Birthing Radiant Being into Our Humanity, with Susanne Marie, Amoda Maa, & T Jonathon Proctor Transcript

Birthing Radiant Being into Our Humanity, with Susanne Marie, Amoda Maa, & T Jonathon Proctor

Summary:

We have an audience here. And the audience will be asking questions a little bit later in the presentation. But the panel members– and I am just the moderator– are as follows: to my left, T. Proctor, who is the founder of Being Real, Being Embodied. In Humboldt County, California, he offers private sessions and group work on this theme that we’ll be talking about tonight. To his left, Susanne Marie is a spiritual mentor and founder of Transformation Through Presence. She offers private sessions and groups. She is a mother of two teens and lives in Northern California. And to her left, Amoda Maa, spiritual teacher and author, offers satsangs, retreats, and private sessions in the UK, Europe, and the United States. She currently lives in the UK. I’ve interviewed Susanne and Amoda Maa on BatGap. You can search and find their interviews if you like. And one of these days, maybe even this weekend, I’ll interview T. as well. T stands for Tyrannosaurus, by the way, his parents were paleontologists, and had a wicked sense of humor. [LAUGHTER]

T Jonathon Proctor: That’s not really true.

Susanne Marie: Actually, it’s a good story.

T Jonathon Proctor: Yeah, it’s a good story. Spread that.

Rick Archer: So, let me ask you a few questions. We brainstormed earlier before the conference about what we were going to say. We came up with some questions we might want to ask you in the beginning to see what you have to say. So how many of you would agree that spiritual realization is relevant to everyday life? OK. And how many feel that it has intrinsic value in terms of subjective fulfillment or deep experiences, but doesn’t necessarily apply to raising kids or working at a job or any of that kind of stuff? And nobody. Good. Sorry. [LAUGHTER]

Susanne Marie: You’re in the right room.

Rick Archer: How many of you have had some kind of awakening? Maybe you define it as a non-dual awakening, something along those lines. Great. Almost everybody. But how many people who just raised their hands feel that it hasn’t really stabilized in your life as an ongoing living reality, at least not to the extent you would like it to? OK. How many feel that it has stabilized? OK. Is it unshakably stabilized? [LAUGHTER] Very good. Does it seem to be getting– well, maybe… [LAUGHTER] Don’t get me started.

T Jonathon Proctor: What color is it? [LAUGHTER]

Rick Archer: How many of you are confused or curious about how spiritual realization is lived amidst ordinary life, what it feels like? Do strong emotions still arise? Are relationships experienced differently? Does the focus or purpose of life change? And so on. How many are curious about that? Maybe you’re not so curious because you’re actually experiencing the answer to those questions. How many of you feel that your awakening deepens as you learn to be more skillful with your animal instincts, emotions, relationships, physical existence? Somehow that deepens your relationship. OK. Almost everybody. So, we’re all kind of on the same page, I think. So, you can see where we’re going with this. And how many of you saw Adyashanti and A.H. Amlas’ talk tonight? That whole talk was about what we’re going to talk about tonight. And this will give you more chance for maybe probing some different areas and asking questions and stuff. So, some of the themes we’re going to talk about tonight are what the difference might be between an experience of awakening and an embodied awakening, what the relationship might be between the personality self, the mind-body vehicle, and awakened consciousness, whether clearing the mind-body vessel is a support for awakening, the never-ending unfoldment of awakening, as Adya was referring to tonight, through the human experience. And the question, is this inclusive recognition of awakeness an evolutionary impulse of consciousness? And what is its relevance to our contemporary world? OK. So, who feels motivated to start?

[SIDE CONVERSATION]

Rick Archer: There’s no question. I mean, I’ve just asked a whole bunch of questions and thrown out a whole bunch of points. As I was reading those, I bet you little thoughts were popping in your heads. As if, “I’d like to say this about that.” So, let’s start with something that most grabbed your interest.

T Jonathon Proctor: I’ll actually start.

Rick Archer: Good.

T Jonathon Proctor: Hi, everybody. Hi. About 16, 17 years ago, I had this very profound experience of what people are calling awakening, this profound experience of feeling freed from a really difficult life, freed from a very painful existence. And in some ways, just as Eckhart Tolle was sitting on park benches, I was going to parks, and I was sitting in ecstasy at the light glistening off the blades of grass. I just was falling in love with nature and the world. I was going out. I had a camper, I would go out and be alone in the wilderness for weeks at a time. And I had this beautiful connection with the Earth, the planet, with the natural kind of rhythms of light and dark, and walking barefoot on the ground. I had this beautiful feeling of presence in my life that I always felt should be there, but I’d never really felt was there. And that went on for quite a period of time.

And then it came to pass that I started to need to do things in the world. I needed to have relationships in the world. I needed to do work in the world to support myself. And what I found is that all of that experience, all of that depth of presence and gratitude and beauty, it didn’t necessarily translate into the daily routine of life. And so, for me, it took some time, because I felt as if I might be betraying something, a teacher or a teaching or even my own realization. But for me, what came to pass is that I decided I needed to get to work and resolve some of the stuff that was going on inside my humanity, as Adya and Hamid were talking about today. And so, I went everywhere that my intuition sent me, and I got very lucky and didn’t get stuck or trapped in a lot of dead ends. And I found really useful ways to address the inner conflict, the judge, the hungry animal, the needy baby, all of the aspects of myself that were outstanding and that were still coming up and driving things in my life. And so, that’s what my life work has become, is to share with other people the methods and practices. And I want to say something about practices here, because practices are often equated with seeking. But I don’t see it that way. I don’t see practices as seeking. I see practices as an art. When Segovia practices the guitar, he is not seeking. If you’re practicing the art of your life, that doesn’t mean you are seeking. That means you are cultivating something here. That means you are cultivating a body of presence. You are embodying presence. And it is a cultivation of presence. So, what I share with people is the way that they can most directly become in contact with themselves and find their own guidance through the difficult work of resolving the human patterns that are our own, that are our families, and that are our ancestral heritage, even.

Audience; Next. [LAUGHTER]

Rick Archer: Incidentally, I think the word seeking is given too much of a bad rap. I don’t think there is anything wrong with seeking. If you like seeking, seek like a son of a gun. And a time will come when the seeking energy subsides, and you feel as if it is more of an exploration and an adventure than some kind of desperate quest. But if there is a strong sense of seeking, there is nothing wrong with it, in my opinion. I don’t care what Papaji said.

T Jonathon Proctor: And just as a note, one of the basic neural pathways in a human being is the seeking path. If you look into the neurobiology, seeking is one of the primal neural pathways in a human body. So, if you are rejecting that, you might actually be rejecting something of your innate humanity.

