Christopher Roberts Interview

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump, the show in which we discuss spiritual awakenings or shifts with people who have actually had one. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this time is Christopher Roberts. I met Chris a few weeks ago when I came to our local weekly satsang or spiritual discussion group a little late because I was doing one of these interviews beforehand and I walked in and sat down next to Chris and just picking up on bits and pieces of the conversation I realized that he had already explained or described a significant shift that he had undergone in his experience not too long before. And so that intrigued me. I thought, “Oh boy, another candidate for the interview show.” And in fact there were three people that night around Chris’s age and younger that I hadn’t met before that very recently had undergone a significant shift or inner transformation. And Chris tells me that every week it seems there are more among his circle of friends. So it may be something in the water around here but I don’t think so. Something’s going on and it’s going on globally but it seems to be going on at an accelerated pace here in Fairfield, Iowa. So Chris, thanks for coming in. It took us a little while to get this organized and I appreciate your taking the time. Perhaps we could start by your just telling us what you feel happened to you a month ago or whenever it was.

Christopher: I’ve been involved in various traditions ranging from Gnosticism to Zen Buddhism to old earth religions, paganism, things of this nature. And I’ve developed, in my opinion, a pretty strong network of beliefs at this point about what enlightenment is, how to achieve this, how to get there, and so forth. I was given material by a friend of mine, coincidentally. He sent me to the website for some other reason and I was looking around and I found something that resonated with me really strongly.

Rick: What website?

Christopher: And this was on ProjectCamelot.com referring to, and the material that I found is an interview with James, a gentleman who runs another website called Wingmakers.com and I’ve been somewhat interested in this material before. I just never had taken an active interest in pursuing it. And so I read this entire interview and by the time I got done I realized that this had called into question everything that I believed. And it was in such a way that it could not say that they were lying or that they were wrong or it was not truthful what had been said in this interview. And so if I accepted that as truth I had to examine what I had already called truth. And then as those beliefs kind of crumbled in a very tarot card tower fashion, I was left with no beliefs. And I didn’t even accept the things in the interview that as my beliefs. I just I had nothing at that point. I was back at zero. But having that experience left such a peaceful understanding that I didn’t need to know. I didn’t need to have an intellectual method or understanding on how to reach enlightenment. I didn’t need to win some race to try to achieve enlightenment before I die or try to stave off death by reaching enlightenment. I could just be and that was enough. And from as a result of that I’ve been experiencing so much more happiness, so much more joy, a lot of spontaneous. My life is very spontaneous now. Not so much before. My life is also very more heart-centered now. Then I was very locked into my intellect before and I don’t feel that way anymore. I’m much more centered on how I feel about a certain situation or I just might as a description of my day I just I do what I should be doing. Doing the next obvious thing is a common phrase nowadays. I get up, I go to the bathroom, I get ready for school, I go to school. But if I feel like I need to be somewhere else and I have extra time that’s where I go. And I always this has been without an exception to this point. I meet a person there’s a friend of mine or someone I know of and they tell me something I need to hear or I tell them something they need to hear or it just works out. Everything is very spontaneous, without any effort and everything just kind of comes together and it’s a really great enjoyable experience. It’s been wonderful.

Rick: Let me unpack that a little bit. What was this website that you went on?

Christopher: The original one was Project Camelot.

Rick: Projectcamelot.com. You’re reading something there and that’s where the interview was or that referred you to another website?

Christopher: It was on that website.

Rick: This was an interview with whom?

Christopher: He is somewhat anonymous but he goes by James.

Rick: So if somebody went to Projectcamelot.com they could find the interview by James pretty easily?

Christopher: Either James or Wingmakers.

Rick: So you’d look for that on Projectcamelot.com?

Christopher: Yes. I think there’s even a tab or something for it specifically.

Rick: And then what was it about the interview that caused your belief system to kind of crumble? What were they saying in the interview?

Christopher: It was a very, I don’t want to say bare-bones, but simple. Everything was very simple and very clear of a system of control that’s in place that is locking humanity into the way that we think, how we get into these cycles. And it’s a little more esoteric or kind of out there.

Rick: Some beings or some authority or some intelligence?

Christopher: Kind of. It’s almost like there’s a lock on our consciousness and it’s these kind of loops that are built into it. And even people who think they’re extremely spiritual are still caught in another loop. And so I thought about that. I was like, “Am I in one of these loops?” And I realized I was. I had absolutely bought into the system.

Rick: Did you feel you’re in a loop because some entity or some power was locking you into it or just because of your own indoctrination or habitual ways of thinking?

Christopher: I would say both, but there’s definitely my own responsibility. That was the focus. I was accepting my responsibility for my spirituality. Because my whole life I had been searching for gurus, teachers, books, techniques, programs, you name it. I’m 26 now. I’ve been looking probably into spirituality since I was 14 to 16. And the reason I haven’t found anything is because I kept looking. I never stopped. This is a big thing that Maharishi always said was self-referral. And some people don’t take the long view of what that actually means of where you are taking complete responsibility at all times for your spiritual evolution. And I had been projecting my responsibility onto gurus and teachers and techniques and

Christopher: historic religions and spiritualities of all this stuff.

Rick: So that constituted your belief structure – the beliefs in all these various teachers and what they taught. Yes. And reading this interview somehow was a catalyst to call all that into question.

Christopher: It was, yeah, definitely. Very clearly for me it called into question everything that I had previously agreed to or believed in.

Rick: Right within the minutes it took to read the interview or did this take a while to work out?

Christopher: There was a bit of a jostle period. I got to the end of it and I was really shaken. I was kind of sitting there going, “Whoa. What do I believe now? How does this work? How does this fit in to what I already – what’s this paradigm? How does this fit into my paradigm?” I couldn’t reconcile. And I didn’t accept that paradigm, but the paradigm I had before shattered. I still haven’t completely formed a new paradigm to structure anything in a sense.

Rick: Well, maybe you won’t.

Christopher: Yeah, maybe I won’t. Maybe I don’t need that.

