Catherine Ingram Transcript

Catherine Ingram Interview

Summary:

Rick:  Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week is Catherine Ingram. Catherine is an international Dharma teacher with communities in the US, Europe and Australia. Since 1992, she has led Dharma Dialogues, which are public events that focus on directing awareness toward greater well-being in an ethical and happy life. Catherine also leads numerous silent retreats each year in conjunction with Dharma Dialogues. She is president of Living Dharma, an educational non-profit organization founded in 1995. Her bio goes on. She has done all sorts of interesting things, but we will talk about that during the interview itself. So no point in my just reading it. Welcome Catherine.

Catherine: Thank you Rick.

Rick:  When I read some of your stuff and listened to some of your other interviews, I just had the feeling to say, “Congratulations on a life well lived.” But it makes it sound like it is over, which it is not.

Catherine: Getting closer though.

Rick:  Keep on trucking and the best is yet to come. You have an interesting story. Some teachers and some people I interview don’t like to tell their story because they say it emphasizes the personal too much, but I don’t think you have a problem with that. So in the course of our conversation it would be interesting to cover your personal history, which I think is quite colorful and quite an adventure in many ways. And also of course in doing that we will be weaving in all kinds of philosophical, spiritual topics and points. So where would you like to start?

Catherine: Wow! I have a hard time picking any particular point.

Rick:  Well you said you had a hard childhood. Maybe that is a place to start. Mine wasn’t exactly a bed of roses either, but how was it hard?

Catherine: Well, my parents, bless their hearts, were young and they really weren’t up for the job actually, how to say it any other way. And at this point in my life I have nothing but love and forgiveness. I see clearly that they did the best they could, all of those things. But living through it was very, very hard as a child. So from a very young age I was asking questions about justice, about fairness, about is there meaning, is there purpose. I became very attuned to suffering wherever I saw it, even as a young person. And that became a huge theme in my life, trying to make sense of my world, which I experienced as unjust and as abusive. So that led me on a spiritual search from a quite young age, like from 12 I would say.

Rick:  This hops us right into a metaphysical consideration, but looking back on it, do you feel that there is some, I could say divine orchestration, not only in your life but in people’s lives in general, which makes such childhoods and experiences not merely coincidental and meaningless in their suffering, but is actually a kind of a divine goad to get us on to something deeper?

Catherine: I don’t see it that way, no. Mainly I see it as, if that is circumstantially the case for you, then you are the one who is going to have to make meaning of it. And some are able to do that by some kind of fate or luck or whatever, and others not. I feel fortunate, really just fortunate, lucky, that I was able, first of all, that I lived in the time that I lived in, when one had access to amazing teachings around the world. You weren’t just stuck in the religion you were born in and trying to make sense of that, which never appealed to me. I was born into a Christian household, Christian one side, Catholic the other, neither of which spoke to me. I mean really, from the time I remember being in Sunday school and just hating it.

Rick:  Me too, it ruined my Sundays. I feel kind of dopey and bummed out the rest of the day.

Catherine: I would look forward to the snacks there after class. But anyway, as I said, I was on this search and fortunately grew up in a time when there was tremendous freedom to find those kinds of things, that kind of information, and to travel and go to the places in Asia where I was inclined to study, and live there and find the great teachers. So all of the things I was doing in those early years, Rick, becoming a journalist and setting up meditation retreats and running them and so on, it was all in the service of being around those wisdom holders that existed on earth. And that was my education. I didn’t go to college. I just threw myself into Dharma study, you could say. And at the same time I came of age in a very free time for a woman. I came of age in the 60s, you could say that was a really hot, fabulous time. I don’t know how old you are.

Rick:  I’m almost 64.

Catherine: You look much younger. So we are about the same age, and so you know very well what I’m talking about.

Rick:  Very exciting time.

Catherine: The music and the freedom and the hope and the travel, and somehow or other we could live on like $100 a month. I have friends who were living in Victorians in San Francisco for just nothing, and it was a different time. Hard to even explain to anyone how we did it. I can’t even remember.

Rick:  Part of me is still there, I was just listening to Jimi Hendrix yesterday.

Catherine: I was just thinking about Jimi Hendrix yesterday, that’s amazing.

Rick:  He was great.

Catherine: He was great, amazing, yeah, I was just thinking about him. Anyway, so you know, it was all of those kinds of freedom and the freedom to study whatever you wanted to study. So I feel very lucky in that regard, because I was going crazy. I was really miserable, and I felt this world was far too coarse and cruel for my sensitive nervous system. And finding the Dharma, I say that very broadly, not that it’s some thing in particular, but that it’s a perspective and a kind of enhancement of your own experience of yourself. Finding that saved me, it just did.

Rick:  I think I heard you say that reading “Be Here Now” was your first introduction to it.

Catherine: Yeah, reading Ram Dass’ “Be Here Now” I was maybe 18 or 19 years old. In the back of the book he had a suggested reading list.

Rick:  Oh, you read all those things, yeah.

Catherine: I read every one of those books. I just went through them. Some I resonated with more than others, but I managed to get hold of all of them and read them.

Rick:  Yeah. Did you do much of a drug phase during that period?

Catherine: Yeah, I did. I wouldn’t say I was ever heavily into drugs, but I was always interested in mind exploration. I did a number of LSD trips, and when ecstasy came around I was a real early adopter of that, way back in the 70s actually. Marijuana, in those days all those mushrooms, etc. I was very interested. I always used drugs kind of ritually. I was very interested in where it would take me in the outer reaches of my consciousness.

Rick:  Yeah, I did too, at least in theory. I mean, after a while it got to be sort of just a muddle. Finally, one night I sat down and said to myself, “What are you doing? You think you have these spiritual aspirations and you’re totally screwing around. Time to shift gears here.”

Catherine: Yeah, absolutely. And also, as Ram Dass once said, no matter how high he got, he always came down. If you’re using drugs for that kind of expansion, it’s a time-limited journey. And it has a price to pay, a physical price. So, that fell away from me quite a long time ago.

Rick:  Yeah, it’s interesting. We should be on this topic. Just this morning I was reading a post on my BatGap blog by this old friend of mine who is claiming that ever since his awakening, whatever that means, drugs are so much more enjoyable. And my response to that, although I haven’t written one, would be something like, “Well, you know, there are lots of things that you could mean by the word ‘awakening,’ and there could be many stages of awakening. And to my mind, if you’ve reached something really significant, I don’t see how drugs could enhance it. They could only muddle it up. It’s kind of like the elephant. It takes a bath in the river, it comes out and throws mud on its back again. It just doesn’t add anything.”

Catherine: Yeah, and well, in the case of the elephant, there’s some actual biological question.

Rick:  Yeah, some reason for it to keep the bugs off.

Catherine: But what I can say to it is that at a certain level of sensitivity, you would experience what the drug is doing in your system, which I can’t imagine is any good. And so I think that that’s also a part of what people might consider about this word “awakening” is to be able to be attuned to your own embodiment and to your own physical system.

Rick:  Yeah, and ultimately we’re our own pharmacopoeia. I mean, whatever chemicals or whatever the body needs to reflect whatever states of consciousness might be possible, we’re wired to be able to produce those.

Catherine: Absolutely, and I would say too, when we’re in our sweet spot, there are likely really happy chemicals running through as well, that are quite self-generated.

Rick:  Of course, there’s the famous Neem Karoli Baba story, when Ram Dass brought him the LSD and he took several of them and nothing happened. Alright, so then you really got into serious practice, 17 or 20 years or something of intense Buddhist meditation. Let’s talk about that a little bit.

