Craig Holliday Interview

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and this, if you haven’t watched it before, is a show, an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. And if you’d like to get more information or help to support this whole undertaking, please go to batgap.com. That’s B-A-T-G-A-P.com. My guest today is Craig Holliday and I’m going to switch to him so you can see his beautiful baby that is in his arms, who won’t be there for the entire interview. Craig is both a non-dual teacher and a licensed professional counselor offering non-dual therapy and meditation workshops, retreats and satsang. His work is dedicated to the discovery of our innate divinity through embracing our humanity. He’s got a little bundle of humanity right there. He works in a way that addresses our everyday suffering as a doorway to our inherent freedom. He meets with individuals in Durango, Colorado and from around the world on Skype. Craig will be telling us his whole story, but just in a nutshell, at just 19, Craig began apprenticing under his teacher David, whom I’m kind of curious about, in southwestern Colorado. David is a little-known meditation master who lives a private meditative life. He guided Craig for 20 years in the lineage of Sri Aurobindo. This relationship deeply shaped Craig’s life and teachings. During the last 10 years, Craig also studied with Adyashanti, who guided him through four profound awakenings, head, heart, hara and kundalini. Upon request from others, Craig began sharing these non-dual teachings in satsang. Over the years, Craig has received ongoing support with teaching in his personal life from David, Adya, John Burnie, whom I’ve interviewed, Lama Tsultrim, whom I haven’t, and others. Despite profoundly awakening to the truth of his own being, Craig also understands the evolutionary nature of our souls and values the work of continually examining our humanity, both individually and with teachers, while surrendering to our divinity in greater and greater ways. He shares this same invitation with others. So that was great, Craig, nice introduction. I’ve never had a baby on the show before.

Craig Thanks, Rick.

Rick: What’s the baby’s name?

Craig This is Ani Sophia, and she’s 9 months old. And she is a wonderful, beautiful little baby. She’s also my teacher, and quite incredible. I’m so happy to have her in my life, I’m really fortunate. So I’m going to give her to my wife now. I just thought it would be fun to have her on the show for a minute.

Rick: Yes, really fun. And she’s so well-behaved at the moment.

Craig Say bye-bye.

Rick: Bye, Ani Sophia. Do you have any other kids?

Craig Yep, I have a 13-year-old daughter as well. She’s not so excited about her father.

Rick: She’ll get over it.

Craig Yeah, we had 10 years of bliss, and then the teenage years came, and she’s doing what she’s supposed to be doing.

Rick: So, mostly, as listeners and as you know, interviews such as this consist of two main components. One is the individual’s personal story, and the other is their teaching, whatever their teaching.

Craig Sure.

Rick: And sometimes I do more of one than the other, sometimes I do first the story then the teaching, sometimes the other way around. But I was thinking in your case, you have quite an interesting story, and it might be interesting to start with that, and that could provide a foundation for the knowledge stuff that we’ll be getting into a little later. And we have all the time in the world, we can go a couple hours if you like, or whatever, as long as it takes to really unpack everything you have to say.

Craig Sure, I guess the big question is, where do you want me to start? And if you can help me with questions, because I’ve lost a large chunk of my memory. So sometimes it’s really difficult

Rick: No, I’ll definitely help you with questions.

Craig to do the stories.

Rick: Yeah, and we’ll help each other, because when I’m talking to somebody, they know their whole life and their teaching and everything better than I do. It’s like when I work with clients in my search engine business, they know their business better than I do, so I need to collaborate. So this is a collaborative thing, and we’ll go back and forth, and I won’t run out of questions and I don’t think you’ll run out of things to say. As a matter of fact, I’ve kind of found it interesting listening to you, as I always do, listening to teachers before I interview them, because you can go on for like an hour or so just saying stuff that I haven’t … it’s a little similar to what you’ve said in other ones, but there’s always a uniqueness and a freshness and an originality as it rolls. And I think, “Well, I’m really not cut out to be a teacher at this stage of the game,” because I couldn’t do that. I’m much better at just asking questions and interacting with people. That’s kind of the way Francis Lucille is, actually. He doesn’t like to give talks. He just waits until somebody has a question and then he responds, otherwise he doesn’t have much to say.

Craig Sure.

Rick: Yeah. All right, so to get rolling with you, so in your bio you mentioned that you met your teacher David at the age of 19. So what got you going? I mean, what made you feel like, “Hmm, there must be … what’s all this spirituality stuff about?”

Craig Yeah, so when I was young, maybe, I don’t know, 10 or 11, I used to go to church, the Catholic church, and I think I used to just walk in and as soon as I’d walk in I just felt the presence of God there. And I was always just struck just by how much divinity was there. And so as a little kid I just thought I was going to be a priest. I wasn’t really sure what a priest was or what they did, but when I saw them, just standing, say, up on the front of the church there, I just noticed that they were playing with energy. And just as a kid I thought, “Oh, wow, that’s what my life is about.” And I grew up in a pretty conservative family in the Midwest and when I was about 14 I started to have all these really interesting spiritual experiences. I didn’t really know what they were at the time. I would just sit down and it was like my room would come alive or nature would come alive and almost like things would … it wasn’t that they were moving, but it just seemed that everything was radiating with just a sense of grace.

Rick: I presume this was happening naturally and you hadn’t imbibed any substances ..

Craig Oh yeah, so I knew nothing about yoga or meditation or anything like that, especially in those days. It was unheard of in, say, Midwest Ohio. And at some point, yeah, I said I was 14, I was taking a class and we were studying, say, the world’s religions and the teacher just mentioned a couple of different things. He mentioned vegetarianism and he mentioned Hinduism and Buddhism and right away I just became a vegetarian. And without even thinking about it much it was just like, “Oh yeah, I’m just not going to eat meat anymore.” And then I started to spontaneously meditate and I just did that. I would sit in my room every night for whatever, 20 minutes or a half hour. Every night my dad would walk in and wonder, “What the hell I was doing?” I think is what he would say to me and I didn’t have much response. But at some point I moved out to Colorado to go to college and pretty much answered an ad in the paper for a labor position, just digging holes is pretty much what it was for. And that’s when I met my teacher David.

Rick: Was he digging holes also?

Craig Well, so he recently moved to town and he was building a retreat center and so he needed some help digging some foundations. I built a greenhouse, I built a bunch of retreat houses for him and gardens and all sorts of things. I worked for him for almost 20 years.

Rick: Wow, so how come this guy is so anonymous and elusive if he’s got a retreat house and everything? I mean, I’ve never heard of him outside of my connection with you.

Craig Yeah, honestly I don’t know. His teacher was Hilda Charlton.

Rick: Oh yeah, in New York, right?

Craig In New York, yeah.

Rick: I have friends who have been with her.

Craig Yeah, and so he studied under her and I think he was pretty much her main disciple. And then she asked him before she passed on, I think she would have like 600 people would come and listen to her speak at St. John the Divine in New York City. And she asked him if he wanted a big following, if he wanted to take on all this. And he said no, he pretty much didn’t want anything to do with the huge group. He’s always had a very small group with him. And if you look at the life of Sri Aurobindo and the work that Sri Aurobindo did, Sri Aurobindo, I think he didn’t meet with anyone for the last 20 years of his life or so. And so my teacher David has been the same way, just a very small group, he doesn’t have a website. He told me he’s taught for I think 40 years and never put up a flyer or anything.

Rick: Just word of mouth. Was Hilda a disciple of Sri Aurobindo?

Craig Hilda wasn’t. Hilda was actually a disciple of Satya Sai Baba in India. And she spent about 17 years in India before anyone went there and toured around and studied with all kinds of yogis and avatars. And so the thing with David is he’s just one of those individuals who has so much grace and so much energy and power and light comes through. I’ve never actually met anyone else like him. And I’ve been throughout India, hung out with Amma a bunch and studied with Sai Baba in India and met all kinds of Western non-dual teachers. And David, he’s just one of those individuals who is almost like he’s not human. He’s just so incredible and so amazing.

Rick:: Are you still in touch with him?

Craig You know, I haven’t actually been to his class in the last year or so, but I pretty much grew up with him. I think of him as a father.

Rick: Well, if you’re ever in touch and if he ever feels like doing an interview, I’d be interested. He sounds like an interesting guy.

Craig Yeah, he’s quite …

Rick: I’ve had people tell me they don’t want to do interviews because they don’t want their teaching scene to get any bigger than it is. They want to keep it small, so I understand that. But it’s nice to have these kind of unknown people.

Craig Yeah.

Rick: That’s sometimes a criterion by which we judge who to have on the show, is how much they want to be on. The more they want it, the less … Okay, so you spent like 20 years with David, working, digging holes.

Craig Yeah, apprenticing with him, working side by side. We’d meet every week for three hours for meditation or satsang, and sometimes twice a week. Like I said, he was like a father to me, so any time I had a question or anything come up in my life, I could just easily go to him. Or oftentimes, if something was going on in my life, he would just call me and say, “Hey, what’s going on with you?” Deeply intuitive, just incredible, incredible being, incredible relationship. Yeah, it’s interesting because I work with so many people throughout the world and most people just have their teachers on YouTube and they don’t get to meet with a teacher, so I feel really gifted that I could spend so much time with him.

Rick: So, you know better than I do what the milestones will be in this story, but maybe some of the highlights of the kinds of things you experienced when you were with David, and the sorts of openings and awakenings and whatnot that you had would be interesting for people.

Craig Sure, sure. Well, with David it was a progressive path, which is very different than say, the path that I studied with, say, Adya. And the teaching was you meditate every day, you open to grace, you open to your direct experience of God in every moment.

Rick: You know, the last time I saw Rupert Spira at the S.A.N.D. conference a few months ago and you were there, my last comment to him because I was in a rush was, “Rupert, the direct path is progressive,” and then his wife chimed in and she said, “Yeah, Francis Lucille says that too.” I said, “We’ll have that discussion another time.” But when you say direct path, I mean, some people think, “Bingo, I’m going to just be there and that’s it,” but it’s progressive whether you like it or not.

Craig Yeah, it’s absolutely the case. So I’d studied with David and then at some point I’d go and see Adya and I’d have these huge non-dual transcendent awakenings and I’d come back and talk to David about it and he’d say, “Oh, that’s nothing,” to my utter dismay. He’d say, “That’s nothing, that’s just something quite small. You don’t even know what we are capable of.” And so, the path of Sri Aurobindo, basically it’s not about individual enlightenment, it’s about enlightenment for all of humanity. It’s changing, it’s upgrading the species. It’s a very radical approach, it’s radically different than the non-dual path that most of us speak about. And so, with David it was just meeting with him on a daily basis, opening to grace, and actually feeling energies and movements of grace that would be almost like downloading into your body, into your being, and affecting you, say, on the realm of material. And so I spent just years working with that, and opening to that. And some of the grace is incredibly blissful and other times it feels like a jackhammer is being driven through your body. I mean, it’s quite a painful approach because you have to give every part of yourself. And so, one of the big things that my teacher taught me was to not to be afraid of pain, to open to pain fully, to fully experience pain, and to be willing to surrender just every aspect of yourself. And so I think that was his teaching and that’s what I got so much from him, was just to be able to fully open to that movement through you and to give everything.

Rick: Did you find that your capacity or ability to do that was a developmental thing? In other words, you weren’t able to sit down?

Craig Oh, absolutely.

Rick: You couldn’t just sit down on day one and say, “Okay, I’m fully open, let it all gush out of me,” because it’s all locked up pretty tight, so it had to be kind of loosened up level by level, yes?

Craig Sure, absolutely. And the work of Sri Aurobindo – I don’t know if we want to spend too much time on his work – but it’s going through your body, your mental mind, your emotional mind, and the different minds within you, and opening to receiving grace in those places within yourself, and allowing them to be transformed. And so it takes years. I mean, it’s something that Sri Aurobindo gave his life to, the mother gave her life to it, who followed him, and it’s an ongoing surrender. And it’s like if all that grace came at once it would probably kill you.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. I’ve read that in a number of places from a number of teachers. They say, “You don’t want this all at once, immediately, completely, it would totally burn you out.”

