Awakening Is Not Experience

Chris Beal Interview

Summary

The discussion explores awakening as something beyond ordinary experience, memory, and description, and how seeking can become confused when the mind tries to recreate it. Chris also reflects on spiritual effort, self-imposed suffering, accepting experience, and how a trustworthy teacher can point seekers back to themselves.

Questions This Interview Explores

• Why can’t awakening be recreated or understood as an ordinary experience?
• Does spiritual awakening require intense effort or self-imposed suffering?
• How can you recognize a trustworthy spiritual teacher?
• Can accepting difficult feelings open the way to awakening?

Key takeaways

• Awakening is not an experience the mind can store, compare, or reproduce.
• Trying to force a repeat of awakening can create confusion and suffering.
• Spiritual discipline differs from adding hardship to prove that you deserve realization.
• A genuine teacher helps you look within rather than making you depend on their answers.
• Allowing feelings and experience without inner struggle can open into a different kind of awareness.
• Awakening may be shared at its root while expressed through each person’s language and personality.

Transcript

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: 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.

👁️ Questions about being enlightened

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 that 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. Chris 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. The way the mind works—and I know you’re an intellectual type, so you’ve probably thought a lot about these things—is that it takes experiences, turns them into memories, and with the memory evaluates whether it should have more or less of those kinds of experiences, depending on whether they’re painful or enjoyable.

But enlightenment isn’t like that, or awakening isn’t like that. It isn’t really an experience. When Adya used to say that, I’d be 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 a hole in experience, so to speak.

Rick: I mean a hole—H-O-L-E.

Chris: H-O-L-E, right. Your consciousness, all of the thoughts, just drop away. Everything drops away. So my experience of it, anyway, is that you find out your consciousness has an infinite bottom, or doesn’t have a bottom. There’s no referent, really, because it’s not an experience, so your mind can’t take it and put it in memory.

Why Awakening Is Not an Experience to Recreate

What happens is that when you come back from that experience, there’s a kind of 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 what usually works for ordinary experiences, and what it’s trying to do now. That can lead to all kinds of confusion and suffering, and so on, until it 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 that 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, the 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 threefold structure, right? It’s not like any other experience we could possibly have, and therefore it’s a little bit hard to define.

Chris: Right. I think it’s impossible to define. That’s also part of the problem: people want to 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,” you might say, “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 from 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 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—I hesitate to use the word—enlightenment, because there’s such a wide range of definitions of it. If you want to communicate with people, you actually want them to understand what you’re saying, 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. For you, it was playing in a 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.

✨ Is awakening the same across cultures?

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. 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 that people around the world throughout the ages can all tap into, and they’re all experiencing the same thing, or whether what people tap into in “higher states of consciousness,” however the culture in question defines them, is unique to that culture, time, and person. 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 where there’s nothing do 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 agree with you, and that’s kind of what I argue with Dana. The way I would prefer defining enlightenment is that it’s a sort of waking up to the ultimate reality. I think you use the term “ultimate reality” somewhere in here—the Truth, capital T, ultimate Truth. 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 other 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 and the age in which one lived. It would be identical in one sense, but one would just reflect it differently according to their language, 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 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. 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. 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 of 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 of times, and he also grew up in Los Angeles. 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—getting chewed by mosquitoes and just persevering. Interesting story.

Chris: Yeah. So, 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, because 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, 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. 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 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 thought, “He seems genuine.” I don’t know what it was, but I think he wasn’t claiming too much. It was, “I’ll just come and see what it’s like.” It wasn’t, “I am the big teacher.” I knew there wasn’t 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 question, which I try to explore in the book: What is the real way? 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—and this is not part of the novel—but 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. Not only at the end, but during the process. Adya is very good at that. He knows how to say just enough, because if you’re looking to the teacher for all the answers, you’re never going to find it inside.

Rick: Yeah.

Chris: Yeah.

