David Buckland 2^nd Interview

Summary

The conversation explores stages of awakening, including witnessing, Self-realization, God-consciousness, unity, and Brahman. It also examines subtle beings, the layers through which consciousness becomes the physical world, free will, reincarnation, and whether the world is an illusion.

Questions This Interview Explores

• What is the difference between witnessing and Self-realization?
• How does consciousness relate to the world and the process of experience?
• Are subtle beings or laws of nature involved in how the universe functions?
• What happens to consciousness after physical death?
• What is Brahman, and how does it differ from consciousness?

Key takeaways

• Witnessing observes experience from a wider perspective but may retain a subtle sense of individuality.
• Self-realization occurs when consciousness recognizes itself as infinite consciousness.
• Unity involves recognizing both the experiencer and the objects of experience as consciousness.
• Subtle beings can be understood as personified laws of nature or impulses of intelligence.
• Death may involve dropping the physical layers while subtler aspects continue.
• The world seems illusory when its deeper source is overlooked, not because creation is unreal.
• Brahman is beyond consciousness and cannot be experienced as an object.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done hundreds of them now. 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 say this every week, which is that Buddha at the Gas Pump is not entirely a labor of love, although I love it. 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 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 Lorne Hoff. I’ve been a regular reader of his blog since even before that. He has a blog at davidya.ca, because he’s Canadian, and he’s a really good writer. I always learn from reading his blog posts.

That’s something those listening might want to consider doing: subscribing to his blog. He writes things faster than I can keep up with him, because there are 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, possibly even before watching this one, 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 has progressed as well. So I just wanted to have another interview with him to get up to date on what he’s been going through. So let’s start.

✨ Witnessing and the stages of awakening

David: I just wanted to start by putting in a little context, so we know what I’m talking about. In the last interview, 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 known as Brahman, where you go beyond consciousness and all the dynamics of creation and the dynamics of experience.

Rick: Let’s unpack that. Okay, witnessing.

David: Okay. Witnessing is when you shift from being a person experiencing through the senses to being a kind of detached observer, experiencing through the senses, through the mind-body as before, but from an infinite place instead of from a local place.

Rick: So you are that infinite place, which is witnessing, which is perceiving, as it were, through a local instrument?

David: Right. Sometimes people have that begin with Self-Realization, with waking up. 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 can be a lag sometimes.

Rick: Let’s unpack that a little bit. What’s the difference, if any, between the Self and the witness?

David: The witness can be kind of like a localized version of the Self. Sometimes the word jiva is used. Jiva can shift into an observer mode, and so it’s a quality of the Self, but it’s kind of a localized quality of the Self. It’s like 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.

It’s kind of hard to describe exactly.

Rick: Let me ask it this way. Would it be fair to say that witnessing can result from a kind of 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 deeper level of the ocean, but not the ocean floor.

David: Yeah, it’s the Self, but the Self is still kind of at a point of individuation. The ego is still attached; the ego is still identified. So there’s this duality there: there’s the 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: Okay. And then when you actually wake up, the way you think shifts?

David: So then the Self recognizes itself as the Self. 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.

Self-Realization is when the observer wakes up to itself and knows itself as infinite consciousness. Then later on, in the Unity stage, the whole thing is kind of like this: 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: 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: Well, the world is the play of consciousness.

Rick: Is it seen as such in that initial stage of witnessing?

David: Yes.

Rick: Okay. So you see the trees and the birds and everything else as the play of consciousness, but not as consciousness?

David: Well, both.

Rick: Okay, now you’re talking about the Unity stage, are you? Unity?

David: Yeah, no, I jumped into the Unity stage there.

Rick: Prior to that, just witnessing?

David: Yeah.

Rick: No, I jumped into the Unity stage there.

David: So then, basically, the subject and object are one.

Rick: 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 of the heart—they may not recognize that process taking place.

Before you wake up, you experience being the doer: “I am. 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. In the witness stage, there’s some value of that as well. You’re the observer of the doing.

What you thought was mind before, you now experience as happening essentially on its own. There’s some volitional thing going on, but there’s clearly a different driver than you thought. The ego kind of claimed those dynamics, but they turned out not to be mine.

Rick: They’re just nature doing something.

David: And so the process-of-experience part is the process that’s creating the devata value—the laws of nature that are creating the dynamics of experience.

Rick: Okay. Devata means?

David: Essentially, deva means “light being,” and devata 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.

Rick: Okay?

David: Now, there’s a point worth making there. We can experience the world—the functioning of the world—in two primary kinds of ways. One of them is with the intellect. From the perspective of the intellect, we experience laws of nature functioning; we experience principles functioning in the world. We see gravity, for example. 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 as beings interacting and having relationships. They work in teams and communities, and so on like that.

Subtle beings and the layers of creation

Rick: Okay. Since this kind of stuff isn’t necessarily talked about that much in spiritual circles, I just want to dwell on it a little bit rather than 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 every bit as much as you and I are, right? They have their own autonomous existence and perhaps some kind of subtle bodies. They have roles to play and functions to serve.

David: Yeah. One of the things they talk about in different traditions is the layers of becoming—how you get from consciousness into form, into the solid world. 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 between consciousness becoming and physical matter.

People call these planes or dimensions, but essentially there are layers of expression that are progressively more dense and more material. You go through the bliss body, the intellect and intuition level, the mental body, as they call it, the emotional body, and then the physical body. They have various characteristics, and so on. That’s a whole other conversation.

But there are essentially these layers of increasing densification, and there is life on all those levels. 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: Most people’s perception is limited to a certain stratum, or certain portion of that full strata, and other people have a broader range of perspective. They see the subtler beings as routinely as other people see birds.

David: There are people I know who routinely work with subtle beings—for example, for humans or for getting certain things done in the world. A friend of mine is working on creating peace in Washington, D.C., using subtle beings.

Rick: And then, of course, there’s—go ahead, continue.

David: Yeah, well, that’s basically it. There are—

Rick: These beings, as I understand it, and I’m just giving you seed thoughts to elaborate on, have kind of a hierarchical arrangement. Or perhaps you could say concentric circles of influence, where some have the smallest spheres of influence, while others have larger spheres incorporating those smaller spheres, and on and on out—just as we have planets, solar systems, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and so on.

David: Yeah, they work in hierarchies. Most light beings have defined roles. They’re able to easily fulfill their desires and enjoy their being and their doing. It’s quite different from our experience here as humans, where we have this ability to experience choice and free will.

It’s a matter of perspective, because free will and determinism are really two sides of one coin. But again, that’s a whole other topic. We get to have this experience of choice and free will, and we get to choose to work in harmony with life—or not. We’re not talking about that now, though.

So it’s quite a different experience from what they have.

Rick: And how do you know all this? Have you experienced these beings yourself, or is it just from reading books?

