Carole Griggs & Ted Strauss Interview
Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done over 415 of them by now and if this is new to you and you’d like to watch previous ones, please go to batgap.com and look under the past interviews menu. This program is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So, if you appreciate it and feel like supporting it, either a one-time donation or a monthly one in any amount, it’ll be much appreciated and there’s a PayPal button on every page of the site. So, my guests today are Carole Griggs and Ted Strauss. Ted was on BatGap many years ago in the very beginning, during the first year I think, along with his wife Hillary Davis, and you can find that on BatGap. Carole hasn’t been on BatGap yet. I met the two of them out at the Science and Non-duality Conference either last year or the year before and they’ve got something very interesting that they’ve been working very hard on and developing and that’s what we’re going to talk about today. But first I’d like them to introduce themselves a little bit more. I thought it would be more interesting if they just give a bit of an introduction rather than me reading some written thing that they had sent me. So whoever wants to go first, go ahead and introduce yourselves.
Ted: I’d say Carole because this is your first time.
Carole: Okay, my name is Carole Griggs. I am an executive leadership coach and work with coaches, or work with clients, to help people live their deepest potential from multiple domains of their being, helping to awaken consciousness within them as well as awaken their heart, emotional intelligence, and the body, their uniqueness, their personal gifts in this world, and their mind, cognitive intelligence, cognitive expansion, cognitive capacities. I’m a university professor for John F. Kennedy, teaching the evolution of consciousness and human development. I’ve been running my own coaching practice for quite some time and also have been working with my colleague here, Ted Strauss, for probably the last two and a half to three years. We met about three years ago and realized that we have a deep commonality of helping people to awaken, and it is our deepest purpose on this planet to help facilitate that process very individually and collectively. Part of the process for the two of us was to create a model that helped people realize where they are in this process and help them locate where they are to accelerate their development and evolutionary process. So, Ted and I met and we had this common idea to map the process, because we’ve both been working with clients for decades on this and so we just started brainstorming and had iterations of different models (and we’ll be talking more about that today) of what we, both of us, our life’s work has come to, this model as of now, that we’ll be sharing with you today.
Rick: Okay how about you Ted?
Ted: Well somewhere when I was really young I started getting really interested in, “What the heck is going on here? What’s going on with life? What’s going on with people? What’s going on with why some people seem to be more advanced in some ways than others?” I then started getting on to the idea of awakening consciousness, when I was probably around 12 or 13, and started reading spiritual books, and started having awakenings, just from reading books. Then I started having experiences that told me that I had a lot of work to do in this area. I started realizing that, as far as I could tell, the biggest problem in the entire world is the lack of proper support for people to become awake and all of who they are… because without that, people become disoriented, misaligned with themselves and the world, the universe we could say, and spin in circles. And so, it became clear to me that the only way this was going to – that I was going to – fulfill what I’m here for is to get as awake as I can be, and then help millions (if not billions) of others. I had no idea how I was going to do that, of course.
Carole: Hm hmmm.
Ted: At the time, I was part of the Transcendental Meditation movement. I was being a teacher in that and Maharishi had his own world plan, you know. He had enacted that world plan and he helped a lot of people to make a lot of progress, me being one of them.
Carole: Hm hmmm.
Ted: But my own world plan started to take form, and it really wasn’t until, maybe, a little after the year 2000, when I started realizing, after a series of awakenings, I started realizing that the only way for me to accomplish my goal of awakening millions or billions is to do so through the internet, through digital, some sort of digital means.
Carole: Hm hmmm.
Ted: So ever since then, I’ve been trying to get various kinds of software going and working on things and after a while it became like abundantly clear that there wasn’t a good model. There was no good map that just explained what it was like, subjectively even, to go through this awakening process, not just awakening consciousness but awakening your whole being. So, we’re very familiar with Integral of course. We’re very familiar actually with a lot of the models out there. In fact, the first half a year or a year, Carole and I were just researching models to understand what we wanted to do with ours. Long story short, I’ll just wrap this part up, is we realized we had to do something that was aligned with how we were seeing the process from our experience of working with thousands of students.
Carole: Hm hmmm.
Ted: So that’s what we did. We spent our time, we spent the last couple of years doing that, taking it out. We took it to S.A.N.D., that’s where we saw you. We went to S.A.N.D. twice. We went to other conferences. We went and met other thought-leaders in the world of awakening and human development and in Academia. Because one of our goals was to make sure that we’re integrating with what we’re doing. We didn’t want this to be just spiritual or just research or academic-oriented. We wanted it to be something that would work for everybody, because our goal is to really unite everybody who has anything to do with human development, be it students or teachers or academics or researchers, and bring them all together under one model that describes what’s going on, so that we can actually create digital media that helps people through the process.
Rick: Good. Well, I really like the idea of maps and models. For some reason that’s always fascinated me, and all the more so, since I’ve been doing this show, because it seems like definitions of awakening are all over the map. And you know, someone says, “Oh, I had my awakening,” and someone says, “I’ve had many awakenings,” and others say, “Oh, I’m totally enlightened,” and others say, “Nobody’s totally enlightened. Everybody’s just a long way to go.” And obviously there’s all the ancient traditions written in foreign languages that have their own maps and Models. I have a feeling that they haven’t even begun to be properly integrated with each other and incorporated into our culture.
Carole: Yeah.
Rick: And basically we’re at the Lewis-and-Clark stage of understanding the topography of awakening, compared to what we have now, where every square foot has been charted and mapped out in precise detail. Do you think that the realm of spirituality is such that it ever could actually be mapped out with such precision, using that metaphor? Or do you think that there’s always going to be too much subjectivity mixed in and too many variables, and so on, to ever really get a clear scientific, comprehensive, systematic understanding of what human development is, in all of its stages and facets?
Carole: Yeah, great question. Thanks. Thank you for that question, Rick.
Ted: Great question.
Carole: I have a PhD in professional coaching and human development, and so a lot of my time was spent studying different methodologies, different theories, different processes, and different maps and models that are currently out there. And so, one of the things that Ted and I did was basically look at every single map and model, not every single one, but as many as we could find, and lay them kind of all on the table per se, and put them all together in a way, “Okay, what are the common themes here and what’s missing?” And so, from a meta perspective, when you take a step back and you take a look at all these pieces, or you take a look at a map, you will start to see patterns. You’ll start to see similarities. When you zoom in and you get too gritty and too close, it is a lot more gray. It’s fuzzy. Not everybody’s process is exactly linear. I mean, it’s just not. So, from one perspective, from the further-out perspective, there are definitely some patterns, especially in what we call “the first six Chapters.” There are absolutely patterns that we’ve seen over time in a bunch of researchers that are really in alignment, or relatively in alignment. After “Chapter that’s where there’s not a whole lot of research has been done. A lot of theory, there’s a lot of ideas, but that’s where our work actually is a little bit cutting-edge and new, because there aren’t, there’s not much written about it. There’s a little bit talked about it. What happens after a consciousness awakening or a heart awakening? What happens after that? And that’s where our work is unique and shows a meta-perspective process of what that would look like for somebody post-stabilized consciousness, heart awakening.
Ted: And I just want to add something that one of the questions you asked there, Rick, was, “Yeah, it is fuzzy. Are we ever going to get to find a clear way to research and see what’s going on?” And I think the answer is, well, “Yeah, like any scientific endeavor.” It’s a constant sequence of theorizing, testing the theories, changing the theory, testing it again. And part of the problem in this whole thing is that it’s really only been, you know, in any, on any kind of a scale, it’s only been since around the mid-90s, since people in general have been having awakenings beyond just consciousness awakening to itself, or just heart opening, just something in our “Chapter 7” on the model. It’s not like it hasn’t been happening. It’s just like we don’t know who they are, we don’t know how to find them, and we don’t even know how to relate using language to see what’s going on. There haven’t been enough subjects that could be identified to do the testing with to see what’s going on. So, part of what’s going on here is that we now have an increasing base of students we’ve been working with for a long time that can be tested.
Carole: Hm hmmm.
Ted: So, as we move along here, the next, one of the next steps we’re going to be going through is using our system and other scientific, yeah, other scientific ways of going about it, to figure out what’s going on with these people, not just subjectively, but eventually objectively. For instance, and we have, you know, our, you know, we’ve adapted the four quadrants from Ken Wilber’s system, and we call them our “Four Views,” and we renamed them “Subjective,” “Objective,” “Relational,” and “Systemic.” On the Objective side, one of the things we hope to do, and we’ll talk about this when we get to talking about our current and future projects, is test brainwaves. And just, you know, once we figure out where people are subjectively, let’s check their brainwaves and see what’s going on, and let the deep learning system go in and figure out what the correlations are. As we figure out the correlations, we can then figure out, “Well, what were they? What words were they using subjectively?” And then we can start making the subjective/objective correlations. So, that’s going to take some time, but yeah, we’re getting there.
Rick: I think it’ll, yeah, I mean, like you said, it’s a never-ending investigation, and science itself has been going on for several hundred years, and I’m sure there’s no end to what it will discover, even though, at times, people have pronounced that everything pretty much has been discovered. And…
Ted: Can I say something on that?
Rick: Yeah, sure.
Ted: There’s some ways in which the spiritual culture at large, especially the spiritual culture inherited from the East, has tended to have teachers say things like, “I promise, this is the highest realization that’s possible.” And Carole and I, at least the two of us, tend to get a little nauseous when we hear stuff like that.
Rick: Oh yeah, me too. I keep a little bucket next to my desk.
Carole: [laughing]
Ted: This is exactly why we put “Chapter 16” on our model. “Chapter 16” basically memorializes the Unknown on the model. It says, “We’re never going to know what the edge is, because there ain’t no edge.” You know, I wrote a book at one time called “Your Endless Awakenings,” because that’s what I felt about it.
Rick: Yeah.
Ted: So, I just wanted to say that.
Rick: Good. And incidentally, when you use the word “Chapter,” it means “stage of development.”
Ted: Yes.
Rick: It doesn’t mean a chapter in a book or something.
Ted: Yeah, we specifically wanted to use some new words, because otherwise people will assume we’re meaning the same thing that other people mean when they use those words, like “stage,” right?
Rick: Sure. Yeah, I just wanted to say that I was recently sort of chatting back and forth with a neo-Advaita kind of guy who’s in Tony Parsons, Richard Sylvester school of thinking, and he was going on about how there are no levels, there is no progress, there is no world, it’s just a story, and there’s only this now, and that kind of stuff. And I was just trying to say that there is, in the form in non-dual communication, it’s absurd to talk that way. And I was kind of responding to say that there’s no such thing as non-dual communication. If it’s completely non-dual, then there’s no people, no individualities, no communication. Once you have some communication, then there’s this and that, me and you, and we’re going back and forth, and the whole relative universe comes in, and there are levels and qualities and stages and degrees of development, and so on. There’s a lot of people who – not a lot, hopefully, but many – who, I think, intellectualize themselves into this understanding of what non-duality is, and mistake that for the actual living reality of it, the living experience of it. Ted’s rolling his eyes as if to say, “Don’t I know it?”