Rick: Maybe it’ll be a free-flowing kind of…

Christopher: I hope so. It’s been great. It’s really been… and I experienced that almost the day after. So it happened in one night and it was pretty late at this point. And it called into all this question and I was pretty in turmoil that evening. And I went to bed and I slept on it. I woke up and I was still in the same turmoil of like, “What do I do now? What does this mean?” And I could tell my habitual cycles were still in place because immediately I wanted to reach out to other people and ask them what I should do. And then I started laughing about that. I was on my way to pick up a friend of mine from the airport and I just really wanted to talk to him about this. I really wanted his opinion. And I just started laughing at this habitual grasp for acceptance and validation. I definitely wanted him to say it is okay for me to have this shift occur. But immediately that day and afterwards I’ve just really enjoyed a supportive nature that I’ve never quite noticed before. Synchronicity, coincidence, call it what you will, but it’s there in my life just about every moment.

Rick: It’s interesting. Maybe this happens when Christians have their second or being born again and their whole life changes or something. But I can’t speak to that. Maybe I’ll have someone like that to interview sometime. But it seems like the mechanics of what happened with you were that an influx of a new idea, a new way of looking at things, caused an experiential and even a physiological shift. Within a matter of 24 hours it reoriented your whole approach to life. You move from your head to your heart and you move from thinking to intuition and maybe from thinking to feeling, if we want to put it that way.

Christopher: There’s much more of what they call in Buddhism a mind gap, where there’s a break between thoughts. If I put any attention whatsoever on that, on my mind at all, it’s no thoughts. The only time that I feel a lot of thoughts is if I’m not really paying attention or I’m bored in some way. That’s the only time I really experience thoughts. I’m just kind of quiet. There’s a feeling level. There’s still definitely a feeling level there. I can feel a way about something that I’m listening to or seeing or experiencing, but there’s not as much monkey chatter. It’s very peaceful.

Rick: Yeah, I mean you must have thoughts.

Christopher: Oh yeah, definitely. The mind is not gone at all, but it’s quieted down a lot.

Rick: And it’s interesting that it should have quieted down. I mean that’s what we’ve been talking about with people here pretty much. Some people have experienced quite abrupt shifts like that and others it sort of snuck up on them over a long period of time, and others maybe a little bit of both. A lot of sneaking up and then a shift and then a lot of sneaking up. But in your case it seems to be fairly abrupt.

Christopher: It was. It’s interesting. I really haven’t thought about this until just now, but there was a period of time before this, probably about a month, month and a half, which I was in a lot of emotional turmoil. I wasn’t really sure what I was supposed to be doing, if I was doing it correctly, where my life was headed. I kind of took a break and I took a block off of school and just kind of went back home, spent some time with some friends. I kind of felt some, I definitely understood I was in a transition period and there was some change coming down the loop. But it was kind of something I’d given up waiting on. I was like, “I’m so tired of waiting on this.”

Rick: You could feel it coming.

Christopher: Yeah, and I had gotten into a much better space once I had gone back to Fairfield. I was like, “Okay, life can start again. Everything’s great.” And then I just got sucker-punched with this.

Rick: By this.

Christopher: Yeah, this shift. And it was the shift, I think the important aspect to talk about is that all of the features are kind of superfluous. It’s the fact that at that moment, I could stop grabbing at enlightenment. I stopped grabbing at the answers. It was just, I don’t know the answers and I’m completely at peace with that, which is something I’ve never experienced before. I’ve always been so intellectually aggressive in trying to gather knowledge, gather information. And that, I think, is the main shift where this easing into life occurred to where it was no longer me struggling against nature, no longer struggling against life or my own self, but I could just let myself be and that evolve in these recent weeks.

Rick: Do you feel like not only are you not grabbing at enlightenment, but you’re not grabbing at anything? It’s like you just kind of take everything more lightly or something.

Christopher: There is definitely a much lighterness to it. I laugh at almost everything nowadays. But there’s still desire. The desire hasn’t gone away, but the desires themselves are, I think they’re really funny. I’ll have a desire to go get coffee. And I’m like, “Well, I don’t really want coffee, but I’ll have this desire to go get coffee, so I go get coffee.” And then my roommate will be sitting there, and he’s looking at me like, “What are you doing here?” And I’ll sit down, and he’ll just spill his beans. I’m like, “I have this going on. I have that going on.”

Rick: Like he really needed to talk to you.

Christopher: Yeah, he needed to talk to me. I’m like, “All right, great.” And we’ll share a cup of coffee.

Rick: So that’s why I wanted coffee.

Christopher: That’s why I wanted coffee. This has happened to me a lot. This is how things kind of work right now.

Rick: Like almost every day.

Christopher: This happened tonight. I decided – I was like, “Well, I should get dinner before I come here.” And so I went to Second Street Cafe, and I walked in, saw a couple of friends, and I was like, “Hey, guys, how’s it going?” And we talked for a few minutes. I was like, “I shouldn’t be eating here.” And I walked across the street to go to Istanbul, and then I sit down, and not two minutes later walks in Carol Lee.

Rick: Arthur.

Christopher: No, I’ve forgotten her name, and she’ll forgive me eventually. But we ended up sharing a meal together and talking and having a great time. But then after that, I was like, “Well, I have some extra time.” And there must have been a reason I went to Second Street in the first place. So I walked over to Second Street, sat down, and within another two minutes, another friend walks over and sits down at the table with me and we share a few moments together. And that’s kind of how my experience is right now.

Rick: Have you been in – since you had this shift, have you been in any circumstances where you were in a strange town or something and you weren’t bumping into friends? And did things seem to have that synchronicity value just as much there?

Christopher: That’s a good question. I haven’t really been out of Fairfield since this has really occurred. Well, I’ll take that back. I drove someone to O’Hare International Airport, and it was –

Rick: Which is about a five-hour drive from here.

