Dana Sawyer Interview

Dana Sawyer Transcript: Aldous Huxley, Perennial Philosophy & Embracing Mystery

 

Summary

Rick Archer and Dana Sawyer discuss the human drive for certainty and the tension between embracing mystery and clinging to fixed beliefs. They explore how perception, interpretation, and the search for transcendence shape personal and collective experience.

Questions This Interview Explores

• Why do people seek certainty in spiritual and religious matters?
• How does our interpretation of experience shape our perception of reality?
• What role do altered states and psychedelics play in spiritual seeking?
• How can we become more open to mystery and ambiguity in life?
• What causes polarization and dogmatism in society and spirituality?

Key takeaways

• The desire for certainty often leads to rigid beliefs and conflict.
• Embracing mystery can foster openness and deeper understanding.
• Perception is shaped by habitual interpretation, not passive observation.
• Altered states can reveal new perspectives but are not a substitute for genuine growth.
• Dogmatism limits both personal insight and peaceful coexistence.
• Letting go of fixed viewpoints can reduce polarization and increase compassion.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week is an old friend named Dana Sawyer. I say old friend because we met in about 1971 when I was teaching Transcendental Meditation in Connecticut and I came to Dana’s college in Danbury, Western Connecticut State College. I instructed Dana there, and we have been in touch on and off ever since. Dana has moved on to do all sorts of interesting things. I will read part of the bio from his Wikipedia page here and then maybe Dana can fill in any important gaps I leave out.

Dana is a full-time professor of religion and philosophy at the Maine College of Art and is an adjunct professor of Asian religions at the Bangor Theological Seminary. He is the author of numerous published papers and books including Aldous Huxley, A Biography , which Laura Huxley, his second wife, described as, “out of all the biographies written about Aldous, this is the only one he would have actually liked”. Dana has been involved in fundraising activities for the Siddhartha School Project in the village of Stok, in Ladakh, India, for more than ten years and is currently Vice President of the Board of Trustees. This project has resulted in the construction of an elementary and middle school for underprivileged Buddhist children that has been visited twice by the Dalai Lama, who regards it as a model for blending traditional and Western educational ideals.

Much of his work for this project has involved translating at lectures for, and teaching with the school’s founder, Genshe Lobsang Tsetan, who is currently the abbot of the Panchen Lama monastery in Mysore, India. Sawyer’s interest in the phenomenon of neo-Hindu and Buddhist groups in America led him to become a popular lecturer on topics of interest to these groups. He has taught at the Kripalu Center in Lenox, Massachusetts, the Barre Center for Buddhist studies in Barre, Massachusetts, The Vedanta Society of Southern California, the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California and other such venues. This work has also brought him into contact with several interesting and important figures in this field including Stanislaw Grof, Andrew Harvey, Huston Smith, Laura Huxley, Stephen Cope and Alex Gray. He has been to India twelve times. And I believe you speak fluent Hindi, don’t you?

Dana: Yeah. John nahin. [laughter]

Rick: Chalo, chalo.

Dana: Oh, good. That is the most important word to know.

Rick: The only one I know. He was most recently in India while on sabbatical during the winter and spring of 2005, and has traveled extensively throughout the subcontinent in Nepal, Pakistan, Sikim, Thailand, Cambodia, Hong Kong, and Japan. And then there is more and it goes on. I think that gives you a taste of what Dana has been up to. And if you want, I will read the last bit. If you think it is important, do you?

Dana: Oh, I don’t even know what it says.

Rick: It’s about your academic work in universities and things here and there. And then you have written a bunch of publications and books and won some awards, and so on and so forth.

Dana: That’s right, good enough. See what you started when you gave me that mantra?

Rick: Yeah, you would have been a ditch digger otherwise.

Dana: Yeah, probably.

Rick: Not that there is anything wrong with that.

Dana: Oh, more noble work maybe?

Rick: Yeah. [Laughter] So I think we are going to cover a wide range of topics tonight, Dana and I. And, when we were talking a week or two ago, Dana said that he felt it would be sort of boring to just talk about his subjective experience. It would be just telling a story that has been told a number of times on this show. Although, my response was that perhaps when we cover certain points, maybe something in your subjective development as it has occurred over the years would help to illumine those points or give credence to why you are making a certain point.

To start the interview, I have been reading a book by Elaine Pagels lately, entitled Beyond Belief, which is about early Christianity. As I was reading it, I started to formulate what I would like to ask as the first question. It’s going to be more of a statement than a question. I will try to ask it as concisely as possible and then let you run with it.

Dana: Okay.

Rick: Not claiming that you are an expert on early Christianity, but as I read the book, I was struck by how much of human endeavor revolves around the effort to alter our subjective experience and also, the squabbles about that subjective experience if it can’t properly be verified and is left to a matter of belief or faith. In fact, in early Christianity, a great deal of this went on. The early church was trying to establish itself and meanwhile, there were terrible persecutions taking place, torture and murder of early Christians. And then they began squabbling among themselves over various interpretations of what Christ actually taught, and so on. And there was this guy named Irenaeus. And there was this tussle between those who wanted to rely more on personal experience and actually verifying for oneself what Christ and other religious scriptures were saying.

Those were represented by Irenaeus, who tried to objectify the whole thing more and say personal experience is very misleading and suspect and heretical and we really should just codify this group of this doctrine and then stick to it and banish everything else. And he pretty much won out and that is how the New Testament was formed, especially the Gospels. And expanding on this notion, then look at what has happened over the last couple of thousand years. Hundreds of millions of people have been murdered in various ways and wars and whatnot. Basically, over the notion that, “my God is better than your God,” even though neither one of us can verify the existence of our respective Gods. But I’m going to kill you anyway, because mine is better than yours.

There has just been a huge drama throughout human history over subtler realities, different realities, not accepting that the way we ordinarily see the world is all there is to it and wanting to change it somehow.

And then taking it one step further, then I will let you run with it, another major way in which we put a lot of effort into subjective experiences, is the whole realm of drugs, both legal and illegal. And what we do, and the billions of dollars we spend on the civil war taking place in Mexico and all that, apparently over the burning human desire to alter our perspective through whatever means, to change the way we see the world. So, you can see this is a little bit of a dis-jointed question but I think the two aspects are related. There has just been a huge drama throughout human history over subtler realities, different realities, not accepting that the way we ordinarily see the world is all there is to it and wanting to change it somehow. So, what do you say to all that?

Dana: That is a lot. So many ideas crowd into my mind. First of all, human beings have such a rage for certainty, because they feel so uncertain. And that is what the historical record of all cultures shows. And in that uncertainty, if people feel as if they are getting a message they can feel very strongly about and very certain about, then they will sometimes run with it, even if it doesn’t serve them in the long purpose of life.

Human beings have such a rage for certainty, because they feel so uncertain.

There is that great Sufi story about how God and Satan are walking down the road and God bends over and picks something up out of the ditch and puts it in his robe. They keep walking and after a while Satan says, “Oh, by the way, what was that?” And God says, “That was the truth.” And so, Satan says, “Oh, give it to me. I’ll organize it for you.” And if you think about in the early Christian church, there was such a movement among certain groups like the Pauline Christians as opposed to the Gnostics who Pagels writes about much more, who wanted to objectify it. As if, “Okay, how can we create a kind of flow chart of certainty?” And so, they created this very strict apostolic succession, similar to a Guru lineage, and in the second century, they codified the text of their version of the Bible. And that was their way of creating certainty.