David: Yeah. A lot of that stuff isn’t in books that I’ve seen. Now, I’ve been experiencing this since my late teens. It wasn’t something I was looking for. I was like, “I don’t know about that.” But it’s progressed since then. I don’t spend a lot of time with that stuff, but it’s just there.

Rick: Yeah. I suppose the reason we’re talking about it is that anyone who’s interested in spirituality, as part of that, perhaps might want to have an understanding of how creation actually works. It can be handy.

David: Yeah. Once we know how creation works, then we’re much more readily able to work with it and do things that perhaps science hasn’t discovered yet.

No-Self, Reincarnation, and Continuity After Death

Rick: Also, I mean, I’ve seen people who are into spirituality, who have had significant awakenings, 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. There couldn’t be reincarnation.

David: Well, you can think of it in terms of those layers. We have this physical body, and essentially what happens when we die is that we drop the lower parts, the lower stuff, but we just move up, basically.

Rick: Right. The higher stuff just keeps on going.

David: Yeah.

Rick: Okay. That was meant to be some unpacking. I don’t want to throw you off track.

David: We were supposed to go through just a brief thing, but some context is good. Also, in the unity stage, there’s essentially a process of experiencing. By just living life, you experience something and think, “Oh, that is the Self. That is myself, and that is myself, and that is myself.” It progresses through all the layers of experience and into memory, the past and future, and all this stuff.

One of the little things in that is that, because everything comes out of consciousness and you are that, you’re able to have the experience of just about anything. For example, you can see what it is to be a tree or a cat. You can kind of tune in to the life of a tree to such an extent that you notice that, from a broader perspective, in unity, you recognize that consciousness is aware of itself globally and at every point. The value that’s experiencing through this body is one of those points.

It’s a simple matter of moving in consciousness to experience this from a different point.

Rick: It’s still embodied in this body.

David: Yeah, this is kind of like the default. It always comes back here. But put your attention on it.

Now, there is a caveat in that, because you’re experiencing it from how your consciousness is, not from how theirs is. They have filters that you’ll recognize. If the cat isn’t awake, then you’re not going to experience exactly what the cat experiences. You’ll experience the cat’s experience to a degree, but not exactly.

Rick: Yeah.

David: So you get flavors that are pretty good. You get a sense of what it is to be these various things. Why would you want to do that? Well, I’ll just go through it. Curiosity.

Rick: Yeah.

David: Why would you want to watch a movie or something? It’s interesting to find out what it is to be different things. But it’s not something I did for any particular reason. I just did it with a little bit of curiosity.

Okay. In the last interview, we talked a little bit about Brahman. Essentially, Brahman is beyond consciousness, beyond that process of experience. So it’s beyond even the process of experience, the devata value, and all that kind of stuff. It’s simply Brahman.

Brahman can’t be experienced because it’s beyond consciousness. You know it by being it. Brahman knows itself. Brahman, in a sense, is about being the devourer, because you have the experience. It’s kind of like, in unity, you recognize, “Oh, that’s consciousness. That’s consciousness.” But in this case, it just absorbs everything.

Rick: Let me ask you a question about Brahman. A lot of times people 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: Right. That’s true in self-realization and unity. So it’s not ultimately true as far as the ultimate reality.

Rick: Yeah, but what is ultimate? The big enchilada, the reality of the universe?

David: Yeah. There’s the kala model, for example, that rates levels of development. 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.

We’re essentially somewhere between animals and high beings, and we can get about halfway. So ultimate reality—I don’t know if that’s even possible.

Rick: But that’s slightly a different point, because reality should be reality irrespective of who experiences it. Reality is not beholden to us to understand it in order for it to be what it is, right?

David: Well, I’ll get to that more shortly. That’s one of the things that I’m experiencing now: 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 second.

In God-consciousness, there’s essentially a refined form of cosmic consciousness or self-realization. Then there’s a refined form of unity. That’s where you get into what I was talking about—consciousness being aware of itself globally and at every point. The ability to see and perceive those dynamics is part of the refined aspect.

Ultimately, at the top of the unity stage is what’s commonly called God-realization.

Rick: At the top of unity?

David: Yeah. Basically, it’s when we ultimately unite with the divine.

Rick: Okay, so you’re distinguishing God-consciousness from God-realization?

David: Yes. Realization, in the sense of 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: So God-realization is when we realize we are God.

David: Yeah. But not just knowing that I’m God—we become God. Because before that, we can…

Rick: We become something we actually weren’t already? Well, we were, but we finally get to know who we always have been.

David: Yeah, it is that. But before that, there can be the experience, “Oh, I’m God,” 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 said, “I’m God, you’re not. I’m way ahead of you.” (laughs)

But with God-realization, there’s a becoming. That can be the doorway into Brahman, because once you become God, you step out of consciousness. It’s kind of like consciousness is aware of itself globally and at every point. There’s nothing more to be aware of in itself. Then it turns and looks beyond itself.

It’s not the person that wakes up. We wake up from the person.

It’s always been looking in on itself up until that point. Then it can look beyond itself, and 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. What do you say about it? Words like “nothing” are often used—emptiness, void, those kinds of words—but they don’t really quite work. That’s kind of a description of the space of open consciousness as a quality when you’re looking at consciousness in a large way.

Sometimes it’s described as a void or an emptiness because it’s just open space.

Rick: Let me ask you this. While I do, you can re-pin your microphone; it just fell down.

David: On the side?

Rick: Yeah, do it on the other side, so the mic itself isn’t tucked on your shirt.

You’re using a lot of terminology—witnessing, God-consciousness, unity, Brahman. My question is: to what extent can you make this more vividly clear for people, in terms of 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. We had a whole conversation previously about…

Brahman and the Uncreated World

What it’s like to experience Brahman? Well, you’re not experiencing anything. But it’s interesting because you’re also still—when that shift was going on, I can recall that it’s like I’m looking at things, and I know that, from that perspective, nothing has ever been created and nothing ever will be. It’s the uncreated. And yet there it is, right in front of me.

David: What it’s like to experience Brahman? Well, you’re not experiencing anything. But it’s interesting because you’re also still—when that shift was going on, I can recall that it’s like I’m looking at things, and I know that, from that perspective, nothing has ever been created and nothing ever will be. It’s the uncreated. And yet there it is, right in front of me.

It changes because, before that, you’re experiencing the world from the perspective of consciousness. Now you’re experiencing the world from the perspective of Brahman.

It’s not that the world is an illusion, because it’s an expression of consciousness, and consciousness isn’t an illusion. The illusion is when you don’t recognize the source, when you’re just seeing the surface appearance. You have it seen as an illusion. People talk about the world being an illusion, but what it is is that the surface value of what’s being seen is an illusion.