The Buddha’s Middle Way and the Role of Struggle

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 before his enlightenment, right? The reason he got enlightened finally was that he decided to cut himself some slack. He decided to ease up a bit, and then he taught the Middle Way after that, which is not being a lazy slob, but also not killing yourself trying to get enlightened. He found a sort of balance.

Chris: Yeah, and I think there’s two kinds of suffering. One is the kind that’s karmic, that you have to undergo anyway because it’s just—you are who you are, and you were born in the circumstances you were born in. Then the other kind is the kind that you decide you need to impose on yourself, that comes from the will: 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.

🕊️ Past lives and spiritual development

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 self-imposed austerity or discipline. And obviously, there are all kinds of diseases and other circumstances in life that can cause great suffering. Maybe this is what you meant by there being certain karmas that people have that seem inescapable, and others that we might take upon ourselves willingly.

Chris: Right, right.

Rick: One interesting question, though: We mentioned bliss earlier, and you mentioned how one can slip into the transcendent, or whatever word you used. 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 your 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? Should there be greater happiness or greater charm and less suffering?

Chris: What do you mean by “move 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. 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, increasingly charming and enjoyable, actually. Whereas there are some kinds of practice where one sets up a struggle from the outset: “Oh, a thought’s come; got to stop that.” That can be very unpleasant. It has to do with the mechanics of meditation, I think. Meditation, like the word enlightenment, is defined very differently by different people. It’s like the word “liquid.” There are 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: to believe him. “You don’t have to do anything. It’s already your true nature.”

When you ask if it’s already blissful as you’re moving toward it, not in my experience, but I wasn’t meditating. I think 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. You’re like—you realize you’re as big as you’ve always wanted to be. Not in a grandiose way, but in the real way, in the genuine way.

Rick: Nice. So 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. You came home disappointed, depressed, demoralized. So it sounds like it was kind of a struggle and 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 as enlightenment? 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? Okay. You had a book or something?

Chris: Well, I didn’t—no, that’s actually not true. There was a book 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. 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’d 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 acculturating us to Japan. So he started talking to me, and I said, “Okay, if I ever want to contact you so I can visit your Zen Center or something, is there a way I can do it?” He gave me his contact information.

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 talked to his teacher, whose name I don’t remember. He’s not alive anymore, of course. He gave me contact information for someone in Tokyo. I followed up on 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 13 years later you had a spontaneous awakening. 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. I was longing for somebody. I had a crush on somebody who wasn’t returning my affections, and I kept hoping. Then came the realization: “Oh, no interest there.” I remember I was lying on my bed and feeling, “Oh.” For me—I don’t know if it’s the same for everybody—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. 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 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?

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.

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 agree that that’s a big piece. You remember Adya’s story, certainly, of how he was struggling like a son of a gun, 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 and everything. Finally, he just went back to his little meditation hut in the backyard of his parents’ home, sat down, and thought, “To heck with it. I give up. I can’t struggle like this anymore.” And then, poof, he 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 had just 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, there was a subsequent one that was a lot deeper, which my teacher in Japan precipitated miraculously from 5,000 miles away.

Rick: Was that shortly after the first one?

Chris: Yeah, it was shortly after the first one.

Rick: Keep going here, but at some point, describe that one too.

Projecting Perfection onto Spiritual Teachers

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 the things that I have done repeatedly in my journey is project that perfection onto the teacher. 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 and 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 then there was the mail. It took, I guess, about three weeks at the quickest to 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 I just thought, “Oh, it’s gone,” and everything was gone. Everything was gone. I couldn’t—how could I function without him? By that time, I had become so dependent on him. I felt my whole life was him, and he was gone. I don’t know. I wish it would come back to me; maybe by the time we finish talking it’ll come clearer, because I forget it right now.