But on the level of the Gnostic Christians, they were actually trying to embrace the mystery rather than the certainty. They were really functioning much more out of a world that you and I are familiar with, as are also, I’m sure, lots of your listeners, which is a longing for something that, well, I know who I am, I’m Rick or I’m Dana and I have this job and I seem to be a male and I do this and that. But that isn’t all that I am. I can tell, I know for sure, on some level there is some little man behind a curtain or some giant infinite void just out of reach. And the Gnostics, from that Greek word Gnosis/ knowledge, that is the knowledge they wanted. They did not want certainty. They did not want it cut-and-dry on a piece of paper. They were trying to embrace that much more profound level of mystery.

Now, I’m almost done with this comment, but when we are trying to reach out for the transcendent, when we are trying to reach out for that mystery, inside of the perennial philosophy, which is really my tradition, the tradition of no tradition or all traditions, however you like to have it. Aldous Huxley says people will unfortunately do drugs, heavy drugs, or sex or porno or something like that because they do not even realize they are searching for transcendence. They are searching for wholeness, but they do get themselves outside of their usual consciousness. But then he would say the problem is that all the transcendence, rather than being vertical toward the sacred, is horizontal. You displaced yourself for a while, but there was no growth and you come back to spinning your wheels. And I think there is some sense to that in my experience.

Psychedelics, Transcendence, and Tools for Growth

Rick: Yeah. I had that realization the last time I took LSD, I was sitting there reading a Zen book and really kind of getting impressed with how serious these Zen guys were. And contrasting that with the way my life was going. Among other things, I had the realization that there is only one way out of this situation, and that is upward, to use a metaphor. But in other words, you cannot blot it out. You cannot blot out the reality and hope to actually escape, because you are only going to have to face it again, perhaps even more painfully. And so, I just had this sense that, well, evolution is getting more and more clear, more and more trying not to hide in any way, but sort of uncovering deeper and deeper realities, that would be the way to actual happiness and freedom.

Dana: Yeah, yeah. Saying that, in a slight disagreement with your point, I’m writing this biography of Huston Smith right now. Huston was very close with Timothy Leary and Ram Das, when Ram Das was still Richard Alpert at Harvard. With them, Huston was experimenting with psychedelics. And still to this day, he has very much respect for psychedelics. I tend to agree with his viewpoint, that it is a tool and with this tool, you can stick your axe in your foot or you can cut a tree down and split your firewood. His viewpoint is: for someone to say unequivocally that psychedelics are not a tool that can be used for consciousness expansion, is to dismiss hundreds of traditional religions that have existed on the planet, including lots of Native American religions, especially in South America.

So, he would just want to add that hiccup at the end that maybe the way they are often used in American culture, as a way of getting yourself blown away instead of being set inside of a cultural milieu where there are lots of reference points on how to channel that experience in a more positive direction.

Rick: Oh, I totally agree. In my own case, it was a real eye opener the first time I did psychedelics. I realized, holy mackerel, there is a whole subtle world here that I had not realized existed. And everything depends upon how you perceive the world. It is not just how you rearrange the objects out there. It is how you shift your whole orientation to the world, that is what is important. But after doing that for a year, I was getting to the point where I pretty well fried my brain. And I realized, to continue in this direction was not getting me anywhere and I needed to do something more wholesome to move on.

Dana: Yeah, Alan Watts said something like, “When you get the message, hang up the phone”.

Once you see that there is a world beyond your everyday consciousness, then there are better tools.

Rick: Right, good point.

Dana: Right. Once you see that there is a world beyond your everyday consciousness, then there are better tools.

🛤️ The Search for Certainty and Embracing Mystery

Rick: Right, exactly. Now let’s talk about certainty for a second, since you brought it up a minute ago. It is interesting, because when I first found out about enlightenment, I felt as if it was something that was going to give me certainty. I was going to have a rock-solid grip on reality, know anything I wanted to know with certainty, no more equivocation, this whole academic thing that there are no absolutes, and everyone’s perspective is as good as anybody else’s. I did not like that at all. And I felt as if I am going to get beyond all that and really be able to come down with absolute precision on any topic or subject or bit of knowledge in the world.

Dana: And how did that work out?

Rick: Not at all actually, but that is okay. There is a saying in the Bible, which I have quoted a few times in these interviews, which is that the foxes have their holes and the birds have their nests, but the son of man has no place to lay his head. To me, that means that if you really expand it or feel unbounded or awake or whatever you want to call it, you cannot find solace or certainty or security in a conceptual cubbyhole of any kind. In fact, any concept that somebody presents to you, you can see the truth in that and then also see the truth in the polar opposite of it. And even though those two might be at each other’s throats, you can see how they are both valid, it is like the Certs paradox, “it’s both a candy mint and a breath mint.”

Dana: The Certs paradox, that’s good.

Rick: And teachers like Byron Katie are so effective, because they are really good at prying people loose from their certainty: “Do you know that is true? Are you absolutely sure that is true? Where would you be if that wasn’t true?”

Dana: Right, that’s right. You raised so many interesting points there. One of them that comes to my mind is that whatever subjective experience we are having, it has to be set inside of a particular interpretation. People will remember Maharishi’s story about the man wearing the heavy diamond necklace around his neck and saying that the guy was denigrating the experience, until somebody said “wow, you’re the richest man on the planet, that is a giant diamond.”

Rick: Yeah, you would have thought it would weigh him down.

Dana: That’s right. I think that is true of life in general. I think, very often we take the fact that life confronts us as a Rorschach Ink blot. It is almost as if man has no place to put his head down, but that there is such wonderful opportunity in that. If the truth could be written on a piece of paper and put in front of you and you could know it like somebody’s phone number, then I wouldn’t have all these books behind me and you wouldn’t have all those books behind you, right? I think, that it is not so much a thing of a searching as it is a flowering thing for me now. I almost like the perpetual intellectual confusion, you know, being convictionally impaired.

If the truth could be written on a piece of paper and put in front of you and you could know it like somebody’s phone number, then I wouldn’t have all these books behind me and you wouldn’t have all those books behind you, right?

Rick: That’s good.

Dana: When it comes to theories about it, whether it is life or some profound experience that you have, how do you explain it and appropriate it. I think a lot of times the poets come closer and someone like Rumi nails it down a lot more than somebody like Dana Sawyer writing books that don’t really get at it.

Rick: I recently heard Nisargadatta quoted as having said that a good measure of enlightenment is the degree to which you are comfortable with paradox and ambiguity.

Dana: I think that is brilliant, I really do. I am reminded, for the biography, I’ve been doing these interviews with Huston Smith. He has an incredible, incredible presence, Rick. My wife, when he calls me, she says “God’s on the phone.” And I was talking with Michael Murphy, one of the two founders of the Esalen Institute, and Michael said, “Yeah, Dana, at Esalen over all these years, we have only had about five presenters who really glow in the dark. And one of them is Huston Smith.” And at the same moment, Huston is very much in this place of – I don’t want to call it uncertainty, it’s not really that. It is kind of a delicious embrace of mystery. I am not sure why we characterize it.

Perception, Dogmatism, and the Limits of Interpretation

Rick: Yeah, it is worth dwelling on this certainty and uncertainty point a bit more, because if you think of it, as I earlier alluded to all the wars and the killing that is taking place in the name of religion, that would not have happened if people hadn’t been so cock-sure of their particular perspective. You have to be pretty darn sure of your rightness to fly an airplane into a building. I saw a cartoon the other day. The airplane was about to hit the World Trade Center and there’s a voice in the cockpit saying, “Wait a minute, what if there are some Qurans in there?” And the other guy said, “What do we care?”