Craig And your nervous system couldn’t handle it, your mind couldn’t handle it. I mean, in a lot of places you become quite disoriented in it.

Rick: Yeah, and even now, you just told me that you might need a little help because a big chunk of your memory is gone. I mean, do you feel like – well, I don’t want to get ahead of the story – but do you feel like even that might be symptomatic of your being a work in progress, and perhaps five years from now or something the memory would be functioning more normally?

Craig You know, I don’t know. What I’ve found, and this is what David told me, and actually Adya told me the same thing, is that what you need to remember will come forward. And to me it’s actually a great relief to have the past fall out of you, because it’s much easier to live and to experience life through the present moment without a past.

Rick: Yeah, and so that’s a good point to just highlight, because a lot of spiritual teachers say that too, that 95% of our thoughts are extraneous and irrelevant to the situation at hand. And in a more efficiently functioning mind and body, there would be relatively few thoughts, but whenever you needed to have some memory or some thought, it would come to hand, appropriate to the situation.

Craig Sure, absolutely, and so much of our egoic nature is, I mean, maybe all of it is based in the past, and constantly projecting that past into the present moment, and we create so much suffering for ourselves and others through living in that way.

Rick: Speaking of suffering, I heard you recount a lot of Kundalini stuff you went through. Was that with David or later on with other teachers?

Craig That was with David and with Adya. And so, if I just summed up the relationship with David, it was a pretty traditional guru-apprentice relationship. We build a temple on top of this hill on his property, basically on top of a mountain, and I said, “Oh David, let’s build a temple down here where the ground is soft and things are easy,” and he said, “No, we’ll build a temple up there,” and it was where there was no road and so it consisted of carrying all the tools up there, all the materials, bags of concrete. I mean, it was a ridiculous relationship because when you’re in that guru-apprentice relationship, the teacher doesn’t care what you think, what you feel, what your egoic wants and desires are. The teacher follows what is true in them, what’s true in their heart, what God is telling them to do. And so that’s probably the biggest thing that I got from David was this sense of, “Okay, God’s the boss, my mind isn’t the boss, my rational mind may think it knows one thing, but God has a different plan for us.” And so it’s just that life of continual surrender and it kind of pushes you to your edge and to your limit and to that breaking point. And of course, the breaking point can be the breaking point of becoming really angry or furious or the breaking point of allowing your heart to break open and saying, “Okay, yes, you win, you’re the boss and I will follow your lead.”

Rick: But presumably David did that with compassion and genuine connection to God because

Craig Oh, absolutely.

Rick: … there have been egregious examples of teachers abusing that relationship and just their egos screwing people around.

Craig Yeah, well, if a teacher was doing that then it’s the job of the student to leave and/or to speak up. But in this case with David it’s interesting because I was in a very intimate relationship with him for 20 plus years, or 20 years, and he was one of those individuals who I never saw him come out of alignment with God. And that’s quite amazing. If you imagine just being with anyone for any period of time, to see them never come out of alignment is just …

Rick: Insofar as you could judge.

Craig Insofar as I could judge, yeah, absolutely. But he just was deeply surrendered to the Divine. I don’t want to speak about perfection because I think perfection has huge shadows in it, but he was just one of those individuals who … yes, he treated me with love, he treated me with deep respect, unconditional love, yet at the same time he didn’t care about my ego. And it’s a very interesting relationship to have because most of us, we meet on the level of ego. People try to keep things nice, nice, and everyone is polite and this and that, but at some point if you truly want to live beyond ego, it can be helpful to get into a relationship where you begin to experience, “Well, what is it like to live in a relationship with someone beyond ego, beyond your own desires or your needs of being heard or seen or whatever it is?” But like you said, there’s a great danger in that too.

Rick: Yeah, and some people kind of get lured in gradually and they don’t know when to cut, when to bail, because there’s this underlying assumption that gets reinforced that, “Well, the teacher is infallible because the teacher is in tune with Divine intelligence and the teacher seems to be doing screwy things, but who am I to judge, because the Divine intelligence is inscrutable, so I better just go along with it.”

Craig Sure, well again, that’s your turn, or our turn as a student, to be like, “Something stinks here, it’s time to go.” And I actually met with a lot of Adya’s students in his inner circle and I was like, “Hey, what’s it like?” And they’re like, “Oh yeah, he’s clear, he’s clean, he’s professional.” And that’s what my relationship with David has always been like. It’s been crystal clear, it’s been clean, and it’s been … for some reason the word “professional” is coming to mind. And, Rick, I can say I’ve met a lot of teachers who have screws loose, who are playing with power games or money games or sex games or whatever it is, and normally you can feel it right away, you’re like, “Oh, this stinks, and yeah, now it’s time for me to go.” And I think it’s good if we’re going to study with anyone, just to have a good, clear level of discernment of what’s helpful and what’s not.

Rick: Yeah, I think it’s very important. And it takes two to tango.

Craig Absolutely.

Rick: Maybe people get attracted to the teacher that they deserve or that they are ready for, and there could be a rather dysfunctional relationship because both parties are dysfunctional.

Craig Sure. And that’s absolutely the case. Oftentimes people say, “Well, this teacher was doing that and this other teacher is doing this thing,” but it’s like, “Well, who are we to demand that a teacher be perfect?” To demand a teacher to be perfect, that’s crazy. It’s like, “We’re not perfect, I mean, I’m certainly not perfect.” I think we put too much pressure on others to be perfect. And it’s like, “Why are we projecting that onto someone? Why can’t we just meet someone with an openness and an honesty and be like, ‘Hey, I want some help growing.'”

Rick: Yeah, that’s good. So tell us a bit about all the Kundalini stuff you went through. I think it’s important. I’ve been getting a lot of input lately about people having Kundalini experiences and we’re trying to set up an interview with some lady who specializes in dealing with such cases. So it might be good to dwell on that for a bit.

Craig Sure. Okay, so if we’re going to follow some linear story then this might be a little …

Rick: Okay, yeah, feel free to keep going linear if I leapfrog on some question.

Craig Okay, so at some point, say about 10 years in my relationship with David, I started studying with Adya as well, because the thing that Adya offered was that you can wake up right now, that you can transcend your mind, your thoughts, your emotions. You can basically step into the world of freedom right now. And even as a young kid that always attracted me, so I started to listen to Adya and right away I had two profound transcendent awakenings which were quite amazing. And then those awakenings then deepened into a heart awakening and at some point there, that’s when the Kundalini came forward.

Rick: Okay, so describe these. Let’s not presume everybody knows what a transcendent awakening and a heart awakening is. What was your actual experience?

Craig Yeah, sure. So with most people I think that I meet with, and most people in the non-dual circles, I think they’re speaking about the transcendent awakening. These are the teachings of Eckhart Tolle or what Adya tends to emphasize on. It’s a sense that..

Rick: Although in fairness to them, both Eckhart and Adya do talk a lot about integration and embodiment.

Craig Oh, absolutely.

Rick: Eckhart’s talking about the pain body and the stuff you have to work out and all that.

Craig Sure, sure. No, I didn’t mean they spoke exclusively about it, but that’s one of the things that Adya is good at, is many people can just walk into his presence and then boom, they step into this transcendent realm. And so that’s what I’m speaking about. So basically, the transcendent awakening is waking up beyond your mind and beyond your emotions as who and what you are. Waking up into the vast space of awareness as who and what you are. It feels like you’re actually waking up and out of your humanity, waking up and out of your body. And this is where a lot of people have this experience and then they say all of a sudden they think, “I’m perfect, I’m free, everything in life is perfect, there is nobody here, no one is alive,” or whatever people say. And it gets a little bit silly. And in a sense, and I’ve even spoken to Adya about this, that the transcendent awakening is by far the biggest delusion that we can experience because when you wake up out of ego you experience such bliss, such freedom, such openness that you feel so empty of self. And in a sense you’re blasted into say a transcendent world, it’s almost like a heaven world, it feels like you’re not living on earth any longer. And it’s quite amazing, it’s quite profound, it is a huge shift in consciousness and yet it is definitely not the full thing.

Rick: Yeah, I actually have a quote from Adya here that I read last week, I think I’ll just read it again because it’s such a good one. He said, “It can be very difficult for any spiritual teacher to get through to students who are fixating on the absolute view as an unconscious way of avoiding their humanness, to get them to stop holding on to their absolute view. This is one of the dangers of awakening, the tendency to grasp at a lopsided view. We grasp at the absolute view of awakening and we deny anything else. It’s actually the ego that fixates on the absolute view, on the absolute in this way, using it as an excuse for dismissing unenlightened behavior, thought patterns and divided emotional states. As soon as we have grasped on to any one view of things we have gone blind to everything else.” That’s from his book, The End of Your World.

Craig Sure, absolutely. And the other reason the ego fixates on it is because it feels so wonderful. It feels so wonderful. But if you look at what freedom is, what freedom truly is, you have to be free of your mind, free of your emotions, and that means you have to be free of what you think and what you feel. And so most individuals, if you feel incredibly spiritual or profound or vast, you take that to believe that, “Oh, this is it. This is the ultimate reality and this feels so good, therefore this must be good, this must be perfection, this must be the total picture.” Does that make sense?

Rick: Totally.

Craig Yeah, and a lot of people work with a lot of individuals who open into this space and they’re like, “Oh, this is it, I have discovered the whole thing.” And sometimes people come to satsang and they are in a session with me and they awaken to this, and then I’m going, “Oh boy, now I just lost them.” But again, like you said …

Rick: In your experience, how long does that really last for people before the other half of life starts crashing in?

Craig Yeah, well, for me my awakening was quite messy, and so during that transcendent stage, I mean that went on for a number of years, where I was just feeling overwhelmed with space. It felt like my mind was the sky. And so that went on for a number of years, but also during that time because … how should I say this politely about myself? … because I didn’t have … my life wasn’t all taken care of, I wasn’t practicing yoga, I wasn’t crystal clear in my humanity, my humanity kept coming forward. And so I had this very messy experience of having aspects of my life come forward. I was going through a real messy divorce and custody stuff. So I live in this space of space and freedom and just overwhelming bliss, and then all of a sudden my egoic nature would come forward. And I kind of bounced back and forth with that for a number of years. And in a sense I think that’s a really good thing because those things come forward because they’re wanting to be transformed. And if we look at God, we can say that God is both the transcendent, spacious vastness, but God is also this dynamic evolutionary force. And so that evolutionary force, because we are a part of evolution, well God wants us to evolve as well. And so those things were coming forward into my consciousness to be healed, to be worked out, to be released, to be transformed. In a sense, that’s when the embodiment process comes.

Rick: So you said you had two transcendent awakenings. Were they distinct from one another?

Craig No, well, let me think about that. Were they distinct? Yeah, they were distinct.

Rick: Like the second one was somehow more profound than the first one or something?

Craig Yeah, so the first one came … I wrote the story of this in my book. The first one came in the sense that I was at the end of a divorce, I was working for my teacher, I was running two businesses, I was going to graduate school to become a therapist, I think I was also remodeling my house. And so I had all this psychological pressure going on within me. And at some point I realized, just one day I was with my daughter and her mom had just pulled up to pick her up and I was pouring her a glass of lemonade and I started to tremble and I dropped this pitcher of lemonade on the table and then I just fell to my knees and it was just like everything broke open within me. My egoic nature knew that I couldn’t hold together my life any longer. And that’s one of the primary functions of our ego is to create an artificial sense of control. And I’ve got to be careful I don’t go into the experience, but in the sense of …

Rick: You went into it in your book.

Craig Yeah, but I mean in this moment.

Rick: Oh, you don’t want to evoke it?

Craig I don’t want to get overwhelmed. So I fell on my knees and I basically surrendered to God and cried my eyes out for four or five hours. All this weight of just egoic, I guess maybe karma or things from my past just emptied out of me and I began to laugh hysterically at the same time. And then all of a sudden I just woke up in this new world. It just felt like, “Oh, it felt like this is heaven on earth.” You know, there was a sense of just stepping out of ego, allowing all that pressure to release, and then just living in this crystal clear reality of this moment. It was quite an amazing experience. And so that was the first big crack, you know, Adya often talks about when the ego cracks open. And so that’s what it was, it cracked open and it was like my consciousness exploded into this transcendent realm of just openness and vastness here on earth.