Carole: [laughing]
Ted: I have so much to say about this.
Rick: Yeah, I’ll let you do that. So I see it as kind of a pitfall, that people do that, and it’s unfortunate, and it’s frustrating, but anyway, what do you have to say about that?
Ted: Yeah, yeah, there’s a huge difference between theoretical ideas about non-duality and the living of it in actuality.
Rick: Yeah.
Ted: The living of it doesn’t mean the distinctions go away, and that’s what I think really trips people up. The living of non-duality means that things are obviously simultaneously individual, unique, and non-dual, part of the whole spectrum of Being. At the same time… and the only reason there appears to be any paradox about that is because of the stage of development we’re at. So, when you’re at a certain stage of development, you can only see the world the way you’re capable of seeing the world. That’s it.
Rick: That’s probably true of every stage of development.
Ted: That’s true of every stage.
Carole: Absolutely.
Ted: And one of those stages is the stage, “Chapter 7”, where you awaken as consciousness, and if you’re one of these people who have like a high contrast, major shift of identification from, let’s say, mind into consciousness, and suddenly it seems like, “Oh my God, this is the one true only reality, and this is what they must have meant about non-duality,” I think what we’re trying to do is put that in a larger context. It’s a true statement at Chapter 7, but it’s not a true statement at Chapter 13. Now it’s a completely different perception of the world. So I think it’s really important for people to understand that even though, yes, in any Moment, you can flip into some state or even a stabilized stage of realization of the infinite, it doesn’t mean that’s all there is.
Carole: Hm hmmm.
Ted: Nor does it mean that it’s even possible for that to be somehow split from the rest of the world, because it’s not. It’s not split from the rest of the world. It’s part of the world. The whole thing is one thing. Being is one thing. It’s all about our perception of parts or of Wholes. That’s really one way of describing the entire process. The process starts with, “We can only see parts,” and the more parts we see, the more we’re like, “Oh wow, this is awesome. I think I’ve got all the pieces.” But no, and then more come in, and then you wake in consciousness, and then you realize, “Oh my god, I actually have a body, and I actually have a heart, and I actually have a mind, and I actually am unique from other people.”
Rick: And I actually have an “I.”
Ted: Exactly. I have a personal self here.
Rick: That’s a big hang-up sometimes.
Ted: Boy, we could talk about that for an hour. The whole, you know, getting rid of the ego thing.
Rick: Yeah, there is no me, and no sense of personal self, but hey, you just upset me with what you said.
Ted: Exactly. So yeah, when people feel like there is no personal self, it’s because they’re at that stage where they’re so enamored with the impersonal self, and they still haven’t quite realized how to integrate those things.
Rick: Yeah.
Ted: And the process of integration is well-known, even in ancient traditions. It’s just that it isn’t well articulated in the West, because people haven’t been able to figure out what all these different awakenings are about, and that’s why the model.
Carole: And yeah, and that’s where our model comes into play, in terms of actually taking this “awakening to Consciousness” as not just the whole, but all these other parts and pieces, and being able to show this in a meta- perspective, where people can really start to grok all these elements, rather than zoning in and getting stuck in cul-de-sacs of just one part of my being, and avoiding other parts. So, trying to broaden out of partialness, and really deeper more into integration and wholeness.
Rick: Yeah. And I’ve noted that the spiritual community at large has begun to grok this over recent years. You know, whereas a decade ago, a lot of people might have just been trying to hide out in the transcendent, or the absolute, or something. Everybody’s talking about integration and awakening, and integration now, and embodiment. Because they have had to, you know?
Carole: Yeah.
Rick: Because life doesn’t leave you alone.
Carole: No, it doesn’t. That’s a beautiful way to put it. You know, a lot of people have had consciousness awakenings. You know, ten years ago, it was all about just wanting to have a consciousness awakening, consciousness waking up to itself. And now that there’s a big chunk of people that have experienced that, it’s, “Okay, what happens after that?” What is that integration process like? And what does it mean to deeply embody consciousness throughout the entire system? So that’s those upper stages, per se, after an original, stabilized awakening, is definitely more online for a lot of people right now. And people are, there’s a lot of curiosity around that, which is where our model kind of maps out that process a little bit clearer.
Ted: And I just want to add that we’re right on the edge of this major shift from that kind of split way of looking at the human development process. And our course that we developed and have given already twice to the master’s program in the Consciousness and Transformative Studies Department at JFK. As soon as we sat down to start designing that course, it became immediately obvious what was going on, because they have a consciousness development thing and a transformative personal development thing. But we put them together. The department is about bringing them together, but they didn’t have a course that truly brought them together. So our course brought it together and we’re – the course – shows students the history of human development understanding in the light of our model. Because the model is great at categorizing stuff. The model is great at categorizing, for instance, if you go on our website at iConscious.global and go under “About research.”
Rick: You’re going to do a screen share, aren’t you, at some point during this conversation?
Ted: Oh yeah, we can do that. Yeah, sure, we could do that.
Rick: I mean, it doesn’t have to be right now, but at some point, we should have you do that and kind of walk us through some of these…
Ted: Sure.
Rick: …charts and things you’ve developed.
Ted: But basically those charts are showing how researchers in the past, how much they have attended to which of the five domains that we say are very primary in our model. Some of them focused on consciousness, some of them focused on emotion, some of them focused on like Fowler on faith or Lovinger on ego and stuff like that. So what we’re trying to do is specifically show people what it means to be integrated. That’s part of our major mission.
Carole: Because, one of the reasons that we are so focused on integration is, integration is what helps expedite one’s growth and development, their process. What happens, a pattern that both Ted and I have seen over and over again is, when there’s a huge gap between one’s consciousness awakening and their development in consciousness and say one’s heart, emotional intelligence or what we call “the Emotions domain.” And if there’s a really big gap in development, it causes a lot of, it causes a lot of a lot of issues in terms of ethics, morals. If you hang out more in one and the other, it’s what we call the “rubber band effect,” and it pulls back development in other areas, because you always get pulled back into your lowest common denominator. Which is why we love to emphasize, finding where you are in this model so you can start to see where the gaps are in one’s development. Are you over emphasizing in Body? Are you over emphasizing in Consciousness and neglecting Uniqueness or neglecting Emotional Intelligence? What is that gap? And that is one of the primary pieces of importance when it comes to integration, because it will slow one’s process, when there is a larger gap.
Ted: And I just want to add to that, more recently as I’ve been contemplating this, it’s really hitting me, the staggering impact of that very statement. The statement that, going about your awakening process in an integrated way, it seems to accelerate your process in a huge manner, like immensely. But that just seems that way because we don’t realize it yet, but up until this Point, we haven’t had very good understandings of what’s going on because of the lack of a clear model. So it’s almost as if, you’re in a huge city you’ve never been in before, you don’t have your GPS, you don’t have a physical map, and you’re expected to get to the other side of the town in an hour. It’s like, “What?” Suddenly, if you just like look at your map, it’s “Oh I just drive over there,” and you get there in 20 minutes, right? That’s what it’s like. In other words, people have been wandering around, in circles for lifetimes. Lifetimes. Suddenly they look at the map and they go, “Oh I see where I am,” and then they start awakening right away. Like within months they have major awakening experiences. And this is one of the great things we want to emphasize. When you get where you are, and you get where you’re going, and you can see how to get there, it’s not a problem.
Rick: So anyway, I just want to comment on the rubber band point you made. You know, I’ve often thought about this over the years. Ted, as an old TM teacher, will remember Maharishi talking about this tight correlation between the growth of Samadhi and the growth of all the other values that Patanjali outlined and so on. Your level of consciousness will be directly linked to your behavior and your ethical qualities and all that other stuff. And it just didn’t seem to work out that way over the years for most people. And so I always wonder, “Well is the correlation tight or is it like a big stretchy rubber band?” where the tendency is for development in one area to pull the others along, but it can really stretch a lot before it does? And you know, it’s Like, if you take a table leg example. You pull one leg of the table, all the other legs are going to come along. But what if one of the other legs is anchored down? You’re not going to be able to move the table.
Carole: Right, right.
Ted: Exactly, yeah. Could I just quickly say, Maharishi used to say, “Go for the highest first.” There was this idea that if you awoke your consciousness, if you awakened in consciousness, everything else would just come along. Like that’s still what you’re talking about.
Rick: Just water the root of the tree, all the leaves will finish, Right? Simple.
Ted: The answer is, “Not really.”
Carole: Yeah, it’s not really. And I would say, when consciousness is awakened to itself as Itself, the capacity to dip into other areas, like maybe some shadow areas, there’s a larger space that can hold it. So there is an advantage, if you will, to giving concerted attention to consciousness awakening, so that container can be a lot larger, less confining, more capacities come online to deal with what’s actually here on the personal side of things. So that is one of the pieces I would add.
Ted: Yeah, so you get all kinds of extra credit for awakening to consciousness. But it’s not enough by itself, that’s all we’re saying.
Carole: Yeah, your container is bigger, it can hold a lot more.
Ted: You can deal with the stuff that’s coming up, because it doesn’t threaten your sense of self…
Carole: Exactly.
Ted: …if your sense of self is imperishable.
Rick: Yeah, well put. I often use the example of trying to dissolve some mud in a glass of water, or throwing it in to a big ocean or lake or something.
Carole: There you go.
Rick: It’s like, bigger capacity, it dissolves the mud much better.
Carole: Absolutely.
Ted: Yeah, right.
Rick: Okay, So…
Ted: Yeah, let me…
Rick: Yeah, go ahead.
Ted: There’s one other point I wanted to get in here, and that is that the idea of “awakening consciousness,” again, really came from the East. But the idea of awakening, let’s say, the heart, East and West, idea of awakening, let’s say, the body or sexual awakenings or other forms of awakenings that might include, “Wow, I totally get exactly who I am and what I’m here to be and do.” That’s a kind of an awakening in the “Uniqueness” department. The thing is that one can, based on your particular uniqueness, based on your personal design, based on what’s your, how you’re designed to realize what’s going on here, people can realize the infinite in different kinds of ways. It’s not all the same. That’s really important to say that, and that’s one of the things that we clearly made a discrimination about when we were designing our “Guided Self-Assessment” test, which we’ll talk more about. But the test basically does not assume that you’re realizing the infinite on the level of consciousness only. You could realize it in your emotional life, you could realize it in your body, you could realize it on all these different domains.