Dana: They would know, right? There was a philosopher in the nineteenth century named Edmund Husserl, and he was a primary influence on Martin Heidegger and other philosophers. He was also a primary influence on Freud, so he had a really broad influence. And he was really the first person to clinically prove that perception is not a passive process, that we are constantly selecting what to put our attention on. So, I am selecting to pay attention to your voice and you are selecting to pay attention to mine. And during this whole conversation, there has been the sensation of our bodies sitting in the chairs, but are we aware of those sensations?

Rick: Subliminally, maybe.

Dana: Subliminally, maybe, and yet what he was pointing out is that we don’t realize that, as we select on a regular basis. And as we grow and we are taught what to select, when you are driving, if you took Drivers Ed, you learned to select the road, right? You are driving, so select the road. Yeah, the kids are beautiful out on the street, but look back at the road very soon. And so, we become very robotic in our actions. And we become robotic in our selection preferences of what we put our attention on. We also become robotic in how we interpret what we select. So, I see a dog and I know what a dog is. I don’t have to see it again. There is no Zen moment in that. There is no richness. And I remember years ago, at the University of Hawaii, which I recommend, you know, if you don’t like school.

Rick: Right. Especially if you don’t like school.

Dana: Yeah, especially if you don’t like school. A Zen teacher, who some of your listeners may know, named Robert Aiken came in and spoke in one of my classes. In front of him was a book, in the shape of a magazine, if you can see what I am saying. It was a kind of a big coffee-table book, not too heavy though.

He held it up to the class and he said “what is this?” And somebody said “a book” and he waived it in front of his face and he said “no, it’s a fan” and then he said “oh, by the way, what is this?” and somebody said “a book fan” and he said, “No” and he threw it on a stack of papers and he said “it’s a paperweight.” And so, he picked it up again and he said, “what is this?” And somebody said, “I don’t have any idea what that is.” And he said, “now we’re getting somewhere, now we’re getting somewhere.” Now, to tie Husserl into Aiken, Husserl was saying that because we become such creatures of habit and we run on automatic all the time, we don’t revisit the mystery of the world enough.

And what happens is: we become so acculturated with our own culture’s viewpoint that we see the world through a lens of concepts and interpretations that are blinding us to the fact that we are not really seeing the world. We are seeing the world through a glass darkly.

We become so acculturated with our own culture’s viewpoint that we see the world through a lens of concepts and interpretations that are blinding us to the fact that we are not really seeing the world.

I think, when people are too influenced by a philosophical viewpoint, and it doesn’t really matter what it is, whether it’s Islam or Marxism or SCI, if that becomes the only way we can interpret our experience, and we cannot revisit the mystery, then we are in trouble on two levels. One, we can become much too dogmatic to interact with others in a peaceful playground kind of way. And then two, we shut ourselves off from so much beauty and so much nourishment, true nourishment. If the mind could settle down more, then the spirit can loom out more, loom forward. And I think that is what they miss. I don’t want to pick on anyone, but I think George Bush Jr. did not realize, when he was calling the evil doers, that it is a matter of perception. If he had been born where they were, he would have had their perspective and if they had been born where he was, they would have had his perspective.

There is a blindness that comes to us when we do not realize that perception is not passive.

Polarization and the Antidote of Open-Mindedness

Rick: Right, it wasn’t part of it. So, what would you say, for instance, about here in the United States these days? Commentators are lamenting how polarized we have become. We always were, but it seems to be getting more extreme. Republicans and Democrats cannot talk to each other. Republicans have to oppose everything Obama tries to do, no matter how laudable it may be. There is just absolutely a gridlock because of this sort of fixity of perspective. And that is just one example. And we could take religious examples, specific issues like gun control or abortion or whatever else. People get locked into their perspectives. So, what is the antidote to that?

Dana: Well, I think getting out of your own light is really the antidote. I think that is the antidote to that.

Rick: What do you mean by that?

Dana: Well, getting over that certainty. I mean, we live in troubled times, everybody is worried about climate change and if they are not, they should be. And whenever you live in times of great uncertainty as we do, and when you live in times of tremendous cultural change such as we are going through right now, then that is going to create a polarization. There are going to be people who will clutch very, very desperately to the way things were. If you look at the Tea Party movement in America today, you are seeing people who want America to stay put. They want to stay America, keep America the way it was in their childhood or in their parents’ childhood. And then you have immigrants who did not have that childhood.

And you have people who see America more pluralistically, an America based on Jeffersonian principles of democracy, not necessarily only being a Red Sox fan or having a certain view of white Protestant America. And so that creates uncertainty and polarization.

But the piece that I’m trying to get at, Rick, about getting out of your own light is that great Zen story. There is a great Zen story about an old master, Chinese Zen, Chan, and the old master and the young master were going up a trail, and I’ll try to make this short. They sit down to take a break, and the young master says to the old master, “Since we’ve got some time on our hands. What is heaven like?” And excuse me, he says, “What is hell like?” And the old master says, “Hell, oh, hell, okay, let’s see… Oh, yeah Hell, that is a beautiful garden with lots of fragrant flowers and birds and palm trees and beautiful perfume breezes and there is a pavilion with silk curtains and beautiful a banquet table and all these wonderful people around the table.” And he has to be stopped by the young monk who says, “Wait a minute – wait a minute.

We’re talking about hell, right?” And the old monk says “Yeah, but the thing is, in hell, you have to eat with chopsticks and the chopsticks are about four feet long.” So, when you pick the food up, your arm isn’t long enough to get the food in your mouth. So, you can never eat the food even though you are there. Yeah, and so the young monk says, “Wow, you know that would be hell.”

So, the young monk says to the old monk, “Okay, okay, so what about heaven? What would heaven be like?” And the old monk says, “Oh, yeah heaven, okay, that’s the same thing, isn’t it? It’s a garden, with beautiful flowers, a big pavilion, silk curtains, a beautiful banquet, with delicious food and all these people around.” And the young monk says, “I don’t get it!” And the old monk says, “Well in heaven you would remember that you could have fed the people across the table from you.”

In heaven you would remember that you could have fed the people across the table from you.

🛤️ Dogmatism, Spiritual Paths, and the Value of Multiple Perspectives

Rick: Yeah, there is a story where the gods and the demons for some reason had their arms put in a splint, so they could not bend at the elbow. So, they were unable to feed themselves, because they couldn’t bend their arms. It turned out the demons all starved to death because they couldn’t figure out how to eat, but the gods fed each other and so they survived.

Dana: And see, are we going to be gods or demons, right? That is the piece that I mean about getting out of our own light. Can we reach across the table? Stephen Cope, down at Kripalu for a few years was doing these East meets East workshops for five days. He would have Buddhist scholars come in and Hindu scholars come in. Even in America today you will often see that people will transplant their old allegiances to Hinduism and Buddhism. Stephen is always sort of teasing and laughing that the Episcopalians have cornered the market on Hindu traditions and the Jews have cornered the market on Buddhist traditions and you might have even heard this expression Jew-Bus. Have you ever heard this?

Rick: I have heard of Hin-Jews! Hin-Jews works. But you know the point is, will we simply say I used to be a Christian and you guys were lost or I am a Catholic and you are a Protestant, you’re lost if you’re not inside the right tradition. Or will we not do that? Will we, as we grow and are exposed to new traditions, not bring that old habit of dogmatic allegiance to one perspective to the point where we are not even willing to listen to the teachings of others? That is a real worry, I think.

So that gives us one hint at an antidote, which is that, if we could somehow expose ourselves to viewpoints other than the ones we are already ensconced in, it might help us to realize that other viewpoints are perhaps as valid as our own. The way I look at it, I have been guilty of a little dogmatism myself from time to time over the years. And even recently, I have listened to a lot of talks by Neo-Advaita teachers. There is this site called Urban Guru Cafe, and there are all sorts of followers of Sailor Bob Adamson whom you may have heard of.