Rick: Yeah, when I first heard you tell that story in your book, the thought that came to mind is not to discount all the years, even decades of spiritual practice you had done. That was not coincidental. That had kind of built up a head of steam, so to speak, that had finally caused the boiler to explode. I just wanted to point that out.

Craig Yeah, you know, Rick, I’ve gone back and forth about that. I’m a big fan of meditation. I sit every day and I’m a fan of spiritual practice and spiritual work, but at that time it seemed as if the two had nothing to do with each other. Now that may not be true, but it just seemed that this was God and everything I was doing before that was almost like, excuse my language, but like peeing in the wind. And of course, that’s probably not true, but that’s what it seemed like.

Rick: It seems that way to a lot of people, a lot of people say that.

Craig Yeah, and we have to be really careful with that, with what seems true at the time. And that’s why I say that the transcendent awakening can be like a delusion, because it seems like, “Oh, because it feels this way, then therefore that means this is true.”

Rick: Yeah, sure, and I’m sure you’ve heard the saying, “Enlightenment may be an accident, but spiritual practice makes you accident-prone.”

Craig Absolutely.

Rick: It’s like, this kind of thing happens to people out of the blue who haven’t done any spiritual practice, but it’s more likely to happen to people who have actually been chugging away at it for a while.

Craig Yeah, and I could qualify that more and say that people who continue to do spiritual practice, then their awakening tends to solidify. People who don’t, their awakening tends to disappear.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. And you know, I actually get flack from some people and from some friends, but for emphasizing on this spiritual practice point, they think I’m just kind of addicted to it or hung up on it or something, but I’m just going from my own experience and from my own understanding, which is that it continually stokes the fire and it integrates. And there may come a time when I completely drop all spiritual practice and feel like it’s totally irrelevant, but you know that when you get to it.

Craig Yeah, it keeps us honest and it keeps us humble. And I think it’s so true that there’s too many people, especially in the non-dual community, who think, “Okay, I’ve awoken and now everything is done.” And it’s like, “Well, is that actually true?” If you look at any great master, they meditate, they practice, they say, “I’m going to surrender until my very last breath.” And I think it’s the very reason why there’s so many people, they let arrogance or pride or some sex scandal or something get the best of them, it’s because they aren’t practicing, they aren’t continuing to surrender.

Rick: Yeah, I remember I’ve used this quote before, but I think you were there when I was interviewing Unmani at the S.A.N.D. conference, and there’s a quote from Padma Sambhava, which is, “Even though my awareness is as vast as the sky, my attention to karma is as fine as a grain of barley flour.” So there’s this sort of need to perfect impeccability in one’s life as a human being, irrespective of, or perhaps on the foundation of, the vastness of awareness that one may have opened to.

Craig Yeah, yeah, if you want to be an accurate reflection of your divinity, that’s absolutely true.

Rick: We’ll get more and more into that as we go along. So then the second awakening, the first involved lemonade.

Craig Yeah, that was beautiful. So the first one was basically the sense that I cannot control life, my egoic nature is not in control. And it was just opening to this huge sense of, “Okay God, you win, you’re the boss, you show me the way.” And so that was the first one. And after that moment I can say that my life was radically changed. And so my life was still messy, like I said, I was going through a divorce, I had all kinds of things to clean up in my life. And it was actually on my way to see Adya for the first time. I was driving up and over this mountain pass, Wolf Creek Mountain in Colorado, a huge mountain pass. And I started to go over it and again I started to have similar experiences I had before. I just started crying, it just felt like chunks of my ego during this time were just coming forward. And I would just start crying and laughing all at once. And I was going down the mountain and then I was driving more and more of this was being released and released. And I came into the San Luis Valley, which is just this incredible valley in Colorado. It’s huge, it’s open, it’s vast. And all of a sudden my consciousness just blew out of my being and it seemed to get as big as, say, the universe. It was like an experience of huge, vast, cosmic consciousness. It was so huge, so vast, it was just undescribable how open it felt. And I think I had some question that was something I was struggling with in my life and I just kind of asked to God. And I just heard this word, “Just surrender.” And I just said, “Okay.” And it opened more. It was unbelievable how open we can become. So then I drove up and I saw Adya, I think the next day. And I was talking to him and I was describing to him my experience and he was like, “Basically, that’s great.” And he said, “What’s here right now?” Because I was saying, “Well, how do I keep it that huge and that open, say, forever?” Because of course that experience just kind of came back a little bit. And he was like, “Yeah, let’s forget about that.” And he said, “Basically, tell me what’s here right now.” I said, “Oh, there’s a quiet here.” He said, “Okay.” I said, “There’s a silence here and there’s a sense of aliveness.” And he said, “Okay, good. Just be with that. Just be with that.” And that’s the invitation. Can we not be with these huge experiences? And these experiences, I should say, they didn’t really end. These huge awakenings, it’s not that they end, but just in a real practical sense, it’s what’s here in every single moment. If we truly want to live in freedom, we have to be willing just to rest into what’s here. And so in every moment there’s a spaciousness here, there’s a quietness here, there’s a vastness, there’s a sense of peace, and there’s a sense of this awake, aware, aliveness. And so the invitation is, “Can we be with this?” And so that’s been my spiritual practice. If I say I have one, just an ongoing thing of just, “Oh yes, it’s quiet, it’s awake, it’s silence, there’s space here, there’s space for everything.” And so if the ego comes forward and there’s trouble that comes forward in the mind, there’s always room, there’s always space for it. And you’ll always be free in a transcendent way if you just identify with that. It doesn’t mean your life gets cleaned up, it doesn’t mean everything gets worked out, but there’s always freedom. We’re always walking around in freedom. And so for it to stabilize, we can’t just live in that huge place that’s kind of blown out of body and all that thing. But just to live in this quiet, awake sense that, “Oh yes, there’s always space here, there’s always room here, there’s always freedom here.”

Rick:: Yeah, that’s nice. I think we acclimate, you know? If you could somehow step back to where you were at 20 or 25 years ago, all of a sudden, even though you might have been relatively okay then, you would probably find it agonizing, unbearable, the sudden contrast. And conversely, if you were 25 years ago, to step into where you are now, even though it seems kind of normal and you’re just kind of cruising along, the contrast would be vast and overwhelming and more than you could handle. So we just kind of keep taking a bite and digesting, taking a bite and digesting.

Craig Absolutely.

Rick: So what was the heart opening? You mentioned two transcendent ones and a heart opening.

Craig Okay, and so the heart awakening comes … again, I went and I saw, I was talking to Adya and I said, “This is when I was living in that transcendent space.” During that time I would just go see Adya, anywhere he was I was just chasing him down. And I said, “Hey, there’s this vastness, whatever, there’s this huge sense of freedom and I see that my ego keeps coming forward.” And a lot of people don’t like that. A lot of people think that if I realize the transcendent then my ego is wiped clean and it’s free and there’s no more ego anymore. And so Adya said, “Well, why don’t you go into that? Why don’t you open into that?” And that’s the same instruction that my teacher David gave me again and again was, “Can you open into that? Can you open to pain? Can you open to your humanity? Can you include your humanity?” And so the transcendent awakening, I shouldn’t say it’s absent of feeling, but the feeling of it is a feeling of living in a heaven world. The heart awakening, that comes through being willing to feel and experience everything in life, all of your humanity, all of life, and not to have a sense of division. Because one of the big things, and this also goes along with that delusion that I spoke about with the transcendent awakening, is the transcendent awakening gives you the sense that I’m awake and the rest of the world is asleep. And you’ll see a lot of people walk around with this, like, “I am awake, I am the awakened one, there’s nobody here,” and all that jive.

Rick: I know, I find it very aggravating to interview those people. I’ve done a number of them and I don’t know, I just never quite see eye to eye.

Craig Yeah, and again, it’s hard to see out of that, but if you have a good teacher, a good teacher will harass you and say, “Well, what’s that?” Normally they point to somewhere below your throat, normally in your chest or in your belly, where we carry all kinds of unconscious stuff. And so it’s hard for me not to be honest, it’s hard for me to be like, “I am the awakened one, I know, I’m having this huge awakening and I have a big fat ego that’s coming forward.” And so the invitation is, “Can you open to that? Can you experience it? Can you be willing to meet your pain, to meet your humanity, with a total sense of love?” And it’s not from you, like me, the ego is meeting myself with love, but more in the sense of opening to the goodness and purity of your own heart and allowing that heart space to embrace your very own pain, to embrace your very own pain.

Rick: When I was listening to you, I heard you use the word “willing” a lot, the willingness to do this and the invitation is to do that. And it kind of made me feel like you probably hung around Gangaji and Eli Jackson quite a bit, because they both often use those phrases. And I guess the sticking point with me on that is, you know, we were saying earlier about how there’s a lot of stuff that’s just buried and it’s tenacious and it’s just not all going to come out at once. And so, well, elaborate a little bit on willingness. I mean, a person might say, “Yeah, I am willing, but nothing’s happening,” or, “It feels like there’s so much still stuck there and let’s get on with it. How do I kind of unearth everything and heal it without overindulging in emotionality?”

Craig Yeah, so the willingness is to connect with your innate divinity, a willingness to connect with the beauty and the divinity of your own heart, and the willingness to feel pain. See, most people don’t want to feel pain. They say, “Oh, I don’t like the way this feels and so I’m just going to go back into the transcendent realm.” And you’ll see a lot of people, even great teachers, I notice them just hiding out in the transcendent realm and being unwilling to feel and to experience their own humanity. And when we do that, of course, then those shadow aspects come forward into our lives. I mean, the reason I shouldn’t say great teachers do that, everyone does this, myself included, and that’s the way I’ve discovered it is in the sense that our ego has all these programs. And again, if we’re going to be free of ego, we have to be free of those programs. So one of the biggest programs the egoic nature has is to seek pleasure and avoid pain at all costs. And so there has to be a willingness to feel pain. And this is one of the gifts that my teacher David gave me, he said, “Go into the pain, see what’s there, see pain as a mystery.” But what our egoic nature does is it says, “I know what pain is, it’s bad, and therefore I’m going to avoid it, ignore it, repress it, transcend it, do anything, but feel it.”

Rick:: Alright, let’s say somebody is listening to this and they say, “Alright, I’m willing to feel pain. I want to feel it, I want to work through it.” How do they actually do it?

Craig You bring your awareness into it.

Rick: In a meditative state? I mean, driving down the freeway while you’re eating dinner with your family?

Craig I do, I do it all. Yeah, of course, starting in a meditative state is great because you have all your attention and awareness, you don’t have a lot of distractions. But if you just notice, if you just come into pain, if you just notice your mind, the first thing it wants to do is it wants to jump back out of it and it wants to go into the story, “This pain shouldn’t be here, how do I get rid of it?” And when I work with individuals or when I work with myself, that’s the game that our mind plays. But if we’re going to live in a way that’s greater than our own mind, we have to be willing to feel, we have to be willing to experience. Just like, say, when you get up in the morning and you want to experience bliss, so you sit down and meditate, you say your mantra 8 million times, you rise through the crown chakra and go out into the transcendent space. That’s one form of meditation. A different form of meditation is, “Can I open fully to pain? Can I feel it? Can I experience it? Can I meet it totally with love?” You know, the same way you meet a child, like my little baby, if she’s crying, you get down on your knees and you pick her up and you hold her close to your heart. You allow her to scream and have her fit and you just gently hold the space for her, and then soon she begins to calm down. And so the same is true with us meeting our pain. Can we open to it? Can we listen to it without believing the story? And here the big trick is to not believe the story of the pain, but to feel the pain, to experience it directly.

Rick: As an actual physical sensation?

Craig Oh yes, absolutely. It has to be a physical sensation. If you’re going to talk, say, psychology now, if you have emotional pain within you, the way emotional pain is healed is through feeling it, allowing it to release, and then it’s gone. But if you don’t feel and experience pain, it stays repressed within you and then it comes out of you in some, say, neurotic way. Do you know what I mean?

