Carole Griggs & Ted Strauss Interview

Summary

Carole Griggs and Ted Strauss discuss their model for mapping awakening and human development across consciousness, emotions, body, mind, and personal uniqueness. They explore why awakening is not linear, why integration matters, and how spiritual development might be studied more systematically.

Questions This Interview Explores

• Can spiritual awakening and human development be mapped in a clear, useful way?
• What happens after a person experiences a stable awakening of consciousness?
• How can spiritual awakening be integrated with emotional, physical, cognitive, and personal development?
• Why do people sometimes become stuck in partial or one-sided ideas of nonduality?
• Can scientific research objectively study different stages of awakening?

Key takeaways

• Awakening includes the whole person, not consciousness alone.
• Development is not strictly linear, but recurring patterns can still be mapped.
• Large gaps between different areas of development can create ethical and psychological problems.
• Integration across domains helps prevent spiritual bypassing and supports faster growth.
• Nonduality does not erase individuality, personal identity, or meaningful distinctions.
• Every realization is part of an ongoing process, with no final edge to awakening.

Transcript

I then started getting interested in the idea of awakening consciousness when I was probably around 12 or 13, and started reading spiritual books and 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.

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 with a one-time donation or a monthly one in any amount, it would be much appreciated. There’s a PayPal button on every page of the site.

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. 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 gave 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. I help awaken consciousness within them, as well as awaken their heart and emotional intelligence; the body, their uniqueness, and their personal gifts in this world; and their mind, cognitive intelligence, cognitive expansion, and cognitive capacities.

I’m a university professor for John F. Kennedy University, 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 that it is our deepest purpose on this planet to help facilitate that process, both 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 helped them locate where they are in order to accelerate their development and evolutionary process.

So, Ted and I met and had this common idea to map the process, because we’ve both been working with clients for decades on this. We just started brainstorming and had iterations of different models—and we’ll be talking more about that today—that reflect what both of 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? Why do some people seem to be more advanced in some ways than others?”

I then started getting interested in the idea of awakening consciousness when I was probably around 12 or 13, and started reading spiritual books and 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.

Why Awakening Needs Proper Support

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. Without that, people become disoriented, misaligned with themselves and the world—the universe, we could say—and spin in circles.

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. 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 I was going to fulfill what I’m here for was 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: Mm-hmm.

Ted: At the time, I was part of the Transcendental Meditation movement. I was 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: Mm-hmm.

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, that the only way for me to accomplish my goal of awakening millions or billions was to do so through the internet, through digital—some sort of digital means.

Carole: Mm-hmm.

Ted: So, ever since then, I’ve been trying to get various kinds of software going and working on things. After a while, it became abundantly clear that there wasn’t a good model. There was no good map that explained what it was like, subjectively even, to go through this awakening process—not just awakening consciousness, but awakening your whole being.

We’re very familiar with Integral, of course. We’re actually very familiar with a lot of the models out there. In fact, for 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, we realized we had to do something aligned with how we were seeing the process from our experience of working with thousands of students.

So that’s what we did. We spent the last couple of years doing that and taking it out into the world. We took it to SAND—that’s where we saw you. We went to SAND twice. We went to other conferences. We met other thought leaders in the world of awakening and human development, and in academia.

One of our goals was to make sure that we were integrating with what we were 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—students, teachers, 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.

Integrating Spiritual Maps of Awakening

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 got a long way to go.” And obviously there are 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.

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. 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.

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 all on the table, so to speak, and put them all together in a way that asked, “Okay, what are the common themes here, and what’s missing?”

From a meta perspective, when you take a step back and take a look at all these pieces, or take a look at a map, you start to see patterns. You’ll start to see similarities. When you zoom in and get too gritty and too close, it is a lot grayer. It’s fuzzy. Not everybody’s process is exactly linear. I mean, it’s just not.

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 6, there’s not a whole lot of research that has been done. There’s a lot of theory and a lot of ideas, but that’s where our work is a little bit cutting-edge and new, because there isn’t 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?

That’s where our work is unique and shows a meta-perspective process of what that would look like for somebody with post-stabilized consciousness and a heart awakening.

Ted: I just want to add something. One of the questions you asked there, Rick, was, “Yeah, it is fuzzy. Are we ever going to find a clear way to research and see what’s going on?”