Dana: No, I haven’t.

Rick: He is a New Advaita teacher, and I listened to them with great interest, because these people are very articulate and clear and brilliant and so on. But I just came away with the feeling as if there is something incomplete, there is something missing. There is this denigration of the progressive, path-like nature. This tendency to say, “Just realize that it is all an illusion and there is no one home, there is no individual self, and you are done. You don’t have to meditate. Gurus are all bunk.” And some of them talk that way. I was be-moaning that or criticizing it and so on. But just lately, I have been feeling as if every perspective is valid, every path is valid. And for some people, that might be the perfect teaching right now. It might be exactly what they need to hear. Just as fundamentalist Christianity might be exactly what somebody needs to hear at this stage of the game.

And if they reach a point at which they need to hear something else, then they will get interested in something else. But there are just so many different teachings and teachers and perspectives and so on. And not one of them is the absolute one that everyone should adhere to. They are all just flowers in a garden of variety. And just enjoy them all and take what you need and leave the rest.

Every perspective is valid, every path is valid. And for some people, that might be the perfect teaching right now.

Dana: Yeah, that works for me. I mean, I certainly like the idea that there are multiple paths up the spiritual mountain. I certainly agree with that. I think the only place where we have to worry is if somebody is raising a philosophical perspective that is implicitly not generous. In other words, maybe people are getting something out of it, but maybe this goes to that horizontal transcendence I was talking about. They get certainty and they get out of the problem they had. You know, they are in the twelve-step program now and that is certainly better than where they were. But if they are sitting down in a place like extremist Islam or extremist Judaism or extremist Christianity, then very often they are really being taught to superglue those filters on their face and see the world only from one perspective. Maybe they even do harm to others.

And then that is hard for me to accept as what they really need at this point, or something like that. But certainly, you can go to a meeting, I think. When I first left the Christian church after my teenage years, and you remember those days in the sixties and everything that was going on, I could not see the inside of a church without being angry and frustrated, thinking they are behind the curve and blah, blah, blah.

Rick: It took me years after I stopped smoking dope to not feel paranoid whenever there was a cop following me. (laughing)

Dana: That is what we talked about, right? The modern ability of the human. So then to be able to go back into a church and hear some beautiful choir music or some beautiful organ music or Gregorian chanting and really be able to really own that and sit with how beautiful it is.

Rick: Yeah, absolutely.

Dana: Wonderful, wonderful.

Rick: Well, to my way of thinking, which of course is always subject to revision, it seems that there, I would not want to try to do it, but it seems that you could place all the different spiritual teachings and paths along a spectrum of maturity, and some of them are really rather primitive. By primitive, I would tend to mean, rigid, doctrinaire, very closed-minded. You can go places in the South where there is some little church down the block, which feels as if it is the only one that got it, and it alone has the true teaching, and the other churches and everybody else in the world is off base. And then moving up the scale, you would find teachings and teachers that were much more inclusive and appreciative.

And what I was getting at a minute ago is that people also fall along that spectrum, and perhaps it is natural for people, at a certain stage in their development, to be in a group or a church or a religion that is very narrow-minded, because it resonates with their mentality, with their state of consciousness. Given the evolutionary nature of the universe, I don’t think they are going to be there forever. It would be nice to find ways of helping everything move up the spectrum. But what I am saying is that all is well and wisely put, and even the offensive, fundamentalist, rigid teachings have their place in the big picture of things.

Dana: That could very well be true. Some religious traditions, like Tibetan Buddhism, actually try to structure the religion in such a way that it is being honest in that regard. What I mean by that is, they have a kind of spiritual kindergarten and they have intermediate levels of teachings. Further along in Tibetan Buddhism, they basically will end up saying, “Well, you know everything that I’ve been telling you all this time? Yeah, well, none of it was true, but it got you here.”

Rick: Yeah.

Dana: And now we go from here. There is an esoteric teaching that comes out later when you are really prepared for it and will understand and take it properly. I think a way to just give a quick example of that is: everybody has seen the Tibetan prayer wheel and they call those physical supports, like prayer flags.

Rick: And you spin it around and…

Dana: Yeah, it’s full of mantras and by twirling it, you are repeating mantras, right? And so, that is a good way to get people to sit down and start to practice every day. They are using their prayer wheel and being as mindful with it as they can be. And then, maybe later on they don’t need the prayer wheel anymore. It is fine to just sit without it, and it is just an obvious example, but there are lots of places in that tradition.

Rick: Kind of like training wheels on a bicycle.

Dana: That’s right. That’s right. So, there are stages and initiations as you move along. The kind of gear you need for the “tree line on the spiritual mountain,” is not the same gear you started out with. You started out in Tevas (a brand of sandals) and sooner or later you could have a parka.

Rick: Throw in an ice axe!

Dana: And we can extend that analogy, but you get that. I think it is very much like that.

🛤️ Spiritual Maturity, Growth, and the Infinite Path

Rick: Yeah, well the TM movement was that way too, actually. Maharishi used to say, “the wise don’t delude the ignorant and you should just speak according to the level of consciousness of the listener. Otherwise, you are just going to confuse them.” It was later on, when all that went public that this was what he was saying, people said, “They are just hiding the esoteric teaching because they are afraid to let people know what it really is when you get heavily into it.” There may have been some of that, but I feel it was like the point you just made about the Tibetans, as if they were beginning exercises, as well.

Dana: Well, I think so, too. I have to say, I got kind of tired of that. I got kind of tired of teaching people who attended because their doctor recommended it for their heart condition and they had listened to the third night’s checking meeting and they responded like, “yeah, whatever, buddy.”

Rick: The third night being the time when you talked about cosmic consciousness.

Dana: That’s right. And that probably was a huge impetus to my own journey, because I remember figuring out, “Oh, this is Advaita Vedanta in a new package.” And so, I started matching up the terms. Oh, okay, so this pure consciousness is Samadhi. And pure creative intelligence is Brahman. And well, what’s the stress word?

Rick: Vasanas

Dana: Yeah, right. And samskaras is another. Then I got so intrigued by that. All right, I want to swim back up the river and go and dig deeper into that, learn the traditional perspective on that knowledge. So that was really just like we were talking about, the hunger for transcendence leading me to break out of being set in my ways at that time. And I certainly was getting set in my ways at that time.

Rick: Meaning before you learned to meditate? Or afterwards?

Dana: Probably now, still. It is very hard for the human mind to not congeal.

Rick: Yeah.

Dana: And you have to keep breaking out of it. A friend of mine has a theory that the only thing we philosophers have ever done that was useful, by coming up with new theories we were breaking out of the old theories. That is the only real value we have, that we at least deconstructed the previous viewpoint. So, the cracks let the light in, right? Whenever there are cracks in a new theory, they will let some light into the room. So, I think, before I started TM and then after I was teaching TM for a few years, I was congealing. And it is not as if I want to be denigrating what had happened or my viewpoint, but I needed and was wanting to continue to broaden.

The only thing we philosophers have ever done that was useful, by coming up with new theories we were breaking out of the old theories. So, the cracks let the light in, right?

🕊️ Cultural Change and the Evolution of Spirituality

Rick: Interesting. I interviewed somebody a couple months ago who made the point that he felt as if a couple thousand years ago there was a thicker membrane to penetrate, as it were, if one wanted to get enlightened and that it took a real superman like the Buddha to actually penetrate that membrane, because there just was not a lot of support for that in society. Whereas now the membrane has been penetrated so many times that it is much more porous and easier to break through. And people are breaking through right and left. I wanted to bring that point up as a segue into having you talk a little bit about cultural change, because you mentioned it a little while ago. What do you think about the idea that I just mentioned and also about what is happening in the culture? Do you have any sense whatsoever where we are headed?