When you go more deeply, you see that it’s an illusion in the sense of the surface value. But when you see its source, that’s not an illusion. That’s part of the dynamics.

Okay, we’re kind of jumping around here.

Rick: Yeah. I hope I’m not throwing you off track, but I’m just trying to get you to clarify these terms as we go along. When you say that it’s an illusion because you’re not perceiving the source, would another way of saying that be that it deserves the term “illusion” because you’re just so underappreciating it? It’s like you’re getting just a faint smudge of what it really is.

David: Right, exactly. 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 exactly an illusion. It’s an appearance, but it’s an appearance of the divine play, which is not a folly or mirage.

Rick: Now, would it be fair to say that it’s an illusion in the sense that—I mean, what you said a minute ago about Brahman—you get the experience that nothing ever happened, that nothing ever manifested?

David: Right, but then it’s not an illusion. The way I described it to Lorne, which he concurred with at the time, was that it’s like the divine has this brief musing, this brief thought. That’s it. Nothing else happens. There’s just this kind of idea.

Rick: And that’s the universe?

David: But consciousness then takes that idea and turns it into a whole thing. It’s not really there, or it was never expressed or created. It was just essentially an expansion of a divine idea.

Rick: But then consciousness runs with it and turns it into a whole thing.

David: Shiva, essentially.

Rick: Shiva being consciousness?

David: Yeah.

Rick: Okay. So the divine has a brief idea, and then Shiva runs with it, goes wild, and elaborates it.

David: Well, it’s kind of like an attempt to know the divine by reflecting that flow.

Rick: Okay. And how does the divine differ from Shiva? What are the…

David: Well, that gets a little further along, but we’re getting there, and we’re getting there. So 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: (The mic keeps slipping down.)

David: Okay. Sorry.

Rick: (Maybe tugging on the wire?)

David: (Oh, maybe that’s it.) Okay. So what’s unfolded since the last interview is that there’s another layer known as Parabrahman.

Rick: Para means beyond.

David: Beyond, yeah, so beyond or greater than. Essentially, it’s also known as pure divinity. Now, the best way to think about that is through the analogy of pure consciousness. We have the experience of being aware of our thoughts and being aware of our emotions. Then, when we meditate, we settle down to deeper and deeper levels. Then we have the experience of samadhi, or pure consciousness—just awareness by itself. There’s no content.

Pure divinity is kind of the equivalent of that. 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. Again, pure divinity can only be known by itself. The experience here was that there was a sense of it, certainly more than Brahman, but no way of knowing it until it essentially started to pour in.

The experience was like this white light pouring into the body and gradually filling it up—from pouring in down to the hip area, and then gradually filling it up.

Rick: 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: Well, this was very specific, though. Then, when that had happened, it could be known. It’s very difficult to put into words. For example, there are kind of seven stages of it, which correlate to the seven chakras and seven koshas and various things, because, as above, so below.

Rick: Seven stages of this filling up with light thing?

David: Yeah, and of the way pure divinity is. 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: But you find yourself going through seven transitions or something?

David: Within what network? Within what range? Within the entire 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 self-knowing that was there. It 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, that’s a good way to put it. It’s just profoundly networked and self-knowing.

Rick: The net of Indra is further along, or is more expressed?

David: That’s kind of more expressed in the bliss body. I’m jumping the gun. But it’s quite a bit—I guess you could say the net of Indra is a reflection of that.

Rick: Okay.

David: Yeah. And it’s like Shakti is—you know, because the experience of the Shaktis is moving through and motivating—

Rick: What are the Shaktis?

David: Well, they’re kind of like threads or sutras of divinity that move through the appearance of consciousness and drive it.

Rick: And are they like the devata we were talking about earlier, or are they different?

David: The devata are driven by that.

Rick: This is like an interrogation.

David: Yeah, it is.

For me, it filled up to about here in stages that correlated with the chakras. Then there was kind of a second thing where it was top-down and came down to the heart in the middle. There have been a couple of similar things in consciousness, so it kind of seems to be a reflection of that.

Laws of Nature and the Ages of Consciousness

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—is the number of laws of nature that are awake, which we were talking about before.

By “awake” here, I mean the opposite of sleep. In darker times, a lot of the laws of nature essentially go dormant and slumber. As we’re in a rising age, laws of nature start waking up.

Rick: Now, when we say “laws of nature,” are we equating that with devata?

David: Yes.

Rick: 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 aren’t maybe doing their jobs. They’re not doing anything. Things could be a lot better if they were all on board.

David: 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.

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

David: Well, there are fundamental things, so it’s effectively everywhere. Once they’re awake and functioning, they integrate with other existing, awake laws and create new syntheses and so forth.

There is potential for new laws to be discovered by humans, and for laws of nature that we would define in science to change, evolve, or shift in certain ways.

Rick: To actually function differently?

David: To function a little differently, or to gain new features—that kind of thing. I’m not aware of that, particularly, but I am noticing these laws of nature waking up.

✨ Awakening in the individual and the collective

Now, the reason I mention this—

Rick: Go ahead.

David: Okay. Well, the reason I mention this is that there’s a new thing that’s happening now, and this is quite recent. Because the physiology is now embodying divinity, the Devas that function—okay, just a second. I’ve got to back up slightly.

There are multiple layers to the body, as I mentioned regarding the koshas. But there are also kind of dominant layers. There’s something like a divine body, although it’s not really the body. There’s the cosmic body, which functions inside creation, outside our universe. It’s kind of more universal, and it’s before the bliss body. Then there are the layers down to the devata body and into our individual forms.

One of the things that happens through the refined stages is a shifting up in those layers. In the later part of unity, you become aware of, and become, the cosmic body. You’re basically functioning 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: You’re helping the collective purify by purifying your aspect or your experience—

David: Yeah, and wake up. So there’s a process where, for a while, for example, I would—I have a blog post where I talk about this—be walking down the road, getting some groceries or whatever, while simultaneously the cosmic body was going around and purifying things.

Rick: You’re aware of yourself doing that as the cosmic body?

David: Yeah. Then, later on, it kind of shifted, and they became one thing. There’s the local and there’s the cosmic, but they’re not two different things. It’s just one thing, but they function on multiple levels.

Rick: Yeah, that makes sense. Because we’re always using the term “multidimensional”—we’re multidimensional beings and all that. So you’re just elaborating on our multidimensionality, what that really means.

David: Yeah. And so, because there’s this divinity being embodied here, the new thing that’s happening is that the Devas that are part of the functionality of this body and the cosmic body are waking up in the Enlightenment sense.

Rick: Yeah, they themselves are becoming enlightened.

David: Yeah, because they’re functioning inside divinity. They know themselves as expressions of divinity, but they aren’t awake to their reality as divinity. It’s kind of like a different form of enlightenment that they have.

