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 about 550 of them now and if this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to www.batgap.com – BATGAP and look under the ‘past interviews’ menu. This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers, so if you appreciate it and would like to support it, there’s a PayPal button on every page of the website. My guest today is Chris Beal. I’ll read a little bio she sent me. Chris discovered Buddhism as an exchange student in Japan in the 1960s. Given her determination, she was sure she would succeed in getting enlightened. But enthusiasm doesn’t always guarantee success. She went home disappointed, depressed, and demoralized. Thirteen years later, after a spontaneous awakening, she contacted the Buddhist priest who had been her main teacher in Japan and began a six-year connection which deepened her understanding of what she had realized. Meanwhile, she sought a spiritual path in the States but found nothing that spoke to her as deeply as her first teacher had until she met Adyashanti twenty years ago. After almost a decade of absorbing his teachings, she found the realization gradually deepening on its own. Cris enjoys writing about spirituality and spiritual awakening. Her writing includes numerous published book reviews, author interviews, and articles. She is currently seeking publication of her novel, ‘Enlightenment of the Flesh’, in which the main character’s dilemma reflects that of many seekers. How do you know which way will lead to the ultimate truth when what you are seeking is not in the realm of imagining? She sent me a little passage from that book, kind of a teaser. I really enjoyed it and said, “Chris, send me more,” but she hasn’t yet. She’s a good writer. You’re a good writer.
Chris: I’d be happy to send you the whole 425 pages if you really want to read them.
Rick: Well, unfortunately, now I’ll be on to the next person.
Chris: I know, I knew you didn’t have time.
Rick: Well, I had some time this week, but yeah. Anyway, it sounded very interesting. You never know, it was very well written. If you send it to me, I might actually get back to it. My eyes are bigger than my stomach, as my mother used to say, with regard to things I’d like to read. Although she used that phrase with reference to food.
Chris: Right.
Rick: Let’s start maybe, just for kicks, by having you elaborate a bit on this last sentence that I read – “How do you know which way will lead to the ultimate Truth, capital T, when what you are seeking is not in the realm of imagining?” What do you mean by that?
Chris: Well, actually, I was thinking about that this morning so I’m glad you asked me that question. So, the way the mind works, and I know you’re an intellectual type so you’ve probably thought a lot about these things, the way the mind works is that it takes Experiences, turns them into memories and with the memory it evaluates whether it should have more of those kinds of experiences or less of those kinds of experiences depending on whether it’s painful or enjoyable but enlightenment isn’t like that, or awakening isn’t like that. It isn’t really an experience and when Adya used to say that I’d like what do you mean? It isn’t an experience. It felt like an experience to me. I understand now that what he means is that it’s actually, it’s a hole in experience so to speak
Rick: I mean a hole – HOLE
Chris: HOLE, right your consciousness all of the thoughts just drop away, everything drops away. So my experience of it anyway is like, it’s you find out that your consciousness has an infinite bottom or doesn’t have a bottom. There’s no, there’s no referent really, ’cause it’s not an experience, so your mind can’t take it and put it in memory. What comes, what happens is when you come back from that experience, there’s a kind of a flavor of it that’s very blissful. Because of that bliss, you want more of that thing that happened to you, but it’s not an experience. So there’s a misunderstanding right away. I’m trying to have an experience like that again, but I can’t because it’s not an experience. There’s a dichotomy between what your mind usually does and usually works for ordinary experiences and what it’s trying to do now. And that can lead to all kinds of confusion and suffering and so on, until that finally becomes clear that it’s not something in the ordinary realm and you can’t repeat it. You can have more awakenings, but every awakening is a dropping out of that, a dropping through the ordinary realm of thought into another, into what’s bottomless really.
Rick: Yeah. There’s a phrase I think it’s in the Brahma Sutras which says, “Contact with Brahman is infinite joy.” And notice it says contact with Brahman, it doesn’t say Brahman, it says contact with it. I was reminded of that when you just said, when you come back from that you may feel very blissful, but that in itself is not an experience. If I understand what you’re saying, every other experience we have by definition involves an experiencer, mechanics of experience such as your eyes and ears, and an object of experience, the thing you’re perceiving. But the thing we’re referring to here doesn’t have that three-fold structure, right? It’s kind of not, it’s very different from any other experience we could possibly have and therefore a little bit hard to define.
Chris: Right. I think impossible to define. That’s also part of the problem, that people wanna put words on it so they can understand it. That’s natural and even necessary to some extent. But when you haven’t awakened, those words are literal. You try to take them literally and that can also lead to a lot of confusion because it’s wordless, it’s silence, and there are no words really.
Rick: Yeah, and you try to compare it with something you have already experienced, which is what we naturally do. If someone says, well, I tried to describe what a mango tastes like, and they said, well, maybe it’s a little bit like a peach. Have you ever had a peach? Yeah, I’ve had a peach, but it’s different than a peach. Maybe it’s a little bit more tangy than a peach or something, as if you mixed in some tangerine juice with peach. You kind of beat around the bush, giving people an idea of what you’re talking about, but then if they finally bite into the mango, “Oh, yeah, that’s what you’re talking about.”
Chris: Right, exactly, yeah.
Rick: Yeah. In any case, how do you know which way will lead to the ultimate truth when what you’re seeking is not in the realm of imagining? Now that’s an interesting, I mean we can pick this apart a little bit more because I know that, from the time I learned to meditate back in the 60s, my concept of of enlightenment or ultimate truth and all has evolved a lot. I used to think, wow, if I were enlightened, I could be in a band and we could just get up on stage and compose music spontaneously. We’d all be totally like psychically connected with each other and we could just do this great stuff without even rehearsing. I had all these ideas about what it might mean.
Chris: Right.
Rick: You naturally mature and grow your understanding and your experience. But I still think there’s a, it’s a word I hesitate to use, enlightenment, because there’s such a wide range of definitions of it and if you want to communicate with people, you actually want them to understand what you’re saying and so we try not to use words that are going to be misinterpreted.
Chris: Right. The mind really can’t understand it, anyway, so it’s going to refer back to experiences like that. Like for you it was playing in the band with total, without rehearsing, just knowing what to play. For someone else it’s something else, that is as close as they can get to ultimate joy.
Rick: That brings up another interesting question and that is that I have a friend who’s been on Batgap a couple of times, Dana Sawyer is his name and he’s been a professor of religions at a University in Maine and he wrote a biography of Aldous Huxley and another one of Huston Smith. He was actually friends with Huston Smith. He and I have had this discussion about, whether there is some ultimate truth which people around the world throughout the ages all can tap into and they’re all experiencing the same thing or whether, the Whether the, what people tap into in quote-unquote “higher states of consciousness”, however the culture in question defines it, is unique to that culture and that time and that person. If people, if all these people who say they have been enlightened or have gotten enlightened could actually step inside each other’s shoes so to speak and see it from the other’s perspective, they wouldn’t necessarily say, “Oh yeah, that’s what I was experiencing.” There might actually be significant differences. What do you think about that?
Chris: Well, what it reminds me of is Jung’s collective unconscious, and I think that is the realm where there’s culture or you go into a space where you have a collective culture. I think awakening is a step beyond that. So you’re not talking about archetypes anymore. As I said, the basis of it is nothing. So, only when we get to the place of where there’s nothing, then we have true unity because there are no, there’s nothing else, there’s no reference. I guess I don’t have anything else to say about that.
Rick: That’s okay. No, I actually, I agree with you and that’s kind of what I argue with Dana, which is that I think that the way I would prefer doing divine enlightenment is that it’s a sort of a waking up to the ultimate reality, I think you use the term ultimate reality somewhere in here, the Truth, capital T, ultimate Truth. That the human nervous system is actually capable, unlike perhaps any other sort of nervous system we know of, of enabling the truth to awaken to itself. Maybe that’s a good way of putting it because it’s not like you get enlightened, but somehow or rather it becomes a living experience through the instrument of the human nervous system properly cultured. If that is the case, then there would be a similarity despite the culture, the age in which one lived. It would be identical in one sense, but one would just reflect it differently according to their language and personality and all.
Chris: Yeah, that’s what I was going to add, that you added. Yeah, I think, it’s gone, whatever I was going to say.
Rick: That’s okay, it’ll come back. Feel free to interrupt me if I’m talking along and you think of something you want to say because I don’t want you to lose your train of thought. Let’s turn to your sort of biographical sketch. I mean, what you’ve been through in your life and we can sort of take little detours as we go, as you describe that to us and explore different ideas. What drew you to go to Japan in the first place in the 1960s?
Chris: It was actually not a very deep decision. I had, there was a woman in my dorm who had gone to France. I didn’t think I could pass the language test and there wasn’t a language test for Japan because it was the first year of the program, partly because it was the first year of the program and partly because, in those days and maybe still, people only studied Asian languages if they were that major, if they were a Japanese major or something like that, and they wanted people from a wider background, to apply for the program. So there was no language requirement and I thought, “Oh, I’ll probably get to Europe anyway someday, but Japan, when would I get there?” In those days, Japan was a lot farther away, psychologically than it is now.
Rick: Cool. Do you know Shinzen Young? Do you know who he is?
Chris: No, I’ve never heard that name.
Rick: Yeah, I’ve interviewed him a couple times.
Chris: How do you spell Young
Rick: Young, like Neil Young, just Y-O-U-N-G, but Shinzen, S-H-I-N-Z-E-N. I’ve interviewed him a couple times, and he also grew up in Los Angeles, and he ended up going to some kind of Japanese American high school there and spoke fluent Japanese even before he went to Japan. You might enjoy checking into his story.
Chris: Yeah, thank you. Thank you, I will.
Rick: He did all kinds of really intense Zen practice over there in Japan, just get chewed by mosquitoes and just persevering. Interesting story.