Catherine: Yeah, so I found this community. Joseph Goldstein was my first and primary Buddhist teacher, and he’s wonderful and clear as a bell. And I found this fantastic community, and all of those friends from those days, many of whom are quite famous Buddhist teachers now, are still my very close friends. We went together on a big journey, but for me, there came a point when practice just fell away. I never was delighted by it, frankly. I never really enjoyed those rigorous, long days of sitting, just sitting on cushions for eight hours a day. It just never appealed to me, and I would do it because I thought one had to, to get anywhere. And because all my friends were into it, my dear friends who I loved and trusted, and it was my world, it was my community, it was everything. So when this practice and this whole program started to fall away, not only was I losing the connection to what for me at that time was Dharma, I was also losing a feeling of being on the inside, in the in-crowd with my friends, because we no longer were agreeing on things, you know, and speaking the same language. It was a very lonely, scary time for me, whereby I felt not connected to worldliness and not connected to my Dharma community anymore, at least for that phase of transition. And that was a very depressing phase, very depressing.

Rick:  But very evolutionary, I would say.

Catherine: Yeah.

Rick:  And the question is, I mean, how would you like to still be sitting on that cushion now?

Catherine: I’m way too old for it now.

Rick:  Right, if they give you a rocker to sit on.

Catherine: Yeah, if they had a laying-down version I could manage it.

Rick:  Yeah, I mean, there’s an important point in this, which is that, you know, I think dedication and perseverance and stick-to-itiveness are important qualities on a spiritual path, but at a certain point, having the independence of mind to leave it and do something else maybe, or do nothing for a while, that’s also important, and you kind of have to know intuitively which is which, you know, what the right time for one or the other is.

Catherine: Yeah, yeah, I agree. And when something is falling away, from my point of view, you know, I love the Gandhi quote, “My commitment is to truth, not to consistency.” And to not just force a consistency to something just because you’ve put a lot of time in, when it is no longer true, when it’s just no longer true for you.

Rick:  Yeah, I left the spiritual movement that I had been involved with for 25 years, and just at a certain point it just felt like this is the way to go, you know. And there was no sort of a… I mean, there was a little bit of grumbling, like, you know, about certain things, but for the most part there was just appreciation for everything that I had derived from it, and okay, now what’s next?

Catherine: Yes, exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah. So for me, the “what’s next” turned out to be, I met Poonjaji,

Rick:  Right, after a couple of years of depression.

Catherine: Yeah, exactly, yeah.

Rick:  Right.

Catherine: I met Poonjaji and that was a very happy meeting. And of course his message was so simple, and you know, and it’s not as if there was some landing and awakening as a result of hearing that message and kind of grokking and imbibing that message, but rather that it’s been a long process of deeper and deeper relaxation, and in non-doing and in non-efforting and in just being.

Rick:  To this day, right?

Catherine: To this day, to this very moment, yeah. Yeah, that, you know, I would say that when I was around him that first time – I went three times to meet him in India – the very first time something fell away, and that something that fell away was seeking. That seeking that had been going on since, as I said, I was about 12 years old when I started asking the big questions. And it fell away into the mystery. And I began to realize I don’t even have to have answers to anything. You know, I’m just another creature here. I’m just another animal on the planet, you know. And I don’t have to know that much to get around. And so all of the seeking and the sort of big, what I call the “me” project, the self-improvement, the trying to get better at anything, in terms of, you know, in terms of so-called spiritual qualities, all of that just fell away. And in the continuing relaxation, certain qualities just emerge on their own. You know, one gets, as you know, one becomes more understanding, more generous, more easy-going, you know, more embodied. Like we were saying, you know, you’re tuned into your body, and this is the subject of my book “Passionate Presence”, that these qualities just emerge. All these qualities that we were looking for and trying to enhance in some way through spiritual practice, and lo and behold, they’re innate, as long as you’re just resting in the simplicity of being, you know.

Rick:  Yeah. At some point during this interview I want to talk about that book and about your “Seven Qualities of Awakened Awareness” that I heard you itemize in one of your talks. Whenever I hear somebody talk about, you know, “seeking dropped off” or “give up seeking” and so on, I’m just inclined to sort of add that it doesn’t mean it’s the end of discovery or exploration, or as you say, deepening or anything like that. It’s just the end of a certain kind of desperation quality.

Catherine: Yeah, right. It’s the end of this motor that’s running, you know, that’s like demanding, you know, to kind of seek and find. Rather, one is open, of course, to, like I call it sometimes, “winks from the mystery” you know. The mystery will wink at you and suddenly there’s a little “aha” you know, or something is revealed, or, you know, there’s a deeper understanding about something, or, yeah.

Rick:  Yeah, it’s just a sort of a kind of a straining quality is relaxed out of. I remember I was on a long meditation course and some guy got up to the mic and he said, “I want to have cosmic consciousness before I leave this course, even if they have to carry me out of here on a stretcher”

Catherine: Oh my God! [Laughter]

Catherine: Yeah, wrong way about though.

Rick:  Yeah, right.

Catherine: Except that, you know, one of the things Poonjaji used to say that was very delightful is, you know, people would say, “Well, all this straining and struggle that I’ve been doing, are you telling me it’s just useless?” And he’d say, “Well, no, it’s useless that you’ll discover it just didn’t work”

Rick:  Yeah. There’s also a fine line between a sort of an intense yearning and motivation for the full awakening and straining from a kind of an individual perspective, you know what I mean? It’s like you hear stories of some great saints like Amma, the hugging saint, so on, and many others who were in their youth were just burning, you know, with this urgency for awakening, and didn’t want to live if it couldn’t be. And so I guess you could call that seeking, but there was just sort of a… to me there’s a subtle distinction between something like that and kind of a more ego-based or individuated, you know, trying to break down the gates kind of thing.

Catherine: Yeah, Poonjaji used to call it “holy yearning”

Rick:  Yeah, there you go.

Catherine: Yeah, and I would also add that I think for some people that kind of burning might be a prerequisite before they sort of come to the relaxation part, that they have to kind of burn hot for a long time before those coals kind of cool off. But for others, I’ve known many others over the course of years of having my sessions, they can come to it more quietly. They can come to it without having… I happened to be one who did have that burning in a kind of desperation because I was trying so desperately to make sense of the intense suffering I was experiencing. But I have certainly met many others who didn’t have to go through that fire.

Rick:  Maybe it’s safe to say there’s no universal prescription or explanation. It’s a very individual consideration and one size does not fit all.

Catherine: Yeah, I think that’s true.

Rick:  Okay, let’s talk more about your time with Papaji or Poonjaji. What would you like to say about that?

Rick:  It was obviously quite a scene. I mean, there’s so many people who have come here, whom I’ve interviewed, and who went to Lucknow and came back kind of like on fire with what they had experienced there.

Catherine: Yeah, well he was quite a gigantic transmitter of the message without even trying, just hanging around him. So that was extremely beautiful. Sometimes people ask me, “What exactly did you gain from… what was the transmission?” And as I said earlier, the falling away of the seeking, and also some kind of confidence, some kind of confidence that one really can just relax and give up the fight and really trust in the deep quietude and the quiet of the heart, that you can just live from that, that there’s a kind of intelligence that comes from that, that really it’s the one and only thing you need to really remember, and all the rest of it unfolds. So I’d say that those were the takeaways from the experience there in Lucknow. Over these many years, and he’s been dead a long time as well now, I would say I have my own expression of this, I’m not just some cookie cutter. He was his own person and had his own way of seeing, and I don’t entirely see it exactly like he does on all points, or that he did. But I’m just so grateful for what he pointed out and what he was. I would suggest maybe that the giving up of seeking and the confidence were kind of effects more than causes. They were symptoms of a kind of an inner awakening that got kindled in his presence.

Catherine: Yes.

Rick:  So it’s not like you made some kind of conscious intention to give up seeking. It’s more like it was able to drop away finally, once that sort of inner awareness was more enlivened in his presence.

Catherine: That’s exactly right, exactly right. You know, you probably have a list of things, because I can see you’ve done your homework, which I so appreciate. I used to be a journalist myself.