Carole: Yeah.
Ted: I just wanted to say that. Awakening isn’t just apparently in consciousness.
Rick: So if you’re realizing the infinite in your emotional life or in your body, how would that feel? How would that be experienced?
Carole: You know, consciousness is kind of the classic one. There’s a heart awakening and a gut awakening, and they actually feel very different. It’s kind of like a diamond, and they’re all awakenings in vast spaciousness in some capacity, but just a different facet of the diamond. So a harder and emotional awakening is often like this in-loveness with everything and in-intimacy with all things, which is very different than a consciousness awakening, and different than a gut awakening. So there are different kinds of awakenings which we emphasize on our model. It’s not just, “Oh, I’ve had an awakening and that’s it.” There are actually – you can have a significant shift in each of the five domains, which we’ll get into in a minute, which is “Consciousness,” “Uniqueness,” “Emotion,” “Mind,” and “Body.” Each one of those have a distinct type or flavor of awakening that takes place.
Ted: Yeah, people, for instance, awakening in the body, it’s more of a Zen awakening in the hara or something like that, you know, where this huge empty space, just emptiness, opens up. And that’s experientially quite different from a head-based consciousness awakening. And all are equally valid. They’re just different. People also use different words to describe them, which is another part of the whole confounding issue about understanding the crossovers between all these different schools.
Rick: So I don’t know if you can answer this question, but I can see clearly how people at various stages of the path would be having all kinds of different flavors and types of experiences. But let’s say you got some of the biggies in a room together, Jesus and Buddha and Ramana Maharshi and all these characters. You think, and if you can somehow step inside their perspective, each of them, you think that then finally at the pinnacle of human development, if that’s where they were at, everything would be the same kind of experience, because we’re talking about attunement to Reality itself, ultimate reality, as opposed to some subjective flavor of it. Or do you think that, even then, given the different nervous systems and backgrounds and cultures and so on, there would be quite different qualities to their subjective experiences?
Ted: There will be different qualities. There’s no doubt that there will be qualities. However, there are common markers, and by the way, let’s remember there is no pinnacle. There’s just “as far as we can see.” And as far as we can see right now, at the top of our model, there’s this whole structure, we’ve got our major three structures, “Dual,” “Unified,” “Singular.” The awakening of consciousness in classical terms falls under the “Dual” category, because usually people awaken to the consciousness separately or in its own realm, and haven’t integrated enough to fully land in the whole thing that’s here.
Carole: And that goes back, Rick, to what we were talking about earlier. Consciousness is just, everything is consciousness, the Advaita. It’s just this, it’s nothing else. That’s kind of the classic, it’s dual, it’s just this, and it’s not, it’s not the relative, it’s not that.
Rick: Although,
Ted: Which is why we don’t call it non-duality.
Carole: Right.
Rick: But in a more mature state, then even the relative is also seen as that. So there really is only one.
Ted: Absolutely, and that’s what’s, that’s one of the markers in common. When you cross into the singular phase, the subject-object perspective that characterized our entire lives up to that point, even our awakened life in the unified phase, or our awakened life since awakening consciousness, there’s still this fundamental “I and Thou,” you know, “me and others,” that we don’t even really know what that is until we’re out of it. There’s no way to know what that is until you’re out of it. But when you get beyond that point, you can look back and say, Oh my gosh.” That w, even in my years’ worth of deeply awakened place, there was still that thing going on. And after that went away, there’s just… yeah… there’s… It’s not exactly no-self, because this thing is still here. It’s both self and no self, without any boundary whatsoever, or any conceivable way to be in that illusion of separation.
Rick: So you have a whole system you’ve developed, a whole body of knowledge, and we want to convey to people as best we can, in the time we have during this interview, what that whole thing is about, and towards the end we can talk about, well, how can you actually take advantage of this and, you know, get involved and benefit from what you, from your work. So what would be the best, most coherent way of laying the whole picture out for us, all these Chapters and anything else you want to say, and naturally I’ll be throwing in questions, we’ll bounce back and forth, but how would you like to proceed?
Ted: Yeah, well, let me share my screen and show you the model.
Rick: Okay.
Ted: When you go to our website and you go to “Model,” you’ll see “Model Intro” and “Interactive Model.” If you hit “Interactive Model,” it takes you to –
Rick: And your website, obviously, one can see there, is iConscious.global.
Ted: Right. So this is the first view of it, and the reason it’s so small at this view is because this is the only way, it’s just shaped that way, it’s the only way you could see the whole thing.
Rick: Yeah.
Ted: But over here we can zoom in, and you can click and hold and then drag it so that up, down, sideways, whatever, so that you can see all these different headers. So let’s just quickly go through the headers. At the top, as we mentioned before, there are these three major phases, “Dual,” “Unified,” and “Singular.” And what this refers to is fundamentally different ways of relating to self, others, and world. That’s one way to say it. In fact, we could just look at these headers right now. “Dual” says Life and Self are experienced as “Partial,” “Fractured,” “Confining,” and “Disconnected.” We put all those words in there because people use different kinds of words, but one way or another, there’s this fundamental sense that there’s more, and I’m not seeing the whole picture, and I’m not getting all parts of myself.
Carole: And this is where 90 some-odd percent of the world resides, is in this “Dual” phase. And actually, probably between stages 3 and 4, or Chapters 3 and the majority of at least North America is within Chapters 3 or 4. Those that are probably listening to this podcast or this YouTube are likely a little bit further along, if you find yourself interested in this, but just in general, that’s kind of the statistics.
Ted: And by the way, those statistics come from research done by Spiral Dynamics, right?
Carole: Spiral Dynamics and other resources as well.
Ted: Okay, so then we’ve got the “Unified” stage. So, in order to get to “Unified,” which is basically a fundamental realization of the unity of all things, but it’s not the full embodied living of that realization. It’s just the recognition of it on the most deep level. You cross this boundary where suddenly it’s like, “Oh, those parts of myself that I was previously rejecting are not fully embracing in myself. They’re all part of me anyway. Why bother rejecting them?” And as you go through that, you land in this place where you realize everything is One. But then, as you said earlier, Rick, which I love, the universe doesn’t…
Rick: Life doesn’t leave you alone.
Ted: Life doesn’t leave you alone. So, the way I would say that is, “Being” keeps poking you in the places where you need to grow.
Rick: Yeah.
Ted: So, Being will keep poking you, and what will happen is, yeah, you realize this here in “Embodied unity,” but you still got to… That forces an immense transformation. And that transformation is one that basically aligns your realization with your whole being – reality, your actions, your belief systems. Everything about you and how you were previously programmed has to become, has to be updated, according to the realization of Unity. It’s like, all the ways we dealt with people as separate entities and everything, for instance. They’re not separate entities. They’re parts of ourselves, just like everything is part of us. Anyway, I could rant for hours.
Carole: And just to go back a slight bit, too, if you look at Chapter 7, that’s the kind of the classic “consciousness waking up to itself.” And so, when a lot of people talk about awakening, they’re typically talking about Chapter S7.
Ted: And consciousness.
Carole: Yeah, and consciousness. And that’s a stabilized awakening, which is different than having a state. People can have state experiences when they go on retreat, but then when they come back 10 days later, it’s like, “Got it, lost it, got it, lost it.” Not quite there. Chapter 7 is really a stabilized awakening experience, which then moves into Chapter 8, which is an oscillation, which is that “Got it, lost it. Oh, everything is whole and complete, and everything is consciousness, too. Oh my god, I’m just this confined small self.” And there’s that back and forth until they…
Rick: Wait a minute. Why would a stabilized awakening come before, an oscillating stage?
Ted: Because when you’re… you can be stabilized in “realization (for instance) of the infinite,” but that doesn’t mean that your sense of self is all there. Your sense of self is what’s oscillating, and it’s oscillating between your… some people would say the divine or imperishable or infinite self, and your personal self. That’s the kind of oscillations that go on.
Rick: But if you’re stabilized as the infinite, I mean, aren’t… Isn’t that…
Carole: It’s partial. You’re stabilized it that, but it’s partial. Chapter 9 is really coming back for the whole. You know, Chapter 9 is… consciousness really lands in the system in a way where it’s… the absolute and relative are all… it’s simultaneous. It’s all right here. All those parts and pieces, and it’s not an “or” anymore. Which is why it’s not till Chapter 9 that we actually have it in the “Unified” phase, because in 7 and 8 there’s still a back and forth, dual movement from one to the other.
Ted: And I just want to add that some people, occasionally somebody will land so heavily in the consciousness domain and be so fully identified with that, that, from their perspective the rest of this development looks like adding the rest of the domains gradually back in, and into the same fold, and into, eventually, the realized unity of all those things.
Rick: I think that brings up a good point, which is that I suspect that, not everyone is going to sort of move through these stages in a predictable linear fashion, but that there’s going to be all sorts of, variations according to the individual makeup.
Carole: Yeah, there’s, I mean, there’s kind of a… there can be an oscillation back and forth, but when you step way back from the meta perspective, you will see a continuous thread that does appear a little more linear. You won’t go from a stabilized Chapter a stabilized Chapter 4. It won’t look like that. You might have states…
Rick: So you’ll have tastes of things, but they won’t be…
Carole: Right.
Rick: The stabilized ones are pretty much going to go in order.
Carole: Exactly. So we call your center of gravity, so if your center of gravity is in, say, Chapter 5, you may have a state in Chapter 9, but you’ll come right back to Chapter high amounts of stress, you may find yourself experiencing states of, say, Chapter 2.
Rick: Yeah.
Carole: But there is typically a center of gravity, which is your daily place of operation.
Ted: Also, [coughs] excuse me, I want to add that one of the things that can confound the appearance of even meta perspective of general linearity, is the way that people are uniquely designed. So, for instance, if somebody is uniquely designed to be the world’s most amazing guru about consciousness, they may appear to have that before others generally do, and that’s just because that’s who they are. Some people might be specifically designed to be an incredible embodiment of love. And so, when they look back at the model, they might say, “Yeah, I got these emotional pieces first.” You know, and that’s why we’ve got all these domains over here, that you could follow one of these domains all the way across and watch the evolution of our relationship with our emotions.
Rick: Yeah, I mean, you had somebody like Mother Teresa, who was this great, compassionate saint, and you could just see it in her face, but she really bemoaned her lack of actual mystical insight, and she was plagued by doubts and all kinds of stuff.
Ted: Yeah, exactly, that kind of stuff. So, you know, people are going to…Their strengths and going to show up and show them leading in their development in general.