What I’m seeing happening is that they’re waking up. They have a universal nature, and then they express up into various forms. They have these kinds of aspects, or fingers—I don’t know how else to describe them—or hairs, whatever. That aspect is active in this body, that body, and so on.

What’s happening is that they’re waking up in this aspect that’s here, and then that shifts back into their universal nature. It kind of falls back in. So there’s a larger-scale awakening that takes place, and then that moves forward into all the aspects.

Rick: So what you’re saying is—

David: It’s another mechanism for global consciousness.

Rick: Yeah. So you’re saying that there are devatas that function within our bodies as well as within the cosmic body. These devatas, I’m inferring, are not exclusive to our body. You and I might have the same devatas 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: Exactly. Yeah. There are some that are Rick-specific, and then there are some that are progressively more universal. As you get deeper in the koshas, you get progressively more universal.

Rick: So the devatas that function in everyone’s body, kind of multitasking and universal—these are the chakra Devas. Let’s try to put this in plain English.

There are certain beings, subtle beings, or impulses of intelligence whose role or function is to reside, in some sense, within everyone’s body, perhaps at various chakras. You’re saying that maybe those are the ones we’re referring to as waking up in a new way, getting kind of—

David: Well, they’re becoming enlightened in the Deva way.

Rick: They’re becoming enlightened as Devas, in a way that a Deva would become enlightened.

David: Yeah.

Rick: 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 everybody in Syria and everyplace.

David: Yeah. Of course, there’s going to be a time process in here, though, because if they’re awakening here, as I say, it has to fall back into the universal nature and wake up in that bigger way. Then it can move forward into all the aspects.

To me, it’s really interesting because it’s like a whole different level. It’s not just a bunch of individual humans who are helping raise group consciousness, but all the levels are kind of coming on board.

Rick: It also puts more richness into the explanation of collective consciousness. Usually, we think of collective consciousness as being this homogeneous, amorphous field, and the field is somehow getting enlivened by people waking up in the world. 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 that this field is not just plain-vanilla, amorphous, homogeneous consciousness or something. It’s actually lively with impulses of intelligence that serve functions within it. Those impulses of intelligence in this, that, and the other physiology are waking up and are better able to perform those functions.

David: Yeah, when you first wake up in self-realization, it’s an awakening to the silence, the silence of consciousness. But the next step is for that silence to wake up to the liveliness of the dynamic, because it’s both silent and alive, right?

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. Essentially, the liveliness stirs the alertness, and it becomes conscious. Then that consciousness begins to move, flows, and curves back on itself.

And becomes intelligent? Yeah. (Laughs.) It’s not just the liveliness agitating the alertness. There’s some intelligence behind that. And so it flows, curves back on itself, becomes self-aware, and the dynamics of consciousness begin. It kind of curves in on itself again and again and—

Rick: Agitation implies chaos, and where you’re—

David: There’s a liveliness, and it implies coherence. And it has a direction.

Rick: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Interesting.

David: Yeah. Another interesting dynamic that’s interesting to share, and that’s been developing for a little while, is that 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 the bliss body—the primordial sound, or whatever—start to differentiate. They take on structure, what people would call sacred geometry. Remember, there are relationships and dynamics going on that create a structure, and then, in the mental body, it gains a field. That goes forward into forms and so on.

But the interesting thing is, I was looking at this juncture: Why does geometry come out of space? There’s a kind of dynamic because, as consciousness comes back in on itself, it creates a subtle space. You’ve got consciousness, subject, and object—(gestures)—and there’s a space in here. That takes the next collapse and becomes a little more dense, becoming the actual element of space.

But why would that space then gain geometry? That turns out to be because the devata work in teams, as I mentioned. When a space is formed, the surface of the space has this dynamic of devata. They talk to each other, sing to each other, and they may create specific—we relate to Sanskrit as the subtle sounds of the devas—but 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. It creates relationships between them.

So you get this subtle structure, and you get directed vibration. Then that structures the fields, which structure form.

Rick: So I was hanging on for dear life to understand that. 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—is that you’re talking about a universal process through which manifestation takes place.

David: Right. I’m talking about why it’s a geometry, though, as opposed to just vibrations in a field. What gives it structure?

Rick: Yeah, what gives it structure? I mean, we’re talking about this a little bit in my interview with Sean Webb. Why should all this structure and orderliness come out of chaos, out of homogenous hydrogen? Why did stars form? Why did stars explode, forming heavy elements? Why did heavy elements accrete into planets and bodies, and why did those bodies evolve? Why is all this evolutionary trajectory taking place?

David: Exactly. Because of the basic laws of physics, like the second law of thermodynamics.

Rick: The second law?

David: I would break it all down to that. Yeah, it was all going to turn into entropy.

Rick: And so where did all the negative entropy come from? I think you’re saying it’s coming from these—

David: Orderliness. Because not only did the universe form planets and stars and that kind of thing, which wouldn’t happen if it were pure entropy, but it has evolved into supporting life forms, and all this kind of thing, however you want to see the history of the universe.

Rick: Which is really hard to explain if you think that the universe is just sort of a random, unintelligent, mechanistic thing.

David: Exactly. It doesn’t make any sense. There has to be not only something to keep it going without falling apart. There has to be a constant input of order, and to make it grow and evolve, you have to have even more.

Rick: Yeah. I imagine there’d be some scientists talking about that at the SAND conference, but I don’t know how they explain it. You’re explaining it in terms of devata, sort of as an expression of that.

So it’s almost like the devatas, if we’re still using the right term—their role is to—they’re almost like Santa’s elves or something. (Laughs.) They’re taking the field of pure potentiality and molding it or shaping it into orderly structures. Those orderly structures become more and more elaborate and complex as—

David: Some of them just come up to the level of a thought, and we have a thought. Some of them come up to the level of emotion, or an energy phenomenon, or electricity. Then some of them come all the way into a physical form.

Rick: Right. And the physical forms are incredibly complex. Look at a single cell—it’s mind-bogglingly complex. We have trillions of them in our bodies, and they’re all coordinating with each other.

David: Yeah. I’ve been reading a little bit about DNA and stuff. It’s fascinating because now, with mitochondrial DNA, they can trace back the mother’s line. If you’re male, the Y-DNA can trace back the father’s line for 100,000 years.

Rick: Amazing.

David: Yeah.

Rick: Solves crimes sometimes. (Laughs.) But I mean, I don’t know, maybe we’ll see how much we can squeeze out of this one point. I’m always awestruck by the beauty and complexity of creation. I’m always pondering what might be the mechanics through which this takes place.

It’s one thing to just say, “Okay, God did it,” or, “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: I have a great deal of gratitude for getting these insights because this isn’t coming from me doing something or accomplishing anything. It’s just essentially, I guess, some kind of dharmic—your role to play. I’m called to write about it, so I do.

Rick: Yeah. Okay.