Rick Archer: In fact, my former teacher, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi always used to say the mind has a natural tendency to seek greater happiness. He used the word seek. And we can see it in our experience right now. We are sitting here talking. Some beautiful music starts playing in the corner. Our attention is going to shift to it without effort, because the mind just continues to seek for greater happiness.

Amoda Maa: This question about whether practices support awakening or hinder awakening is a real juicy one. And it is also, in some ways, a delicate conversation, because it really depends almost on which side of the fence– if there was a fence. There isn’t a fence, but if there was a fence, which side of the fence you are on. And we can look at it as if you could say, before awakening, is there a role for practices to cleanse the vessel, to clear the mind-body vehicle? About meditation practices, emotional cathartic practices, psychotherapeutic practices, can they support the cleansing of the vessel so that awakeness can be more easily recognized and stabilized? It is a little bit like polishing the sides of a diamond. If the sides of the diamond are covered in dust, which is the ancestral patterns and the conditioning, the family conditioning, the social conditioning, all the personal conditioning, if they are covered in dust, then the light of awakeness, which is always present, cannot be fully recognized or it cannot emanate through this particular body-mind vehicle. So, does it support awakening in that respect? Well, it can polish the sides of the mirror. But does it cause awakening? I don’t think we can say that anything really causes awakening.

So, regarding the seeking that perhaps is being referred to, the danger in that is that if we seek to create awakening or to cause this experience of awakening or this idea of awakening, because it is always an idea of awakening before it has actually been realized, and therefore, it is not actually the way it is. It’s just a picture in the mind or an imagination. If we are seeking to achieve some kind of picture of awakening through following certain practices, then the danger in that is that we are seeking identity in those practices. And that simply reinforces the sense of self-identity. And that is where it becomes stuck. And that is when we say that, well, practices are not relevant or not important.

On the other hand, if those practices are seen like a boat that takes you to the other shore, when the shore has been reached, to use that metaphor, then those practices naturally fall away. There is the other side of that coin, which is that, as in your experience, T, if awakening has been recognized and all the qualities of being which come through that, like peace and bliss and all this are realized, and then those contractive patterns re-emerge as part of the personality vehicle, then it would be naive and arrogant, perhaps, not to use those practices to support the cleansing of the vessel any further. So, it is not an easy answer, is it? It depends which side of the coin you are on. Using the practices intelligently and honestly is the key point.

Rick Archer: We might ask, does the wind cause the sun to shine? No, of course, the sun is always shining, has always been shining. But the wind is really good at blowing the clouds away. And when the clouds are blown away, holy mackerel, the sun is shining. I guess it always was. So that is my angle on practices.

Susanne Marie: My thought about practices is that if we are following our innate intelligence, our own intuitive heart, the practices we are needing to be following will reveal themselves. At times, it might be inquiry. There might be a time when the mind is really seeking for clarity and for understanding. And so, then you will be drawn to different methods of inquiry. And other times, the heart is wanting to be revealed. And you will be drawn to bhakti paths and such. And in yoga, the body wants to open up and have veils be removed. And so, I think that there is a natural intelligence that can guide and that we can tune in to and we can learn to tune in to.

T Jonathon Proctor: And I think in a sense, that is what we are doing here. I don’t want to speak for you, but I think what we are doing here is that we are providing that kind of guidance toward your inner guidance. But we are not high holy spiritual gurus who are standing on a platform and are in a room with 10,000 people. We are working one on one with people. We are saying, what is happening for you now? And how are you feeling stuck? What is getting in your way? What is coming up in your life? Why is that? What is needed? And speaking very directly, personally to people, cultivating a person, cultivating a soul in this world, letting this beautiful soul emerge like an elegant flower emerging from the earth. It is very organic. It is very kind. It is a very compassionate process.

Susanne Marie: And learning to cultivate that for oneself. I mean, really, the pointer is always back to ourselves and being a light unto ourselves in the end, whether we are drawn to practices, whether we are drawn to working with different teachers, watching Buddha at the Gas Pump, whatever it is, in the end, it is our own inner selves that are guiding. And that is the one to be focusing on and to be listening to. That is how I feel about it.

Rick Archer: T, you mentioned that you went through an Eckhart Tolle phase after your awakening, where you were not too functional in the world. You were just experiencing a lot of bliss and clarity and so on. I’m just curious about the audience, if there are many people in the audience who had some kind of profound awakening and more or less had to metaphorically sit on park benches for some time after that, where it made you somewhat dysfunctional in terms of the ability to hold down a job or anything like that. Show of hands on that point. Several. Yeah. OK. So, the rest of you did not have any problem? A lot of people say they have had some kind of significant awakening. Did you just take it in stride and keep on going?

Audience: My experience was it was more of an opening, a realization and a release. So, it was an incredible release of this burden that I was carrying. So, this heavy mind thing that I held for years suddenly just cracked open and the whole thing just fell apart. It took a little processing time to deal with it in the world, but I did not have the experience of not being functional.

T Jonathon Proctor: I would not say that I wasn’t functional. I would say that it just did not make a lot of sense when I went to move into action. So, I was still functional, I was still functioning. But when I would function, I would kind of go back to the old ways of functioning, because there was not really a template for new functioning. The development was not there yet.

Rick Archer: Boy, I have definitely gone through some non-functional periods. Obsessive, idiosyncratic, really certifiably nuts, but I put on a good face. I could get up in front of a group and give a talk. I may be totally nuts right now, for all you know, putting on a good face. And it has taken decades for that. It took decades. It is probably still happening. Ask my wife. But there has just been this continual reshuffling and purification and rearrangement and integration, which has made me a better human being in many respects. And I don’t see it ever ending. As Adi was saying tonight, it is a lifelong process.

Susanne Marie: Yeah, and first, there is what was spoken of earlier by Adi and Hamid. It is something that we as a panel really seem to be congruent on, that there is first an emptying out process that happens, and a letting go of identity, and letting go of the landmarks that we are used to, the ways that we perceive the world, and the dropping away of all that. That can be an ongoing, long process that can take place, chunks of identity can still drop off. And suddenly, it is not there anymore. Or inquiry will be used, and it is purposely being used because something is really gnawing on itself. And it knows that it is wanting to be let go of. And so, there is this intelligence that is moving and that is guiding the whole process. And it is as if the sense of “I” is born. And then at some point, it wants to be let go of. And that is just the evolution of a human being, the healthy evolution of a human being, in my mind.