Rick: Okay.
Ted: So, then we go from after the “Unified,” we go into this “Transforming” stage, which is…You know, it’s easy to mistake this for, [coughs] excuse me, it’s easy to mistake this for all kinds of things that can happen prior to this. But what we mean by this “transforming” chapter in our model is, let’s see, how do we put it, “Core duality based conditioning surfaces for healing,” which is kind of how I described it. In other words, we’re programmed to operate in a world of apparent separateness, but that comes up for healing, and everything about how we operate comes up for a complete healing in the light of the realized unity of being.
Rick: Okay, so let me just ask a question to have you elaborate on that. So, are you saying that once a certain level of realization has taken place, “Unity” you call it, that a lot of buried stuff isn’t going to be able to hide anymore?
Carole: Absolutely.
Ted: Yeah.
Rick: It’s going to have to bubble up and be processed.
Carole: Yeah, Rick, I like to call it the “flashlight effect.” So consciousness comes deeply down into the body, it’s like a flashlight going down through every nook and cranny, and any stuck duality, if you will, or any stuck anything is going to, it’s going to have a flashlight shown on it, to come up and be loved and accepted in this Unified space. And so there is a cleaning out, if you will.
Rick: Yeah, and waking down, we used to call that the “wake-down-shake-down.”
Ted: Exactly.
Rick: Yeah, okay.
Ted: Exactly. And I just want to point out that no, people aren’t going to have to go through that. They’re just going to be constantly prompted, and if they ignore the prompts,
Rick: they’ll just be prompted more.
Carole: It just hurts. It will be uncomfortable.
Ted: Right.
Rick: Yeah.
Ted: They’ll just get more and more uncomfortable until they’re poked on to the next level.
Rick: Yeah.
Ted: And the next level is, after you’ve gone through enough transformation, let’s say at least 80% approximately, it’s as if you’ve been hacking your way through a jungle for your whole life, and suddenly you’re in a clearing. And it’s like, “Wow! You mean I won’t have to spend my whole life healing myself, or getting all my parts integrated, or doing more spiritual work?” And this is the place where people who have been identified as spiritual seekers for their whole lives often have a hard time letting go. They’re so identified as a seeker who’s always got to be doing all these things. Once you get up to this place, that starts to slowly evaporate. You get to this place where it’s like, “Oh, I’m just who I am. I don’t have to be a spiritual person. I’m just a person. Everybody’s spiritual, because this is part of the universe.” So, and this is clearly, by the way, shown on ancient maps and models like the Zen ox-herding pictures, where you get to a certain place where it doesn’t matter. You just go back to market. You do your thing.
Rick: Yeah. What would you say about somebody like me who went through years and years of just yearning, craving enlightenment, or bust, kind of feeling, and then somehow or other that just dropped off, and everything’s flowing along smoothly. But I still am completely enthusiastic about this stuff, and it’s all I really want to think about and focus on. It’s more, it’s turned from a desperate quest into kind of a, an adventure and an exploration kind of thing.
Ted: Exactly. So, you know, that generally sounds like up in here, where it’s like, okay, you’re doing your thing. It’s like the universe says, figure out who you are now instead of everything you’re trying to be.
Carole: Yeah.
Ted: Figure out who you are, and eventually universe says, “Okay, go do it,” and you’re forced to go do it, and that’s where you are, right?
Carole: And that’s the beautiful thing about the transforming stage is that it, any energetic pulls to go do and be something other than what you really are, Is, once that’s cleared up, then you really get to this individual place we call “fundamentally untangled,” and liberated into being what you are here to be in a very much more clean, succinct, not many hiccups and pushes and pulls to yank you out of alignment or where you’re headed.
Ted: And it’s something that I think everybody wants. Everybody feels this pull to “Who am I? What am I here to do or be?” I hear it all the time. Everybody’s got to find their own way into that. Sometimes people will find their way into that, into at least pieces of That, prior to major consciousness awakenings, you know, in the “Consciousness” domain. Some people, they’re born and when they’re two, they figure out who they are and they go do it. Not quite, but, I’ve seen people like that.
Rick: Harri Alto is like that.
Ted: But that doesn’t, that still doesn’t mean they’re living their full potential. It still doesn’t mean they’re living in a unified, stabilized, “Unified” phase or anything beyond that. It just means they figured out that domain and they’re brilliant at that.
Rick: Yeah, in fact, people might wonder what all these horizontal rows are and then vertical cells beneath each column. I presume that refers to different major aspects of development, such as emotional and, body, there you go, “Uniqueness”, “Emotions,” “Mind,” “Body,” and then you say something about each of those four things – or “Unconsciousness,” each of those five things – at each of these Chapters.
Carole: Right.
Ted: Exactly. This is all very vertically aligned. If you read across in “Survival,” everything about what “Survival” is about applies to everything, etc. The themes apply vertically.
Rick: Right.
Carole: It allows for, say, somebody to be in Chapter 6, Consciousness but Chapter 2, “Uniqueness,” Chapter 4, “Emotions.”
Ted: Right.
Carole: It allows for people….
Rick: I see, so it doesn’t just march across.
Carole: No, not at all.
Rick: It could be all mixed up underneath.
Carole: No, for instance, like if you’ve spent mountaintop focusing on a consciousness awakening, emotions may be in Chapter 2, and that’s where the discrepancies can be seen on this model. It can help people start to integrate a little more whole.
Rick: Yeah, it kind of helps to explain the behavior of some famous gurus.
Ted: Yes, thank you for saying that.
Carole: That’s true.
Ted: That way we didn’t have to say that.
Rick: Well, people are, people wonder that and it’s a real head-scratcher. It disillusions people, it confuses people.
Ted: Exactly.
Rick: They wonder how can this guy be so awesome and yet be doing this.
Carole: This is exactly why. This would be why.
Ted: In fact, that’s one of our major motivations for creating this model the way we did. We want to show them exactly. When you take the Guided Self-Assessment, it basically asks a long series of questions that help you understand where you are in the model and the result of that will often show that people are not very integrated. In fact, one of the results of the… oh, this is a little messy. I don’t have a nice version of it handy, but I think I could get to it pretty quickly. We’ll show you the results screen that you get after taking the guided self-assessment and you’ll see what it looks like when we actually have these different domains of development not very well integrated.
Carole: And while you’re looking for that, you know, so the Guided Self-Assessment takes about 15 minutes, and within 15 minutes it’ll show you results. So this would be an example of results of where you are in [row] “Consciousness,” where you are in “Uniqueness,” “Emotions,” “Mind,” and “Body.” So, in this example, this individual is, their center of gravity for Consciousness is in Chapter 7. Their Uniqueness is in 4, Emotions and Emotional Intelligence is in 3, Mind is in 9, and Body is in 3. So it gives them a real understanding of where they are in the bigger perspective. And then we provide a series of resources to help them evolve from where they are to that next field, if you will. So for, say, “Emotions,” if they’re in Chapter 3 Emotions, if they go onto the “Treasury” page, which are “Models Interactive,” you can click on Chapter 3, “Emotions,” and there’ll be a whole series of, treasury of resources, the audios, videos, practices specific for that domain at that level of development. Because, one of the myths is that, sure, here’s a meditation practice, and it’s going to help Everybody. But really, there are practices that are more appropriate for certain people at certain levels of development than in others, and for certain aspects of one being. So there may be certain practices are more body-oriented, some that are more emotion-oriented, and if you’re, if you lean more towards consciousness, there may be some practices that you’re unaware of to help with the emotion, to help evolve that. So the “treasury of resources” really gives you a plethora of information and practices and practical tools and forums and things like that to access different things to help in that developmental region.
Rick: Let me Just…
Ted: Also, I just want to point out that at the bottom of the results, we’ve got these three metrics here that result from the test. First one is “Integration Percent.” By the way, this one is not an actual result, and the numbers may not actually work. It was just my idea to represent where I was about 20 years ago. And you’ll see this integration number. Basically, if all of these domains, even if they were, down in Chapter 3, but if they were all at exactly the same place, you’d get 100% integration.
Rick: I see.
Ted: So that’s what that means. “Center of Gravity” means we’re taking an average between these scores of all the five domains. That tells you, on average, where your development is. And then there’s “Potential Realized.” The ”Potential Realized” basically takes all of these scores, adds them up, and compares them with what you would have gotten if you had been in And so, you could have, you could have some serious progress in one or more domains, but then your potential realized could still be low because you’re just so focusing in one area.
Rick: Yeah, I mean, you could have like an Einstein who’s maybe all the way across the board on the Mind.
Carole: Exactly.
Ted: Yeah.
Carole: And we see that actually, Rick, we see that a lot in the West, that the mind does tend to be the overdeveloped element, and consciousness is typically pretty low, unless you’ve been in meditation practices, and emotional intelligence tends to be, pretty low as well. So there are common themes that we’re seeing in the West versus the East. The model or the “GSA,” the Guided Self-Assessment, helps people realize where they are in particular and where they could probably use a little more support.
Ted: I don’t know if this is a good time, Rick, but I could demonstrate what the “Treasury Resources” look like.
Rick: Sure, why not?
Ted: Okay, so let’s say you’ve taken the GSA, you’ve gotten your scores.
Rick: GSA means?
Ted: Guided Self-Assessment.
Rick: Guided Self-Assessment.
Ted: And you got your results, and now you want to say, “What do I do with that? Now what?” Well, the answer is you go to the model, and let’s say you need some help in “Consciousness.” So we’ll say, let’s say you’re in Chapter 6, Consciousness, see? Click on that, and up will spring, hopefully, if it’s all working right… The “Resource” page. So basically here it says, “All right, we’re in Chapter 6, we’re in “Consciousness,” and these are the resources that are available. And each of these resources, – this is just here for demo right now, we don’t have them all installed yet – but basically there’ll be a series of slides, and you can click on the right or click on the left and go through hundreds of these things, maybe, to get, like…. Here’s just the description and views what this will be about. And here we talk about the needs and the challenges that are happening at that place, just for that domain, at that stage. There’s quotes and examples and cartoons and images and videos and stuff down here in quotes and examples, so that when you read these things and you start to understand where they are in the model, it starts changing your perspective. Suddenly you can hear that quote or hear that or see that example and understand the meaning in a bigger context.
Carole: Yeah, just to give you an idea, too, if you’re in, using this example, if you’re in Chapter 6, Consciousness, typically you can look at Chapter 5 in the description and say, okay, I remember being there. You know, you could really land in, “Okay, two years ago I can, I remember that,” and you could potentially look at Chapter 7 and say, “Okay, I can taste that” and I can sometimes lean into that, but I’m not quite there yet.” So there’s often that feeling of, “Okay, yep, this is where I am,” especially after reading the descriptions and views, the challenges, and all the practices and what here.