Chris: Yeah, so that, I don’t know if you want to talk about this, but that does bring up for me one of the themes of the novel, how much do you have to suffer? In order to get enlightened or whatever. Certainly the belief when I was young and my character genie’s belief when she was young, she somewhat reflects me, is that you have to suffer or it’s not going to happen. That’s karmic stuff. You believe everything that’s worthwhile, you really have to work for it and if it’s too easy it’s not real. So I think that’s a worthwhile discussion.
Rick: Yeah
Chris: To what extent.
Rick: Since it came up let’s talk about it now and then like I say we’ll take little detours and we’ll just keep coming back.
Chris: Okay, well can it be too easy, you you see these, I remember when I was looking for a teacher kind of casually I found Adya on a bulletin board, it was a flyer saying ‘satsangs’. I studied the flyer and I thought he seems genuine, I don’t know what it was, but I think that he wasn’t claiming too much. It was that, I’ll just come and see what it’s like. It’s not, I am the big teacher. I knew there wasn’t like a bunch of gold around his head. I think there’s also a tendency for people of maybe the opposite personality type to go for what’s easy, the easy promise, the easy, I have all the answers, come to me and I’ll give you the answer. Then you get involved in a cult or something like that. So it’s just an interesting, it’s an interesting question which I try to explore in the book, what is it that, what’s the real way or is there one way or are there multiple ways for different people and how can you be misled, what causes people to be misled by a teacher who’s promising to help you wake up. I think, this is not part of the novel, but I think one of the signposts of a genuine teacher is if they know how to turn you away, if they know how not to give you answers and turn you back on yourself, and not only at the end, but during the process. Adya is very good at that, he knows how to say just enough, without, because if you’re looking to the teacher for all the answers, you’re never going to find it inside.
Rick: Yeah.
Chris: Yeah.
Rick: Yeah, those are all interesting questions which I think about a lot myself. On the question, and we’ll unpack that, but on the question of suffering, obviously the Buddha went through a lot of suffering, right, before his enlightenment. The reason he got enlightened finally was that he decided to like cut himself some slack. He just decided to ease up a bit and kind of, then he taught the middle way after that, which is not, you’re not a lazy slob but you’re also not killing yourself trying to get enlightened. You found this sort of a balance.
Chris: Yeah and I think there’s two kinds of suffering one is the kind that is karmic that you have to undergo anyway because it’s just you’re who you are you were born in this circumstance that you were born in and then the other kind is the kind that you decide you need to impose on yourself that comes from the will, that you need to do this in order to earn it, so to speak.
Rick: Yeah.
Chris: I don’t remember if I had another thought after that.
Rick: That’s okay. We’ll go back and forth. Now suffering. So obviously there are different kinds of suffering. There’s sitting in a Zendo being chewed by mosquitoes and it’s freezing cold and you’re tired and somebody comes along and whacks you with a stick every now and then. It’s not everyone’s idea of a picnic. Obviously, that’s a set of a self-imposed austerity or discipline and obviously then there are all kinds of diseases and other circumstances in life that can cause great suffering. Maybe this is what you meant by, there are certain karmas that people have that are inescapable it seems and others that we might take upon ourselves willingly.
Chris: Right, right.
Rick: One interesting question though is, we mentioned bliss earlier and you mentioned how one can slip into the transcendent or whatever word you used and maybe you don’t experience much while you’re there because it’s not really an experience per se, but afterwards you feel all this blissfulness. One way of looking at it is, that innermost nature is blissful by its nature. All the traditions say that, the kingdom of heaven is within, nirvana is supposed to be blissful, and samadhi, different terminologies, sat-chit-ananda, ananda means bliss. So if it’s blissful, shouldn’t there be a diminishment of suffering as one moves toward it? there be sort of greater happiness or greater charm and less suffering.
Chris: What do you mean by moved toward it? Do you mean before the first awakening or after the first awakening? As awakenings are deepening?
Rick: Or as, yeah, awakenings are deepening. Or as one progresses toward it. Like, let’s say you sit down to meditate and your awareness starts to settle in and settle down. Perhaps, one would find that if it’s done naturally, perhaps one would find that to be increasingly charming and enjoyable actually. Whereas there are some kinds of practice that one does where one is kind of from the outset setting up a struggle – oh, a thought’s come, got to stop that, and so that can be very unpleasant. It has to do with kind of the mechanics of meditation, I think. Meditation is like the word enlightenment, it’s defined very differently by different people. It’s like the word liquid. There’s so many things that are liquids, but they’re very different in their properties.
Chris: Well, I’m not a meditator. I think Zen cured me of meditation forever.
Rick: That’s interesting, yeah.
Chris: One of the attractions of Adya for me was that I believed him when he said, “You don’t have to do anything.” I can just feel it now as I’m saying it, that I believed him and that’s what I needed, was to believe him. You don’t have to do anything, it’s already your true nature. There is a, when you say is it already blissful as you’re moving toward it, not in my experience, but I wasn’t meditating. I think as after you have the first awakening, everything relaxes.
Rick: Yeah, yeah.
Chris: The way I experienced it is that you always feel like you’re too small for the container that you’re in, and once you have the awakening, it just blows up and you’re like, you realize you’re as big as you’ve always wanted to be. And not in a grandiose way, but in the real way, in the genuine way.
Rick: Nice. So I get the, you kind of, I get the impression that when you were in Japan you were trying to meditate a lot and like you say that cured you of the desire to meditate and that you came home disappointed, depressed, demoralized so it sounds like it was kind of a struggle and that it wasn’t terribly fruitful. Is that right?
Chris: It wasn’t fruitful at all although some seeds were planted.
Rick: Some seeds were planted.
Chris: Yeah.
Rick: Obviously how did you even glom onto the idea that there was such a thing of enlightenment because you didn’t go to Japan with that thought in mind. You must have discovered it over there.
Chris: No, I actually discovered it on the ship on the way over.
Rick: Oh, really? Ok. You had a book or something?
Chris: Well, I didn’t, no, that’s actually not true. There was a book called, it was written by a southern Californian. I can’t remember the name of the book now. It’s on the tip of my tongue. He wrote about the beatnik culture in Los Angeles. I read that book maybe a summer or two before I went to Japan. That was when, and they were all doing Zen and that was the first I heard about Zen. So I did know about it. But when I was on the ship on the way over, I met someone who was going there to do Zen. He was from one of the Ivy league schools. He just graduated. I can’t remember which one now. So, I was reading Suzuki’s, Daisetsu Suzuki, not the one in San Francisco, Zen Buddhism, and it was on our list of readings for, inculturating us for Japan. So he started talking to me and I said, “Okay, if I ever want to contact you so I I can visit your Zen Center or something, is there a way I can do it? He gave me his contact information. So after I’d been in Japan a short time, I contacted him. He was in Kyoto, I was in Tokyo. I went over there and I talked to his teacher, whose name I don’t remember. He’s not alive anymore, of course. And he gave me contact information to go for in Tokyo. I followed up that information and ended up doing Zen at Enkakuji, which was Daisetsu Suzuki’s temple. He was actually there. So
Rick: Then, you came home demoralized and all that, but then 13 years later, you had a spontaneous awakening. Was that actually, that was still pre-Adya, I would assume?
Chris: Oh, way before Adya.
Rick: Way before Adya.
Chris: Yeah, way before Adya.
Rick: So, how did this spontaneous awakening happen and what was it?
Chris: Let’s see if I can say it in a simple way. So I was longing for somebody, I had a crush on somebody who wasn’t returning my affections and I kept hoping and this was the realization, oh, no interest there. I remember I was lying on my bed and feeling, oh, and there was for me, I don’t know if it’s for everybody, but with rejection there was also a kind of self-blame, like maybe I shouldn’t be wanting this and that’s why I’m suffering, and somehow that just went. It was okay to have every feeling that I had, I didn’t have to push it away. Then I kind of went through into something else where it’s okay whatever my body is doing and feeling and by body I meant mind, body, everything, it’s okay. That was the, it was just a little hint, but it was enough to know what that space was like. Then I wrote to my teacher thinking, I couldn’t, I had no relationship with him, but I had no one else to tell.
Rick: So even though it was this little hint, it was significant enough that you counted it as an awakening?
Chris: Yeah, he counted it as an awakening. He wrote back and said, “You’ve entered nirvana,” and da-da-da, and I’m like, “Oh, I thought this was just a little hint.” So I think it was deeper than I was able to recognize at that time, the sense Of, I think a big piece of moving into the awake space is stopping the inner struggle. That struggle stopped for a moment and I fell into that space, but I didn’t recognize it because I’d never been there before. I had no referent.
Rick: Yeah.
Chris: I had no teacher to tell me.
Rick: Yeah, I think that I agree that that’s a big piece. You remember Adya’s story certainly of how he was like, struggling like a son of a gun and, just like really pushing himself to the limits. He got to the point where he thought he was going to crack up because he was pushing so hard with his meditation and his retreats that he was doing and everything. Finally, he just went back to his little meditation hut in the backyard of his parents’ home and sat down and thought, to heck with it. I give up. I can’t struggle like this anymore. And then poof, had this major awakening.
Chris: Right. That was after he’d left that retreat, right? He left that retreat and gone home.
Rick: Yeah, he split in the middle of it because he just had reached his limit.
Chris: Right.
Rick: Well, I think that’s interesting. I think it’s also interesting just to throw in here that I don’t think one has to beat oneself over the head with a hammer to see how good it’ll feel when you stop, to use that metaphor. I think one can approach spiritual development in a non-struggling way from the outset. But that’s kind of another story.
Chris: Yeah, well, that’s an interesting question, isn’t it?
Rick: Yeah.
Chris: You can, I think, again, that’s karmic. I think there are some people who really feel the need to push themselves. They don’t feel it’s real if they’re not struggling. They don’t feel like they’re really going to get somewhere. And there are other people who have had maybe a more gentle upbringing and don’t necessarily think that you have to, go through suffering in order to get there.