So, it has a way of returning back to source, back to essence, back to its state of freedom, inherent freedom, free of what it has accumulated over a lifetime. That is kind of like the emptying out phase. There are so many beautiful teachings out there to support that. Then, when it has reached a point of stasis where it has been stopped in something like in the beyond, in a beyond place where it does not need to go any more beyond. And so suddenly, that is the place where people speak about how the end of seeking occurs. There is no more momentum to want to return back. It is just natural, and you know that it is not there anymore when that desire is gone to want to return. And so that whole seeking is actually intelligence. It is life intelligence moving. It knows exactly what it is doing. And if we can put our trust in it and just let it take us, the momentum of it, itself and other, that gap closing. And it wants to know itself as that.

And so, that is the seeking. It is as if I am asking, what am I? So, this gap closes. And then when it is done, there is this pause. And some people stay in that pause a while, because it is a really beautiful place to be. It is this place free of identity, free of our conditioning oftentimes. Sometimes it is for a nanosecond. Some people, as you know, ease into this. It is not a sudden clap of big fireworks. And then some people, as I, had a big fireworks thing. And then there is this beautiful, natural re-entry phase. And that is the piece that we really are wanting to speak about here today with you all, is the re-entry phase of life back into itself. So that wakes up to itself. And then it has this natural intelligence of, well, what am I? The fullness of what I am, the full other 50%. So, there is the beyond. And then there is everything else. And so, then that beautiful paradox gets resolved. And that re-entry takes the shape of what was so beautifully spoken of earlier by Adya and Hamid. It goes into every area of our lives. It goes into saying yes, basically. It is a big yes to everything, back to a yes to even the conditioning, a yes to even being a me. That sense of me doesn’t drop away. It does not drop away completely. It gets thinner. But the sense of me is part of the whole. And so that yes includes all aspects of itself. And that is the beautiful journey of embodiment.

Rick Archer: That is an important point. Amoda, do you want to say something?

Amoda Maa: No, I was just really going to support that, in the sense that I find that in speaking with people in my groups and sessions, that is one of the main points of confusion. Is there still a sense of me? Is there still a sense of “I”? Is there still a sense of self? And many people, the majority of people, even if they have had an awakening experience, really still hold onto this idea that there is no self. And they have created this fantasy that no self means that there are no more bad feelings. There is just this kind of pain-free life. I know it sounds very naive, but it is actually what I encounter all the time, is still a holding on to some idea of this.

And then stuff happens. The movement of life still comes through. And the feelings and the emotions and all the challenges that come with being a human being and all the messiness that comes. And there is a disappointment with that. And there is a disillusionment with that. And even if it is a subtle disillusionment, again, it tends to separate that which has been recognized as awakeness and this idea of self. So, there is still an inner division, an inner conflict happening. And that seems to create much distress. And so, the seeking starts again.

And so, it’s good to speak of this, that the self, the personality, the sense of “I” doesn’t just disappear completely. In my experience, how I’ve experienced it and how I see it being experienced is that it is not the self that dies. It is not even the ego that dies. Because as long as you are alive in a body, you still need an ego. If we are talking about ego as that which perceives inside from outside, if I could not see what was in me and what was out here, I would probably be psychotic. Or I would probably be just a blubbery mess. You have to be able to maneuver in the three-dimensional reality that has perceived boundaries, perceived inside and outside. Now, that is not the deepest truth of it. And that is not the deepest recognition. But it is part of operating through form, as form, whilst we are still alive.

So, I feel that the ego still exists. But what happens is that the sense of identity is not locked into the ego. So, it is not encapsulated in time and space. And in realization or liberation or awakeness, it is as if the sense of self-identity becomes liberated from the prison of three-dimensional reality. And in that liberation, it becomes non-localized, unlocalized. In other words, you could say it becomes one with everything. It is not contained in me, but there is still a me. And so, the perception of “I” is very different to when it is still locked in the prison of egoic identity. But it still operates. So, it is as if the personality or the self, the mind-body vehicle, becomes transparent. It becomes permeable. And so, the experience of life is still very human. It is still very ordinary. Pain is still experienced, if pain is part of direct reality. Everything is experienced. In fact, it is much more intimate. It is exquisite. It is exquisite in its sensitive response to what is. It is exquisite in its agony and its ecstasy. So, in some way, it is much, much deeper. It is much, much juicier. It’s much more alive and vibrant. Everything is felt in its full vibrancy. But the self isn’t locked into that. It is not stuck in that. Or it doesn’t stick to the self. So, the self is experienced as permeable. Everything passes through very quickly. And if there is a contraction, then maybe it gets stuck there for a while. There is some stickiness. But if the light of awareness is fully revealed, if you like, that contraction can dissolve very easily and quickly. In the light, everything is purified. So, everything passes through, and everything is purified. So, there is not this dense boundary. There is not this rigid boundary of self. So yes, there is a me. And it is the same me. And it is a very different me.

Rick Archer: One way of putting it is: I have this glass of water. And there is water in the glass. If I take this water and put it into the ocean, there is still water in the glass. But there is also the ocean. And so, you don’t lose the sense that I am a person. You just gain a bigger context. I am not only a person. I am also this vastness. But I am still a person.

Susanne Marie: And in the middle of the person, there is nobody. So, there is a person and no person. There is experience, and there is absence of experience. And they are always one thing. They are two sides of one coin. So, there is a person. There is a reemergence of a person. There is a sense of me. But in the middle of that, there is no me. There is nothing there in the center of anything. And so that is why this light of awareness that Amoda is speaking about, when it’s approaching– when it goes to work with conditioning, with areas that are challenged. We are having bad weather. When the sense of me is as if there is a hole in the middle, that is what happens with awakening. There is a hole in the middle of everything. There is the born and the unborn. There is that kind of “die before you die” experience. And so, there is experience, and there is no experience happening simultaneously. And so, when embodiment is happening, it is not as if you are getting re-identified necessarily. It is that light of awareness out of love, actually, which is moving into areas of wanting to have those areas become whole, to know themselves as whole. So, there are these places that have been denied. There are pain body things. There is just confusion that gets accumulated. And so, this light of awareness descends back down into the vehicle. And it is falling in love with itself, actually, with all of itself. And it does so without a fear of losing itself. And the reason it is not afraid is because it is not a center of identity any longer. It doesn’t believe that it can be lost. A “me” that believes in itself is afraid of being lost, but when there is no center to “me,” the fear drops away. And so, there is this kind of courage that happens in this going into the unknown territory. And it really is so deeply intimate, so deeply intimate. And everything that is getting cleared out here in yourself, in oneself, is then how you are seeing life on the outside. So, this purified vessel, this heart that starts to take over is how you start to see all of life, and even the difficult things. So, the places that are difficult inside and that are hard to connect to, this kindness towards oneself begins to take place. And then this kindness starts to take place outside in the world, how we feel about things that are difficult and challenging.