Christopher: Yeah, it’s a while away. And there was a coincidence kind of leading up to that – or not a coincidence, but they had called me and said, “Hey, I need to get to O’Hare by 7 o’clock in the morning.” And this is at 1230 at night, they called me. And I was just about ready to go to bed. I was supposed to write this paper, and it was the only reason I was still awake. But I couldn’t write it, and I was going to just go to bed. And the phone rang. And I answered it, and they asked me, and I was like, “I don’t want to do this.” And I resisted it very strongly. And I felt – I just didn’t feel good. I felt like I was making a bad decision.

Rick: Not doing it?

Christopher: By not doing it. And so I thought about it for a moment after that, and I was like, “There is no reason why I can’t do this.” And so I called them back. They get over there. We leave within 20 minutes, and we’re on our way to O’Hare.

Rick: Nice guy.

Christopher: I just –

Rick: Not too many people you could call at midnight to drive you to Chicago.

Christopher: I just did what I thought I needed to do.

Rick: And how did that whole trip turn out?

Christopher: It was good. They ended up sleeping most of the way there, and I kind of drove on my own. And I had a really good experience of just kind of – it was an interesting – it was a new experience that I’ve been experiencing just recently – was almost treating my body like it’s an entity awake. Like I can talk to my physiology in a way of like – I kind of went inward, and I was like, “Listen, I’ve got a long way to drive. You’re not going to be able to sleep for a while. I need to be awake.” And there was almost like a very subtle awareness of like, “Okay.” And I drove the whole way. Didn’t need coffee. Didn’t need anything. Wide awake. I got there without any real problems, and then I ended up driving back home because I’m originally from Illinois. So I just drove another three hours south to Peoria, Illinois. And I ended up staying there with my grandparents. And I don’t really think there was too much coincidence there. I don’t remember anything sticking out.

Rick: Although you never know, you know. I mean, it doesn’t – I suppose that the significance of an event doesn’t necessarily have to slap you in the face. You could have had some influence, or you know, maybe it’s the last time you see your grandparents. You never know, you know?

Christopher: It’s a two-way street, too. You know, you make a wrong turn, and it takes you out of your way, and you’re like, “Well, what was that all about?” Well, maybe you missed something.

Rick: Yeah. Could have missed a car crash or something.

Christopher: Exactly. Because that happened on the way to Chicago. I missed a turn, and I ended up taking this long way around. And we were concerned that time-wise we wouldn’t get there, and we got there perfectly on time. And I got home perfectly fine.

Rick: If you were to fast-forward in your imagination to five or ten years from now, let’s say you’re married and you have a couple of young kids, and you have to be at a job from nine to five that you really need to be at in order to support the family, and so on and so forth, do you feel that that would put a damper on your spontaneity, or this tendency to go with the flow?

Christopher: I probably would have thought that before, but I found that if that is the life that I was living, that would be in more an alignment to where I should be doing and what I should be going, and that spontaneity is where I should be, is with this family and in this job or whatever situation. And this is, I can use school as an example right now. There’s been a couple of days in school where I’m just like, “I don’t think I should go to class,” and so I didn’t go. And I ended up running into some really great people, spending a wonderful day, learning a lot more than I probably would have got out of the class for the day. Another situation is I had a lot of reading I had to do for class, and I was really concerned I wasn’t gonna be able to do it because I was, you know, just being spontaneous and just running around town and doing what I thought I needed to do, and I helped a lot of friends and spent a lot of good times, and then I get home, get a phone call, “Oh, you don’t have to do that homework.” So I think there’s an element of when you’re on your path, you’ll be supported. And I kind of feel if I were to fast forward, if this continues to unfold the way it is, I will be in a situation that will be in accord with that spontaneity. If it is spontaneous at that point, it could very well settle down to, “Okay, it’s gotten to where I need to be,” and everything else just kind of goes.

Rick: So, you know, you mentioned that you had studied Zen and Wiccan things and a whole bunch of different spiritual potpourri for about ten years. What were your primary practices during that period and most recently?

Christopher: When I was younger, I was much more into the ritual ceremony kind of aspects of paganism. I started going more towards the Eastern philosophies of Gnosticism and Zen Buddhism, and that’s where I started picking up meditation. There were some meditation techniques during my paganism phase, as I like to call it, but they were more visualizations than any type of settling down or transcending. But I was using more breathing type techniques, slowing the breath, watching the breath. There were also some concentration techniques where it’s watching the mind chatter and kind of shooing it away.

Rick: Were you pretty regular and diligent with those sorts of things? Like every day you’d do something or just dabble here and there?

Christopher: I wouldn’t say regular in the sense of like TM, where you’re asked to do two times a day. I would say every other day, whenever I could fit it in, but I did much longer practices than just 20 minutes. It would be sometimes an hour, sometimes two, sometimes three, and pretty intense practices sometimes of just really deep meditation. I also got really strongly into A Course in Miracles for about five to six years up until just recently. I would say it was a major part of

Christopher: my tradition.

Rick: And there were practices in that?

Christopher: It’s a lot of mind restructuring. It’s a lot of looking at your beliefs and re-examining how much your ego is involved in that belief. It’s a lot of forgiveness. And forgiveness, I would say, is still a strong practice of mine. It’s an understanding of not that they’ve done anything wrong. It’s that you’re holding something against them. And in the cosmic sense, they’ve done nothing wrong. But we have this tendency to cling to some minor infraction that they’ve caused us. And so it was kind of a watching what comes up when I interact with people and if I hold a grudge, you know, to immediately put this forgiveness practice into use. And that is definitely a strong predecessor, I would say, to this

Christopher: new experience.

Rick: How do you elaborate on the connection?

Christopher: Well, it’s kind of in a more abstract way. It’s almost that it changes the local experience.

Rick: What do you mean the local experience?

Christopher: The experience of, I’ll give you an example. I used to work for FedEx. It’s a very high stress job. I was a truck loader and there was a driver that worked a few trucks down for me. And we had gotten into a spit. We were just fighting and yelling at each other and very emotionally entrapped in this argument. And I put this practice in place. I forgave him. It’s all inwardly. I don’t have to go and tell him this. This is all me forgiving what I hold against him, but putting that kind of out there. And I immediately felt, you know, I should go down there and apologize to him. And so I walked down there. We both had big smiles on our faces. We started laughing about the whole thing and, you know, oh it was silly. Why did we do it? We shook, you know, we hugged. And this is not a hugging setting. And, you know, we just joked about it. And it was immediately this local shift in reality of mental, you know, we were both very stuck in this fight. And then that kind of technique just shifted everything. And that’s kind of how I feel in a sense where my reality is almost being manipulated in a way, a positive way, for whatever I need to do.

