Rick Archer: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually Awakening people. I’ve done hundreds of them now. And if this is new to you, please go to batgap.com and look under the past interviews menu where you’ll find all the previous ones organized in various ways. If this is not new to you, you’re probably tired of hearing me saying this every week. And this, which is that Buddha at the Gas Pump is not entirely a labor of love, although I love it. But it depends upon the support of those who also love it or appreciate it and would like to support it. So if you’re one such person and would like to contribute to it in any amount, there’s a PayPal button on every page of the site. Okay, my guest today is David Buckland, who’s a good friend of mine, I interviewed him about three years ago, up in Canada, when I went up there to do a retreat with Lorn Hoff. And I’ve been a regular reader of his blog since even before that. He has a blog that’s at davidya.ca because he’s Canadian. And he’s a really good writer and I always learn from reading his blog posts. And so that’s something that those listening might want to consider doing, you’re subscribing to his blog. He writes things usually faster than I can keep up with him because all kinds of other things I need to read. But I always take the time to read them. We covered a lot in David’s first interview. And I would recommend that people watch that, even possibly before watching this or listen to it in any case, but you can also just listen to this one without having watched that. And I think you’ll get read into what we’re saying. David has had a profound level of experience for many, many decades. And his experience has progressed even in the past three years. I would imagine your understanding as well. And so I just wanted to have another interview with him to kind of get up to date, and what he’s been going through. So let’s start.
David Buckland: So I just wanted to start by putting a little content, building a little context. So we know where I’m talking about. So in the last interview, in the first interview, I spoke about the witnessing process and waking up, Self Realization, cosmic consciousness, and the process through what’s known as God-consciousness and Unity stages of Enlightenment, and then into a post consciousness, quality of Brahman, known as Brahman, where you go beyond the consciousness and all the dynamics of creation and the dynamics of experience.
Rick Archer: Let’s unpack that. Okay, witnessing.
David Buckland: Okay, so witnessing is when you shift from being a person experiencing through the senses, to being a kind of a detached observer, experiencing through the senses, through the mind-body as before, but kind of from an infinite place, instead of from a local place.
Rick Archer: So you are that infinite place, which is witnessed, which is sort of perceiving as it were, through a local instrument,
David Buckland: Right. And it’s that sometimes people have that, that begins with Self Realization, with waking up. And sometimes it can start beforehand, where the self has woken up to the experiencing, or the process of experience here, but it has not woken up to itself yet. There’s a there can be a lag, sometimes
Rick Archer: Let’s unpack that a little bit. So what’s the difference if any, between the Self and the witness?
David Buckland: While the witness can be kind of like a localized version of Self, sometimes the word Jiva is used. Jiva can shift into an observer mode. And so it’s quality of the Self, but it’s kind of a localized quality of the Self. It’s like either you’re looking in through the senses, but you’re not aware of what it is that’s experiencing. So you’re kind of aware that you’re aware, but you’re not aware of what that is. Well, it’s kind of yeah, it’s kind of hard to describe exactly.
Rick Archer: Let me ask it this way, would it be fair to say that witnessing can result from a kind of a more silent level of mind having been established or enlivened? And yet that’s not the Self because it’s not fundamental enough to be the Self, it’s just a quieter level, like a, like a deeper level of the ocean, but not the ocean floor.
David Buckland: Yeah, it’s the Self, but the Self is still kind of at a point of individuation. Yeah, the ego is still attached, the ego is still identified. And so there’s kind of this duality there of self, there’s the ego being identified, and then there’s this observer of the ego being identified. But the observer doesn’t know what it is yet, it kind of seems like you know what it is, but until you actually wake up, you don’t know what it is,
Rick Archer: okay. And then when you actually wake up, right how to think shifts.
David Buckland: So then you recognize the Self recognizes itself as the Self. And so the consciousness has a three-way dynamic. There’s the observer, the process of experience, and the observed, the objects of experience, the things in the environment around us. So self-realization is when the observer wakes up to itself, it knows itself as infinite consciousness. Then later on in the unity stage, the whole, it’s kind of like, there’s the experiencer, and then the object of experience, we wake up to the screen on which the world is playing out, we recognize that consciousness underlies the experiences of the world, as well as our own experience.
Rick Archer: And to put that more precisely, consciousness itself recognizes that it is the underlying thing. But it doesn’t regard the world as that it sees the world as being something other than that.
David Buckland: Well, the world is the play of consciousness.
Rick Archer: Is it seen as such? In that initial stage of witnessing? Yes. Okay. So you see the trees and the birds and everything else as the play of consciousness, but not as consciousness?
David Buckland: Well, both.
Rick Archer: Okay, now you’re talking about Unity State? Are you, Unity? Yeah. Prior to that, just witnessing?
David Buckland: Yeah, no, I jumped into Unity stage there. Yeah. (laughs) So then you basically the subject and object are one, yes. Okay. So what’s left is the process of experience, the devata value, the process of how the world comes to be. Now someone who hasn’t gone through a god consciousness stage or refined perception and that kind of thing. The awakening heart, they may not recognize that process taking place. They, before you wake up, you experience being the doer, I am, these are, you know, these are my actions, I am making these decisions. These are my thoughts. These are my emotions. But after waking up, you experience being the observer. And actually, in the witness stage, there’s some value of that as well, you, you’re the observer of the doing. And so what you thought was mind before, you now experience this happening, essentially, on its own, there’s some volition thing going on. But there’s clearly a different driver than you thought, the ego, it kind of claimed those dynamics, but they turned out not to be mine.
Rick Archer: They’re just nature doing something.
David Buckland: And so the process of experience part is the process that’s creating that the devata value, the laws of nature, that are creating the dynamics of experience. Okay, devata means? Essentially, deva means light being and devata is, is kind of a point value, it doesn’t have an expression as a form value. It’s simply like a point of intelligence that is acting. Okay?
Rick Archer: Are you saying that light beings or Devatas are somehow instrumental in the conductance of the world and I’ve experienced
David Buckland: Yeah, they’re the actual doers, if that can be said, What are these light beings? They’re impulses of, of intelligence, impulses of divinity, they’re the laws of nature. Now, there’s a point worth making in there. We can experience the world, the function of the world in two primary kinds of ways. One of them is with the intellect and from the perspective of the intellect, we experience laws of nature functioning, we experience principles functioning in the world we like we see, Gravity. Yeah, we see these principles happening. But from a heart-based perspective, with refined perception, we can experience those same laws of nature as personified, as beings and beings interacting and having relationships. They work in teams and communities, whatever like that, and it’s…
Rick Archer: Okay. Yeah, and since this kind of stuff is not necessarily talked about that much in spiritual circles, I just want to dwell on it a little bit, rather than just zip through things. So what you’re saying, I think, is that if we had the eyes to see it, underneath the surface level of apparent appearances in the world, there are all sorts of intelligent beings who are being very much every bit as much as you and I are, right, who have their own autonomous existence, and perhaps some kind of subtle bodies. And they are, they have roles to play, functions to serve.
David Buckland: Yeah, one of the things they talk about in different traditions is kind of the layers of, of becoming how you get from consciousness into form into solid, the solid world. And there are several different models, I’m going to be doing a talk at SAND in a couple of days on the koshas or sheaths, the seven layers from, between consciousness becoming into physical matter. And so there are these kinds of seven, people call it planes or dimensions. But essentially, there are layers of expression that are progressively more dense, more material. Yeah, like, so you go through, there’s the bliss body and the intellect/ intuition level and the mental body, they call it, and the emotional body and then the physical body, and it’s kind of, and they have various characteristics, and so on like that, that’s a whole other conversation. But there are essentially these layers of increasing densification. And there is life. The world is full of life on all those levels. There are all kinds of types of beings with different functions and so on.
Rick Archer: And so most people’s perception is limited to a certain strata or certain, certain portion of that full strata. And other people have a broader range of perspective. And they see the subtler beings as routinely as other people see birds and?
David Buckland: There are people I know who routinely work with subtle beings for humans, for example, or for getting certain things done in the world. A friend of mine’s working on creating peace in Washington DC, using subtle beings.
Rick Archer: (joking) And then, of course, there’s, Go ahead, continue.
David Buckland: Yeah, well, that’s, that’s basically, there’s like,
Rick Archer: These beings, as I understand it, and I’m just sort of giving you seed thoughts to elaborate on, have kind of a hierarchical arrangement. Or perhaps you could say concentric circles of influence, where some are smallest spheres of influence, others are larger, incorporating those smaller spheres, and on and on out just where we have, like, you know, planets, solar system, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and so on.
David Buckland: Yeah, they work in hierarchies. Most Light Beings have defined roles. They’re able to easily fulfill their desires, enjoy, you know, enjoy their being, they’re doing, it’s quite a different.. Where here as humans, we have this ability to experience choice and free will. It’s, it’s very, it’s kind of a perspective, because it’s free will and determinism are kind of really two sides of one coin. But again, that’s a whole other topic. But we get to have this experience of choice and free will and get to choose to work in harmony with life. And or not, we’re not talking about that. Yeah. So. So it’s quite a different experience than they have.
Rick Archer: And how do you know all this? Have you experienced these beings yourself? Or is it just like reading books?
David Buckland: Yeah, I, no, a lot of that stuff isn’t in books that I’ve seen. Now, I’ve been experiencing this since my late teens. Wasn’t something I was looking for, and was like, I don’t know about that. But, you know, it’s progressed since then. And I don’t spend a lot of time with that stuff. But it’s just, it’s just there.
Rick Archer: Yeah, I suppose the reason we’re talking about it is it’s, I don’t know, I think that anyone who’s interested in spirituality, as part of that, perhaps might want to have an understanding of how creation actually works. Exactly. It can be handy.
David Buckland: Yeah. And there’s once we know how creation works, then we’re much more readily able to work with it and yeah, and do things that perhaps we, science hasn’t discovered yet.
Rick Archer: Also, I mean, I’ve seen people who are into spirituality for you know, have had significant awakenings even whose understanding, in my opinion, is somewhat limited or restricted, for instance, they might glom on to the notion that ultimately there is no self. And then they might deduce from that, that since there is no personal self, there couldn’t possibly be anything after the body dies, it couldn’t, because that would imply some kind of self that would continue. Couldn’t be reincarnation,
David Buckland: Well, you can think of it, think of those layers, you know, we have this physical body and that and essentially what happens when we die is we drop the lower parts, the lower stuff, but we just move up basically,
Rick Archer: Right, the higher stuff just keeps on keeps on going.
David Buckland: Yeah.
Rick Archer: Okay. So that was meant to be some unpacking, I don’t want to throw you off track
David Buckland: Where we’re supposed to go just do a brief thing. But yeah, right. It’s, some context is good. So and also, in the unity stage, there’s a essentially a process of experiencing just by living life, you experienced something, and oh, that is the self that is myself. And that is myself, and that is myself. And it kind of progresses through all the layers of experience and into memory, and past and future and all this stuff. And so, one of the little things in that is that because everything comes out of the consciousness, and you are that you’re able to have the experience of just about anything. So, for example, you can see what it is to be a tree, or cat, or you can kind of tune in to the life of a tree to such an extent that you notice like, Yeah, from a broader perspective, in unity, you recognize that consciousness is aware of itself globally, and at every point. And the value that’s experiencing through this body is one of those points. And it’s a simple matter of moving in consciousness to experience this from a different point. However, that’s is
Rick Archer: still embodied in this body,
David Buckland: Yeah this is kind of like the default. And yeah, it always comes back here. But you know, put your attention on it. Now, there is a caveat in that, because you’re experiencing it from how your consciousness is not, not from how theirs is. So there, they have filters that you’ll recognize, but, but if there, if the cat is isn’t awake, then the cat, you’re not going to be, you’ll experience the cats experience to a degree but not exactly, yeah. So you get flavors are pretty good. So you get a sense of what it is to be these various things. So why would you want to do that? Like from like, well, I’ll just go through, like Curiosity. Yeah. So I did a little, like, why would you want to watch a movie or something? So it’s interesting to find out what it is to be different things. But yeah, it’s not. It’s something I just did with a little bit of curiosity. And okay, so in the last interview, we talk a little bit about Brahman, and essentially, Brahman is beyond consciousness, beyond that process of experience. So it’s beyond even the process experience and the devata value, and all that kind of stuff, it’s simply Brahman. And Brahman can’t be experienced, because it’s beyond consciousness. And so you, you know it by being it. Brahman knows itself. And Brahman, in a sense, is about being the devourer, because you have the experience, and, it’s kind of like in unity, you recognize, oh, that’s consciousness, that’s consciousness. But in this case, it’s more, it just absorbs everything.