Rick:  Oh, we can take this in whatever direction you want.

Catherine: I would like to take this in, and it’s because I’m thinking about it all the time. And that is, we are in a world that’s in trouble, you know? We are really in a world that’s in trouble. I mean, it seems that we could talk about any number of things, any one of which could threaten the survival of our species.

Rick:  Yeah.

Catherine: You know, rogue nuclear materials and capabilities.

Rick:  Climate change, genetic engineering.

Catherine: Fukushima is poisoning the ocean.

Rick:  Fukushima, yeah, there’s a big radiation cloud floating across the Pacific.

Catherine: And hundreds and thousands of tons of radioactive water going into the Pacific, and on and on. I mean, there is just, it seems, no end. And not only that, but more and more humans on this planet, struggling for fewer and fewer resources, fewer and less and less clean water. And so, you know, sometimes I feel that the focus on sort of personal delight and happiness, I mean, of course that’s important.

Rick:  Self-indulgent or something.

Catherine: Sometimes I feel so. And it was always my sense, even as a young journalist, I focused on activism, you know? And so, one of the things I think a lot about is the ways that we, who have been in this sort of spiritual community, are going to be called upon in these coming years. And how important it is for us, and because of our privilege, and how incumbent it is upon us to really be clear, and to not go into any kind of transcendent conversation or perspectives. You know, to really be solid and clear and strong. And I feel that I’m, in my own case, I feel like I’m being honed for that. Do you feel that?

Rick:  Oh yeah, for decades. And this is exciting that you’re bringing this up. I’ve kind of touched upon it in some recent interviews. I interviewed Foster and Kimberly Gamble a couple of weeks ago, who did the Thrive movie. And we talked about this stuff a lot. And I have Llewellyn Vaughan Lee coming up in November, who just wrote a book on spiritual ecology. And he’s always identified, I’m just using him as a case in point, he’s always kind of identified himself as a mystic, who was primarily concerned with inner dimensions and so on. And he now feels called to take on this mission of the ecology, and the climate, and so on. But the interesting thing in his book, which is really a collection of essays from a lot of different writers, is that they’re all pointing to the spiritual dimension as being the ultimate solution – not the exclusive solution – but an essential component of any meaningful solution. That without that, there’s a sort of baselessness, which will cause more material solutions to ultimately fail.

Catherine: Right, exactly. I mean, Einstein said it long ago, didn’t he? That we can’t solve the problem at the same level of consciousness that the problem was created. Something like that.

Rick:  Yeah, exactly.

Catherine: And I think one of the primary things that is desperately needed is a worldwide focus or expansion into empathy. One of my friends, Jeremy Rifkin, wrote a beautiful book called “The Empathic Civilization.” That’s what we have to have now. And of course, that’s exactly our field, is in consciousness there is automatic empathy. And another thing that I speak a lot about is in the understanding, in the deepening and quiet of one’s own clear space, there’s just more contentment. Contentment is sorely missing in this world, and it’s also part of why we’re destroying ourselves. It’s just this constant gulping of the resources, because people are just not easily content, especially in the Western world.

Rick:  Well, both of these things point to really inner qualities, you know, contentment and empathy is… you can’t superimpose empathy on a person. It has to kind of spring naturally from some inner state in which it is abundant. I’m reminded of that verse in the Old Testament, “My cup runneth over” If the cup isn’t full, it’s not going to run over.

Catherine: Yes, exactly. I often speak about letting your well fill up so that it runs over, letting your own inner well fill up in all the ways that we know. Yeah, absolutely.

Rick:  Yeah, and you know, it’s encouraging to me. I interviewed a guy named Talat Jonathan Phillips a few months ago, and he was kind of an activist during the Bush years, you know, protesting and this and that, and also I think involved in that, what shall we call it?

Catherine: The anti-

Rick:  Yeah, the thing that happened a couple of years ago.

Catherine: Occupy Wall Street?

Rick:  Occupy, of course, yeah, I was thinking Wall Street, but I couldn’t remember Occupy. But in any case, what he observed is that there used to be this gulf between spiritual people and the activist people, and you probably observed this too. And they couldn’t understand each other, and each of them thought the other was sort of out to lunch, you know.

Catherine: Missing the boat.

Rick:  Yeah, yeah, but it seems to have been bridged now to a great extent in many people at least, where each side is kind of recognizing the validity and significance and importance of the other and incorporating both within their own experience and activity.

Catherine: Yeah, I see that very much so, and I also honor people’s nature. Some people are just more comfortable in the activist world with perhaps some influence from the spiritual types, and some are… it’s almost like cast, different casts. Some are warrior cast, some are priest cast, but to have a great sort of tribal communication and effort together is a good idea.

Rick:  Or dharmas, you use the word dharma a lot. It often is defined as that course of action which is most appropriate and evolutionary for you.

Catherine: Yeah, exactly, right, yeah, exactly. And I’ve known a lot of activists over the years, and if you’re just moving from anger and outrage and wanting to stop people that you perceive as evil, you’re going to burn out. You’re basically running on hate and anger.

Rick:  You’re doing what Einstein said not to do.

Catherine: Yes, exactly. Yeah, you’ll just burn out, and not only that, it’s not very effective.

Rick:  Right.

Catherine: But yet also we know on the other side, just being kind of spiritually obsessed with yourself and having a grand old time, or in some sort of transcendent story whereby you see this world as illusion, isn’t so incredibly, to my mind, ignorant and ineffective.

Rick:  You said something great in one of your writings that is going to be one of my mantras now. You said regarding dismissing the suffering of the world as illusion, you said you’re only entitled to do that if you can be burned at the stake and dismiss that as an illusion. If you regard the world as illusion yet still get annoyed at petty things, you’re a spiritual hypocrite.

Catherine: I agree.

Rick:  Yeah, that’s great.

Catherine: Yeah.

Rick:  So what are you doing in terms of… I think you’re doing something to help animals, I remember hearing, and then I heard… what sorts of ways are you engaging in kind of a spiritual activism?

Catherine: You know, it is interesting. Having known so many activists, worked as a journalist in activist material a lot, and been on lots of boards for human rights, I find myself the most broken-hearted somehow about what’s happening to the world’s creatures, to the other animals.

Rick:  Because they’re so innocent?

Catherine: Because they’re so innocent, yeah. And because we’re seeing the last of them. I mean, we are just on a rampage of… yeah, I’m unfortunately privy to so much information about what’s going on with the animals. So I hear pretty much daily, because I’m on this board, Global Animal, wonderful organization. And I just heard yesterday about all the poaching that’s going on of the elephants, killing the elephants just in droves. Now they’re not even bothering to shoot them, they’re poisoning them. So they’re poisoning their water supplies, which is also going to poison a lot of the other animals using those same rivers and lakes. And it’s just, you know, it’s really heartbreaking and shocking what we’re doing. And so yes, I find myself really caring now much more, in a sense, about the other animals. Because the humans are overrunning, we’re overrunning our own population. They are diminishing, you know.

Rick:  And there’s so many other examples. You could, you know, the clear-cutting of the orangutans natural habitat, and just so many things. I mean, so many species go extinct every day.

Catherine: Yeah, that’s right.

Rick:  So when we get right down to it though, you know, is the presence of spiritual people on earth somehow going to change the hearts of the poachers and the clear-cutters? Or do we have to get in there with, you know, Uzzies and park rangers, go in there and try to fight these guys and stop them? Where do you…?

Catherine: How do you do it? I know…

Rick:  How do you do it?

Catherine: Well, it’s a race, Rick. We’re in a race, you know. There’s of course a lot of evidence for an awakening of consciousness on the planet, whereby more and more people are saying certain types of behavior are simply not okay. But at the same time, the rate of destruction is such that it takes your breath away. So it’s hard to know. I can’t venture even a guess as to how it’s going to play out and what in specific cases we should do.