Rick: Okay, and everything that Ted is showing us here now, this is something that becomes apparent once you sign up for the,
Ted: That’s right, once you can take the Guided Self-Assessment by itself After that, if you sign up for the Treasury Resources, it’s called the, just the iConscious Treasury, you’ll get access to these like 400 slideshows.
Rick: Okay, so what we’re seeing right now then is, at the particular stage that you wanted to show us, Gina Lake and Adyashanti and Byron Cady and Jeff Foster might be good teachers to look at.
Ted: Exactly,
Carole: Yeah, exactly. So there are examples of people that tend to focus specifically in that domain or they have a lot of their teachings are focused in that domain, or that Chapter, of development. There are some teachers that really focus in the earlier stages, some on “Unified and embodiment” and others on “Singular.” we were starting to dump in some of these teachers that people can find their retreats, their books, their audios and videos that are supporting their process, where they are in their development at this time.
Ted: And some of these teachers have a huge range in which, you know, like Adyashanti has a huge range, so he might show up in a whole bunch of these different boxes.
Rick: Yeah, boy oh boy.
Ted: And then we’ve got this forum thing, so when you hit the “Forum” tab and then you go over here and click this, you’ll get into the actual forum for that Chapter. We didn’t want to have so we got 16 of them, one for each Chapter, so if you hit that, from within any one of the domain resources, you’ll come to the same place where everybody who’s at a similar place in their development can chat. I think that’s, in my experience, an extremely important thing for people to do.
Ted: Yeah, well, I just wanted to show what’s going on with the Treasury, you know. The Treasury isn’t complete right now. It’ll be done in approximately a month, and if people sign up for a free account, which will have a prominent button on our website in the top right corner on the sidebar, then as soon as this is ready, we’ll just email you, and you can go and check it out.
Rick: Okay.
Carole: Rick, the Guided Self-Assessment is available, though. It’s live. So, if anybody wants to take the Guided Self-Assessment, they can go to iConscious.global, and they can take the test. Again, it’s probably about anywhere between, I don’t know, 30 and 100 questions, and shouldn’t take more than about anything to do that?
Carole: Fifteen bucks, yep.
Rick: Oh, okay.
Carole: And then they’ll be, we’ll email the results. Then, once you get the results, you can take a post GSA and have an interpretation and a walkthrough of what do my results mean.
Rick: Yeah.
Carole: And then, within probably about a month, we should have the Treasury Resources all up and running where people can subscribe and have access to all the resources that we’ll have.
Rick: Okay, great. So, in terms of you guys, do you claim to have personally traversed this whole range of possibilities that you’ve outlined here? Or would you rate yourself as having degrees of development in each of these areas, and being it not necessarily the final Chapter, and you know, your, your works and you, you yourselves are works in progress that are still kind of exploring all this, and to a certain extent, a lot of what you’ve mapped out here is theoretical even for you.
Ted: Great question. You know, when I was a TM teacher, when people would say, are you enlightened?
Rick: Right.
Ted: I was trained to say, well, we don’t talk about that.
Carole: [laughs]
Rick: Yeah, because if you said you are, then people would say, “Well, you’re a bit of a jerk, and that’s enlightenment?” And if you said you aren’t, then they’d think, “Well, he’s been meditating all these years, he’s not enlightened, how effective this?” So we were taught to duck that question.
Ted: Yeah, which, by the way, and I’m not ducking the question, but I do want to say that, I think that, especially here in the West, my observation is that people get all kinds of really interesting ideas about what awake people are supposed to look like, and act like, and sound like, and smell like, or whatever. They’re supposed to look and act and smell exactly like them, not like the guru, right?
Rick: Yeah.
Ted: So that’s one of the reasons it’s been so hard to identify what “awakening” is really about, because the guru claims to have their own awakening, and the guru has their own unique personal issues and glitches, or whatever.
Rick: Yeah.
Ted: And just personality traits, right? So then everybody tries copying the guru’s way of being, and it doesn’t work for them. They’re like, “Yeah, something’s really out of whack here.”
Rick: Yeah, well, that was one of my original motivations for starting BatGap. I was in this weekly satsang that we did locally. There wasn’t any one teacher, there’s a bunch of people just chatting with each other, and then many people were having awakenings, and many people would say, “Well, I had this profound awakening, and then I told my friends, ‘Hey, I’m witnessing sleep, and I seem to be in pure consciousness. In other words, they’re implying that they’re enlightened in some way, and they’d really get shot down, you know? The friends would say, “Well, that’s impossible, you’re imagining it,” and “You can’t levitate,” and “You don’t seem holy,” and all that.
Carole: Hm hmmm.
Rick: So a lot of them would just want to shut up, not talk about It. So I thought, “All right, well, all these people are having awakenings, and all these people, all these other people don’t believe it, so I’m going to just start taking ordinary people and interviewing them, and getting it out there, so that people can see that it’s happening to people just like them, and that might help them have the same thing happen.”
Ted: Right. So if we drop the impossibly idealistic standards about what awake people are supposed to be like, then I can say that, “Yeah, I personally am living in Chapter 14. I crossed into “Singularity” about a year and a half ago, and that shift was really different from any other shift I’ve been through.” And, you know, Carole and I are both Enneagram Type 7s, and my observation is that Enneagram Type 7s tend to go through a pretty dramatic shifts in their process. Other people, like Type 9s, are kind of like slow and steady, usually, until something pops. But basically I’ve been through all kinds of shifts my whole life, and lots of ways in which I could say, “Wow, I’m awake. Wow, I’m even more awake. Now I’m even more awake.” After a while it’s like, “This is sounding redundant. Maybe it never stops.”
Rick: Yeah.
Ted: But yeah, for me, it’s like crossing into the singular phase was very palpable, and then about half a year after that, that
Carole: You want a screenshot?
Ted: Yeah. Back, let me get this out of the way. Over here at 14, we describe it as “Fluidity.” There’s all these descriptions in every one of these domains. But the “Fluidity” is basically an experience of 24 by 7 flow, absolute flow. The reason that it is so, at least in my observation, is because all fundamental resistance to life as it is, is gone. And when that resistance is gone, there’s nothing in us to declare ourselves separate, because that illusion of separation was really about, “Oh, I don’t like it. What do I do about it?” And this is like an automatic way of going into, of living in the subject-object perspective that’s separating ourselves from it without even knowing it. But when you cross into Singularity, that’s not possible.
Carole: Yeah, Singular.
Ted: It’s not possible anymore. At that point, you find yourself flowing with life as it is, and that flow becomes, after a little while, becomes the primary feature of that realization. This Chapter 15, I can’t say I’m living that.
Rick: No.
Ted: But that is our observation looking around us at the other people who appears to have gone beyond. How about you, Carole? Would you say pretty much what he said?
Carole: Pretty much what he said. I’d probably oscillate a little bit more with 12, 13, is what I’ve noticed.
Rick: And what about some of the standard earmarks of higher states of consciousness, such as witnessing-sleep or Celestial-perception, things like that? Do those fit into your models? And those aren’t exclusive to any one spiritual organization. You find references to them across many traditions.
Ted: Yeah, yeah. You know, that is a question that I brought to a previous teacher, and that teacher helped me understand something that I think I still agree with, and that is that the idea of witnessing-sleep, yes, you can develop that. That’s a sort of, I would consider that as an advanced skill, that some people will have the ability, will naturally have that more. Others will naturally have that less. But that doesn’t define what we mean by these various, even the consciousness awakening. It’s like, I’ve had lots of experience of all those things, and I still do from time to time, but it does not describe the stage. I think it describes a special skill that can be developed.
Rick: It’s not an acid litmus test of any kind?
Carole: No, no, not at all. And actually, you know, I know a lot of healers as well, and it’s the same thing. It’s just because you have the capacity to heal with certain, in certain modalities, or in certain ways doesn’t… It’s a skill set that it might be you, that individual.
Rick: Right, and also, and conversely, being able to heal doesn’t mean you’re in certain state of consciousness, but also being in a certain state of consciousness doesn’t mean you’re necessarily going to be able to heal.
Carole: Absolutely,
Ted: Exactly.
Rick: It might have been a skill that Jesus had or something,
Carole: Right.
Rick: but Jesus’s brother who might have been equally enlightened wouldn’t necessarily have had that ability.
Ted: Exactly, exactly, you know, and the ability to see on a celestial level, that again is very individual kind of thing. So the more you awaken, the more you’re going to find yourself having specific experiences that, to you, are absolutely linked with awakening, right? But when you step back and look at the model and understand the bigger context, it’s like, “No, that’s just you, dude.”
Rick: Yeah, well, it’s interesting to talk about because that one really hangs up some people because they’ve been told that there’s this, this map that involves these specific things at each and every stage and that these are like, verifiers that you’ve actually reached that stage. If you’re if you’re not having them, then you haven’t reached that stage. And so people figure “Well, I’m nowhere because I’m not having this.”
Carole: Well, we have verifiers, if you will, or qualities that one would probably experience if they were at a certain stage or Chapter of development, but they’re not going to be specific to lucid dreaming or capacity to heal or anything like that.
Ted: Right. Yeah, in fact, I just want to point out, because there’s a lot of people who are going to go, when they’re listening to this part of the conversation, they’re going to go, “Oh, these guys are just, they’re not there and that’s why they’re saying that. That’s why they made their map around their own thing.” It’s like, “No, I don’t think so,” because we’re like, we’re viewing thousands of people and we’re telling you what our experience is and we’re lining it up with the research. But anyway, there’ll be a lot more to be said about that. Yeah, specific skills are going to show up for specific people and it’s not going to look like those things that we heard about when we were growing up because humanity’s understanding of what this awakening process is about was really limited. When I was, you know, in school with Maharishi, there was… the model was like three or four stages. You could push it to five maybe. It was like, “ignorant, enlightened,” like, oh yeah, “cosmic consciousness, unity, God consciousness, unity consciousness.” And I asked Maharishi what’s beyond that and he said, “Krishna consciousness,” which is some sort of group realization. which actually I think that’s true. But it’s very low res, right? Now we have a much – that’s one of the things Carole and I have done, is we have made this image, especially after Chapter 6 and especially down through the domains, we’ve made the picture very high res, which allows us to then test it with more and more accuracy.
Rick: Yeah.
Carole: I’m curious if there are any questions, Rick. I don’t know if there are any questions.