I think the answer is, well, yeah, like any scientific endeavor. It’s a constant sequence of theorizing, testing the theories, changing the theory, and testing it again.

Part of the problem in this whole thing is that, in any kind of a significant way, it’s only been since around the mid-1990s that people in general have been having awakenings beyond just consciousness awakening to itself or just heart opening—something in our Chapter 7 on the model.

It’s not like it hasn’t been happening. It’s just that we don’t know who these people 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 who could be identified to do the testing with and 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 who can be tested.

Carole: Mm-hmm.

Ted: As we move along here, one of the next steps we’re going to be taking is using our system and 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, we’ve adapted the four quadrants from Ken Wilber’s system, and we call them our “Four Views.” 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 brain waves. Once we figure out where people are subjectively, let’s check their brain waves and see what’s going on, and let the deep-learning system figure out what the correlations are.

As we figure out the correlations, we can then figure out what words they were using subjectively. 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. I’m sure there’s no end to what it will discover, even though, at times, people have pronounced that pretty much everything has been discovered. And…

Ted: Can I say something on that?

Rick: Yeah, sure.

Ted: There are 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.” 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]

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.

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 the Tony Parsons–Richard Sylvester school of thinking. 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.

I was just trying to say that, in the form of non-dual communication, it’s absurd to talk that way. I was kind of responding by saying that there’s no such thing as non-dual communication. If it’s completely non-dual, then there are no people, no individualities, and no communication. Once you have some communication, then there’s this and that, me and you, and we’re going back and forth. The whole relative universe comes in, and there are levels and qualities and stages and degrees of development, and so on.

There are 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 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… 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 “Chapter 7,” where you awaken as consciousness. If you’re one of these people who has 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-hmm.

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, then more come in, and then you awaken 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, 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, we’re trying to broaden out of partialness and really go deeper into integration and wholeness.

From Transcendence to Embodied Integration

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. 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?”

So, ever since then, I’ve been trying to get various kinds of software going and working on things. After a while, it became abundantly clear that there wasn’t a good model. There was no good map that explained what it was like, subjectively even, to go through this awakening process—not just awakening consciousness, but awakening your whole being.

What is that integration process like? And what does it mean to deeply embody consciousness throughout the entire system? So those upper stages, per se, after an original, stabilized awakening, are 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 more clearly.

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. Our course, which we developed and have already given twice to the master’s program in the Consciousness and Transformative Studies Department at JFK, made this immediately obvious as soon as we sat down to start designing it.

They have a consciousness development component and a transformative personal development component. 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 them together, and the course shows students the history of human development understanding in the light of our model.

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, and how much they have attended to each 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, and some of them focused on Fowler’s work on faith or Loevinger’s work 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 that integration is what helps expedite one’s growth and development, their process. A pattern that both Ted and I have seen over and over again is that 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,” it causes a lot of issues in terms of ethics and morals.

If you hang out more in one and not 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 overemphasizing Body? Are you overemphasizing Consciousness and neglecting Uniqueness or 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 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 seems to accelerate your process in a huge manner, immensely.

But that just seems that way because we don’t realize it yet. Up until this point, we haven’t had a very good understanding 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 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. Within months, they have major awakening experiences.

And this is one of the great things we want to emphasize: when you know where you are, where you’re going, and how to get there, it’s not a problem.

Rick: So anyway, I just want to comment on the rubber band point you made. 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.

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?” The tendency is for development in one area to pull the others along, but it can really stretch a lot before it does.

It’s like if you take a table-leg example. You pull one leg of the table, and 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. That’s still what you’re talking about.

Rick: Just water the root of the tree, and all the leaves will flourish, 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, has a larger space that can hold them.

So there is an advantage, if you will, to giving concerted attention to consciousness awakening, so that container can be a lot larger and 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 into a big ocean or lake or something.

Carole: There you go.

Rick: It’s like a 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—the 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, based on your particular uniqueness, based on your personal design, based on 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, and that’s one of the things that we clearly made a distinction 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.

Distinct Paths of Emotional, Consciousness, and Gut Awakening

A heart or emotional awakening is often like this in-loveness with everything and intimacy with all things, which is very different from a consciousness awakening and different from a gut awakening.

