Arjuna Ardagh Interview

Summary:

Full transcript:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week is Arjuna Ardagh. Welcome Arjuna.

Arjuna: Thank you so much.

Rick: I’ve had a lot of fun preparing for this interview because you’re a really enjoyable guy to listen to. You’re very creative and articulate and you have a lot of things to say about a lot of things. So, as usual, I’ve listened to many hours of various recordings you’ve made, both old and new, and it’s been very stimulating. So, thanks for all you do.

Arjuna: Wonderful. Well, thank you.

Rick: So, let’s start. People like to hear someone’s kind of personal story a little bit, you know, what all they’ve been through, and they also like to obviously hear what it is they have to say if they have a message or a teaching of some sort. So, let’s start with your story. As much detail as you feel would be of interest, both to you to tell it and to people to hear it.

Arjuna: Sure. Well, I can give you the quick version and then maybe the expanded version.

Rick: Sure. We have plenty of time.

Arjuna: Okay. So, the quick version would be, I was born.

Rick: Wow, me too.

Arjuna: I suffered in various ways. It was brought to my attention that there is a dimension that is not suffering, and since then, my life has been devoted to giving as much attention as possible to the dimension that doesn’t suffer and reminding other people to do the same. So, that’s pretty much the relevant condensed version. We could also always fill that in with places and events and stories if you like that.

Rick: A little bit. You know, I understand you kind of learned to meditate when you were 14, and you’ve been with several well-known teachers, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Osho and Papaji, and we can flesh that out a little bit because I’d be interested to know what motivated you, for instance, to learn meditation at such a young age.

Arjuna: Well, in a nutshell, it was suffering. I had the particular destiny, I suppose, to be born into a family that had quite a high level of suffering. It was London in the 1950s after the war, and both of my parents were quite tortured intellectuals, I suppose. So, I was born into that. It so happens that my family has way above average incidents of suicide and mental illness. So, I kind of inherited this diseased mind. Now, in a way, all minds are diseased, but in my case it was very obvious. So, when you’re a little boy or a little girl, you don’t really question your family. That’s how it seems to me. When you’re little, your mom and your dad are your life, that’s your life. And then outside, beyond them, there’s the world, but it’s remote from you. When you get to be a teenager, that’s when you realize that you really exist in the world, that the whole world is your life, and you start to open to it. Now you can actually compare your family with other families and recognize the lot that you have. So, for me, that happened at 14 when I started to realize that my particular family was different, in some ways, from my friends’ families, and there was much more suffering and much more anxiety and so on.

Rick: Perhaps you’re about to say this, but I have a very similar background, alcoholic father, mother who tried to commit suicide three times and was in and out of mental hospitals, and I learned meditation at a fairly young age myself, 18. But I’ve kind of felt, looking back, and I’d like to know if you agree, that the intensity of that childhood, the horror of it in many ways, made me a much more ardent seeker than I might otherwise have been.

Arjuna: It can do, for sure. That can be the result of suffering. It can also cause you can drown in it. I mean, it’s … who knows what it is that causes us to respond the way we do to our circumstances. But in my case, I was 14, and I realized that if I was to just do nothing, if I was just to follow the pattern I’d been born into, I would probably commit suicide or go mad. So, the obvious thing available in 1971 was psychotherapy, and I got quite interested actually in R.D. Laing, and there was a book called “Death of a Family”. I can’t remember who wrote it now, David, somebody. Anyway, I got quite interested in alternative psychotherapy, but then I quickly realized, I met Laing actually in London at that time, and I realized that the psychotherapists were about as crazy as the patients. So, then I actually … well, actually what happened is I was at a boarding school in England, which if your family isn’t crazy already, a British boarding school will drive you crazy. It’s like a prison. And I was wearing this very formal collar, like a sort of a formal uniform, like a wing collar, black tie, like a sort of Victorian uniform. I was walking next to Canterbury Cathedral, that’s where I went to school, and I found a Hare Krishna monk. This was 1971, so he was sitting there chanting, “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna.” I thought, “Oh, this must be somebody from India.” So, he had a shaved head and fairly pale skin for an Indian, but still I waited patiently until he finished chanting, and I went up to him in my school uniform, and I said, “Excuse me, sir, do you speak any English?” He said, “Yeah, mate, sit down, come on, sit down, I’ll tell you all about the Hare Krishnas and Krishna and reincarnation.” So, he was actually from the East End of London, and we became friends. And he told me all about many things. He told me about karma and Krishna and reincarnation, everything. I thought, “This is great, this is fantastic, sign me up.” So, I called my mother and I said, “Great news, I’ve found my mission in life, I’m going to become a Hare Krishna monk.” And she did not respond as enthusiastically as I had hoped, and she actually got quite freaked out. So, we had to do a kind of negotiation there on the phone, and the negotiation was that instead I would learn Transcendental Meditation, so that’s what I did. I signed up with TM, and I went all the way through that. I did their courses, I became a teacher, I learned the siddhis they teach, and many things, which I think you know about. So, that was all good. And then, we wind forward about 10 years to the late 70s. So now, supposedly I’d learned to levitate, which is not quite all it’s cracked up to be, but I’d learned all these things. But, I was in my early – what was I? I was in, I don’t know, early 20s, I guess. And I was terrified of women, you know, so I could do these kind of supernatural powers, but I was afraid of women. So, I thought there’s something wrong with this picture, you know. So, I found another teacher, which was Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh.

Rick: Did the TM movement somehow instill that fear, or that’s just something you never really matured into?

Arjuna: Well, I just hadn’t given it a lot of attention, really. I’d spent a lot of time in these TM retreats. So, anyway, Bhagwan Rajneesh was the great teacher about sex at that time. He had a very, of course, a very eclectic path, but it included releasing sexual inhibitions. So, I really dived into that. I went to live with him in India, in Pune, and then I moved to Oregon with him, and lived in his community in Oregon. And I really got very involved in that, and got a lot of benefit from it. And now we wind forward another 10 years to 1991, where I was living in India with him. And he was talking every day. He died in 1990, but there were still these videos. So, he was talking, or there were videos of him talking about enlightenment, he had this way of speaking, A very, very kind of a lyrical way of speaking. The whole mystique. Yeah, you know, “There’s nobody here. Everything is just happening on its own.” So, this was all really enticing, but I realized everybody pretty much at that time in the community was seeking. He was speaking about the end of seeking, but we were all seeking. We were all really working on ourselves, and there wasn’t much room within that community at that time to actually embrace freedom. There was a lot of room to embrace seeking, but not to embrace freedom. So, I found a book while I was living there called “My Master is Myself” by Andrew Cohen. And it described a meeting he’d had with an old Indian man in Lucknow in India by the name of H. W. L. Punja. And it described, not a story about seeking, it described a story about the end of seeking. And I was enthralled by that. I was fascinated. So, I actually got on a plane from Pune to Lucknow, only with this name in my head, H. W. L. Poonja. I didn’t know anything else. I just got on the plane, arrived in Lucknow. I went to stay in a hotel. Excuse me if I go into a little bit of a story.

Rick: That’s okay. I like it.

Arjuna: So, I went to stay in a hotel, the Clark Savad Hotel, and they had a phone book. So, I look up in the phone book for Punja.

Rick: Hundreds of them, probably.

Arjuna: No, no. There were actually not that many. So, there was a Punja listed. I called up. I get this voice. They’re always chewing paan. So, I said, “Is this Mr. Punja?” “Yes, I’m Punja.” And I said, “Well, I’ve come here for liberation.” He said, “Okay. Meet outside hotel, 11 o’clock.” So, next morning, I go down outside the hotel and this guy shows up on a little moped, a small moped, really small. He tells me to get on the back. He’s about 45, 50 years old. I get on the back and what ensued then was the most terrifying experience of my life as he drove me through this, weaving through this heavily polluted Indian traffic, you know, weaving through trucks. At one point, we were like hurtling full speed towards a truck, waiting for a head-on collision. He just swerved at the last minute. So, we keep driving and we get to the outskirts of Lucknow to an area called Indira Nagar. He parks outside, like a very small suburban house, way on the outskirts of Lucknow, close to the forest. He took me in and sitting there was an old man, quite a well-built old man, shaved head, dressed very much like the rickshaw drivers. He was dressed in an old t-shirt and a kind of lungi. He wasn’t dressed like a guru, just sitting there. And he was gazing into space as though he was looking at something a mile away that we couldn’t see. He was just gazing into space with this kind of an empty look. And then he looked at me and as soon as our eyes met, I knew that the game was up. I knew immediately that I couldn’t escape this guy. R’ So you found the right punja then, after all.

Arjuna: Yeah, it was actually his son.