Rick Archer: Let me ask you a question about Brahman. A lot of times people talk, they say, okay, consciousness is the fundamental reality of the universe, everything is consciousness interacting with itself, and so on and so forth. It’s the ultimate constituent,
David Buckland: Right? That’s true in self-realization and unity. So it’s not ultimately true as far as the ultimate. Yeah, but what is ultimate? Big enchilada, reality of the universe. Yeah, there’s the, there’s the kala model, for example, that rates levels of development. And here they have 16 kalas. Krishna is given as an example of 16. Humans can make something like eight or nine, one through eight, or something like fourth or eighth or something. Yeah. So we’re essentially somewhere between animals and high beings, and about where we can get about halfway. So ultimate reality, you know, I don’t know if that’s even possible. Yeah.
Rick Archer: But I mean, it’s well, but that’s slightly a different point. Because reality should be reality, irrespective of who experiences it. It’s reality is not sort of beholden to us. Right. To understand it in order for it to be what it is, right?
David Buckland: Well, I’ll get to that more shortly. That’s one of the things that what’s (I’m) experiencing now is that there’s a value that this physiology isn’t capable of knowing at all. It’s just beyond, and I’ll get to that in a sec. But, but it’s Yeah. So, in God-consciousness is essentially a refined form of cosmic consciousness or self-realization. Then there’s a refined form of unity. And that’s where you get into this when I was talking about consciousness being aware of itself globally and at every point. And that ability, you know, to see this, those dynamics to perceive those dynamics. That’s a part of the refined aspect. And ultimately, at the top of the unity stage is what’s commonly called God-realization. At the top of unity? Yeah. And that’s what basically it’s when we ultimately unite with the divine.
Rick Archer: Okay, so you’re distinguishing God-consciousness from God-realization?
David Buckland: Yes. Realization in the sense, in other terminology, like self-realization is when we realize we are the self, or become the self, or however you want to word that.
Rick Archer: So God-realization is when we realize we are God.
David Buckland: Yeah. But not just know that I’m God, but we become God. Because before that we can…
Rick Archer: We become something we actually weren’t already. Well, we were but… we finally get to know who we actually always have been.
David Buckland: Yeah, well, yes, it is that, but before that, there can be the experience that oh, I’m God, also, you know, even in God-consciousness, there can be a quality of that. I remember a friend joking about this, he was having that experience. And he’s I’m God, you’re not. I’m way ahead of you. (laughs) But with god realization, there’s a becoming and that can, was here and a few other people I know, that can be the doorway into Brahman, because once you become God, you’re, you step out of consciousness. And it’s kind of like consciousness is aware of itself globally, and at every point, there’s nothing more to be aware of, of itself. And then it turns and looks beyond itself. Because it’s always been looking in on itself up until that point, and then it can look beyond itself, and then it recognizes Brahman. Now Brahman, can be said to be conscious, but not consciousness, because it’s not flowing, and moving. It’s just, so it knows itself. Yeah, I mean, what do you say about it. Words like nothing are often used. Emptiness, void, those kinds of words don’t really quite work. Because that’s kind of a description of the space of open consciousness, as a quality in, when you’re looking at consciousness in a large way, sometimes as described as a void or an emptiness, because it’s just being open space.
Rick Archer: Let me ask you this. And while I do, you can re-pin your microphone, it just fell down. And that is, you’re using a lot of terminology, you know, witnessing, God-consciousness, unity, Brahman. (And do this so the mic itself is not tucked on your shirt. On the side? Yeah, do it on the other side.) And so my question is, to what extent can you make this sort of more vividly clear for people like what it’s actually like to experience this that or the other thing rather than just throwing terms at them? I realize that’s a tall order. Okay. I mean, we had a whole conversation previously about
David Buckland: what it’s like to experience Brahman, well, it’s you’re not experiencing anything. But it’s interesting because you’re also still, I can recall when that when the shift was going on the, it’s like, I’m looking at things. And I know like the world from that perspective, nothing has ever been created, and, or ever will be it’s, it’s the uncreated. And yet, there it is, right in front of my, you know, and it changes because it’s, because before that you’re experiencing the world from a perspective of consciousness. Now you’re experiencing the world from the perspective of Brahman. And it’s kind of it’s, and it’s not like the world is an illusion. Because it’s, it’s an expression of consciousness, and consciousness isn’t an illusion. It’s, the illusion part is, when you don’t recognize the source. When you’re just seeing the surface appearance. You have it seen as illusion. So people talk about the world is an illusion. But what it is, is the surface value of that scene is illusion. When you go more deeply, you see that it’s, it’s an illusion, in the sense of the surface value, but when you see it source, that’s not an illusion. That’s part of the dynamics. Okay, we’re kind of jumping around here.
Rick Archer: Yeah, I hope I’m not throwing you off the track. But I’m just trying to get you to clarify these terms as we go along. And so when you say that it’s an illusion, because you’re not perceiving the source, would another way of saying that be to say that it deserves the term illusion because you’re just so under-appreciating it, it’s like you’re getting just a faint smudge of what it really is.
David Buckland: Right. Right. Exactly and when you see it as the play of the divine or however you might frame that, then you recognize that it’s not an illusion in the bigger picture. It’s just an illusion when we see it only on the surface. When we see the deeper dynamics, then we recognize that it’s not, it’s an appearance, but it’s not exactly an illusion. It’s an appearance of the divine play, and which is not a folly or mirage.
Rick Archer: Now, would it be fair to say that it’s an illusion, in the sense that, I mean what you said a minute ago in Brahman, you get the experience that nothing ever happened, nothing ever manifested.
David Buckland: Right. But it’s, but then it’s not an illusion. It’s like, well, the way I described it to Lorn, which he concurred with at the time was that it’s like, the divine has this brief musing, this brief thought. And, and that’s it, nothing else happens. There’s just this kind of idea. And that’s the universe? But consciousness then takes that idea and turns it into a whole thing. But it’s not really there or it was never expressed or created. It was just essentially an expansion of a divine idea.
Rick Archer: But then consciousness runs with it and turns it into a whole thing.
David Buckland: Shiva essentially.
Rick Archer: Shiva being consciousness? Yeah. Okay, so the divine, so the divine as a brief idea, and then Shiva runs with it and goes wild and elaborates it.
David Buckland: Well, it’s kind of like an attempt to know the divine by reflecting that flow.
Rick Archer: Okay. And how does the divine distinguish from Shiva? What are the…
David Buckland: Well, that gets a little further along, but we’re getting there, and we’re getting there. So we’re kind of like, this is kind of supposed to be the preamble. We’re still in the preamble. Okay. Because this is the stuff we talked about to some degree.
Rick Archer: (mic keeps slipping down.)
David Buckland: Okay. Sorry.
Rick Archer: (Maybe tugging on the wire?)
David Buckland: (Oh, maybe that’s it.) Okay. So what’s unfolded since the last interview, is there’s another layer known as Parabrahman.
Rick Archer: para, means beyond
David Buckland: beyond, yeah, so beyond or greater than. And, essentially, it’s also known as pure divinity. Now, the best way to think about that is the analogy of pure consciousness. So we have the experience of being aware of our thoughts, being aware of our emotions. And then when we meditate, we settle down to deeper and deeper levels. And then we have experience of Samadhi, or pure consciousness, just, just awareness by itself, there’s no content. So pure divinity is kind of the equivalent of that, and there’s a certain kind of way, only, it’s what’s described as the source of the source. It’s the actual reality from that perspective. It’s, yeah, again, pure divinity can only be done by itself. The experience here was that there was a sense of it, of certainly more than Brahman. But no way of knowing it, until it essentially started to pour in. And so the experience was like, this white light pouring into the body and gradually filling it up from kind of pouring in to, down to the hip area, and then gradually filling it up.
Rick Archer: Somebody else told me that recently in an interview, I forget who it was, but he talked about just filling up with light as if a vessel was being filled.
David Buckland: Well, this was this was very specific though. And, and then when that had happened, then then it can be known. And it’s very difficult to put into words. For example, there’s kind of seven stages of it, which correlates to the seven chakras and seven koshas and you know, various things. Because, as above, so below.
Rick Archer: seven stages of this filling up with light thing?
David Buckland: yeah, and of the way pure divinity is. And yet there is no, I mean, it’s one, but it’s kind of seven, I don’t know, it’s hard to describe.
Rick Archer: But you find yourself going through seven transitions or something.
David Buckland: Within what network within what range? Within the entire like net of Indra kind of thing, where each point is infinitely correlated with every other point. Yeah. And the second, for example, was this profoundly networked, like the self-knowing that’s there was far beyond anything in consciousness, and even in global consciousness, it’s just so networked, like the Shaktis, it’s all infinitely correlated, yes a good way to put it and it’s just profoundly networked and self-knowing. Net of Indra is further along or is more expressed, that’s kind of more in the bliss body (jumping the gun). But it’s quite a bit, I guess you could say Indras Net is a reflection of that. Okay. Yeah. And it’s like Shakti is, you know because the experience of the Shaktis is moving through and motivating. What are the Shaktis? Well, they’re kind of like, threads or Sutras of divinity that move through the appearance of consciousness and drive it.
Rick Archer: And then like the devata we were talking about earlier or different?
David Buckland: The Devata are driven by that
Rick Archer: This is like an interrogation.
David Buckland: Yeah, it’s yeah. So for me, that kind of it filled up to about here and stages that correlated with the chakras. And then there was kind of a second thing where it, it was top-down and came down to the heart in the middle. Yeah, and there’s been a couple of similar things in consciousness. So it kind of seems to be a reflection of that. So. And it’s interesting, because one of the things that define the age we are in the large cycles of time, that determine group consciousness, whether we’re in a golden age, or Silver Age, and so on, like that, is the number of laws of nature that we were talking about before, who are awake. And by awake here, I mean, in terms of versus sleep. Because in darker times, a lot of the laws of nature essentially go dormant and slumber. And so, as we’re in arising age, laws of nature start waking up.
Rick Archer: Now, when we say laws of nature, are we equating that with devata?
David Buckland: Yes.
Rick Archer: So we’re saying that there are these subtle beings or impulses of intelligence who serve certain functions, and they have kind of gone dormant in a certain age, and they’re not maybe doing their jobs. They’re not doing anything. Yeah. And things could be a lot better if they were all on board.
David Buckland: Yeah, that factory is closed, kind of thing. And they work in teams as I mentioned. So what I’ve been observing over the last four or five years, is new laws of nature waking up, everywhere. Yeah, yeah. Well, there are fundamental, so it’s kind of effectively everywhere. They’re fundamental things. And then once they’re awake and functioning, then they integrate with other existing awake laws and create new synthesis and stuff. Yeah. And so there’s a potential for new laws to be discovered, for, by humans, Yeah. And for Laws of Nature that were that we would define, in science, to change, or to evolve or shift in certain ways. To actually function differently? To function a little differently or to, to gain new features. That kind of thing. I’m not aware of that, particularly. But I am noticing these laws of nature wake up. Now the reason I mention this… Go ahead. Okay, well, the reason I mentioned this, there’s a new thing that’s happening now, that’s this is quite recent. Because, because the physiology now is embodying divinity, the Devas that function, okay, just a sec. I’ve got to back up so slightly, okay. There’s like, multiple layers to the body like I mentioned about the koshas. But there are also kind of dominant layers. There’s kind of like, divine body, although it’s not really the body, there’s the cosmic body, which functions inside creation, outside, outside our universe, it’s kind of more universal. And then, so it’s before the bliss body. And, and then there’s the kind of layers down to the devata body and into our individual forms. And so one of the things that happen through the Refined stages, is a shifting up in those layers. So in the later part of unity, you become aware, you become the cosmic body, you’re basically you, you, you’re functioning kind of in the universal body as well. So you’re purifying not only in your own physiology, you’re purifying in the collective. It’s kind of like a collective or shared body.
Rick Archer: You’re helping the collective purify. Yeah. By purifying your aspect or your experience of
David Buckland: Yeah and wake up. Yeah. And so there’s a process where, though, for a while, for example, you know, I would kind of, you know, I, there’s a blog post where I talk about this where I’m walking down the road, I’m getting some groceries or whatever. And simultaneously, the cosmic body going around and purifying things and…
Rick Archer: You’re aware of yourself doing that as the cosmic body.
David Buckland: Yeah. And then later on, it kind of shifted, and they became one thing. So there’s the local, and there’s the cosmic, but they’re not, they’re not two different things. It’s just one thing. But they function on multiple levels. Yeah, that makes sense. So, so now it’s kind of, now it’s kind of like It’s a divine thing going on.