So there are different kinds of awakenings, which we emphasize in our model. It’s not just, “Oh, I’ve had an awakening, and that’s it.” You can actually have a significant shift in each of the five domains, which we’ll get into in a minute, which are “Consciousness,” “Uniqueness,” “Emotion,” “Mind,” and “Body.” Each one of those has a distinct type or flavor of awakening that takes place.

Ted: Yeah, people awakening in the body experience more of a Zen awakening in the hara or something like that, where this huge empty space, just emptiness, opens up. And that’s experientially quite different from a head-based consciousness awakening. They’re all 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.

If you could somehow step inside each of their perspectives, do you think that, 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.”

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,” and “Singular.” The awakening of consciousness in classical terms falls under the “Dual” category, because usually people awaken to 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 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 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. Even in my years’ worth of deeply awakened experience, 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. Towards the end, we can talk about how one can actually take advantage of this and get involved and benefit 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? Naturally, I’ll be throwing in questions, and 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—that you could see the whole thing.

But over here we can zoom in, and you can click and hold and then drag it 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, in this “Dual” phase. And actually, probably between stages three and four, or Chapters 3 and 4. The majority of at least North America is within Chapters 3 or 4.

Those who are probably listening to this podcast or watching this YouTube video are likely a little bit further along, if you find yourself interested in this. But 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 deepest level, you cross this boundary where suddenly it’s like, “Oh, those parts of myself that I was previously rejecting are now fully embraced 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, 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 have 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 be updated according to the realization of Unity.

It’s like all the ways we dealt with people as separate entities, 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 kind of the classic “consciousness waking up to itself.” So, when a lot of people talk about awakening, they’re typically talking about Chapter 7.

Ted: And consciousness.

Carole: Yeah, and consciousness. And that’s a stabilized awakening, which is different from 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. It’s 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 a 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 oscillation that goes on.

Rick: But if you’re stabilized as the infinite, I mean, aren’t… Isn’t that…

Carole: It’s partial. You’re stabilized in that, but it’s partial. Chapter 9 is really coming back for the whole. You know, Chapter 9 is where consciousness really lands in the system in a way where 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.

After Chapter 6, there’s not a whole lot of research that has been done. There’s a lot of theory and a lot of ideas, but that’s where our work is a little bit cutting-edge and new, because there isn’t 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?

Which is why it’s not until Chapter 9 that we actually have it in the “Unified” phase, because in Chapters 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 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 eventually into 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 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 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 7 to 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… 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 5. Under 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, excuse me, I want to add that one of the things that can confound the appearance, even from a 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, that’s why we’ve got all these domains over here. 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’s strengths are going to show up and show them leading in their development in general.

Rick: Okay.

The Transforming Stage and Core Conditioning

Ted: So, then we go from the “Unified” phase into this “Transforming” stage, which is… You know, 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 have a flashlight shone 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?”

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.”

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 the marketplace. 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 turned from a desperate quest into kind of 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 the universe says, “Okay, go do it,” and you’re forced to go do it, and that’s where you are, right?

And that’s the beautiful thing about the Transforming stage: any energetic pulls to go do and be something other than what you really are, 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 much cleaner, more succinct way, without many hiccups and pushes and pulls to yank you out of alignment or away from where you’re headed.

Carole: And that’s the beautiful thing about the Transforming stage: any energetic pulls to go do and be something other than what you really are, 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 much cleaner, more succinct way, without many hiccups and pushes and pulls to yank you out of alignment or away from 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 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 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 the 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, et cetera. The themes apply vertically.

Rick: Right.

Carole: It allows for, say, somebody to be in Chapter 6 in Consciousness, but Chapter 2 in “Uniqueness” and Chapter 4 in “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, if you’ve spent a lifetime 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 wholly.

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 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, 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 showing where you are in “Consciousness,” where you are in “Uniqueness,” “Emotions,” “Mind,” and “Body.”

In this example, this individual’s center of gravity for Consciousness is in Chapter 7. Their Uniqueness is in Chapter 4, Emotions and Emotional Intelligence are in Chapter 3, Mind is in Chapter 9, and Body is in Chapter 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 example, if they’re in Chapter 3 of Emotions, they can go onto the “Treasury” page, which has “Interactive Models,” click on Chapter 3, “Emotions,” and there’ll be a whole treasury of resources: audios, videos, and practices specific to that domain at that level of development.