There does seem to be a greater and greater influx of spiritual interest in the kind of spiritual development that we are talking about here. On the other hand, contrasting with that, there seem to be more and more severe problems counterbalancing it.

Dana: Yeah, well, it’s funny you asked this question, because just now, I am reading Phil Goldberg’s book on the American beta.

Rick: I was just thinking about Phil as I was asking that question.

Dana: Yeah. And of course, he is very interested in that. I know he interviewed you for the book. And Phil is the sort, that I think his explanation really rings true for me, which is: back in the sixties, when the floodgates were opened to Asian immigration, we got all these yogis and swamis and lamas and you remember those days. And that brought all this knowledge in, at a time when there was this very, very idealistic, romantic generation eager for new ways of looking at things and opening new ways of looking at things. And we have been through a very interesting growth curve in the last forty or fifty years, where we have absorbed so much wisdom from the East, but we have also been through a maturation process of realizing how naive we were in that first blush of enthusiasm. In India, they have had so many millennia of dealing with fraudulent gurus and gurus who fall off the wagon.

But there are some, I don’t know, maybe the membrane fell out of the sky and landed on them and it’s thicker around them now, but they are harder to dupe. They are not as naive, they are not as likely to believe they are going to be enlightened in a few years. And I don’t think we were, but I think we are. I think Phil is right, that the boomers now have grown and have realized that spiritual maturity never comes easily. That is the journey of it. It is a complex process. We have arrived at a place where, if I am not as certain about what I think, then I am more likely to be open to your thoughts if they are different. And I think of times back when I was teaching TM when, if somebody was talking about a different spiritual path, I had to immediately convince them they were on the wrong one.

📚 India: Disillusionment, Inspiration, and Spiritual Teachers

Rick: So, let’s talk about India for a little bit. You have been there twelve times and you have been interviewing all these Swamis. What can you tell us that people would find fascinating about India and, well, specifically about your experience in meeting all these guys?

Dana: Well, you know, probably a lot of the people who are listening to this have been to India. I don’t know how much time they have really spent there. My experience over all these years, thirty years now of going to India regularly, and my wife and I are going this December, is that it was incredibly disillusioning and incredibly inspirational. So, there is that mystery again, right? Having to live with paradox. I remember so many times where there would be a let-down. And then you become kind of jaded because you have seen it all before.

In India, the ability to perform miracles is the way that, inside of some advaita movements, like when you’re witnessing waking, dreaming and sleeping, that’s the proof that you’re now enlightened, you’re bona fide, qualified, and finished in some sense. And in India, you practice the siddhis to be able to manifest objects. That is why Sai Baba is still as popular as he is.

Rick: He’s a slight of hand artist.

Dana: Exactly, and there are so many of them in India.

Rick: And actually, he is not a good slight-of-hand artist. I have had magicians look at his thing, friends of mine who are into magic and say, well, he is just an amateur. You know, I could do a lot better than that.

Dana: Yeah, there is a book, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, that’s really worth getting, but there is an anecdote in there, where a guy is with Sai Baba. And it is around American Easter time, and Sai Baba manifests an Easter candy, and he is passing it out to people. And the guy observes that the candy has passed its expiration date on the back of the candy. Which I think is awesome. You know. If you like this kind of stories, let me give you a really fun one.

I started to get very familiar with the jadugars, the magicians, and the tricks that they were doing, and the tricks the Swami’s were doing. And so, it would be, “Oh, I can stop my heart from beating, and I’m gonna go into samadhi, you take my pulse, and you’ll see that my heart is stopped.” And I would say, “Oh you’ve got a walnut under your arm and you’re squeezing it into your armpit and stopping the pulse from coming down your arm.” Sometimes they would be sort of surprised and embarrassed.

I remember once going into a Krishna temple in Mussoorie. There was a man, a Baba, sitting in front of the door. And he had a bowl in front of him, so I reached down to put a rupee coin into his bowl. And he said, “No, don’t give me money, I do not need any money.” This was a new one for me, because they tend to like money a lot. He said, “If I need anything I can manifest it myself.” And I said, “Really?” And he said “Yes.” So, he says “If I am thirsty,” and he reaches up and he grabs his dreadlocks and he squeezes his dreadlocks and all this milk started to pour off of his face and it filled this bowl. And he looks up at me and I said, “Oh no, see, I know that one.

You take a sponge, you fill it up with milk, you hide it in your dreadlocks, and then you squeeze it.” He got this kind of funny look on his face, and then he said, “Okay, have you seen this one?” He didn’t even blink, he just went to the next trick, and thought to himself – maybe I’ll get him on this one. Okay, that was a goof. So, there were lots of this kind of experiences.

Rick: Did you ever see anybody perform what you have considered to have been a genuine siddhi?

Dana: No, I can’t say. I have thought about that a lot. I can’t say I have. Now I have seen amazing body control. Amazing hatha yoga at a level most people can’t imagine. I can’t imagine. I saw a man in a marketplace one time in a bazar holding up a snake, about a two and a half-foot long cobra. And he said, “Look at this cobra.” And so, he has grown this group of people around him and he was talking about Kundalini yoga, you know, the serpent power and all this. And he takes the snake and he sticks the head of the snake into his mouth and he ingested this entire snake whole!

Rick: And it was a live snake?

Dana: Yes, it was a live snake!

Rick: Wow, I wonder what the snake thought about that?

Dana: Probably it didn’t like it, and the proof of that was, then he kept going for only maybe another minute or two on the lecture about the serpent power rising. Then he drank this glass of water, a volume of water, and then he started doing this thing with his diaphragm. You could see him manipulating it. Pretty soon, he opens up his mouth and here comes the head of the cobra. And he takes this cobra, and he brings this cobra all the way out. I don’t know whether he was drowning the cobra with the water in his stomach cavity and the snake found his esophagus enough that he could grab it? You know, he regurgitated it head-first.

Rick: And it was still alive?

Dana: And it was still alive, and I was close enough that he didn’t switch snakes or something.

Rick: I have seen them put it down their sleeve or something like that.

Dana: He was not even wearing a shirt, he just had a lungi on. So, I mean, that’s incredible, right? It is absolutely amazing!

Rick: I wonder if he does that around ten times a day in the market for the audiences?

Dana: Probably.

Rick: The snake is probably totally used to it by now.

Dana: So right, they are in cahoots!

Rick: It’s fed well and figures it’s a good gig!

Dana: So, what he will do is he will have a ring on his finger. Often these guys do, and they will say, “I can do this and I don’t ever get bitten because of the power of Kalima, so this ring is protecting me and I can bring people back from the dead with this ring, I’ve never been ill because of this ring.” And so inevitably, after the show, some country bumpkin will say, “My mother is dying, I could really use that ring” and so he’ll pay an exorbitant amount for a poor person, two or three hundred rupees. Then of course, the guy has a whole bag full of these rings and goes on to the next village. I’ve seen that so many times.

Rick: So that is the disillusionment side. How about the inspiration side?

Dana: The inspiration side, and it is real inspiration. Unfortunately, you never meet them out in the marketplace, and also unfortunately, if you cannot speak an Indian language, you are rarely ever going to meet them, just because it cuts down on the numbers of people you can be exposed to and communicate with. Not that all communication has to be verbal, right? But I have certainly met men and women who I profoundly respect. They are doing the real work and they have really gotten somewhere. And I think that we have a good – what do I want to call it? – I think especially after a certain level of spiritual maturity, we become very adept at smelling a stink bomb in the room. Whether you have been to India and seen all the tricks or not, you can tell if somebody is being authentic. I think in the American experience of spiritual teachers we tend to like our spiritual teachers good looking.