But something happened where there was just—oh, he said in the letter, “You’ve got to stop looking for love out there.” And 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 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 I’d been looking for, how to find love inside. And it was just so deep. That one—there 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 interestingly, I didn’t stop doing it. There was still that projection onto the teachers for a long time. By the time I met Adya, it was much less because I had been through so much by then. Because of that, my relationship with Adya 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 are 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 them as invincible, all-knowing, or something like that. Then perhaps you get disillusioned with that, go through your teenage years, start getting rebellious and distancing yourself from your parents, and later on begin to feel, “Well, they weren’t so bad after all. They’re doing a pretty good job; they’re doing the best they could.” 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. 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. 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. There’s more and more of an emphasis on “I’m the one who’s doing this for you,” and “I’m the one who’s creating the shakti here,” or whatever. Then it just becomes a self-reinforcing situation that can get very unhealthy. We’ve seen how far off the rails some of these situations can get. But it’s good not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and to keep a balanced perspective. There are so many people who go through something like that and then say, “That’s it. No more teachers. Teachers are no good. Nobody should have a teacher.” They go to that extreme.

Chris: That’s one of the dangers of having a bad teacher.

Rick: You get disillusioned.

Chris: Once you get disillusioned, you may 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 you should always interrupt me if a thought comes to mind. We’re just kind of going back and forth. What comes to mind now is the value of cultivating discernment. 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 interesting. I don’t know her. I’ll have to take a look at her books.

Rick: Yeah, the title alone gives you a pithy summary of what that book is about. She’s been on BatGap a couple of times.

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 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 there’s a certain naturalness that happens when it comes to rest in you and there’s no more struggle. On the other hand, it can also be said that, as far as awakening goes, for people who haven’t had one, anyone who’s had one can be a teacher in a way, as long as they don’t get attached to the idea that they’re the teacher.

Rick: Yeah. Somebody who’s in first grade can teach his little sister her ABCs.

Chris: Exactly, yeah. I think one thing that happens—Adya talked about this—is that even though he had had multiple awakenings when he started to teach, with the first awakening, or the second or the third, you think, “That’s the way.” 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 experiences. Because once you begin to see all the different ways it can manifest, there isn’t just one way. People wake up in a myriad of ways, and everybody’s totally different. So there has to be a way to recognize, underneath the multiplicity of experiences, what genuine awakening is.

Rick: Also, I’ve said this so many times that people have been telling me I shouldn’t say it so often, but I’ve kind of come to the conclusion that there probably is no final awakening. Saying, “I’m totally awakened,” would 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 you want to have had. Maybe you need to 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 some time back—once the Kundalini reaches what they call the Makara point, 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, and 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 the time when I was involved with my first teacher. I was having a lot of Kundalini experiences. This whole thing mostly happened in dreams. I’d wake up from a dream and have all these streamings going through my body.

Rick: Like energy flows?

Chris: It was really fascinating. Energy flows, yeah.

Rick: Yeah, that whole body of understanding says that we have this vast network of subtle energy conduits, called nadis, throughout the body, and they all have to be purified in order for awakening to be fully embodied.

That’s interesting. I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t know that much about it. I guess for me, and this is probably a personality thing, I react to the word “purified.” I have a negative sort of idea about it. To me—and again, this is probably just my personality; I don’t want to state it as any ultimate truth or anything—it seems as though the path is more about everything being okay. It’s not about getting rid of certain things. 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 involved in the struggle to get rid of certain things—keeps you shackled somehow, psychologically shackled. 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 that’s actually how I discovered BatGap. I was in a satsang with her, and somebody made reference to her BatGap interview. I said, “BatGap, what’s that?” Afterward, he told me what it was. She is so open-armed. Everything comes in, everything comes in. When I discovered her, that 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.

Rick: Yeah. I was quite a bit after. And I felt that there was that little bit of feminine, inclusive energy that I needed.

Yeah. It’s like we all need different things at different times. I kind of think of it like this: If you fly from here to, let’s say, someplace in 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.

Obviously, some people stick with one teacher for their whole lives; other people just move. Other people are total dilettantes and just jump around too much without going deep. But others, I think, take it seriously, enjoy or derive benefit from what a teacher has to offer, and then, 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—Adya’s Sangha—just as it was really growing, very, very fast. In the first couple of 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 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 thought, “Her!”