Rick: Yeah, there’s another phrase from the Vedas that says, “Be easy to us with gentle effort.” In my own case, I happened upon a teaching that explicitly discouraged any form of struggling. It was emphasized in terms of being effortless and natural and all that stuff, so I never went through a struggling phase. But I imagine that people who get together with Adya at any time in his teaching were never encouraged to struggle by him. His approach is, we’ve had discussions about this, but it seems very natural and effortless. He’s not trying to amplify any kind of inner turmoil that people might be habituated to.
Chris: Right. Yeah, and I think, once I had had that first awakening, and then there was a subsequent one that was a lot deeper that my teacher in Japan precipitated from 5,000 miles away miraculously.
Rick: Was that shortly after the first one?
Chris: Yeah it was shortly after the first one.
Rick: Keep going here but describe, at some point Describe that one too.
Chris: I can. So after I connected with him and this is actually an important theme I think, so I might as well talk about it now. One of my, the things that I have done repeatedly in my journey is project that, project that perfection onto the teacher. So as soon as he wrote back, there was just this huge attachment, “Oh he gets me, he knows what it’s like”, and I became really dependent on him. Every letter he wrote and writing, communicating in those days, he didn’t speak English and I didn’t write Japanese well enough to write in Japanese.
Rick: Everything is translated.
Chris: The letters had to be translated in both directions and it took, and then you had the mail. It took like, I guess, three weeks is about as quick as I could get a response. So I was just hanging on every word, when is the next response going to come? Will he still accept me? I finally got a letter and I wish I had it here because I don’t have a good memory of what it said right now, but he was essentially saying I don’t have anything for you and it just, I just like, oh it’s gone and everything was gone, everything was gone. I couldn’t, How could I function without him? I had become by that time so dependent on him. I felt my whole life was him and he was gone I don’t gosh, I wish it would come maybe by the time we finish talking it’ll come clearer because I forget it right now, but something happened where there was just I, he, oh he said in the letter, “You got to stop looking for love out there” And I said, well, I said to myself, well, I would if I could, but I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know how. Then just something kind of, there was just this little turn of my mind and there it was. It was just asking the question and there it was that thing that I’d been looking for how to find love inside. And It was just it was so deep. That one. I mean that was no question that there was an awakening there It was like, yeah. That was the second.
Rick: Yeah that song looking for love in all the wrong places.
Chris: Yeah Right, but, it didn’t stop, I didn’t stop doing it interestingly There was still that projection on the teachers for a long time by the time I met Adya it was much less because I had been through so much by that time. Because of that, my relationship with Adhya was relatively painless.
Rick: Yeah.
Chris: But yeah.
Rick: I’ve definitely been there myself, so I can totally relate to it. I think it’s natural at a certain stage. There’s so many different stages of growth that people can go through, even in ordinary life. There’s a certain stage at which you’re totally dependent on your parents and you see your parents as like invincible or all-knowing or something like that and then you get perhaps disillusioned with that and you go through your teenage years, you start getting rebellious and distancing yourself from your parents and then later on you begin to feel like well they weren’t so bad after all, they’re doing a pretty good job, they’re doing the best they could. I mean we go through all these phases and you can go through that with spiritual teachers too.
Chris: Yeah and I don’t think it’s wrong. I think the projection is natural. Yeah. But that’s why it’s so important to have the right teacher because the wrong teacher will encourage that and the right teacher will turn you back on yourself.
Rick: Very good. Yeah, you said that earlier. Yeah, it becomes this sort of negative feedback loop with the wrong teacher where their ego gets amplified and then, you get more dependent on them and there’s more and more of an emphasis, I’m the one who’s doing this for you and I’m the one who’s creating the Shakti here or whatever. And then, I don’t know, it just becomes like a self-reinforcing sort of situation that can get very unhealthy. I mean, we’ve seen how far off the rails some of these situations can get. But, it’s good to sort of not throw the baby out with the bathwater and to kind of keep a balanced perspective. There’s so many people who sort of, they go through something like that and then they say, “That’s it. No more teachers. Teachers are no good. Nobody should have a teacher. They kind of go to that extreme.
Chris: That’s one of the dangers of having a bad teacher.
Rick: Get disillusioned.
Chris: Once you, yeah, you get disillusioned and maybe turn away from the whole spiritual project altogether.
Rick: Yeah, which I think is probably not good karma for the teacher who causes that to happen.
Chris: Probably not.
Rick: I don’t know. I don’t mean to talk too much here, but so you always interrupt me if a thought comes to mind, but we’re just kind of going back and forth. What does come to mind now is the value of culturing discernment. In fact, Mariana Caplan wrote a couple of books along these lines. One was called ‘Eyes Wide Open, Cultivating Discernment on the Spiritual Path’, and another was ‘Do You Need a Guru?’ It analyzed the whole question in great depth and her conclusion was, yeah, basically you do, at least at some point. She wrote another one called ‘Halfway Up the Mountain – the Error of Premature Claims to Awakening.’
Chris: Oh, that’s an interesting, I don’t know her. I’ll have to take a look at her books.
Rick: Yeah, the title alone. She’s been on Batgap a couple of times. The title alone gives you a real, a pithy summary of what that book’s about.
Chris: Right. Well, there is, you don’t know what you don’t know when you don’t know it.
Rick: Exactly
Chris: It’s natural that after people have had an awakening, they feel like this is the end all and be all of everything.
Rick: Did you ever get it to a point like that? Did you ever feel that way?
Chris: I’m trying to think I never felt that I wanted to teach when I wasn’t ready. I think, and I don’t even know if I’m ready now. I think there’s a certain naturalness that happens when you come to a place where it comes to rest in you and there’s no more struggle. On the other hand, it also can be said that so far as an awakening goes for people that haven’t had one, anybody can, anyone who’s had one can be a teacher in a way, as long as they don’t get attached to that idea that they’re the teacher. Yeah.
Rick: Yeah. Somebody who’s in first grade can teach his little sister ABC.
Chris: Exactly, yeah. I think that, one thing that happens, Adya talked about this, even though he had had multiple awakenings when he started to teach. But one thing that happens with the first awakening, or the second or the third, is you think, “That’s the way.” And I look at teachers who have a “that’s the way” attitude, and you’ve interviewed some of them, although I’m not going to name them, as people who haven’t really had the full panoply of awakening, because, awakening experiences. Because once you begin to see all the different ways it can manifest, there isn’t any just one way. People wake up a myriad of ways and everybody’s totally different. So there has to be a, there has to be a way to recognize underneath the multiplicity of experiences what is the genuine awakening. Yeah.
Rick: Also I’ve said this so many times, that people have been telling me I shouldn’t say it so often but I kind of feel like I’ve kind of come to the conclusion that there probably is no final awakening. Saying, I’m totally awakened, it’d be like saying I’m totally educated.
Chris: Yeah, yeah.
Rick: Couldn’t possibly learn another thing.
Chris: I agree with that. I don’t know. I may change my mind in the future. But I think there’s a certain basic realization that you want to have had. Maybe enough, you might be familiar enough with that territory that you know what it looks like. You haven’t just had a few glimpses.
Rick: Right, right.
Chris: But in the end, it can always be deeper. You can always go, you can always say, oh, I never saw that before.
Rick: Yeah. According to Kundalini Vidya, I interviewed a woman named Joan Harrigan, sometime back. There’s, in terms of that understanding, once the Kundalini reaches what they call the Makara point here, or Makara, it doesn’t go down again, it won’t go down again. So that’s stabilized. It’s not all the way up. There’s more, even when it is all the way up, there’s plenty of refinement that can continue to take place as long as you live. But according to that tradition, there is a point at which you’re beyond the possibility of slipping back.
Chris: Oh, that’s interesting. It brings up, at the time that I was involved with my first teacher, I was having a lot of Kundalini experience. This whole, mostly it happened in dreams. I’d wake up from a dream and have all these streamings going all through my body.
Rick: Like energy flows?
Chris: It was really fascinating. Energy flows, yeah.
Rick: Yeah, that whole body of understanding is that we have this vast network of subtle energy conduits, nadis they call them, throughout the body, and they all have to be purified in order for awakening to be fully embodied.
Rick: That’s interesting. I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t know that much about it. It’s, I guess for me, and this is probably a personality thing, but I react to the word ‘purified’. I have a negative sort of idea that, to me, and again, this is probably just a personality I don’t want to state it as any ultimate truth or anything, but for me it seems as though the path is more about everything being okay. It’s not about getting rid of certain things or it’s. I don’t know whether everything being okay has anything to do with awakening itself, but it opens the door because the struggle, the psychic energy that’s involved in the struggle to get rid of certain things keeps you shackled somehow, psychologically shackled somehow. So when that relaxes, like it did with that very first awakening where I was like, “It’s okay, it’s okay, love is okay. I don’t have to get rid of love just because I didn’t get it back on one occasion. It’s okay. Everything I’m feeling is okay.” I tend to go more in that direction. I know you’ve interviewed Pamela Wilson because actually that’s how I discovered Batgap. I was in a satsang with her and somebody said, made reference to her Batgap interview and I said, “Batgap, what’s that?” Afterward he told me what it was. She is so, just open arms. Everything comes in, everything comes in. When I discovered her, that was my, it was the next place I had to go, that feminine energy. I think I discovered her in 2008, something like that. That was even after you’d been involved with Adya for a while. Yeah. I was quite a bit after. And I felt that I, there was that little bit of sort of feminine, inclusive energy that I needed, that was.
Rick: Yeah. It’s like we all need different things at different times. I kind of think of it like, if you fly from here to, let’s say someplace in, let’s say Kathmandu, you’re not going to do it in one plane flight. There’s no plane flight that goes directly from Iowa to Kathmandu. First, you’re going to fly to Chicago and then probably New Delhi and then New Delhi to Kathmandu. You wouldn’t say that one of those flights is better or more important than the others. Each one is necessary and is an important leg of the overall journey. So, obviously, some people stick with one teacher for their whole lives, other people just move. Other people are totally dilettantes and they just jump around too much without going deep, but others I think take, go seriously enjoy or derive benefit from what a teacher has to offer, but at a certain point maybe a different teacher has to offer something they need.