Rick: That’s neat. You mentioned, I heard you tell a story last week about how you kind of were crossing a street and some lady blew her horn at you or something like that. Maybe you want to tell that story or maybe not.

Christopher: Okay, I can tell that story. I was at the coffee shop with my roommate and some friends. We were having a good time. I was like, well, I think it’s time for me to go. And so I got up and I walked out. And I usually would have waited for a ride and just rode back with my roommate. I was like, I’m just gonna walk. And it was a pretty nice day. And I was walking across the street from the VFW. There’s a stop sign there and a crosswalk. And I’m walking through the crosswalk and a woman comes up to the stop sign. And as I’m about halfway across the street, she honks her horns at me. And she starts kind of waving her hand at me in this like angry gesture. And she’s on her cell phone. And I just immediately just lock in on her. And I just start yelling at her. And I tell her to get off her phone and she needs to learn to drive. And I would get really upset with this woman. And it was just so sudden. I didn’t have any real like control. It was just pure reaction. And I was still flustered over the whole thing. I was like, what is this all about? Like, why is she so angry at me? I had the right-of-way. She was at a stop sign. And I had this feeling though that what had happened was fear had gotten

Christopher: triggered. That she was on her cell phone and probably didn’t see me.

Rick: And so she might have been about to go and hit you or something.

Christopher: And that fear response triggered of, oh my god, I almost hit this boy. And he didn’t look or whatever. And I had. I had seen her car coming. I was like, well, I have the stop sign in crosswalk. And so I immediately just, you know.

Rick: Which is uncharacteristic for you.

Christopher: Very uncharacteristic. I’m very pretty even keel. I swore and I got really angry. But I’m continue walking down the road and I see her car pull in and park on my path. And I’m like, oh goodness. This isn’t good. And I was hoping that she had just. That’s where she was going and it wasn’t going to be. She’s stopping to engage with me. And as I’m walking, she’s walking slowly to where she’s going. So she can meet up with me. And we meet up and she immediately starts yelling at me about, I’m not looking both ways. Like, I’m like. She starts just really strongly. And I’m. And I lock right back on and just, you know, look, I have the right of way. You need to get off your cell phone. Like, what’s your problem? And then she starts yelling at me. She’s like, you’re not going to win this argument by yelling at me. And I’m like, you came out of your car yelling at me. And it was just, you know, no one was winning this argument. It was just anger and karma. And it was just no way to win it. And she, she pushed every button I had. She brought up my upbringing and she brought up all these other issues that I still have. I mean, explicitly she mentioned. She did. She did. She said, the problem with you is you were not raised. You grew up. And I just, I can still feel it.

Rick: I know your face just got red.

Christopher: I can feel that excitement that was there.

Rick: Yeah.

Christopher: And eventually I just was like, look, I’m done with this, you know, whatever. And I walked away, but I still, I couldn’t let it go because she was still talking at me. And I turned around, I yelled at her again. And I was like, whatever. I stormed away. As I was walking home, I was like, what the heck was that all about? Like, why that lady? Like, why? And then I immediately went back to that forgiveness practice that I had talked about. And I went inward and I was like, whatever that was, that’s from me. That’s not her. You know, she didn’t do anything to me. And I went through this forgiveness practice and I was, I was really jittery. Just so much energy had been released between the two of us. And I got home and I was still, still very, and I sat down and I wrote her a quick letter. I was like, listen, you know, my response to you was improper, you know, and I asked her for forgiveness and I normally don’t physically ever ask anybody’s forgiveness. So I do something wrong. I just go inward, deal with it. And it usually turns around. But I was like this, I think this needs to be done. And so I wrote this and I was, you know, forgive me for my behavior. I’m not gonna argue with you who was right, who was wrong. That’s neither here nor here. Here or there. But my behavior was inappropriate and, you know, I hope you forgive me for that. And I hope that we’ve worked through any karma that we had with each other. And I signed it and I put it on a car. And that’s the last I’ve heard of it.

Rick: Interesting. I don’t think you had something to go through.

Christopher: Yeah. It was, it was like a catfight. It was just roar. It was intense. It was probably the most intense experience I’ve had in a long time with somebody like that.

Rick: Do you feel, you mentioned that you’re a literature student. Well, let me ask you one thing before I get into that. How did you end up in Fairfield?

Christopher: Through a series of coincidences, funny enough. I had pretty much decided I wasn’t going back to school. I was just gonna work and eventually become a writer and that would be my thing. You’re over in Illinois. Over in Illinois. Peoria, around Peoria, Illinois. And I had just moved back in with my mother again and I was working for FedEx in Peoria. I had previously worked for FedEx in Rockford, Illinois. And I’d moved back and I had, I actually quit that job. I was so unhappy. I just, that I was being pretty much, you know, mistreated. And so I left. And it was a really big deal for me because I’m a very rooted person when it comes to my obligations and my responsibilities. If I have a responsibility, I do it whether I like it or not. And so I walked out on this job in the middle of a shift. You know, I’m not taking this anymore. And it was a really big deal and it was this big release of like, good, that’s done. I don’t know what I’m gonna do now, but it’s done. And it was a six-month period of where I just didn’t know what was gonna happen. I was looking for a job. I was, you know, didn’t have any money. And I was playing video games a lot. And I would listen to podcasts about spirituality.

Rick: While you’re playing video games?

Christopher: While I was playing video games. I was actually pretty bored by the video games. The reason I played was because my friends played.

Rick: Right.

Christopher: And I wanted to keep up with them. And so when they weren’t online, I’d be playing and listening to these podcasts in the background. And one of them I picked out was David Lynch talking about consciousness. And the podcast itself, I don’t even remember what it was about. I have no idea. And it was on a media player and it cycled into another podcast. And the podcast was about a student’s life in MUM.