Rick: Well, no one has sent in any yet. They can if they wish by going to the upcoming interviews page on BatGap.com. About verification, Ted, you know, as you were speaking earlier about EEG and all, it would seem to me that there should really be some neurophysiological correlates to all these stages of development. And we may be a long way from having instrumentation that’s sophisticated enough to really measure them, because we’re talking about very subtle shifts in consciousness and experience and emotions and all kinds of things. But, you know, hypothetically, if we got to the stage where we had the technology to measure this stuff accurately, there could be a kind of a physiological correlate for every little box on your grid.
Carole: We hope so.
Rick: Yeah, I mean, it may not happen in our lifetimes, but we could get there.
Carole: Yeah, and they’re starting to see the, they’re starting to see the comparison. I mean, there was definitely studies on gray matter in the brain based on how much one is been meditating. So there is, they are showing variations with that. So, yeah, we’ve got a long ways to go. The technology isn’t quite there, and the technology that is there is extremely expensive. So, yeah, our ultimate goal would be to be able to map all that stuff, all the objective, statistical type stuff to correlate with the subjective experience.
Rick: Yeah, that gets us…
Ted: By the way, you know…
Rick: It seems like it’s a project that you could, it could become like CERN, you know, trying to build, find the Higgs boson with the Large Hadron Collider. I mean, you could have a huge team of people working on this in order to really nail down every little aspect of it. At this point it’s just you two guys, but, and of course other people elsewhere are doing all kinds of research and stuff.
Ted: Yeah, and by the way, you know, we could get lucky and find out that doing that research may not be quite as expensive or big as CERN. We might find out that the kind of data that we can pull in through the process that we’re creating on our website will allow us to start understanding correlations.
Rick: Yeah.
Carole: Hm hmmm.
Ted: So, for instance, maybe in a couple of years when EEG headsets become good enough and cheap enough to just like everybody will have one, it’ll just be part of something they’re already wearing, or whatever. Then we can start using the deep learning algorithms to understand these correlations without having to do an enormous project like that. The artificial intelligence will start understanding what’s going on.
Rick: Yeah. It’s interesting to consider though, how important is it to find the Higgs boson compared to how important is it to really understand human potential and human development and, higher states of consciousness and, you know, which thing, if fully understood, will have the biggest impact on our world?
Ted: Well, you know, the way I would answer a question like that is to say they’re all important and they’re all happening simultaneously.
Carole: Yeah.
Rick: Yeah, but imagine, I mean, even if you took the, resources from, CERN and allocated them to conscious development, I don’t know if you can just throw money at it and have it all happen. Probably a lot more could be thrown at it and it would accelerate it. And given the state of the world and, how all problems are really manifestations of human consciousness at whatever stage of that, it would seem to me that that should be our prime, our main priority.
Carole: Well, actually, Ted and I are in the process right now of utilizing artificial intelligence to Create, basically, a coach in your pocket so that our model will be – The artificial intelligent avatar basically will be informed by our model to help guide people through this awakening process to, hopefully, expedite it all over the world in a way that you don’t need to sit down with a coach, or somebody like ourselves, who have this experience, who can guide you through the process, one day at a time. You’ll have access to that on a regular basis and access – people from all over the world will have access to this. No matter where you are developmentally, if you can’t afford certain things, I mean, some people can’t even afford running water, but, you know, if we can, if we can make this avatar accessible to everybody in the world, as you said, awaken consciousness, can you imagine how world problems will start to shift if that is accessible for everybody? So that’s one of our big projects actually we’re in the process of now is creating that avatar that people can have access to and basically in their pocket.
Rick: Yeah.
Ted: There’s really two, I just want to point out there’s two projects there. One is for a while now we’ve been working with a project called Loving AI in which we designed the dialogue for Sophia, the famous robot made by Handsome Robotics, who’s you know on YouTube all the time and talking to major personalities. We were invited to design the dialogue to help people awaken through the robot. They just did their first test, they’re going for another test soon, but their first test had some really incredible results. You’ll start seeing maybe in the next month or less some, we’ll put on our site under “About Media,” we’ll start showing some of the results of that test. Some people were having experiences of transcendence more easily and more directly because it was a robot and not a person.
Carole: Yeah, which I was pretty skeptical to be honest Rick. I was pretty skeptical about the capacity for a robot to really help awaken people. You know, there’s something about sitting with somebody in person, transmission that, in my experience, is incredibly powerful. I mean my whole dissertation was basically on how the coach identifies themselves and the transformative possibilities then that are in the space for the client to change. And so, having a robot, I was really concerned that would this robot be able to hold some kind of a conscious space for a human being to really be invited into awakening. And the results so far are staggering and actually people are, there’s a book that was written by Jamie Wheal recently, I think, “Stealing Fire,” and in there he talks a little bit about people that are coming back from war and they have the option between a robot therapist or an avatar therapist and a live therapist and people are even choosing more and more the avatar for various reasons that they’re doing some research on now. And so there is actually a demand and a need and a desire for the avatar, for the robots. Not that humans are not going to be chosen ever again anymore. I mean, I’m a coach myself and I love what I’m doing. It puts me out of a job just as much as it puts all the therapists out of a job. But there are going to be plenty of people that still want that live person. So far, statistically speaking, people are really leaning towards this avatar. So it’s interesting. Technology is really supporting this movement to awaken the world.
Ted: Yeah, and I don’t, by the way, see this putting any coaches out of a job, any more than having all kinds of knowledge that doctors have at their fingertips these days. They’re not out of a job. They just go… when you’re sitting with a doctor these days, they’re just on their computer, you know, filling out forms, getting information on the internet and stuff like that. That could be part of what goes on, at least a portion of it. So I don’t think it’s going to put people out of a job. Quite the opposite.
Carole: Well, I shouldn’t have said that. I was kind of kidding.
Ted: Yeah, yeah, but you know, in a way, I think it’s going to likely be the opposite. More and more people have access to systems like this that will help them awaken and realize that there are portions of the process where they really need human support.
Rick: Yeah, and chances are robots aren’t going to end up getting arrested for sleeping with their clients and losing their licenses and stuff.
Carole: That’s true. Right.
Ted: You could just decommission them and, you know, make them build cinder block walls.
Rick: Right. So a while ago you were showing us, in the chart you were showing us a particular stage and then you click on teachers and we saw Adyashanti and Byron Katie and stuff like that. Is your thing largely a referral service in a sense or do you yourself have a whole collection of techniques and practices that you would teach people directly?
Carole: Yeah, that’s a great question. So we will be populating this with as much content and information we have access to with all of our background and everything and we’ll be opening to anybody who wants to dump some things in there and let the cream of the crop rise to the top. We’ll also be, our current plan is to, we’re going to be starting to contact a lot of these teachers and saying, “Hey, if you, if you want, we will put your name in here and we’d just love to advertise you and, you know, get people to where they really need to be and if they want to come to a retreat from you, they can come find a retreat from you. In exchange, just put our website somewhere on there and they can find us so that there’s an exchange. Let’s all help each other find each other. So that’s kind of our current plan. How logistically that will work out, we’ll see, but that’s kind of the general direction right now.
Rick: You can even give content…
Ted: I just want to say, yeah, we’ll also have some of our own content on that and that’s going to grow over the years. One of the things we did was we created our own software that gives us the ability to have guided interactions with people through audio, video, text, graphics and buttons. So like it is on the site, in fact, if I – I don’t think I could do it right now, but basically, we could paste in an interaction that would happen that you can actually go and do right now. Just go over to iConscious.global and what’s going to happen is a box will pop up and take over most of your screen and it’ll engage you in this interaction. Right now, the interaction it’s engaging you in is helping you understand our system and tour the various pieces that we’re offering and then you can sign up for this or That. After you’ve gotten into this system, you’re going to start seeing interactive courses pop up that you could just click on, pay a few bucks and take the thing.
Rick: Yeah.
Ted: So it’ll be both that and other people’s resources at the same time.
Rick: I just wanted to make a comment on what Carole said about contacting the teachers, which is that you could even give them a questionnaire that would make it a lot easier for you to fit them into your model because you may not know everything about them.
Carole: Yeah, that’s very true.
Ted: Yeah, great idea. Just have the forum online and automatically puts them in.
Rick: Yeah, a question came in from Jared in St. Paul, Minnesota. We’ve kind of covered this, but I think there’s an opportunity for elaboration here. He’s asking, “Where would things like Kundalini and other mystical experiences fit into your model?”
Ted: Yeah, that’s a great question. Thanks for asking that, Jared. And I think, I want to hear what Carole has to say too, but I would just say that Kundalini openings can happen at almost any point in the process. You know, Carole had something going on recently that really was pretty major. You probably want to talk about that. You know, I don’t think that they, they’re more like state experiences. They’re always temporary, right? You never heard of anybody who had a Kundalini opening that never stopped. So it’s a state. Something is opening, something is shifting, some new energy is flooding the system. You know, the word Kundalini can cover a huge range of description of experiences. But one way or the other, I would call that a state experience and it will integrate. And the energy that you experienced in that state, it’s like a vision of the future. You will eventually experience that kind of ease and flow and openness. It’s just, you’re getting there and this, that experience tells you you’re on the right direction.
Rick: You want to tell us about your Kundalini experience, Carole?
Carole: Well, I mean, I could. I don’t know that that’s the direction I really want to go today. I mean, just in general, there was an experience of just multiple, multiple actually, over the course of a week. One was more in the head region, one was definitely more in the heart and the other was definitely from my gut. And so there were just different openings and different cleaning outs, is what it felt like, and processing and coming up and integrating into the whole. And so I think those, I agree with Ted, I think those can happen at any stage of development. And like anything else, they don’t, they don’t, they don’t always happen in a certain place. But they’re often a part of a lot of people’s experiences. So it doesn’t necessarily tell you what Chapter you’re in. They’re more state Experiences –
Ted: Right Cl – that can really place anywhere in the model.
Ted: And people who don’t have these big experiences often look at people who do and go, “Oh gosh, I wish I had that.”
Carole: Yeah.
Ted: And then they’re like, “I guess I’m not there yet.” And what’s really interesting about that is I have had so many interviews with people who actually have had all kinds of major stabilized awakening shifts, but they’re still comparing themselves to people who are more highly developed because the guru says you have to have this or that. So when I just go, you know, I think I would put you at Chapter 9 based on what I’m feeling and everything we’ve, you said in the interview, sometimes what happens is they go, “Right, I had that shift back in 1997,” or whatever it was, “but nobody validated it.”
Carole: Hm hmmm.
Ted: And when you validate it, they can own it and embody it.