I went up to her at lunchtime. I never did that. I always wanted silence at lunchtime. I never wanted to talk to anybody. But I went up to her and 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. There’s a long story behind that, but I lost him. I was still going through this ache that I had lost my first teacher. I was just telling her the story of my spiritual journey.

Then that night—it was an intensive, all day Saturday and Sunday afternoon—I thought, “I’m going to ask Adya about this ache I still have about losing my first teacher.” So I did. 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 first awakening, so you see that the pattern didn’t stop at that point. I said, “I want to get it back. 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 split open. That was the first awakening with Adya.

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 a guy named Prakash in Redmond, Washington. It touches upon some of the things we’ve already talked about and others we haven’t. The 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, which elaborates a bit. He said, “Seeking that arises in an individual is a natural process, and the stages of consciousness achieved are also natural.” Many people feel that there are progressive stages of unfoldment of higher consciousness, right? Some traditions have given them specific names. If you read the Yoga Sutras, for instance, there are 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 something like that? Let me read this whole question, because he goes on: “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 asking, could he have willfully made this progress earlier or on his own, or was it really just a matter of circumstances that triggered the progression he’s experienced? I don’t know if 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. 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—who just woke up. I did have a spontaneous awakening, so I have to eat my words a little bit here, in light of what I said. 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 surrounded by people who are not awake, it’s pretty hard. You don’t have any reminders that there is a deeper place. 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 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 to deeper experiences.

I think, from what he talks about—and I wasn’t 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 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 about putting yourself in circumstances conducive to an awakening is important. A lot of the traditions say that 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 going in 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 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 there is definitely something to it. I think Jesus said things like that. It’s in the Vedic traditions, too: being around spiritual aspirants is conducive to spiritual development. Obviously, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t visit our family or be holier-than-thou around people or anything. But, you know, going on spiritual retreats, having friends that we can discuss these things with, 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 body, and you said, “Ew, I don’t like that association.”

Chris: Purification, yeah.

Rick: I have an association with the word purification. It does have sort of moralistic implications, 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 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. It would basically 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 the body could be thought of as an instrument through which we live, whatever we do or 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, for the sake of convenience—an experience as profound as enlightenment must require a profoundly different state of neurophysiological functioning than the ordinary waking state.

Chris: I think—I have a lot of thoughts. You had so many things in there, I don’t even know where to start. First of all, there is certainly a necessity for the body not to be holding patterns that keep the thoughts or karmic energy in place, so there isn’t room to fall through to that groundless place. I don’t really know very much about it, but I was doing a kind of bodywork at the time I had the original opening. It was Reichian work, and I still think it played a role. It opened up places where I had been holding and allowed that to happen.

One of the things you brought up is something I’ve been moving more and more toward, I guess I could say: the body isn’t just a vehicle, but the body is it. The body is the awakeness itself. The awakeness manifests as the body. One of my most recently acquired teachers, 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 so clearly: 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 awakening, which is somehow insubstantial, and you’ve got the body, which is substantial. One of the things 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?” It was such a miracle. I remembered that 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. Not when I’m making my lunch, but at other times.

I remember, in the very beginning, constantly touching a table or touching Harry’s dashboard. He remembers this, I’m sure; he’s nodding. I kept touching his vast dashboard, and I thought, “What is that?” At first, I didn’t know; I couldn’t figure out why it felt funny. Adya helped me a lot with this because he got it. I didn’t have the words for it. He understood what I was experiencing—that lack of separation—and yet he didn’t say too much. If he had, it would have gone into the mind. He let me discover 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, the sidewalk, the tree—everything else.

Chris: That’s right.

Rick: People use the word nonduality. Okay, well, if nonduality is really the reality, then everything is really just one thing, although it’s not a thing. It’s a thingless thing.

Chris: Thingless thing, exactly. I like that.