Divine Sutras and the Awakening of Chakra Devas

David: I did want to mention, rolling back slightly, when I was talking about these devata waking up, or the devas in the body, the chakra devas waking up. One of the things that was an impetus for that was that, in the summer, Lorn and Lucia Hoff—you mentioned Lorn earlier—introduced what they refer to as the Divine Sutras.

It’s essentially two parts. One is samyama from the Yoga Sutras, from Patanjali.

Rick: Yeah.

David: But when people are awake, they can use samyama much more directly and much more precisely. It’s not just dropping it into the lake, throwing it into the lake. You can actually put it into a precise point. It’s an upgrade to the samyama technique, so that you’re able to place it, and then the Divine Sutras, which—

Rick: Okay, wait, hang on. Unless somebody has done the TM-Siddhi program, they probably don’t know what the samyama technique is. You better describe that a little bit.

David: Okay, let’s see. Remember, essentially, samyama in the Yoga Sutras—there are gazillions of versions of that out there—is essentially a technique that combines samadhi, pure consciousness.

Rick: Yeah.

David: Essentially, it’s when you’ve established enough from your practice to be able to stay in samadhi without being bumped, to be able to have a thought while you’re in samadhi. Then you’re able to add an intention, a specific intention or a specific focus. The third book in the Yoga Sutras 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: None of which you’ve seen anybody accomplish yet. (Laughs.)

David: Anyway, know their past lives—

Rick: But some of them are subjective when they say they’ve accomplished them. (Laughs.)

David: Okay. So this is applying that technique with more precision, or applying it to a quality of the Divine Mother, of pure divinity. I started doing that this summer, and that’s really kicked it up. Essentially, it kind of enlivens the divinity in a way. It was becoming embodied here, but that enlivened it a lot more, and that’s helping to—that seems to be the cause of them starting to wake up.

Rick: So Lorn and Lucia are teaching them?

David: Yeah, they’ve started to teach them. Another friend of mine has had a similar experience. A different kind of deva woke up, a different type, but a similar kind of thing.

Rick: Is there actual—do you actually communicate with these devas? Do they say, “Hey, David, how’s it going?” and you say—

David: Well, not on that kind of level. But there’s—

Rick: I’m being facetious.

David: Well, it’s kind of interesting because right now, before, there was the experience of being awake and having 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 it: “Oh, yeah, there’s these devata interacting this way over here, and this is going on, and, oh, I ate too much,” or whatever else is going on.

But there are multiple points of awakeness here. There isn’t just the default experience of being awake. Now there are these other points that are experiencing being awake in different ways.

Rick: Those devatas. So, just to use a metaphor, just as we’re a conglomeration of trillions of cells, many of which aren’t human—the whole 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. These things have lives of their own, and they’re part and parcel of our makeup.

They might not be exclusively within us. We’ve already established that they might have a broader life, just as the molecules we breathe in and breathe out—

David: There’s a hierarchy there, too, because there are the ones that are more universal, and then there’s the kind of progressively more expressed, and then they’re more and more local.

Rick: Maybe some are with—

David: And, yeah, yeah, but the big ones are universal, right?

Rick: And so where was I going with this? They’re waking up. 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.

Maybe it was about communicating with them. Oh, yeah.

David: Yeah, so there’s—

Rick: Something in the Gita about supporting the gods, and they support you. I wonder if that’s what this—

David: Different level, but yes, it’s both ways. There are various dynamics going on. I can put my attention on the territory of one of the Devas, and it amps that way up.

They’re kind of alive, and they’re interacting with each other as well. The awake ones are creating synthesis, especially the throat and heart ones right now.

Rick: 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”?

David: Well, probably, but I’m not aware of that part. I’m pretty sure that I do feel like I’m in some kind of training program. It’s just kind of, “Okay, now we’re finished with this lesson. Now it’s this one.”

Rick: Yeah. Well, we’re all inside of a training program, each in our own ways. Okay. So what have you gotten in your notes there?

David: Okay. Let me just go over some other points we talked about here. The other thing that I wanted to talk about was the book.

I think we touched on it briefly in the first interview, but I don’t think it was written at the time of the first interview. It was written, but not finished. Basically, what it needed to wait for was the Parabrahman shift.

Rick: And that tremendous introduction you had to wait for—that brilliant piece of writing from Rick Archer.

David: But, yeah, basically, it’s a project that was driven by the process for a lot of my life. There isn’t a person here managing my life in that kind of sense. It’s managed by nature. Certainly, there are opinions and tastes and things like that, but there’s a lot of flow of nature through life.

A lot of it is allowing life to unfold how it’s unfolding, which took a lot of practice. There are still areas of life that could use some work.

Writing the book was a good example. I was trying to get it finished. I actually hoped to have it finished before the first interview, but I certainly didn’t. It turned out that the Parabrahman stage needed to unfold first so that I could actually talk about it in a semi-intelligent way.

So, anyway, it finally happened, and I got it finished and published. The book is about the seven stages of enlightenment. It’s mainly written for—

Rick: Not seven states of consciousness, but seven stages of enlightenment. States of consciousness are not—different. I mean, not like Maharishi’s seven-state model.

David: Those are included in it, but it goes a little further than what he brought out back in the day.

The main motivator was that, because I write about this stuff online, I get a lot of contact from people who are having shifts they don’t understand and don’t have the background for. Sometimes the tradition they’re in or the teachings they’ve heard don’t cover the territory, or the teaching says it’s supposed to happen one way and it’s happening another way.

So it’s written as an overview of the process, including some of its primary variations and what drives them, to support people on their journey. It’s also kind of like a map.

Reading it can definitely create concepts, but the map is not the road. The mind has a certain nature, and if you don’t give it a good map, it will make up its own, which may not be helpful.

The map is not the road.

For people who say that we shouldn’t talk about the stages because it will create concepts, there are teachers I’ve met who don’t talk about the stages for that reason. But from my experience, the mind is going to create concepts anyway. It’s better to have good concepts and then recognize that they’re a map to be dropped, because reality is beyond the mind and beyond concepts. It’ll never be what—

Rick: Yeah, I mean, if any teacher is sitting up in front of a roomful of people talking, he’s using concepts.

David: Yes, exactly. You can’t communicate without them. Even words themselves are essentially idea forms that we have a shared idea about, although there can be variations. For example, I use the word “awakening”—

Rick: Concepts shouldn’t have a bad reputation. 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: On getting attached to those concepts, because we can attach ourselves to them, and that could actually be a barrier to the shift.

Rick: One thing I’ve seen over the years, ever since I started doing BatGap, is people who mistake the concept of nonduality for the actual living experience of it. They assume that they’ve achieved some sort of nondual state, whereas they’ve really just gotten a little hypnotized by the concept.