Rick Archer: Because we know we’re always using the term multi-dimensional, we’re multi-dimensional beings and all that. So you’re just kind of elaborating on our multi-dimensionality. Yeah. What that really means.
David Buckland: Yeah. And so because there’s this divinity being embodied here, now, what’s, the new thing that’s happening is that the Devas that are part of the functionality of this body and the, and the cosmic body and that are waking up in the Enlightenment sense.
Rick Archer: Yeah, they themselves are becoming enlightened…
David Buckland: Yeah, because they’re functioning in, inside divinity. So they know themselves as expressions of divinity, but they don’t, they’re not, they’re not awake to their reality as divinity. Okay, and so it’s kind of like a different form of Enlightenment they have. Yeah. But what I’m seeing happening is they’re waking up, it’s kind of like, they’re, they have a universal nature. And then they express up into various forms. So they have these kind of like aspects or like fingers. I don’t know how you, or hairs, whatever, and they’re kind of like, there’s, that aspect is, is active in this body, that body, that body, and so on. And so what’s happening is they’re in this and so they’re waking up to it in that aspect that’s here. And then that shifts back into their universal nature. And it kind of it falls back in. So there’s a larger scale awakening that takes place, and then that moves forward into all the aspects. So what you’re saying… It’s another mechanic for global consciousness.
Rick Archer: Yeah. So you’re saying that there are Devatas that function within our bodies, as well as within the cosmic body. And these devatas I’m inferring are not exclusive to our body like you and I might have the same devata’s functioning in both of our bodies. We don’t have the David devatas and the Rick devatas, we have the same devatas functioning in everybody’s bodies.
David Buckland: Exactly. Yeah. There are some that are, that are Rick specific. And then there’s some that are progressively more universal, as you get more, as you go deeper in the koshas, you get progressively more universal.
Rick Archer: So the day devatas that function in everyone’s body, kind of like multitasking, universal, this is the chakra Devas. And so what, let’s try to put this in plain English. So there are certain beings, subtle beings, impulses of intelligence, whose role or function is to reside in some sense, within everyone’s body, perhaps at various chakras. And you’re saying that they are maybe those are the ones who were referring to are waking up in a new way, get kind of…
David Buckland: Well, they’re becoming enlightened in the deva way,
Rick Archer: they’re becoming enlightened as Devas, become, in a way that a deva would become enlightened. Yeah. And the significance of that is that if they are in everyone’s body, and they’re becoming enlightened by virtue of certain people getting enlightened, perhaps that’s the reason, and helping them to get enlightened, then they’re getting enlightened in, you know, everybody in Syria and, and everyplace.
David Buckland: Yeah, of course, there’s going to be a time process in here though, because if they’re awakening here like I say, it has to fall back into the universal nature and wake up in that bigger way. And then it can move forward into all the aspects. But it’s, but it’s, to me, it’s really interesting because it’s like a whole different level of, it’s not just a bunch of individual humans that are helping raise group consciousness, but it’s like, you know, all the levels kind of coming on board,
Rick Archer: it also puts more kind of richness into the explanation of collective consciousness, because usually, we think of collective consciousness as being like this homogenous amorphous field, right, like, and the field is somehow getting enlivened by people waking up in the world. And that Enlightenment is benefiting everyone, just as if the ground in a forest became more nutrient-rich, all the trees would benefit. But what you’re saying is this field is not just plain vanilla, amorphous homogenous consciousness or something. It’s actually lively with impulses of intelligence, which served functions within it. And those impulses of intelligence in this, that, and the other physiology are waking up and are better able to perform those functions.
David Buckland: Yeah, when you first wake up, in self-realization, it’s an awakening to the silence, silence of consciousness. But the next step is for that silence to wake up to the liveliness of that dynamic, because that’s because it’s both silent and alive, right. And so, actually, if you look at the actual becoming of consciousness itself, and again, this is from a Brahman perspective, there are these aspects of alertness, liveliness, and intelligence in Brahman, that, and essentially the liveliness stirs alertness, and it becomes conscious. And then that consciousness begins to move flows, and curves back on itself. And becomes intelligent? Yeah. And because it’s not just Yeah. (laughing) It’s. So it’s not just, it’s not just, it’s the alertness isn’t just, I mean, the liveliness isn’t just agitating the alertness. There’s some intelligence behind that. Yeah. And so it flows, curves back on itself, become self-aware and the dynamics of consciousness begin. And it kind of curves in on itself again and again and
Rick Archer: agitation implies chaos and where you’re put when you’re…
David Buckland: There’s a liveliness. And it implies coherence. And it has a direction. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Interesting. Yeah, and another interesting dynamic, that’s, that’s interesting to share that’s become, that’s been developing a little while, there’s the bliss body, and the next one up is known as the intellect body. But it’s also the level of very fine feelings and intuition, that kind of thing. It’s a level where the fine vibrations of, on the bliss body, you know, the primordial sound, or whatever, starts to differentiate. And it takes on structure, what people would call sacred geometry, remember that there’s kind of relationships and dynamics going on, creates a structure, and then in the mental body, gains a field and that, that goes forward into forms and so on. But the interesting thing, you know, I was looking at this juncture, why is geometry come out of space, there’s kind of the dynamics of, because consciousness comes back in itself, it creates a subtle space, because it’s, you know, you’ve got consciousness, subject, and object, (gestures) and there’s a space in here. And, and that, it takes the next collapse and becomes a little more dense becomes the actual element of space. But why would that space, then gain geometry. And that turns out to be because the devata work in teams, as I mentioned, and it’s kind of when there’s a space formed, the surface of the space has this dynamic of devata. And they, they talk to, talk to, sing to each other, and say, and they may create specific, we relate to Sanskrit as the subtle sounds of the devas, but they don’t, they don’t use words in a sequence, the way we would speak Sanskrit verses, they do harmonies and they speak together, simultaneously, and it creates these reverberations. And it creates relationship between them. So you get this subtle structure, and you get directed, directed vibration, and then that, that structures the fields which structure form.
Rick Archer: So I was hanging on for dear life to understand that. So I think what you’re saying, I often do this in interviews, I try to restate what the person said to see if I got it right, you know. So I think what you’re saying is that you talking about a universal process through which manifest, manifestation takes place. Right. And
David Buckland: I’m talking about why it’s a geometry, though, as opposed to just vibrations in a field. Well, vibration can… What gives it structure?
Rick Archer: Yeah, what gives it structure? I mean, we’re talking about this a little bit in my interview with Sean Webb, but you know, why should all this structure and orderliness come out of chaos come out of, you know, homogenous hydrogen? And why? Why did stars form? Why did stars explode, forming heavy elements? Why did heavy elements accrete into planets into bodies and why did those bodies evolve? Why is all this evolutionary trajectory taking place?
David Buckland: Exactly. Because of the basic laws of physics. Like, the second law of thermodynamics. Second law, I would say break it all down to. Yeah, it was all gonna turn into entropy.
Rick Archer: And so where did all the negative entropy come from? And I think you’re saying it’s coming from these.
David Buckland: Orderliness. Because not only, because not only is the universe, did the universe, form planets, and stars and that kind of thing, which wouldn’t happen if it was pure entropy. But it’s evolved into supporting life forms, and all this kind of, however, you want to see the history of the universe, and
Rick Archer: Which is really hard to explain, if you think that the universe is just sort of a random, you know, unintelligent, mechanistic thing. Exactly. Doesn’t make any sense.
David Buckland: There has to be, not only, just keep it going without falling apart. There has to be a constant input of order, of order, and to make it grow and evolve, you have to have even more.,
Rick Archer: Yeah. I imagine there’d be some scientists talking about that at the SAND conference, but I don’t know how they explain it and you’re explaining it in terms of devata, sort of As an expression of that. Yeah. So it’s almost like the Devatas if we’re still using the right term, by using that one, their role is to, they’re almost like Santa’s elves or something, (laughs) they’re, they’re kind of taking, you know, the field of pure potentiality. And, and molding it or shaping it into orderly structures, and those orderly structures become more and more elaborate and, and complex as,
David Buckland: and some of them just come up through to the level of a thought, and we have a thought. And some of them come up to the level of emotion and, you know, whatever, or an energy phenomenon or electricity. And then some of them come all the way into a physical form.
Rick Archer: Right. And the physical forms are incredibly complex. I mean, look at a single cell, it’s mind-bogglingly complex. And we have, you know, trillions of them in our bodies. And they’re all coordinating with each other.
David Buckland: Yeah, you know, I’ve been reading a little bit about DNA and stuff. And it’s fascinating because now they’re mitochondrial DNA, they can, they can trace back the mother’s line. And if you’re a male, the Y DNA can trace back the father’s line for, you know, 100,000 years. Amazing.
Rick Archer: Yeah. Solves crimes. Sometimes. Yeah. But I mean, that’s, I don’t know, maybe we’ll see how much we can squeeze out of this one point. But I’m always awestruck by the beauty and complexity of creation. And I’m always pondering, you know, what might be the mechanics through which this takes place? And it’s one thing to just sort of, say, Okay, God did it or, you know, it’s all divine intelligence. But it’s really interesting to go into the fine mechanics of how God does it. Santa’s helpers?
David Buckland: And I, I have a great deal of gratitude for getting these insights. Because It’s not, because this isn’t coming from me doing something or accomplishing anything. It’s just essentially. I guess some kind of dharmic. Yeah. Your role to play. And I’m called to write about it. So yeah, I do.
Rick Archer: Yeah. Okay.
David Buckland: I did want to mention, rolling back slightly. When I was talking about these devata waking up, or the Devas in the body, of the chakra devas waking up. One of the things, the impetus of that was in the summer, Lorn and Lucia Hoff, you mentioned Lorn earlier, introduced what they refer to as the divine sutras. And it’s essentially two parts: one is samyama from the yoga, from Patañjali, yeah, but it’s when people are awake, they can, they can place, they can place, they can use samyama much more direct, much more precisely. It’s not just, you know, dropping it into the, throwing it into the lake, you can actually put into a precise point. And so an upgrade to the samyama technique so that you’re able to place it, and then the divine sutras, which,
Rick Archer: Okay, wait, hang on. Okay. So unless somebody has done the TM Siddhi program, they probably don’t know what the samyama technique is. Okay, so you better describe that a little bit.
David Buckland: Okay, let’s see, remember, essentially samyama, the yoga sutra. There are gazillions of versions of that out there. It’s essentially a technique that combines Samadhi, pure consciousness. Yeah. And so essentially, it’s when you when you’re establishing enough from your practice to be able to stay in Samadhi without being bumped, you know, be able to have a thought while you’re in Samadhi. So that, then you’re able to add, have an intention. So this specific intention or a specific focus, and, and then the third book in the yoga sutra, then describes a whole series of different things you can do with that. Knowledge of past lives, invisibility, flying through the air, all that kind of thing.
Rick Archer: none of what you’ve seen anybody accomplish yet. (laughs)
David Buckland: Anyways, Know their path lives,
Rick Archer: but some of them are subjective when they say they’ve accomplished. (laughs)
David Buckland: Okay. So this is applying, applying that technique, but to more precision or something to a quality of the Divine Mother. Of the pure divinity and, and so I started doing that this summer. And that’s really kicked it up. Essentially, it kind of enlivens the divinity in a way that, it was, it was becoming embodied here. But that kind of enlivened it a lot more and so that’s, that’s helping to, that seems to be the cause of them starting to wake up
Rick Archer: so Lorn & Lucia are teaching them.
David Buckland: Yeah, they’ve started to teach them. Another friend of mine has had a similar experience, a different kind of Deva woke up, different type, but similar kind of thing.
Rick Archer: Is there actual, do you actually communicate with these Devas? Like, you know, they say, Hey David, how’s it going? And you say,
David Buckland: Well, not in that kind of level. But there’s
Rick Archer: I’m being facetious
David Buckland: well, it’s kind of interesting because right now before there was the experience of being awake and having, you know, various, if I put my attention on it, most of the time, I’m just doing usual stuff and not paying attention to this stuff. But I put my attention on Oh, yeah, there’s this, these, these devata interacting this way over here. And this is going on and, and oh I ate too much or, you know, whatever else is going on. And but there are multiple points of awakeness here. So there isn’t just kind of the default experience of being awake. Now, there are this other points that are experiencing being awake in different ways.
Rick Archer: Those Devatas. Yeah. So just to use a metaphor, maybe. So just as you know, we’re a conglomeration of trillions of cells, many of which aren’t human, all the bio, microbiome, and all that stuff. You’re saying that part of our makeup is these devatas or impulses of intelligence, which have a life just as a cell has a life of its own. And these things have lives of their own. And they’re part and parcel of our makeup, and they might not be exclusively within, within us, we’ve already established that they might have a broad, broader life. Just as you know, molecules we breathe and breathe and
David Buckland: a hierarchy there too. Because there are the ones that are more universal. And then there’s the kind of the Yeah, progressively more expressed. And then they’re more and more local.