Chris: Yeah, well for me it was also a practical thing because I came into the Sangha just as, Adya’s Sangha, just as it was really growing, very, very fast. And at the very beginning, the first couple years, I was able to have one on one talks with him, but then he just cut it off. There were too many people, he couldn’t see them all. I felt I needed that, I needed that. I found Dorothy Hunt, who was in the Sangha. I actually found her when she was still a student. She was not a teacher then, but she was sitting in the front row and I saw her and I thought, “Her!” I went up to her at lunchtime. I never did that. I always wanted the silence at lunchtime. I never wanted to talk to anybody. But I went up to her and I said, “Will you have lunch with me?” And she said, “Well, I’m manning this table, but if you want to keep me company, that’d be nice.” So I did. I told her the story about my first teacher who had. There’s a long story behind that, but I lost him. Still going through this ache that I had lost my first teacher. I was just telling her the story of my spiritual journey and that. Then the next, that night it was an intensive. So it was all day Saturday and Sunday afternoon That night I thought I’m going to ask Adya about this ache I still have about losing my first teacher and so I did and I asked him I said “I’m just tired of giving it to him. All that love is going over to him I’m tired of it and I’d already been through that the first awakening, so you see that the pattern didn’t stop at that point” and and he said So I said I want to get it back. I want it. I want to recognize it here and he said, “well, it could be over there or it could be here, but really it’s just love” and that was it. My mind is split open and that was the first awakening with Adya She not only, she was important to me because she precipitated that by just listening to my story and taking it in. And yeah, she was one of the important people to me because I was able to see her one-on-one.
Rick: Yeah, that’s good Let’s, well, let me ask somebody’s question here a question came in This is from, and then we’ll get back to more stuff, this is from a guy named Prakash in Redmond, Washington. It touches upon some of the things we’ve already talked about and others we haven’t. First part of his question is, “Can any stage of consciousness be forced?”
Chris: I’m not sure what he means by any stage of consciousness.
Rick: I think he’s implying, well here’s the second part that elaborates a bit, he said, “Seeking that arises in an individual is a natural process and the stages of consciousness achieved are also natural. So many people feel that there are progressive stages of unfoldment of higher consciousness right and some of them have been given, some traditions have given them specific names. If you read the Yoga Sutras for instance there’s all these degrees of Samadhi and so on.” I guess he’s asking, can you kind of storm the gates of heaven as it were and force yourself into a higher state or a more awakened state or some such thing. Well here, let me read this whole question because he goes on. He said, “I experienced a level of consciousness when I had some trauma. When the trauma stopped, the experience of consciousness and love exists in my memory and continues as a meditation practice. Advancement in my level of consciousness is not in my hands.” So, I guess he feels it’s not for us, it’s not in his hands. And I guess he’s saying, could he have wilfully made this progress earlier or on his own or whatever or was it really just sort of a matter of circumstances that triggered the progression that he has experienced? Not enough you can answer this, but you might have an opinion about it based on your own experience.
Chris: I do, but I’m not sure I’m right. I think, for me, it’s always been about finding the right setting. I know there are some people, and he seems to have been one of them, that just woke up. I did have a spontaneous awakening, so that’s a little bit, to what I said, I just have to eat my words a little bit here. But I think when you’re in the right setting, and especially when you have the right teacher, it does happen naturally. You can’t force it beyond that. But if you’re just out in the world and you’re surrounded by people who are, not awake, it’s pretty hard. You don’t have any reminders that there is a deeper place. I don’t think, I’m not very familiar with the different types of yoga and the different philosophies around them and all of that, but it seems to me that the deeper thing that drives you, most people that I’ve talked to, say they had it from the time they were children and they didn’t know. In my case, I didn’t know about it, but there’s always some kind of “this isn’t enough, this isn’t enough.” There’s some kind of lack and that lack drives the forward thrust to awakening and then just to deeper experiences. I think from what he talks about, he’s had, and I’m not there, I didn’t experience it with him so I don’t know exactly, but it sounds like it’s a hint of where he needs to go. If he doesn’t put impediments in his way, he’ll go there. He’s had an opening already, so he knows that place exists. In that sense, I think once you’ve had an opening, there is a kind of a driving force to move you in that direction because it’s so blissful. It’s so blissful.
Rick: There’s that word again, yeah.
Chris: Yeah, right.
Rick: Yeah, that’s a very helpful answer, I think. His final comment was, “When you’re ready, books, teachers, and experiences find you.” You know, the old saying, “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.” And what you said in there about, putting yourself in circumstances conducive to an awakening is an important thing. A lot of the traditions say it’s, if you’re interested in enlightenment or whatever words they use, it’s really important to hang around the right people. Hang around kindred souls who are also interested in it. If you hang around people who couldn’t give a darn and are kind of going on a different direction. When I first learned to meditate, I basically dropped all my friends and just didn’t have friends for a few months until I began to accumulate new friends because my friends were getting into heroin and doing stuff that wasn’t conducive to what I wanted to now do with my life.
Chris: I’m glad you did that. You might not be sitting here right now.
Rick: I might not, I came close to not. But, its, there is definitely something to, I think Jesus has said things like that, it’s in the Vedic traditions that, being around spiritual aspirants is conducive to spiritual development. Obviously that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t visit our family or just sort of be holier than thou or around people or anything, but you know, going on spiritual retreats, having friends that we can discuss these things with and so on, reading the appropriate types of websites or whatever, putting your attention on it. I mean I do this all week long. I’m always putting my attention on this stuff.
Chris: Yeah.
Rick: Because I love it.
Chris: Exactly.
Rick: And talking to people like you, because I love doing it.
Chris: Right.
Rick: I feel like it’s a powerful evolutionary influence.
Chris: It is. I agree with you.
Rick: My next question is just a wrap up of something. I mentioned purification of the not, and you said, “Ew, I don’t like have this association.”
Chris: Purification, ye.
Rick: I have association with the word purification. It does have sort of, moralistic implications or, all kinds of puritanical connotations and so on. I don’t mean it in that sense, I mean it more in a neurophysiological sense. It’s said that we have all these deep impressions in our makeup, in our neurophysiological makeup and that those impressions, they condition us. Even in Western psychology this is understood, one can become deeply conditioned into certain habit patterns and behaviors and so on. Part of the whole knowledge of this is that the neurophysiology can be transformed and that transformation could be understood with a word like purification. Just basically would mean restructuring the chemical and structural makeup of the system and eliminating abnormalities in that realm.
Chris: Obstructions might be a good word.
Rick: Obstructions, that’s a good word, yes. Because they’re, the body could be thought of as an instrument through which we live, whatever we do, experience. We experience anything, surfing or watching a movie or eating a meal, we’re using this instrument. So certainly an experience, I don’t mean to say experience because we’ve already talked about how inadequate that word is, but let’s for the sake of convenience, an experience as profound as enlightenment must require a profoundly different state of neurophysiological functioning than ordinary waking state.
Chris: I think, I have a lot of, you had so many things in there I don’t even know where to start. I think first of all that there is certainly a necessity for the body not to be holding patterns that keep the, I guess the thoughts or the karmic energy in place so there isn’t room. There isn’t room to fall through to that groundless place. In a sense, and I don’t really know very much about it. I was doing a kind of body work, at the time I had the original opening, and I still think, it was Reichian work, and I still think that it played a role. It opened up places where I had been holding and allowed that to happen. One of the things that you brought up is something that I’ve been moving more and more toward, I guess I could say is that the body isn’t just a vehicle, but the body is it. The body is the awakeness itself. It manifests. The awakeness manifests as the body. This was one I, my most recently acquired teacher, although he doesn’t know he’s my teacher is Rupert Spira.
Rick: Oh, Rupert, yeah, he’s great.
Chris: Yeah. I’ve listened to both of your interviews with him. My interest in him is because he focuses that, he focuses that so clearly, that it’s not just a vehicle, but it IS. As long as you think of it as just a vehicle, you’ve got a subtle duality going on. You’ve got, the awakening, which is somehow insubstantial, and you’ve got the body that’s substantial. One of the things that I realized is there is no substantiality. Everything is empty.
Rick: Yeah.
Chris: I remember exactly where I was when I had that realization. I remember taking it to Adya and saying, “How can this be?” How can this be? It was so, such a miracle. I remembered, I used to chant in Zen, we used to chant, “Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form. Form is nothing but emptiness. Emptiness is nothing but form.” I suddenly understood what that meant. There’s nothing substantial and that’s why when I touch something it feels like I’m touching myself Not always but when I’m focused on it. When, not when I’m making my lunch, but when I’m. I remember the times in the very beginning when I keep touching a table or I would touch Harry’s dashboard. He remembers this I’m sure, he’s nodding. I would kept touching his vast dashboard and I found out his dashboard, what is that? Because at first I didn’t know, I couldn’t figure it out how it felt funny Adya helped me a lot with this because he got it. I didn’t have the words for it. He got what I was experiencing that lack of separation. He got it and yet he didn’t say too much. Because if you said too much it would have gone into the mind, he let me discover it experientially – what it means when you touch something and it’s not other, anymore This body, I think is already awake, but it’s not substance the way we usually think of the body, it’s something else that I can’t define.
Rick: That’s very interesting. Not only is this body that substance that we can’t define, but Harry’s dashboard or the sidewalk or the tree or everything else.
Chris: That’s right.
Rick: People use the word non-duality. Okay, well, if non-duality is really the reality, then, there, everything is really just one thing, although it’s not a thing, it’s a thing-less thing.
Chris: Thing-less thing, exactly. I like that.