Rick: Yeah, one sort of substanceless substance, as it were. Rupert speaks eloquently about that in terms of consciousness: everything is consciousness. It may be consciousness appearing as a computer monitor, as your body, or as a pile of dog poop or whatever, but it’s all one thing. And, of course, physicists chime in here—some of the more enlightened physicists—and corroborate that with their understanding that if you get right down to the nitty-gritty, there is no diversity. Diversity is just 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. I don’t know if—

Rick: You deprived me of the rest of my novel, but—

Chris: I’ll send them to you. I really will. She’s asked that question. She’s asked that question by some of the students at her college: “What do you mean by sameness? I wouldn’t want everything to be the same.” 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: everything appears diverse, but there’s a fundamental suchness, and that suchness is identical for everything.

Rick: There’s always a paradoxical thing: 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. In Vedanta, there’s a term called mithya, M-I-T-H-Y-A, and it means dependent reality. They use the example of clay pots. You might have a whole shop full of clay pots for sale, and you go in there and see big pots, little pots, red pots, brown pots, whatever. 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. You just wouldn’t have the full picture, because at 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’s something—a way of seeing it—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 diversity, where there’s something underneath that.

Rick: Yeah, it reminds me of that Rumi quote: “There’s a field beyond right and wrong. I’ll meet you there.” That’s a 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 it. We were talking, based on that Prakash guy, about forced stages of consciousness and all. 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 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, 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 for the real divine to come through.

Rick: Yeah. Which gets us back to the original topic: 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? 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 there’s a huge diversity of people and the ways they wake up. Some people could just be walking down the street and suddenly it’s there. It doesn’t happen that often because 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 hasn’t been a struggle.

Rick: That’s very true.

Chris: So there’s nothing that says it has to be. It’s just that usually the mind is so programmed—and it gets back to what we were talking about in the beginning—that the way memories are formed and the ways we’re taught to interpret experience all go against awakening. So, usually, because of that, you have to be pushed. But I don’t think there’s anything inevitable about it. 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 when you see them play, there’s this naturalness and almost effortlessness, even though they’re working really hard playing tennis, basketball, or whatever they’re doing. There’s this grace, and that’s when we usually like watching them: there’s this sort of beauty in 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, it’s a loose analogy.

Why Awakening Cannot Be Learned Like a Skill

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. You learn and learn and learn, and you put that in the bank until you can draw it out naturally. 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: it doesn’t work that way with awakening. You can’t learn how to do it.

Chris: 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. You learn and learn and learn, and you put that in the bank until you can draw it out naturally. 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: 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, “My memory has been restored. I know who I am.”

Chris: Oh, but that’s a different memory.

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—there’s kind of a mutually reinforcing influence that takes place when the field gets enlivened, and everyone within that field benefits mutually.

Rick: It’s a different kind of memory. A lot of people—you’ve probably heard this—say, “You know, I’ve always known this. Somehow, it’s so obvious now, but I’ve 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, 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. Tim from Victoria says, “In my experience, the desire for and pursuit of fundamental truth seems to exaggerate”—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. As I said, for me with Adya, that was what I heard: You don’t have to do anything. And “you don’t have to do anything” was a deep relaxation.

So that tendency to contract—if I’m reading it right, if I’m getting his question right—that tendency is a kind of contraction, too, and it 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 pail of water with 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 Amma who said that. I don’t know. I’ve heard it. Again, that phrase, “Be easy with gentle effort.” Papaji used to say, “Give up the search,” and a lot of people parroted that. A lot of people interpreted it to mean, “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 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 “give up the search” is something—I don’t know the context in which Papaji said it—that would be said at a specific time for a specific student.

Rick: Right.

Chris: It’s not an overall generic statement.

Rick: He was saying that to the people sitting within 20 feet of him in that room, at that time.

Chris: Because I would think it would be even more specific than that: to this specific person, “It’s time. It’s time for you to give up the search.” Because if you say it to anybody who has 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 someone with the initials BB. Isn’t that the name of that little robot in Star Wars? The little round one that rolls along? BB something. BB from Vermont asks, “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 are 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—nevertheless, I’m going to be hungry after this interview, and 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. 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 are pots. On one level there are no individuals, and on another level there are. 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.

