you’re helping to replenish them.

Anamika: I’m slowly getting involved with trying to get some funds together and setting up a website.

Rick: That is laudable. When I put this up on BatGap, you can put in some explanations about what people could do if they wanted to contribute to that.

Anamika: Well, that’s great.

Rick: Linking to some website, putting some text on BatGap or whatever. That would be good.

We were talking about this earlier today… about the importance of doing some kind of service as a spiritual practice, you know, because some people can get sort of self-indulgent when they’re into spirituality. It’s kind of all about me. And there can be a real benefit to… (moving hands forward)

Anamika: Yeah, I feel the opposite. I am so exposed to life, to whatever comes. There’s no choice but to respond.

Rick: What do you feel? Has your heart opened up more as a result of this? Do you feel that you’re more compassionate?

Anamika: It’s more that I am there to respond to life.

Rick: Before, you were more closed in?

Anamika: Yes, because if you’re more into the person, it’s kind of a closed system. When that falls away, life just comes. There’s a response happening; you can’t help it.

When that falls away, life just comes. There’s a response happening; you can’t help it.

Rick: That’s nice. Okay, I don’t have a whole lot of questions. I’ve had a kind of very intense day. But I don’t want to miss this opportunity for you to…

Anamika: Rick, what did you think of the book?

Rick: I really liked it. I mean, you know, I can nitpick, just as I was doing a little earlier when I was kind of arguing with you about that kind of stuff. I try to play devil’s advocate sometimes… to argue the perspective that… If there is any sense, when I am reading something or listening to somebody, that what they’re saying is not inclusive of all the dimensions and strata and diversity of life, then I kind of react.

I get the sense from this conversation that you’re not doing that, that you’re saying this realization you’ve had has made you much more open, less constricted, more inclusive, and more appreciative of everything—all the expressions, right? But, I mean, there are some circles where, in some cases, people have this thing: “Well, there is no person, and life is an illusion. You know, who cares about it?” It’s this kind of nihilistic thing which seems to me like the person is shutting down more than opening up. And I think you’ve reassured me that you’re not doing that. Right? (laughing)

Closing thoughts

Okay, well, I don’t have any more questions at the moment. And if you feel that there’s something important—there’s nothing important—that you would like to say that we haven’t touched upon… You’re going to think one hour from now, “Gosh, I wish we had talked about that.” Please bring it out.

Anamika: Then I could only tell you one hour from now, because now I don’t know…

Rick: Well, that’s good. Let’s wrap it. I’ve been speaking with Anamika Borst, and…

How do people get this book if they want to read it?

Anamika: It’s on Amazon.com.

Rick: Okay, I’ll link to it. Let me read the poem that’s on the back. You read it; it’s your poem.

How far do we have to travel? To which places do we need to go? What time frame will deliver the freedom from ourselves? What if, for once, we question everything? All labels, all beliefs, all assumptions. And inquire into the nature of what we truly are? The freedom from the idea of being a someone strips us naked. And we discover that fulfillment is here and now. Life at zero distance.

Good, which is the title of the book, Life at

Zero Distance: The Freedom of Being Nothing and None.

Great, so I’ve been speaking with Anamika. I’ll be linking to her blog and her book from her page on BatGap.com. If you go to BatGap, you’ll see all kinds of other stuff that is there—all the indexes of all the interviews I’ve done with all kinds of people. There’s a place to sign up to be notified by email each time there’s a new interview. There’s a place to sign up for the audio podcast, in case you don’t want to be sitting in front of a computer for hours on end, a donate button, and a discussion group that crops up around each interview. I’ll link to that. There’s a forum and a discussion group, and a few other things. Check it out. And I’ll be doing more interviews and taking more things here at the conference. So thanks for listening and watching, and expect something to be posted in the next day or two.

Anamika: Thank you, Rick!

Rick: Thanks, Anamika. Glad we could do it!

Anamika: It’s been nice. Thank you…

Rick: Hope it was. (Hugging)