Rick: MUM meaning Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa. Just who knows who will be listening to this.

Christopher: So I listened to this and at first I kind of ignored it just because it was so outside of my realm of thinking at this point. And I didn’t pause the game but I closed the game and I replayed this thing again. And I was like, no way. No way does this place exist. So I punch it up on the internet and I find the website. I’m looking around on it. I’m like, wow. Maybe this is a college that I could go to. And I see…

Rick: The website by the way is mum.edu if anybody wants to check it out. Continue.

Christopher: So I check around the website and I found they have these Visitors Weekend things. And they’re like 10 bucks and they refund your travel fees. And I was like, well I think I can figure that out.

Rick: That’s a pretty good deal.

Christopher: Yeah, pretty good deal. And then I found out it was, you know, only two and a half hours away from my hometown. And I was like, well I can just drive up there. And within a week I was signed up for Visitors Weekend and I was out here. And it was probably one of the best weekends I’ve ever had in my entire life. It was just really, really great.

Rick: What’s so good about it?

Christopher: I got to connect for the first time with a lot of people that shared the same values as me. Had the same kind of spiritual mindset.

Rick: People who are already here or people who are coming for the Visitors Weekend?

Christopher: Visitors Weekend mostly. They were just people in the Visitors Weekend.

Rick: Checking it out.

Christopher: And our Visitors Weekend, fun fact, had probably the largest percentage of people come back to come to school. But it was just, I really felt like I could be me for the first time. Because my family, I come from a Christian family in the sense that they call themselves Christian. They don’t really go to church. They don’t read the Bible or anything like that. But they were very proud of that or very accepting of that being their belief structure. And so they’re not that open to new ideas. And so I had always kept my spiritual practices pretty hidden. And so coming here was like I could really breathe and let myself be. And I just had a great time. And I really thought the town was great. And so a month later I had all of my paperwork done. The FAFSA sent out and I got accepted two days before the move-in day. And I was here.

Rick: That’s great. And so has it lived up to your expectations?

Christopher: My experience here, yes. But I would say it’s much different than I’d intellectually planned things to go. MUM has its place. I think it’s great for those people it works out for. I have my varying disagreements with philosophy there. But that’s fine. But it has been a great place for me to run into my like-minded people and have a place to where I can work on a degree while working on myself. Because right now I definitely, if the degree were any harder than it is right now, I probably wouldn’t be doing it. I’d be more interested in what’s going on in me.

Rick: Yeah.

Christopher: Go ahead.

Rick: So you’re working on a literature degree. And I was wondering, you know, how your spiritual development and particularly this shift that you recently underwent impacts your appreciation of literature. Do you somehow see it with fresh eyes or deeper insights or anything like that?

Christopher: There is a, the last class that I just took, and this was during this period, was Hero and Literature, which is based off of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Myth or Hero’s Quest.

Rick: I have that queued up on Netflix. I’m planning to watch that.

Christopher: And I just noticed a really deep understanding of the archetypal things that were coming up in this class that we were talking about. One of the main things was the Grail Quest and the Arthurian tales. And I just really, really understood the symbolism that was in these stories really well.

Rick: Since, you mean, you felt, you’re saying that this kind of shift from head to heart that you underwent enabled you to understand things like that more deeply or more intuitively. Is that what you’re saying?

Christopher: To some extent. I’ve always been really well, or really well equipped to deal with abstract concepts pretty well. But I feel like I grasped these quicker than I normally would have. I just saw it. It was plain to me. And I could see it in a way that connected with me as well, of this kind of outward journey to find communion with God. That’s the Grail Quest in a nutshell.

Rick: I see.

Christopher: But these archetypes, I could see how too they could help, you know, facilitate ideas, like a compact idea, and these archetypal understandings. And they resonate with us on a deeper level because it’s something that we all know in a way, whether it’s plain to us or not. We have experienced archetypes.

Rick: So in the month or so since your belief structure crumbled and you had this shift in your experience, is there sort of a settling of dust? I mean, is there an ongoing clarification or ripening of the experience or enrichment? Or have you kind of just basically shifted gears and

Rick: now you’re cruising along at the same speed in the next year?

Christopher: I kind of feel like the last month was a giant trust exercise. The universe was constantly showing that as long as I didn’t resist and I trusted, that I would be provided for. And every moment that that occurred, it worked instantaneously.

Rick: Have you occasionally not trusted?

Christopher: Yes.

Rick: It sort of hits up against you?

Christopher: But in that self, it was a very strong lesson and it was very clear. My roommate and I both wanted to meet up with a couple of friends and we were kind of forcing the issue. Like they usually hang out in the same spots we do and we didn’t see them. And we’re like, “Well, they live right over there. Why don’t we just go see if they’re over there?” And we both felt like we were kind of pressing the issue. And so we walked over there and it was just completely the wrong time to meet up with them. They’re not in the right space, kind of intruding on whatever they were doing. And we both understood like immediately, like, “Oh, we shouldn’t be here.” We left. But we both had that validation too of we should have trusted our intuition, our instincts on this. But it was a great lesson and, “Hey, you know, this works out when you do it right and it doesn’t work

Christopher: out when you don’t.”

Rick: There’s an interesting kind of paradox or balance between individual effort and going with the flow. And like you just gave an example where you were a little too intrusive in terms of your individual effort. You should have trusted your intuition and just gone with the flow, which was not to push the situation. And I’m wondering if it’s always necessarily that way, that you can actually successfully go through life just cruising and going with the flow, or if sometimes you need to take arms against a sea of troubles, as Shakespeare put it, and just really apply some serious gumption to breaking through some kind of boundary or resistance or opposing something that’s wrong or whatever.