Rick:: Yeah, so you might be sitting in meditation, let’s say. The reason we mention meditation is that it seems like a lot of humanity is really busy trying to distract themselves from feeling anything. You know, “Got to go to the next movie, got to camp out on the sidewalk in front of the Apple Store to get the next iPhone,” you know, it’s just all kinds of stuff that people are always doing. And what you’re advocating seems a bit more introspective and probably requires a little bit of a freeing up from the usual distractions. So you’re saying, let’s say, one is sitting in a meditative state and feeling some ache in the heart or something like that, and who knows what that ache is actually associated with in terms of any events that ever happened. And one may attach a meaning to it, one might think, “Oh, I really want to be with this person,” or “So-and-so really wronged me ten years ago,” or something. But what you’re saying is, don’t get caught up in those meanings, just keep coming back to the physical sensation and dwell on it, be with it.

Craig Yeah, and you want to be with it fully, you want to be willing to be with it fully and completely.

Rick: As much as you can.

Craig As much as you can. I would say you want to join with it 100%. 100%. You know, it’s like if I was in pain, and I went to one of my teachers, say David or went to Adya or something, I would sit there with them. And there would just be this sense of, “It’s okay to fully feel and to fully experience this.” It’s like 100% to become one with the feeling. When you become one with the feeling, you’ll find that your heart will break open and the experience will rush through your body. It will feel like, I mean, it may feel crazy, you know, if it’s, say, the first time you’re doing it, it will feel absolutely overwhelming, perhaps even terrifying. Now, oftentimes when I walk people through this, they turn pale. But as you breathe through it, what you discover is a hugeness of love and a hugeness of indestructibility. That who and what I am is greater than any experience in my body. Greater than any experience of pain. Because if we’re going to be free, we have to be free of fear of pain, fear of feeling. And also, I’ll say this, this will sound probably crazy to most people, but if you experience pain just in the most intimate way, you become totally intimate with pain, what you’ll discover is absolute bliss there. Absolute energy. And it’s amazing. It is quite amazing to be like, “Oh my God, I was so terrified of this thing.” And now look at it. As I open to it, as I join with it, as I become one with it, as this energy moves through my body, I discover something quite profound, much more profound than what I thought it was before.

Rick:: Are you just mainly referring to emotional pain here, or would you also say that to a burn victim or a cancer patient or something?

Craig Oh, I don’t think I could say it to a burn victim or a cancer patient. Like, if it’s true physical pain, there is pain that is just true physical pain. I think it’s possible and for a while I lived with chronic back pain and for me that chronic back pain ended up being kundalini energy. But if you look at, say, pain, if you go into any pain, even if it’s a physical pain, you can go into it and experience it on the level of bliss if you fully and totally open to it. But I’m not going to be that arrogant to say that you could live that way forever. I mean, if someone drew … I’ve been a carpenter before and if I hit my hand with a hammer it’s going to hurt. It’s going to absolutely hurt. So I want to be clear to anyone who’s in that kind of pain that, yeah, of course, we have bodies and we have physical pain. But pain can teach us so much. We have such an aversion to pain, especially, I don’t know if especially spiritual people, but I know a lot of spiritual people, maybe all of humanity, is just trying to escape pain. And in this world we’re going to experience pain and this invitation is, “Can we open to it fully and completely and to see if it actually is what our mind is telling us it is?”

Rick: So would you say that the reason that you might enter into bliss having fully felt your pain is that that pain you were feeling was actually the thing that was blocking you and by fully feeling it you remove the block and as soon as the block is removed there’s naturally an upsurge of bliss that was kind of bottled up and waiting to be experienced?

Craig So I would say that’s true, but also if you experience any energy fully and completely at its core, its very nature, its very essence is bliss. So say, I’m not that good with all the quantum physics kind of stuff, but I don’t have that kind of mind, but if you experience any energy in its most fundamental essence, I imagine it’s bliss.

Rick: Yeah, I don’t know about if a quantum physicist would agree with that, but certainly the traditional teachings do. There’s that saying, “In contact with Brahman is infinite joy.”

Craig Sure

Rick: I once heard a lecture in which the teacher said, “Bliss itself isn’t blissful, but it’s the contact with it, the interface between our human experience and the field of sat-chit-ananda or bliss that creates waves.”

Craig Exactly, and that’s what I meant, that field that you’re speaking about, like this whole world is like this field of energy and that energy is God, and of course you experience God, like you said, it’s blissful.

Rick: Okay, I think I’ve wrapped up that question. Oh, I know I had a question kicking around, which was that, how successful do you think people would be just listening to this interview, in sitting down and doing what we’re saying, experiencing the bottled up pain and kind of healing and resolving it, or how important will it be for most people to have a facilitator or a teacher to help them through the process?

Craig It’s absolutely helpful. That’s how I learned, just through sitting with David, sitting with Adya, sitting with John Bernie. Just being willing to have someone there to hold that space for you. In a sense, if you go to a good therapist – I know “therapist” is a dirty word for a lot of people – but if you go to a good therapist, what they’re doing, hopefully, is holding a space of love for you. And in a sense, like any mother knows this, we all know how to do this. We do it with our children, we do it with our dogs, we do it with our partners, but we don’t always do it with ourselves. It’s just like being willing to hold this space while part of you is screaming and shouting and has a big story, just meeting it with love and also meeting it with that wisdom of the parent who knows, “Okay, I’m not really going to listen to the big story of my five-year-old who’s having a tantrum because they don’t get a cookie.” You hold the space of love, you don’t listen to the story, the energy moves through them and then they’re left in this sense of, “Oh, I am actually okay,” in a more fundamental sense, in a more true sense. I don’t have to believe my mind, I can calm down and come into this deeper place and realize that’s how we all grow up. You know what I mean?

Rick: Yeah. Of course, these days some of these teachers, like Adya of course, are very popular and you can go on a retreat with them with 300 people there, but there’s not going to be a good chance of you sitting in the seat and interacting with them personally. But what do you think of that?

Craig Yeah, that’s why it’s helpful to find a teacher. That’s what I do, say, professionally, is I sit with people and we do this type of work. But I think there’s a lot of people out there doing it. But it’s finding someone, one who’s done the work on themselves, because when you’ve done the work on yourself you feel confident in the sense that it’s going to be okay. A lot of therapists actually come to me for training and they say, “Well, how do you hold a space like that?” Well, the first thing is you have to not be afraid of feeling, you can’t be afraid of losing control. You have to walk through those doors first and then you realize that, “Oh, it’s actually okay. I didn’t actually go crazy. I’m actually quite here, quite incredible, quite strong, quite vibrant, quite alive.” But again, this isn’t an egoic thing. It’s a trust thing, it’s you trusting in your nature that you’re good, that nothing can destroy you, and as you do, God shows you that.

Rick: So, on the other side of your transcendent awakening, there was a lot of vastness and kind of detachment, I suppose, and that kind of thing characterizing your life. And then you went through this more of a heart awakening. So, on the other side of your heart awakening, how was your everyday life experienced?

Craig Yeah, so an overwhelming intimacy with all of life.

Rick: Pretty much all the time, more or less.

Craig All the time, yeah, to the point of it being ridiculous. I think when we first start having … the time that’s close to the awakening is a little bit of a ridiculous period in life, because in a sense most of us become somewhat or mostly non-functional. So for me, I was walking around with such bliss, such overwhelming ecstasy just pouring out of my body. I remember I was walking across the sidewalk or parking lot and I saw gum stuck on the ground, and it was just like overwhelming. Love was just pouring out of some dirty piece of gum. But it’s this sense of just being overwhelmed by love and unity and intimacy with all of life. And a very interesting thing comes through being willing to feel and experience pain, through also being willing to be open and in love with all of life. The part about being open and in love with all of life, that’s kind of a grace, that’s just easy. It’s just like when you’re flooded with bliss and openness, it’s easy to fall in love with a doorknob or a wall or the sky or even someone being angry. I can even remember someone coming at me being really angry and just being like, “My God, they’re so beautiful!” And so that’s easy. But from this willingness to meet pain fully and just to experience it fully without any fear there, a funny thing happens in your mind is a true non-duality begins to happen in your mind in the sense that you begin to lose the sense of division between opposites, if that makes sense. Because the big division that we all have is, “This feels good and this doesn’t feel good.” But when you’re willing to open-heartedly feel and experience everything without reservation, that part of your mind begins to die, it begins to dissolve, it begins to disappear. And life becomes very strange then because in a sense you begin to experience things that sometimes were painful or terrible and you don’t see them from a place of judgment, if that makes sense.

Rick: It does. Would it also be true to say, in your experience, that not only the distinction or division between relative pairs of opposites became less contrasting, but the distinction between the transcendent silence and the entire relative creation, in your experience, became less, and is still becoming, less and less contrasting, so there’s really not so much gulf between the two?

Craig Oh, absolutely. I thought about it differently than how you just described it, but what I felt is that the transcendent descended into the being and just was experiencing spaciousness everywhere in everyday life. And there wasn’t any more this sense of, “I’m awake and the rest of the world is not awake.” There was just this sense of, “All of life is awake, all of life is alive and vibrating with beauty and divinity.” The shadow side of the transcendent realm is kind of this awake aloofness, “I’m the awakened one and everyone else is just mere mortals or whatever they are.”

Rick: “Scum of the earth!”

Craig They’re living in their egoic nature or whatever it is. There’s this very bizarre dissolving of a feeling that you are at all different from anything else on earth. It’s funny because I’ll see as much beauty in somebody terrible, like if I visited someone in jail or something, or someone in a fight as in another being who is an awakened whatever. And so those divisions, they dissolve and it becomes really bizarre to live in a way without divisions.

Rick: And yet, on the other hand, you probably have a much greater affinity with your daughter than with some kid that you might see in the shopping mall, and by the same token with your wife. So despite this more universal perspective, we still have our favorites, don’t we?

Craig We definitely still have our favorites, yeah. And I think our humanity helps to keep us in check because we can get a little bit out there when the heart really awakens that way if we’re not careful. And Rick, that’’s good that you brought that up because this relates back to what you were saying about spiritual practice. It’s always good to carry in your back pocket a little bit of discernment. You know what I mean? It’s good not to say, “Okay, I’m going to give all my money to this hitchhiker I just picked up because I’m totally in love with him and he’s having a really hard time.” It’s like, “Oh, maybe you pick him up and give him a ride, but you don’t give him all of yourself.” You know what I mean?

Rick: Right, yeah.

Craig Yeah, so you always want to have some discernment and to have those spiritual practices to keep yourself in check. And I think one of the things that I like to do is to look at the shadows of all these experiences because, like I said, the reason I learned them is because I found them coming up in my own life. If you’re not careful when your heart awakens, this is where you see people go on meditation retreats or yoga retreats and then all of a sudden everyone is sleeping with each other or everyone is in these gooey hug fests or whatever it is. You need to be really careful that you don’t get yourself in a lot of trouble. You have to have some discipline or you’re going to make a mess out of your life and a mess out of someone else’s life.

Rick: Yeah, there’s an interesting quote from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, which is kind of repetitive, but it says, “It is not for the sake of the husband, my dear, that he is loved, but for one’s own sake that he is loved. It is not for the sake of the wife, my dear, that she is loved, but for one’s own sake that she is loved.” And then it goes on and on, enumerates a lot of things that we may love, but it’s not for the sake of those things, it’s for one’s own sake. And then the conclusion is, “The self should be realized, should be heard of, reflected on, and meditated upon. By the realization of the self, my dear, through hearing, reflection, and meditation, all this is known.” And the reason I bring it up is that I think there’s a tendency to project. Like you said on the meditation retreat, one is there, getting full of energy and shakti, and all of a sudden everybody, you fall in love with everybody, everybody looks beautiful, you start having infatuations with all kinds of people. So the question is, well, is that really about them or is it really about your own heart that’s going through some kind of stirring or awakening? And yet, you still love your wife

Craig Exactly

Rick: more than that other person that you might pass on the street or something. So it’s a funny thing because there’s this sort of projection thing, and yet some people, in terms of our relationship with them, are intrinsically more lovable.