Carole: Yeah, and that’s a great point, Ted. I’m glad you brought that up. Ted and I actually had a Chapter called “Owning,” because there was such a big pattern that people would have these openings, but there wasn’t a, “Yes, I’ve had this.” There’s kind of a humble element, or I don’t even know what it is, where people just didn’t want to claim that they’ve had this experience. And when you claim that experience, it drops in in a deeper way that is important for one’s continued development, to be able to own that, recognize it, and fully embody it.
Rick: That’s interesting about validation because it’s been said traditionally in some circles that you do need a guru to validate your experience. Otherwise, there’s going to be some final doubts which will prevent you from completely owning it. And it seems like you’re developing a system which can systematize or automate that validation.
Ted: It will certainly help, but I want to say that there’s an element here that’s about being [clears his throat] an element that’s about being human mammals because mammal creatures are always, you know, when they come out of when they’re born, first thing they do is like look at their Mom and go like, “How do I be?” And then they just start templating right on Mom. That’s how to be. “I’m going to be like Mom.” And that’s just a natural part of the process. So another part of this is that you can have all kinds of subjective illuminations, awakenings, and shifts, but that doesn’t mean you know what that means from a larger systemic perspective.
Rick: Hmm.
Ted: You know, “Okay I had this big experience, something shifted, it appears to be permanent, but what is it?” You got to talk to somebody who knows what that is or at least a robot or something in our system perhaps that will help you understand “Oh yeah you just have like a Chapter 7 consciousness awakening,” you know? “Please it’s great, it’s awesome, you’re going in the right direction, but don’t think that’s the highest anything, right? It’s just where you are. But we can confirm, based on everything you’re telling us, yeah, Chapter 7 awakening,” or whatever it is. And I think that’s a hugely important part of the process.
Rick: Yeah. Another thing I just, a thread of the conversation about the kundalini awakening, even kundalini experts like Joan Harrigan and others will tell you that there are almost an infinite variety of ways in which kundalini can rise and work its way through the system. It can go off on little you know little tangents and sidetracks and it can go straight up or it can get stuck here and all that.
Carole: Hm hmmm.
Rick: So that that can give rise to almost an infinite variety of experiences. And it can also be real flashy or it can be so quiet that you don’t even know anything’s happening.
Carole: Hm hmmm.
Rick: Yeah, so I mean anyone listening to this, if you’re reading literature or things online about kundalini awakenings, never compare yourself to somebody else not only with kundalini but with any of this stuff.
Carole: Yeah.
Rick: You know it can be very confusing.
Carole: Yeah and actually I’m so glad you brought that Up, Rick. Like it’s just so important to just honor where you are and not compare you know where you think you should be or to somebody else. The sooner you can just love where you are, actually the quicker you will probably move through your process.
Rick: Yeah, I mean my standard answer, if somebody asks me if I’m awakened is I say, “Well I’m more awake than I used to be and less awake than I will be, God willing.”
Carole: There you go.
Ted: Yeah because as soon as you put up any kind of a model people will go well that’s the goal over there. And then they’re seeking that goal and they’re not being here attending to what’s happening right here.
Rick: Yeah.
Ted: Which is that’s the real fire of transformation. If you want kundalini, be here now in all your whole body, your emotions, your body, all domains.
Rick: Yeah, that’s important. I mean, some people Say, “Give up the search” and all that. My attitude is, if you have the kind of, if you have the understanding that, like you say with your 17th Chapter, “Who knows where it goes from here?” If you have the understanding that this is a never-ending adventure or progression, then you don’t really sweat too much about whether you’ve reached this or that or the other stage. You know it’s like “I’m fine where I am and I’m just going to keep on trucking.”
Carole: Yeah.
Rick: And “We’ll see where it unfolds.” but it’s…. also it helps to kind of have in mind the notion that this whole process doesn’t end with the death of this body.
Carole: Yeah.
Rick: If you can really take a long view then you just keep on moving along doing the best you can.
Carole: Yeah and you know to speak to your seeking, you know you can’t stop seeking even if you tried.
Rick: If you’re succeeding, you’re seeking.
Ted: Exactly.
Carole: You can’t just stop. You’ll just the energy is still here to do that and you will do that until you don’t.
Rick: You know and if someone tells you should and then you find that you’re tending not to, then that’s only going to make it more complicated for you.
Carole: Yeah.
Ted: And by the way that whole seeking impulse is absolutely natural and good and necessary and right. It’s our own being trying to find all of itself, all of our parts, the whole context, how do I be all of who I am? That’s the seeking impulse. Why would you want that to stop?
Rick: I also think that there’s an evolutionary impulse intrinsic to the nature of the universe.
Ted: Exactly.
Rick: The seeking impulse is that being reflected within us.
Ted: Right. It’s just that the seeking impulse, I just want to point out that the seeking impulse has its own trajectory of evolution. You know when we’re down in the dual phase, it tends to start peaking around Chapter it’s like “There’s more, I know there’s more, I’m looking for it.” And then it’s the infinite at that point that they’re looking for. But then when you realize the infinite after a while you get pretty sick of seeking it. So then the seeking impulse is actually prompting you to seek the other parts you haven’t fully discovered or embraced. And then when you fundamentally fall into that unity awakening and you’re like here in your body and you’re very deeply present but it’s not all integrated yet, the seeking impulse turns into “How do I get this all integrated? How do I sort out all these issues that I haven’t ever been able to fully get to the bottom of?” And frankly you can’t until you’re at least in Chapter 9. You Just, you don’t have enough wholeness, wellness and stillness in all circumstances to deal with all possible healings that you need to go through.
Carole: Hm hmmm.
Ted: So the seeking will just keep – getting now that you know when you get into this singular phase the seeking becomes… it isn’t really seeking at that point actually I have to say.
Carole: No, it’s not.
Ted: It doesn’t feel like that from the inside, it’s just being what is.
Rick: But it’s a very interesting point which is that the very, that energy or that impulse or that natural tendency morphs into different things over the different stages. It might not even be recognizable, if you compare this stage to that stage, but it’s the very same energy that’s just taking a different form and it’s like some kind of cosmic vacuum cleaner that’s just moving around and wherever the next dirt, is it goes there. I don’t know.
Ted: Yeah it’s just the universal impulsive evolution for all individuals and for everything.
Rick: Yeah, okay Good. covered that point. So what else do we want to cover in our remaining time?
Ted: I think we’ve actually kind of done it. Is there anything else Carole you want to
Carole: No not necessarily specifically, I’m just wondering if there are any other questions from people that we could answer specifically. Ted and I talk about this stuff all the time so sometimes we brush over certain topics or we’re not as clear and detailed as we could be, so, just curious if there are any areas that would be helpful for us to clarify.
Rick: Well if there are then people should send them in quickly because we won’t be going too much longer. You know that there was that movie in the in the 60s or something called “Bob, Carole, Ted and Alice.” Irene was saying we should call this “Rick, Carole, Ted and BatGap” or something. [Laughter]
Ted: Yeah.
Rick: Now you sent me a thing here Ted. Let me see if we got all this. Let me read these through and see if there’s anything we haven’t covered. Our big vision, what led us to create the model, JFK course, the need to go digital, loving AI project, we’ve kind of gotten that, the LIA startup, your offerings, GSA treasury, blah blah, purpose, mission, vision.
Ted: Yeah I think that I have one thing to say from that list and that is Yeah, if anybody wants to you know is interested and wants to be supportive of our startup we’re in the planning stages right now. [clears his throat] We’re in the planning stages right now. We have a stellar team of founders that were with you know Carole and I and a couple other people and we have a tremendous amount of support from worldwide community of people who are involved with the same kinds of things we are. Artificial intelligence and how it gets applied to consciousness and human evolution. So there’s going to be… pretty soon we’ll start going around holding meetings trying to get some investment and if this is something that you know you or any of your friends believe in and want to help us just go send us an email, go to the website send us an email and let us know.
Rick: There’s one question I thought of earlier when I was preparing for this interview and we’ve kind of covered it but I think it would be worth asking which is that you know since you’ve been so immersed in developing this map, you know, you kind of live and breathe it I’m sure. Do you find that you’ve automatically when you listen to a particular spiritual teacher it just kind of comes to you where he or she would fit into the map or not necessarily even teachers spiritual person reporting experience “Oh they go right about there.”
Carole: Yeah yeah yeah I know thank you for that Rick yeah and I do it with my clients all the time it’s just kind of information that comes in it’s just kind of digitally internally kind of landing in certain places and then you know coaching from that place immediately you know based on what I’m seeing or feeling and yeah the model really and I’ve talked about this it really lives in both of us in a way that, whether it’s coaching or whether it’s interactions with other teachers or interactions with other people in general, it really, the model is really alive in both of us, in how we see and how we coach and how we interact.
Rick: One interesting thought that I just had is that you know with teachers, especially if they become more Popular, and start attracting bigger Audiences, there’s the problem of just speaking to a crowd not really having the time to give individual attention and actually trying to address people at a whole range of different stages of development in one presentation you know and they’re kind of stuck there because they’re never going to be able to give the individual attention that people need. so you know and you can still get tremendous inspiration from such people even people at various stages might be hearing the very same talk and hearing different things but getting inspiration from it. But it’s nice that you have something that could actually give customized tailored…
Carole: Yeah absolutely. And, you know, one pattern I have noticed with students and clients of mine is people do tend to find who they need when they need them on their path. For instance, I found Byron Katie just so perfectly appropriate for where I was. It just spoke to me at that time and her work was just perfect for my level of development at that time. I’d say it was the same thing with every teacher that I bumped into along the way. There is kind of a naturalness and organicness to finding the right teacher at the right Time. We’re dropping these teachers in the right places that people can find them probably a little bit quicker than the way Ted and I found people to support our process
Rick: Yeah.
Ted: I just want to add something. Back in I had spent years going to teachers who were sitting on stages proclaiming absolute truth. Right around 1996, I started rotting out of that I got to the place where it’s like “Yeah I can’t do that anymore.” It’s just me Personally, right? I needed somebody who could give me individual attention and customized help to get where I needed to go. I went and found a teacher and I got the help I needed and it worked. And that was a wonderful thing. So, we’re not really putting down any teachers or any system or any approach to any of these things we’re saying it’s all necessary at different points in the Process. Ultimately, we’re gonna, we’re building an artificially intelligent agent that will deal with each person in an incredibly specific individual way, finding out who they are, like we do when we’re working with people, and giving them what we what they need. But it’ll be better than any teacher could possibly be, because the idea is it’ll have the information from all the teachers and traditions.
Rick: Hm hmmm.
Ted: It’s like what google was doing with all the information on the planet when it’s just index the whole thing and make it available in the right way for what people need and want. That’s exactly what we’re doing.