We sort of laminate, as Andrew Harvey says, the movie star. That is the template. The movie star and the veneration of movie stars becomes our template for venerating spiritual teachers. So, they are often good looking and they are often very charismatic and in my experience they are not. My experience in India is that they are not either one of those things. Not that you have to be homely to be enlightened or something.

Rick: They are just a cross-section of how people tend to look and only a handful are going to be movie star types.

Dana: That is right, and they may not even be very articulate about what they are trying to communicate. They are experiencing something, but they are not going to tell you the snake and rope analogy.

Rick: Right.

Dana: You know what I mean? They are not going to fall back on these hackneyed analogies. They are going to express it as we all do, right? Life is an art. And so, you are expressing the art of what you are. And every now and then you will meet someone who is so incredibly beautiful, whether they are male or female, monk or not monk, or some of the village people for me are so inspirational. Their life is so simple, and they have had to face a very hard life. And that has caused them to not take life for granted. And they have fallen into this really beautiful, beautiful place.

And even some, I don’t want to run down swamis because I’ve got some good friends who are Swamis, but Sundanan, whom I was talking about before, and my wife had this experience with him too. When I took my wife to meet him, and my wife is no mystical pickle, as we used to call them, she’s hard to impress. And she is not even really particularly interested, quite frankly. She finds her spiritual growth in other directions. She is an artist. I had to warn her when we were going to meet Sundanan. He likes eye contact, but don’t make eye contact with him for very long. And what would happen with him, he didn’t meet many people, but when he did, he enjoyed the experience of pouring back and forth into each other’s being. And he would pull you, you would go into Samadhi whether you wanted to or not.

If you just sat with him for a while and made eye contact, you would not really even realize the process was going on. And he was not really consciously doing it. He was just so profoundly in Samadhi that you got a contact high out of it. He would just be pulled into it if you were not already there. Yeah.

Rick: There is a group here in town, it’s all over the country, called Waking Down, started by Samuel Bonder. And that gazing is part of their deal. And it seems to be quite effective actually in helping to transmit or enliven Samadhi in one another.

Dana: I think that’s true. I think that is a very viable channel. It is like romantic love poetry from the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The romantics really believed there were several primary doorways into the infinite. One of them was Henry David Thoreau, time spent in nature, or John Muir, time spent in nature. Art was most definitely, if you’re thinking about Chopin or Wagner or Franz Liszt, that music was the doorway into the infinite. I’ve had that experience. I know you have, you are a music fan. And so also romantic love, that love between two people, I make meaningful eye contact with my wife all the time. I make meaningful eye contact with my nephew’s dog. I think sometimes we really do see to the bottom in each other.

Rick: The eyes are the windows of the soul.

Dana: We can see there is something delicious about that. We seem to be two, but when we see to the bottom of each other, we merge into that same one place. I see why they are using it as a door. Now the thing is, we create a false idolatry when we say, “Oh, this works for me, therefore it is the path.” Right. One of the things I always worry about, when I talk about the human mind being robotic, is: if we are drowning in the infinite every minute of every day, well right now we are drowning in the infinite. So, are we seeing it that way? And if we don’t, is it because, oh, later I’m going to drown in the infinite when I look into Billy’s eyes. But right now, there’s no infinite available. When we really do the work… Do you see where I’m going with this?

Rick: I think so.

Dana: If everything is coming out of the infinite, everything is the doorway back into the infinite, that is the hope. So, you can be looking into eyes and that is a viable path. You can be spending time in nature, you can be meditating, you can be swallowing snakes. If it is something that you are applying yourself to with the right consciousness, then it becomes a powerful tool.

Rick: In my experience, it just becomes more and more evident. I mean, if the infinite is infinite, then there is no place where it is not. And there is no thing in which it is not, no circumstance, no experience in which it is not staring you right in the face. And as we gradually or quickly, however we do it, unravel that roboticism that you mentioned, then the likelihood increases of having at least a taste of it at all times, and it tends to continue to increase. It gets to be more and more than just a taste as time goes on.

Dana: That’s right. I could not have said it better. I think that is it.

Rick: And I think it is important to clarify one’s understanding of what it is that one is heading for, if a person is on the path to enlightenment. Because I know there are people in this town who have built up grandiose fantastic notions of what it is going to be and since they don’t detect anything of that nature in their own experience, they feel that they must still be a million miles away from it. Whereas, it is closer than your own breath and if we can perhaps just get more realistic about what it actually is, then it helps a lot in terms of noticing to what degree it is already being lived.

Dana: Well, I think that was the gift back in those early days when you and I met forty years ago this coming December, that I had read so much Emerson and Thoreau and Aldous Huxley and all this stuff that you read, and you read about this idea of the infinite. But then as you got the gift of a particular technique, a particular path, as you got the gift of different conceptual structures that could point you to it, “Oh, I thought that was a deer, but it’s really a moose.” You know what I’m saying? That you had concepts that clarified your understanding of something you were experiencing. Like when you are on a mountain and you are having that experience of profound timelessness and you don’t want to be in the past and you are not thinking about the future, it is so delicious to just be in the moment. Yeah. Okay, that’s it. That’s it. You’re walking on a beach with somebody you love.

There is just this playful, wonderful, deliciousness. Yes, okay, that is it. You know, this moment when chills are running up your spine, where you listen to a symphony, okay, that’s it. And I think that back in those days, that was the gift. It’s to set all those experiences inside of a context of, “Wow, if I don’t drown in my thoughts, and if I don’t put all my attention on the future, if I do be here now, then I can find some contact with that.” I’m sure this is your experience, Rick, that it is so comfortable and so familiar. Familiar like your breath. You smell your own breath every minute of every day. You can’t smell your breath, but it’s right there. It’s always just there.

And, you know, that’s the gift of those days, I think, is to have somebody point it out and say, you know, this is it, and no, it’s not lightning bolts shooting out of your head, and it’s not your ability to swallow snakes, and it’s not your ability to stop your heartbeat, or when I say it’s not that, I mean, I’m really saying it’s not that to me inside of my own view, because…

Rick: That is not a necessary criterion of it.

Dana: That’s right.

Rick: Maybe somebody who is enlightened can swallow snakes, and there may be some people who can swallow snakes who aren’t enlightened, but the two are not necessarily correlated.

Dana: Exactly, and then the other piece of that for me is that ability to apprehend the absolute to be there, to feel it, to enjoy it, is not full spiritual maturity to me.

Rick: Right, I was going to say that actually. Go ahead and you might as well elaborate because you are responding to a question I was going to ask.

Dana: To me, full spiritual maturity is recognizing that there is no such thing as full spiritual maturity. It is really recognizing that the road is an infinite continuous flowering inside of your individual moment of existence, that there will always be room for growth and room for insight. That that will never, ever end and there is something very beautiful about it never ending. I like that. I am thinking of teachers who teach from that viewpoint. Huston teaches from that viewpoint, that I was talking about with you once, of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. He says the need for self-actualization is the highest of all human drives. That okay, once we have food, we want to feel like we belong to people and we have a drive for self-respect and so on and so forth. But ultimately, we have a drive for self-actualization.

In his description of what self-actualization is, and he interviewed dozens of people whom he felt were self-actualized, including Aldous Huxley, he points out that inside of their viewpoint the journey never ended. That the self-actualized realized that self-actualization is never complete. It is an ongoing process that goes on and on and on. So, I think very often we might say, “Oh, enlightenment is this and I want to meet that criterion.” And I think that’s sad. I think it is sad because there is always going to be something richer to discover inside of one’s growth that, “okay, I’m experiencing the feeling that the infinite is looking over my shoulder all the time.” Okay. What is that doing for the growth of my heart? What is that doing for the reduction of my ego?