Rick: Yeah, one sort of substance-less substance as it were. Rupert speaks of that eloquently in terms of consciousness, everything is consciousness. It may be consciousness appearing as a computer monitor or as appearing as your body or appearing as a pile of dog poop or whatever, but it’s all one thing. And, ofcourse, physicists chime in here, some of the more enlightened physicists and corroborate that with their understanding that if you get right down to the real nitty gritty, there is no diversity. It’s just diversity is an appearance in unity.
Chris: Yeah, there’s no diversity in substance, but there is diversity and that was, I don’t know, you only read the first chapter where I don’t know if
Rick: You deprived me of the other my novel but
Chris: Send them to you. I really will. But she’s asked that question, She’s asked that question by some of her, the students in her at her college. She’s asked, what do you mean by sameness? I wouldn’t want everything to be the same and she realized she’s really confused about this. She doesn’t know whether everything becomes identical or what, but you’re right, exactly the way you said it’s the appearance is everything is diverse, but there’s a fundamental suchness and that suchness is identical for everything.
Rick: There’s always a paradoxical thing where, yeah, it’s all the same but it’s not. I used this analogy last week but I’ll use it again because it’s germane here, but in Vedanta there’s a term called mithya, M-I-T-H-Y-A, and it means dependent reality. And they use an example of clay pots where you might have a whole shop full of clay pots for sale and you go in there and you see the big pots, little pots, red pots, brown pots, whatever, and there seems to be a great deal of diversity in the shop. But if you get right down to it, there’s actually nothing but clay. You could truthfully say there are no pots here, it’s only clay. You wouldn’t be wrong, it’s just like, you wouldn’t have the full picture because at the the very same time there are pots and it’s absurd to deny that there are.
Chris: Exactly, exactly. I’m familiar with that analogy. Yeah, yeah.
Rick: Irene, okay, continue.
Chris: There is something that, there’s a way of, I’m starting to see it now, can you see it? Can you feel what we’re experiencing right now?
Rick: Sure.
Chris: Yeah, so There’s a way that you can connect in an energetic way and feel that field where there isn’t a diversity, where there’s something underneath that.
Rick: Yeah, reminds me of that Rumi quote, remember, “There’s a field beyond right and wrong, I’ll meet you there.” That nice little quote.
Chris: Yeah, I love Rumi.
Rick: Yeah, and of course the field isn’t just in some transcendental realm, the field is all pervading.
Chris: Yes.
Rick: I think there’s a stage at which it can seem like okay, that’s in this transcendental realm and everything else is separate from that and perhaps a later stage at which the field becomes all subsuming. Irene sent over a question, unfortunately she’s left the room, but I’m going to ask her. We were talking about, based on that Prakash guy, we were talking about forcing stages of consciousness and all. And Irene’s question or comment is, the only forced awakening I can think of would be a moment of complete surrender to the divine. At a time of hitting rock bottom with no place else to go, a person will seemingly plead or try to force the divine, but it is really a complete lack of any force or total surrender. Does that make sense?
Chris: It does make sense.
Rick: That often happens. Alcoholics talk about hitting rock bottom before they have a turnaround and many, and Adya sort of hit rock bottom, when he left that retreat and, thought he was going to crack up and then finally surrendered. I think a lot of times we push it as far as we can, in terms of thinking we can do it. And then finally we say, “I give up. I can’t do it.”
Chris: Exactly. And then when you give up, it releases and that opens the space, at least that’s the way I interpret it.
Rick: Yeah.
Chris: When you give up, it opens the space up for the real divine to come through.
Rick: Yeah. Which gets us back to the original topic of does one have to struggle a whole lot before giving up and realizing that the divine can do it for you? Or, and there is that phrase, ”God helps those who help themselves”, Or can one sort of-
Chris: Who said that anyway? Ben Franklin?
Rick: It was in the Bible someplace, I think. Or else-
Chris: I don’t think it is.
Rick: Maybe not, it might have been Ben Franklin. I don’t know. Someone will tell us. Or can one sort of bypass a lot of that struggle? And it’s like, let’s say you’re on a train.
Chris: Can I just, before I forget the question.
Rick: Go ahead, yes please, go ahead.
Chris: I think it’s karmic.
Rick: There you go
Chris: I think for some people, they have to have that struggle. They can’t let go without that struggle. You’ve interviewed enough people, you probably know that there’s a huge diversity of people and the ways they wake up. Some people could just be walking down the street, suddenly it’s there. It doesn’t happen that often because we have, our minds are so programmed that we tend to push it away when it gets close. But there are a few people for whom it’s not been a struggle.
Rick: That’s very true.
Chris: So there’s nothing that says it has to be. It’s just usually the mind is so programmed and it gets back to kind of what we were talking about in the beginning that the way that memories are formed and the ways that we’re taught to interpret experience those all go against awakening Yeah, and so you have to have, usually because of that, you usually have to be pushed But I don’t think there’s anything inevitable about, I’m sorry I interrupted you, go ahead.
Rick: No, that’s all right. I’m kind of reminded at this point of professional athletes who work really hard to become the best, but then when you see them play, there’s this naturalness and this almost, it seems like effortlessness, even though they’re working really hard, playing tennis or basketball or whatever they’re doing, but there’s this grace and that’s when we usually like watching them is, there’s this sort of beauty of the naturalness of their performance, but boy, a lot of work went into getting to that point.
Chris: Yeah. But I don’t think awakening is that much analogous?
Rick: No, not it’s a loose analogy.
Chris: Because yeah, because it does rely on memory, although it’s muscle memory to a large extent if you’re talking about sports, but it’s still memory, it’s still learning and you learn and you learn and you learn and you put that in the bank until you can draw it out naturally and awakening doesn’t work that way. Again, I guess I still want to emphasize this because it’s been such a hard learning for me that it doesn’t work that way with awakening. You can’t learn how to do it.
Rick: True. Although ironically at the end of the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna says to Lord Krishna, he says, “My memory has been restored. I know who I am.”
Chris: Oh, but that’s a different memory.
Rick: It’s a different kind of memory. A lot of people, you’ve probably heard this, a lot of people say, “You know, I’ve always known this. Somehow I just, it’s so obvious now, but it always, I never noticed it, but here it is, boy, plain as the nose on my face.”
Chris: Right.
Rick: A question came in from Tim in Victoria, British Columbia. He said, “In my experience, the desire for and pursuit of fundamental truth seems to exaggerate attention or division.” This is kind of what we’ve been talking about, “exaggerated attention or division between the focus and intimacy of the immediate human experience centered in the mind-body memory”, this is perfect, “and the sense of vastness and utter transcendence evoked by direct unbounded awareness. It is my intuition that these domains are not truly separate, yet this painful discontinuity persists. Can you express how true awakening reconciles this paradox?”
Chris: I love that question. It’s really deep.
Rick: Beautifully written, yeah. It’s nicely written.
Chris: Could you read it once again? There’s a lot in there.
Rick: I will. The whole question is worth rereading. So, Tim from Victoria says, “In my experience, the desire for and pursuit of fundamental truth seems to exaggerate,” so in other words, the yearning, the striving, “seems to exaggerate attention or division between the focus and intimacy of the immediate human experience centered in the mind-body memory, and the sense of vastness and utter transcendence evoked by direct unbounded awareness. It is my intuition that these domains are not truly separate, yet this painful discontinuity persists. Can you express how True Awakening reconciles this paradox?”
Chris: I would go into that place more deeply where he says, “It’s my intuition, that this doesn’t really exist.” Because there’s a place where he knows that already. Of course that’s right. It doesn’t truly exist. There’s nothing there preventing awakening and as I said for me with Adya that was what I heard and you don’t have to do anything and the don’t have to do anything was a deep relaxation. So that tendency, if I’m reading, if I’m getting his question right, that tendency to contract, it’s a kind of contraction too, that relaxes. When that’s actually heard, you don’t have to do anything. It’s already there, and he already knows it’s there. He already knows it. But it relaxes on its own, in its own time, is my experience. You can’t say, “Relax now!”
Rick: Yeah. “I’m really going to relax.” It’s like having a choppy pail of, having a pail of water that has little ripples on it and you want the waves to stop so you’re trying to push them down. You create more waves.
Chris: Oh wait, I have something else I want to say about that. That pushing toward is not really in the way. It just seems to be in the way. It’s not really in the way. So yeah.
Rick: If you get on a train, you might be tempted to keep holding your suitcases, but the train is actually carrying them for you. You can put them down.
Chris: Nice analogy. Did you make that up? That’s very good.
Rick: No, I’ve thought of that one before. Actually, I think it might have been Ama that said that one. I don’t know. I’ve heard it. Again, that phrase, “Be easy to us with gentle effort.” Papaji used to say, “Give up the search,” and a lot of people parroted that and a lot of people sort of interpreted that to mean like, “Oh, you know, I’m done. I’m enlightened. I don’t need to do anything.” I think there’s a sort of balance between, intentionality or motivation or, to grow spiritually and getting in the way by injecting too much individual effort into the process. You can actually, throw a monkey wrench in the works if you get too involved.
Chris: I think that give up the search is something, I don’t know the context in which Papaji said it, but it’s something that would be said at a specific time for a specific student.
Rick: Right.
Chris: It’s not an overall generic.
Rick: The people sitting within 20 feet of him in that room, he was saying that to them then.
Chris: Because I would think it would even be more specific than that to this specific person who, it’s time. It’s time for you to give up the search. Because if you say it to anybody who hasn’t barely started the search, they’re not going to get anywhere.
Rick: That’s important.
Chris: Yeah.
Rick: Yeah. Tim, if we didn’t fully answer your question, feel free to ask a follow up.
Chris: Yes, please.
Rick: Yeah, because that was a really good question. Here’s one that just came in from some initials BB. Isn’t that the name of that little robot in Star Wars? The little roundy one that rolls along? BB something. BB from Vermont. “Please speak of free will and choice, or is there only ever a continuing unfolding where one is not choosing their actions?” This is an eternal debate.