Rick: I figured, yeah.

Arjuna: So, what happened was, he was sitting there talking about stuff I couldn’t really understand. “Emptiness is fullness”, “There is no teaching, no path, no teacher”. I couldn’t really understand much of what he was saying. It was in a language foreign to me. But in the break, he went into his bedroom to chew paan, which is like this mixture of tobacco and spices wrapped up in a betel leaf. So he was going to chew this stuff, it had a lot of red juice. So I was invited to go in, because there were only like eight people in the room. I was invited to go in because I was the new visitor. So I went in to meet him and he said, “Yes, what do you want? Why have you come? What do you want?” And he was very gruff, like an army officer. “What do you want?” And I said, “what is in the way? I feel like I’ve been seeking all my life. What is in the way of finding?” And he looked at me like it was the most utterly stupid question anybody had ever asked him. He looked at me and like frowned, like is this guy a complete idiot? He said, “What is in the way of finding? Why seeking, of course?” Completely obvious, what’s in the way of finding? Seeking is in the way of finding. Well, you know, it didn’t really help so much at the time. So we went back into the meeting again and then he called me up. And he said, “What is it you want?” He’s very insistent. “What do you want? Why have you come here? What do you want?” And I said, “I want freedom. I want enlightenment.” And he said, “Okay, okay. This I can give. No problem. This is easy.” He said, “First you show me the one who is bound. Show me the entity which is bound and I will set it free.” I thought, “That’s a great deal. I’ve never heard any teacher say that before. If I just have to show him my ego, he will set it free and that will be the end of the story. That’s great. That’s wonderful.” So I went back to the hotel room and it was funny because it was like the mind was still running, actually a lot, but it was as though the central kingpin which held it all together had been pulled out. So now there were all these thoughts flying about, but they didn’t really have much relationship to each other. They were sort of random, chaotic. So it would be like cauliflower, enlightenment, childhood memory. It was just like endless, unrelated thoughts. It felt a bit like going mad, you see, because if your mind runs without any thread to it, it feels like madness.

Rick: And it wasn’t so much anything he had said to you, it was more just the being in his presence and some kind of subtle resonance or something that had taken place.

Arjuna: Being in his presence every day. I was going back to see him every day.

Rick: Right, so he was unhinging you more and more.

Arjuna: He asked me, “What is happening with you?” I said to him, “I feel drunk.” It was like that. It was like being around him was like intoxication at that time. And I said, “I feel drunk.” He said, “I have only given you a thimbleful. I have the whole bottle here.” “Give me the whole bottle.” And he said, “I am not yet sure of your capacity.” And I said, “Don’t worry about my capacity. Just give it anyway.” And then he said, “That is the right answer.”

Rick: Very good.

Arjuna: A lot of great dialogues like that. So anyway, after six days, these days people get this immediately. Now it’s not difficult, but that time it took me anyway six days of this going mad. And so one night I went to bed realizing I had to show him my ego. I had to find my ego and give him my ego so he could set it free. So I actually wrote a little letter to him. I can’t remember what I said, but I wrote something and folded it up and put it on the dresser. I wasn’t really sleeping because of this feeling of going mad. I was just lying there half asleep with all of these thoughts. But it was a kind of a restful state, like a sort of mild hypnosis. And you know what happens if you go to bed with a strong thought in your mind. If you go to bed like thinking about income taxes, first thing in the morning, the first thing that comes up is income taxes. So that’s what happened. I went to bed thinking I have to find my ego and give it to Poonjaji so he can set it free. First thing that came up in the morning was six o’clock, kind of the body comes out of its rest – got to find the ego. So in that state of great innocence, first thing in the morning, feeling now fresh and rested, this thought comes, got to find the ego. So got to find the me. So the attention goes back to look for it. Where is the me? Where is it? Where is this me? Where is the… and it just, the seeking for it just went back and back and back, or went out and out and out into infinite empty space. It just kept looking and the more it looked, the bigger the space in which it was looking. And there was suddenly, complete outside of thought or understanding, there was the immediate realization of infinite consciousness, of consciousness without limits, without content, of infinite space.

Rick: Which you had never tasted before with Osho or Maharishi? Or not to that degree of clarity or something?

Arjuna: Not like that. That’s not quite the right way to say it. It was like there was the recognition, “Well, this has always been here.” It was clear that that had never been missing, it’s just attention being on something else, you see. And so in retrospect, when that opens, you realize, “Well, this has actually been here all along.” It’s like looking into the sky and there are clouds. Well, then when you notice that the sky is infinite, of course it’s been infinite the whole time, it’s just your attention was on the clouds, you see. So in that sense it’s more of a realization than a discovery. It’s more of a “Oh, silly me, of course it’s always been like this.”

Rick: Well, they say Columbus discovered America, but it was always here. I mean, he didn’t really discover anything that didn’t already exist.

Arjuna: Well, that would be more like saying that you or I discovered America because we woke up one morning and realized we’re already in America.

Rick: We’re already in it, right.

Arjuna: So somehow the body just went into this release, laughing, just laughing, laughing, laughing. For 20 minutes the body was just continuously laughing. About what? Like a great joke. And I went downstairs, had this huge breakfast, suddenly all the waiters seemed like my best friends. Everything, the world was shimmering, everything was fresh. There were no thoughts, there were just no thoughts. It was just amazing, it was just like empty. And I went to see him and that was it. We didn’t really … that was it. That was the end of seeking. Now, what happened was for me, and I think it’s really important to put this piece in, is it stayed in that kind of shimmering emptiness for a while, for a few weeks. And then it was actually necessary for me to go back to Pune, where I had been living, to get my stuff, because I wanted to live with Poonjaji, and as it was necessary for the body, to do stuff, to get on planes, so the me got reinvented, because it had to do stuff. And this is a very important point, really important point, because there is the temptation to feel that when the sense of me gets rebuilt in order to perform actions, that somehow that is a threat to the freedom. And that’s what happens for a lot of people involved in this sort of exploration, is we feel as soon as I have to do things, go to work, pay the mortgage, be a parent to my children, that that recreation of a me that has to do things is somehow obliterating freedom. That is actually the more tricky part. Having these expansive realizations is quite easy, doing the concepts around it is a bit more tricky. So, that was phase one, just going back to get my stuff. And then I lived with him for about a year. I lived in a house near to his, and I saw him every day, and I hung out with him in his house, I went for walks with him. He became a bit like a father, really, like a perfect father. We had a good time. He is very, very loving, very kind, very attentive personally. He married my girlfriend and me. We are not together anymore, but he married us. He really gave a lot, he gave really personal attention. So, not only was he the bestower of freedom, he was the bestower also of great personal love. And then my girlfriend, wife then, got pregnant. I still haven’t figured out how that happened. I don’t know if you can agree with me. I’m joking.

Rick: Hopefully it wasn’t Papaji.

Arjuna: So, she started to get allergic to India and the system of India. So, we went back to America. And what happened then for me was, now we were living in America, so we had to have a house. And I had a lot of money at that time. I had several hundred thousand dollars that I had saved from my work. And so, living in India, I was kind of retired. I would never have to work again. But now, living in America, raising a family, I wasn’t retired anymore. So, I thought, “But I don’t really want to work.” He asked me to give satsang.

Rick: What sort of work had you done? I mean, you got into the TM movement when you were just a kid. And you had been hanging around with gurus. When did you have the time to make a couple hundred thousand dollars?

Arjuna: It was more than that. I bought real estate with very little down. And it was at a point in the market where that very little down yielded about 15 times what I put in.

Rick: Very cool.

Arjuna: I had a school, which I just founded like on the wing of grace really, for training therapists. I was training therapists to use hypnotherapy, I wasn’t a psychotherapist myself. The law in Washington State at that time allowed you to be a counselor. You didn’t have to be licensed. So, I trained therapists. It went beautifully well. I trained hundreds of people. So, after a few years, I lived quite frugally. I just had a lot of money. So, anyway, that was that. So, now, we had a child coming. So, I invested the money. Many people came and said, “Oh, great. You’ve got this money. If you put it into this thing, it will split.” I didn’t know anything about investing. A fool and his money are easily separated. So, I met a few people, not just one thing. A few people said, “If you invest in this, it will split to this and that, and you’ll make tons of money.” So, I did that with five different things, and they all went bankrupt. Every single one went bankrupt.

Rick: Ouch.