T Jonathon Proctor: So, it sounds as if you are talking about the movement of compassion or the descent of compassion into our own person, into our own self.

Susanne Marie: Yeah. Yeah.

Rick Archer: Did everyone get what you were saying? Did that make sense in terms of there being a me and there is not a me, and you are doing and you are not doing? Does that sound contradictory or anything? I think just one little simple way of helping to understand it maybe is that we are multidimensional in reality. There is a vast range to our existence. And ordinarily, people are kind of locked within a fairly small portion of that range in which they just perceive themselves to be an individual doing things, very much in control. But then if the range of our conscious awareness expands, it comes to incorporate levels of our existence which don’t fit that same narrow description, which are silent, which are not doing anything. And so, one begins to have the experience of, hey, I am really busy doing stuff. I am not doing anything at all. All this stuff is going on. Nothing is happening. It seems as if it would be divisive in some way in one’s experience, but one comes to incorporate the paradox within one’s experience. And so, it all just fits rather nicely, and it actually makes life much more smooth and easy. It doesn’t set up any kind of conflict.

Amoda Maa: It is as if there is no ownership. There is no ownership of the me. There is no ownership of what happens. There is no ownership of life.

Rick Archer: The wave doesn’t own the ocean.

Amoda Maa: Yeah. And there is a great freedom in that.

T Jonathon Proctor: I would say, though, that sometimes it does. Sometimes we come back in, and we are very attached to something, or we are very reactive about something. Or there is some moment that just catches us, and we really believe this moment. And it feels so real, and it feels as if this is life or death, right? And so suddenly we are back in a life or death struggle over whether somebody put mayonnaise on our sandwich or not. So, I think the freedom of flow between these expansive, beautiful, blissful states, the states of stillness, the states of feeling contact and oneness with other beings and the rest of life on the planet, even a chair, those are beautiful states. But we tend to want to exclude the states where we are maybe feeling hurt or small or wounded. We tend to exclude that. That is not part of our spirituality. What if we were free enough to just feel wounded? What if we were free enough to be petty? What if we were free enough to be dumb? What if we were just free enough to be whatever we happen to be in every moment?

Susanne Marie: And to me, that is the waking up to wholeness, to unity, to just really deeply getting. And it is an ongoing understanding, actually, that takes place, where you realize, one realizes that you really are the whole, which means that you are the one who is upset. You are the one who is angry. You are the one who is maybe confused. So, the wholeness realizes that it is those things. That is what is happening. And so, there is unboundness within boundness. It is the same kind of thing, the paradox that takes place. And so, there is this ability to see how micro one can really be, how absolutely involved one can be in experience, and how it is really OK that there is nothing that is going to be lost. Because really, that is containing the whole. The whole is the whole. So, the whole already has everything in it. So, when there is an understanding, when there is a stepping back that happens, this kind of thing that we call awakening, where you step back from experience enough to realize that you are the space in which everything is arising, when that is really known that you are the space in which everything is arising, there is this chance, this opportunity, this re-welcoming of entering into the arising.

Rick Archer: I didn’t understand part of what you just said. You just said that the whole gets upset, or the whole is petty, or whatever you were saying.

Susanne Marie: Yeah, because the space itself is the whole. It is just this languaging, the oneness.

Rick Archer: The oneness, the totality, the vastness of the absolute.

Susanne Marie: Right. And so, within that, everything that is arising is part of it.

Rick Archer: Yeah.

Susanne Marie: Everything that’s arising.

Rick Archer: The good, the bad, and the ugly, whatever.

Susanne Marie: Everything.

Rick Archer: Right.

Susanne Marie: Yeah. So, if there is pettiness, if there is confusion, that is the whole being petty.

Rick Archer: I see.

Susanne Marie: That is the whole being confused.

Rick Archer: Maybe not the totality of the whole, but some expression of pettiness is coming up. This particular wave, this is a petty wave coming up in the ocean.

Susanne Marie: Right.

Rick Archer: But it doesn’t mean the whole ocean is petty.

Susanne Marie: Right.

Rick Archer: OK.

Susanne Marie: But just as earlier, what Adya and Hamid were saying, that in every experience, that in itself right there, there is absolute truth right then what is happening.

T Jonathon Proctor: I think this is the point. To me, this is really one of the crux of the points of embodiment and what it truly means to be a human being, is to come back into realizing that every expression is truth. Some expressions are a kind of veiled truth. So, when the pettiness arises, or when we are bitter, or when we are whatever the feeling is, or we are angry, or when that feeling arises, what is the true nature of that? One thing that I have a difficulty with, and I have had the experience, but I think it is a step along the way, is feeling like this vast, spacious awareness in which everything arises and dissolves. I’m saying, be the vast awareness in which everything arises and dissolves, and be in contact with everything that arises and dissolves, in that everything that arises is found to be none other than the truth, the truth of reality, the truth of being. So, anger, what is anger? Oh, well, let’s check it out. Let’s investigate. Let’s get curious. Let’s find out the truth of our experience. Let’s find out the truth of our lives. What is it? Are we curious? Do we want to explore, are we exploring? What is it about being here? Is it just about getting through things until we die? Or is it about this life being incredibly precious beyond anything? It is so incredibly precious. It is so incredibly unlikely. These weird little two-armed, two-legged people who in a certain sense trot around in defiance of gravity, with all the important packaging up here on this planet. We totally are particularly weird creatures. Isn’t it fucking cool? [LAUGHTER] This is it. O.K., let’s party. This is really it. [LAUGHTER]

Rick Archer: Were you saying just now that, the thought came to me…

Susanne Marie: What were you saying?

Rick Archer: Were you saying just now, don’t use the vastness as a refuge in which to hide from uncomfortable things?

T Jonathon Proctor: Well, you can if you want to, if that is working for you. But if you know in your heart, yeah, I did have this experience of vastness, but now I am using it to hide out in, you might as well just give up the game and tell the truth. The truth is going to come out eventually. The truth is going to come out eventually in your life. Why not just tell the truth now? Why not just take the painful pill?

Susanne Marie: Give it up.

T Jonathon Proctor: Give it up. Give up the games and just be a real human being, right here, exactly where you are, with what you are experiencing. This is what we have. This is our experience now.

Rick Archer: Are you more or less saying, you are embracing your humanness?

T Jonathon Proctor: I think I’m saying exactly that.

Audience: OK, so you were saying that the fear drops away as part of the experience that you experienced going from not having full awareness to having full awareness, right? Did I understand that?

Susanne Marie: The fear of going into experience?