Craig Sure, no, absolutely. I have a very funny relationship with my wife in the sense that because I have such little memory and my heart seems to be open, every day I tell her, “My God, I look at you and I just fall in love with you again.” And sometimes she asks me, “Don’t you get bored of me?” And I say, “Well, if you don’t have a memory, it’s hard to get bored.” And when I see her through my heart it’s just like, “Oh my God, I just fall in love with you.” And it’s so wonderful. And the same with my kids.

Rick: Like a freshness, every day a freshness.

Craig Yes, a freshness. It’s very nice, even with my 13-year-old, she gives me a hard time because she’s a teenager. It’s like, “Oh,” you know, I look at her and I’m like, “Oh my God, you’re so beautiful.”

Rick: It’s kind of like what Ronald Reagan said about coming down with Alzheimer’s, you can laugh at the same jokes over and over again.

Craig Yeah, it can be like that. I’m always asking my wife, “Oh, is that a new dress? Is that a new shirt?” And she says, “No, I’ve had this.” And I say, “Oh, okay, good, it looks good on you.”

Rick: We can edit this out if it’s too personal, but when we went out to dinner with that group at the S.A.N.D. conference, you told this story about how you were engaged to somebody, and then this woman walked in the door and you fell in love with her. And I guess that’s the one you ended up marrying, and it was probably a bit of a sticky wicket to get unengaged to the other one. So I was just kind of overhearing the conversation as you were telling it, but in a way I was wondering whether you were like that person on the spiritual retreat who just kind of falls in love with everybody, or what was it about this woman walking in the door that made you realize, “Whoa, this is it, this is the one I really love?” And was this all kind of post-heart awakening that you were functioning in this way?

Craig Yeah, so I want to just clarify the story. I wasn’t engaged to the person, but I was going to get married. I thought I was going to get married to them. But then my wife walked in the door and when I saw her I said, “Oh boy, you know, there’s something really here.” And yeah, I ended up falling in love with her and I just resonated in a deeper way with her. And it was quite profound.

Rick: So you didn’t necessarily have a track record of love at first sight? This was sort of a unique, profound experience?

Craig No, no, this was a unique thing. When I saw my wife, I fell in love with her right away. And then I knew that my relationship before was over, that it was over. And no, it wasn’t the sense of just because my heart was awake that I was just falling in love with everything. I was falling in love with everything, but I just knew in a very deep way that, “Oh yes, this is who I’m supposed to be with.”

Rick: And I imagine the way your life tends to flow is that you’re quite appreciative of a divine orchestration that’s happening all the time. So your current wife didn’t just walk in that door arbitrarily.

Craig No, God brought her to me.

Rick: Yeah, exactly.

Craig And I think God does that with all of our life, is God brings us things. So in that moment God brought me something quite wonderful, but in other moments God brings us quite terrible things. That’s something that I talk with people every day, is that God brings us terrible things, and terrible things they also help us to awaken, oftentimes much more so than good things.

Rick: Yeah, well it’s hard for some people to even believe in God because of the things that happen to people. How could there be an intelligent, compassionate Presence guiding the universe if such horrendous things are happening to people all the time?

Craig And that can be true when we look at God from the perspective of our egoic nature, even say from a rational nature, but God is beyond reason, God is beyond rationale, and honestly God does things to make us grow, because God is an evolutionary force. Evolution obviously didn’t care about how the dinosaurs felt. Evolution had a greater thing in mind. Of course, to be a dinosaur, that was a painful experience whatever it was that happened.

Rick: Asteroid hitting the Yucatan.

Craig Yeah, it was a painful experience. I couldn’t imagine being a dinosaur and being a father and having a little baby and watching the baby starve to death or die all at once or burn up in a fiery hell or whatever it was. But the thing about God is we have to be careful not to interpret God through the lens of our mind. We have to be willing to meet God through God and then it begins to make much more sense. And that’s something very difficult. Someone has to be willing and ready for that perspective. This is not a perspective we can force upon someone. Someone comes into my office with cancer, I don’t say, “Oh, you have cancer because God is trying to teach you.” You know, we don’t talk in that way. That would be to be quite rude and insensitive.

Rick: But in the back of your mind you believe that, don’t you?

Craig In the back of my mind? It’s not a belief, in the back of my mind..

Rick: It’s the way I understand the universe to work.

Craig I know, and I know through my own experience that the biggest hell and pain that I’ve been through is what has served to wake me up.

Rick: Yeah, so you’re saying that not only, let’s say, spiritual aspirants can learn from relationship breakups and financial problems and all the other things that happen in life, if they’re open to and appreciative of the divine hand guiding things. But you’re saying that the kind of stuff we watch on the evening news, you know, the plane crashes, the fires, the various wars and tragedies, that in the big picture of things, those too are, you know, there’s an evolutionary kind of momentum or force governing even those things for those people.

Craig Oh yeah, yeah, this is God’s world. I mean, we think it’s our world, but this is God’s world, it’s God’s play, it’s God’s evolution. Yeah, absolutely.

Rick: Yeah, I know it is hard for people to swallow.

Craig It’s hard for me to swallow sometimes too, when I think about war. I have an older brother and he goes to war, when I think about that and you see a little baby in the hospital with cancer, or a friend of mine who has a baby and goes to the hospital. It’s like, it breaks your heart, you know, but the invitation is can you allow it to break your heart open, you know, and just to be willing to see it and to experience it from a vast place and not just from the perspective of our mind. Of course, from our mind it feels like hell and in a sense, you know, a lot of people say, “Well, this is a dark planet or a dark world or whatever,” and I look at it more as, “This is an evolutionary planet,” you know, that’s what Sri Aurobindo taught, “This is a world of evolution and in evolution,” you know, whatever we’re evolving into, we’re still in the stage where people kill things to eat, kill each other, people rape, people say mean things, you know, I even say mean things. It’s like we can see all these things within ourselves, we can see them all within our own mind, in our own nature. So we are one with evolution and so these are the things that are happening at this time on our planet. Now maybe in a thousand years or a hundred years, I don’t know, it will be radically different, but at this point in time, yes, these things happen.

Rick: Yeah, so we’ll move on to the next point, but maybe to wrap this one up, I would suggest to people that even though this sounds kind of philosophical, it is something to ponder and that you are speaking, we’re both speaking from experience, not just kind of philosophical niceties that make the world make more sense to us, but there’s a sort of a cognitive appreciation of the fact that this is the way things are actually unfolding and being conducted.

Craig Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And maybe beyond cognitive, but it’s like an intuitive experiential thing that we experience through our heart.

Rick: That’s kind of what I mean by cognitive, intuitive experiential, yeah.

Craig Yeah, absolutely. Like when I experience, you know, say, something terrible that I see on the news through my heart, I can see God’s hand in it, I can feel God’s hand in it. When I feel total pain or some nightmare come through my life, it’s like, “Oh yes, I see and experience God’s hand in it.” My mind doesn’t like it, my mind says, “No, I do not want this to happen.” But in a huge way, if we can truly be open, we can say, “Okay, all right God, what do you have to show me here?” And oftentimes we have to be walked through the dark to discover the light and it’s a painful experience. I had this really bizarre experience, it was last year I went to a … I think it’s called a cancer ward, just a part of the hospital or a chemo ward where everyone was getting chemo. And I walked into this room and it was a really big room and there must have been 20 or 30 people in there. And I’ve always been kind of scared of hospitals and never liked the feelings or vibrations there, but I walked into this room and there was all these people and they were hooked up to the chemo machines or the drip or whatever it was. And I felt like I was in a heaven world. There was just so much love and so much grace and so much … I was like, “My God, it was such an amazing thing for me just to walk into this.” And here it was, everyone there looked as if they were one step away from death and yet it was just overwhelming, just overwhelmingly full of love and grace and beauty. And it was quite paradoxical to the mind, because the mind would say, “Well, these people are dying, this is really sad, this is bad,” you know, whatever the mind would say, “We have to cure cancer,” or whatever. But the experience of it from the heart was that this was heaven.

Rick: I bet you there are a lot of celestial beings there doing their thing in a scene like that, just attending to people, guardian angels or whatever you want to call them.

Craig Yeah, absolutely.

Rick: Okay, so in terms of the awakenings that you have undergone, we’ve now gone through two transcendent ones and a heart one, and then you mentioned a hara one, which I presume is kind of a Buddhist word for the gut, you know, Adyashanti talks about head, heart and gut. Is that what it is and what was that?

CraigYeah, so I’d say this is the most confusing one, in the sense that it’s a falling away of the personal will. And just thinking about it, feeling into it, kind of makes me go very blank and very quiet. So, can you ask me a question about it?

Rick: Falling away of the personal will. So, do you feel now that you have a personal will?

Craig Yeah, that’s a great question. I’d be arrogant if I said no. Yes, of course I have a personal will, which arises, but also it seems as if there is this greater force, you know, greater sense of divinity that moves through me as me. Do I live in that place in every moment? Absolutely not. I’m quite young and I can be quite immature sometimes.

Rick: How old are you?

Craig I’m almost 40.

Rick: Okay, and you’re still a baby.

Craig Yeah, I’m still a baby. And yeah, my egoic nature does come forward from time to time and there are all kinds of ways that I can grow. But at some point, after the heart awakening and … actually, after the heart awakening came the kundalini awakening, but the hara awakening is more of a sense of that who and what I am cannot be destroyed, you know, in the deepest sense. And so it feels very quiet, it feels very large, it feels like as if my life ended right now, that would be totally fine, completely okay. It feels like a total completion, you know, an absolute strength, you know, an absolute quiet.

Rick: And so in terms of will, would you say it’s a ratio thing, where much earlier in your life, it was like 99% Craig trying to run the show and 1% Divine kind of hiding back there someplace, and the ratio started to shift as you did spiritual practice. And then this hara awakening was a kind of significant shift in terms of that ratio, where just enough Craig to sort of still live an individual life remained, but you know, Brahman is the charioteer, to use a Sanskrit phrase, translating. That’s a thing they say actually, that the wholeness is running the show, driving the chariot anymore, not the individuality.

Craig Yeah, I would actually say that, and also another thing happened too, but let’s talk about that. Let me make sure I can get this fully. Life became very impersonal, like completely impersonal. And I went through this phase of where it just seemed that everything was just, I don’t really have words for it, but just completely, like there was no experience at all, like none, like zero experience.

Rick: Really? Explain that. So let’s say you’re riding a bicycle down the street, there’s zero experience, how do you reconcile those two things?

Craig Yeah, it’s quite interesting. So say before the experience transcended its vast spaciousness, the heart experiences overwhelming intimacy with all of life. And so say the experience of this awakening was complete silence. And it wasn’t that there was energy or bliss or anything, it was almost like total nothingness, but that nothingness is, to use the Buddha’s words, say, pregnant with all potential. And so that is almost like a description of say nirvana, of just no experience, like none. There’s no me and another, and there’s just … it’s quite difficult to speak about, I’m sorry.

Rick: Was it a sense of nothing ever happened? Like let’s say you’re, I don’t know, at a concert or something, I don’t know if you went to a concert during this phase, and you’re seeing the concert, experiencing the concert, and yet in a kind of almost predominant sense there is no concert, there’s nothing going on here, it’s all just silence. Is it kind of like that?

Craig I don’t know if I had that experience.

Rick: I’m just using the concert as a case in point. I’m not trying to put words in your mouth but you’re having a hard time describing it.

Craig It was like this great non-experience of everything. It’s quite bizarre of just saying no experience, like there is no experience, there is no other. I’m not going to say there’s no one here, I’m not going to play that card. But it just felt like everything was just like wiped clean.

Rick: How long did that last?

Craig You know, it’s interesting when you ask how long something lasts. I mean, I experience that right now if I just step into it. Do I live in that place? No. But it’s like with all these things, I can go into different worlds. But at some point it’s almost like every experience imploded into that experience of just this non-experience of … and that’s very disorienting. It’s quite bizarre. Because you know, your ego doesn’t know what to do with that. Like your mind doesn’t know what to do with it. And in a sense, there’s nothing glorious or glamorous about it, no one could ever want that. And within that I think just different parts of yourself begin to fall away. And I think with that I probably had a big sense of memory but also a sense of will fall away. And that’s that sense of like I remember … so say looking from that perspective and you see something as terrible as a tsunami come through and destroy a village in Japan. And there’s just this sense of just like total quiet and total peace with it all. I don’t even know if peace is the right word. But to say that sounds crazy. And I almost hesitate even saying it right now, if anyone was in that experience or had their whole life wrecked, for me to sit and to say, “Oh yes, that’s peace.”