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 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 say, “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.

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 say, “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. Naturally, being the fanatic that I am, I 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. C was sort of a nil group, B was sort of people with good experiences, and A was people with really good, clear experiences. So there was this huge sense of, “Oh my God, I want to be like them,” and all this stuff. 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 something came up a little bit earlier that you hinted at, or maybe said explicitly: 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—these days, there’s so much information coming at you. There are so many things you can watch on YouTube in the spiritual realm, and then in the political realm, all the stuff with COVID-19 and all these different conspiracy theories flying around. You can spend all day watching that stuff and get rather influenced by it, especially if you’re susceptible to being influenced by things.

You can kind of get off on these tangents, thinking about stuff without really discerning or discriminating clearly 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 cultivate discernment and discrimination on the spiritual path. Do you remember that book The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham?

Chris: I don’t. I probably read it, but it was probably too long ago for me 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. It’s important to 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 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 some of these ideas, in my opinion. 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. They might have been 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, “If at any point I seem to be falling from my status of God consciousness or my realization, help me, give me feedback.” So he was saying right from the outset of his relationship with Yogananda that he wasn’t infallible either. No matter how advanced you may be, you have to be careful.

Chris: Yeah, well, not being infallible is different, though, isn’t it, from 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. 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, another quote from Don Juan in the Carlos Castaneda books: He said, “A warrior has time only for his impeccability.” In other words, not being sloppy, being precise in one’s behavior, in one’s thought, in life in general—

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, 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 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 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 who’s dead, so we don’t get in any trouble. Trungpa: was he a genuine teacher, or 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, 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 Chödrön 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 of 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 the teacher to have a completely 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.

You know how you were saying earlier about being a little bit more self-referential, 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, it 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 healthier approach would be to say, “Well, there’s something wrong here, and I don’t know 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 else.”

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: More than impressed. 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 the behavior contradictory, or is it just behavior? I mean, 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’Keeffe, Craig Holliday, Mariana Caplan, and—what’s her name? It’s slipping my mind at the moment.

Chris: I have heard of it, and I don’t know why. It might have been that 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 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 points that might reasonably be expected 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. There have been some great scientific geniuses who were morally off the wall.

Chris: Right.

Rick: Even Einstein is said to have been 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’ve talked to students who are very grateful for his straight-arrow approach, 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 saying, “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 whose interview I took down who slept with hundreds of his female students. When I took the interview down, he was very upset and 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. All right, 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, et cetera. 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: the teacher and you. 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—when the catalyst is introduced, then the reaction is facilitated. So, a spiritual teacher like Adya could be thought of as a catalyst, perhaps. 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, helps to create, an energy field in which awakening and transformation are more likely to take place.

Chris: Right, yeah. And so there’s a little bit of, I guess, a philosophical contradiction, because Adya is also not a separate person, and yet most of us have experienced that field that surrounds people who are awake, and 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. It seems like 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, 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 having their menstrual cycles at the same time.

Chris: Oh yeah, 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—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 be someone who 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 who 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 it’s probably not him. But in any case, hopefully 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.

Rick: Yeah. I just don’t want to overshadow the guests, and it depends. Some guests go on and on. You’re giving short answers, so I have to say something.

🕊️ How fiction can point to spiritual truth

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. Most spiritual people don’t read fiction. They think it’s not true, and they’re into truth. So why would they read fiction? I look at it a different way. I think that because 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 direct. In my novel, there’s a character who’s trying to get enlightened, but it doesn’t have to be that direct. Fiction can simply point 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 by creating—like you talked about—a field. I think you can create a field with words, too. So I’m putting out a pitch not only for my novel, but for fiction in general. I think it’s important to expand the way we look at what we read and see that there’s a way language can work. It’s almost the same way 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 are 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 is a spiritual, contemporary, female version of Siddhartha, and much longer.