Audience: You said fear, and I understood it sort of like psychological fear, existential fear. So that would not count, necessarily, as the human experience that continues? You don’t experience fear on that level?

Susanne Marie: No. That is a great question, yeah.

Audience: Or if there is a transitional period where you still were?

Susanne Marie: Right.

Audience: Yeah.

Susanne Marie: Right, so in regards to fear, to me, fear is not a problem. And I have learned to become comfortable entering into fear, exploring fear, because fear has a lot of different flavors to it. It is never exactly the same flavor. We just put this umbrella word and call it fear. But at different times, it feels differently, right? In different parts of our body. And sometimes it is really more mental, and sometimes it is more of a physical feeling. And so, I think that one of the ways to meet fear, to really be with fear, is to break it down to sensation, and to be with the sensation, and to allow it to be there. Because actually, it has information. It is, as everything that you’re feeling is actually part of wisdom. It is not a mistake. So, if we get close to it, and we really enter into it, then it has something to share with us. And then right in the center of every feeling, of every experience, the emptiness is right there. The place that isn’t afraid, the place that is comfortable with the experience. And so that is what I am speaking to. It is not as if fear has completely disappeared. And it is not even a goal of mine.

You know how in spiritual circles, we set up these paradigms, these ideas of what it is supposed to look like to be free? And I think that it is a setup oftentimes. Because then we are neglecting our own humanness, the things that are just naturally arising in our bodies. And there is intelligence there. Sometimes fear is because you are entering into an unknown, a new place. It could actually be something that is kind of exciting. So just to allow yourself to walk towards and just rest with something as much as possible is for me the beginning of how to meet something like fear. And then this beautiful connection can happen within it. A self-connection, it is not separate from you. There is not fear and you. So, it is just one thing. And fear is a part of you. So, you can feel that and make friends with it.

Rick Archer: Does that help?

T Jonathon Proctor: Sorry.

Audience: It sounds hard?

Susanne Marie: Yeah. Yeah, it is because it is– she says it sounds scary. It is because we have been trained since we were little to turn away from uncomfortable feelings. So, part of it is a retrainment. It is not as if you have to wait for some kind of awakening experience in order to learn how to start meeting your inner experience yourself, your feelings. And so, to turn towards things and to learn how to step towards them little by little, eventually embracing them, that is a certain type of intelligence that totally serves every step of the way, before, during, after awakening. It is all part of it. And it might sound hard, but it is such a gift to yourself. It is such a gift.

Rick Archer: Regarding fear, there is this line in the Upanishads that goes, “Certainly all fear is born of duality.” And a lot of people report when they have a profound shift or awakening that they go through this sound barrier of fear and experience this tense, almost terrifying fear, and then break through it, and the fear dissipates. So, would you say, in your experience or however you want to explain it, that awakening should eliminate fear to a great extent, because we are no longer this isolated, vulnerable, little thing without any kind of solid foundation, which does arise when one is really established in being or in the self?

Susanne Marie: I did have a three-week period about two, three years ago, maybe it was three years ago, where I felt as if there was an amplification of fear. It went from a two to an eight. It was just really high. And I had no idea if and when it was going to ever end. It felt as if it was personal fear. It felt as if it was also collective fear. And it had a tonality to it. And it felt as if it even had a sound to it. It was intense. And it was almost as if what was in the background got brought to the foreground, and it was undoing itself. It was as if it was burning itself out. And the way that it was burning itself out was by letting myself surrender to it, because I didn’t know how long it would be there. It is one of those things where you just eventually start to learn that all of experience is God. And that one experience is not more God than another experience. So having this amplification of fear was as if I just sat with it, burned in it. And then it dissipated. So yeah, I feel as if that is true, that a large part does go away. And then there is this human thing that still happens with certain types of fears that still arise.

Rick Archer: I mean, if you hung Ramana Maharshi from the Golden Gate Bridge by his heels, I think there would be some human adrenaline thing going on in fear, despite the fact that on some level he would probably be untouched by that experience.

T Jonathon Proctor: Are we doing reductum ad Ramana Maharshi? Everything now reduces back. That’s just the thing I see in this. Everything ultimately reduces back down to talking about Ramana Maharshi.

Rick Archer: Kind of like bringing up Hitler whenever you want to.

Susanne Marie: One last thing I’ll say about fear, just in this conversation on my part, is that fear and all these different aspects of emotions, different things that come up, are not separate from God. So that when you stop seeing it as if it is proof that you are not one with everything, that it is proof that you have lost something or that God is not here, that when that levels out, then fear is held in a completely different way. Then it is just sensation. It is just a current of energy, just like all energy flows through.

Rick Archer: Don’t be shy, Amoda, if you have anything to say.

Amoda Maa: Well, there is not much to add to that. The greatest fear is an existential fear, the fear that, if you get to the root of it, you are absolutely alone. If you like, in the great totality of the universe, that you are separate from that. It is kind of like the core wound of separation. It is a kind of primordial separation as we come out of the womb, out of the oneness of the womb. And so, it is a universal human experience. And in my experience, because the futility of escape from that, which I’d spent most of my life turning away from in many different forms, when that particular texture of fear was turned towards, and it was finally seen, there was no choice, if you like, other than to surrender to that. And that surrender meant that the self, or the sense of self, might well be annihilated, although it is unknown in that experience, as you’re experiencing it. The existential fear might be true in some way, that I don’t exist, that I will be swallowed up into this black hole. And for me, it was when that was fully surrendered to, then that particular root of fear was completely dissolved. And what emerged from that was initially a sense of oneness. I don’t particularly like that word, because it means different things to different people. But it was a sense of “there is no me, there is only this.”

So, some aspect of the psychological sense of self felt as if it died. There was a death of self in that. And all that was experienced was God. And for the first time in my life, I actually experienced it as God. That’s not a concept, or a word. It meant nothing to me, before that, other than the usual religious thing. So, I experienced everything as God. And I was not separate from that. And for me, that was a real turning point. And that fear, which, prior to that experience, if you like, gave birth to victim consciousness. Because if I am separate from anything, then I am a victim of that when it doesn’t match my expectations of how it should be. And I saw how I had been a victim of everything, my own thoughts, my own feelings, my relationships, my own beliefs. It’s almost as if all of that just went into a black hole and just got sucked in. And there was nothing. And in that nothing, there was everything. And that was God. So, God is nothing. God is everything. And I am that.

And from that moment on, that victim consciousness completely has dissolved. And what was allowed in that, was that every whisper or little tendril of belief that had played itself out as a victim just came up and got sucked into that hole, which was initially a black hole, but actually was light. So, everything got dissolved in that. And that happened both immediately, as an almost nanosecond experience, but also then had a continual unfoldment that I call the maturation. And that maturation took a long time, maybe seven, eight years. And it is still going on. So, for me, that was kind of an immediate, very direct, and sudden, spontaneous dissolvement of that existential fear. And then, there was a kind of maturation of that, which happened over a very long period of time.