David: That’s actually one of the things I talk about in the book. A lot of people talk about self-realization in terms of nonduality, but in the original texts, self-realization is described as dvaita, duality.

There is the experience of being awake within and a separate, perhaps illusory—but not always—world. So there are two things there. You may write that off and say, “The world’s an illusion,” but it’s still separate. It’s not part of the whole or part of the oneness. It’s not a nondual stage.

It’s actually not until later, in unity, where the one that has progressively expanded becomes even more so in Brahman, that it’s an actual nondual stage.

✨ Different flavors of awakening

Rick: You sent me an email the other day, which I thought was fascinating. I think you sent it to both myself and Kristin Kirk. It talked about how awakening or realization could have very different flavors or emphases depending upon which guna was predominant in the nervous system.

If this is too abrupt a segue for you, let me know. I didn’t want to cut you off from something you were going to talk about. You talked about how people might have very different experiences depending on their neurophysiological makeup. Tighten up your mic again, because you keep talking into it there.

You hear people talk about Bernadette Roberts saying one thing and somebody else saying another, 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: The first thing is that there’s this concept from Vedic philosophy of the gunas. They’re essentially three fundamental qualities of creation, maintenance, and destruction. The interplay of those gunas is what leads to the various qualities of the world appearance.

We tend to have a dominant guna in our functioning. Of course, everyone has all of them, but there will tend to be a dominant one. For most people in the world, tamas guna is dominant, which is essentially inertia or dullness. Consciousness is not as clear, and so we experience the world as solid and real because that quality of solidity and inertia is dominant.

When we engage in spiritual practices, various things can influence it, but one big influence is that we shift toward rajas, the fire and transformation guna. This comes from Shankara, by the way; it’s something he brought out.

When rajas becomes more dominant, we come to see the world as illusory. The deeper reality becomes—

Rick: You said that was tamas?

David: No, no. With tamas, the world is real. It seems real because of tamas. With rajas, it becomes seen as illusory, which is a sign of spiritual progress.

It’s interesting because it’s quite common to have that 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.

People can wake up and still experience the world as real and solid. They can wake up and experience the world as illusory. Or there’s the third type: when sattwa becomes dominant, with clarity or purity—there isn’t really a good English word for it—the person experiences the world as a divine play, lila .

People can wake up and still experience the world as real and solid. They can wake up and experience the world as illusory. Or there’s the third type: when sattwa becomes dominant, with clarity or purity—there isn’t really a good English word for it—the person experiences the world as a divine play, lila.

That can also be dominant when somebody is self-realized. If sattwa is dominant, then they’re much more likely to have a God-consciousness phase. If it’s not, 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: So being in unity increases sattwa, and then with the increase of sattwa, they eventually have that phase?

David: Yes. A friend of mine in Brahman is having their God-consciousness shift into their God-consciousness phase.

Rick: There’s God-consciousness—well, I don’t want to get sidetracked. We should keep focusing on this. But if you’re having a God-consciousness phase, as you put it, what does that mean exactly? Are you experiencing celestial perception? Are you experiencing angels and subtle beings, or what?

David: Essentially, it’s a combination. It’s kind of like Shiva—it’s the masculine, consciousness side of the equation. Shakti is the feminine side. So there’s the awakening heart and the refinement of perception.

It’s kind of becoming aware of all those layers between the physical surface levels and consciousness. There’s all that stuff in between: the bliss body, the field of creation, and so on, where these dynamics are taking place.

Once you become aware of those, your experience of the world is quite different, because how you see it becoming is different. What you see underlying it is different.

Rick: So you can be in unity and experience the world in terms of the Self, and yet not have experienced all of its subtle strata?

David: Exactly. It’s funny because it seems like you would have to have—

There are also people who have that refined perception who aren’t awake yet.

Rick: Who haven’t even realized the Self, yeah.

David: They’ve recognized consciousness, and they’ve recognized the flow of divinity and subtle beings and the awakening heart. Although, as Maharishi said, you can’t really know God, per se, until you’re awake—until you know who you are.

Until there’s that stable platform of awake consciousness within, it’s hard for the really refined perception to be stable, because it’s so fine. When you have the mind kicking things around, it’s really hard for that to unfold.

Rick: Yeah. He also said that there would be a certain immensity to the experience of God that would be overwhelming. He said God couldn’t even telephone from a distance; you’d be crushed.

David: Well, that’s the thing with pure divinity. There’s an embodiment of this stuff, but just putting the attention on pure divinity is like—well, the physiology isn’t capable of sustaining it. It sustains it 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 we’ll see.

Rick: Yeah. You were talking about the cosmic college earlier, and I interviewed this guy who had a background with the Theosophical Society. 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, you’re kind of back in kindergarten at the next range of—

David: It wouldn’t surprise me.

Every time I’ve had a stage shift, like from self-realization or into unity, whatever it feels like, you’re back in kindergarten again, because the platform you’re experiencing reality from has changed. And as you go further along, the whole environment of your reality changes as well. They go together. When you change, it shifts.

Rick: Some people might find that discouraging or disheartening. They might think, “Oh, God, I’m always going to be chasing the dangling carrot.”

David: Oh, no, no. It’s not like that. It’s an adventure. It’s really cool.

Rick: But, yeah, I mean, I find it more inspiring than anything, because it’s like, “Oh, boy, you know, the wonders never cease.”

David: Even within the unity stages, there are a series of substages, as you progressively recognize yourself as more and more and more. And so there are these progressive shifts. 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. There is this progressive series of shifts. It makes you very good at letting go and stuff, because everything keeps shifting and changing.

Rick: Yeah. So you’re saying a minute ago that, I guess this is attributed to Shankara, according to the predominance of the guna, your awakening is going to have a different flavor, and your orientation to the world is going to be different. Either, what is it, real or illusory or divine?

David: Yeah. And it’s interesting, too, because maya, if you look at the roots of maya, means “to build.” It doesn’t actually mean illusion. It means the creation.

Rick: I remember it being defined as “that which is not.”

David: Oh, interesting.

Rick: But anyway, maybe it can mean both things.

David: Exactly.

Rick: Another thing I’m wondering along this very same line is, some people make a big emphasis on there being no remains of any sense of a personal self anymore. 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 say, “There’s no one here.” And I wonder if that’s a guna thing, too.

David: Yeah, actually, that’s a good point. I hadn’t thought of it that way. Yeah, that might relate to that.

Rick: Such as your glasses. You haven’t pulled the mic off yet.

David: It could be. Yeah. What’s your… Lorne 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: If I stick you with a pin, I’m not sticking the couch. I’m sticking you.

David: Yeah, I’ll go, “Ouch.” Yeah, exactly. There are certainly opinions here and tastes. I like this; I don’t like that.

Rick: And is it a person who has those? Is that the flavor?