Chris: Yeah, I actually don’t know. I know that for some people this is a really important question. I think if you look at the structure of the Universe as I understand it at this point, there can’t really be individual free will because there’s no individuals. So what is that will then? On the other hand, there seems to be, just as you would say, there’s nobody making lunch because there’s nobody there, but nevertheless, I’m going to be hungry after this interview, I’m going to have to go get some lunch. So operationally, there’s free will, but in terms of the structure of the universe, there can’t be. There can’t be, it doesn’t make any sense if there are no individuals, there can’t be individual free will. So that’s as best as I can do with that.
Rick: Yeah. I think it’s like the pots, there are no pots, it’s only clay, and yet there’s pots. On one level there are no individuals, on another level there are, and the bigger reality is that these paradoxes can be comfortably contained within that bigger reality.
Chris: Name, what were the three things that he posited at the very end of that question again?
Rick: Oh, I just deleted it.
Rick: Well, hang on, I’m going to get it back.
Chris: It’s not important, I just thought
Rick: It’s okay, I’ll just get it here.
Chris: I’m not sure I answered the question thoroughly.
Rick: Yeah. Here it is. Please speak of free will and choice, or is there only ever a continuing unfolding where one is not choosing their actions?
Chris: Okay. My hit on it is that the latter is the truth of it, but it seems that we are making choices in our everyday lives. Certainly, when you’re in ordinary consciousness, in the psychological realm, deciding, do I want to go to a movie or do I want to stay home tonight? I think the more important thing is what’s underlying the question.
Rick: Yeah, maybe BB can tell us what’s underlying the question for him or her. I also think one has to be true to one’s own experience. Someone says, I don’t have a sense of a personal self, I don’t feel like it, there’s no I making choices here, everything seems to be on automatic. Fine, that’s their experience, but is it your experience? Can you really live the experience that another is describing if it’s not actually your own?
Chris: That is so important and I think it’s worth talking more about. That whole question of wanting to have to do the right thing in order to make progress, I have seen that. I mean, I was around Adya’s Sangha for most of a decade, and I saw that the people who made progress were the people who always went inside, instead of comparing themselves to what other people were doing. It’s really hard not to do. It’s so hard not to do. You see somebody who seems to be awake and you’re like, “Okay, tell me how you did that.” But it’s really important not to compare and not to say, and I still have this tendency to do it sometimes, I see somebody says, “Oh, I’ve experienced so and so.” And I’m like, “Oh, I haven’t. What’s wrong with me? Wait a minute.” It’s so important to stay true to your own experience and not look at what other people are doing or how they did it.
Rick: Yeah, very true. It was even worse in the TM movement. I started a six-month course one time and Maharishi said to us, “Okay, this is a competition to see who can purify the fastest.”
Chris: Are you kidding me?
Rick: No. He had us fasting and doing all this stuff. I naturally being the fanatic that I am went totally overboard and got down to 120 pounds, doing all this weird stuff. Then later on he actually grouped everybody into A, B and C groups. A was sort of a nil group and B was sort of people with sort of good experiences and the A group was like people with really good clear experiences. So there’s this huge sense of like, “Oh my God, I want to be like them.” and all this stuff, it was, maybe it was to burn us out from that way of thinking, I don’t know, but I don’t think that way anymore.
Chris: Yeah, that’s horrid.
Rick: It’s a good principle not to compare oneself to others.
Chris: I think that something came up a little bit earlier that you hinted about, or maybe said explicitly is that there is something inside, especially after the first awakening that knows where you’re going and it’s really important to trust that. It’s also important I think to you know these days there’s so much information coming at you, there’s so many things you can watch on YouTube in the spiritual realm and then you know political realm all these you know the whole thing with COVID-19 and all these different conspiracy theories flying around and you can spend all day watching that stuff and get rather influenced by it, especially if you’re rather susceptible to being influenced by things. You can kind of get off on these tangents of, thinking about stuff without really discerning or discriminating clearly as to what might actually be true. It becomes an addiction for some people and I see a lot of spiritual people doing that. In fact, I see some people saying, “Oh, how can spiritual people be so gullible as not to believe that this is a giant, plot by Bill Gates to overtake the world?” On the other hand, I’m thinking, “How can spiritual people be so gullible as to believe that it is a giant plot by Bill Gates?” So, I don’t know. Whatever it is.
Chris: Yeah, we’re friends on Facebook, so we probably see some of the same stuff.
Rick: Yeah. Whatever it is, I think it’s important that one culture, discernment and discrimination on on the spiritual path. You remember that book The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham?
Chris: I don’t, I probably read it but probably too long ago to be able to tell you.
Rick: Famous book. I think it was based on his experience around Ramana Maharshi but the implication of the title is that the spiritual path is a bit of a razor’s edge and one can sort of easily go off one way or the other and it’s important to sort of be on your toes and be discerning and discriminating.
Chris: Especially in the beginning. Yeah. I think.
Rick: At any stage.
Chris: We’re talking about real. No I don’t think so. I think once you’re, I think once you really have established, at least in my experience, once you’ve really established that place in yourself, you really recognize it, then it doesn’t, you don’t get pulled anymore.
Rick: Maybe.
Chris: That’s not your experience?
Rick: No. I see people who have been meditating for decades or on the spiritual path for decades who are kind of off in la-la land with, in my opinion, with some of these ideas. And we were talking earlier about spiritual teachers who get a little bit carried away with themselves, because they begin to be adulated by their students and they might have been, they might be old, they’re old timers. So, I think no matter what stage you’re at, Remember in Yogananda’s book, Autobiography of a Yogi, when he met his teacher Sri Yukteswar, Yukteswar said to him, he said, if at any point I seem to be falling from my status of, God consciousness or my realization, he said, “help me, give me feedback, don’t.” So he was saying right from the outset of his relationship with Yogananda that I’m not infallible either and no matter how advanced you may be, you have to sort of be be careful.
Chris: Yeah, well, infallible is, not being infallible is different though, isn’t it, than falling for kooky things?
Rick: Yeah, well maybe it’s a matter of degree. There’s a quote from Padmasambhava which I’ve said many times on this show, which is that he said, he was a great Buddhist teacher, but he said, “Although my awareness is as vast as the sky, my attention to karma is as fine as a grain of barley flour.”
Chris: I’m not sure what that means.
Rick: Well it means, well, another quote from Don Juan of the Carlos Castaneda books, he said, “A warrior has time only for his impeccability.” In other words, sort of not being sloppy, being precise in one’s behavior, in one’s thought, in one’s, in life in general, not.
Chris: Too much work.
Rick: Yeah, well, so what you’re getting at.
Chris: I’m a lazy spiritual devotee. What did you say?
Rick: Well, so what you’re saying then is, one can spontaneously just sort of.
Chris: No, I think there are dangers. I think there are dangers, but.
Rick: But you don’t want to be browbeating yourself all the time. Yeah.
Chris: It seems to me that you just have to, once the awakening is there, you know what’s true. You know what’s true. It’s just a matter of turning to that. Don’t forget to go there. Don’t forget to go there. It seems to me that’s the simplest answer I could give to That.
Rick: Okay. Well, once the awakening is there, is it something you have to go to, or does it become an abiding sort of foundation?
Chris: Eventually, but not in the beginning.
Rick: Okay.
Chris: But not in the beginning. So, in the beginning, you have to remind yourself to go there.
Rick: Yeah. Eventually it abides.
Chris: Eventually, it depends what you mean by abides. I know it’s always there.
Rick: From your experience, let’s speak in terms of.
Chris: In my experience, but, I will forget it when I’m having an ordinary conversation or, whatever. It’s always there. I can always find it, but I’m not always attending to it. Let’s put it like that.
Rick: Yeah, and you shouldn’t need to, should you?
Chris: No, I don’t think you need to.
Rick: You don’t need to attend to breathing. It just keeps happening.
Chris: Exactly.
Rick: I guess that we were talking a little bit about the spontaneity of right action, and, there are examples of, fairly advanced teachers who have gotten in trouble because perhaps they don’t have enough critical feedback from students, perhaps they refuse to, accept critical feedback and they kind of get carried away in their own grandiosity. These could be fairly advanced people with, multiple levels of awakening.
Chris: It’s a fatal flaw. Yeah, it’s a fatal flaw and it’s, I don’t know, obviously there’s some ego stuff that hasn’t been taken care of. That can exist side by side with awakening. I don’t have an answer to that. I see it and I’m appalled by it. It’s also hard to discern. Take somebody dead so we don’t get in any trouble. Trungpa, was he a genuine teacher or was he, did he have ego stuff? I think he was a genuine teacher, but I know there are people who say genuine teachers wouldn’t do this and that and the other thing. I think it depends on where it’s coming from.
Rick: Yeah. Well in case people don’t know, he died in his 40s of alcoholism with his body completely destroyed, in a state of delirium. So you can, we have to sort of define what genuine teacher means I think, and a lot of people benefited from their association with him.
Chris: A lot of people.
Rick: Pema Chodron and many others. Same with Adi Da, who was another one. I’ve interviewed a number of people who were his students. So, my way of reconciling the paradox is just to think of everyone as a work in progress. Someone can have great, spiritual gifts and still have, like you said, all kinds the shadows or unresolved issues. Ken Wilber uses the phrases, “Wake up, clean up, and grow up.” You need all three.
Chris: Yeah, and is there a connection? I mean, I think that’s part of idealizing a teacher, that we expect that the teacher has a completely, either totally transparent ego or no ego at all. That projection onto the teacher of no ego is a problem. Does the ego ever really go anywhere or does it just? I don’t have an answer to that. I know I still have an ego. I have a pretty big one, as my friends will tell me. But.
Rick: So do I, as my wife will tell me.
Chris: Or does it just become less important because it’s not who you are? You know it’s not who you are, so there’s not as much investment in it. Maybe for some people it totally disappears. I actually just don’t know. I want to try to stay with my experience and not compare myself with people out there who claim not to have one.