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—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 his best. I read all his books, but those two are just absolutely beautiful. They’re set in South Africa, and they’re about the friendship between a South African boy and a Bushman.

Chris: I remember that. Those are his pre-Zen books, 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 about doing Zen in Japan. I knew 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 through the question form about their favorite works of spiritual fiction, we’ll mention them. Another example would be 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. Do you remember how that movie went?

Chris: Yeah, I did see that one. I don’t know if I remember a lot of it. Richard Dreyfuss was zapped, and he had this experience that he couldn’t let 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 headed toward Devil’s Tower. The government had staged this great big thing: “There’s a poison gas leak, and you have 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.” He finally prevailed and ended up being the only one to get on the spaceship because he was the only one who didn’t get waylaid by all the naysayers.

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, but it was really cool. I shouldn’t go into it, but maybe I’ll mention it on Batgap when it actually comes out. They asked me to write a blurb for it, which I did. That was a first.

It’s a novel?

Rick: Yeah, it’s a novel. The 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 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. There are all kinds of different things. 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; they’re not really about people on an enlightenment journey. Other ones are about people on an enlightenment journey. There are still others, too. It’s a whole hodgepodge of different books, but it’s amazing how many there actually are that relate to Buddhism.

Rick: You could probably think of a lot of the scriptures of different religions as fiction because 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, with people doing all these amazing things. They could have been embellished by someone with a bit of imagination, but there’s 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 the kind of differentiation between what was true and what wasn’t 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.

I’ve never really read Philip K. Dick, but I’m told he was a very spiritual guy, and that his science fiction works really had a spiritual bent to them.

Chris: Right. Yeah, 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, the one I read and wrote the blurb for, was originally called something like Awakening: The Story of Adya. I got back to the authors and said, “Adya? This sounds like it’s a biography of Adya.” I checked with Adya and said, “Are you okay with this? Do you want this book to go out with this title?” He said, “No, people are going to think it’s my biography.” So they changed the title. But they were students of Adya’s and were honoring him. Adya was the name of the planet in the Pleiades where this guy was supposedly from, but they changed it to a different name.

Chris: Oh, this is science fiction?

Rick: Yeah, they made it 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, a couple of years ago, called Beautiful Ruins, and I can’t remember the author. Unfortunately, I could get it to you later, but that doesn’t do any good for this interview. It was a whole journey that took place mostly in Italy, and the characters—all the multiple characters in the story—converge in the end. I got to the last chapter and 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. Of course, there’s not only spiritual literature, but spiritual music. You can listen to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or something, 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. I think they’re touching in to what we fundamentally are, and the reason 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—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 are 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 in the spiritual context. It’s a huge area that I’m not really that qualified to talk about, but I think it’s 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 sort of embodies the transcendent.

Chris: Right.

Rick: Alrighty. Well, what else? Is there anything else you’d like to cover that we’ve 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. There are lots and lots of entries in it, and people might enjoy reading it. 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. There’s also links within that blog, too. I have a literary blog as well.

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 you to feel obligated when I sent you something. I didn’t want you to feel like, “Oh, no time to read this, but I have 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. For 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 even want to do some kind of interactive video thing at some point. I don’t know—lots of people are doing that these days, where they just have a Zoom meeting and anybody who wants to join in can talk. 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 can make some new friends.

Chris: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah. All right, well, thanks, Chris. Thanks for your flexibility. We made Chris jump through some hoops 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. I 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’ve been listening or watching. Next week I’ll be speaking with Elena Nezhinsky, who also lives in the Santa Cruz area and was one of the founders of Liberation Unleashed. She hasn’t been doing that for a number of years, but she wrote a book called Buddha on a Bull, which I guess is reminiscent of the Zen ox-herding pictures or something.

Chris: Yes.

Rick: In any case, she’ll be my guest next week. Thanks for listening and watching, and we’ll see you for the next one. Thanks, Chris.

Chris: Bye. Thank you.

Rick: Thank you.