Rick:  Yeah, it’s tricky. I mean, and there’s so many other examples. I mean, the whole big debate about Syria right now.

Catherine: Yeah.

Rick:  You know, what do we do? To me it’s not as black and white as most people are thinking. I can see the argument for going in there and doing some strategic strikes as a slap on the wrist or whatever, for using poison gas, and I can also understand people not wanting to do that. But ultimately, is there any solution to that and so many other problems on that level? Any… It’s like in the Gita, Arjuna said, “I don’t want to kill these people. I would just as soon live on alms in this world” And Krishna said, “No, you have to fight. Fighting is what’s called for in this circumstance”

Catherine: Right, you have to do your duty in this circumstance.

Rick:  Yeah.

Catherine: Yeah, I know, but this is always a hard one, and as one who… I mean, I, you know, having been in Gandhian thought for most of my adult life, I have tweaked my fanaticism about it, because there are times when I think, “Yeah, you know, we’re going to have to just fight the fight” I’m not sure this is one of them, but I have had those thoughts and feelings about certain circumstances. And, I mean, the classic one that’s always used is Hitler. Of course, I’m glad we stopped Hitler.

Rick:  Yeah.

Catherine: And there are plenty of other times when I see some bad actor get stopped, and however you stop him, fine, it’s fair. You know, because you always want to look at what is the greater good, and what is the least suffering, you know? So those are the questions. I don’t know that any strike in Syria is going to ultimately work out well for anybody, you know. I just don’t know. It’s certainly not been the case in the last 12 years of our interventions.

Rick:  Yeah. But then nothing in the relative is 100% good or bad. There’s always this sort of mixed bag.

Catherine: Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. Yeah.

Rick:  Laurens van der Post was one of my favorite authors. I used to read all of his books. He was a South African writer and he wrote some beautiful books about the Bush.

Catherine: Yes.

Rick:  Did you ever read him?

Catherine: Yes. What was that?

Rick:  “A Story Like the Wind in a Far-Off Place.”

Catherine: Yes, “A Story Like the Wind.” Oh my, beautiful.

Rick:  He was such an interesting guy because on the one hand he was a soldier and an adventurer, and he lived this very sort of active life, and on the other hand he was best friends with Carl Jung, and he was like a really deep spiritual man. So he managed to kind of blend these qualities together very nicely. And one of his lesser-known books was one called “The Prisoner and the Bomb” and he was a prisoner in a Japanese prisoner of war camp during World War II, and they had a little clandestine radio that they were listening to, you know, the Japanese didn’t know they had, and they heard about this event that had taken place.

Catherine: Is this a book or is it in real life?

Rick:  It’s a book. Well, it’s a true book. It’s a true account of his experience. And they heard about this kind of miraculous, this awesome event that had taken place in Hiroshima. And the Japanese were talking of it as if it were some kind of divine thing, not in a good sense, but just sort of, you know. And he went on to argue in the book that in favor of having used nuclear weapons there, he said, “Well, if we hadn’t, it would have become a ground war in Japan, and a million US troops would have died, you know, and however many Japanese.” So it’s another one of those kind of sticky wickets where, you know, it’s so hard to be moralistically certain on one side or the other.

Catherine: I know, it’s true. It’s like the fortunate or unfortunate story, you know, that one? The fortunate or unfortunate where the farmer has two horses and…

Rick:  Oh, right, right, right, right, right, yeah.

Catherine: Yeah.

Rick:  Yeah. So anyway, we’re kind of leaving ourselves in a state of uncertainty, which I think is great. You know, this is just…

Catherine: It kind of brings us back, you know, it just brings you back to your own goodness, your own commitment to goodness, however it plays out. You know, you can’t really have it attached to outcome. It has to be only for its own sake, every single day. There’s a quote I love from W.S. Merwin, who has become a friend when I was living on Maui. He said, “On the last day of the world, I would want to plant a tree” And I just love the sentiment of that, that you just keep doing it for its own sake, you know. And do it from the sweetness of your own heart, you know, whatever your action is in the world.

Rick:  Yeah. What I kind of think it comes down to is, well, you just sort of said it, but you just keep, you know, stoking your fire as best you can. And you know, as best you know how. Give plenty of attention to your spiritual development, but that’s not all one does in life. One has to eat, one has to sleep, one has to work, and so naturally there’s the activity phase of your life.

Catherine: And dancing, and…

Rick:  Yeah, all that stuff.

Catherine: …bread, and all those things, yeah.

Rick:  And that will be nourished by your spiritual life, and perhaps aligned more, kind of, evolutionarily, you know. And so you can kind of… life can kind of come into a harmonious balance, where you can be fighting the good fight, but doing so not from a standpoint of righteousness, because that has a kind of a moralistic implication, but from the standpoint of kind of natural law, one might say, or just attunement with Divine Will, or some such things.

Catherine: Natural empathy.

Rick:  Yeah, yeah.

Catherine: Yes, indeed, yeah.

Rick:  Would you like to say anything more on that whole theme of, you know, the state of the world, and what… I mean, most of the people who listen to this show would consider themselves to be spiritually motivated people, you know. And so, you know, what more can you say about…

Catherine: Like Buddha at the gas pump, actually.

Rick:  Yeah, right. What more can you say about what a spiritually motivated person might do, or would want to know, you know, when confronted with all the horrors of the world?

Catherine: Well, another aspect that I think a lot about in this regard is the intensification of letting go, as one goes along in this world, you know. That on the one hand, you’re showing up, and you’re celebrating, and you’re giving it your all, and so on. But at the same time, you’re also saying a lot of goodbyes, you know. You’re getting pretty adept, aren’t we, at letting go? We’re getting pretty much the hang of it here. And it seems that, you know, you can hardly get through a week without some new thing to be letting go of, some big situation, you know, especially at this age. I, you know, hear about…

Rick:  Do you mean like friends dying and stuff?

Catherine: Yeah, friends dying, diagnosis of this and that, and just, you know, just… And also just a sensing of loss on the horizon, you know. So, that also has a very powerful effect on, I think, one’s perspective, one’s capacity for love, for appreciation, for generosity, for not holding onto things unnecessarily, for truly not sweating the small stuff, and so on. And I’d say that’s another component of, you know… I said something many, many years ago in an interview, when I talked about seeing the glory with tears in your eyes, you know, that there’s a way in which, you know, I’m looking at all of this, you know, all of this, seeing it and feeling it and loving it so much, and at the same time I often have tears in my eyes, you know.

Rick:  Yeah, I have a quote from you here, “Seeing the divine in everything, the beautiful and the horrible” And you talk a lot about sort of being broken-hearted, wide open, you know, just kind of letting everything flow through you.

Catherine: Yeah, that’s true. Yeah, I seemingly get more and more broken-hearted.

Rick:  And that seems to be a kind of a universal spiritual characteristic too, at least you hear a lot of people talk about it. In fact, I have one friend, he said, after he had a profound awakening, he couldn’t go to movies anymore because he’d make a scene, you know, crying.

Catherine: I cry every single day.

Rick:  Even in movies that weren’t really that sad, he just gets so…

Catherine: I know, and sometimes someone will be telling me something sad, and I’ll have tears running down my face, you know, and I sometimes want to say to them, “Don’t worry, this happens all the time, I’m not really that bad”

Rick:  That’s beautiful. I mentioned Amma earlier, right? My wife and I go to see Amma every couple of times a year, and it’s interesting to watch her in that respect, because person after person after person will come to her, and she’s just like clouds moving along, and one person will come and there’ll be tears running down her cheek, and she’ll be smiling, and the next person will come and she’ll be laughing uproariously, and the next person, and then something will happen, and she’ll get a little angry over here, you know, and it’s just like, “Boom, boom, boom” without any kind of rigidity or stagnation.