✨ Consciousness and the resting point of awareness

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 at others, and for certain aspects of one’s being. So there may be certain practices that are more body-oriented, and some that are more emotion-oriented. If you lean more toward consciousness, there may be some practices that you’re unaware of to help with the emotions and help evolve that.

So the “Treasury of Resources” really gives you a plethora of information, practices, practical tools, forums, and things like that to access different resources 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 that result from the test. The 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.

You’ll see this integration number. Basically, if all of these domains—even if they were down in Chapter 3—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 the scores of all five domains. That tells you, on average, where your development is.

And then there’s “Potential Realized.” “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 Chapter 16. So you could have some serious progress in one or more domains, but then your potential realized could still be low because you’re focusing so much in one area.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, you could have an Einstein who’s maybe all the way across the board on the Mind.

Carole: Exactly.

Ted: Yeah.

Carole: And we see that a lot in the West, Rick. The mind does tend to be the overdeveloped element, and consciousness is typically pretty low unless you’ve been engaged in meditation practices. 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 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 and 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 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.” Each of these resources—this is just here for a demo right now; we don’t have them all installed yet—will basically be a series of slides. You can click on the right or click on the left and go through hundreds of these things, maybe, to get a sense of what they’re about.

Here’s just the description and views of 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 and at that stage. There are quotes and examples, cartoons, images, videos, and other things down here in “Quotes and Examples,” so that when you read these things and start to understand where they are in the model, it starts changing your perspective.

That’s where our work is unique and shows a meta-perspective process of what that would look like for somebody with post-stabilized consciousness and a heart awakening.

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 using this example and you’re in Chapter 6, Consciousness, typically you can look at Chapter 5 in the description and say, “Okay, I remember being there.” You could really land in, “Okay, two years ago, I can 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’s there.

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. You can take the Guided Self-Assessment by itself. After that, if you sign up for the Treasury Resources, called the iConscious Treasury, you’ll get access to these 400 or so slideshows.

Rick: Okay, so what we’re seeing right now, then, is that at the particular stage that you wanted to show us, Gina Lake, Adyashanti, Byron Katie, and Jeff Foster might be good teachers to look at.

Ted: Exactly.

Carole: Yeah, exactly. So there are examples of people who tend to focus specifically in that domain, or who have a lot of their teachings focused in that domain or that chapter of development.

There are some teachers who really focus on the earlier stages, some on “Unified” and “Embodiment,” and others on “Singular.” We were starting to add some of these teachers so that people can find their retreats, books, audios, and videos that support their process, wherever they are in their development at that time.

Ted: And some of these teachers have a huge range in which they teach. 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. When you hit the “Forum” tab and then go over here and click this, you’ll get into the actual forum for that chapter.

We didn’t want to have 16 separate forums, 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.

Well, I just wanted to show what’s going on with the Treasury. 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 anywhere between 30 and 100 questions, and it shouldn’t take more than about—

Fifteen bucks, yep.

Rick: Oh, okay.

Carole: And then we’ll email the results. Once you get the results, you can take a post-GSA and have an interpretation and a walkthrough of what your 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 yourselves as having degrees of development in each of these areas, and not necessarily being in the final chapter? Your works, and you yourselves, are works in progress that are still 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. 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, and he’s not enlightened. How effective is 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, 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, act like, sound like, and smell like, or whatever.

They’re supposed to look and act and smell exactly 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. 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 were a bunch of people just chatting with each other.

Many people were having awakenings, and many people would say, “Well, I had this profound awakening,” and then tell their 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: Hmm-hmm.

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 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, “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.”

Carole and I are both Enneagram Type 7s, and my observation is that Enneagram Type 7s tend to go through pretty dramatic shifts in their process. Other people, like Type 9s, are kind of 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, crossing into the singular phase was very palpable, and then about half a year after 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 are all these descriptions in every one of these domains. But “Fluidity” is basically an experience of 24/7 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?”

This is like an automatic way of going into, of living in, the subject-object perspective that separates 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, 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 appear 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 and 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. The idea of witnessing sleep—yes, you can develop that. That’s a sort of advanced skill that some people will have the ability to develop naturally more than others.