Christopher: It’s definitely something that I’ve mulled over. Is this something that’s going to be constant in my life, the spontaneity or the sense of just release and let the flow take me? Or is it something that I need to really be involved in? And so far the experience has been that as long as I trust, I am supported. And if I resist in any way, then I am not. But it doesn’t mean that the support is running the show in the sense that Maharishi teaches that in cosmic consciousness, everything, nature is functioning through the physiology for you and you are the silent witness at this point. It’s not that. I’m still very active in my experience. It’s just that I’m kind of being led around the nose to where the experiences are. And then it’s up to me to do that. But there is a strong feeling level, a strong intuitive feeling level of what I should be doing at that time, of how I should interact with somebody or which person to interact with. And it’s an ongoing process of, if it’s a group discussion and there’s several cross-talks going on, and I’ll kind of key in on which one I should be paying attention to, and I’ll work with there. And if the energy shifts again, I’ll move to the next one.

Rick: So you sort of go through life feeling shifts in energy, feeling kind of like, you know, just kind of as if a scent leads you in this direction, you know, a subtle thing rather than anything obvious that slaps you in the face.

Christopher: It’s really subtle. It’s subtle to the extent that I don’t know if I’m doing it right always. And the only way I know is that I’ve experienced, you know, good rewards or feedback from doing that.

Rick: Somehow what you said in the last few minutes reminded me of Gandhi, you know, and also perhaps of Martin Luther King, who was inspired by Gandhi, in both of whose cases they, you know, were not kind of, well, nonviolent, you know. I mean, they’re both nonviolent and did things in a way which was much less confrontational than some people might have liked. But, you know, they moved whole societies through that process.

Christopher: It’s also, I’ve had this good support of, you know, I wasn’t sure like what I should be doing or where I should be putting my attention. And things have been coming up. People have been coming to me with things of, you know, “Hey, do you want to write this article for the school paper?” Which, “Sure, okay, yeah.” And I did that pretty effortlessly, you know, it worked out. There’s, you know, things seem to come into my awareness when I need them. And I feel really supported right now. And I don’t know if that is how it will be for the rest of my life or if this is some sort of integration period. It does feel a little more integrated. It doesn’t feel as new and fresh or kind of like, “Will it work? Will it not work?” It feels more like, “Oh, this is just how it always was.”

Rick: Yeah.

Christopher: In a sense.

Rick: So integrated sounds like a good thing.

Christopher: Yeah. Yeah.

Rick: It’s like you can kind of trust it more.

Christopher: Definitely. It’s not even a question of trust at this point. It’s just, “Oh, wherever I go, wherever I’m being led around by the nose, this is where I should be.” Yeah. It’s kind of an underlying perfectness to everything.

Rick: Huh. That’s neat. Is the perfectness primarily a behavioral thing in terms of being where you need to be and when you need to be and stuff? Or is there even something in your … Has your perception

Rick: shifted? Your actual way the way the world looks to you visually?

Christopher: Visually everything is …

Rick: Through other senses also.

Christopher: Visually everything is the same. I don’t see auras. I don’t see any of that kind of stuff.

Rick: Right.

Christopher: But there’s a … It’s a strong feeling level has shifted to where I don’t really think about necessarily decisions I need to make as well as more feel where my intuition is pointing me. And thoughts will come up to support or deny. Sometimes ego squeaks in. “Maybe we shouldn’t go that way.” But for me it’s a very subtle feeling level of things of intuitive, where I should go, where I should be. I kind of lost track of your question there.

Rick: I think you were getting it. Do you feel like you’ve become more creative?

Christopher: I don’t know. Creative …

Rick: When you have to write a paper or something, does it just flow more effortlessly, creatively?

Christopher: I did have that experience with the first paper I wrote for that class about the Holy Grail and all of that. But the second paper I had to write was about material that I didn’t really connect well with. And it didn’t … The paper didn’t flow well at all.

Rick: You had to force yourself.

Christopher: I had to really force the paper. And it took me much longer than normal. I’m usually very good about turning stuff in on time. This was like five days late. And it was a very forced paper. I’m usually a very creative person with writing. I haven’t really tested this out too much. I’ve been kind of just running around crazy, like in a sense of I just go all the time. But it’s very supportive too in giving me, when I need my time, it shows up. There’ll be a chunk of time where I have time to work on homework or take care of myself or get a nap in or whatever I need to do. But the creativity, I’m not sure yet. I think I know there’s some more testing that needs to occur on that one.

Rick: Interesting. Well, I could ask you questions about where you see this going in the future and all that stuff. And if you feel inclined to comment on that sort of thing, fine. But somehow I’m feeling, maybe it’s contagious, it’s rubbing off on me, I’m sort of feeling like that would be a dumb question, like who knows where it’s going.

Christopher: Yeah, I couldn’t really give you anything but an intellectual guess. But I don’t think that’s really that valuable at this point.

Rick: Right, that’s what I was sort of feeling. So I won’t ask that question. Is there anything that you would like to say that you feel like might be of interest to people that I haven’t thought to ask you about? I would say just from my own experience, there needs to, not needs to, but there’s this kind of fundamental truth for me. And I’m just, I want to make that clear that this is my truth and not anyone else’s. But there is a level of support occurring in everyone’s lives. Because my support is that I run into these people I need to see, but they’ve also been supported in being gotten to me. And not all of them are having the same experience that I’m having, where they’re being led around the nose by intuition or the universe or whatever you would like to call it. But there’s a level of ease there that if you stop struggling for even a moment, it rushes in. Because the struggle you think is really big and is really overpowering is actually quite illusionary. It doesn’t have any mass, it doesn’t have any form really at all. And once you give that up, it compresses and it’s gone. And you have much more space for this flow of nature to occur or support. And every path is completely different. And that’s something that has really resonated with me recently, is even though I find similarities in people’s paths, they are completely and utterly different. And there’s a deep respect for that. Of, “Oh that’s their path, that’s great, that’s so exciting. Where do you think that’s going to go?” Or, “Are you having a good time?” You know, with that. And there’s a really deep appreciation for everything else everybody else is doing. I’m around people a lot, “Oh that’s good, this is bad.” People say that. Yeah, other people say, “This is good, this is bad. I don’t enjoy this, I don’t enjoy that.” But for me, I just have this level of, “Okay, you don’t enjoy that.” But it’s what you need at the time, otherwise it wouldn’t be happening. And with that level of this ease or trust, life just gets easier. There’s such a release when you stop trying to control everything, because you just can’t.