Rick: Well, and it’s also a little bit easier to watch it on television than it would be to be in that village as a tsunami was starting to crash down on you and there were cars tumbling in the water towards you and stuff. You might have a bit more of an adrenaline reaction.

Craig Oh, sure, absolutely. But I could also say that all kinds of painful things happened in my life and it was just like a sense of just … and it’s nothing anyone could ever want, it’s nothing anyone could ever desire. It’s free of want, it’s free of desire, it’s free of any sense of personal “I am having this experience.” It’s almost like you are the experience of it, if that makes sense.

Rick: Did it make it difficult for you to function when this came on, in terms of your job and stuff?

Craig Oh yes, so Rick, through all these awakenings I’ve had a lot of trouble functioning. What Adya said to him is that I kept harassing him about it, and he’s like, “Yeah, it’s very inconvenient for life and it makes you live in a very different kind of way. You can’t have everything you want or desire anymore, you can’t chase after this or that. You just have to surrender to it and just be like, “Okay, this is what’s leading me and if you are around any great teacher you’ll just see that there is this other thing that leads them and it’s not always convenient to what they want or to what they desire, say, in their humanity. It often times takes us to places we don’t actually want to go or could never want to go. And so yeah, it took my bank account, it took my house, it took my business, it took my ability to work.

Rick: But you regained those things, you’ve got a bank account now and a house and a business and a wife and a kid and all that stuff.

Craig Yeah, now I’m quite busy, but at the time I can remember different parts of my nature coming forward and just not knowing how I was going to make ends meet and different fears would come forward. You have to have a sense of faith and a sense of trust and also sometimes you just have to get up off your butt and go to work. But like Eckhart Tolle, they said he spent two years sitting on a park bench and I spent two years kind of laying in my backyard just looking at a willow tree, dancing in the wind. Of course, I had children too, so I had to get up and take care of them, cook dinner, run around town. But there was a lot of time where I just spent allowing these things to fall out of you. So in between the heart awakening and the hara was this kundalini awakening.

Rick: Oh, okay, you wrote them in a different order on the paper here. I was thinking the kundalini was coming last.

Craig No, no, I’m sorry.

Rick: But I just wanted to say with regard to the hara thing, it would seem that sometimes the slate needs to be wiped clean before you can draw something new on it. And I don’t know, there are verses in the Bible about losing your life so that you can gain it and all kinds of quotes like that, all kinds of examples of people’s lives who just kind of totally fell apart, but then from the ashes something much better got built.

Craig Yeah, and I want to be crystal clear here, Rick. So those sound beautiful and during the time you have this paradoxical experience of it being, yes, a totally perfect, totally divine, and also various parts of your egoic nature are coming forward, oftentimes screaming, as you’re wondering if you’re going to end up on the street homeless. It’s an incredibly painful and paradoxically incredibly blissful experience at the same time.

Rick: Yeah, and it’s interesting because if you had been in a monastery or something when that happened, like my friend Francis Bennett was, then it might not have mattered that much because you’ll be taken care of there, you’re not responsible for all that.

Craig Yeah, you might miss the morning prayers, but yeah, you’re taken care of and that’s the beauty of the monastery, from one perspective, that’s the beauty of it, it’s there to take care of you. But as more and more people are awakening in this way, and I work with a lot of people, it can be nerve-wracking, it can be confusing, it can be financially painful, it can rip your heart out. But through this experience that’s where you come to this non-dual reality of seeing that, that everything is divine, everything is God. And another interesting, a very interesting thing happened during this stage was my personality, my humanity, it imploded into my divinity so that there was no difference. And I’m not saying that my personality was some great divine thing, it was like my personality in its humanity, in its shortcomings, in its neurotic behavior, in its silliness, in its distorted vision, that too totally became the experience of God. And so to me, a lot of people talk about the end of seeking, and there’s this end of seeking that happens when we experience a transcendent awakening. There’s a different kind of end of seeking that happens, let’s say, within the Hara awakening, in the sense that our very humanity, our very infallibility, fallibility becomes God. And you’re like, “Oh, wow, even when I get angry or sad or hurting or fall on my knees, that too is the greatest experience of God.” And this is one I’ve had a very difficult time conveying to anyone. It can sound quite arrogant, or how could that be possible? Do you know what I mean, depending on how you interpret the words?

Rick: Well, if you think of God, if you understand God to be omnipresent and all-pervading, then how can all these things you just enumerated not be?

Craig Yeah, yeah. And there becomes this funny thing of a total acceptance of your humanity, not your best humanity, but say your worst humanity. Like a total acceptance of it, like, “Oh, wow, yeah, that’s God too.” And I think we have to be real careful there, because when we walk in, because when we totally accept it, a shadow of totally accepting something is giving it full permission to act. Do you know what I mean? And I think that’s how a lot of teachers who work all the way through this, and then they still are left with these egoic parts, and they totally accept them, and then they see that there’s no division between it and God, and then they give themselves permission to act from that space. We have to be really careful. And I just noticed that in myself. I don’t have a big teaching community or anything where I could have power abuses or anything like that, but I just saw it in my life where I was kind of letting myself get away with things that are like, “Oh, you shouldn’t let yourself go down those roads.” Do you know what I mean? And so it’s this bizarre experience of total acceptance and total divinity in my just regular, everyday humanity, and just such a love for it.

Rick: You mentioned the word “discrimination” earlier, and it would seem here that that term applies again, where through all these unfoldings, you’re never off the hook in terms of needing to be discriminating and discerning as to what you’re doing and what’s going on. And those who lose that discernment or discrimination get into trouble.

Craig Yeah, get into a lot of trouble. It’s amazing the amount of trouble that can happen there. I was really following the teachings of one particular teacher and boy, did he go off the deep end of it. And it was heart-wrenching to see what happened to his life and his community. It happens all the time. I think it’s good. So you have to have your discernment, but also it’s helpful to have a couple of good friends around, it’s helpful to have a wife or someone to be like, “Hey, you’re being a jackass,” or kids or teachers or friends who can speak up to you and say, “Hey, you’re out of alignment here and you need to put yourself in check.” It seems to me that as long as we’re in human form, we can really fall on our face and make a mess of things. And so that’s true, but also it’s true that as long as we’re in human form, we’re going to be growing, we’re going to be evolving because we’re one with evolution. And so these things are supposed to come forward within us. Do you know what I mean? They’re supposed to, because we’re one with the force of evolution itself. And so these things are going to grow through us as us. Did that make sense?

Rick: Yeah, it did.

Craig To think that we’re going to get to some great, vast, non-dual state where we’re untouchable, that’s to deny half of God, the dynamic aspect of God. And to me that is a huge mistake that most of us make. It’s a mistake I’ve made before too, in my beginning search for enlightenment was that, “Oh, I’m going to get to some place where there’s going to be complete unmovability and nothing can touch me and I’ll be totally free of whatever.” But I mean, come on, you know, I had to be real honest, like, “Oh yeah, maybe in heaven we can sit on our lion throne.” But as long as we’re on earth, we are one with evolution and our mind is the same mind of, say, everyone on the planet to some degree. You know what I mean? Because we’re one with, say, consciousness, one with evolution.

Rick: Yeah, I have debates about this sometimes with some friends, some of whom feel that they have reached a stage or that one reaches a stage in which you’re pretty much done and anything after that is negligible in terms of development. But I don’t know, maybe I’ll agree with them at some point, but it seems to me that it’s just as long as you’re breathing, there is plenty of opportunity for further refinement.

Craig Because we’re one with evolution, we’ll always be growing, as long as we’re in form, a form of any kind on this planet, in this world. Now, if we move on to, say, whatever, the realm of the Buddha and that realm where you go and you never incarnate again or whatever happens there, yeah, maybe you just stay there forever and you experience that half of God. But if we are in this realm, this realm is a realm of evolution and there is no way you can outrun evolution. It is our nature, it’s God’s nature, there’s no escape from it. In fact, a deep form of surrender is can we surrender to that and give in to that impulse and allow it to grow through us as us into something greater.

Rick: Yeah, even speaking of other realms, I mean, you read Vedic stories about these devas and whatnot that are still climbing up the ladder, so to speak, in terms of greater and greater possibility. In fact, there’s this understanding in that tradition that there are 16 “kalas,” they call them, which are supposed to be stages of evolution, and supposedly the human beings occupy the fourth through the eighth. And so even if you’re the most enlightened person to ever walk the earth, you’re still at maybe kala eight, and there’s other possibilities when you leave this place.

Craig Yeah, no, it’s crystal clear we don’t have the full picture. One of the things my teacher David kept pointing out to me is that, yeah, we’re going through these stages, yes, maybe we’re having these huge experiences of awakening, but in the big picture of things, we actually don’t really know much. We don’t have a clue, and so we have to be very careful how arrogant and how proud we become.

Rick: Yeah, of course some people feel like, “Well, once you’re enlightened, that’s it, you’re not going to get reincarnated anymore,” and in fact, there’s no individuality left, so there’s no possibility of any further development or refinement. Comment on that?

Craig I mean, have you ever met someone who doesn’t have an individuality?

Rick: Not that I know of. At least they all appear to.

Craig Yeah, they all appear to.

Rick: Amma has one.

Craig Yeah, yeah, absolutely, Amma has one. I mean, she can be funny, she can be fierce, you know, she can be all kinds of things, whatever God calls upon. But yeah, I think we all have an individuality, and in a sense, to deny our individuality is to deny an aspect of God.

Rick: So all these stages of awakening that you’ve described, I get the feeling that each one is kind of digested, as it were, added to your repertoire, and that the flashiness of the initial transition passes, but that there is still … it kind of becomes part of your foundation, and that each awakening is still there, if you care to notice, that whatever quality dawned with each awakening is still part and parcel of your experience. But we assimilate it, it becomes par for the course and then we kind of move on to further things. Is that a fair summation?

Craig Absolutely, yeah. I can remember talking to John Burney once, and talking about this big heart awakening or whatever, and he’s like, “Oh yeah, you’ll get used to that,” and I was like, “There’s no getting used to this.” And he’s like, “Oh yeah, okay, you get used to this.” But at the time you almost get upset, you know, like, “How could you ever get used to this?” And it’s like, yeah, it integrates within you, it just becomes a normal part of your everyday experience, absolutely.

Rick: Okay, so we haven’t really covered the kundalini awakening thing yet. Let’s get on to that, because it is quite a story, and as I mentioned earlier, a lot of people go through this stuff, sometimes people who have never heard of kundalini and don’t know what’s happening to them, and perhaps check themselves into a psychiatric ward or something. So, it seems to me that as more and more awakenings take place around the world, this kind of thing is going to happen more and more, and it’s got to become more common knowledge so that we don’t have tragedies where people are given Thorazine or something where they really need some more spiritual guidance.

Craig Sure, sure. I think kundalini is probably the most difficult awakening to work with. It can be. Some people, they just experience it, it just opens up and it moves smoothly through their being. With me, I never did any type of kundalini yoga or did the breaths or any of that kind of stuff, but just being in the presence of my teacher David for about 8 years, I just had intense energy always moving through my body and that was just normal. I mean, it was to the point of driving me crazy, but at some point I had all this energy in my back, especially my spine, but just all throughout my back. And I had 8 years of just intense pain and I would cry every day, I was in so much pain.

Rick: Because it was blocked?

Craig Because it was blocked, sure.

Rick: Or it was purifying and the purification was painful.

Craig Yes, yes. So I just had so much energy in me and I didn’t know what it was. I just thought that there was something physically wrong with my back or I did something wrong with my back. I was in such pain, Rick, I couldn’t even think straight. So I would cry every day. It’s going to break my heart just thinking about that experience. But I would lay flat on the floor just for hours. I could barely cook my kids dinner. I would come home from work and I would just lay on the floor. There were times when I would just crawl and you could barely crawl into bed or barely crawl out of bed. And then there were times when it would just open and all of a sudden I would be in ecstasy and I would be like, “Oh my God, I feel incredible.” And so I went back and forth for a number of years with that. I was seeing my teacher David a lot and Adya a lot during this time. I was also getting a lot of body work done. One day I was getting some body work done and this guy was giving me a massage and all of a sudden I started having a seizure .. on the floor and he turned pale.