But that doesn’t define what we mean by these various stages, even the consciousness awakening. 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 test or 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. Just because you have the capacity to heal in certain modalities or in certain ways doesn’t mean anything. It’s a skill set that might be particular to you, that individual.

Rick: Right. And conversely, being able to heal doesn’t mean you’re in a 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, the ability to see on a celestial level, that again is a 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 really hangs some people up. They’ve been told that there’s this map that involves these specific things at each and every stage, and that these are verifiers that you’ve actually reached that stage. If you’re not having them, then you haven’t reached that stage. 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, the capacity to heal, or anything like that.

Ted: Right. Yeah, in fact, I just want to point out, because there are a lot of people who are going to go, when they’re listening to this part of the conversation, “Oh, these guys are just 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 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. 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 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 is true.

But it’s very low-res, right? Now we have a much higher-resolution picture. That’s one of the things Carole and I have done, 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, 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 hypothetically, if we got to the stage where we had the technology to measure this stuff accurately, there could be a kind of 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 comparison. I mean, there have definitely been studies on gray matter in the brain based on how much one has been meditating. So they are showing variations with that.

So, yeah, we’ve got a long way to go. The technology isn’t quite there, and the technology that is there is extremely expensive. 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 could become like CERN, trying to 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 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.

So, for instance, maybe in a couple of years, when EEG headsets become good enough and cheap enough that everybody will have one—they’ll just be part of something they’re already wearing, or whatever—then we can start using deep-learning algorithms to understand these correlations without having to do an enormous project like that. Artificial intelligence will start understanding what’s going on.

Rick: Yeah. It’s interesting to consider, though, how important it is to find the Higgs boson compared to how important it is to really understand human potential, human development, and higher states of consciousness. 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—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.

Given the state of the world, and how all problems are really manifestations of human consciousness at whatever stage of development, 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. Our model will inform the artificial-intelligent avatar and help guide people through this awakening process, to hopefully expedite it all over the world.

Part of the problem in this whole thing is that, in any kind of a significant way, it’s only been since around the mid-1990s that people in general have been having awakenings beyond just consciousness awakening to itself or just heart opening—something in our Chapter 7 on the model.

That way, you don’t need to sit down with a coach or somebody like ourselves, who have this experience and can guide you through the process one day at a time. You’ll have access to that on a regular basis, and people from all over the world will have access to this.

No matter where you are developmentally, or if you can’t afford certain things—I mean, some people can’t even afford running water—but if we can make this avatar accessible to everybody in the world, as you said, and 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, that we’re in the process of now: creating that avatar that people can have access to, basically, in their pocket.

Rick: Yeah.

Ted: There are really two projects there. One is something we’ve been working with for a while now called Loving AI, in which we designed the dialogue for Sophia, the famous robot made by Hanson Robotics, who’s on YouTube all the time talking to major personalities. We were invited to design the dialogue to help people awaken through the robot.

They just did their first test, and 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—we’ll put some of the results of that test on our site under “About Media.” Some people were having experiences of transcendence more easily and more directly because it was a robot and not a person.

Human Transmission and AI-Assisted Awakening

Carole: Yeah, which I was pretty skeptical about, to be honest, Rick. I was pretty skeptical about the capacity for a robot to really help awaken people. There’s something about sitting with somebody in person, transmission, that, in my experience, is incredibly powerful.

My whole dissertation was basically on how the coach identifies themselves and the transformative possibilities that are then in the space for the client to change. Having a robot, I was really concerned: Would this robot be able to hold some kind of conscious space for a human being to really be invited into awakening?

The results so far are staggering. 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 who are coming back from war and have the option between a robot therapist or an avatar therapist and a live therapist. People are even choosing the avatar more and more, for various reasons that they’re doing some research on now.

So there is actually a demand and a need and a desire for the avatar, for the robots. Not that humans are never going to be chosen again. 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 who still want that live person.

So far, statistically speaking, people are really leaning toward this avatar. 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 puts them out of a job. They just go—when you’re sitting with a doctor these days, they’re on their computer, 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 in a way, I think it’s likely to be the opposite. More and more people will 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, losing their licenses, and stuff.