Rick: Do you feel that the average person is capable of just stopping the control? Or do you think it’s kind of something that has to happen when you’re good and ready for that kind of a shift?

Christopher: Oh, I think everything happens when you’re good and ready for it. Whether it’s abrupt and uncomfortable or easy and without much effort at all. But I think that the only reason that things like that can get said is that it will ignite somebody one way or another.

Rick: But I mean, if President Obama came on television and said, “Okay everybody, stop controlling America. Just everyone chill and relax.”

Christopher: I think they’d impeach him. I would say some people are very in love with their control or their idea of control. And they think that the world is a very scary and chaotic place. So people will come to this in their own time or own level. And it may not be the same experience for them. They may feel that they’re very in control and having very deep enlightenment type experiences. But for me, the step was to let go of the control.

Rick: In my experience over the years, the several times that I felt the greatest release of control and upsurge of naturalness and spontaneity were kind of unexpected. One of them actually happened in a dream or in my sleep. I woke up with a radically improved sense of freedom and release. And I felt like I had been released from an incredibly tight constriction or bond that I hadn’t even known had been gripping me. But it had been gripping me with incredible intensity. And when it was released, I felt like this huge relief and gratitude and sense of freedom. But you couldn’t have told me the day before, “Release this.” “Release what?” “Fine, I’d be happy to, but where is it? What is it? How do I release it?” But it just kind of happened when I was ready and I was asleep, as I said. And I woke up feeling like a new person. And there have been a few other instances like that. That was the most dramatic. So sometimes I hear people advocating that everyone should just see things differently, change your perspective, become a different… And I wonder how voluntary it really is, or whether it’ll just happen when you’re ready. And maybe the best you can do is do whatever spiritual practices appeal to you in order to prepare yourself for that sort of transition.

Christopher: Well, I think that’s kind of what’s occurring when you do these spiritual practices, whatever they may be, is that there’s a level of working through whatever things that you have to get out of the way for the more deeper spiritual experience to come up, whether that’s TM or Zen meditation or Eckhart Tolle’s breathing exercises or, you know, the Course in Miracles of forgiveness techniques of removing unconscious guilt, as they call it. Whatever it may be is kind of rerouting things in your immediate universe to prepare you for these experiences. And sometimes they come completely unexpected, like you said. Eckhart Tolle, he was not a very spiritual man, and he had his awakening one night.

Rick: Yeah, he was on the verge of suicide.

Christopher: There’s a lot of people. It seems there’s two polarizations you can have of someone, you know, like Maharishi who goes into reclusion, becomes a monk, and reaches enlightenment, and then you have Eckhart Tolle who’s about ready to commit suicide, and he becomes enlightened. The same thing with Byron Katie. She was at the end of her rope, and so you can either hit rock bottom or you can try to climb the ladder.

Rick: I suppose, you know, again it’s a matter of each person’s individual path and unique pattern of unfoldment.

Christopher: Definitely. I have a really hard time thinking of or even comprehending any system that could make any group of people enlightened. A system will appeal to certain parts of their journey, but I don’t think there’s one system that can ever fully enlighten everyone.

Rick: Yeah, different strokes for different folks. Sly and the Family Stone said… Very simple way of putting it, yes. There were times in my experience of teaching TM where, you know, the TM movement would try to do something where all 7,000 people working in some factory would learn TM. And I was actually in a thing like that in the Philippines where we were trying to teach a whole school to meditate. And you know, it was a bit of a frustrating experience because some people are obviously into it and it appealed to them, but boy, you sure couldn’t force it on people who didn’t want to do it. And it felt… it created a great friction to try to impose it on people just sort of in a blanket fashion.

Christopher: Yeah, and you see that in almost every level of life. You know, people doing jobs they don’t want to do, children going to schools that don’t work well for them. It just creates the emotional feeling of unhappiness because something’s being forced upon you. Your free will is being taken away from you in a sense, or you have to give in your free will to someone else’s will imposed on you. And so it creates friction.

Rick: Which kind of harkens back to what you’re talking about in the beginning of the interview where you said your orientation for many years was to sort of give your free will, as it were, to this guru or this teaching or this practice, you know, to kind of look to them for guidance as opposed to your own inner inspiration.

Christopher: It was definitely a projection of my spirituality and responsibility onto them. Instead of accepting that spiritual responsibility, it’s also a realization of, if I really wanted enlightenment, why didn’t I stick with any of these practices? Why didn’t I actually really, really focus in and really do the work? Well, the answer is I didn’t want to be enlightened. I didn’t want to have that experience. I wanted to keep seeking. I was a seeker of truth and not an obtainer of truth.

Rick: So do you feel like if you had dug deep into a particular thing, you would have made more progress? Or was it that you hadn’t found what you were looking for and it might have been wrong to commit yourself to something that might have closed you off to other possibilities?

Christopher: In a nutshell, I would say that it’s just spiritual laziness or irresponsibility. But through all of these methods and patterns of spirituality that I’ve attempted, it has led me further consciously to a point where I could go, I could have this shift. And it’s pretty futile to guess at what would have been in the past because obviously what I did was right or otherwise I wouldn’t be here. But I think there is a level of spiritual responsibility that is necessary in walking an enlightenment path. And I for no moment at all believe that I am in an enlightened state at this point. Just had some experience which has changed my outlook in life. But having that responsibility in my spirituality, I feel much more at ease or walking the path. All of this energy that I’ve placed out on other people and hidden my responsibility on these other things has been withdrawn and now it’s back in me. And I can go, “This is really not that hard. Why was I making such a big deal out of this before?”

Rick: Yeah, I mean some people… it may be a bit presumptuous that we call this show “Buddha at the Gas Pump,” the implication being that there are people like the Buddha walking around pumping gas and stuff. But in almost every one of these interviews I make the comment that we’re not implying that everyone who comes on this show has reached some pinnacle of human evolution, but what everyone has had is some kind of significant shift, which appears to be permanent in nature, at least so far. And then their life has really changed significantly as a result. And there are many such people around. That’s very interesting. And people I talk to find that who haven’t had such a shift and hadn’t even realized that many people have had such a shift find it very inspiring that there is such an abundance now of people undergoing this kind of… it gives them hope to progress to more of themselves.