Rick: An actual seizure where you went unconscious or something? Or the Kriya’s thrashing around kind of thing?

Craig Yeah, I guess I call them seizures because most people don’t know what Kriya’s are. But yeah, it’s the thrashing around, this energy. I’d get stuck like this, or my back would arch in all these weird, obscure ways. My hands would make these bizarre mudras and do all kinds of things. And it felt like such amazing ecstasy. It just felt like I was on some crazy drugs. I haven’t done drugs, but it felt like what I imagine, say heroin or something would feel like.

Rick: No, definitely not like heroin. Heroin totally dulls you out.

Craig Oh, okay, sorry. I thought that would be ecstasy. It just felt like energy was raging up my spine, out my hands, down my feet. I had trouble talking. I had trouble just walking. The guy was ready to call the ambulance. I was like, “No,” because I knew what it was. I was like, “Oh, just let me call a friend or get me someone who can drive me home.” So that went on for about two years of just intense experiences. There were times I couldn’t hold the fork, couldn’t hold the cup, I couldn’t think straight, got my words all confused. Any kind of neurological thing just would go through me. I had to be careful talking about this because so many people would come to me, “Oh, let me heal you, let me tell you what’s wrong with you, let me diagnose you.” And so I had that go on for years. But yeah, it was amazing. And I couldn’t sleep sometimes for months at a time, which is then your brain

Rick: Couldn’t sleep at all or couldn’t sleep well?

Craig Oh, I couldn’t sleep at all.

Rick: Wait, can you live for months at a time without any sleep?

Craig Yeah, just so much energy. I mean, it was not lacking energy. And sometimes I would just lay there, I would just put a hand on my heart, a hand on my belly, and just breathe through it. And there were probably periods of times when I got some sleep, but overall for two years I had tremendous trouble sleeping. I would just lay in bliss and I don’t know what would happen. It definitely was not sleep. It was just like laying there and just vibrating with energy. And still to this day I have a lot of trouble sleeping. When I teach I have trouble sleeping, sometimes if I meet with too many individuals in a day I have trouble sleeping. And the Kundalini stuff, I could probably write a book on all those experiences. But it was probably similar to what Gopi Krishna went through, just intense pain, intense bliss, all kinds of states. And there was also burning, purifying energies. It felt like it was raining acid in my head for six months. Like Adya, he laughed at me about that, he said, “Yeah, good luck with that.” It’s just so much what people go through. What most people say when they come to me, their biggest question is, “How do I make this end?” And see, that’s absolutely the wrong question. The question is, “How can I surrender to this in a greater and greater way?” Because what an experience like this will do to you, overwhelming pain, almost being pushed to the brink of insanity, the brink of craziness, overwhelming experiences of forces just pushing themselves through you, basically it’s going to teach you to surrender or suffer. And so the invitation is, “Can I surrender to this too, fully and completely?” Because anywhere you try to deny it, anywhere you try to avoid it, the pain just gets worse.

Rick: Yeah, so first of all, Irene passed me a note that said, “You can have kundalini awakening and still need professional mental help.” So I just want to throw that in. But it should be somebody who knows what it is.

Craig Yeah, and I’ve actually worked with a lot of people who’ve gone mad with kundalini, where they’re like, “I am the Messiah now,” and I’m like, “Hey man, you’re not the Messiah. You’re having an incredible experience.”

Rick:: “I’m the Messiah, so you couldn’t be.”

Craig Yeah, but that’s why it’s good to have spiritual practice. If you’re rooted in spiritual practice, spiritual discipline, you’ll know that the most fundamental teaching is, “Don’t believe your thoughts, don’t believe your feelings.” If you’re overwhelmed with feeling and overwhelmed with thoughts, it’s going to be hard not to believe them. So a lot of people go mad, literally get blown into schizophrenia or temporary states of delusion. And since I’m trained as a counselor and I never really worked with mental health before, it’s good to be like, “Oh yeah, you’re having some delusions here, and can you come back to your core, come back to the truth of your heart, just that basic simplicity?” Like Adya was telling me in the beginning, “Can you come back to that basic simplicity? What’s here all the time? There’s a quiet here and there’s just an awake sense of intelligence. Can you rest in that and not rest in, ‘Oh, I’m the Messiah or I’m the awakened one or I now have healing energies or I’m excuse my language bat shit crazy because I’m in so much pain I can’t think clearly?’ You can see that you’re in pain, you can see that you’re being overwhelmed, so can you rest in that quiet silence?” But most people, unfortunately, they don’t have good teachers or they don’t have a teacher or their teacher doesn’t know what the hell it is or their teacher told them to do these breaths. And I think the Kundalini breaths are probably the worst thing you can do because it gets all that energy excited and gets it going. And you have to be really mature if this stuff wakes up in you and to be able to remain sane, if that makes sense. But sometimes it awakens in people who aren’t mature, who don’t have spiritual practices. And I always say, “Oh boy, God, what are you doing to this person?” But that’s between them and God and if I can help I definitely get them grounded and just say, “Okay, let’s get your feet on the ground, let’s focus on what you need to do.” And can you both breathe through this energy, allow it to move through you, surrender to it totally, and not believe what you think or what you feel in relationship to this energy? And that’s quite difficult for most people, myself included.

Rick: I think it’s good to point out that it is a powerful thing we’re talking about here and not something to toy around with.

Craig Oh yeah, what you said in the beginning, some people end up in mental institutions or some people something like this takes all of your money. It may take your wife and your kids away, it may take everything you knew to be permanent about your life away from you. But again, can you come back to that basic sense of sanity and allow this energy to move through you? And most anyone I work with in this, they’re going, “I can’t do this,” and it’s true, you can’t do it. And so that’s the invitation is, “Can I surrender that too?” And surrender and trust in a greater and greater way. And then in the end, you and that energy become one. It doesn’t become there’s me and there’s Kundalini, there just becomes this one vibrant movement, this dynamic force moving through your being.

Rick: And in addition to this more psychological advice, like “Can I surrender?” and stuff, wouldn’t you also advise very good grounding things, like you might want to start eating a heavier diet, you might want to start jogging or lifting weights, you might want to get massaged, any number of things you could do that might ground and integrate you. And in addition to you giving advice to people like this, there are people like Bonnie Greenwell and Joan Harrigan at the Kundalini Care Place in Tennessee who specialize in dealing with people who are having this kind of issue.

Craig Yeah, and what you said is absolutely true. Can you get grounded? Can you get your feet in the dirt? Can you walk on the grass? Can you just do whatever you can to get yourself fully grounded, fully embodied? And again, while you’re going through the experience, it’ll sound crazy, like, “There’s nothing I can do.” But can you breathe through it? Can you walk through it? Can you eat a heavier diet? Can you do a very gentle Hatha yoga? Can you work with, say, a therapist or a counselor who can help open these blockages within you so that that energy can begin to move more smoothly through you? Yeah, things like that are absolutely helpful. I would definitely stay away from anything that excites the energy, any yoga that’s harsh or moving a lot of energy, any of those breaths, any crazy meditative practices where you’re running energy or moving energy, things like that you definitely want to avoid.

Rick: I mean, some of that stuff can be okay under the guidance of a competent person, but you wouldn’t want to pick up a book in a New Age bookstore on intense pranayama practices and start doing them for an hour or two a day because you could really flip your lid.

Craig Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, yeah.

Rick: So, with you, is there still kundalini stuff going on or has it pretty much run its course and everything is smooth?

Craig It’s smooth for the most part. Sometimes it definitely intensifies at different times. So, say, when I went to the SAND conference this year, it intensified. When I go on retreat, it intensifies. When I teach, it intensifies. When I work with individuals, it intensifies. Sometimes I’ll just drive down the road and it’ll intensify. For the most part, it’s very calm and it’s just in the background. For a while, it was causing a lot of trouble. People around me were starting to have it. It became a real problem for my wife for a little bit and I was like, “Oh boy, I wouldn’t wish this experience on anybody,” but it’s part of life, I guess.

Rick: Yeah, and in your experience, both personally and as a person who’s been tuned into the spiritual scene for quite a while, would you say that your kundalini history was a little bit on the extreme end and that most people don’t have to go through anything this traumatic?

Craig Yeah, that’s a good point. I hope so. Almost everyone I see with it are people who’ve had extreme experiences with it. They’ve found me on the internet and they’ve contacted me. I see a lot of people who’ve been through intense pain with it. But again, we have to keep in mind, if you’re fully open to it, it will radically change and radically reorient your life. For some people, like I was talking to Francis and he said that his was just a normal flow within him and he said it wasn’t a big deal. And I think all kinds of people have that experience where it’s just a normal flow and it’s not a big deal. But for my teacher David, he said it was not a big deal, it just went up his spine and it was just smooth. And then when I talked to Adya about it, he’s like, “Yeah, he went through hell and back,” and it drove him to the very brink.

Rick: Yeah, so it’s good for people to hear then that going through what you just described is not necessarily going to be what’s going to happen to them, but it may.

Craig: It may, and the thing is, we don’t have a choice about it. I mean, you have a choice whether you play with the breaths or not, I wouldn’t recommend that. But for me it just came, I didn’t ask for it, I had a desire to know freedom. I never had a thought to know what kundalini awakening was, that was not one of my thoughts, but it came and oh boy, did it come.

Rick: And then you had the hara thing that we’ve already talked about, which was just this sort of deep silence, getting established.

Craig Exactly, and I think one of the things that the kundalini did was it forced surrender, and it forced a sense of total integration. And I think that kind of led into the hara awakening, that there’s no separation between me and God, and I don’t mean that in an arrogant way, I just mean that in a down-to-earth basic way, a total non-separation.

Rick: So now, how long ago was that hara thing?

Craig About three years ago or so.

Rick: Okay, so now if you look over the last three years, and as your life continues to unfold now, how do you feel like … what’s the leading edge for you? You know, we’ve agreed that evolution continues, how is your evolution continuing to unfold?

Craig I’m just working with my humanity, just in an everyday, down-to-earth practical sense. Can I be more kind? Am I believing what I think? Different thoughts come forward and you believe them and you say, “Oh yeah, I’m getting hooked here.” Can I be sweeter? Can I be gentler? Can I embrace different aspects of myself which I may not be proud of? It seems like life gives me all kinds of opportunities to embrace my egoic nature and also, I’ll say, the collective egoic nature. Because in a sense, a lot of the stuff that arises within me doesn’t feel so personal. Sometimes it feels very personal, like, “Oh yes, I’m being a total fool here and can I embrace this?” But also there are things that just arise within me just throughout the day and it’s like, “I don’t know what it is, but can I be willing to embrace it and meet it with love?” And things feel more and more impersonal and occasionally, if I’m going to be honest, there are personal things that come forward that I still have lots of work to do on.

Rick: Yeah, I can just sort of hear some non-dual types listening to this and saying, “Who is this ‘me’ he keeps talking about?” You know, I mean, if he’s gone through all these transformations and awakenings, how kind of substantial or predominant can the Craig Holliday character really be? Because it seems like he’s still very concerned about it. In fact, you just described that that’s really the leading edge of your growth now, is enhancing or improving or refining the Craig guy. And some people emphasize that there is no such person, it’s like a dream character, and you’re talking about dressing up a dream character in nice clothing.

Craig So when you’re in the transcendent state that’s true, yeah. But if you say any Master on earth, I mean, they work with themselves in a very humble way, in a very humble way. And if you think you’re done with yourself, well then great, then you can work on all of the collective consciousness of all of humanity. So when are you going to …

Rick: That’s a good point. When is the work over? I mean, again, the way I see it is it doesn’t feel like me so personal. Sometimes it feels personal, but just from a greater perspective it feels like being one with evolution, that you’re just willing to grow, willing to evolve, willing to surrender, as Papaji said, “Till your last breath.” And he was Mr. Nondual himself, you know?