Arjuna: And some of them turned out to be complete scams. Like it was just really lying. So, now I was faced with, “What am I going to do?” The only thing I had was that Poonjiji had asked me to give satsang. So, really, that initiated a process that I’ve been in for 21 years, which is really the much more tricky process of living completely in the world, which I didn’t really want to do. I was much more interested in living in India and renouncing the world, but I’ve been thrust, whether I liked it or not, living in the world, dealing with money, dealing with kids. I’ve raised my boys now are 20 and 17. I’ve raised two boys, dealt with buying a house, having a mortgage, the property market going upside down. So, I’ve been through all of this and really found out – what does it mean to live this freedom in a way without turning your back on the world, without becoming, renouncing in any way? It’s turned out that a lot of these challenges with relationship – my marriage actually dissolved – now I’m married again, but a lot of very, very difficult human things, the dissolution of a marriage, finding out what it means to be a father and to do that with some integrity, finding out how to deal with money in a way that you can follow your passion and give your gift and really give what’s important to you and also take care of the bills. These are all quite difficult challenges I would say, much more difficult than realizing freedom actually.

Rick: Now in the midst of the more severe of those challenges, did you go through periods where you felt like, “Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?” I mean did you kind of lose that infinite spaciousness or was there always a flavor of that which sustained you?

Arjuna: I think a bit of both actually, a bit of both. I’ve certainly learned a lot about stress. Most of the people I work with now, we’ll talk a little bit perhaps about what I do now,

Rick: Yeah, we’ll talk a lot about what you do now.

Arjuna: I’m not a teacher in the way that some of your other guests may be. I’m a coach and there’s a big difference, we can talk about what that difference is. But most of the people I deal with think that their difficulties are a result of an incomplete realization. What I see is that their difficulties are actually much more to do with stress. And it’s really important, I think, for most of us to understand what stress is, how it builds up, what we can do to release stress, and what is the relationship between stress and awakening. Because really, the lives we are living, unless somehow you have amassed tons of money and you’re living without having to work and without raising kids and all that, then maybe you don’t experience much stress. But if you’re dealing with the stuff I’ve been dealing with the last 20 years, raising kids, making money, dealing with health issues, then you probably know a little bit about stress. And that’s actually, I think in a way, my greatest challenge is, like for most people, my greatest challenges has ended up being what I have to teach and what I have to help people with.

Rick: Yeah. Let’s segue into talking about what you’re teaching by dwelling on this topic a little bit. So, how do you define stress?

Arjuna: Well, stress is really, I would say, something that happens in your body. I mean, very simply, it means that the hormones to do with fight or flight, like adrenaline and cortisol, are being secreting more tthan the hormones that balance that, which in the case of a man would be testosterone, in the case of a woman, be oxytocin. So that would be a kind of physiological definition of stress.

Rick: And it’s probably a lot more complicated than that if you talk to a… an endocrinologist.

Arjuna: It’s a pretty central part of it, but it’s also to do with, when you go into stress, your breath becomes shallower. The kind of thoughts you have are different. Your vision changes from a feeling of, “I can deal with this, this will pass,” to a feeling of sudden emergency and the need to do things quickly. So I think most of us know, without having to define it objectively, most of us know what it’s like to feel stress.

Rick: Oh yeah, everyone has experienced it. Now, one man’s stress is another man’s challenge. I mean, you could put a group of people in the same circumstances and some handle it with ease and others are totally stressed out, like a traffic jam or they’re late for a flight or something like that. And I would suspect, and we can have you comment on this, that that has to do both with the physiology of the different people and how efficiently it operates, and also with perhaps, well, it could be many factors like their whole psychology, but also I’d like to bring in whether you feel that an experiential grounding in spiritual dimension or more expanded awareness would be a buffer, such that situations which might be stressful for another person would be handled with ease.

Arjuna: Definitely, yeah, definitely. I mean, that’s the whole thing. That’s really what I’ve been exploring the last many, many years is the relationship between awakening to that expansive dimension of yourself and dealing with the world. And let me just put a little caveat in, because I think, a footnote, I think this is really an important insight about many contemporary spiritual teachings, particularly in the Advaita tradition, which is often in the West is known as, is given expression as satsang. But there are other expressions, like the Dzogchen teachings in Tibetan Buddhism, which tend to be a little bit more sophisticated about this. But here is the view that is often put forward, which I believe is incomplete, that if you have a deep realization of your true nature, which is infinite and eternal, a genuine realization will demonstrate that there is nobody here, that there is no doer, and therefore all stress will disappear and all trouble, difficulty will disappear, and if it’s not like that, this is the many satsang teachers take, if it’s not like that, if things are not flowing easily without the sense of the doer, there is something wrong with realization. In my opinion, that view can easily be used in a way that becomes judgmental and punitive of the challenges that we face as human beings. So what I’ve noticed is that very often that view is expounded by teachers who simply by force of circumstance don’t have very much challenge in their lives. This is the archetype of the spiritual teacher, which I don’t belong to, which is the teacher lives in a very secluded life, maybe has no dependence, doesn’t deal with money, is served food, sits in meditation a lot. Well, of course, anybody given that lifestyle will find it relatively easy to rest in spaciousness, but that’s a function of lifestyle as well as of realization. So in my case, I was kind of forced against my will really to take on a whole lot of challenges and responsibilities. So I didn’t have the option to live this rarefied life and emerge from time to time and sit on a chair covered in a white blanket and give these esoteric teachings. I wasn’t offered that. And so actually I’ve had to develop a completely different set of teachings which are delivered from the trenches rather than the pedestal. And it’s a different teaching that emerges when you are actually facing the real things of life on a daily basis. And that’s where I’ve developed now a coaching model instead of a teaching model. And I think it would be perhaps interesting for us, Rick, to explore the differences between a teacher-student relationship, which is what often happens around awakening, and a coach-coachee relationship, very, very different kind of relationship that we can look at the differences. And not for everybody. Some people really want a teacher-student relationship and benefit from it. But for many people, the coaching relationship offers something very, very different, a very different way of exploring awakening.

Rick: Yeah, let’s get into that. And I’m glad you added the caveat that for some people the guru-disciple relationship might be totally appropriate. And I kind of grant people the liberty to gravitate toward whatever works for them. And having been through a number of different phases myself, as you have, I wouldn’t say, “Well, everybody should do this now,” just because that’s what I’m doing. Because, you know, different strokes for different folks. Everybody is at different stages of development and naturally we don’t have to worry about it. They’re just going to move from one to the next as it becomes appropriate, just as you and I have. But good. So what you’re offering now though is very practical. And there’s that saying, which I’m sure you’ve heard, that the next Buddha is the Sangha. And you’re offering a Sangha, a kind of community of peers who can help one another.

Arjuna: Yeah. Let’s perhaps take a look at the traditional student-teacher relationship, which has some of the qualities of the traditional student-teacher relationship have been carried over into the context of contemporary teachers, contemporary spiritual teachers. So the basic assumption, I think, with traditional teacher-student relationship is the student is aspiring towards a higher state or different state, which is labeled as enlightenment. The teacher is in a different state of consciousness. So this basic assumption that we are in different states yields all sorts of secondary assumptions, which is you know things that I don’t know. You know things about me that I can’t see in myself. You make decisions and do things and see things that I don’t understand. Therefore, your actions are beyond my capacity to judge or understand. So if you have inconsistencies or if you have behaviors, if I don’t like them, it’s only because of my limited perception because you’re in this higher state, and therefore somehow infallible. As the teacher, you don’t have desire. I have desire because I’m locked in my ego. You don’t have an ego. I’ve got an ego. You don’t have an ego. So when you want money or have sex or something, it’s somehow completely different than when I do because I’m coming from my self-interest. You’re coming from some other place. So we could go on and on about this, but these kind of assumptions are very common in the traditional guru-student relationship. And very often the teacher appears to be emanating some kind of charisma, which reinforces that. And I know a little about this charisma because I sat seething charisma for a long time. Much to my shock and horror, when Poonjaji asked me to give satsang, I noticed this, that this same grace which I had been receiving from other teachers now started to fill the room when I was teaching. And so the people in the room would think, “Oh, Arjuna is giving this.” Then I realized, “Wow, this is not quite what I thought because I’m feeling it. I’m feeling the grace descending on the room. They’re feeling the grace descending on the room and they’re thinking it’s coming from me.” But now I realize it’s coming from we don’t know where.

Rick: And yet there’s something interesting here, which is that when you were hanging around Poonjaji, it wasn’t so much what he said that really shifted things in you, it was just the proximity. It was being in his presence. And presumably if he had been working as a ticket taker at the railroad, if he had been in that function, it wouldn’t have been appropriate for him to have been kind of channeling, if you will, that kind of energy or that kind of shakti. But having taken on the role of teacher and having set up this whole scene, it began to pour through him and it changed the lives of many. So it seems like we can’t entirely diss it, you know, there’s something to it.