Catherine: Yes, yes, a great fluidity. Poonjaji had that, and it’s something I so admire, and I see it as a condition of really being in your truest, deepest self, which is that it would be like weather flowing. All of these emotions and feelings, they move through very quickly when you’re letting yourself be this kind of expanse in which nothing is really sticking. And yes, I love that. I love that one could be crying one moment and laughing the next, like a child.

Rick:  Yeah, yeah. There’s that old Indian philosophy thing about lying on stone, lying on sand, lying on water, lying on air, in terms of the flexibility of the nervous system and how with some people they’re very rigid and impressions stay, and with others they just kind of… You can make a deeper lie on air than you can make on stone, so the experience is rich, but it just passes by.

Catherine: Yes, that’s great. I’ve never heard that before, yeah.

Rick:  Yeah. And also, I mean, just mention Amma again, it’s like here’s someone who, if anyone is qualified to do so, probably can see the illusory nature of the relative world, and yet exerts every ounce of strength to do something to improve it.

Catherine: Yes.

Rick:  All these practical things, trying to get young girls out of prostitution, and taking care of widows, and building houses for tsunami victims, and just all this stuff. So, this whole thing about spirituality leaving you in some kind of dream world where you don’t care about the world. In fact, somebody else was posting something like that on my blog the other day, saying, “I’ve gotten to a point where I just don’t care about anything, there’s this sort of indifference” And I didn’t respond again because I’m too busy, but my feeling was, “Don’t consider yourself done, dude”

Catherine: Right, yeah, it’s like the Hermann Hesse book of Siddhartha, you basically find yourself, or the ox-herding pictures, the towns and the oxen, you find yourself back in the marketplace.

Rick:  Back in the marketplace, yeah.

Catherine: Really, if you go the whole journey, then you’re going to be back in the marketplace caring about the other beings here, you know, of course.

Rick:  Yeah.

Catherine: If you truly see it as all your own self, as the manifestation of whatever blazed this into existence, you can’t help but feel it as that, you know, and there’s incredible tenderness for it.

Rick:  Hey, would you mind if I interject a completely off-topic, irrelevant, trivial comment?

Catherine: Sure.

Rick:  You look a lot like Jackie Kennedy on NASA.

Catherine: People have been telling me that. They came into power like when I was in the second grade or something. I’ve been hearing it my whole life.

Rick:  Okay, just wanted to say.

Catherine: People sometimes stop me at restaurants and told me that.

Rick:  That’s funny. So, that segues us into another thing I’d like to talk about, and feel free to loop back to anything else that occurs to you, in terms of things we’ve covered, like this whole activism and animals and environment stuff. But you went into quite a lot of… during your dark night of the soul phase, I guess we could call it, after you walked away from the Buddhist practice, you went into a phase, which perhaps you’re still in to some extent, where you didn’t believe anymore in a lot of things you had believed in – karma, reincarnation and whatnot. I’d like to discuss that a little bit. Would you say you don’t believe in them, or is it more that certainties became theories? You know, like the jury is out. Who knows if there’s reincarnation or karma? I can’t say there is, but I can’t say there isn’t.

Catherine: That’s exactly it. I’m completely agnostic about it. I don’t believe it, per se, but I certainly wouldn’t…

Rick:  Rule it out.

Catherine: I wouldn’t claim that it isn’t the case, that I could have any access to know that. But I don’t have those beliefs. They fell away. I used to have them, I used to entertain them, I could say, for many years, because they made the world just, so I really liked them.

Rick:  Yeah, it helped you make sense of things.

Catherine: Helped me make sense of things. But they began to fall away, and I couldn’t… [dog barks] speaking of some of the other furry creatures…

Rick:  I think she wants her breakfast.

Catherine: Those beliefs fell away, and yeah, they’ve never come back.

Rick:  Yeah. I’d say, speaking for myself, I believe in them, because they do make sense. It’s like I believe in all kinds of things that I haven’t experienced. I believe that extraterrestrials have visited our planet and perhaps are still doing so, but I have no proof of it, you know? But it just kind of makes sense to me. So it’s like… but if somehow someone were able to disprove it entirely… It’s more like an intuitive thing, but who knows? It might just be my bias. You know, there’s a story of Einstein, speaking of Einstein again, where they sent an expedition to Southern Africa – some place in Africa – to measure the bending of starlight by the sun’s gravity during an eclipse, and that would prove or disprove his theory of relativity. And it turned out, you know, star light was bent and it proved the theory, and they came to Einstein and said, “What would you have done if the theory had been disproven?” And he said, “I would have been sorry for the dear Lord, the theory is correct”

Catherine: That’s great!

Rick:  Because he just had this intuitive knowing, you know? And so perhaps that’s the way in which these things were referring to. If they can be known, that’s how they can be known. In fact, Patanjali talks of a city where you remember your past lives, when Adyashanti had his second significant awakening, all these past lives flashed in front of him. And one could say, “Well, that’s in your DNA” or it’s just something from watching too many movies when you were a kid, or something, but who knows?

Catherine: Yeah, who knows? I know. Again, I don’t, fortunately, I used to think a lot about all of that, you know, when I was younger, and somehow I’m spared a lot of consideration about these matters. I just am content to not know.

Rick:  Yeah.

Catherine: Yeah.

Rick:  You talked about, you know, at our age, things falling away. If you experientially, though, if it were your experience that all you are is this body, and when this body dies, you’re finished. If that were really solidly your experience, I don’t think you would be able to let things fall away as easily, or as, you know, effortlessly as you do. I think through all your spiritual practice and development, there must be some innate experience that you are something deeper than that, something less transitory.

Catherine: Well, this is an interesting discussion, because sometimes I say in my sessions, that in this recognition, there is an experience of eternity. Like you’re recognizing something that is eternally manifesting itself, right? And yet, you’re only recognizing it for a short time. It’s like an experience of eternity, but for a very short time.

Rick:  During your lifetime, you mean?

Catherine: Yeah. So it’s as if you’re recognizing something that is blazing away, but that the expression of you, and this is my view, the expression of you is just this momentary flash of it. And, you know, I’ll be happily surprised if I find myself continuing on in any form that is recognizable, that I could remember or whatever. But I don’t really have that expectation, and as a result, every one of these moments become incredibly precious, right? I mean, incredibly. Their stock goes way up. And, you know, the very transitoriness of it intensely enhances it, in my view.

Rick:  Yeah. And along these lines, I heard you discuss how, in your experience, there’s this sort of dual, kind of paradoxical simultaneous dwelling in eternity, along with relative, you know, temporary stuff. You phrased it much more nicely, but that’s what you’re alluding to, that one kind of has a foot in both camps, so to speak.

Catherine: Yeah, yeah. Right.

Rick:  Now, a number of people say that they go through a phase where it’s like they are recognizing this eternity, they’re recognizing this silence, and then something shifts or turns, and suddenly they are that silence, they are that eternity. Perhaps from that perspective, from that vantage point, recognizing transitory world, recognizing individuality, but the orientation shifts so that that’s really where they have taken their stand. And as such, they know themselves to be something which isn’t going to be influenced by the death of the body.

Catherine: You know, I’ve had so many experiences that are hard to give words to over the course of my life, and I’ve heard people describe similar types of experiences in hundreds or thousands, perhaps. These experiences come and go, you know, they’re rarely a steady state.

Rick:  I know examples in which they are, though.

Catherine: Do you?

Rick:  Yeah. I mean, I have one friend, for instance, who says he hasn’t lost this sort of establishment as pure awareness since he was 10, 12 years old, now he’s in his mid-60s. he says he hasn’t been asleep in 50 years.

Catherine: Really?

Rick:  Yeah, I mean, obviously his body goes to sleep, he probably snores, but the inner awareness is never overshadowed.