Rick: Yeah, that’s always good to do.
Rick: You know how you were saying earlier about being a little bit more self-referral in terms of not investing all your hopes and dreams and beliefs and everything in a teacher but sort of looking, checking in with what you think and what you know and stuff like that, not being dependent, that stuff you were saying. Well, with regard to these teachers like Trungpa or others who are. I mean the scene around him was everybody was having a drunken orgy because that was his.
Chris: That’s what he did.
Rick: Yes, because he did.
Chris: It’s the way to get enlightened.
Rick: Right, same with Adi Da. Now, seems to me one could say, “Well, you know, I mean”. See, what often happens is people say something like, “Well, this doesn’t make any sense to me. This seems really crazy, but this guy’s supposed to be enlightened and I’m not, so what do I know? So, whoop-de-doo, let’s pop a cork and, get into it.” Whereas I think the more healthy approach would be to say, “Well, there’s something wrong here and I don’t if this is enlightenment maybe I don’t aspire to this kind of enlightenment and maybe I’ll just go you know hop in the car and find something.
Chris: Well wait I think it’s a little more complicated than that because the people who’ve met Trungpa and you’ve interviewed them I’m sure although I don’t think I’ve watched those Interviews.
Rick: They’re impressed.
Chris: but they more than impressed more than impressed, it’s the same as when I I didn’t, it’s the same as when I met Adya. You recognize.
Rick: Yeah.
Chris: You recognize there’s someone who’s awake. That is the confusion because you recognize the awakeness, but you see the behavior. So what do you do? Is that, is the behavior contradictory or is it just behavior? I mean, he, the way he described it as I understand it is, it’s just my behavior. Doesn’t matter. It’s just my karma.
Rick: Yeah. I don’t know if you’ve heard about the Association for Spiritual Integrity. It’s an organization that I founded along with Jac O’Keefe and Craig Holliday and Mariana Caplan and, what’s her name is slipping my mind at the moment.
Chris: I have heard it and I don’t know why. It might have been, I went on your website and found it.
Rick: Yeah, in any case, it’s because of this issue because it’s been so rife in the spiritual community and it’s done so much damage and disillusioned so many people and confused so many people. So, we thought to just kind of establish some sort of code of ethics, not that we’re in a judgmental position, but just some kind of points which might reasonably be expected to be, to align with spiritual teaching and spiritual studentship. So, people can go to that website if they want, spiritual-integrity.org. But I don’t know, I’ve thought about this a lot and given talks at SAND about it and stuff. I just sort of feel like, again, work in progress. Everybody’s a work in progress. Someone, I mean, there have been some great scientific geniuses who were morally off the wall.
Chris: Right
Rick: Even Einstein is said to be a bit of a womanizer. Then there’s the whole question about morals being relative and who’s to say what’s right and wrong, it gets complicated. I don’t know, maybe I’m naive and idealistic, but I’ve always felt that enlightenment should imply a blossoming of holistic development. The kind of thing you see in someone like Adya, who just really seems to have his act together in so many different ways. At least, if there are different kinds of enlightenment, then that’s the kind I want.
Chris: Yeah, well taken, yeah. For sure. I know I have talked to students who are very grateful for his, straight arrow, if I could use that terminology, that he doesn’t do messy stuff.
Rick: Yeah. And he and some other teachers are very good about, “call me on my shit”, if I seem to be, they’re not closed to any kind of constructive criticism or feedback. Right. Yeah. They don’t lord it over you and say, you know you’re too stupid to understand someone like me.
Chris: Yes, that can be a response. Yeah that’s a tricky response.
Rick: There was a teacher who’s an interview I took down who slept with hundreds of his female students and I when I took the interview down he was very upset and he said who are you to judge what an awakened person is supposed to be like.
Chris: Hundreds? My goodness. Busy guy.
Rick: Yeah, he’s got a lot of energy. Alright, let’s get ourselves off this topic. I have another follow-up question that came in from BB in Vermont. He said, “My question on free will comes from hearing so many teachers speak about what needs to be done, etc. If you cannot choose, then you are a person who gets to do. There is no doer.” Yeah, it’s a little bit Watch the editing here Dan. So then “there is no one who can choose to do whatever teachers say needs doing.” Okay, so teachers are saying to do this and that and the other thing, but if there’s no doer, how can you choose to do it? I think that’s what he’s saying.
Chris: Well, what comes to me, I don’t know how good of an answer I can give to this, but what comes to me is someone asked Adya a question like that one time and he said, “I’m just moving energy around.” So it’s like there’s a myth that there’s a human self in here and that it’s doing what the teacher is saying to do and that there are two discrete entities, my hand gets big when I do this, doesn’t it, on the screen?, there are two discrete entities, the teacher and you, and the teacher is telling you, the self, with a small “s” to do something, but really it’s just energy happening. The teacher who’s in that deep place and, anybody who goes into that space with Adya at satsang can feel it immediately, can move the energy in another apparent form, and that’s what’s happening. That seems the clearest explanation to me.
Rick: Yeah, I like that. You know the term catalyst, a catalyst in a chemical reaction facilitates the chemical reaction without itself changing or something. I forget exactly how it works, but it’s sort of a, it’s, when the catalyst is introduced, then the reaction is facilitated. So a spiritual teacher like Adya could be thought of as a catalyst perhaps who, it’s not that he is doing stuff to people or even that they are doing stuff to themselves because of what he says, but somehow he sets up a, helps to create an energy field in which awakening and transformation is more likely to take place.
Chris: Right, yeah, and so there’s a little bit of a, I guess a philosophical contradiction because Adya is also not a separate person, and yet most of it has, most of us have experienced that field that surrounds people that are awake, and most of us, some of us know how to generate it also. There is something that the form embodies, some kind of energy that the form embodies, And there is some way in which that energy can be thrown out, seems a kind of, the wrong kind of word, but I can’t think of another one.
Rick: Yeah, there’s an entrainment that takes place.
Chris: Entrainment, what do you mean by entrainment?
Rick: Well, the way entrainment works is, well let’s think of tuning forks. You know you have a tuning fork that is struck and another tuning fork nearby, if it’s the right frequency or note of a tuning fork, begins to resonate also.
Chris: Yes.
Rick: or a burning log, you put another log near it and that log starts to burn. So, it’s not like something is, there’s like a, well, it’s like even in, this is a weird example, but they say that in nunneries and so on, all the women end up getting into having their menstrual cycle at the same time.
Chris: Oh yea, I’ve heard that.
Rick: It’s sort of this kind of entrainment that takes place. We were talking an hour ago about the value of being in the company of spiritual aspirants if you are one yourself. There’s something that, there’s kind of a mutually reinforcing influence that takes place when the field gets enlivened and everyone within that field benefits mutually.
Chris: Right. Yeah.
Rick: And a teacher can just be somewhat, someone that kickstarts the enlivenment or helps to accelerate it more than it would if he weren’t there.
Chris: Yeah, I think that is what a teacher is, but for some of us who like to do a lot of projection, it takes a lot of time to figure that out.
Rick: Yeah. But that’s kind of cool. It enables us to conclude that there is definitely a value to a teacher, but it’s not just the teacher that is, if, that is doing it. It’s more like a field effect, and the teacher is just a catalyst for helping to enliven that field effect, but if he were all by himself, I don’t think the field would get enlivened in the same way. It takes the whole sangha, the whole confluence of people to do it.
Chris: Right. I think so.
Rick: Yeah, interesting. So, Bill, I hope, or BB, I wonder if, I know a BB from Vermont, Bill Brunel. I wonder if. Probably not him. But in any case, Hopefully that we answered that question.
Chris: And many more.
Rick: And many more, yeah. I hope people don’t mind that I’m talking so much in this interview. I get flak for that sometimes.
Chris: You need to stop apologizing for that. What you say is perfectly interesting.
Rick: Well, I get criticized pretty harshly sometimes by people for doing it. I try not to, but it’s different in different interviews. I mean, we’re having this conversation.
Chris: Yeah. Well, you want to say what comes up for you, otherwise it’s not a natural interchange.
Chris: Yeah. I just don’t want to overshadow the guests and, it depends. Some guests, they go on and on. You’re giving short answers, so I have to say something.
Chris: I do want to talk a little bit about the role of fiction as I mentioned.
Rick: Oh yeah, let’s do it.
Chris: Yeah, because I think that’s something different that other people are not, most spiritual people don’t read fiction. They think it’s not true and I’m into truth. So why would I read fiction? I sort of look at it, hello, you broke up a little bit.
Rick: I’m here, it’s okay.
Chris: Okay. I sort of look at it a different way. I think that because the ultimate reality is beyond appearances, you really can’t define truth. So fiction is actually a better means of understanding ultimate reality. It doesn’t have to be, in my novel, there’s a character who’s trying to get enlightened, but it doesn’t have to be that direct. It can just be that fiction points you to that deeper truth that can’t be said in words. Sometimes I read a passage and I’m like, “How did he do that? How did he get so perfectly what reality is?” Not by saying it in definitions, but somehow creating, you talked about field, I think you can create a field with words also. So I’m putting out a pitch there for not only my novel, but for fiction in general. I think it’s important to sort of expand the way we look at what we read and see that there’s a way that language can work. It’s almost the same way that Adya uses language in a satsang. He talks around truth. He doesn’t say truth because you can’t say truth. I think literature does the same thing. It points us in that direction without defining it.
Rick: Yeah. Well, I think there’s a lot of great works of fiction that have been very spiritual. Siddhartha had a big effect on me when I first read it, Hermann Hesse.
Chris: Yeah, me too.
Rick: I think my novel’s a spiritual, contemporary, female version of Siddhartha and much longer.
Rick: Yeah. And then I went back and read all, let’s just mention some of our favorite spiritual fiction books and maybe the audience will want to read some of those. What’s another one of yours?
Chris: Go ahead if you have some. I’ll think of it.