Arjuna: Right. Well I think it’s wonderful that we can take an open-minded curiosity about these things without having to come to conclusions right away. Let’s put that thought on hold for a minute, what you just said. It’s very interesting about what are the components that create this experience of transmission or presence. Because we can come back to that, I think there’s a lot we can …

Rick: And I’ve had the same experience incidentally, having taught for 25 years. You get up in front of an audience of a couple hundred people and boy, the energy just really starts to flow through you, you know. Can’t get to sleep that night, you’re high as a kite.

Arjuna: So here we have this kind of hierarchical relationship Which, I would say can be very helpful. Particularly if you find a genuine teacher or a fairly, even a relatively pure teacher, it can be helpful to relax control, to let the teacher steer the process, so that you become essentially very feminine, whether you’re a man or a woman, you become receptive and feminine. And that is the heart of the devotee, to be surrendered. So there are, we don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, there are benefits to a teacher-student relationship, and I’ve benefited very much from it myself. There are also, however, drawbacks.

Rick: Both for the student and the teacher, I would add. Because boy, if that teacher isn’t really a pure vessel, it can really go to his head.

Arjuna: I don’t think there’s such a thing as a completely pure vessel as a human being. But anyway, let’s …

Rick: Correct.

Arjuna: So for the student, of course, let’s think about it. One of the disadvantages of that is, the student sits down onto the cushion of the seeker. So they get used to their role in this theater, “I’m the one sitting on a cushion who has an ego, who’s seeking.” And every day they show up to the satsang and the teacher is back on the podium. Well, you get used to your role that way. So actually, it’s not a very fertile ground for awakening to happen, because you get more and more settled into or identified with, “I’m a seeker on a path, I’ve got an ego, I’ve got my stuff.” Now, of course, that stuff that needs to be worked through doesn’t exactly exist. It exists often through thinking about it or focusing upon it. So it can become like a hamster on a wheel. That’s one way it can happen. The other thing that can happen is as human beings, I would say we are very, very towards projection. We project all sorts of things, negative and positively. We are very, very, very prone to project love, beauty, but also evil, all kinds of things onto other people. To say that out there is like that, and it’s not in me. We project evil onto Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden, and if you are a staunch Democrat, you project it onto George Bush or whatever. We project a lot of things we don’t want to see in ourselves. In my opinion, we also project our divinity. We don’t necessarily want to or feel comfortable with recognizing that ourselves. So we project onto Dalai Lama or Eckhart Tolle or Byron Katie or whoever, and say, “That person has got it all. I don’t.” So the teacher-student relationship, because of the way it’s set up, often the theater of having somebody on a throne with lights and flowers and the whole thing, camera facing them, is a theater which is inviting us to project. Just like People Magazine is inviting us to project onto Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, so the teacher-student set up is inviting that projection. But as you said, there are many other potential pitfalls. But as you said, what is also true is that the teacher-student relationship can be a great prison for a teacher. Because, at least I know from my own situation, but also from interviews with hundreds of contemporary teachers, we all of us have a human dimension as well as a divine dimension. And as far as I can see, that human dimension doesn’t really go away.

Rick: It doesn’t, and it’s kind of curious that so many teachers attempt to conceal it. They play into the whole game and don’t want to show you the feet of clay.

Arjuna: It’s addictive, you see. It’s a very addictive role to get into. And I know this. When Poonjaji asked me to give satsang, I could feel how addictive it is. You’ve got a few hundred people looking at you, with innocence, like you are the one I’ve waiting to meet, and after a little bit, there’s a part of you that goes…

Rick: “Hey, not bad. Too bad I’m married.”

Arjuna: And we all of us, we have a great capacity for self-deception.

Rick: Have you seen the movie “Kumaré,” by the way?

Arjuna: No.

Rick: Fascinating movie. They played it out at the Science and Non-Duality Conference. It was about this guy, an Indian guy who grew up in New Jersey, who became very disillusioned with teachers and the whole guru scene, and he even went to India to try to find a genuine one and didn’t satisfy his search. So he thought, “I’ll set myself up as a guru and see what happens.” So he grew his beard and his hair, and he began talking with an Indian accent, even though he grew up in New Jersey, and he really got into the whole scene. He went out to Phoenix and Tucson where people wouldn’t know him. And here’s this guru, Kumaré, who’s come to town, and he began collecting people around him, and the whole dynamic began to grow. And interestingly, people started seeing real changes in their lives. He was just making stuff up as he went along, but they were losing weight and getting motivated, but then he just began to feel more and more guilty. He thought, “I’ve got to break it to him.” So I won’t give away the whole movie, but everybody’s got to see this one. It’s great.

Arjuna: I went through the similar process myself, but not quite as consciously as you’re describing. But I did that. I gave satsang. I traveled. And there was certainly a lot of great things that happened. People had strong awakenings. But I realized that there was something inherently dishonest in the theater of it. Because the theater suggested that there was some fundamental difference between the one at the front and those people who were in the role of students. And I saw that that theater, it kept the students locked into the role of students, but it also allowed the teacher to get lost in a bubble of “I’m different from other people.” And you can perform a very useful function to other people as a teacher, but you don’t necessarily get to live out your human life in a way that may also be necessary.

Rick: Incidentally, one of the reasons I started this show, I initially conceived of it as something I was just going to do here in Fairfield, because I knew people here in Fairfield who had awakened by anyone’s definition of it. But I also knew many more people who thought that those people must just be on ego trips, because they seem so ordinary. And to be awakened, you’ve got to look like Maharishi. There has to be this whole vibe about you. And so they had become very discouraged with regard to their own progress. They thought, “Oh well, I like to meditate, but it’s not going to happen for me in this lifetime. I’ll just sort of carry on and nothing will ever really wake up for me.” And so I thought, “Oh, I’ve got to mix these people up and show them that guys just like you are having significant realizations, and it’s commonplace almost.” So anyway, I’m sorry I’m talking a little bit too much, but you continue.

Arjuna: It’s good to have a conversation.

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

Arjuna: So what happened anyway was, back in 1995, I went back to the school where I had been teaching before, where I had been teaching hypnotherapy. It was called Alive and Well in San Rafael, California. I said I would like to start a training program again like I had before, but this time with an emphasis on awakening. And we called it the Living Essence Training. So I think the first class we had about 36 people, and as best as I could, I trained them how to facilitate awakening in each other. And it was surprisingly successful. I could show them how to ask the right questions, make the right eye contact, be present in a certain way. There were many components to it. And they were able to bring about the same shifts in consciousness that had been happening in satsang. Of course, let me make it clear that these shifts were for the most part not very stable, because there’s a lot more required to living this than just having a little glimpse. But nevertheless, it was great to see that what we thought was only available through an enlightened teacher was actually available through an interactive relationship. Well, that course, which started in 1995, has developed and developed and developed. And I realized after some years that what we were actually doing was coaching. Coaching was developing at the same time. You’ve heard of life coaching, which is based on sports coaching. And coaching is really the antidote to a hierarchical relationship. A hierarchical relationship assumes this person knows something that I don’t know, has abilities that I don’t have, and so I need to learn from them.

Rick: So how would you distinguish that between, let’s say, going to college and studying physics, and obviously the professors do know a lot more about physics than you do, which is why you’re there and they’re there. What’s the difference?

Arjuna: Well, there are times when this relationship is really good. For example, supposing that you wanted to learn Final Cut Pro, which is a video editing program and you didn’t know. And you hired somebody and said, “Show me how to use it.” That relationship would be smart. You wouldn’t want somebody to say, “Well, what do you think?” You need somebody to show you here’s how to do it. But there are other areas of life where that doesn’t work so well. A coaching relationship is very different because, well, let’s go back to sports. Let’s think about Michael Phelps, who has won 17 gold medals, more Olympic gold medals than anybody else in history. So he had a coach. I don’t remember the coach he is now, but he had a coach. And he has had the same coach his whole life. And if you look at interviews with … Did my video just freeze?

Rick: No, you’re okay. It just shifts back and forth from HD to SD, but you’re fine. Keep going.

Arjuna: It doesn’t matter that it does that, huh?

Rick: No.

Arjuna: So Michael Phelps, I’ve read interviews with him, and he says, “I’ve had the same coach when I first started out, and I would never have won a single gold medal. I would never have won anything without my coach. I owe everything to this coach.” Now the coach, I’m sorry I don’t remember his name right now. I could tell you in a moment. Why don’t we just pause the video, and I’ll go find it. Shall I?

Rick: Oh, hang on. I can just find it. Okay. Bob Bowman.