Christopher: Yeah, it’s interesting because this concept came to me recently of this flavor of God, that your physiology or your personality is a flavor of the divine. And so everyone’s experience is like a different flavor of ice cream. It’s very different. What they’re attaining, what they’re achieving is very different. But everybody seems to be… well, I can’t say everybody, but most of the people that I am with or my friends or people I’m around a lot are going through something. Their emotions, hidden emotions are being brought up, old karmic demons that they wouldn’t take a chance to look at are surfacing. Like me and this woman that I polarized on and we had this thing. There’s no reason for that to have occurred other than I needed to take a look at that, whatever it was. So I think a lot of that is getting pulled up in this younger generation. And I don’t really know anybody who’s

Christopher: not going through something right now.

Rick: That’s interesting.

Christopher: But I wouldn’t say that it’s all awakening experiences or enlightenment experiences.

Rick: Well, everybody’s going through something.

Christopher: It seems to be surging right now.

Rick: Yeah. Well, the ice cream metaphor is an interesting one because even though there are so many flavors of ice cream, there are certain fundamental qualities of ice cream. It’s cold, it’s sweet, it could melt. There are certain qualities that ice cream has. And like that, it seems like, even though everyone expresses it and experiences it in their own way, there are certain fundamental attributes to an awakened or an awakening state, which are fairly universal. For instance, your thing of being more intuitive and spontaneous and not forcing one’s ego against the world so much. That’s pretty common in people’s experience.

Christopher: Yeah. There’s far less…

Rick: Silence, having a quieter mind. That’s another one.

Christopher: There’s far less ego interaction that seems to occur, too, that people are interacting on a deeper level, even at a surface level. There’s something more going on than just two egos monkey-chattering at each other.

Rick: Right.

Christopher: There’s a feeling level that’s involved.

Rick: In your experience.

Christopher: In my experience. With just the people that I’ve been around with, I just feel a much deeper connection to them. They seem to be aware of this as well. Recently, I’ve just been showered with love and affection from all of my friends, telling me how great I am.

Rick: Don’t let it go to your head, kid.

Christopher: This is a big thing with me, is I’m very much a giver and not much of a receiver. It’s hard for me to take in compliments. They’ve just been blowing me away with it to where it’s like, I can’t say that, you know, no, no.

Rick: Have people remarked that you seem to have changed?

Christopher: There have been some comments to that.

Rick: I mean, you’ve probably told your friends about what you’ve been going through.

Christopher: Some of them, yeah. When it comes up, I don’t really feel a need to…

Rick: Has anyone whom you haven’t told that you underwent an inner shift remarked that you seem to be different in some way?

Christopher: Yeah. There’s some people that come up to me and they’re like, “Oh, you seem different. You seem really good. Are you feeling good?” I’m like, “Oh yeah, I feel great.” And then the story will usually unfold because they’ll ask, you know, “What caused this?” or whatever. But yeah, there’s been some definite comments on my energy changing or how they feel about being around me. So there is something to that, I guess.

Rick: It’s interesting that you say that a lot of people that you know are going through stuff, and I presume and hope that the stuff they’re going through is evolutionary and perhaps indicative of some shift on the near horizon. But there does seem to be an accelerating awakening taking place from what I can observe. I mean, I don’t interact with that many people, but it’s more and more common to run into people who say that they’ve really changed in some profound internal way.

Christopher: It seems to be happening at the level that people are ready for it.

Rick: To the degree that they’re ready for it.

Christopher: The degree that they’re ready for it. And it’s happening in more subtle ways in some people’s lives, I think, than others. My friend recently told me a story that his sister had stage 4 cancer and was going to die. And he convinced her to stop chemo and move to a completely organic diet. And this is somebody that would never have accepted such a thing. Just by changing your diet, you can heal your body. And she did this, cancer’s gone. Completely fine. Doctors are completely blown away. So it’s these people that aren’t necessarily spiritual, or necessarily interested in these kinds of lifestyles, but their lives are changing too, in subtle ways.

Christopher: Probably most of the people listening to this interview are aware that there have been predictions that the year 2012 is going to be a significant threshold of change in the world, and so on. And there’s that movie out these days with everything being destroyed. But many people who have a spiritual orientation feel that that’s really not what is meant by this prediction, that we’re in the midst of a spiritual renaissance, and that higher states of consciousness will kind of become more commonplace, or even the norm in the world, as a result of the changes that are taking place. That’s more of a comment than a question, but if you have anything to say about it. I could draw a conclusion from what I’m seeing currently, that that is in a process. I don’t think that necessarily 2012, the solstice of 2012, is the day that’s forecasted. It’s going to be any kind of observable benchmark. I think that we are in this process, and have been for several years. And as we get closer to these dates, that things are speeding up to an extent.

Rick: I saw this funny cartoon where there are these two Mayans, and one of them had this big stone calendar. And he said, “I ran out of space, I can only go up to 2012.” And the other Mayan says, “Boy, that’s really going to freak some people out.”

Christopher: Yeah, I’ve seen that same cartoon.

Rick: Alrighty, well, this might be a good time to wrap it up.

Christopher: Sounds great.

Rick: Well, thanks Christopher, I really appreciated this. And as I always say at the end of these interviews, if you stay tuned for a few minutes, you’ll see some titles. And in those titles, you’ll see links to various things you can do. Chat group, my email address, if you want to send in questions, a few other things. There’s a YouTube channel, if you’re watching this, on the Fairfield Public Access TV station, in which all these interviews are archived. And perhaps by the time you see this, I will have managed to create podcasts out of this series, so that people can listen to it while they’re in their car or whatever. So, thanks a lot for watching, and we’ll see you next time. This has been Rick Archer interviewing Christopher Roberts on Buddha at the Gas Pump.