Rick Archer: maybe some are with the
David Buckland: And yeah, yeah, but the big ones are universal, right.
Rick Archer: And so where was I going with this? So they’re waking up. And what were you just saying that made me go off on this tangent? (laughs) Anyway, well, let’s just keep going. And it’ll come to me. Okay. But there was something I was getting that there was a subtle kind of question here. About, maybe it was about communicating with them. Oh, yeah.
David Buckland: Yeah. So there’s,
Rick Archer: Something in the Gita about support the gods and they support you. I wonder if that’s what this
David Buckland: different level but yes, it’s both ways. But there’s, you know, the various dynamics going on, but like, I can put my attention on the territory of one of the Devas and it amps that way up. amps it up. Yeah, amps it way up. So they’re kind of like they’re alive and that. They’re interacting with each other as well. The awake ones are, are creating synthesis, especially, especially the throat and heart ones right now.
Rick Archer: Did they see you as a kind of a project? Like, Hey, boys, we got a live one here. Let’s really kind of work on this guy. And
David Buckland: well, probably, but I don’t I’m not aware of that part. But I’m pretty sure that I mean, I do feel like I’m in some kind of training program. It’s just kind of because it’s sort of like Okay, now we’re finished with this lesson. Now. It’s this one.
Rick Archer: Yeah. Well, we’re all inside of a training program, each in our own ways. Okay. So what have you gotten your notes there?
David Buckland: Okay. Let me just, some other points we talked about here. Yeah. So the other thing that I want to talk about was the book. Yeah, I think we touched on it briefly in the first interview, but. I don’t think it was written in the first interview. It was written but not finished. And it was basically, what it needed to wait for was the Parabrahman shift,
Rick Archer: and that tremendous introduction, you had to wait for that, brilliant piece of writing from Rick Archer (laughs)
David Buckland: And the, But yeah, basically, it’s a kind of a project that I’m, that was driven by the process. A lot of my life. There isn’t a person here managing my life in that kind of sense. It’s a, It’s managed by nature. And that’s certainly, you know, there are opinions and tastes and stuff like that. But, but there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of flow of nature through the life. And so a lot of its allowing life to unfold how it’s unfolding, which took a lot of practice, but still areas of life that could use some work. So writing the book was a good example, where, you know, I was trying to get it finished. I actually hope to have it finished before the first interview, but certainly didn’t. And, but it turned out that the Parabrahman stage needed unfold first so that I could actually talk about it in a semi-intelligent way. And, so, Yeah, so anyway, it finally happened. And so I got, I got finished and published. So the book is about the seven stages of Enlightenment. It’s mainly written for
Rick Archer: not seven states of consciousness, but seven stages of Enlightenment. Yeah, well, states of consciousness are not… Different. I mean, not like Maharshi, seven state model,
David Buckland: Those are included in it. But it kind of goes a little further from what he brought out back in the day. And the main motivator is because I, was because I write about this stuff online, I get a lot of contact from people who are having shifts they don’t understand, they don’t have the background. Or they’re, the tradition they’re in, the teachings they’ve heard, don’t cover the territory. Or the teaching said it’s supposed to happen this way and it’s helping this other way. And various kinds of things. So there’s, it’s written as a kind of an overview of the process, and some of their primary variations and what drives that. So that people, you know, to support people on their journey. I mean, it’s also it’s kind of like a map. And so definitely, reading this can create concepts. But the map is not the road. And that’s certainly a dynamic, but, you know, the mind has a certain nature. And if you don’t give it a good map, it’ll kind of make up its own. Yeah, which may not be helpful. And so that, you know, so for people who say, you know, not to be, they don’t, there are teachers I’ve met who don’t talk about the stages because it will create concepts, but the minds going to create concepts anyways, from my experience. And so it’s better to have good concepts, and then recognize that it’s a map to be dropped, because the reality is beyond the mind, beyond concepts. And so it’ll never, it’ll never be what…
Rick Archer: Yeah, I mean, if any teacher is sitting up in front of a roomful of people talking, he’s using concepts, yes, yes. Every single word that we speak is, is a concept that represents something
David Buckland: Right. Exactly. You can’t communicate without it. Because it because even words themselves are essentially idea forms that we have a shared idea about. But there can be variations, you know, like, I use the word awakening
Rick Archer: concepts shouldn’t have a bad reputation, they, as long as they’re substantiated by experience, I think that’s probably what those teachers were saying. They don’t want you getting all hung up on
David Buckland: but getting attached to those concepts, because we can attach those concepts that could actually be a barrier to the shift.
Rick Archer: Well, I see one thing I’ve seen over the years ever since I started doing BatGap was people who mistake the concept of non-duality for the actual living experience of it and assume that they have achieved sort of some non-dual state, whereas really, they’ve just gotten a little bit hypnotized by the concept.
David Buckland: And that’s actually one of the things I talked about in the book a little bit, because a lot of people talk about self-realization in terms of non-duality. Yeah, but in their original texts of Self Realization, is described as Dvaita, duality. Because there is the experience of being awake within and a separate, perhaps illusory, but not always, world. And so there are two things there. And you may write that off, oh, they’re the world’s an illusion. But it’s still separate. It’s not part of the, it’s not part of the whole part of the oneness. It’s not a non-dual stage. And it’s actually not until later in unity, where, where, you know, the one that’s has progressively expanded, and even more so in Brahman, where it’s an actual non-dual stage.
Rick Archer: Now, you sent me an email the other day, which I thought was fascinating. I think you sent it to both myself and Kristin Kirk, which talked about, and if this is too abrupt to segue for you, let me know I didn’t want to cut you off from something you’re gonna talk about, but it talked about how awakening or realization could have very different flavors or emphases depending upon which guna was predominant in the nervous system right? Yeah. (And tighten up your mic again because you keep talking about it there.) Yeah. Because you hear these people talk about you have Bernadette Roberts saying this and so and so saying that and, and there seems to be some fundamental disagreement among them. But when you look at it in the way you explained it there really isn’t it’s just that they have different glasses on according to their neurophysiological makeup.
David Buckland: Okay. So first thing is there’s this concept from Vedic philosophy of the Gunas, are essentially three fundamental, fundamental qualities of creation, maintenance, and destruction. And the interplay of those gunas is what leads to the various qualities of the world appearance. Now, we tend to have a dominant guna in our, in our function and we have a world of course, everyone has one or another dominant guna. Yeah. So we all have all of them. But they’ll tend to be a dominant one and for most people in the world, Tamas guna is dominant, which is essentially inertia, dullness. Yeah. And so the consciousness is not as clear. And so we experience the world as solid and real. Because it’s, there’s that quality of, of solidity, inertia, that’s dominant. When we engage in spiritual practices, various things can influence it, but that’s a big one, we shifted the rajas, fire, and transformation guna becomes more prominent. And that, this, comes from Shankara, by the way, this is something he brought out. When, when rajas becomes more dominant, then we come to see the world as illusory. The deeper reality becomes, gets, Then you say that was tamas? No, no, no, the world is real. Oh, it seems real with tamas. With rajas, it becomes seen as illusory, which is a sign of spiritual progress. But it’s interesting, it’s quite common to have it with self-realization, because of spiritual practice, and so on. But the two aren’t tied together. The guna evolves distinctly from the stages in consciousness. So people can wake up and still experience the world as real, solid. They can wake up and experience the world as illusory. Or the third, the third type, when sattwa becomes dominant, with clarity or purity, there isn’t really a good English word for it, then the person experiences the world as a divine play. Lila. Yeah. And so that can also be dominant, when somebody is self-realized, if there’s a, if sattwa is dominant, then they’re much more likely to have a God-consciousness phase. Whereas if it’s not, then some people skip it, they go from self-realization to unity, and the God-realization or God-consciousness stage tends to happen much later.
Rick Archer: So being unity increases sattwa. And then with the increase of sattwa, they eventually have that phase
David Buckland: yeah, a friend of mine in Brahman is having their God-consciousness, the shift into their God-consciousness phase.
Rick Archer: There’s God con… Well, I don’t want to, this is, we should keep focusing on this. But this if you’re having a god consciousness phase, as you put it, does that mean exactly? Are you experiencing celestial perception? Are you experiencing angels and subtle beings or what?
David Buckland: Yeah, essentially it’s a combination. It’s kind of like, Shiva, it’s kind of like the masculine, consciousness side of the equation. Shakti is the feminine side. And so that’s the awakening heart, and the refinement of perception. So it’s kind of becoming aware of all those layers between the physical surface, the surface levels, and consciousness and there’s all that stuff in between the bliss body and the field of creation, and so on like that, whether these dynamics are taking place. And once you become aware of those, then it’s kind of the dynamics your, your experience of the world is quite different. Because how you see it becoming is different, what you see underlying it is different.
Rick Archer: So you can be in unity, you can experience the world in terms of the Self, and yet not have experienced all of its subtle strata. Exactly. It’s funny because it seems like you would have to have
David Buckland: There are also people who have that refined perception who aren’t awake yet,
Rick Archer: who haven’t, who haven’t even realized the Self, yeah.
David Buckland: Yeah, they’ve recognized consciousness, but they recognized the flow of divinity and subtle beings, awakening heart, although, as Maharshi said, you can’t really know God, per se until, until you’re awake. Foundation, until you know who you are. Yeah. Because until there’s that stable platform of consciousness, awake consciousness within, then it’s hard for the really refined perception to, to be stable, because it’s so fine, that when you know the mind kicking things around us, it’s really hard for that to unfold.
Rick Archer: Yeah, he also said that there would be a certain immensity of the experience of God which would be overwhelming, he said, God couldn’t even telephone from a distance, you’d be crushed.
David Buckland: Well, that’s the thing with pure divinity, it’s like that so there’s this embodiment of this stuff, but just putting the attention on pure divinity and it’s like, the physiology isn’t capable of… it sustains to the degree I can, but it’s quite clear that there’s a lot more potential. I’m sure some of that will unfold, but, but we’ll see.
Rick Archer: Yeah, you’re talking about the college earlier and I interviewed this guy who had had a background with the Theosophical Society and he was saying that in their worldview, once you’ve reached the pinnacle of human evolution, whatever that might be. And then you drop the body, then you’re kind of back in kindergarten at the next sort of range of (it wouldn’t surprise me) potential progression.
David Buckland: Every time I’ve had a stage shift in, like from self-realization, or into unity, whatever it feels like you’re back in kindergarten again, because now in the platform, you’re experiencing reality from has changed. And as you go further along, the whole environment of your reality has changed as well go together, when you later change, it changes shifts,
Rick Archer: and some people might find that discouraging or disheartening. They might think, Oh, God, I’m always going to be chasing the dangling carrot.
David Buckland: Oh, no, no, it’s not it’s like an adventure. It’s really cool.
Rick Archer: But yeah, I mean, I find it more inspiring than anything. Because it’s like, oh, boy, you know, the wonders never cease.
David Buckland: Even within the Unity stages, the stage whether there’s a series of sub-stages, as you progressively become recognize yourself as more and more and more. And, and so there’s kind of like these progressive shifts, and they’re inclusive of the layers of experience, but also all those subtler layers. And like I say, past and future and memory, and all this kind of thing. And so it there’s this progressive series of shifts, it makes you very good at letting go and stuff because it’s right, because your keeps shifting, keeps changing.
Rick Archer: Yeah. So you’re saying a minute ago that, you know, I guess this is attributed to Shankara that according to the predominance of the guna Yeah, you’re gonna your awakening is going to have a different flavor. And your orientation to the world, it’s going to be different either, You know, what is it, real or illusory or divine.
David Buckland: Yeah. And it’s interesting, too, because maya, if you look at the roots of maya, it means to build, it doesn’t actually mean illusion. It means the creation.
Rick Archer: I remember him being defined as you know, that which is not. Yeah, that not which.
David Buckland: Oh, interesting. Yeah.
Rick Archer: But anyway, maybe it can mean both things. Exactly. But another thing I’m wondering along this very same line, is, you know, some people make a big emphasis on there being no remains of any sense of a personal self anymore. They seem they seem to say they’ve lost the sense of a personal self. In interacting with them. They very much seem to have one. But they say, well, that’s just your perception. You’re not seeing it through my eyes. They ignored my there’s, yeah, there’s no, there’s no one here. And I wonder if that’s a guna thing too. That would be
David Buckland: Yeah, actually, that’s actually a good point. I hadn’t thought of it that way. Yeah, that might relate to that.