Arjuna: Okay, great. So Michael Phelps, he says, “I owe everything to my coach, Bob Bowman.” And he’s had the same coach his whole career. Bob Bowman has never won any gold medals. He’s never won any award in swimming at all. He swam on his college team, but when he graduated from college, he never swam competitively again. His career was to be a coach. So here you have somebody who could never win a gold medal, coaching somebody to win gold medals. What this guy is good at is supporting this guy. He has the skills to support this guy to be brilliant. Now that’s a beautiful relationship because it’s anti-hierarchical. It’s the opposite of hierarchical. This guy is saying, “I’m not as good as you are. You’re a better swimmer than me, but what I’m good at is standing by the side of the pool and cheering you on and asking the right questions and encouraging you so that you can blossom to your full potential. This relationship is not about my full potential. It’s about your full potential.” So in a coaching relationship, the coach is seeing the potential brilliance in the athlete and bringing it forth by asking the right questions, by being sensitive to the coach, to the athlete. So this relationship is not about the coach’s brilliance. The emphasis is on the potential brilliance of the coachee. This could be with a coach coaching a team as much as an individual. So that’s the basis of sports coaching. Completely non-hierarchical relationship where frequently a coach encourages an athlete or a team to do things that the coach themselves never do. There are many other interesting things about the relationship, but that’s one thing to focus on. Now it was actually a conversation in the very early 1990s between Werner Erhardt, the founder of Est, and Stuart Emery, the founder of Actualizations, and Timothy Galway, who wrote The Inner Game of Tennis, and Thomas J. Leonard, that really began to see how that relationship, which so far had only been found in sports, could be applied to other areas of life in a way that could be very effective. So that was the birth of life coaching, which Timothy Galway had already begun to explore in the ’80s with The Inner Game of Tennis. And it was Thomas J. Leonard, who died unfortunately very young, who saw that this could actually become a viable career, this could become a viable profession, learning how to be a coach, just like in sports coaching to other people, to encourage them to find their brilliance and to be in service to that instead of you transmitting your brilliance. So Thomas Leonard, in his short life, he died at 45, he was able to apply this to business coaching, executive coaching, wellness coaching, life coaching. And really what we’ve been doing is exploring how much is that possible within the field that we have called spiritual awakening. Now, let’s address a point which I know is important to you. The point then comes is how much is realization caused by the transmission from a “enlightened being” to an “unenlightened being” like a candle lighting another candle, or how much is realization actually the byproduct of the one who has seen, asking the right questions of the one who hopes to see. So the answer I would like to offer you is twofold. First of all, Poonjaji always emphasized that the transmission was not the important thing. Other people have not emphasized that. Muktananda, for example, put a lot of emphasis on Shaktipat. But Poonjaji always said, “What you’re seeking for is within yourself.” So he said, “Don’t focus on transmission. Focus on the transmission that is arising from within you, the spark of brilliance within your own self.” So I’ve really made my mission the last 20 years to really explore that, to see if we take that transmission element out of it by setting people up in relationship with each other, let’s see what is possible. And so that’s really how I’ve explored this, is when we have a training, it used to happen in physical groups, that people would come to California, we would be together in a retreat. But I was careful, rather than working with people one-on-one, where they would assume the transmission was coming from the teacher, I would show them how to facilitate this with each other through asking the right set of questions, basically genuine questions, not conceptual questions. And then I would let people facilitate this with each other, so it became completely obvious that it was not actually to do with the transmission from a teacher, because they were doing it with each other. Well, what happened after the crash of the housing bubble in 2008, and the shift in the economy, it was not so easy for people to travel to California anymore from across the world. But also there was an opening in the possibilities in technology like we’re doing now. So we started to offer our awakening coaching training online, using a technology called Maestro Conference, where people can actually meet in little groups, like small rooms, using a telephone. So now, I’m able to demonstrate how to facilitate this kind of awakening on the phone. So I could demonstrate, I’m in California, I could demonstrate with a volunteer in Spain. And meanwhile, people are listening in from Brazil, New Jersey, Seattle, all over the place. And then, with a click of a button, once they’ve figured out what it is I’m showing them, I can click a button, put them into small groups of three with a teaching assistant watching, and they can go through the same process of inquiry from all over the world. They’re not even in the same room with each other, so forget about transmission now. We’re thousands of miles apart. But here’s the incredible thing. The opening, the opening to spaciousness is just as strong using this technology where people are separated by thousands of miles apart as it was in California. And in California, it was just as strong as it was when I was giving satsang, playing the role of the transmitter. And in giving satsang, people were having just awakenings just as strong as they were in India. So it leads us to question, what is the fundamental important component here? Is it the transmitting power of the teacher, or is it — this is the question, not an answer — is it, in fact, the open disposition of the aspirant? Is it, in fact, the open, innocent heart of the aspirant to really willingly ask the question, “Who am I? Who is experiencing this moment? Who is hearing this? Who is feeling sensation in the body? Who is seeing this moment? Who am I really?” Is it, in fact, the innocent disposition of the student that may be more significant than the transmitting power of the teacher? Certainly, it’s worthwhile asking that question because it frees us up for a radical democratization of awakening. It means we can now have real awakening in a way that is completely — it’s like having to be in a railway station, which is good. It means that we can explore this possibility of radical awakening free of the reliance upon somebody assumed to be in a higher state or a different state.

Rick: That’s great. A couple of thoughts which came to mind as you were saying all that. One is, I wonder whether there still isn’t some element of transmission taking place, but transmission is really a non-local thing. In physics, there are all sorts of examples of a particle which turns this way over here and then turns that way over there. Even at the speed of light, there’s no way the two could have known what the others were doing, but nonetheless, boom, boom, they’re synchronized. With Maestro Conference and all this, there’s a tuning in, a meeting of souls regardless of geographic distance. That’s just a thought, but who knows? I’m just guessing. Another thought is that things really — I wonder if this would have worked in the 1950s, or whether we’re living in a time where the ground is much more fertile, and the soil has been tilled, and it’s much looser and easier to get seeds to sprout.

Arjuna: That seems to be a very strong possibility. The other aspect of all this which is interesting, having this kind of first glimpse, having this moment of “Ah!”. In my opinion, again, this is just an opinion, in my opinion, I would say that in these kind of spiritual circles like you attract with your interviews, I would say we have paid a disproportionate amount of attention to the importance of the glimpse. In the assumption, for many of us, this kind of radical recognition that your true nature is infinite, and that’s it. You are awakened, and it’s all over, and everything’s easy. In my opinion, I’m open to being wrong about this, that is fundamentally, deeply not true. And therefore, personally, I don’t use the word “awakened” or “enlightened” at all. I don’t believe there are enlightened people or awakened people. I would say there are people who are in a stream of awakening where the attention can be so much given to this stream of awakening that it becomes a constant stream. But I don’t really find it useful to think that you have this moment of “flip” and then it’s all over. I would say what I’ve noticed is that the infinite dimension of ourselves and the human dimension of ourselves always coexist. So really, each morning you wake up is another new fresh opportunity to bow deeply to the infinite presence and to surrender the human personality again and again and again to that infinite potential. Now, mentioning this because when we look at it that way, that this is not becoming awake or awakened, but about constant awakening, constantly throwing yourself into the fire of awakening again and again. The emphasis becomes much more on how you live this day than on somehow giving importance to a state.

Rick: For what it’s worth, I totally agree with you. And this is a very lively topic in many of my interviews. And I even just moderated a forum out at the SANS conference in which we talked about this sort of thing. I get emails from people all the time saying things like, “I am totally awakened” or “I am done” or whatever. And I just sort of scratch my head and say, “Well, we’ll see about that.” And it is paradoxical because you don’t want to always be putting yourself in a sort of a … You can help me out here … a position of, “Oh, I don’t know anything. I’ll never get it.” But on the other hand, at the same time, it is actually helpful to have the attitude of a beginner, to have the attitude that there is no telling what the full scope of possibilities is. And we should never rest on our laurels. And as you say, it’s like riding a bicycle. When do you get to stop balancing? It becomes sort of second nature after a while. But you keep doing it, you keep balancing, otherwise you fall.

Arjuna: That’s a beautiful analogy. And another analogy that I enjoy very much for this is that it’s like playing the violin. So you play the violin and at the beginning it’s very squeaky and then you play a little more and there’s more music comes and more music comes. Could there come a point for anybody where you play the perfect note and then you can say, “Ah, that’s it. Now I’m done with the violin. I’ve just perfected the violin. There’s no more beauty to be gotten out of this instrument. I’m going to take up golf instead.”