Catherine: I see. Well, in any case, maybe there are some exceptions, but from my point of view, even a steady state is not even required. One’s awareness can sort of dance around in relative and in more expansive, what’s called the absolute, and easily move back between the territories, and one infuses the other, just like the yin-yang symbol, you know. That’s good enough, you know, that will transform your life, having those places from which you move. Sometimes it’s really cool to just be very, very relative about something. I mean, in fact, being with Poonjaji, you know, he would care about how much you were paying for the bananas, you know, and he would tell you which banana seller to go to, and which train to take, right?

Rick:  Sure.

Catherine: And he and I would constantly discuss the news, because he was an avid reader of the newspaper.

Rick:  As was Ramana Maharshi.

Catherine: Was he? I didn’t know.

Rick:  Yeah, he probably was following the events of World War II, but he used to read the paper all the time, or listen to the radio.

Catherine: I didn’t know that, yeah, and Poonjaji the same. So, you know, to give it its due, and to participate, and to care, you know, it’s admirable to me.

Rick:  Yeah. Well, you know, with the yin-yang symbol, there’s always a white dot in the black, and a black dot in the white.

Catherine: That’s what I meant.

Rick:  Yeah, but it’s kind of a question of ratio. Who is to say that, I mean, that when Ramana Maharshi, or for that matter Poonjaji, was reading the newspaper, or worrying about the banana sellers, that, you know, that could have just been the little dot, in a much larger wholeness that was perpetual and predominant.

Catherine: I assume that.

Rick:  Yeah, yeah.

Catherine: I absolutely assume that. And I feel the same in my own case, when I hear, as I have recently, one of my best friends has pancreatic cancer. There’s a part of me, there’s a part of my awareness that is tracking that on a daily basis, but I would say that it’s like that dot, you know, it’s strong, and it’s very obvious in the screen of the awareness, but it’s, you know, there’s a lot else going on.

Rick:  Yeah.

Catherine: And it is, in the mix, it’s just the understanding that everybody dies, you know.

Rick:  No one gets out of here alive.

Catherine: Right, exactly. And the end of the story is everybody dies, you know.

Rick:  Yeah. And obviously from the viewpoint of the objective observer, you really don’t know what a person’s inner reality is.

Catherine: Yeah.

Rick:  You know, I mean, people looked at Christ on the cross and must have thought, “Oh, what a horrible experience, he must be suffering so much” For all we know, that was just a little dot in a much larger reality that was, you know, not suffering.

Catherine: Well, in contemporary time we’ve seen, you and I grew up in an era when we saw on television Vietnamese monks self-immolating, you know, setting themselves on fire, and sitting there, sitting there, remember that?

Rick:  Yeah.

Catherine: Just sitting there still.

Rick:  Yeah.

Catherine: Yeah. So, yes, of course, in the deepening of this understanding, it saturates all the experience and all of the perspectives. That’s why I was saying earlier, when I’m crying with someone, I want to say to them, “Don’t worry”

Rick:  Yeah, I’m okay.

Catherine: It’s not that big a deal, it’s just some part of myself is in the moment of grief.

Rick:  That’s beautiful and it’s important. And so what we’re saying is that it’s not that you kind of swing from one pendulum extreme to the other, it’s that within a kind of a larger wholeness comes to contain all these polarities and swings and different experiences, but that larger wholeness is not perturbed by them, just the way the ocean isn’t perturbed by the fish and the currents and all the other things that are happening within it.

Catherine: That’s right. I often speak about what I call “coexisting awareness” whereby we have different types of awareness that coexist, just as we all know when we’re watching a movie, we know we’re in the theater, or else we’d run out of the theater when they started shooting on the screen. We don’t do that because we know we’re sitting in the theater and we’re very involved in the movie. Or I sometimes use the metaphor of, as you alluded to, the ocean. You can have a storm on the ocean, but the Marianas Trench, the depths of miles down in the ocean, is very still. It’s the same ocean, but there’s different activities happening. And in this expanse of awareness, especially as it gets quiet, as it gets generally quieter and is just letting whatever arises, arise and flee away as they do, there can be a lot happening, popping about, just passing through very quickly and very freely.

Rick:  It reminds me of something. When I was about 19 years old, my girlfriend left me and went back to taking heroin. I went to my meditation teacher and I was really upset about it, and she said, “Be an ocean”

Catherine: A very good advice. Yes, lovely. Did you take that advice? Did it work out for you?

Rick:  As best I could. I didn’t want to make a mood of it because I felt like the real significance of that is not just to walk around thinking, “I’m an ocean, I’m an ocean” but I continued my spiritual practice to become more ocean-like.

Catherine: Yeah, lovely, lovely.

Rick:  Yeah.

Catherine: Yeah. Shed a few little ocean drops maybe from your eyes.

Rick:  I did actually. She kind of left during an encounter group I was in and I just completely broke down. I don’t cry easily, not as easily as you do, but it was one of the few times in my life when I just completely sobbed and fell into somebody’s arms and just sobbed and sobbed and sobbed until it was just like, it wasn’t even about her, it triggered some catharsis.

Catherine: Yeah, yeah, I understand.

Rick:  So are you still keen on the seven qualities of awakened awareness that I heard you talk about?

Catherine: Yeah.

Rick:  Let’s talk about that a little bit because that was very interesting.

Catherine: Yeah, and I would also say I call them seven. In my first book, the publishers made me put, “Experiencing the Seven Qualities of Awakened Awareness” I never wanted that subtitle.

Rick:  There could be six, there could be eight, there could be a thousand.

Catherine: Exactly. When I redid the book, I made it my own and just called it “Passionate Presence, Seven Qualities of Awakened Awareness”, point being that I began to notice in my retreats that people would come and all we were doing was hanging out in this free space, just emptying out, you could say, and livening up. I would notice these qualities would just emerge in people, just generosity and authenticity. People would speak more authentically, like really say the real stuff. Tenderness, delight, wonder, all of these qualities, seven of them, I’m probably forgetting one or two, discernment. They would just come, they would just arise. I found it true then when I wrote the book many years ago and true to this day. I just gave a talk about it at a local Unity Church here.

Rick:  Do you feel that somehow those qualities are inherent within awareness, as if kind of components of awareness itself? Or do you feel that it’s sort of when the interface between awareness and our individuality gets nicely connected, then somehow those qualities are just kind of expressed more by the relative personality?

Catherine: I think that’s a really interesting and good way to see it. And of course, as with any of our various talents in life, we’re all on a spectrum. So some people might be in their quietude, they might be extremely tender and maybe less discerning, and others vice versa. But I would say all of these qualities are very typical. And I like your expression about how the relative kind of brings them out, you know, that living in the world and engaging with people. Some of them, there were two that I had on that list. Silence, which is just the falling into or the way that the set point of the awareness is basically just very quiet. And wonder, which is also a component that is not necessarily engaged with other people, but is just sort of looking at the whole picture in a kind of appreciation of its mysteriousness.

Rick:  Yeah. So in terms of your own experience now, [dog barks] there’s another doggy.

Catherine: You have two dogs?

Rick:  Yeah, we do. One of them is sleeping here, one of them is standing here. I can almost lift him up to say hello. Come here. There he is. Hello.

Catherine: How old is he?

Rick:  Oh, he’s about eight or so, and the other one is pretty old, like 14, but they’re in good health. And then we have a very old cat also.

Catherine: You know, I love having animals around. They’re these reminders of what unconditional love looks like, you know?

Rick:  Yeah, yeah.

Catherine: Pure love, you know?

Rick:  They really enrich your life.

Catherine: Yeah, they do.

Rick:  They also have this sort of innocent quality that you kind of entrain with to a great extent, you know?

Catherine: I know.

Rick:  And it kind of enlivens your own innocence and childlike. It’s just like playing with children, you know? You get down on the floor and you become like a little child and it cultures something in you.