Rick Archer: (Such as your glasses. You haven’t pulled the mic off yet.)
David Buckland: It could be. Yeah. What’s your… Lorn talks about that sometimes, too. But the orientation I have is that I experience there being a person. It’s not the center of things.
Rick Archer: If I stick you with a pin. I’m not sticking the couch. I’m sticking you.
David Buckland: Yeah, I’ll go ouch. Yeah, exactly. There are certainly opinions here and tastes. I like this, I don’t like that.
Rick Archer: And is it a person who has those, a flavor
David Buckland: but it’s like, it’s not a, it’s not. It’s like before it was what I was, yeah. And now it’s kind of like this. Well, it’s like the idea of the Leisha avidya, there’s like the, you handle some butter. And then there’s the grease, a bit of grease on the palm. It’s kind of like that. There’s this, this, there’s this sheen on the surface that has, there’s laws of nature that that are functioning a certain way here that have, you know, the ability to write, but not so much to pole vault. Yeah. And so, you know, there’s the skill areas, and, you know, and so on, and all those make up a personality. Yeah, and there are certain ways, but there is this quality of Leisha avidya that’s there that that can be because you can’t really function in the world unless you, you know that there’s a because, you know, you know, you don’t just walk out into traffic and you can drive your car down the road, there has to be some quality that’s looking out through this person and functioning that way.
Rick Archer: It seems that way, to me, I can’t argue too far with people who say that there’s no sense of a person because you know, you can’t really deny anyone’s experience. But I’ve never understood it.
David Buckland: Yeah, no. An example for me. When I first woke up, had the self-realization shift. There was a sense of ego death.
Rick Archer: Yeah.
David Buckland: Yeah, it felt like it. But what I realized after…
Rick Archer: someone said, Hey, David, you turned your head
David Buckland: I don’t remember, but what I realized after a short while was what had actually ended was the attachment to the ego. But the ego as a function to recognize this person versus that person, like I said, it’s not the couch, it’s my arm, whatever. That, that function, the ahamkara function is still there. Yeah. And but it’s like my little finger, it’s not central, it’s just there. Similar thing actually happened with the Unity shift, there was a collapse of what I called the core identity. Various teachers talk about it in different ways. But there’s kind of like the identity has kind of a three-level structure, the concepts of a me which falls away with self-realization, the energetic drivers of that. And that falls away in the kind of the GC phase, assuming people are cleaning. (God-consciousness phase) Yeah, in assuming people cleaning things up. And then in the gut, it’s kind of like a core grip, a core identity. That’s not usually conscious until prior to unity, although Susanne Marie, for example, had it with her Brahman shift. So it kind of varies. And I’ve since met people who haven’t had it yet in Brahman. So it’s very, it’s a somewhat different process. It’s like an embodiment thing. But anyways, with the loss of that core identity, there was a loss of any sense of personal me. Yeah. And so any personal pronouns, David, was meaningless. That lasted about two weeks. And then it kind of integrated. So if I bought into that, I may have, you know, taken my spiritual name or something, and, and, you know, stop using personal pronouns. You know, Friends kind of joked about my, my person formerly known as David.
Rick Archer: But it’s almost like, David was still there. He was the one analogy I thought of is like you no longer part of the awareness, though. Yeah. But like, if you’re in a dark room, a candle can be really bright. And if you take it out in the sunshine, you can barely see the flame because there’s so much sunlight, there could have been this infusion of light, metaphorically speaking, which made it really hard to locate the individual.
David Buckland: but you can figure out how to go to the bathroom and how to brush your teeth, or Yeah, but it was also like, when I woke up, there was a, there was an ego-death thing there was when I next sat down to meditate, I couldn’t figure out how to meditate as the person that meditated was no longer there. But then after a couple of days, so it integrated. the automatic functions still work. But..
Rick Archer: Maybe the thing was you’re sort of already in the transcendent. So how could you? Why How would you meditate?
David Buckland: Well, there was that too. we already were, yeah, that it did definitely change. It was sort of like dropping the relative instead of going somewhere. Yeah. But, but yeah, it was a really curious experience. There was some sense of a person way, way off in space somewhere, but it was, you know, how did I meditate with that? But like I say, it integrated after a few days, and it was then I was able to resume practice. So it’s a Yeah, it was an interesting… So I can see why people talk about that. And because I can see the experience, but for me in every case, the distinctions integrated. And then there was it’s like, the priority shifted, what was at the center shifted, but the basics were reintegrated.
Rick Archer: Have you seen cases where people get to a certain stage? And then they kind of fixate on it? And assume that they’re done? And don’t move on?
David Buckland: Yeah, yeah, that’s actually I was writing, corresponding with somebody just last week, and, and they were, they had reached the third time where they felt done. Yeah. And so yeah, they’re very much people can feel quite done after you wake up and even start to teach. I mean, I had this sense of wanting to go out and tell the world. I’ve had people tell me, I’ve interviewed, you know, but I knew better than to do that. But, but yeah, but I reached. I don’t know how many times but there’s there can be this sense of being complete and done at certain points. But then after a little bit of time, then some new vistas open up. It’s kind of like when you first wake up, there is a sense of, you know, liberation, and I’m free, that process is done. There’s no more to do, I’m not the doer, but then maybe you start to think, Okay, what is doing, and it’s still happening. How do I tune myself to this doing so that I don’t have, you know, events that show up in my life that are caused by friction and discord? How do I clear that up? And then when you get to know the process better, then you can move more into the flow of it.
Rick Archer: Yeah, maybe it’s natural that there’d be resting places after significant shifts where you could just sort of enjoy that for a bit without worrying about what, what more there might be. But then the process of evolution naturally, you know, gives you a prod.
David Buckland: Yeah, well, one of the big things that tend to happen is you create this big open space with a shift, and then anything that’s unresolved, starts to bubble, starts to bubble up into that space to be resolved. Yeah. Yeah, I’ve had I know, a couple of people who had a really rough time, actually, after they woke up because there was stuff that I didn’t think would be possible to wake up with, still carrying that stuff, but and they did, and then it’s right in their face. You can’t sort of push it aside. It’s conscious, you’re conscious now. And so then they really had to face it. So yeah, so preparing the ground. That’s a really good idea.
Rick Archer: So in a way, you’re kind of a mapmaker, in terms of delineating all these stages, and fine gradations of stages and so on, it seems to be something you’re, you know, you tend to do and are well equipped to do you want to comment on that before I continue? Because there’s a question here
David Buckland: I just want to point out I didn’t make earlier. The third kind of audience for the book is people doing research. Because I see people are that are doing research on this stuff. And they don’t have the complete picture. Yeah, they don’t have the fundamentals. And so they’re kind of creating models based on people’s experiences or, or something else that’s not fundamental to the underlying process. For example, in the book, I outline, the five different ways people will experience awakening subjectively. Yeah, because of how they’re coming to it, it changes how they experience. Is it, is it an awakening from an ego into a no-self? Or is it an awakening from an ego into a cosmic self? Or does the ego seem to expand and become a cosmic self, and so on, and each of those variations, they can sound like they’re quite different. But it’s actually the same process being experienced somewhat differently subjectively, where there are other things, like I mentioned about the difference between emptiness and nothing. But in Brahman, they’re actually quite different, but are sometimes confused to be the same thing.
Rick Archer: Yeah. You know, William James wrote that book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, which I never read, but the title kind of, is interesting in this light, and I’m wondering if
David Buckland: the challenge with that kind of thing, though, is, is the person doesn’t know how to differentiate between someone who’s had a shift change and is experiencing from new reality, or has had a passing experience?
Rick Archer: Yeah, I think you’re parsing it much more subtly and comprehensively than he was able to do. Yeah, yeah. But the interesting thing here, and then one question I want to ask is, do you feel that we, as a species will ever reach a point, which we really understand, we have a very well-defined map of the territory of human experience, kind of like we have the periodic table of elements or, or, you know, detailed map of North America now which to, you know, satellite imagery, and everything is so precise as compared to what Lewis and Clark had.
David Buckland: But the challenge also, though, is the platform is evolving. Give you an example, the yoga sutra, we mentioned earlier in there, Patanjali describes waking up. But he doesn’t call it self-realization, or he defines it very differently. He talks about Kaivalya, singularity. And which doesn’t make a lot of sense until you roll back to that thing I talked about and further along in unity, where you can recognize that consciousness is aware of itself globally and at every point. So in a higher age, there’s that potentiality to know you’re a point. And for that point to wake up to its wholeness. So it’s the singularity. Whereas in the current time, that’s not how people experience waking up. So we can create these maps. But you know, the book, for example, isn’t, it’s taking these some of the ancient Vedic knowledge, but putting it up in modern language, and in the modern context, how people are experiencing it now. Yeah. As opposed to what Patanjali potentially described,
Rick Archer: but I guess the point I was getting at is, you know, what science wants to do is it wants to understand how the universe works. What’s really going on, and, and it’s obviously a work in progress. There’s every single field of science has plenty of ways to go, plenty of ways to go. And so with spirituality. Did anybody ever have it all figured out? And if not, will anybody
David Buckland: but the thing is, it’s not about a person figuring it all out. Yeah? Like the Vedas aren’t all known by one person. Right. There, it’s like a library,
Rick Archer: Nor is any scientific thing known by one person. It’s a collaborative effort.
David Buckland: Yeah, it’s a collaborative effort. It’s known by the group. Yeah. So. So do you think, okay, one of the experiences I have that might be filling this a little bit, the Vedas themselves are encoded with their essentially encoded experiences. Yeah. In, in the fundamentals of consciousness. But they’re encoded with the person that’s going to experience it, cognize it. So they’re essentially there’s a specific person but is born and has the experience. And what that does is it awakens those laws of nature, that are associated with that. And, again, that they’re mentioned in that, you know, if you look at the Vedas, it talks about the rishi, the devata, and the chhandas values in the meter. And, and it’s, it’s kind of like, there’s this blueprint. And at a certain point in time, somebody comes forward, they have this experience, they awaken those principles in life, and the universe can evolve. So they’re kind of like the Veda is a description of those key signposts is the wrong word. But the key points in the process where the next stage can, then it’s time for the next stage to come along.
Rick Archer: So are you saying that, I think you’re sort of saying that the Vedas are they, they’re more fundamental than the universe itself, they’re this sort of ultimate template of creation. And that no one person can actually know the whole template. People can know the field from which, in which the template resides.
David Buckland: But it’s, but by them having that experience, it’s kind of handed into group consciousness. In the book, I talk about three stages of cognition. or three types of cognitions. And there are those kinds of original ones that I’m talking about there. But there are also other ones where they’re revived, where they’ve gone dormant, and then they revived again, in a rising age. And then where the someone more, earlier on, they have a basic cognition, where more people are having that experience, more people are having that cognition, which enlivens it in consciousness. So it’s, it’s like a group effort. Yeah, so this person wakes up this day, but this person cognizes, this thing, this person brings forward this knowledge and this way, this person publishes, you know, Eckhart’s book, and, and this person… So there’s, there’s this group collaborative effort that together raises the whole and makes it kind of part of the group. And so that, you know, I don’t have the time in my entire life, to even to have the experience of what it’s like to be every kind of creature and being.
Rick Archer: And it wouldn’t really be useful or necessary to know that, you know,
David Buckland: exactly, whereas it might be someone else’s Dharma to bring that out more
Rick Archer: in a scientific sense that no one has the time in life to study all the disciplines and get to the cutting edge of every field of human knowledge.
David Buckland: Yeah. Another example would be we live in a, in a, there’s the divine, there’s kind of like these thoughts of the Divine and which expresses creations, and we happen to be in a creation that’s quite a bit more complex. And within that creation are multiple universes, and then each universes, the laws of nature are a little bit different. So different kinds of beings are being expressed and so on. And, you know, just to take a scan of the different universes would take more than a lifetime. So it’s, there’s, there’s so much vastness,
Rick Archer: This universe alone has 10 trillion galaxies.
David Buckland: Exactly. So there’s, you know, there’s only so much individual attention could process, so they’re just as vastness. And it takes, it takes all of us to do this together. And like I met… we talked about earlier, with the devas waking up, they play also another role. So it’s not just humans doing this, but other kinds of beings. And I suspect to a certain point even more, what’s the more or less evolved beings you might say, some of the animals in this kind of thing will probably be part of that too. I wouldn’t know what to expect. Yeah.