Rick: He was, he was Mr. Give-up-the-search.

Craig Yeah, so that’s one perspective, if you call that the evolving edge. And then also the evolving edge within myself is just opening to deeper and deeper levels of divinity within myself. So say divinity goes on forever, well it’s like, “My God, there’s countless worlds you can open to, and can you allow these worlds to open to you and come into your life and allow them to live through you as you?” And you know, that work goes on forever.

Rick: Yeah. I like what you said about, you know, well, if you think you’re perfect then there’s that whole world out there, you know? And there’s … time for letting the dog out. There is a … I mean, do you have a sense that more and more you have become kind of an instrument of the divine? You know, not like you’re some big world-famous guru, but in your own way, in your own dharma, you’re kind of being divinely guided to facilitate the awakening and evolution of others.

Craig Yeah, boy, that sounds quite grandiose.

Rick: Well, it does though. I mean, you know, it’s like … you mentioned about the dropping of individual will. Okay, well, if the divine is running the show, then what is the divine doing with the instrument of Craig Holliday, not just fulfilling his individual sort of wants and cravings really, but is there a sense that your life has become a sort of a channel through which the divinity can flow into the world?

Craig Yeah, yeah, and a lot of times when I’m teaching, you know, or when I meet with individuals it feels like that. And sometimes it feels like that if I’m just walking down the street with my little dog and just having this experience of divinity pouring through me. And then other times my life feels just so basic and so quiet. It’s quite bizarre how basic and quiet it becomes. It’s like so utterly ordinary and someone could call it totally boring, and yet there just seems like just this wonderful, ordinary, profound peace that’s there, say, in every moment, even if I’m making a fool out of myself.

Rick: Yeah, that’s nice. So you covered a lot in your book, and I took a lot of notes and I haven’t really even referred to them, but we’ve actually covered a lot of the points that I had jotted down. And so is there anything that you feel like we haven’t really covered that is important to you or that you emphasized in your book that you’d like to be sure to include in this interview?

Craig I don’t know. I think that’s everything. Let me just look. I thought I might write some notes, but it seems like …

Rick: While you’re doing that I just want to say that, you know, you’re a young guy, you’re under 40, so that’s great. God willing you’ll have at least another 40 years of doing your thing and letting it … it’ll be interesting to see. I won’t be around for another 40 years probably, but seeing how it all unfolds over the course of your lifetime, isn’t it an adventure?

Craig It’s such an adventure. What I’m amazed by every day is how we have these ideas of what should be happening and how it should happen. And then oftentimes God has a different idea of how it comes forward. And so it’s just, can we surrender more and more to that? I mean, it’s a funny thing being an individual. Oftentimes there’s so much violence in the spiritual world against individuality. But I think I heard Hameed speak about this, just about our individual consciousness, and that this too is an aspect of God and this too is an aspect of being embodied. Can we just allow this divinity to live through us in just an ordinary experience of being human? It’s quite wonderful, it’s quite amazing.

Rick: Francis Bennett has a nice phrase that he says to people who are hammering on this point of not being an individual. He says, “Of course you’re an individual, you’re just not only an individual.”

Craig Exactly.

Rick: Most people think that all they are is this individual, and when you wake up to your universal nature you might think you’re not an individual at all, but you’re both.

Craig: Yeah, you’re absolutely both, absolutely, 100%. Yeah, Rick, the other thing I saw when I looked up my notes is, if we talked about the different shadows that can come forward during awakening, and I think we did a little bit, but just in the sense that when someone has a transcendent awakening, a big shadow that can come forward is you can have a greater sense of separation between you and life, like I’m the awakened one and the rest of the world is deluded, so that’s a shadow. There can be a tremendous aloofness that can come forward, tremendous arrogance, a tremendous pride. You can become incredibly ungrounded, you cannot take care of your life.

Rick: So far I’m laughing because so far I’ve been through all these things you’re mentioning.

Craig Yeah, well I have too, that’s why I’ve learned about them. And so, these are the things that we have to be careful with. It’s just like I was saying before, when someone comes to me and they’ve just had a transcendent awakening, it’s almost like, say if you fall in love with someone and then you went and saw a therapist, the therapist couldn’t say anything to someone who’s just fallen in love. Their life is perfect, everything is great, they’re floating on a cloud, but it’s just not the truth. You know what I mean? And so we have to truly be humble. If we look at the heart awakening, the shadow of the heart awakening is, “I only want to feel bliss, I only want to feel what’s good.” And so when we do that, again, we create a division between us and life. Because the true non-dual reality, it must include that which doesn’t feel good, that which is painful, the parts of ourself which we want to avoid. And so the other shadow of the heart awakening is, you fall in love with everything we spoke about that, about you getting in trouble through not having discernment or discipline in your relationships with others and causing pain. You see this, there’s some people, they wake up in their heart and they immediately leave their wife and go out and start another relationship or whatever. And it’s like we have to be really careful there. Or we think that this is the only reality, that the whole world is just this mushy, gooey bliss world. And we become very insensitive to people who are in tremendous pain. Does that make sense? And of course you can become ungrounded there. With Kundalini, a lot of the shadows are … I don’t know if “shadow” is the right word, but you can go into all that mental illness stuff, we spoke about that. There can be all kinds of neurological disorders, we spoke about that. And then with the hara awakening there can be that sense of … there’s a sense of disassociation, like I’m going to disassociate from life and I’m not going to be present, I’m not going to be here. And that can lead to all sorts of trouble.

Rick: Yeah. Do you think there are any other significant awakenings in addition to the ones we’ve enumerated?

Craig Oh yeah, absolutely. So the big one, which I guess we didn’t speak about, was what Sri Aurobindo was speaking about, was say the awakening of God in matter. And so that’s something I can’t claim, I shouldn’t claim anything.

Rick: It hasn’t happened to you yet.

Craig Yeah, and I think that’s one of the … God waking up in matter, as matter, and making this a divine world. And that may be a day away or it may be thousands of years away.

Rick: Well, there’s God waking up in matter as far as the entire world is concerned, but there’s also God waking up in matter as far as our experience is concerned, isn’t there?

Craig Yeah, and I guess I was speaking about, yeah, in the entire world.

Rick: I think it’s going to have to happen in the experience of a lot of people before it happens in the entire world. And I think that in individual experience it’s perhaps something more than you’ve described so far.

Craig Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. And I think as far as, say, the extent of awakening, I think there can be countless awakenings. I think we put so much emphasis on, “Oh, this is spiritual awakening, and now I’m awake and now the game’s over.” I think we’re not being very humble when we’re standing in that space. I think it’s like God goes on forever, so what we’re speaking about may be ahead of somebody, but if we look ahead of us, well, my God, it’s much more than what we can see.

Rick: Yeah, it’s a healthy attitude. Nobody who’s really sincerely interested in all this stuff wants to be finished when they’re not finished. They don’t want to think they’re finished if they actually aren’t, because you kind of cheat yourself, you sell yourself short.

Craig Yeah, well, and it’s also a hell world to live in that kind of arrogance. It’s a tremendous amount of pain to live in a place and say, “Oh yes, I am here and nobody else is, and I’m the only one,” or whatever it is. That’s a hell world, and to have to defend that, my God, that’s got to be painful. It’s a confusing thing, because people want to put a label on me and say, “Oh, you think you’re this,” or they say, “You are that,” and you’re like, “Yeah, but also I’m a total idiot too,” so keep that in mind. Please keep that in mind, that I’m growing just like you, just like everyone else. We just want to be really careful with ourselves, not to overemphasize one thing or the other, but to honor both, and just this sense of being fully human and divine, it’s quite a paradox.

Rick: And you know, it’s very true what you’re saying, the correlation between spiritual awakening and personal maturity.

Craig They don’t always match.

Rick: No, it can be very loose. I mean, there can be very, very saintly people who are doing incredible things in the world, who don’t have a heck of a lot going on in terms of their inner spiritual awakening, and vice versa.

Craig Yeah, it’s absolutely true, yeah.

Rick: Yeah, cool. Well, it seems like, I bet you if we were to have another interview in 10 years or something, although it doesn’t necessarily need to be that long, but if we were to have another one quite a bit down the line, we’d cover a lot of the same ground, but in many ways it might be a very different conversation in terms of what had unfolded by that time, both for you, for me, and for the world.

Craig Yeah, for the world, absolutely.

Rick: But something’s unfolding, and that’s exciting and it should give people hope and inspiration, I think.

Craig Yeah, I hope so. And I forgot to say this in the beginning, Rick, but I really hope that when people listen to these shows, this one or your other shows, just that we really listen from our heart, because then we get the direct experience of whatever it is that’s happening, instead of this just being some kind of intellectual thing. And so I think a lot of us really need to focus our spiritual life in that way, can we experience life from our heart and not just from our mind?

Rick: Yeah, I think a lot of people do, and I get really nice feedback from people all the time. In fact, there’s a testimonials page on batgap.com, but people who have even literally been suicidal and have had their lives turned around, or this woman told me recently her daughter was working in strip clubs and not living a real happy life, and now she’s kind of gotten into spirituality and has become a real Batgap fan.

Craig Yeah, that’s got to make you smile.

Rick: Oh, it’s very gratifying. One wants to be of value to the world, and it’s gratifying to feel that one is contributing something like that.

Craig Yeah, no, it’s really beautiful what you’ve done.

Rick: Well, I couldn’t have done it alone. There’s Irene sitting here who works on it as much as I do, if not more, and a nice band of volunteers around the world who do all kinds of things, video post-production, audio post-production, Jerry Bixman who does all the equipment management and set-up, and there’s a translation and transcription team which anyone listening can join if they like, so we can get it out to people in other languages, and technical assistance from various people. So it’s really kind of a nice team effort.

Craig Yeah, it’s beautiful work you do. Thanks Rick for having me. Is there anything else?

Rick: Yeah, I want to make some basic closing points that I always make. So I’ve been speaking with Craig Holliday, and he lives in Durango, Colorado, which is a wonderful place to live. I think I’d move there if I could, and I would get the season pass to the ski area. And he obviously works with people locally there in Durango, but also people all over the world on Skype, and so if you feel like connecting with Craig, I’ll be linking to his website from his page on batgap.com, and it’s what, craigholliday.com?

Craig Yeah.

Rick: With two L’s in “holiday.”

Craig That’s right.

Rick: You got me singing the Bee Gees song the other day when I was thinking, you know that song “Holiday” by the Bee Gees?

Craig I do.

Rick: Yeah, it’s a beautiful song. And in any case, so go there and you’ll find out everything that Craig is doing, how to get in touch and involved. And you’re still doing that weekly satsang online that you do?

Craig Yeah, so I’m doing it bi-weekly.

Rick: Bi-weekly.

Craig Yeah, and I want to start a group of people who want to work in a little deeper way, who want to kind of stay in the group for a long time and just get some more support with that. So I’m starting almost like an online school or course.

Rick: And you have some kind of email sign-up thing so people can get notified?

Craig Oh, sure.

Rick: Good. Okay, so that’s it about … and your book of course, and I’ll be linking to the Amazon page where people can get your book, “Fully Human, Fully Divine.” And then with regard to Backgap in general, explore it, look around, there’s a past interviews menu and under that all the interviews are categorized in various ways. There’s a “Donate” button, which I really appreciate people supporting, clicking rather, in order to support this.

Craig Yeah, “Please donate.”

Rick: Yeah, really it’s necessary and appreciated. There is a place to sign up for my email list and you’ll get about one email a week notifying you of each new interview as it’s posted. This whole thing also exists as an audio podcast, so you can listen while you’re commuting or something, so you’ll see a link that says, you know, “Sign up for the audio podcast,” and a bunch of other things. We even have like a thing where you can download the Batgap logo as a screensaver and the Backgap theme song for your ringtone on your phone and stuff, so you’ll see that under one of the menus, all kinds of stuff. And we plan to offer a lot more in the coming year and have some nice ideas in mind. So, thanks for listening or watching, and thank you again Craig.

Craig Yeah, thank you so much Rick for having me.

Rick: And we’ll see you all next week.