Rick Archer: Nice. Your turn.

T Jonathon Proctor: Well, I just want to thank you for sharing your experiences, because this is part of the beauty of awakening, that we all have these experiences. But one of the things that can happen is that we hear of a beautiful experience like that, and then it becomes something we want to move towards, or something we need in our lives, or something that will fulfill us, or a way that we will become ultimately enlightened.

And just bringing it way back into the physical, out of the metaphysical, depending on your traumatic history, depending on your attachment history, people can have a chronically triggered fear system in their brains. Your nervous system can be chronically triggered towards fear. And that, regardless of whatever awakening experience you may have had, if that’s really in your body, that can be helped along, and that can be worked with, particularly with a lot of the new trauma work that is being done. All that can be aided by certain practices, by certain kinds of interpersonal regulating experiences. So, it is important to understand that if we have a chronic condition of something, that we not immediately jump towards trying to find a metaphysical relief from that something, but also give in to the possibility that we may just need to do certain regulating practices in our lives. That could be meditation. That could be qigong. That could be working with a trauma therapist.

Again, this is coming right back down into matter, into the brain. The brain is continually growing and repairing. We know that even now, late into life, the brain has plasticity. I think you had Rick Hansen on your show, didn’t you? So, you can watch that. You want to hear a better dissertation about that, watch his show with Rick Hansen.

Rick Archer: Neuroplasticity is the word.

T Jonathon Proctor: Yeah. But let’s also take care of ourselves. Let’s take care of ourselves. Let’s take care of our bodies. Let’s do what needs to be done. You wake up, and it’s like the story, what is it? Chop wood, carry water. Chop wood, carry water, and you wake up, and you chop wood, carry water. So have a balance. It is this inner guidance that you are talking about, a balance between seeing, when do I need to just take some steps and work with this on a very practical level? And when do I need to really stop and face the fact that this body will not be here forever? The people I love won’t be here forever. This lifetime is limited. Every experience is limited. So, there is that back and forth. Does that seem consistent with what you are saying?

Amoda Maa: It is all about honesty, isn’t it?

T Jonathon Proctor: Yeah.

Amoda Maa: It is just being really honest with where you are at and really honest with what is your direct experience. And it really does not matter, ultimately, what is here. What matters, is your capacity to fully be intimate with that, to fully face it, to turn towards it, to sit inside it.

T Jonathon Proctor: And what I feel, and what happened to me ultimately, is that I realized I needed somebody to help me with that. And I went and found the people who would help me with the things that I needed help with, on the physical and on the metaphysical. And in a sense, what it does is it optimizes your experience.

So, then you said burning. There was a hell of a lot of burning going on in this body. There was a hell of a lot of burning that was happening for me. And there was a ton of discomfort. There was a ton of very difficult states. And my orientation to it was, just sit with this. Just sit with this. Just let it move through. But now I know there are more skillful ways of working with that. And I really encourage you to find whatever method you can to optimize your experience, to help your experience along in this physical body.

Susanne Marie: I got a lot of nervous system support before, during, and after. Sometimes I still go and get a cranial session or something. It is just a lot, being in a body. It is a lot being in a body now, on this planet. And the nervous system can get overloaded, especially when conditioning is coming up to be met, I totally agree with you. There are all kinds of modalities out there that can be supportive. And a flexible nervous system contributes very, very much to how free we feel. Of course, freedom is always here. But do you know that? Can you feel it? So having a flexible nervous system really is a great support.

T Jonathon Proctor: There is a Dan Siegel phrase. He makes a lot of acronyms. And is it acronym? He calls it FACES. It’s Flexible, Adaptive, Coherent, Energized, and Stable. Flexible, Adaptive, Coherent, Energized, and Stable. So that gives you a kind of a feel of how our nervous systems, how an integrated nervous system, how a nervous system in balance can be functioning.

Susanne Marie: So, you’re wondering about what it is like to be parenting my two teenagers. I have a boy and a girl.

Audience: From a place where there is this, where there is an emptiness.

Susanne Marie: Emptiness. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That’s a great question. So, from the place of where there is this sense of the me not being solid. Well, the rubber hits the road in every area of our lives. And parenting, of course, is a big one, especially with teenagers. So, it’s the same kind of thing as what I was describing earlier, is that there is congruently, simultaneous to perhaps difficulty. There is freedom within it. And I guess it is just the way that all of life is being approached. And so, I don’t have any kind of limits within myself of what I am not letting myself feel or experience or how much I care, how much I worry.

With teenagers, they push all your buttons. And they are sometimes walking dangers to themselves. So, there is all that kind of body thing coming up, the instinctual drives or the main fear would be of losing one’s child during this time that is a dangerous time. So, I think what it is, it’s awakeness, learning how to be awake within all experience and to be present to all experience and to not flinch. Even if there is flinching, to be with it, to be with it, to be with their pain. Because there is this bonding that happens with our children where we feel so intimate with them. We know what they are ourselves in such an intimate way.

So, there is this survival instinct that can come up with another body. So, I guess there is just this increasing ability or desire or willingness– probably willingness is the best word– to remain open to experiencing whatever is being experienced and to stay present with them in what they are experiencing. So, they get to experience someone in their lives who is willing to dive in with them into their reality. So, I don’t go into any kind of denial of their reality. I don’t go into any kind of denial of their sense of being a me, of taking things really seriously and things hurting or their hearts being broken or whatever it is they are going through. So, there is a willingness to just be so present to that as if it is real, completely real. And on one level, it is. We never would deny their experience. So, there is that. There is this full diving into experience with them.

And then at the same time, we bring ourselves to everything that we do. We bring our state of boundness and our state of freedom to everything that we are doing. So, parenting from a place of being less bound inside, of knowing inherently that we are free and that there is no center, even if there is this whole vortex, a whole hurricane, like a tsunami, right in the center is a hole. And that’s true for them as well, whether they know it or not. So, there is this feeling of, “I’m with you. I believe you completely. I meet you there, right?” No denying of experience. And I can’t help but bring what is free to it. Does that help? Yeah.

Rick Archer: So, he asked the panelists, you have all experienced an awakened state. What brought you to the point where you felt that it was now time to teach or to start helping others? So, his question is, do you find that teaching or helping others is enhancing or detracting from your own journey? So, answer in any order that you feel.