Carole: That’s true. Right.

Ted: You could just decommission them and make them build cinder-block walls.

Rick: Right. So a while ago, you were showing us, in the chart, a particular stage, and then you clicked on teachers, and we saw Adyashanti and Byron Katie and people 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. We will be populating this with as much content and information as we have access to, with all of our background and everything. We’ll also be opening it to anybody who wants to dump some things in there and let the cream of the crop rise to the top.

Our current plan is to start contacting a lot of these teachers and saying, “Hey, if you want, we will put your name in here. We’d just love to advertise you and get people to where they really need to be. 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 so they can find us, and there can be 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 the general direction right now.

Rick: You could even give them content—

Ted: I just want to say, yes, 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 create our own software that gives us the ability to have guided interactions with people through audio, video, text, graphics, and buttons.

That’s how 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 that a box will pop up and take over most of your screen, and it will engage you in this interaction.

Right now, the interaction it’s engaging you in is helping you understand our system and touring the various pieces that we’re offering. 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.

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 form online, and it 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. 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. Carole had something going on recently that really was pretty major. You probably want to talk about that.

I don’t think that they’re— 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.

The word Kundalini can cover a huge range of descriptions of experiences. But one way or the other, I would call that a state experience, and it will integrate. The energy that you experienced in that state is like a vision of the future. You will eventually experience that kind of ease and flow and openness. It’s just that you’re getting there, and this 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. In general, there was an experience of multiple—multiple, actually—openings 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.

There were just different openings and different cleanouts, is what it felt like, and processing, and things coming up and integrating into the whole. So I agree with Ted. I think those can happen at any stage of development. Like anything else, 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 like state experiences.

Ted: Right. They can really take place anywhere in the model.

People who don’t have these big experiences often look at people who do and go, “Oh gosh, I wish I had that.”

And then they’re like, “I guess I’m not there yet.” What’s really interesting about that is that I’ve 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 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.”

And when you validate it, they can own it and embody it.

Carole: M-hmm.

Ted: And that’s a big part of the process.

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 of people having 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’d had this experience. When you claim that experience, it drops in in a deeper way that’s 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 are going to be some final doubts that will prevent you from completely owning it. It seems like you’re developing a system that 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—

Being human mammals, because mammal creatures are always, when they’re born, the first thing they do is look at their mom and go, “How do I be?” Then they just start templating right on Mom. That’s how to be: “I’m going to be like Mom.”

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.

“Okay, I had this big experience, something shifted, it appears to be permanent, but what is it?” You’ve 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 had, like, a Chapter 7 consciousness awakening. 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.”

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 thread in the conversation about the Kundalini awakening is that 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 tangents and sidetracks, and it can go straight up, or it can get stuck here, and all that.

Carole: M-hmm.

Rick: So 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: Hmm-hmm.

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.

And actually, I’m so glad you brought that up, Rick. It’s just so important to honor where you are and not compare where you think you should be 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, “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 the real fire of transformation. If you want kundalini, be here now in your whole body—all of you: your emotions, your body, all domains.

Yeah, that’s important. I mean, some people say, “Give up the search,” and all that. My attitude is, 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.”

Rick: Yeah, that’s important. I mean, some people say, “Give up the search,” and all that. My attitude is, 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.”

And, “We’ll see where it unfolds.” But it also 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 to speak to your seeking, 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. The energy is still here to do that, and you will do that until you don’t.

Rick: And if someone tells you that you should stop, and then you find that you’re tending not to, 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. The seeking impulse is that being reflected within us.

Ted: Exactly. It’s just that the seeking impulse—I just want to point out that the seeking impulse has its own trajectory of evolution. When we’re down in the dual phase, it tends to start peaking around a certain chapter. It’s like, “There’s more. I know there’s more. I’m looking for it.” And then it’s the infinite 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 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 don’t have enough wholeness, wellness, and stillness in all circumstances to deal with all the possible healings that you need to go through.

Carole: Hmm-hmm.

Ted: So the seeking will just keep getting—now, when you get into this singular phase, the seeking becomes—I have to say, it isn’t really seeking at that point.

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 energy, or impulse, or 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. 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 impulse of evolution for all individuals and for everything.