Rick: Well, now some people would argue, “Well, yeah, but that doesn’t apply to the spiritual realm because here we’re talking about something that’s absolute, the absolute self.” But then again, I know how you’re going to respond to this. Absolute is fine, but how about how that is lived in the life that we’re living? And is there any end to the degree of refinement there?

Arjuna: So I think that’s the point. That which is realized is absolute, but the embodiment of that realization in your day-to-day life, that is not absolute and that there is always more possibility for love to be expressed. Now, and this is really, I would say, where the traditional model of enlightenment is now in a process of radical evolution. And that’s where I love the view of, for example, Andrew Cohen or Ken Wilber or recently there’s a new book out by, never mind, I’ve forgotten his name. It’s called “Evolutionaries,” but I’ve forgotten the guy’s name. It’ll come back.

Rick: I think it might be one of Andrew Cohen’s students or something. Carter Phipps or one of those guys.

Arjuna: He’s a great teacher in his own right. So it’s not Carter, it’s somebody else. So it’s Clint Phipps, but anyway, it’s Carter, somebody else.

Rick: Jimmy Carter, okay. A

Arjuna: To be Awakened or what we call enlightenment, it is actually in its own process of evolution. So the enlightenment of the Buddha has been upgraded now, you see, because for example, I’m going to upset a lot of people with what I’m going to say right now. So I know that what I’m going to say right now will be very, very, very confronting to many people. But Buddha offered a model of enlightenment, which essentially involved renunciation. He sat, stood on the threshold of his bedroom with Yaśhodharā and Rāhul in the bed, his young, beautiful bride and his son in bed. And he chose to walk away from that and to then become a renunciate seeker for six years until he woke up under the Bodhi tree and then spent the rest of his life living as a renunciate monk with a begging bowl. He never went back. Even after the awakening, he never went back and reassumed his responsibilities as father. Today we would call that a, what do you call it, not a delinquent father, but somebody who, what is that called, a something dad. You know what you call that? Like somebody who doesn’t take care of their children.

Rick: Yeah, they get arrested for it. I know what you mean.

Arjuna: Yeah, it’s not a delinquent dad, but today,

Rick: people know what we mean. It’s someone walking out on their kids and not being a father. We wouldn’t celebrate that today or leaving their wife. But anyway, Buddha offered us a model of leaving your responsibilities behind in favor of spirit. So did many other people. Now, you could in a way, and this is where I’m going to really upset Buddhists big time by saying this, you could say that that was not actually a very evolved model because it required you to leave all the challenges behind in order to have awakening. I’m probably going to get struck by lightning tonight by saying this. But today, that possibility is neither available to us nor even attractive to us. So today, if you survey people interested in spirituality and ask them, “How many people are interested in celibacy?” Almost nobody. “How many people are interested in awakened sexuality?” All the hands go up. “How many people are interested in renouncing money?” Almost nobody. “How many people are interested in conscious business?” All the hands go up. Today, the whole thing has evolved. The game has evolved many notches. We are interested now, most of us, in how can this be lived in every aspect of life. So how can that awakening not only be impressive to you on your meditation cushion, how can it be impressive to your teenagers? That’s a much more difficult hurdle, a much higher hurdle. How can this be impressive to your lover? Not just in the kind of namaste, but in the way that you make love through your body. How can that awakening become a living embodiment that gives itself as a gift and brings ecstasy to the other person? How can that awakening be translated into the way that you do business and deal with money in such a way that people feel open, served by your relationship to the world and the contribution you make? These, in my opinion, sorry I’m getting a little hot under the collar here, but in my opinion, higher hurdles, much more challenging and important hurdles than experiencing emptiness on a meditation cushion. In fact, sitting in emptiness on a meditation cushion becomes almost like an irrelevant escape, relative to the much greater challenges of opening your eyes, sitting up on a meditation cushion and actually experimenting with how can this awakening now become a pregnant gift, a gift full of possibility. And that is what we are exploring in awakening coaching.

Rick: Yeah, well you know you were talking about stress earlier and in my experience it’s still a nice antidote to stress to spend some time in meditation. It relieves a lot of fatigue and stress and kind of charges your batteries, but you wouldn’t want to stay there all day, you know, that’s not the point. And interestingly, based on what you were just saying, I interviewed a guy a couple of months ago, Francis Bennett, who had spent several decades as a Trappist monk and had done a bunch of Vipassana and Zen and whatnot while he was in the monastery, they were very liberal monasteries he was in, and he had had a very profound awakening of the type that we often discuss in these circles. And after living in that awakening for a little while, he began to think, “You know, it’s time for me to leave. I better go out in the world now and see if this really stands up to the challenges that I’ll be confronted with, and you know, I’m open to getting married if that becomes a possibility.” So it’s like he had done the inward stroke, and after that the spirit just sort of moved him to get more into the types of things you’re talking about here.

Arjuna: Beautiful story, beautiful story Rick. And you know, getting married could be seen as symbolic or iconic of a relationship to life. Getting married means that a man and a woman, usually, although now the law changed, so it could mean a man and a man or a woman or a woman, but let’s take it, getting married most often, statistically most often, means a man and a woman opening to each other and giving each other the gift, masculine and feminine, and such to create a whole greater than the sum of the parts. Now, supposing that we were to take, instead of a man and a woman, supposing we were to say that it’s a union of masculine and feminine energy, where now we can remove the persona and say it’s actually a meeting of consciousness, which you could say is masculine and penetrating, and the swirling incarnation of life, which you could say is feminine. So now, marriage is not just a man and a woman getting into this thing, it’s actually the union of consciousness and life. And that doesn’t only need to involve marriage, it could involve having children as a kind of marriage of consciousness and life, starting a business, bringing consciousness into life so it gives its gift, painting, building a building. And this is the invitation for all of us, just like your Trappist friend, for this awakening to actually move out of the monastery, both literally and symbolically, into life and to give its gift. Now, what I’ve noticed from interviewing, I’ve spent a lot of my life interviewing people, because that’s how I’ve really found out about stuff. I did 170 in-depth interviews for Translucent Revolution and many more for Living Awakening, which is an online course. By doing these interviews, I’ve discovered what does it take to have a really, truly, no limits, fulfilled life. Who are the people who are really living profoundly, deeply, ecstatic, fulfilled life, like a life of no regret? And by and large, I would say it’s not the spiritual teachers, mostly who appear to be really ecstatic, fulfilled. The people I find who are really just exploding with, “Yes!” People who have discovered a mixture of spiritual awakening and fully giving the gift, that their gift is fully discharged, fully discharged into the world. So I’m thinking, for example, of Lynn Twist, who has raised more than $2 billion to alleviate world hunger. She has had her share of spiritual awakening, but she has also given herself fully to the way she can contribute. She is a deeply, deeply fulfilled person and a very unpretentious person as well. Another example would be John Gray, who is well-known for his book, “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus,” but he’s contributed much more than that, about stress and hormones and nutrition, many things. I know him quite well because we are in a men’s group together. This man, he spent actually 10 years in India, in Switzerland, I’m sorry, in a meditation retreat. So he has had his share of deep spiritual awakening.

Rick: Yeah, we were buddies on those retreats, Johnny and I.

Arjuna: Yeah, so Johnny Gray has fully given his gift and he is fully giving his gift. I know him and he is constantly, constantly giving. He has got millions of dollars. He doesn’t need the money, but he is constantly seeking out new ways to give and to serve people. That is a deeply fulfilled man. Another example would be Dave Ellis, who wrote the book, “The Master Student,” one of the best-selling textbooks in history. All the new students at universities get this book, “The Master Student.” He has made more money than he needs. Now he coaches the CEOs of non-profit organizations so that he can coach them to give more to the world. He is focused on the most advantaged 10% in the world through non-profit organizations. Profoundly, deeply satisfied man. I also know him quite well. Every time we meet, he is happy, he is bright, he is up, he is optimistic because he is giving his gift. So I would suggest that the peak of spiritual attainment is not to be found only on a meditation cushion. It may involve multiple times on a meditation cushion, but the peak of spiritual evolution is that you discover the gift that moves itself through you, and you find ways to fully discharge itself in every area of your life.

Rick: Deepak would be another example, I think. So in your awakening coaching program, do you help people to unfold, to have the sort of awakening that you’ve just described, which is not only the abstract, unmanifest aspect of it, but the full oomph into the relative aspect of it?

Arjuna: To realize the absolute unmanifest aspect of it takes a nanosecond, and maybe in terms of a structured process to make that reliable, it takes about 10 minutes. To live that in your sexuality, in your intimate relationships, in your creativity, in every area of your life, takes a lifetime.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, when you say it takes 10 minutes to realize the unmanifest aspect of it, I mean, maybe to have a glimpse, but in terms of sustained, clear, unperturbable kind of awareness, that takes more than 10 minutes, in my experience.