Rick Archer: Well, they say inside yuga you know, the animals are kind of much more conscious and awake and everything than they are
David Buckland: well, because we’re all in the same consciousness. So it’s the raise that up to that level, then everything is raised
Rick Archer: Rama had monkeys and bears helping him fight Ravana. Yeah. It’s sort of like in the since I asked you that question. 10 minutes ago, our discussion of it has given me a better feeling for the answer to it. Which is that the universe itself is sort of God involved in a hide and seek operation, self-exploration thing, which it’s almost presumptuous of a human being to suggest that in, in either science or spirituality, we’ll ever get a complete detailed nail it down understanding of every last little mystery of creation, it’s, there’s always going to be room for exploration and discovery.
David Buckland: And for me, it’s, it’s an evolution. And these days, I can shift to different realities depending on how I want to explore, explore. So there’s the reality that nothing has ever been created in the first place and never will be, there is a reality that the divinity is profoundly self-networked, and there’s no reason for it to ever express, because it already knows. And then there’s a reality of where the universe, you know, like the Vedas and the devas waking up, and that kind of thing we were talking about earlier, the universe is going through a process of waking up, and it goes through these various cycles. And, and, you know, there’s an article where I talk about why would creation repeat itself? If it’s if the purpose of creation is to come to, to know itself? Why would it do it again? But it doesn’t, because, you know,
Rick Archer: why do you wake up the next day after having already been awake the previous day, you get to experience it again. But a different
David Buckland: Yeah. And so there’s, they’re all, They’re all essentially perspectives, and each perspective has knowledge that comes with it. Yeah. Ways of knowing and stuff like that. And it’s profound to experience pure divinity, this profound self-knowing, but, but there’s no learning to happen in that. It’s already known. So whereas going down and coming into a human experience, there are all kinds of learning that can take place. And there are all kinds of nuances that can be fleshed out. And all these different variations, all these different beings, experiencing in different ways brings out different aspects, and moves things along. We all have a part to play in this, in this Lila,
Rick Archer: that was just gonna say, and you can see why they use that word. Yeah, play. The whole thing is like, Well, what a game, you know. It’s so much more entertaining than just sort of pfff.
David Buckland: And it was certainly a relief, though, when you’re, when you can sit back and watch the stage, as opposed to being on the stage and, and seeing it as real. You can get into the suffering.
Rick Archer: Yeah, it can be very, it can seem and you know, and there can be circumstances we live fairly blessed lives in terms of our health and our food and our economics and our comfort and all that stuff. But you know, some people are really going through it in this world and you can’t blame them for seeing it as real. Right. You know, if you’re in the Congo going through what women are going through, they’re in Aleppo going through bombing.
David Buckland: Yeah, if that’s their experience, that’s their experience. But it’s beautiful that there is this awakening happening. Larger and larger scale in the world, that’s gonna raise people out of that over time, lift all boats. Yeah, yeah. And that’s, that’s really beautiful. Yeah. I have no idea. How much time has passed.
Rick Archer: I don’t know how much time is past. One and a half hours. See anything else there?
David Buckland: Oh, one thing. One thing it would be interesting to touch on it I became aware of more recently. Adyashanti talks about head, heart, gut. Right. Essentially, when you, when you there’s the process of Kundalini rising to the crown, and awakening, and then there’s a descent of, you can say descent of embodiment, Shakti rises to join Shiva and then they descend together. And there’s this prominent predominance of head heart gut. I mentioned earlier about those three values of ego, the concepts, the emotional drivers, and the core grip. But why just those three chakras? Well, there’s also the gut, rather the root that’s from my experience with related to Brahman, but why, why, why didn’t the throat, wasn’t the throat one of the stages. But it turns out it’s kind of, well, in my experience, the descent is happening on a subtler level than the rise. It’s like the Kundalini in those koshas, the layers were talking about earlier. The chakras are introduced on the bliss, in the bliss body level, bliss body Kosha and then they express forward through the layers into the energy body. And so there’s kind of and become more and more specific. They’re universal at first and so they have universal devas associated with them. But as they move forward into expression into your individual body, then you can get them in different spaces and misaligned and, you know, various kinds of, and then we have the individual expression of them in the energy body. But it’s also why the chakras are experienced differently, some people describe chakras with a geometry. Some people or Mantra, some people will talk about the flowers, as flowers and some people talk about vortexes, this is experiencing them on different levels, on those different levels. The, but it turns out that there’s on this other levels are the, what’s called the Maha marmas. And so they’re kind of like a higher octave of certain chakras. And there’s the, I can’t remember the names of them. But there’s these three. Hyridaya is the heart one. So the Anahata Chakra and Hyridaya Maha Marma. And Basti is the gut or something, anyway, but they mark, a person that has a, has a practice and so on is their process is to have the full range of you know, self-realization, God-consciousness, unity, then it’s the awakening of the head, the concepts of self, the concept of the ego dynamics, is the head, top Maha Marma. And then the heart Mahamarma with God-consciousness, and the gut with Unity. So the book doesn’t have that more recent discovery. I’d heard of the Hyridaya chakra, the higher octave version, but I didn’t realize it was a Mahamarma. That tied several traditions together.
Rick Archer: Yeah. There’s room for exploration here. I don’t know if we want to go into it anymore. But I mean, this whole thing of the chakras awakening, I guess most people conceive of it as happening sequentially and in ascending order, right. And you’re saying that, well, maybe, but
David Buckland: it’s an energy, but it’s one thing, it’s important to understand that that process is not causal of The Awakening. It’s, it’s an embodied, it’s the way correlation? It’s not causal. No, but is it correlated? Yes, it’s correlated. So there’s a process, for example, someone can have the, you know, Self Realization and then unity, and skip that process and not have God-consciousness until later. And similarly, with the chakra rising, is a way of embodying, the energetic embodying and, and clearing the channels so that we can hold the awakening when it happens. But the rising Kundalini itself doesn’t cause it, that awakening is driven by divinity itself. People say this happens by grace. Yeah, yeah, it’s divinity. It’s like this. Kind of like this little, little drop of pure Divinity.
Rick Archer: Yeah. But is it preparatory? I mean, could you say that it’s,
David Buckland: it’s a good preparation. Yeah. But, but there, there are, some people have the approach that, that if I can get my Kundalini up to the crown,
Rick Archer: my awakening, but you know, which has a very sort of individual effort kind of connotation to where I can do this.
David Buckland: Exactly. Whereas awakening is a letting go. It’s an allowing or surrender. It’s because it’s divine that’s doing it. It’s not you, it’s not the person. And that’s actually a good point to mention in the last interview, also, that it’s not the person that wakes up, we wake up from the person. Right. So that the there’s Yeah, so there’s, there’s nothing a person can do to awaken. That, they can prepare the ground. So that, so that when an opportunity arises, when that opening happens, that they’re able to stabilize it and keep it and it’s, they’re able to have a smoother process. So it was really valuable to have those spiritual techniques, but the techniques themselves will never cause the awakening. Because it’s, it’s, it’s the divine that’s doing it.
Rick Archer: Yeah. So is it sort of like the divine if we want to… What’s the word, not anthropomorphize, but maybe, but personalize it, personalize? Does the divine sort of keep an eye on humanity and say, well, this guy’s ready. Bless him with awakening. You know, metaphorically speaking, like that, but more like when you’re ready to pop, you don’t pop through your own
David Buckland: while you’re when you’re ready to pop, your, it’s because it’s time. It’s kind of,
Rick Archer: but a whole lot of transformation has taken to get you to that point.
David Buckland: Yeah. And then when we’re going through the process, we don’t experience, we don’t recognize necessarily there’s a process taking place. And that’s going to lead to here. It’s only when we look back in retrospect, that we see oh, that actually contributed and that contributed to I didn’t think that was you know, even something you know, a disaster or something really nasty can be a profound healing, which leads to the awakening. It’s like that. So we can’t see, well, we’re in the middle of it well, what’s, what’s contributing, but later on, we can look back and see, but there is definitely this kind of process where we’re being guided. But again, it’s not us doing it
Rick Archer: through others that saying, you know, God helps those who help themselves. There’s also the saying of, you know,
David Buckland: more inclined to wake up,
Rick Archer: or Enlightenment may be an accident, but spiritual practice makes you accident-prone.
David Buckland: Yeah, because there are, I think, various points where somebody might make the shift. But if they don’t, you know, if they get a call, a movement, a sense that they should go and see a teacher and they resist and, and don’t do it, or whatever, there’s some circumstance that they’re presented in, and they’re not, they’re not ready, or they don’t, then it you know, the opportunities goes by, but you know, it’s not like we shouldn’t be trying to double or second guess our life or anything. But, you know, I think that it’s, if it’s meant to happen, it’s going to happen.
Rick Archer: Yeah, we do have to be cautious not to give people the impression that they can just do whatever the hell they please and enlightenment’s gonna happen if it’s supposed to happen. It just sounds too defeatist or something. It’s like, you know, Patanjali and to get back to Patanjali. He talks about Yogis being mild, medium, or intense in terms of their determination, and, you know, degrees of intensity up to vehement and those with the vehement intensity are more likely to Yeah, awaken.
David Buckland: There’s a lot of little things in there to, like in the seventh mandala of the Rig Veda, Vasishtha, the sage Vasishtha, he mentions that, the importance of desiring unity. Yeah. So there has to be some forward movement there, too, for some intention to move forward. And, you know, as I’ve observed, if you don’t know it’s there, you’re not going to desire it. If you think you’re if you feel done. Right, then you know, and so I think that’s the concept of being done, or the concept that there’s only self-realization can actually turn into a barrier in itself. Because then, because anything, there’s nothing more than there’s not gonna be any intention, not going to be attention,
Rick Archer: which highlights the value of what you’re doing. And what I’m trying to do with the show is to have greater knowledge out there in terms of the possibilities, because otherwise, people can shortchange themselves thinking that, you know, some relatively minor attainment is the end,
David Buckland: and I wasn’t even really aware of some of this stuff. Yeah, it was, it was possible, until quite recently.
Rick Archer: But the whole thing about grace, I guess we’ve covered it, but just what’s this? You talked about. Okay. Here’s a question, a question from a listener. Anu asks, you talked about the Kundalini rising. And how that is not indicative of self-realization or awakening. How about the reverse in an awakened person, has the Kundalini risen? Understand the question?
David Buckland: yeah. Okay, I’m no expert in Kundalini, but from what I’ve seen, usually, one of the dynamics that I experienced, which I had no explanation for, for a long time was when I started witnessing in the 70s. According to the information I had, that indicated Self Realization, but I knew I wasn’t self-realized because there was still identified ego there, there was that duality we talked about earlier. Much later, a friend of mine had a book and I was looking at and it talks about this process, there’s a, in the kundalini rise were just above the third eye, there’s a point called Makara. If the Kundalini reaches that point, it becomes stable it doesn’t go back down anymore. Up until that point, it tends to go up and down. It reaches that point there’s tends to be this certain kind of experience. In my case it was a brilliant white flash and, and everything disappeared for a short time and, and then and basically I witnessed thereafter and, and because there’s kind of like a witness point just below that and
Rick Archer: witnessing thereafter included during sleep?
David Buckland: Yeah. So the so, the witnessing, if the kundalini is rising up and going down again, witnessing comes in and then go and come in and go. But once it reaches Makara, it remains stable, and there’s only a short distance between that and awakening, but for me, it was about 31 years. (laughs) And, but what the Kundalini Vidya tradition that talked about this mentioned was that sometimes it can stop there to allow the body to clear out that because the crown chakra kind of manages the process, and to help clear out the physiology and make it more ready, so that when I did wake up, it was very clear and solid, right away, and there was a couple of the stages came quite quickly afterward, because there had been that preparation, whereas some people will awaken earlier and they’ll have more processing to do after their, after the first shift. As I like to say, everybody’s process is a bit different. So. So it was the point I was making was Kundalini coming to the crown is not the cause of the awakening, it’s the embodiment. So it’s, it’s so there’s a process of preparation where the kundalini comes up. So by the time someone is awake, the Kundalini is up. But it may come pretty well up beforehand, or it may come up at the same time, or it may come up, when they’re stabilizing the shift that they have the opening and then that shift stabilizes. It’s, they’re tied, there’s a correlation. It’s just the point I’m trying to make it’s not causal and still trying to force the Kundalini. You know, from what I’ve seen, is not productive. And people that I know that have done that it can be dangerous, and the people who have done that have a much rougher process.
Rick Archer: Yeah, I know, some people who’ve gone through very rough Kundalini processes, you know, they even consider themselves to have had some circuits fried permanently as a result, you know,
David Buckland: it’s a, it’s a powerful energy. And if you practice appropriate practices, it arises naturally on its own accord, you know,
Rick Archer: yeah, for sure. So just to rehash that just a little, is it possible that kundalini can fully rise, and yet you’re not awakened? Or you can be awakened, and it’s not fully risen, or do the to correlate closely enough that if it has fully risen, you are awakened?