Rick: Yeah. Okay, good. We’ve 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. I’m 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, there was that movie in the ’60s or something called Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. Irene was saying we should call this Rick, Carole, Ted and BatGap or something.

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, then more come in, and then you awaken 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.”

Ted: Yeah.

Rick: Now, you sent me a thing here, Ted. Let me see if we’ve 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, if anybody wants to, you know, is interested and wants to be supportive of our startup, we’re in the planning stages right now.

We have a stellar team of founders with Carole and me and a couple of other people, and we have a tremendous amount of support from a 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.

Pretty soon, we’ll start going around holding meetings, trying to get some investment. If this is something that you or any of your friends believe in and want to help us with, just 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. Since you’ve been so immersed in developing this map, you kind of live and breathe it, I’m sure. Do you find that, 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 when a spiritual person is reporting an experience, do you think, “Oh, they go right about there”?

Carole: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you for that, Rick. I do it with my clients all the time. It’s just information that comes in, kind of digitally, internally, landing in certain places, and then I coach from that place immediately, based on what I’m seeing or feeling.

The model really—and I’ve talked about this—it really lives in both of us in a way that, whether it’s coaching, interactions with other teachers, or interactions with other people in general, the model is really alive in both of us: in how we see, how we coach, and how we interact.

Rick: One interesting thought that I just had is that, 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. They’re kind of stuck there because they’re never going to be able to give the individual attention that people need.

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. One pattern I have noticed with students and clients of mine is that 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. She just spoke to me at that time, and her work was 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 a kind of naturalness and organic quality to finding the right teacher at the right time. We’re dropping these teachers in the right places so 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. 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. 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 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 they need. But it will be better than any teacher could possibly be, because the idea is that it will have the information from all the teachers and traditions.

Rick: Hmm-hmm.

Ted: It’s like what Google was doing with all the information on the planet when it just indexed the whole thing and made 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 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. 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.

I really appreciated my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Heffernan. She was really nice, but then I had other teachers in later grades that I also really liked.

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. For instance, I interviewed Raphael Kushner a couple of 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 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 about 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 remembered 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 a 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 are 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. 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 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, “It doesn’t matter.” 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. 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, whether they’re one-on-one or with a big group.

There are plenty of ordinary awakened people who 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 it’s 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 being’s 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. That whole thing was really an inheritance from the time in humanity’s development 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.” 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—or 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. I just really enjoyed my conversation with him, the overlaps and the curiosities on both ends, and what we’re each discovering.

There are some similarities. There are some differences. I think one of the biggest differences is that Jeffrey primarily focuses on consciousness, whereas we focus on an integrated model, including all five domains, not just primarily the consciousness awakening.

There are other similarities and differences, but there are plenty of similarities with his work, and I love following his work because he is coming at it more from—he’s a scientist and a researcher. I deeply respect him and his work. I’m sure he and I, or we, Ted and I, will stay in touch with him, perhaps. By the time we were done, we both were just curious about 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 to a point where, before you go through too many stages, you’re not going to be able to function in the world. He actually even talks about coming back down to a lower stage so you can function.

I kind of had problems with that. I mean, there obviously have been examples, like Ramana Maharshi or whatever, who probably couldn’t hold down a job. I mean, he’s just very high up there, but not in any kind of worldly capacity.

I really wonder, idealistically at least, if 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 who don’t know Jeffrey’s work—and I don’t claim to speak too precisely about his work—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. You can land in location three as your primary awakening, and you can go back to two, and then you can jump to four.

Four is kind of the “non”—more the nonfunctional and non-heart-feeling location. I’ve heard stories about that, where people want to at least go back to three so that they 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 are these four locations, and that’s a little different. Ted and I’s system is not necessarily that you’re bouncing all over the place like that and choosing areas like that. I also know that 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 have—

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 from 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 way of wrapping 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. I really appreciate that, and I 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. 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, there’s a contact option. 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 it is 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? What’s not clear? What do we have to fix?” That’s where we’re at.

Rick: Okay, great. So, thanks. Let me just make a couple of wrap-up points. This, as most people watching this will know, is an ongoing series. It’s been going on for years, and hopefully it will continue to. If you are somewhat new to it, 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, Stitcher, 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 livestream link you can click on and watch. 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 Bourgeault, 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.