What is that doing for the visionary imaginative capacity of my mind to imagine other ways that we could live and transcend global warming and climate change. So, there are so many avenues for growth there to say “Oh, well, that was fun and now I’m here.”

Full spiritual maturity is recognizing that there is no such thing as full spiritual maturity. The road is an infinite continuous flowering inside of your individual moment of existence.

Rick: Well, interestingly, this fellow, Samuel Bonder, who started Waking Down after having been with Adi Da for so many years and then having his own awakening, the whole emphasis of that group is, it’s called Waking Down in Mutuality. And by “down,” they mean the embodiment of the awakening. They feel as if the awakening is the first stage. And then you have to embody that, have to bring it into your life and make your life resonate or aligned with that. And then the mutuality part is to get it resonating with the other people in your life, so that enlightenment is not just a loose thing leaving your relative life divorced from that. But rather, it is something that permeates every dimension of your life.

Dana: Hmm well, that’s noble. In Mahayana Buddhism, in Tibetan Buddhism for example, wisdom and compassion go hand in hand. How that plays out socially is: they would say you want to get over yourself or get your ego under control and have a more profound experience beyond the boundaries of individuality. That is easy – start helping other people, through compassion for others, that becomes the sadhana, that becomes the practice. And so, by reaching out to others and improving their conditions, one is growing, one is growing very quickly. So, do we start by when I get my house in order that I’m going to help others? And then there are traditions that say, “I’ll start by helping.” I see joining the Sierra Club as a kind of yoga, as a kind of sadhana. I see people, Green Peace-ers out there trying to save whales from being hurt, putting themselves out there.

Rick: Do you watch whale wars?

Dana: Yeah! That’s pretty incredible and I admire not only the courage but the interspecies love that is going on there. So, we have come back full circle to this idea that it is all coming out of the absolute, so everything is a path back into it. And I think it is wonderful if there is that added social peace in this group that you are talking about. I think that’s really wonderful that they are saying, where we mutually are going to grow and support each other.

Tantra, Morality, and the Confusion of Levels

All right. Make eye contact with her. You mentioned Tantra, Rick, and that’s such a poor excuse that gets played way too often. And I’ve heard it so many times. For a while, I was doing a thing where when I would read Tricycle Magazine, or I would read Yoga Journal, Enlightenment Magazine, I would act as a whistleblower sometimes. Not like, “Oh, Dana knows everything, and he’s claiming he knows these traditions better than everyone.” I certainly don’t. But some traditions I do know and I am very familiar with, and I know quite a lot about Tantra. There have been groups who have tried to create these weekends where, “We’re going to teach you how to have better sex and more loving partnerships,” and that has nothing to do with Tantra, even remotely. It really has nothing to do with that.

It is really much more like, okay, referencing our conversation, if everything comes out of the absolute, then everything comes out of the infinite and it is part of the one design. So that means death is part of it. That means that feces are part of it. And so, whenever we turn up our nose to any aspect of it, we are making divisions in the mind. The divisions are not in reality. And so, the tantric is saying, “Okay, I’m going to…” If you think about American gurus getting back to that, they’re often backlit. They’re very good looking and they’re backlit and they have this big halo of light and some kind of pretty colored robe on and all that. And in India there are a lot of tantric sadhus like the Naga Babas who will smear themselves with the ashes of the dead and they sleep in the shmashan grounds, the cremation ground.

And so, they wash with ashes of the dead and they sleep and use skulls for pillows. And they are really saying, “I’m training myself to overcome my fear of death. And part of that is my attachment to the illusion that death isn’t part of life. And so that piece of it, in that piece of it that I’m going to learn to control my desire to such a point where, like Shiva, even during sex, I have transcended attachment and I am owning my own being in the center of what I am.” It’s not about having fun, you know?

Rick: And that is the way it gets distorted, because people feel as if, “okay well if the absolute is in everything then I can just do everything, I can take all these drugs and I can sleep with my students’ wives and do this, that, the other thing and it’s all just because I am exploring various expressions of the absolute”. So any sense of morality is thrown out the window.

Dana: Well, what happens is then, one is telling the truth and a lie at the same time. The truth is, from the level of the absolute, there is no consequence, from the level of the unchanging being then there is no consequence in any action ultimately. How could there be? Right?

Rick: Right. It’s untouched.

Dana: But then, there is life down here in the world also. And there are consequences to actions, and they can be profound and they can be very damaging. And to try to…

Rick: confuse levels?

Dana: Exactly, to confuse levels or appropriate an entire, really beautiful Sadhana like Tantra and to say I’m going to use this for my own personal gratification, like, “hey, baby come on up to my place and I’ll show you my tantric yoga.”

🛤️ Compassion, Spiritual Maturity, and the Universal Path

Rick: One point I want to make about India is: I have a friend who, I don’t know if she is actually even listening to any of these interviews I do. She lives here in town, but she often criticizes me for making a big fuss about people whom she considers to be real newbies on the spiritual path, even though they may be reporting a profound spiritual awakening and even an abiding one. But she is always looking to examples of yogis and saints in India as being the real article. And my feeling is that enlightenment is not an Indian thing. Indian culture is very familiar with it, just as Eskimos have lots of words for snow, but it is really a universal thing. And there is no reason why somebody in a suit and tie or working in a business or something should not actually be just as legitimately in an enlightened state of consciousness as some guy who has all the trappings of Indian spirituality.

Would you agree with that and have you met people in the west who you feel are just as significantly enlightened, to use a word I don’t like to use, as people in the East who you have met?

Dana: Well, it all pivots on the definition of this word enlightened, but if we go back to the word I prefer, spiritual maturity, then spiritual maturity, yes, definitely, they have. I would say there is a pretty even split there. Yeah. There are people in our culture whom I think are very, very far along. I remember, because of doing interviews all the time for the Huxley book and the Huston Smith book, I’ve had long conversations with Deepak Chopra and Andrew Harvey and Pico Iyer and Ram Das and Stanislav Grof and Joan Halifax, Roshi and you know my hat is off to all of them. I see profound insight, in several of those cases, and in most of those cases, it is the equal of anything I’ve seen in India. Yeah, so I think you are absolutely right. The people who are hungriest for it, the hungriest for the growth, find their way to the growth. Or it is not only hunger, it can be a path of beauty.

Because I teach at an art college, I am constantly meeting artists in their forties and fifties, in their sixties and seventies and twenties and I hear them talking. They are talking about their artwork. As they start talking about it and about their experiences that are triggered through art, I think, wow, in a different idiom where you are talking about the spiritual path, the beauty of work and the aesthetic interest that you find in art has led you into the infinite. And you have gone through that door that romanticism postulated, whether the art is romantic or not. So, I totally agree with you. I think spiritual maturity is everywhere.

Enlightenment is not an Indian thing. It is really a universal thing.

Rick: Yeah, not only East and West, but South. If you look at certain African cultures or South American cultures or whatever, you are going to find it there too.

Dana: Yeah, Australian aborigines have a really amazing spiritual tradition.

Rick: Somehow for me, and maybe you can divest me of this notion, or maybe not, but somehow for me when I speak of spiritual maturity or spiritual development, I have the notion that it does not just mean that you are a really sensitive, integrated person, but there must be some kind of tapping into a connection with universal awareness, which transcends all persons and cultures, and that is the litmus test of spiritual development. That somehow that dimension has been brought to awareness and then, hopefully, has begun to impact the expressed aspects of your life. Are we on the same page with that?