Arjuna: Well, okay.

Rick: It could take years to really fully integrate to the point where it’s solid as a rock, and nothing is going to throw it off.

Arjuna: Well, perhaps, may I offer you a slightly different way of seeing that, which is not better than what you’re saying, which is different. I’m not saying I’m right, but I just want to offer you another possibility. The reason I wanted to bring this up is, obviously, I talk to people who are concerned with these things a lot, because I’m a coach. The notion of a glimpse and then solid as a rock may have some validity to it, I grant you, but it may also actually become quite an impediment as well. Let me suggest to you why. When the attention, attention is usually facing kind of, you could say, outwards in a way. So, the attention is facing to things we see, things we hear, things we feel in the body, but also to thoughts and feelings, which in a way are kind of out as well, they are the attention going out. So, really awakening, to put it in a very simple way, it means that somehow or other, the attention comes to rest on itself, which there isn’t really inward and outward, it’s a way of speaking, but you could say the attention turns inward, so attention becomes aware of its own nature, and when it does, it’s a kind of an explosion, it’s a kind of an atomic explosion, the attention comes back to itself, it’s the realization of infinity. So, let me just offer you this as a possibility, I’m not saying nothing is the absolute truth, it’s just a way of seeing it. You could say that that kind of realization is always going to be a matter of a glimpse, because it’s like the attention returns to itself and there’s that realization, the attention returns to itself and there’s that realization. So, in a way, one way to see it is that we have available to us glimpses now, now, now, now. You could get really in the habit of having frequent glimpses, right? You could maybe be glimpsing, so it comes almost like a movie, but it’s still, it’s frequent glimpses. Now, that which is glimpsed is infinite. That which is glimpsed doesn’t really change or move, it’s consciousness. And the everything else is really, this is what is recognized in the glimpse, everything else is happening within that consciousness. Do you see what I mean? So, when the sound is heard, the sound is the frequency in that consciousness. When there is movement or color, it’s movement within, it’s a ripple within the consciousness. Even quantum physics will substantiate that everything is a ripple in the space-time continuum. So, actually, that which is solid as a rock is the consciousness. It’s already solid as a rock, it doesn’t need any change in the human condition for that to be a rock. And in any moment, in any moment, in any moment, the attention can recognize that or the attention can be outwardly directed. So, if we see it that way, really, there’s only now, there is only this moment, and in this moment, there’s really two possibilities, broadly speaking. There’s the recognition, spaciousness, or there may be the temporary distraction of attention into something that is limited. ……. is well, which is the recognition of what I’ve just said, which is the recognition that this is how it is. The recognition that the spaciousness doesn’t move, it is already solid as a rock. The recognition that the spaciousness is stable, and the recognition that the attention is constantly moving. Now, that, the different way of seeing it, that is what I would call realization. Realization that this is how things are. And I would personally see that as the end of seeking. The end of seeking, because now there’s the recognition, this spaciousness doesn’t move, and it’s perfectly okay for attention to get wrapped up in something, and then to come back to the spaciousness. Nothing really happened, because the spaciousness doesn’t change. That is not about a gradual process in time, that you have a glimpse, you have more glimpses, and finally in five years, ten years, whatever, it’s stable, which is the model, for example, that Maharishi Mahesh Yogi offered. You have transcendental consciousness, cosmic consciousness, God consciousness, unity consciousness, these kind of, it’s a process. That’s one way to see it, which may have some validity. That, in my opinion, would not merit the word realization, it’s more something to do with attainment. The other way to recognize it is that whole seeking is in time, it’s relative to a person, but the spaciousness doesn’t change. The spaciousness is always the same, and the appearance of a person comes and goes. That is more a matter of realization, it happens now, and that realization doesn’t have any evolution in time.

Rick: No, but let me just tell you my experience and see if it concurs with yours, which is that spaciousness, which has always been there, just continues over the years to be appreciated more and more clearly. Like you said, the attention can go out and you get caught up in something, but you can come back to the spaciousness. The tendency for it to work that way seems to be less and less. In other words, the spacious, silent awareness is there in the midst of airports and arguments and all kinds of other situations. It’s not a matter of on/off, black/white, the two are kind of integrated with one another. And I might throw a question in here for you, which is that in light of all that we both just said, I’m sorry, you’re speaking but I couldn’t hear you, what did you say?

Arjuna: Before you say the question, just let me explain the possibility that both of those views could be, although they are logically linked to each other, both of those views may be simultaneously true.

Rick: I agree. In fact, you know that old saying, “Neti, neti, not this, not this.” My saying would be, “This, this,” because just about whatever you say, it’s true. But probably the opposite of it is also true because of the polarity thing, the paradox thing. But in your own experience then, having had this profound awakening with Poonjaji 20 years ago or whatever, what has been the nature of your continuing growth? You’ve recognized long ago that that spaciousness is always there, you can check in anytime you like, but obviously there’s an unfoldment which will probably continue to the day you die. So what is the characteristic or nature of that unfoldment? How is your life or your experience and interaction with life becoming richer, clearer, whatever?

Arjuna: I’m afraid I can’t really answer that question directly because it doesn’t feel like that.

Rick: What does it feel like?

Arjuna: Ill explain. The most fundamental thing about the realization that happened with Poonjaji that really is now and now and now and now, it’s not really something that happened in 1991, it’s something that’s always here, is that there really isn’t a person here. There isn’t really anything called a “me,” you see. There is this consciousness and then there is everything that’s experienced. And so there isn’t any central agent there that evolves or grows. However, there is something else, which is that there is a process. It’s not a thing, it’s not a person, it’s not an entity, but there is a process which kind of happens through the individual when the individual is made available. So this mind-body-organism, this monkey, this thing, can become more of a channel than a thing. And when it is allowed to become a channel, which is what it is anyway, when it is allowed to become a channel through the realization that there is nobody here, there is no person, in the light of that realization of “no me,” this form becomes available for gifting. And that process of gifting definitely evolves. So the books get more precise, the teachings get more precise, the effectiveness of training gets more precise, the children who are now 17 and 20 feel more loved, right? The wife feels more loved, feels more seen, feels more appreciated. Less people get hurt, more people feel uplifted and loved. But that’s not really the evolution of an individual. It is simply the allowing of love to give its gift through the vessel that’s left when the illusion of an individual is no longer held to. Now that may seem like a semantic difference.

Rick: No, it seems brilliant, beautifully put. I love it. And I didn’t mean to imply that there was a little Arjuna guy in there that’s getting more and more shiny or something. It’s really just what you said, that there is this growth that continues, but there is a whole new orientation than there was when you were kind of locked into a sense of “me, me, me.”

Arjuna: So this brings up an important point which is why I really emphasize coaching so much. I personally, of course now we know when the words “I personally” are said, it’s kind of a little bit, meaning that we better say “Infinite consciousness from this chair feels that…”

Rick: It would be nauseating if we talk that way.

Arjuna: Just use “I” as a shorthand. So it feels from here that the coaching relationship offers so much more to the unfolding of this gifting than a hierarchical teacher-student relationship could. And once we recognize the beauty of the coaching relationship, really we discard the hierarchical teacher-student relationship like a piece of clothing that has become too tight, too constraining. Because the coaching relationship recognizes that this is not really about transmission of one state to another. It’s not about me trying to get enlightened. It’s actually a way that the infinite consciousness can support itself in two different incarnations so that the gift of love can be unlocked and given. And that really happens, I would say only can happen within a context that has moved beyond, that has evolved beyond hierarchy. Hierarchy, in my opinion, is fundamentally a lie. Any relationship that implies hierarchy is fundamentally, deeply a lie and a deception. So if you look at nature, if you look at… I’m able to look over the top of my laptop right now into the garden and I can see all the leaves and the plants and the bushes. You wouldn’t ask, “Which one is in charge?” It’s just stupid. I mean, they coexist in an ecology. That is really the nature of life. You look at dolphins, you look at flocks of birds. I mean, flocks of birds might rotate the one that flies at the front. It’s only human beings who have this notion of not good enough, better than. And unfortunately, the sense of inadequacy and the need to project superiority, which has dominated politics and business and all sorts of things, has been imposed upon spirituality. So we’ve developed this notion of the enlightened and the unenlightened. I have to say from this chair, it is fundamentally a lie. It is fundamentally a deception about the nature of reality. Life itself does not contain any inherent hierarchy in it. It is the play and interaction of the ocean with itself. I mean, look at the ocean, which is movement of lots of water molecules. There is no hierarchy in that. So actually, that’s the beauty of the coaching relationship, is that when two people can support each other, maybe even one week Joe coaches Mary, the next week Mary coaches Joe, incredible magic, incredible release of love can happen. When we abandon the idea that this one is better than that one, actually keeps us locked. This relationship keeps us locked into a mindset that is childish and somewhat retarded in our evolution.