David Buckland: I can see from what I said earlier, I can see some variation on that. But it could come up and yet they’re awakening. Because I’ve seen people, for example, who wake up and because it’s so ordinary and normal and simple. And they have all these concepts of what it’s supposed to look like. They don’t believe it. And so it takes a while for them to accept it, and where they start to see that things have changed and, and how they’re responding to life and so on like that. I mean, there are all kinds of variations and how it shows up. For me, as I mentioned, it was really clear and distinct. And so there was no, you know, there was an ego death. It was very distinct that so there was no mistaking it for me. But other people, it’s much softer. And there’s and we talked about oozing on the last interview. Oozing yeah, that’s kind of like this, very slow, gradual processes. And they’re just kind of, you know, I’ve met a couple of people who didn’t know their awaken had been awake for a decade.
Rick Archer: Because they were expecting something else. Yeah, they’re
David Buckland: expecting some flashiness and some, you know, skills or whatever,
Rick Archer: which events, which again, points to the value of knowledge. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
David Buckland: And once they knew they’re awake, their progress kicked up, then they were engaging it and paying attention to it. It wasn’t just kind of this background thing that was there in their life.
Rick Archer: It’s almost like, I mean, what I sense, have, in my opinion, the knowledge component is you can almost say, as important as the experience component in the whole evolutionary process. You know, you really can’t take that far, that big a step with one leg without bringing the other leg along. Yeah. Gotta just keep the two apace.
David Buckland: Yeah, it’s like the map analogy, you can, you can, you know, experience going down the road and you go in and start with a tourist attraction, and you stop at a gas station, restaurant, and you have these experiences, and you can kind of just go driving down the road and see where you’re, you know, see where it takes you. But if you actually want to get somewhere it’s useful to know which road to take, so you have a map and you’re experiencing as you go towards that destination.
Rick Archer: Yeah. And it’s also again, my observation, subject to flaws and limitations, that a person can be really quite advanced in their evolution and yet due to some misunderstanding or lack of understanding or something which is not fully developed in that area. Doesn’t, they get stuck in some way. They don’t realize that there could be more.
David Buckland: Yeah, because there’s the kind of thing about wake up, grow up, clean up. Yeah, because it’s waking up is great. But if you don’t take care of your baggage, your junk garbage, and stuff, you give more power to it. So there’s a, it’s a holistic kind of process, really, if you want to have the whole person and, you know, I’m not sure I haven’t established this yet. But it, because I’ve seen people that have made the Brahman shift without letting go of that core grip. So there’s still that core unconscious identity that can drive the bus to some degree, even though the awakeness would be driving the bus most of the time, they can still get caught a little bit by that. So it wouldn’t surprise me if there are some people out there that are, that have some of that, or that there’s, there’s some subconscious, because there’s all those layers, again, when you got some junk in that’s unconscious, and those subtle layers you haven’t brought light to, and there’s resistance to going into whatever charge there has, it’s still going to be having influence on your expression and how you respond to, to stuff in your life.
Rick Archer: So what would you prescribe? If you would? And obviously, there would be individual prescriptions. But if you could make any sort of general blanket prescription? What would you prescribe as the best means of kind of safeguarding and facilitating the path such that one doesn’t get stuck? So it’s just that one continues to foster both one’s experience and one’s understanding?
David Buckland: Well, I mean, I found myself being part of a teaching was useful for a while. It gave me the well, it gave me the techniques that were quite effective, to clear the ground and experience Samadhi and culture, the Source within. It gave me the understanding that I needed to, to put it all in some kind of context and understand how to deal with certain kinds of things in life. So in that sense, finding a teaching that you resonate with, is really valuable. Yeah, to support your, support your process, and then a certain point, you Well, that’s kind of like stages of it, but there’s a certain point, you gain the, you kind of step into the flow of it, and so that your life is guided by the process itself. And so you’re able to work with it. Having a spiritual community is still valuable, though. So you because you can still get caught in your stuff, here and there, and have, it’s useful to help people call you on your stuff.
Rick Archer: Well, actually, on that note, how important is it to have a teacher, in addition to a teaching?
David Buckland: Well, it’s, it’s good for getting the right start. But a certain point, there’s also around right around unity in there. There’s the idea of the resolute intellect. Essentially, that intellect level above the bliss body. In most people, it’s associated with the mental body. So the intellect and the mind are tied together. And so the mind is kind of being drifted, you know, moved around by our emotions and our experiences and our resistances. And that kind of stuff. So the intellect doesn’t have a really solid platform. But after we’re clearly awake, the intellect comes to associate itself with this being, with that silence within. And so it has a more stable platform. And as perception refines our ability to discriminate clearly gets better and better. And so there is this idea of the inner guru that comes online, in that period where, where you put your attention on something, and you experience it, but the intelligence in that also, is known. And so it comes with, your experiences come with understanding. Sometimes it’s still useful to have perspectives. I mean, I have a few friends, I read their content, because they, their perspective is different. And they bring out you know, it’s like, oh, I hadn’t noticed that before. Like the mahamarmas. You know, I was aware of that process. And, you know, Adyashanti and some others speak of it, but I wasn’t aware of that connection to them.
Rick Archer: So you saying that, as one progresses, the necessity of a teacher diminishes as a general rule that to which there are probably exceptions, but it’s more critical in the beginning than in the final stages or latter stages.
David Buckland: Yeah, getting a good start is good, because there’s a lot of people out there who are just kind of, you know, window shopping a bit. Yeah, I’m trying out this and try not that. And what we, what we tend to do is we’re driven by the mind often, looking for the concepts we like that suit our philosophy, our approach to like, to life, and then we kind of, but what that does is kind of enables our concepts. And we can get even more identified with it, we can look for a philosophy that that
Rick Archer: forces are by our prejudices.
David Buckland: Yeah. I mean, the confirmation bias and that kind of thing. No, I mean, some of that is fine. If we have a basic platform, that’s reasonable. But when we, when we’re basically going out there collecting concepts, and we’re, you know, going to be at the SAND conference this weekend (Science and nonduality). Yeah. And yeah, and it’s full of concepts. And you see a lot of people there that are basically looking for better concepts and collecting any, of course, a lot of them conflict with each other. And, and, you know, people have these big charts and tables of all these correlations and all this kind of stuff. But oftentimes, it’s just concepts. And by itself, without experience, without means of experience, it can become quite Yeah. Yeah.
Rick Archer: Like some people say, for instance, I think Maharishi used to say actually, that, you know, the shift to unity kind of necessitates a teacher to dispel some basic doubt that kind of grips you at that transition point, the teacher kind of reassured you and dispels a doubt and says, This is it, you know, and it kind of resolves any fear or discomfort.
David Buckland: Yeah, it’s interesting, because I had a, I had a, I had my unity shift on a Lorn and Lucia retreat. And, and so Lorn, talking about it afterwards, but I didn’t have the experience that there was doubt that way. And some ways, Brahman, but it depends, I guess everybody’s process is different. Yeah. All right. In some ways, Brahman might require it more.
Rick Archer: So maybe it’s too simplistic to try to pin it down in terms of when and how you might need a teacher maybe, maybe it’s more appropriate to say, you know, yeah, depends on the person,
David Buckland: but also as you’re getting started, but also verifying an initial awakening, because often, as I mentioned earlier, often people can have the shift and not know it, or not be sure because they have these concepts about it. And, and, you know, one of the, I’ve seen a lot of people wake up and, and one of the things that is almost universal is surprise at how simple it was, how could I not have gotten this before? After years of practice? And also how normal and ordinary it is.
Rick Archer: Yeah. And in another vein, it can be terrifying. If you had no idea what’s happening to you, like Suzanne Siegel, you know, their Collision with the Infinite book.
David Buckland: Well, that’s interesting though, actually, because she did have a background, but she fought it, because she knew but she couldn’t, she didn’t believe that that was it.
Rick Archer: Yeah. I think her concept that she had formed years previously. Yes, it would just was so different than the actual experience when it dawned. Yeah, that she’s gonna put two and two together.
David Buckland: Yeah, exactly. But there was definitely a risk, because she had people tell her she was awake. Yeah. And she refused to believe it. And she went looking for people to pathologize it and went through this whole struggle. And finally, she accepted it. Yeah. And then she relaxed into it. And she had her Unity shift fairly soon afterwards. That’s kind of an extreme, extreme example. Yeah. People don’t usually fight it that way.
Rick Archer: We probably should have done this in the beginning. Because we’ve been and we sort of did do it. But we’ve been throwing these terms around. And perhaps as a recap, I could answer I could have you answer this question that someone just handed me. How do you define and what are the differences, differences in experience between unity consciousness, God-consciousness, and cosmic consciousness.
David Buckland: Okay. Okay, cosmic consciousness is essentially equivalent to self-realization, self-realizing itself. So there’s a shift from if there isn’t witnessing in prior, which there isn’t usually but it’s, I don’t know, half dozen people that have that. But there’s a shift from being a me experiencing the world. And there might be some sense of presence or consciousness, of being behind (the head) whatever. But there’s kind of like the shift back into that, and then kind of goes out and becomes infinite. And it’s kind of like you’re kind of out here in this infinite experiencing through this body. But from there, yeah, it’s much more back there. Yeah. And it depends on how great the contract is, contrast is because I said, as we talked about, some people have a much more mild shift and so it kind of goes much more slowly or quite quietly. We shift from experiencing ourselves as being the doer and you know, and the actor in the world to observing, witnessing the doing going on. There is often times a sense of freedom or liberation from our, because it’s like we were in this little box. And suddenly we’re out of the box. And we’re in this much bigger place. Because ego is, you know, a very small thing, tiny kind of set of little concepts. And we play these kinds of roles in our life. Acting out these things as the parent and the friend and, and the worker, and all this kind of little roles we have, and our concepts about what that supposed to look like, and so on. And you step out of that, and it’s a huge relief, liberation. As it as it gets established. And deeper and you settle into, what’s commonly called nirvana or Satchitananda, absolute bliss consciousness. So there’s the, there’s the sense of being this consciousness, but that consciousness is awake. And I’ll be talking at SAND about the Koshas, as I mentioned, and there’s kind of like, our usual experience of life, we’re living in the physical, emotional mental bodies. So where are dominantly in, but after the clear awakening, and it becomes established, we’re living in the top three, consciousness, citta maya, the field, and the bliss body. So sat chit ananda, and we’re sort of living, that we’re still living in the body as well. And that sense, but who we are, is kind of outside that in the upper three koshas. And so it’s kind of this flip in where we are. So it’s a very different experience of the world, there may be that sense we talked about before the world becomes gains a sense of illusoriness, that can be really strong, or it can be very slight, and just like, Oh, this isn’t as doesn’t seem as solid as it used to. Or, or, like I say, it could be really, you know, like, the world is meaningless. And there’s nothing and, you know, that kind of thing. That could be yeah, sometimes for some people, there’s no real change in their life itself. And for others, various things change, it kind of varies. Like, in my own case, a whole bunch of things fell out of, fell out of my life beforehand, and basically set the stage for the shift to happen. Whereas another friend of mine is living unity now. He works multiple businesses, he’s gotten more busy, more creative, more active, in all kinds of ways. It’s a, it’s a huge variations, there’s no, there’s no way of knowing how your specific unfolding is going to unfold. OK – that’s cosmic consciousness, and then from there, the consciousness kind of wakes from itself in the world, a lot of people these days, are going straight into unity. And so there’s a shift from experiencing myself here to experiencing myself as it’s kind of, like you become the container of everything. And so, all of this is within myself, there’s no longer an inside and outside, there’s a, it’s not necessarily very conscious, but there’s usually a distinct experience of this is in me, you know, these are my emotions, my thoughts, and so on, they’re inside here and outside is separate, whereas with the Unity shift, those two become one. And so there’s no longer inside and outside, it’s just kind of a continuum. And this is all inside too, there’s another way of framing as it’s all inside. Although they’re usually there’s a progression with that. And so because of that, there’s it’s a profoundly different relationship with the world and everything becomes very intimate. You can also take on a reality where because you are, you are, you know, infinite consciousness, and this coach has infinite consciousness, and it’s myself, the world can actually become more concrete than it ever was before, because it is absolute non-changing, changing in an appearance, indestructible but in appearance. And so, this will be a surface value, which may be seen illusory, can then take on this, this sense of reality, not because of its appearance, but because it’s all just consciousness, or all just absolute Being
Rick Archer: know that to be indeed indestructible, by which all this is pervaded.