Dana: To some extent. You know, Beethoven often talked about his experiences of the infinite and the eternal, and he could be a jerk on other occasions. I tend to see spiritual maturity as something beyond simply that experience of the transcendent. I think it is a wonderful beautiful thing.

Rick: I agree, that is what I have been saying, that you can be a jerk and have the transcendent.

Dana: That is right.

Rick: If we think of the whole package, two hundred percent of absolute and relative development, would you in your lexicon say a person can be really spiritually developed and yet not have that transcendent dimension?

Dana: I would. And I say that because I have met people who are profoundly compassionate toward others and not to feed their ego. They have a profound compassion, and out here in the world of physical being, that is very valuable. We live in a world of other beings and other people. As I said before, they are just as sacred. They are not “sacred light.” They are just as sacred. They are the infinite, the absolute in my way of thinking and experience. They are it, expressing itself and moving around. And so, that compassion I see is a more critical peace. I would see transcendence of ego and compassion as more, as better rulers of spiritual maturity than the experience, that inner experience of the eternal. That is my two cents, but let me finish a thought.

In Hinduism, in the sect of the goddess worshippers, the Shaktas, they believe that the world is a conjoining of male and female energy at every level so they are tantrics. And so, a healthy life is the conjoining of male and female energies inside of your body, and your chakras, and in your relationships, and in every level of nature. That the physical world is feminine, that its charge at every level is feminine, and that the absolute, the Brahman in Hindu traditions is a masculine energy, is masculine. And so, the physical world, prakriti, which is a feminine noun, I’m sure you’ve heard that word, prakriti nature. It is mother nature, it is a feminine charge. And Shakti is another feminine noun. Shakti is the energy of God. And so, Brahman is God in God’s own being and that is masculine. But Shakti is God alive and moving and awake.

And their viewpoint is, “Okay, I can use that, but the flat God lying there, I can’t really use it. I want the lively, shakti one.” And so that is what makes them goddess worshipers and goddess devotees. They are not denigrating the Brahman. They are not denigrating the eternal in its pure form. They happen to like the eternal when it is moving around. And I think that since we live in a world of beings, that has come to be the yardstick for measuring growth that I tend to prefer.

Rick: At least it is a yardstick that you can see and measure because it is more manifest. It is more obvious. You know that Upanishad where it talks about two birds sitting on the self-same tree and one protects the fruit and the other doesn’t. I forget which Upanishad it is, but it is said to represent the absolute and the relative, the silent witness. They are friends but one eats the fruit and is more active and the other just sort of sits there. I think that is what it is meant to represent. And I guess the question I was getting at is of people who have awakenings generally. Well, most of the people I interview, or a lot of people you hear these days, speak of really shattering the sense of being confined by an individual ego and perhaps not even being able to detect one anymore.

Even though they might have likes and dislikes and so on and so forth, they insist that there is really no one home and that what they are, and more predominantly, if not entirely, is an impersonal vastness. And so, I guess what I was getting at is whether a person who is very kind and compassionate and loving and so on and so forth. Those might be just very laudable relative qualities which are highly developed in them, but unless there is the dimension of the unmanifest, which is the sub-stratum of existence, then by definition it is a highly developed human state, maybe a self-actualized state as Maslow would define it, but it doesn’t necessarily fit the term enlightenment.

Dana: Yeah, I can go with that. I think if you are sitting in this, marinating in your vastness, then there is some ego there, is what I would say.

Rick: You think it is a self-gratifying kind of thing?

Dana: Yeah, you are in a tape loop of bliss and that is very enjoyable, but if there is no ego in there then if you are really claiming to have transcended your individuality, then think of the Dali Lama, someone who is very concerned about the problems of his people and the problems in the world and is trying to build bridges of compassion between people. It is very pleasant on a sunny day to wake up in the morning and sit and have a cup of tea and look out at the mountains and again, to marinate in that tape loop bliss. But we can’t use it. We need to have you come out and help. And so that is why I tend to think, when you see the compassion manifesting, even if it is just like Adyashanti or Gungaji, wanting to share a beautiful experience they are having with other people, teaching as an impetus, right?

Rick: Sure. It is a way of serving. But, take Mother Teresa for instance. Towards the end of her life, she admitted that she really was assailed by doubt and didn’t have a whole lot of profound subjective experience. But then look at her life, it was unbelievable. So, there must have been something really profound happening inside to have given expression to such a life. So maybe she was just so humble that she did not recognize it and maybe she was very much tapped in to universal awareness and the divine consciousness which wants to infuse itself into the world. And she was a profound, powerful channel for that.

Dana: I think you are exactly right.

Rick: Just thinking aloud here, it may have just been her humility that caused her to feel as if she was a chump.

Dana: I think that is true a lot of times. When Khen Rinpoche, this Tibetan Lama that you were talking about, the abbot of the Panchen Lama monastery, when he first started coming to New England to give teachings, he gave a teaching and I took a bunch of students of mine there twenty years ago. He really was struggling with his English and he said he was from Ladakh and I thought, “Well, he might know Hindi.” And I came up to him afterwards and spoke to him in Hindi, asked him how he was doing, where he was staying. And we kind of glommed on to each other because there aren’t a lot of people in Maine who speak Hindi. And so, we were talking and I ended up teaching with him. And people will come to him a lot.

And you have seen this kind of experience when you were around Maharishi, sometimes people will come with him and they feel as if, because he is making eye contact, they can see what he is. They feel like he is looking into their soul and he is judging them and it is really them judging themselves. And they will start crying, they will have this big release and feel as if they need to apologize for all the mistakes they have made. There is something very beautiful about it. But then, other people will come sometime and, “Oh, I’m not very far along the path and I’m doing my best and I’m good to my family.” And they are apologizing for not being very far along. And I can tell by the way he is treating them that he is really recognizing some stages of development in them that they themselves really are not noticing.

I think it was Emerson who said something like this: Emerson was saying he wasn’t very far along in his growth or something. And one of the other transcendentalists said, “What you are is shouting so loud, I can’t hear what you are saying.”

Rick: That’s good.

Dana: And I really like that. Every now and then, I think people are something colossally beautiful. And they are not really honoring how far their growth is, and how much spiritual maturity they have accumulated.

Rick: And as Jesus put it, you shall know them by their fruits.

Dana: Exactly, that is where it has got to get up on legs and walk around and then we find out.

Rick: Good. Well, this is about as good a place to conclude as any.

Dana: I think so too.

Rick: Yeah, I have kept you up way past your bedtime.

Dana: It is great to see you, Rick.

Rick: Yeah, good to see you, Dana.

Dana: It is the longest that we have talked in years and years.

Rick: Probably the longest we have ever talked.

Dana: Oh, God.

Rick: I was always kind of blowing into Danbury in a snowstorm and teaching thirty people while you were having a party in the next room and then racing back down to Fairfield.

Dana: Some of those nights I also remember sitting up till about three o’clock in the morning, figuring out how we were going to change the whole world.

Rick: Oh, good.

Dana: It was all going to happen. I celebrate those days.

Rick: Yeah, enjoy. Well, let’s stay in touch. I will conclude this interview by just reminding people that you have been watching or listening to Buddha At The Gas Pump. And there are a number of places where you can watch or listen to this. So, if you want the mothership, go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P. And there you will find all of them archived, as well as links to YouTube and Facebook and a podcast and other ways in which you can listen, and a chat group and so on. And in fact, speaking of chat groups, I will have Dana’s interview up in a day or two and there will be a place where you can make comments. If you have a question for Dana, I will alert him to the fact that you have posted a question and if he has the time he will come in and answer it.

Dana: And if you have an answer for Dana, you can have that too.

Rick: So great. Thank you and we will see you next week.

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