Rick: Let me say about three things to that before I forget them all and then I think Carole wants to say something. One is that people shouldn’t feel guilty about moving from teacher to teacher because you know teachers have a certain range of applicability or relevance and you may hit up against the limit of that range and actually need something else and it’s good to be loyal and it’s good not to be a dilettante. But on the other hand, you might need to move on and you shouldn’t agonize over it. You know, I really appreciated my second grade teacher Mrs. Heffernan she was really nice but then I had other ones in later grades that I also really like
Ted: Exactly!
Carole: Well said, Rick, well said.
Ted: And let me quickly add to that. If you find yourself agonizing over it, embrace that.
Rick: Yeah. And the second point I want to make is that I’ve encountered teachers who themselves have gotten rotted out, as you put it, of the hierarchical arrangement like for instance I interviewed Raphael Kushner a couple weeks ago and he was saying how he did satsangs for a while and just got so uncomfortable with sitting on a stage in any way elevated above everybody in the audience. Susanna Marie is that way too. She would really prefer kind of a circular kind of an arrangement. I’m not sure if I remember what the third point is. I knew I wouldn’t be able to remember them all, but maybe Carole has something.
Ted: Let me just say something to what you said and that is that some people are going to be designed to sit on a stage. That’s just because that’s what they’re here to do but I can say for myself –
Rick: Oh, I just remember my third point. Let me just say –
Ted: Okay, go ahead.
Rick: – and that was that it doesn’t have to be an either/or situation. It can be both ends. I mean, I like to go and see Amma once a year and it’s big big scene. [Ted nods] You can go for the group thing and derive benefit from it, but you can also, simultaneously, get the individualized attention you may need. Okay, go back to what you were saying.
Ted: I just want to say yeah, I think there’s different reasons why teachers end up at a place where they no longer want to sit on the stage and do that. I’ve done that. I was … In the prior work I was in, I was doing a heck of a lot of teaching work, sometimes 40 hours a week for years. After a while, I was forced, through a series of healings, that were really all about my two-year-old need to be acknowledged for who I am. Like, “Yeah Ted, you are good enough.” Once I finally got to that place where it’s like I got that thing fed that needed to get fed, that part of me that needed that acknowledgement, it’s like I didn’t care anymore. After that, it’s like, doesn’t matter if I said I don’t really like sitting on a stage that much, kind of, a little, you know? I’ve got that part, you know, that the five-wing in me that’s like, “Oh that’s a little much.” I also like it, at the same time, but I have no particular interest, ever since I went through that transformation, and I don’t seek that at all. There will still be people who are very deeply evolved and they’re designed to be sitting on a stage and give their teaching that way.
Rick: Yeah, and their popularity is such that they couldn’t really do it on a one-to-one basis or anything
Carole: Right, right. And, you know, I’m a one-to-one coach. I think it’s one of my gifts. Other people are much better on a big stage with I can do that, and I do do that. I noticed that my skill sets are in the smaller places, so there’s no right or wrong as to how a teacher shows up, you know, whether they’re one-on-one or big group. There are plenty of ordinary awakened people that are software developers for Google, you know? They’re not advertising as anything. They’re chop-wood-carry-water. They do their thing. They have a skill set and they’re living in the world from that skill set, from an awakened space. I think that we are going to see a heck of a lot more of that in time to come, that not every being’s job to go out and teach awakening. It’s just not.
Rick: Yeah
Carole: They will be at the gas pump basically and pumping gas well.
Rick: If it were every awakened beings job to do that, we pretty soon wouldn’t have anybody to do all the other things in the world that need to get done
Carole: Exactly.
Rick: We’d always be sitting around contemplating our navels. [laughter]
Ted: Right. It was really just, that whole thing was an inheritance from the time in humanity’s development yeah when awakening wasn’t that prominent, you Know? It would happen to somebody once in a while. They’re like, “Wow this incredible thing happened,” and everybody else is like, “Tell me how to do that,” and so. But that’s not what’s going on right now. People are awakening in all kinds of ways, all over the place. Like Carole said, it’s just going more into the ordinary.
Carole: Yeah.
Rick: Yeah. Here’s an interesting question that came up from Mateo in Carpi, Italy. He’s asking if you know about Jeffrey Martin’s work. The reason I find that interesting is that Jeffrey has been trying to do something kind of similar. He’s got a whole map that he’s worked out and he’s trying to do neurophysiological research to go along with it and so on. So, have you collaborated with Jeffrey at all?
Carole: I met Jeffrey, I was aware of his work, about three years ago and followed him for a while. Actually, I met Jeffrey Martin in person about four or five months ago in Shanghai, China. We were both speaking at a conference on technology. I made a point to have lunch with him one day and probably three or four hours later, we walked away from lunch and I just really enjoyed my conversation with him and the overlaps and the curiosities on both ends, and what we’re, each of us, are discovering. There are some similarities. There are some differences. I think one of the biggest differences is Jeffrey primarily focuses on Consciousness, where we focus on an integrated model, including all five domains, not just primarily the consciousness awakening. There are other similarities and differences, but you know there are plenty of similarities with his work and I love following his work because he is coming at it more from a, you know, he’s a scientist and a Researcher. I deeply respect him and his work. I’m sure he and I will or we, Ted and I will stay in touch with him, perhaps. By the time we were done, we both were just curious how we’re going to end up collaborating at some point.
Ted: By the way, I just want to mention there’s a potential interesting collaboration we explored. They’re working on some platform for gaming and human development and we might participate.
Rick: That’d be fun.
Carole: Yeah we’re basically –
Rick: Regarding Jeffrey, I’ve interviewed him, so people can look that up if they want to. And I just wanted to say, while we’re still on the topic of him, that it’s kind of interesting because his model, as I understand it, (obviously there’s a lot more I could understand) gets you before you go through too many stages, you’re not gonna be able to function in the world. He actually even talks about coming back down to a lower stage so you can function.
Carole: Sure.
Rick: I kind of had problems with that. I mean, there obviously have been examples, like Ramana Maharishi or whatever didn’t, probably couldn’t hold down a job, you know? I mean, he’s just very high up there but not in any kind of worldly capacity. I really wonder, idealistically at least, I think that one should be able to integrate to the point where you could have all kinds of responsibilities and practical things and yet be in a very highly developed state. In fact, you should be much better at functioning in the world, if things are properly integrated.
Ted: Yeah I think that, without specifically knowing what he said or what the context was, I would say it sounds like that was his way of talking about the same thing we’re saying, which is, if you’re not developed in your Body domain very much, and your Consciousness is way out there somewhere, there’s going to be this bungee effect. You have to come back to your body. You know the universe is going to keep poking you until you do.
Carole: And he’s just –
Rick: I’m sorry go ahead,
Carole: That’s okay. I was just going to say, for those listeners that don’t know Jeffrey’s work, (and I don’t claim to speak too detailed for his work but) he primarily has four “locations.” And he calls them “locations” because he doesn’t feel they’re linear. You don’t have to go from one to the other to the other, that you can land in location three as your primary awakening and you can go back to two and then you can jump to four. And four is kind of the ‘non,’ more the non-functional and non- heart feeling. I’ve heard stories about that, that people want to at least go back to three, so that people can actually feel love for their child and actually care for their child.
Rick: Yeah, that’s what he was saying.
Carole: Yeah, so there’s these four locations and that’s a little different. Ted and I, our system, is not necessarily that you’re bouncing all over the place like that and choosing areas like that. I also know, after his fourth location, there were another series of locations.
Rick: I think he goes up into the twenties, actually, and I asked him about that, and he said you have a light body or something, but you know, I just think that, ideally, the very best of any location would be carried into subsequent ones and that you could be way high up on the scale and it wouldn’t diminish your feeling for your children or any other capacity that you might –
Carole: Right. Our model is more transcend-and- include. You can go from Chapter 3 and when you go from 3 to 4, it includes 1, 2 and 3. You go up to transcend- and-chop-off, you know. It’s transcend and –
Ted: – and then come back and figure out what you left
Carole: Yeah.
Rick: Yeah.
Carole: So, yeah, that would possibly be a little bit different than his system as well.
Rick: Yeah and so apologies to Jeffrey for not doing justice to his system here, we may not be, and he might have good answers to the points we’re making here. We don’t want to mischaracterize it.
Carole: No, not at all.
Ted: Right, yeah.
Rick: Okay. So we’ve been going on for quite a while. No more questions have come in. Is there anything you’d like to say by of kind of wrap up in conclusion? And also in doing that… well, do that first and then I’ll maybe have one more practical point.
Ted: Well I just want to say thank you for having us on, allowing us to share what we’re up to with your audience. Really appreciate that and really appreciate your questions, especially your perspective, because you’re not like another spiritual seeker who’s just doing their thing, trying to figure out what… You’re out there interviewing all these teachers. So you have an enormous perspective of what’s going on and that really informs all your questioning and how you’re holding it, and I really appreciate that.
Rick: Oh thanks. So I guess, in terms of practical steps, if people are interested in finding out more, they should just go to your website, which I’ll be linking to from your page on Batgap.com. And if it’s not clear to them what they should do when they get there, that there’s a contact thing I’m sure they can get in touch with you and –
Ted: Sure.
Rick: – sign up for an email notification thing or something like that.
Ted: Right and if it’s not clear, we haven’t done our job, and we’ll be constantly working on that.
Rick: Yeah and you are it’s a work in progress
Ted: Yeah it’s a work in progress, you know? We’re just now launching the Guided Self-Assessment and in a month we’ll be launching the Treasury service. We’re just at the end of this long marathon and now we can go back to the website and go “Okay what’s working” you know “what’s not clear? What do we gotta fix?” That’s where we’re at
Rick: Okay great. So thanks. Let me just make a couple of wrap-up points. Just that this, as most people watching this will know, this is an ongoing series. It’s been going on for years and hopefully it will continue to. And if you are somewhat new to it, then go to batgap.com. You can check out all the previous interviews. You can sign up to be notified by email of new ones as they’re released. You can sign up to get onto the audio podcast on various platforms such as iTunes and Stitcher and Android devices and all, and a bunch of other things. Just explore the menus and you’ll see what’s going on. Also, the “Upcoming Interviews” menu is the place you’d want to go, if you’d like to watch these live and submit questions because each week there’s a live stream link you can click on and you can watch it. It also says when they’re scheduled and everything. Okay?
Ted: Great okay.
Carole: Great thank you.
Rick: So see you all next week. My next guest will be Cynthia Bourgault who is a mystic and Episcopal priest or minister and an expert in the field of centering prayer, which was developed by Thomas Keating whom I’ve also interviewed. So I’ll see you then, maybe. Thanks all.
Carole: Right thanks.
Ted: Thanks Rick.
Rick: Yep take care.
Ted: Yep