Catherine: Yeah, I was about to say, and what it feels like when you’re with a baby, you know? When there’s a baby in the room, it’s like this direct line to that purity of being.

Rick:  So animals are kind of like that all the time.

Catherine: Yes, I know, I know. In fact, one of my great emphases on my retreats and in my sessions is to be more and more like an awake animal, a conscious animal. Just that simple, not have to be anything fancy, some kind of fancy spiritual, you know, hoo-ha. But rather just another creature, right? A human creature, which is a more complex creature than most. And just be that, you know? Just let yourself be very simply that. And I encourage people to watch their pets, their dogs and cats and whatever kind of pets they have, and to entrain with that kind of consciousness.

Rick:  On your retreats and all, do you advocate any sort of practice, or do you just talk to people and, you know, somehow it’s a nice weekend?

Catherine: My retreats, first of all, they’re silent retreats with the exception of sessions of Dharma Dialogues. So for instance, we’re having one in Italy soon, a residential retreat, a seven-day retreat. And other than the two sessions with me, and then there’s two yoga sessions in which the yoga teacher gives instruction during the day, there’s no talking, everyone is in silence. And the silence, I always say, does all the work. You just start to get on a frequency of deep inner quiet, and you don’t have to manifest your personality because you’re not having to engage. So there’s a way in which you do become like an awake animal. You’re wandering about, you’re feeling the breeze on your face, you smell things, you know when it’s time to eat, you know when it’s time to move, you know when it’s time to bathe. All of it becomes very instinctual, intuitive, and you also begin to see how unnecessary most of the activity of mind actually is. You know, that most of it is really spam, you know. And you start to parse out easily and quickly what is unnecessary to pay attention to, and that becomes a habit. And you really start to live in such a way that you see that you don’t have to pay attention to most of what’s going on in your head. I don’t know why evolution has gone this way. I think it’s pretty contraindicated for our health. Probably at one time it was great for us to be such thinking creatures, and to be constantly on problems and anticipating stuff in the future and so on. But I don’t think it’s useful now. I wonder sometimes if another aspect of our evolutionary journey as humans might be that we train ourselves in a sense to ignore most of the extraneous thought that is just causing trouble.

Rick:  Hmm, that’s an interesting point. The pace of life is so fast these days.

Catherine: Yes.

Rick:  There’s so much information impinging on us. I once heard the presidency described as like trying to drink from a fire hose, but I’ve also begun hearing people refer to their life and everyone’s life as being like that. You know, there’s just so much coming at you.

Catherine: Yeah, yeah, interesting metaphor really.

Rick:  Yeah.

Catherine: Yeah.

Rick:  And, you know, I think that…

Catherine: It’s like trying to drink from Niagara Falls.

Rick:  Yeah, and if you’ve never taken recourse to silence, you know, if you’ve never established any kind of connection with that inner silence, then that’s all you’ve got is this deluge of stuff coming at you, and you can see why people are so crazy.

Catherine: Exactly, and also why more and more I think it’s necessary to really deliberately unplug. I mean, almost like you have to force yourself into it, you know, because otherwise if you’re just living your normal life, even with a relationship to your own inner quiet, it’s still very hard. You’re under a deluge, almost all of us, you know. You know, I mean, you and I know very well that much of our life, we grew up, there was no email. I mean, I even remember when phone messages came online, you know.

Rick:  Yeah, right.

Catherine: It used to be that the only time you got a phone call was when you went home and you were at home and the phone rang, you know.

Rick:  Right, you could answer it.

Catherine: You could answer it, but otherwise you didn’t have to walk in the door and find out who’s been calling you while you were gone. And now we all live in such a way that even when we’re sleeping, messages are coming in waiting for us, you know, when we wake up, we’re never really off. And so to really sometimes deliberately empty out, completely unplug, and be away from all of that, you know, sometimes people now go on vacations, but they have to be somewhere where there’s Wi-Fi connection because they have to be online.

Rick:  Right.

Catherine: I think it’s generally unhealthy to have to be collating information just all the time.

Rick:  Yeah, and you know, people don’t have to quit their jobs or leave their families or any of that other stuff. But as you say, if you can take a break from it, and you can take daily breaks if you have some sort of meditation practice, but then also occasional weekend breaks or week-long breaks or things like that can really make a big difference.

Catherine: Absolutely. I think almost everyone needs that. And there may be people for whom they can be still in the middle of a tremendous amount of movement, you know, like a center of a top or the eye of a hurricane, but I think most of us, I certainly count myself in this category, need to unplug now and again and to varying degrees.

Rick:  Yeah. I was a student of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi for a long time, and the first time I ever went to a course with him, the first lecture he gave was, he said, “Survival of the fittest is the law of nature, and we have to be fittest” He said, “The pace of modern life is so fast now that you have to deepen the silence in order to counterbalance it.” And he said, “If a load is too much for a donkey, there are two things you can do, lighten the load or strengthen the donkey” And he said, “We may not be able to lighten the load of our lives, but we can strengthen ourselves so as to be able to make it seem lighter by, you know, yeah”

Catherine: Interesting. I would have been trying to lighten the load.

Rick:  Well, sometimes that can be done too. I mean, people do a lot of stuff that they might find is not so useful if they…

Catherine: Yeah, that’s true too. There are ways of simplifying often that people don’t see, and I think that in this quieting of heart, one of the other things that comes with it, one of the things I talk about in my book in the category of discernment, is you begin to see elegant solutions often that are much simpler and easier than the way you’ve been doing it. Those make themselves apparent.

Rick:  Well, you know, it’s like you were saying earlier, with regard to the world situation and all the dire problems and challenges that we face, so much of that is symptomatic of a kind of a craving for more and more, which has gone awry, which is really kind of unnatural, which is never going to be fulfilled in the direction that people are pursuing it. And perhaps, ultimately, the solution to all these problems is for enough people to fulfill that craving in a more inward, natural kind of way, to find that inner fulfillment, and then all these other symptoms of the crazy outer craving will just kind of crumble and disappear.

Catherine: Yeah, I like that.

Rick:  Another thing I think that will happen is that intelligence – I don’t know if that was one of your qualities of awakened awareness – but there’s an innate intelligence in this silence, and the more that wakes up, the more we’re going to see brilliant inventions and ways of accomplishing things in a much more sustainable and benign way.

Catherine: Yeah, I actually use the phrase in my book quite a bit interchangeably with awakened awareness. I sometimes call it awakened intelligence.

Rick:  Beautiful, yeah. Yeah, so I mean, there’s not a sort of a shortage of natural resources, there’s a shortage of intelligence. And if we could really have an abundance of intelligence, then personally I believe that we could have all sorts of… it wouldn’t be like we wouldn’t go back to an agrarian society, we’d have kind of a complex technological society, but it could be so harmless, so harmonious.

Catherine: Yes, absolutely, yes. Yeah, I think what you’re pointing to is, in the use of this word “intelligence”, because we do see intelligence, but it’s not wisdom intelligence. We see quite a bit of cleverness, you could say, on Earth.

Rick:  Yeah, IQ kind of intelligence.

Catherine: Yeah, and people inventing all kinds of nefarious things, you know, that are just harming us.

Rick:  Sure.

Catherine: But the wisdom intelligence is a bit in short supply.

Rick:  Yeah, I mean…

Catherine: May I just say…

Rick:  Yes, please, yes.

Catherine: Yeah, as you’re saying, that, you know, there certainly, I think, exists a possibility, and your show was a part of that whole movement, whereby more and more people will start to see that if we don’t get this more together, and if we don’t start to, you know, re-channel and direct the attention in more intelligent ways, we literally won’t survive. And so that may be the tipping point, it may be that enough people, and apparently, according to those who study these matters, that you only need like 10% for a tipping point.

Rick:  Possibly even less. There are, you know, that hundredth monkey example, and there are examples such as in a laser, the square root of 1% of the photons, if they become coherent with one another, the rest of the photons join in and the whole thing becomes as if a single photon.