Amoda Maa: It is really quite difficult to say how it arose or why it arose as an impulse. It is almost impossible to pin it down. Whenever I try to pin it down, it’s kind of elusive as to say, well, that is why, or that is the time, or for this reason or for that reason. All I can say is that it arose. For me, it was never a goal or an agenda. It arose because it did. It is choiceless. The impulse to speak arose, but I never had the intention to teach or to offer satsang or anything like that. I had written a book following on from this so-called experience. I mean, it is not an experience to me. It is not an experience that was experienced. It was what I just described about this existential falling into that and something dissolved in that. But I did write from that place. I wrote a book called How to Find God in Everything, although there is no how to. But it was really the invitation into welcoming God as everything. And I didn’t know what to do with that book.

Now, I have had a lot of experience in working in personal transformation. So, I have worked with people one on one on a more therapeutic level, although I’m not an official therapist. I have worked with people in emotional catharsis and breath work and holding lots of groups, but in a slightly different capacity. So, I do have that role, if you like, as part of my experience. So, I have facilitated, as I say, working with people to move through certain energetic blocks that had actually dissolved as a role and as a path in life. But I imagine or I see that that experience will have been part of my life’s movement. So, I can’t deny that.

So, it is not as if I just started teaching. Previous to that, I was working in Asda or something. No, it was part of my experience. But there was a very long gap where there was nothing happening, when I wrote the book. I didn’t know what to do with it. I had no agenda about teaching. I didn’t feel ready to speak about it. I didn’t know how to speak about it. And really, for about– I can’t remember– maybe four, five, six, even seven years, nothing much was happening. I really sat in the unknown. A lot of that was very, very uncomfortable because a lot of my deeper beliefs of lack of self-worth arose and some deeper, perhaps ancestral conditioning, deeper conditioning arose in that. But I had the willingness to just allow that to reveal itself in time. I did a little bit of speaking about my book, but it was in a different context, and it didn’t work for me. It was more public speaking, and I felt sort of squeezed into a particular role of being a motivational speaker, which just wasn’t right.

So, I dropped everything. And in dropping it, there came a point about only two years ago where the impulse moved in me again. And I was living in a very small town in England, so, it was not as if there was much of a community to work with. But I simply hired a room, and I sat in silence. And for the first time, I did not give a public talk or try to. I did not try to facilitate anyone’s energetic release. I did nothing. I just simply sat there in silence with my eyes closed. And through some synchronicity, somebody that I had met in the local Whole Foods store, who was a Course in Miracles teacher, came along, and he brought a couple of friends, and we sat there in silence. And I just spoke from silence, but there was no agenda in teaching anything or even in helping anyone. That didn’t occur. I can’t help anyone. So, there was nothing.

And out of that, that particular impulse just kept on coming. And so, that continued for months and another year. And at some point, after about seven or eight months, I found, oh, wow, this is satsang. It just kind of revealed itself as that. And it’s almost as if, when it finally had a name, a name that I didn’t feel embarrassed of or out of alignment with, it just all fell into place in some way. And it’s as if it was choiceless from that point on. It just had its own momentum, and it still has its own momentum. And within that, there is no personal agenda in it. And if there is a whisper of an agenda of an outcome or a direction, it is so not comfortable, so that it immediately just evaporates back into emptiness. And that’s it. So, it feels like the me in it, which, obviously, there is a me, because I have to plan my schedule and organize things and communicate and whatever else needs to happen in the background. But the me in it is really not the doer. And I know that sounds like a cliche, but that is the experience of it. It is simply life happening through me as me. And in that sense, I’m its servant. And that is both very humbling, and it is also very graceful, because it feels as if it is just a river of grace that is flowing. And that’s what is happening. Maybe one day something else will happen. I have no idea what direction it will go in. It’s just happening. When it stops happening, something else will happen.

Rick Archer: He is asking again, does doing that enhance your personal evolution?

Amoda Maa: I suppose it does, but I don’t even have that perception of it. I don’t feel like, I don’t see it as giving anything to me. It’s giving to itself. So, there’s no sense of me feeling, oh, this is teaching me something more, or this is opening me even more, or it is adding to my life, or it probably is facilitating a deeper opening. But it doesn’t get perceived that way.

Audience: So, you don’t see it as a practice?

Amoda Maa: No, I don’t see it as a practice. There’s nobody practicing. I mean, I don’t know. I guess it is like forging a sword in the fire. There is a kind of forging of that sword in the actual just doing of it, I suppose. But that is not how it is seen. It is not reflected on as something that is being added to this life.

Rick Archer: Do you guys want to answer his question also, or should we go on to another question?

T Jonathon Proctor: I’ll just say a simple thing. A lot of stuff is as she said, but it’s an overflowing of the heart. And yes, it enhances, because that is what is happening. And that is as if your heart intention is to move with what is true for you, you can’t help but develop. You can’t help but develop skills. You can’t help but experience the joy of the interpersonal relationships that happen. And it can’t help but clarify, as you said, some of the other reasons why we want to be sitting in front of people and talking. So, there is clarification, and there is development, as Hamid was talking about earlier today.

Rick Archer: Does anybody else have a question at the moment?

Audience: [INAUDIBLE]

Rick Archer: OK. So, one thing that I was talking about with a friend earlier that I think might be good to just throw out there, because a lot of people get tripped up by it. And that is, speaking in terms of my own experience, I started out with the feeling that this or that enlightened person must be perfect in every respect. That was my conception of what enlightenment was. And pretty much any word that came out of their mouth was the Gospel truth. Anything they did was kind of divinely inspired, even if it didn’t make sense to me, or if it seemed kind of nutty in some way. I think, well, the cosmic intelligence is inscrutable, and who am I to say, I must not understand it?

And there are so many stories of so many teachers ending up caught with their pants down, literally. [LAUGHTER] Many people have become seriously disillusioned. I mean, I know people who just completely left the spiritual path because of this sort of thing, or others who just became really cynical and bitter and critical and negative and so on. So, I think this topic relates a great deal to embodiment, because some of the teachers I’m referring to just were blazingly bright in terms of their consciousness. Really, knock your socks off. Walk into a room and your whole awareness shifts in their presence, and yet it’s discovered that behind the scenes they were doing this, that, or the other thing. Ken Wilber has talked a lot about this with his idea of lines of development, that you can be really highly developed along certain lines and rather stunted in others. Early on, I had the understanding that consciousness is tightly correlated with all the aspects of our personality and behavior and ethics and all those things. Since then, I have come to feel that the correlation is still there, but it is like a big stretchy rubber band, where things can get pretty far out of correlation. There might be a little bit of a tug to the thing that is out of correlation, but it can still stay way out of correlation throughout a person’s life. They can be highly developed in their consciousness and yet kind of immature in other respects.