Rick: I agree with all that. But again, let me play devil’s advocate, there is always this paradoxical thing going on with any statement that one makes with any degree of assertion. And that is that there do seem to be levels of spiritual maturity, just as there are levels of other types of maturity. You were talking a minute ago very eloquently about how your experience of life is that of a channel through which this divine intelligence, or whatever you want to call it, flows more and more richly and effectively. But if we compare different people, then obviously their capacity to do that varies. And if we take it down to the animal level or the mosquito level or something like that, even though we are all animated by the same consciousness, there is obviously a very different, there is a wide range in terms of how fully that consciousness can express through us. So there is a hierarchy in that sense.

Arjuna: Yeah, I agree. It is true. And that is a point that Ken Wilber makes very much. There is a difference between mentally imposed hierarchy and natural hierarchy. But paradoxically, paradoxically,

Rick: It’s like playing paradoxical ping pong here.

Arjuna: And this is where I just want to say before we just, really, we can get awfully tangled up in concepts here. And the way beyond the concepts is to focus on the gift. When we start to focus on what is the unique gift covered over that is wanting to give itself through you, and what is in the way of that, all of this becomes pragmatic and useful and joyous. Because if two people meet, trying to figure out what is the philosophically correct thing, it does not really go very far. If two people meet, asking, “Who are you really? What is your true nature?” Let us actually not ask that conceptually. Let us go back into ourselves and really investigate. “Oh wow, it is infinite. Wow, it has no limits. Wonderful.” And then from there, now, let us feel into what are the habits, the automatic habits in day-to-day life which inhibit that infinite consciousness giving itself into the world. “Oh yes, there is this thought that keeps coming back, ‘I am not good enough.’ Let us investigate that thought. Let us drill down into it. Let us explode it. Ah yes, now we are free of that. Beautiful. That did not take very long. And now what is next? Oh yes, nobody loves me. Let us find a way to free ourselves of that. Oh yes, now, wow, yes, I never mind about my meditation. I went to work today and my increased sense of humor, just seeing myself in a different way, became infectious and the whole office feels different as a result. When I made love to my wife last night, she shrieked with delight, louder than she usually does. Now we are talking about some real tangible results in the world. And this is where, in my opinion, spirituality has cut itself a little short by saying that true awakening should not be measured by results in the world. True awakening is somehow freedom from all of that and to tie awakening to any kind of manifest results is bringing it back into I don’t agree.

Rick: I don’t either. It should really, the proof of the pudding is really in …

Arjuna: If awakening is for real, your teenagers should be impressed.

Rick: Yeah, and if you are behaving like a real SOB, then your awakening probably needs some work.

Arjuna: We can find an integration between awakening and human integrity, because there have been stories that have emerged in the last years of people, for example, claiming high states of enlightenment, but then it turns out they were having a clandestine affair with one of their students. Lots of stories. Well, that is an obvious violation of human integrity, but it gets overlooked or forgiven because, “Oh, but they are enlightened.”

Rick: Yeah, they are transmitting Shakti or something.

Arjuna: So this is where this kind of relationship keeps us childish, because if we actually level the playing field and see we are all that infinite consciousness, whether realized or not, we are all that infinite consciousness, and we are all human beings. Now we can say as human beings, there is such a thing as responsibility, there is such a thing as integrity, and we can call each other. So as an awakening coach, I work with other people. I have a team of people we teach together, and I get called to the mat frequently for violations of integrity, if I didn’t keep my word, I didn’t say, “I didn’t do what I said I’d do,” etc., etc. And that actually, I would say, is a very healthy environment. I love it, but as the one who invented the coaching method, my colleagues don’t feel the need to put me beyond reproach. They can constantly point out ways that I am letting them down as a human being. And that’s a healthy environment where we can interact with each other and realize we are all in service to an intelligence, which is great math, yet the sum of who we are as individuals. That’s the possibility, I would say, of a mature environment for exploring spiritual awakening.

Rick: That’s great, and I’m sure it makes the whole thing much more valuable for you than it would if you had this hierarchical thing going on, and you were Mr. Perfect and beyond reproach. It’s maybe a little bit more difficult, but a lot more evolutionary.

Arjuna: Yes, and this is where you see, coming back to these, there are so many cases in the last years of these kinds of violations of integrity among people teaching enlightenment. The most obvious case, of course, is a teacher taking advantage of a student, sexually. That’s a great example of a violation of integrity, which in any other field would be completely, I mean you just couldn’t get away with it.

Rick: Or you get fired, or whatever.

Arjuna: And yet, there are people who got fired temporarily, but they bounce back because somehow it’s forgivable. And this is unfortunate, but in a spiritual context, we forgive violations of integrity that we would never forgive in the rest of life. And other examples are amassing large amounts of money for personal gain, or it goes on and on. So in this way, the hierarchical relationship actually becomes a disservice, not only to the student who gets taken advantage of, but it becomes a disservice to the teacher, because their possibility to involve personally, to learn from life, to become a better vehicle of love, actually gets shut down. If a student, if a teacher is given license to have a secret affair with a student, which is hushed up for years and condoned by other people, then when it’s discovered, they go through a couple of years of disgrace and they’re back teaching again, that person never got an opportunity to face their own shadow, to realize, yes, maybe the truth of who we all are is magnificent and glorious and infinite, but I as a human being have a little work to do, a little self-examination, a little honesty, a little humility to bring into the mix. That whole thing is bypassed when we have this pedestal thing going on. So this is where the democratization of enlightenment from a teacher-student relationship to a coaching relationship is such a relief and such an evolutionary invitation for everybody.

Rick: Yeah, you’ve really convinced me of that, even more than I already was. I mean, I think it’s been very helpful for me and I’m sure will be for the listeners to have heard this with the clarity with which you’ve expressed it. It’s very good and I think really worth pondering deeply.

Arjuna: Yes, just like everything else, these are collective memes, as they talk about in Spiral Dynamics. You could say what I’m speaking to today, Ram Dass, who is a beautiful example, he often said, “My name, Ram,” Ram is an acronym for rent-a-mouth, you know? “Rent me for a few hours to speak what is actually emerging in the collective.” So you’ve probably heard that the Rubik’s Cube, that box with the colors, it was actually invented by two separate people in different parts of the globe at the same time with no contact with each other. It was simply an idea whose time had come. And in the same way, I would say that the democratization of enlightenment or the democratization of awakening from hierarchy to a meeting of friends is an idea whose time has come. It’s not my idea or somebody else’s idea. And also the recognition that awakening, what we’ve been talking about today, the recognition that awakening is not actually ultimately just about experiencing limitless consciousness or a meditation. That’s the beginning of it. The real fruition of awakening has to do with the gift that is being given into the world and how that is received. These are evolutionary means. In other words, they are collective ideas that we are stepping into and embodying.

Rick: That’s great. Well, let’s leave it at that because I don’t think you could say it any more clearly than you already have. I could go on for another two hours with you, but I’d like to do that maybe in a year or two from now. We’ll do another one of these and see where we’re at at that point. I think we probably both will have grown in our clarity and understanding and experience.

Arjuna: Definitely, definitely.

Rick: So let me make a couple of wrap-up points, which I always make at the end of every interview. I think the dog is insisting that this interview end. We’ve been talking with Arjuna Arda, who lives out in the west coast of the US but travels around and doesn’t need to travel around because he’s using this Maestro Conference thing to facilitate, conduct this awakening coaching program all over the world. I’ll be linking to his site, which is awakeningcoachingtraining.com and any other sites you want me to link to, Arjuna. And people can get in touch. I’m sure you’ll experience a bit of the BatGap bump, which is something like the Colbert bump, but maybe not quite as big. And this interview is or has been one in a continuing series. I do a new one each week. If you’d like to be notified of other ones as they’re released, either subscribe to the YouTube channel or go to BatGap.com and sign up for the email notification. This is available as an audio podcast if you’d like to listen to things while you drive and so on. So you’ll find links on BatGap.com. You’ll also find a chat group that builds around every single interview, and you feel free to participate in that. There’s also a donate button. I don’t make that a requirement, but it enables this whole thing to keep rolling along. And as the numbers increase, perhaps the donations will reach a point at which I can do this full time. So thank you very much for listening or watching. Thank you, Arjuna, for your patience. So thank you, everybody. Thank you all for listening or watching, and we’ll see you next time.

Arjuna: All right. Thank you. [Music]