David Buckland: Yeah. Well, it’s kind of an interesting it was, you know, it was an interesting thing. So there’s, there’s a whole series of and sometimes Unity is talked about as coming in stages. So if there is sufficient refinement going on, and it’s worth noting Ayurveda has this idea of the six bhavas. When we’re born into this life, we bring in these six areas. Three of them relate to our bloodline, mother’s line, father’s line, and nutrition during pregnancy. The other three relate to what we bring forward from prior lifetimes and other bodies and other bloodlines. Not always, but usually other bloodlines. And two of those are Atman and Sattwa. So essentially, what it means is development of consciousness, development of refinement is cumulative. So what development over lifetimes Yes, so what develops in prior lifetimes we bring forward into this life, we build, we build on it from there. And so this is why you see people coming in and basically waking up just without any real practice, you know, that kind of stuff, or spontaneously out of nowhere, and you see other people, you know, cranking away for years with their, with good practices, and not really making a lot of progress, apparently, but they’re still they’re building their bank account, you could say. And so it’s a mixture there. So, if there is a sufficient refinement, and we continue in that process, then then a god consciousness stage unfolds. And essentially, what that means is the perception refines, we become aware of those layers between the physical and, and the consciousness. And now, I mean, it’s not just on a, like, we all experience our emotions, but we also can experience that level of reality in the world, we can experience the flows of energy, the prana, and those kinds of dynamics. You know, people talk about auras, and there’s kind of different layers of because, because the kosha means sheath, so essentially, we have our physical body on Annamaya, which basically means the food body, and then we have the energy body, which is a little bit bigger. So it immerses, we’re immersed in the energy body, it fully penetrates the physical body, but it sticks out a little bit around the body. So people can see that a little bit, you know, by the kind of it sticks out a little bit. And then the mental body is a little bit bigger, again, a little bit, it’s a little more subtle, a little bit more generalized, less specific. And then and so on, going out until consciousness is essentially infinite. So it’s, it’s
Rick Archer: so with God-consciousness, consciousness, why is the God word in there,
David Buckland: Okay, so basically, there’s this, this refinement of perception of those layers become apparent, the heart awakens, the Hridaya Mahamarma. And, and it leads, that refinement leads us to become aware of the doers, those Devata. And again, if the heart awakens, then there the capacity to experience them as beings, arises also, and, or it’s tied into that anyways. And, or we may be more, you know, the scientist orientation more heavily leaning on the intellect, and we can, you know, go into the refinement and experience them in, that has principles and functions, you know, looking at geometry and, and fields and that kind of thing, depending on how we experience because people also have a dominant sense, I’m very visual, I see stuff, some people are more feel things, or they’re more auditory or whatever, like that, they experience it in different ways. They hear vibrations of music of the spheres or, or they feel the layers, they can kind of feel the layers in the body and having different kinds of densities and consistencies and different kinds of flows, and so on that, that, different styles of that. And so once you become aware of these, these refined values, especially when you get down into celestial perception around the bliss body and so on, then you start to experience forms of the Divine itself. In acting in the world, and so on, As gods, yeah, people would call God gods, well, angels are a little more gross, but, but at that level, it’s more like, like I mentioned in the first interview about experiencing Krishna, for example, and then later on Christ, and so on. There’s been a bunch of them. And, and to me, from my perspective, I find it really handy because you can experience them both ways. It’s kind of like a shift of focus or a shift of orientation, to go from the intellect to the heart, and then shift orientation to the world around us and then you can see, you know, for example, you know, if I’m in a plane and that’s, it’s really rough, a lot of turbulence, I can have a conversation with the vayus, the wind, the wind devas and asked them too, you know if they could move off a little. And, and sometimes I have to, you have to kind of go up the ladder, and you have to be very respectful and stuff. Because, you know, they’re being told to do something. So they’re doing it. But you know, you’ve got pulled out a little bit and you express respect. And so you can have this.
Rick Archer: That’s an interesting point. I mean, some people think that sounds kooky.
David Buckland: 20 years ago, maybe not more than that now. But at one point in my life, if I heard myself saying something like, this is like, Oh, my God,
Rick Archer: I mean, in that same vein, there must be devas involved in volcanoes and earthquakes and hurricanes and all those things. Yeah. And theoretically, which kind of like
David Buckland: And actually that, that ties into what we were talking about earlier on as well. Because this, when we’re, when we’re suffering, we’re caught in our stuff. Sometimes people repress it. And sometimes people kind of spew out and into the environment. And that stuff, if it’s not being processed, it retains our energy signature. So we don’t kind of it doesn’t go away in that sense. But it but as it builds up in the environment, at a certain point, it has to release in some way. Yeah. So nature will that’s one of the things that motivates riots and natural disasters, wars. Yeah, is this buildup of stress in the environment. So if we can alleviate that through enough people being awake and so on, through, you know, working with the devas, in such a way that they help, help with that kind of thing, then we can, yeah, like, my friend that works on Washington
Rick Archer: is not doing such a good job.
David Buckland: Well, who knows, but if he wasn’t working on it, who knows, it could be worse? We’ll see.
Rick Archer: That’s kind of fascinating, because, you know, people would say, okay, earthquakes, tectonic plates, or hurricanes, pressure variations or whatever causes or hurricanes? And, you know, sure, all that kind of stuff.
David Buckland: There’s, there is the physical mechanics. That’s not, I don’t object to that. But what’s actually driving that? Yeah. Well, you can say that, Oh, this, this, the, there’s the pressure under the earth and, and that, I’m sure, but part of the dynamics, if you look at the energy, or you feel it or whatever, like that in an environment, you can go into someone’s house to visit and you can feel it, sometimes there’s been a big fight, or it’s like real kind of Uch you don’t want to be there. Yeah, like that. It’s kind of like that on a larger scale. And there’s places you can go in it just feels nasty. Yeah. And at some point that energy has to resolve.
Rick Archer: Yeah, well, it’s, you know, you make a very important point here, really, if, which is if this is true, if this is the way things work, then wars, of which there have been far too many are not ultimately caused by political differences, or religious differences or anything like that they’re caused by a buildup of impurity or stress in collective consciousness and can be diffused by the dissolution of that impurity or stress if we can actually do that.
David Buckland: Yeah, it’s, I would add. And it’s also caused by ways people are relating to the world, what kind of, what kind of things are supporting, because it’s, it’s also driven by people who, you know, are motivated by power and that kind of, but the buildup of stress gives them an opportunity to move in.
Rick Archer: Well, yeah. And also, if there’s, if it’s true that there’s sort of Asuric and Devic forces kind of playing tug of war with one another, which is literally depicted in the Vedas, you know, that snake on the mountain, then certain people are aligned with one camp and certain people are aligned with the other. Yeah. And, and those aligned with the Asuric camp are more consumed by greed and promoting their own agenda, regardless of the consequences and stuff like that
David Buckland: And not recognizing there will be consequences. Yeah, which there will be. But that’s actually an interesting dynamic, too. Because if, you know, when, when you’re smooth, and you do something that’s not so good. You see the result quickly. Yeah, you get smacked. Yeah. And whereas when if you don’t, you’re not seeing consequences, it actually indicates there’s a backlog. And so there’s more of a time delay. Although it’s complicated, because there’s different layers of that and different areas of life where we’re, you know, we might have some emotional stuff we haven’t dealt with, but we’re kind of clean, more clean on the mental level, or we might have a bunch of mental deviations and be a little cleaner. And some other area of life, you know, everybody’s a little different that way. But nonetheless, it’s one of the reasons people don’t recognize the consequences is because they’ve got a backlog. Yeah. So there’s a time delay in there. Yeah. We try to teach our children about that because they don’t recognize the consequences of some of their things they do, like stick your finger in a fire, it’s gonna hurt.
Rick Archer: Alright, so we’ve kind of meandered into a number of little points here, which are profound and significant. But is there something you could say by way of a wrap-up? That would be a nice conclusion to this whole conversation?
David Buckland: Good point. Well, yeah, I guess I guess, personally, I’m really inspired by what’s going on watching so many people wake up, because I’ve been writing about this online for over a decade, I get a lot of contact from people, and that have woken up and they’re trying to understand how to support it. Or they’re thanking me because they didn’t have language, you know, so there’s some language there that they can use to, because the mind has to digest the experience for it to be integrated. And if there’s no language, it’s very difficult for that to take place. And, and just seeing the processes happening in the people I know who are quite awake, and these devas waking up, and the divine sutras coming out. And the people are going through stages now that when you heard not so long ago, and, and this profound shifts going on. Now, the issue, though, is understanding that dynamic because when consciousness rises, it pushes what hasn’t been resolved to the surface. And so what we’re seeing a lot in the world right now is some things may seem to be getting worse. If you look at statistics, they’re actually getting better, like crime rates, murder rates. You know,
Rick Archer: Steven Pinker, somebody who writes about that, there’s a whole lot of good stuff going on.
David Buckland: Yeah, somebody sent me a thing on box.com Recently, and it’s just like this long list of statistics about, you know, child or infant mortality rates are going way down, and, and people’s wealth around the world are going way down, or Up sorry, and all these markers of things are improving. But if you look at the news, you know, it’s almost like both are happening at the same time. Yes, exactly. Yeah. And so it’s pushing this stuff to the surface. But if you understand that, that’s what’s going on, it’s there to be seen and recognized and cleared. So you know, the way that men in power have been treating women, for example, that’s been going on for a long time, wouldn’t talk about it, now it’s coming to the surface, and it’s being adjusted to be seen, and coming to more, we can have the opportunity to go to a more balanced place about that, and, and how more appropriate relationships, and professional you know, in those kinds of fields, and so on. And, and all these things are there as a process to help purify. But if we see it as a growing problem, and we get invested in it in a way, then we’re actually amplifying it. And so it’s kind of important, we recognize what the dynamic, it’s like when you’re trying to let go of something. If you grab onto it harder, it doesn’t help it go away. It’s like the idea of being antiwar versus pro-peace. antiwar basically amplifies war. Whereas pro-peace amplifies peace, what you put your attention on grows stronger. So it’s understanding the dynamics of how that works is very important in the current time. So we don’t enable the issues that are coming to the surface, but rather we help to heal them.
Rick Archer: Yeah, our friend here was just telling me about up in Portland, the Antifa, I guess they’re called, which is some kind of far-left radical group. And then the proud boys, which is a far-right radical group are kind of clashing with each other. And it’s I don’t know where I was going with that. But just the polarities if you really want to be, to introduce something good into society. Taking a radically, a radical, and even violent stance against the things you don’t like is probably going to be counterproductive as opposed to just injecting the second element of what you actually want to see happen. It was it that somebody said be the change we want to see and
David Buckland: yeah, and it’s even energetically I remember going to this energy workshop some years ago, and they showed us we got paired off and they like, one person was really angry and then you monitored your state with that. If you resisted the anger it amplified, they got more angry and you felt the anger more, whereas if you were transparent to the anger and just allowed the anger, it would basically just go through and it would dissipate.
Rick Archer: Yeah, I experienced that with my wife. Yeah.
David Buckland: And yeah, it would it would dissipate. So it’s just like how we are with this stuff makes a huge difference. Yeah. So it’s not, it’s not about what’s happening, it’s about how we are with it, that makes the huge difference. And becoming more conscious of our own internal dynamics, that helps us become conscious of where we’re resisting, and, and, you know, and holding on, and that allows us to go in there and try and heal and, and, and, and because, you know, if it’s showing up in your life, it’s, if it’s out there, it’s in here.
Rick Archer: Okay, so you have your blog, Davidya.ca, and I’ll link to it on BatGap and have already linked to it from your previous interview. But I’ll also link to from the page for this interview. And I highly recommend that people go there, there’s tons of stuff already written, you probably never read it all unless you don’t have anything else to do. But if you sign up for…
David Buckland: coming up on 2000 articles,
Rick Archer: but if you sign up for the email notification, you’ll get an email every time he posts a new one. I try to read them all, just because I always learn something.
David Buckland: Yeah. And there’s a key post tab that has articles organized by subject a little bit that kind of explains some of these perspectives like about the koshas and the stages and things. And there’s also a media tab where I have some of my previous talks and interviews.
Rick Archer: Okay, and then your new book Our Natural Potential, which I think people would enjoy reading covers a lot of the stuff that we’ve been talking about today, Our Natural Potential. And I’ll have a link to that on your webpage. So thanks. Thank you. It’s been a good conversation. Thank you for listening and watching I’m here at the SAND conference and be doing some more things while I’m here. And I think the next interview I’ll be posting… Well, we’ll see. I mean, I imagine that could end up in a different order. But they’ll there’ll be some nice material coming out over the coming weeks. So thanks.