David: But it’s not… It’s like before, it was what I was, and now it’s kind of like this. It’s like the idea of lesha avidya. There’s the butter, and then there’s a little bit of grease on the palm. It’s kind of like that. There’s this sheen on the surface. There are laws of nature functioning a certain way here that have the ability to write, but not so much to pole-vault.

And so there are the skill areas, and so on, and all those make up a personality. There are certain ways of being, but there is this quality of lesha avidya that’s there. It has to be there, because you can’t really function in the world unless you know that there’s a person. You don’t just walk out into traffic. 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: 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 can’t really deny anyone’s experience. But I’ve never understood it.

David: Yeah, no. An example for me: when I first woke up and had the self-realization shift, there was a sense of ego death.

Rick: Yeah.

David: Yeah, it felt like it.

Rick: Someone said, “Hey, David, you turned your head.”

The Ego as a Function After Awakening

I don’t remember, but what I realized after a short while was that what had actually ended was the attachment to the ego. 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 function, the ahamkara function, is still there. But it’s like my little finger. It’s not central; it’s just there.

David: I don’t remember, but what I realized after a short while was that what had actually ended was the attachment to the ego. 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 function, the ahamkara function, is still there. But it’s like my little finger. It’s not central; it’s just there.

A 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 is kind of a three-level structure to identity. The concept of a me falls away with self-realization. The energetic drivers of that fall away in the God-consciousness phase, assuming people are 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. It’s a somewhat different process. It’s like an embodiment thing.

Anyway, with the loss of that core identity, there was a loss of any sense of a personal me. Any personal pronouns—David—were meaningless. That lasted about two weeks, and then it kind of integrated. So if I had bought into that, I may have taken my spiritual name or something and stopped using personal pronouns. Friends kind of joked about my “person formerly known as David.”

Rick: But David was still there. He was the one… The analogy I thought of is that you were no longer part of the awareness, though.

It’s like if you’re in a dark room, a candle can be really bright. 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: But you can figure out how to go to the bathroom and how to brush your teeth.

Rick: Yeah, but it was also like, when I woke up, there was an ego-death thing. When I next sat down to meditate, I couldn’t figure out how to meditate, as the person who meditated was no longer there.

David: But then, after a couple of days, it integrated. The automatic functions still work.

Rick: Maybe the thing was that you were sort of already in the transcendent, so how could you meditate? Why would you meditate?

David: Well, there was that, too. We already were, yeah. That definitely changed. It was sort of like dropping the relative instead of going somewhere.

But, yeah, it was a really curious experience. There was some sense of a person way, way off in space somewhere, but how did I meditate with that? Like I say, it integrated after a few days, and I was then able to resume practice. So, yeah, it was an interesting experience. I can see why people talk about that, because I can see the experience. But for me, in every case, the distinctions integrated. The priority shifted; what was at the center shifted, but the basics were reintegrated.

Moving beyond a sense of completion

Rick: Have you seen cases where people get to a certain stage and then kind of fixate on it, assume that they’re done, and don’t move on?

David: Yeah. I was corresponding with somebody just last week, and they had reached the third time where they felt done. So, yeah, people can feel quite done after they wake up and even start to teach. I had this sense of wanting to go out and tell the world. I’ve had people I’ve interviewed tell me that, but I knew better than to do that.

But, yeah, I reached that point—I don’t know how many times. There can be this sense of being complete and done at certain points. But then, after a little bit of time, new vistas open up. It’s kind of like when you first wake up. There is a sense of liberation: “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?” It’s still happening. How do I tune myself to this doing so that I don’t have events 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, you can move more into the flow of it.

Rick: Yeah. Maybe it’s natural that there would be resting places after significant shifts where you could just enjoy that for a bit without worrying about what more there might be. But then the process of evolution naturally gives you a prod.

David: Yeah. One of the big things that tends to happen is that you create this big open space with a shift, and then anything that’s unresolved starts to bubble up into that space to be resolved.

I’ve known a couple of people who had a really rough time after they woke up, because there was stuff that I didn’t think would be possible to wake up with and still be carrying. But they did, and then it’s right in their face. You can’t push it aside. You’re conscious now, so then they really had to face it. So, yeah, preparing the ground is a really good idea.

Rick: 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 tend to do and are well equipped to do. Do you want to comment on that before I continue? Because there’s a question here.

David: I just want to point out something I didn’t mention earlier. The third kind of audience for the book is people doing research. I see people who are doing research on this stuff, and they don’t have the complete picture. They don’t have the fundamentals. So they’re creating models based on people’s experiences 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. Because of how they’re coming to it, it changes how they experience it. Is it an awakening from an ego into a no-self? 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. Each of those variations can sound like they’re quite different, but it’s actually the same process being experienced somewhat differently subjectively.

There are other things, like I mentioned about the difference between emptiness and nothing. In Brahman, they’re actually quite different, but are sometimes confused to be the same thing.

Rick: William James wrote that book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, which I never read, but the title is interesting in this light. I’m wondering if—

David: The challenge with that kind of thing, though, is that the person doesn’t know how to differentiate between someone who’s had a shift and is experiencing from a new reality, and someone who’s had a passing experience.

Rick: 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 at which we really understand, and have a very well-defined map of, the territory of human experience, kind of like we have the periodic table of elements or a detailed map of North America now, with satellite imagery and everything so precise compared to what Lewis and Clark had?

David: But the challenge, though, is that the platform is evolving. Let me give you an example. The Yoga Sutra, which we mentioned earlier, describes waking up. But Patanjali doesn’t call it self-realization, or he defines it very differently. He talks about kaivalya, singularity, which doesn’t make a lot of sense until you roll back to that thing I talked about 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. We can create these maps, but the book, for example, is taking some of the ancient Vedic knowledge and putting it into modern language and a modern context—how people are experiencing it now, as opposed to what Patanjali potentially described.

Rick: But I guess the point I was getting at is, you know, what science wants to do is understand how the universe works—what’s really going on—and it’s obviously a work in progress. Every single field of science has plenty of ways to go, plenty of ways to go. And so it is with spirituality. Did anybody ever have it all figured out? And if not, will anybody?

David: But the thing is, it’s not about a person figuring it all out. The Vedas aren’t all known by one person.

Rick: Nor is any scientific thing known by one person. It’s a collaborative effort.

David: Yeah, it’s a collaborative effort. It’s known by the group.

So, do you think—okay, one of the experiences I have that might be filling this in a little bit—the Vedas themselves are encoded with what are essentially experiences. They’re encoded with the person who’s going to experience and cognize them. So there’s essentially a specific person who is born and has the experience. What that does is awaken the laws of nature that are associated with that.

And again, they’re mentioned in the Vedas. If you look at the Vedas, they talk about the rishi, the devata, and the chhandas—the values in the meter. It’s kind of like there’s this blueprint, and at a certain point in time somebody comes forward, has this experience, awakens those principles in life, and the universe can evolve.