Catherine: Really?

Rick:  Yeah.

Catherine: That’s interesting.

Rick:  And in the heart, 1% of the cells are pacemaker cells, they regulate the beating of the other 99% of the cells.

Catherine: Wow.

Rick:  Yeah.

Catherine: Interesting.

Rick:  But I like what you say about wisdom intelligence. You know, fracking is very clever, genetic engineering is very clever, you know, very sophisticated technologies, nuclear fission is very sophisticated and clever. It took a lot of brains to come up with the atomic bomb.

Catherine: That’s right.

Rick:  But, you know, it’s sort of intelligence up here, it lacks the wisdom foundation. And, you know, I think that when that foundation is sufficiently enlivened, maybe this is wishful thinking but I think it may actually work this way, then these more superficial expressions of smart intelligence will kind of align with the wisdom intelligence. And then we can still have very sophisticated technologies and stuff, but they’ll kind of be in alignment with wisdom, not suicidal, you know.

Catherine: Right, exactly. That would certainly be good. That would be a good use of our cleverness.

Rick:  Yeah.

Catherine: Yeah.

Rick:  Personally I think that’s the way it’s got to go. I mean, I don’t see solutions in any other way.

Catherine: Yeah, I know. I’ve been a part of a conversation for many, many, many years about, you know, kind of looking at technology itself as one of the major problems, right? That we keep hoping that technology will save us and instead it just deepens the problems. But the truth is, I mean, I’ve had to kind of come to see that you’ve got to ride the horse in the direction it’s going. We’re not going to go back to, you know, agrarian life, you know, and give up computing. It’s just not going to happen, I don’t think.

Rick:  Nope.

Catherine: So we better work with what we’ve got. And I think, you know, there must be ways that we can figure this out and not rape our resource system and turn the earth into a smoking ruin with no fresh water. You know, it seems like that could be possible.

Rick:  Yeah, well you know the rudder of a ship is a fairly small thing, actually, compared to the entire ship.

Catherine: Yeah, but you can just turn it a little bit.

Rick:  Yeah, you can turn it a little bit and the ship doesn’t turn instantly, you know. I mean, the Titanic couldn’t miss the iceberg because they spotted it too late.

Catherine: Right.

Rick:  Maybe we’ve spotted our iceberg too late, but you know, if you turn it, soon enough this huge, thousands of tons ship goes in a completely different direction.

Catherine: A completely different direction, yes.

Rick:  And so the rudder is this deeper dimension, this wisdom, intelligence.

Catherine: Yes, yes, yeah. And just inching it just a bit is going to make a difference in the course.

Rick:  Yeah. So we’re getting somewhere here. This is good. I think it’s good for people to kind of acknowledge, to know this, to sort of think about this kind of point, you know. Because I think spiritual people can kind of forget that their spiritual life can actually make a difference in the world. And like you say, it can become narcissistic where it’s all about me and my fulfillment and, you know, Don’t touch my deer skin and, you know, this stuff. But this spiritual activism thing, I think the whole principle, the whole kind of awareness of it is starting to wake up more and more.

Catherine: Yes, I do too, and yeah, happily so. Yeah, it’s definitely the focus, I would say, of my thoughts that I pay attention to. It’s a lot about what we’re facing and what is going to be needed and the importance of really staying steady. Just as, you know, I mean the example that just came through is, you know, like a parent who maybe has a very ill child, you know. You’re on a two-fold demand. One is to be taking care of the child as best you can and to be applying wisdom intelligence to the decisions. And the other is to be maintaining your own quiet and strength and love and clarity for that child. And it’s those, you know, riding those two horses in a sense, you know.

Rick:  And this phrase you just used, “staying steady” you know, there are so many structures and institutions and systems in the world that really have no right to exist ultimately in any kind of sane and harmonious world, but they’re so entrenched. And if the world is going to change, you know, if we are really turning this ocean liner in a better direction, then those things somehow or other are going to either collapse or be dismantled or crumble or something. And there could be a lot of dust kicked up while that happens, you know. It could seem like all hell’s breaking loose.

Catherine: Yeah, no doubt.

Rick:  And maybe it’s already happening to some extent.

Catherine: I think it is happening. I think it is happening. I think we’re seeing a lot of shaking up of a lot of the systems, you know. And we will probably see a lot more in the rest of our life.

Rick:  Yeah, and that could be frightening for people if they don’t have this perspective that ultimately something good is happening.

Catherine: Yeah, or also that, again, whatever is playing out, you know… Because let’s say, again, using the example of the mother or the father or the parents of a very ill child who might be actually dying, you know, that it ends up the child dies. The work is the same. The inner life is the same. You still are maintaining this love, this appreciation, this generosity, this caring, all the way to the last moments, you know.

Rick:  So what you’re saying is that regardless of the outcome, whatever it may be, the course of action is more or less the same. You just have to do it.

Catherine: That’s right. Whether it’s going to work out or whether we are seeing, you know, the last phases of mammalian life on the planet.

Rick:  Yeah, as the Gita says, “You have control over action alone, never over its fruits. Live not for the fruits of action, nor be attached to inaction”

Catherine: Yeah, beautiful. Yes, love that.

Rick:  Yeah. Great. Well, is there anything we haven’t covered? Have we figured out all the problems of the world?

Catherine: We covered quite a few of them. I don’t know if we figured out any, but we surely appreciated the dilemmas.

Rick:  Yeah. Are there any kind of closing thoughts you’d like to leave us with?

Catherine: Hmm. I was thinking yesterday, in fact, Leonard Cohen is a friend of mine, and he was in an interview somewhere, he said that as many years as he had been struggling with depression, there came a point in his life where happiness overcame him. And I was thinking about that yesterday in the context of getting older and noticing that things just don’t really stick. I mean, even the saddest things. Like I said, one of my very best friends is very possibly dying, and it’s very much in my heart, and I’ve already grieved a lot over it and had shed quite a few tears. And I expect there will be more. And yet, happiness keeps overcoming me. I would say to be kind of happiness prone, as soon as possible. Just to let your light blaze through. Appreciate this day, this moment. Your cup of tea, your walk around the block, whatever. Your patting your dog. Every single bit of it, let that fill your well so that you can be ready and a gift in this world.

Rick:  And if you don’t know how to do that, investigate because there are ways.

Catherine: Yes, definitely.

Rick:  I mean, don’t feel like it could never happen to me, you know, be a little proactive. There are ways of…

Catherine: …bumping it up. Yeah, absolutely, definitely, yeah. Find your ways through to joy and not see that as some selfish activity, but as part of this whole picture that we’re talking about. That it is for the good, the greater good, that you stay in your strength and in your joy.

Rick:  Beautiful, great place to end it. So, let me make a few concluding remarks. First of all, thank you very much, Catherine. I knew I’d enjoy this interview and I very much did. You’re a wonderful person to talk to.

Catherine: Thank you.

Rick:  Thanks. Those who are listening or watching, you’ve been listening to or watching an interview in an ongoing series. I think Catherine is in the 190s range in terms of the numbers of ones that I’ve done.

Catherine: Wow.

Rick:  And I intend to continue doing them for the foreseeable future. So, if you’d like to be notified of new interviews as they are posted, just go to batgap.com and there’s a little place where you can put your email address and you’ll get an email once a week or so whenever I post a new one. You can also subscribe to an audio podcast, which many people do. There’s a discussion group there, which I mentioned earlier, if you feel like getting into that melee. You can get a little crazy at times, but that’s the way the Internet works. There’s a donate button, which I rely upon people clicking occasionally if they feel the motivation and have the means. I think that’s about it. I’ll be linking, of course, to Catherine’s website and you can get in touch with her through that link. That should be it. Thanks for listening and watching. We’ll see you then.