Rick: Yeah, I do have some. Well, obviously there’s some, well, firstly, the works of Laurens van der Post. There’s a book called A Story Like the Wind and A Far-Off Place.
Chris: Oh, he wrote fiction too?
Rick: Oh, yeah.
Chris: I didn’t know that.
Rick: Those two books are, they’re his best. I read all his books, but those two are just absolutely beautiful. They’re set in South Africa and it’s about the friendship between a South African boy and a Bushman.
Chris: I remember that. Those are his pre-Zen, because you know he did Zen in Japan.
Rick: I knew he went to the East. I didn’t know he actually.
Chris: That’s why I read him. I read his memoir of doing Zen in Japan. I did know at the time that he was a novelist, but I forgot about that part of it. Yeah.
Rick: Yeah. And actually, as we’re talking here, if people want to send in a little question about, through the question form, their favorite works of spiritual fiction, we’ll mention them. But another would be, well, some of the great movies. I mean, Star Wars is a very spiritual thing, inspired a lot by the works of Joseph Campbell. Close Encounters, I think, is a tremendous allegory for the spiritual path. You remember that how that movie went?
Chris: Yeah, I did see that one. I don’t know if I remember a lot of it. Richard Dreyfuss, he was zapped and he had this experience and he couldn’t let it go. He knew there was something more and the whole society was telling him no, give it up, forget it, you’re crazy. He eventually got out to Wyoming and he’s going towards Devil’s Tower and the government had staged this great big thing. “There’s a poison gas leak and you got to get out of here, it’s going to kill you.” And he said, “No, I have to go. I know there’s something there. This means something.” And finally prevailed and he ended up being the only one to get on the spaceship because he was the only one that didn’t get waylaid by all the naysayers.
Chris: No, I have to see that again. It’s been, many years.
Rick: Yeah, fantastic movie.
Chris: Yeah. I read a good one recently that’ll be published pretty soon. I forget the title of it, it’ll, but it was it was really cool. I shouldn’t go into it but, it’ll, maybe I’ll mention it on Batgap when it actually comes out. They asked me to write a blurb for it which I did. It was a first.
Chris: It’s a novel?
Rick: Yeah it’s a novel. First spiritual fiction book I’ve read in years. It involves the Mayans and the Pleiades and all kinds of cool stuff
Chris: Well I was, I did reviews for a website that’s coming back, it’s called the Buddhist Fiction Blog. I’d like to know about that book when it comes out and maybe I’ll review it. It’s all kinds of different things, I mean when you say Buddhist fiction you can mean a lot of things. A lot of the books are just books that have a Buddhist setting, it’s not really about people on an enlightenment journey. Other ones are people on an enlightenment journey. Other ones are, it’s a whole hodgepodge of different books, but it’s amazing how many there are actually that relate to Buddhism.
Rick: You could probably think of a lot of the scriptures of different religions as fiction because, I mean, it’s very unlikely that many of the stories in these books are true. If you read the Puranas of the Vedic literature. There are all kinds of fantastical stories and events and people doing all these amazing things. It could have been embellished by someone with a bit of imagination, but there’s a tremendous wisdom imparted by these books.
Chris: Sort of more like mythical.
Rick: Yeah, mythical. I think there was a time when there wasn’t really that kind of differentiation between what Was, what’s true and what’s not true that there is now. So, you know, history was mythical. It wasn’t researchers going back to find out what really happened in the past.
Rick: I’ve never really read Philip K. Dick, but I’m told that he was a very spiritual guy, that his science fiction works were, really, had a spiritual bent to them.
Chris: Right. Yeah, I haven’t, I haven’t ever gotten into science fiction, although some people keep sending me things and saying, “This is really good, you ought to try it.”
Rick: Yeah. That book I was just trying to remember the title of that I read and wrote the blurb for was originally called, it was I think something like ‘Awakening, the Story of Adya’. I got back to the authors and I said, “Adya? I said, this sounds like it’s a biography of Adya.” I checked with Adya, I said, “Are you okay with this? You want this book to go out with this title?” and said, “No, people are going to think it’s my biography.” So, they changed the title. But they were students of Adya’s and so they were just kind of honoring him by, Adya was the name of the planet in the Pleiades where this guy was supposedly from, but they changed it to something.
Chris: Oh, this is science fiction?
Rick: Yeah, that they made up. But they changed it to a different name.
Chris: I can see why he wouldn’t want that. Yeah, no. There’s also, well, it doesn’t have to be about a spiritual journey to be spiritual.
Rick: Good point. Give us an example.
Chris: There was a book I read, I think it was, a couple of years ago, called Beautiful Ruins, and I can’t remember the author. I could, unfortunately, I could get it to you later, but that doesn’t do any good for this interview. It was about, it was a whole journey, took place mostly in Italy, and the characters, it was one of these things where all the multiple characters in the story converges in the end. I got to the last chapter and I thought, “I don’t want this to end. Should I even read this last chapter?” Then I read the last chapter and it was so transcendent. There was something about it. When this happens to me, I can’t put my finger on what it is, no matter how many times I go back and read it, that does it. It’s something like, “Life is perfect just as it is, no matter what you think.” When I read a book that has that essence in it, it seems like the writer has seen something that, through all the things, this is the appearance, and the appearance is perfect just as it is. You don’t need to go rearranging the pieces. I don’t even understand how somebody can write like that.
Rick: That’s great. Ofcourse, then there’s not only spiritual literature, but there’s spiritual music. There’s some, you listen to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or something and get yourself in the right mood and it can just send you out into the stratosphere.
Chris: Right, all those things relate back somehow to what we fundamentally are. It’s touching in, I think, to what we fundamentally are and the reason that it works is because we don’t have words for it. We can’t define it in a pigeonhole.
Rick: Yeah, that’s a beautiful point. I think perhaps the greatest works of art of any kind, music, art, and literature, they spring from that field which we fundamentally are. The artist is in tune with that field to a sufficient degree that the expression of the art enlivens that field in us and helps bring us back to that.
Chris: Yeah, I think so. I think the greatest art, that’s what it does.
Rick: It really does. Yeah, it sort of evokes the transcendent through a form.
Chris: Right, exactly. It’s, interesting because when you see that everything is appearances, then it makes sense to read a novel where everything is made up. Everything is appearances and it’s just another version of that.
Rick: Yeah, it’s true. There’s so many things we could say about this. But anyway, I’m glad you brought that up because I don’t think that topic has ever come up in a Batgap interview talking about art and literature and so on in the spiritual context which is a huge area that I’m not really that qualified to talk about but I think is very real for millions of people and has been for a long time. I mean, look at, the Pietà or something like that, it’s just a bunch of marble but it just has, it sort of embodies the transcendent.
Chris: Right.
Rick: Alrighty, well, what else? Is there anything else that you’d like to cover that we have neglected to talk about?
Chris: I’m sure there will be after we quit.
Rick: Yeah, right. I always do that right after I hang up. I think, “Oh, God, we should have talked about that,” or “I shouldn’t have done that,” or whatever.
Chris: I can’t think of anything. It’s been a lot of fun.
Rick: Yeah. So, you have a blog, and I’ll link to it, and there’s lots and lots of entries in it and people might enjoy reading it and I guess it’s interactive, right, if people want to leave comments or questions or whatever, they can do that.
Chris: Yeah, I hope they do and there’s also links within that blog too. I have a literary blog too.
Rick: Okay, great. Well, I can link to both so they don’t have to hop from one to the other. You can send me the links and I’ll just link to both.
Chris: Okay, and then the Buddhist Fiction blog just came back online so I’ll link to that too.
Rick: Yeah, give me everything you want me to link to. That chapter of your book that I read was very enjoyable. I think the whole book is going to be very interesting.
Chris: You really want to read it?
Rick: Well, send it to me. I’ll give it a crack. It’s not a matter of want, it’s a matter of finding the time.
Chris: Right.
Rick: Because I’m in a continuing battle with my inbox. I never manage to empty it.
Chris: No, you’re a busy person. I can see from what you have listed.
Rick: Then I have tons of stuff to read and tons of stuff to listen to, but I like it that way. It’s kind of like, an idle mind is the devil’s playground.
Chris: Right, yeah. No, I didn’t send it to you because I didn’t want to, people feel obligation when you send them something and I didn’t want you to feel like, oh, no time to read this, but I got to read it?
Rick: No, that’s nice of you, but I read as much as I can.
Chris: Yeah
Rick: And then I.
Chris: Okay.
Rick: Yeah. Okay, good. So, thanks. Those who’ve been listening or watching, there’ll be a page for Chris on batgap.com as there always is for each interview and I’ll include the links that she’s talking about. You might want to even do some, I don’t know, at some point some interactive video thing where you can have, a lot of people are doing that these days where they just have a Zoom meeting and anybody wants to join in and talk like like you could talk about spiritual literature or Buddhist literature or whatever. You don’t even have to charge money for it. People enjoy that kind of thing. Just a suggestion.
Chris: All right. That’s a good idea. I mean, I do some Zoom stuff with friends, but it’s people I know, so at this point.
Rick: Yeah, well, you make some new ones, new friends.
Chris: Yeah.
Rick: Yeah. All right, well, thanks, Chris. Thanks for your flexibility. We made Chris jump through some hoops in order to get the right level of video quality here. But it can’t.
Chris: I hope you did get it.
Rick: Yeah, we did. It looks very good. Thanks to your friend, Harry, for letting you come to his place and make this.
Chris: Thank you to you.
Rick: I’m glad we had this chance to meet. Hope to meet you in person one of these days.
Chris: Thank you very much.
Rick: Oh, you’re welcome.
Chris: I appreciate your attention and your good questions.
Rick: Thanks. And thanks to those who have been listening or watching.
Chris: Yes.
Rick: Thanks for listening and watching and we’ll see you for the next one. Thanks Chris.
Chris: Bye. Thank you.
Rick: Thank you.
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