So, my understanding of embodiment, if it is really lived up to, if one really achieves embodiment, would be to actually integrate all those various other aspects and to not be way out of sync. I think a lot of well-known teachers we are referring to, who had various behavioral problems, never really had the opportunity to do that, because they were in a bubble and very often explicitly prevented any kind of feedback or criticism. And so, they could go more and more out there in terms of their behavior without any checks and balances. And I know a lot of contemporary teachers who I respect, really appreciate the checks and balances and have people around them who will call them on their stuff if they start getting out of whack.

OK, I’m going to repeat his question for the recording. So, he was saying, what place does humility have in embodiment for you? And the first part was the energy of humility.

Audience: What would you say is humility?

Rick Archer: What would you say is humility?

Audience: How would you define humility as a quality, as an energy?

Rick Archer: Yeah, how would you define humility?

Audience: Having said that, what place does that have in this process, this journey?

Rick Archer: Yeah, what is its importance or its role in this whole journey, and particularly with reference to embodiment and with reference to not getting in trouble because of blind spots, regardless of how highly evolved we may become?

Audience: It was inspired by what you were saying, basically.

Rick Archer: Inspired by what I was saying.

Susanne Marie: Well, I’ll just begin by saying that the checks and balances that you were speaking about with having people around, well, they can be your friends. They can be your family.

Rick Archer: Your spouse, whatever.

Susanne Marie: Yeah, spouse. But ultimately, it’s ourselves. So, I think it comes down to telling ourselves the truth and being vigilant inside to not moving when something arises, to staying with it, to staying with a discomfort that is arising, and I think that this is also a question of how deep one’s awakening is. Because the deeper that it has gone into the embodiment process, there is this understanding that everything is that. Everything is God. So, the desire to want to deceive oneself or to deceive others collapses. And one of the things that happens with awakening is that there is this deep desire to be authentic and be real, authentic and real to oneself and to others. And so, to not be honest with where one is in truth, it would feel so painful. It feels painful inside. So, you wouldn’t want to do that to yourself. And it also has to do with that movement of love, of self-love. That love has a desire to be honest.

Rick Archer: To me, that sounds like an ideal, as if that is the way it should be. But I can think of examples where it really has not been that way. And in spite of what appears to be a very profound degree of awakening, there is still dishonesty and deception.

Susanne Marie: Well, I think that comes with people wanting to create an identity out of being seen as something, as a spiritual teacher. It is as if people lock themselves in place. And I think there is a danger in coming out as being a spiritual teacher.

Rick Archer: Particularly if you have grown up in a culture which contains none of the elements that you end up confronting when you come to a different culture, as has often happened with Indian teachers coming to the West.

Susanne Marie: And so awakeness is a live and breathing thing. It needs to be refreshed in every moment. And so, if we are boxing ourselves in with beliefs of how we are supposed to act and be and look to others, then we are not allowing that aliveness and freshness to be taking place within ourselves. So, I would much rather be myself, be my authentic self and just know that that is much more important than being seen as anything in particular.

Amoda Maa: I totally back you up there. I totally agree with that. I think humility is absolutely central to embodiment. And yeah, if there isn’t that honesty of telling the truth to oneself in what is here and what is being experienced as one’s own direct experience, if that is not met without censorship, then there is still a sense of self invested in something. There is still a sense of self invested in, as you say, Susanne being seen as something. And that is one of the very subtle but very powerful pitfalls of being a so-called spiritual teacher, or being anything, for that matter. And in the capacity to meet everything, what is met in that can be shame. And shame is one of the things that we really, really don’t want to face. And shame is quite indefinable, really. When you look at it, what is it? What exactly is it? This sense of not being right, this sense of being exposed, this sense of being vulnerable, it’s a vulnerability. And I guess vulnerability and humility go together. Our capacity to be vulnerable means that everything, the good, the bad, and the ugly, everything is revealed. And that is really the core of embodiment. Embodiment happens naturally as a byproduct of that, as a byproduct of being open, vulnerable to what is really here, even if it appears to be really distasteful and ugly.

Audience: You are saying humility is kind of a standing in the truth, a standing in authenticity. It is interesting because Teresa of Avila said humility is truth.

Rick Archer: OK, he just said Teresa of Avila said humility is truth.

Audience: Which is what they are saying.

Rick Archer: Which is what you guys are saying. Yeah.

T Jonathon Proctor: I will add one thing to that. This is such a lovely question, and it is so important. And it’s complex in a certain way, because if you’re lucky enough, as in a song by the Blind Boys of Alabama, “Sooner or later, God will cut you down.” Sooner or later, God will cut you down. If you’re lucky enough in your life, you’ve been cut down, every time that you inflate. The people that are allowed to inflate indefinitely, I think are the ones you are talking about. Or they inflate like a tire that gets a bubble out of one side. So, in that area, they are just totally distorted. So, from my life, and I don’t know about the rest of you up here, but every time, every single time I’ve inflated, boom, I was cut in half. And I feel the visceral intensity of that as I’m talking about it. But man, I feel the blessing of that. Man, I feel total gratitude for that. Yeah.

Amoda Maa: Yeah, that’s my experience too. Being beaten into submission. And it is such a blessing.

T Jonathon Proctor: It is such a blessing. And then you just don’t touch the fire. You don’t want the fire. You don’t go there as much, maybe, if you’re lucky.

Susanne Marie: We learn.

T Jonathon Proctor: You still do, maybe. But you say, oh, wait a minute. I sense that is hot. That feels hot over there. I’m not going there.

Susanne Marie: That is one of the good things, is that we learn through the pain.

T Jonathon Proctor: Yeah, so our pain–

Susanne Marie: It teaches.

T Jonathon Proctor: Beautiful. Because yeah, what you are saying, our pain is our friend. Our pain is our teacher, one of our greatest teachers.

Rick Archer: Any other thoughts, you guys? Any questions from the audience? Or any thoughts on the stage? OK. Well, thank you. I hope this has been useful for people. I guess it has been, or you wouldn’t have stuck around. Let me just conclude, since this will be on BatGap, by saying that this is another in a continuing series of interviews and panel discussions that are on BatGap.com. We’re well into the 250 range now. So, if you are new to this, go to BatGap.com and explore. There is a past interviews menu item with a bunch of different categories under it. There is a discussion group or forum. And each little episode has its own section in that forum. You will see a link to it on the page for this conversation. There is an audio podcast with a link to that on every page. There is a Donate button. There is a place to be notified by email each time a new interview or discussion is posted. And some other things. So, thank you for listening or watching. And I will probably be doing a few more things while I’m out here at the conference.

T Jonathon Proctor: Thanks, Rick.