So the Veda is kind of a description of those key—“signposts” is the wrong word—but the key points in the process where the next stage can come along, where it’s time for the next stage to come along.

Rick: So are you saying that—I think you’re sort of saying that the Vedas are more fundamental than the universe itself? They’re this ultimate template of creation, and no one person can actually know the whole template. People can know the field in which the template resides.

David: But by 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 cognition. There are those 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 are revived again in a rising age.

Then, earlier on, someone has a basic cognition, where more people are having that experience, more people are having that cognition, which enlivens it in consciousness. So it’s like a group effort. This person wakes up this day; this person cognizes this thing; this person brings forward this knowledge in this way; this person publishes Eckhart’s book; and this person… So there’s this group, collaborative effort that together raises the whole and makes it part of the group.

I don’t have enough time in my entire life even to have the experience of what it’s like to be every kind of creature and being.

Rick: And it wouldn’t really be useful or necessary to know that.

David: Exactly, whereas it might be someone else’s dharma to bring that out more.

Rick: In a scientific sense, 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: Yeah. Another example would be that we live in a creation where there are the divine—there are kind of like these thoughts of the divine—and that expresses creations. We happen to be in a creation that’s quite a bit more complex. Within that creation are multiple universes, and in each universe the laws of nature are a little bit different. So different kinds of beings are being expressed, and so on.

Just to take a scan of the different universes would take more than a lifetime. There’s so much vastness.

Rick: This universe alone has 10 trillion galaxies.

David: Exactly. So there’s only so much an individual can process. There’s just this vastness, and it takes all of us to do this together. Like we talked about earlier, with the devas waking up, they also play another role. So it’s not just humans doing this, but other kinds of beings. And I suspect, to a certain point, even more- or less-evolved beings—you might say some of the animals and this kind of thing—will probably be part of that too. I wouldn’t know what to expect.

Rick: Well, they say inside a yuga, you know, the animals are much more conscious and awake and everything than they are.

David: Well, because we’re all in the same consciousness. So it raises that up to that level, and then everything is raised.

Rick: Rama had monkeys and bears helping him fight Ravana. Yeah. Since I asked you that question 10 minutes ago, our discussion of it has given me a better feeling for the answer. The universe itself is sort of God involved in a hide-and-seek operation, a self-exploration thing. It’s almost presumptuous of a human being to suggest that, in either science or spirituality, we’ll ever get a complete, detailed, nailed-down understanding of every last little mystery of creation. There’s always going to be room for exploration and discovery.

David: For me, it’s an evolution. These days, I can shift to different realities depending on how I want to explore. There’s the reality that nothing has ever been created in the first place and never will be. There is a reality in which divinity is profoundly self-networked, and there’s no reason for it ever to express because it already knows.

And then there’s the reality in which the universe—like the Vedas and the devas waking up, the kind of thing we were talking about earlier—is going through a process of waking up, and it goes through these various cycles. There’s an article where I talk about why creation would repeat itself. If the purpose of creation is to come to know itself, why would it do it again? But it doesn’t, because…

Rick: Why do you wake up the next day after having already been awake the previous day? You get to experience it again, but differently.

David: Yeah. They’re all essentially perspectives, and each perspective has knowledge that comes with it—ways of knowing and stuff like that. It’s profound to experience pure divinity, this profound self-knowing, but there’s no learning to happen in that. It’s already known.

Whereas, going down and coming into a human experience, there are all kinds of learning that can take place. There are all kinds of nuances that can be fleshed out. All these different variations, all these different beings experiencing in different ways, bring out different aspects and move things along. We all have a part to play in this lila.

Rick: I was just going to say, and you can see why they use that word—play. The whole thing is like, “Well, what a game!” It’s so much more entertaining than just sort of, pfff.

David: And it was certainly a relief when you can sit back and watch the stage, as opposed to being on the stage and seeing it as real. You can get into the suffering.

Rick: Yeah, it can seem very real. There can be circumstances—we live fairly blessed lives in terms of our health, our food, our economics, our comfort, and all that stuff—but some people are really going through it in this world, and you can’t blame them for seeing it as real. If you’re in the Congo, going through what women are going through, or in Aleppo, going through bombing…

David: Yeah, if that’s their experience, that’s their experience. But it’s beautiful that there is this awakening happening on a larger and larger scale in the world. That’s going to raise people out of that over time, lift all boats. Yeah, yeah. And that’s really beautiful. I have no idea how much time has passed.

Rick: I don’t know how much time has passed. An hour and a half. See anything else there?

Kundalini, embodiment, and preparation

David: Oh, one thing. One thing it would be interesting to touch on, which I became aware of more recently. Adyashanti talks about head, heart, and gut.

Essentially, when there’s the process of Kundalini rising to the crown and awakening, and then there’s a descent of embodiment—you can say a descent of Shakti. Shakti rises to join Shiva, and then they descend together. There’s this prominent predominance of head, heart, and gut.

I mentioned earlier 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, or rather the root, which from my experience is related to Brahman. But why didn’t the throat—the throat wasn’t one of the stages?

It turns out that, in my experience, the descent is happening on a subtler level than the rise. It’s like the Kundalini, in those koshas—the layers we were talking about earlier. The chakras are introduced on the bliss-body level, the bliss-body kosha, and then they express forward through the layers into the energy body. They 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 in your individual body, then you can get them in different spaces and misaligned in various kinds of ways. Then we have the individual expression of them in the energy body.

That’s also why the chakras are experienced differently. Some people describe chakras with geometry. Some people describe them with mantra. Some people talk about the flowers, as flowers, and some people talk about vortexes. This is experiencing them on different levels, on those different levels.

It turns out that on these other levels there are what’s called the Maha Marmas. They’re kind of like a higher octave of certain chakras. I can’t remember the names of all of them, but there are these three. Hridaya is the heart one, so the Anahata Chakra and the Hridaya Maha Marma. Basti is the gut, or something.

Anyway, they mark a person who has a practice and so on. If their process is to have the full range of self-realization, God-consciousness, and unity, then there’s the awakening of the head—the concepts of self and the concept of the ego dynamics. That’s the head, the top Maha Marma. Then there’s the heart Maha Marma with God-consciousness, and the gut with unity.

The book doesn’t have that more recent discovery. I’d heard of the Hridaya chakra, the higher-octave version, but I didn’t realize it was a Maha Marma. That tied several traditions together.

Rick: Yeah. There’s room for exploration here. I don’t know if we want to go into it anymore, but 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: It’s an energy, but it’s important to understand that process is not causal of the awakening. It’s embodied. It’s a way of correlating; it’s not causal.

Rick: No, but is it correlated?

David: Yes, it’s correlated. So, for example, someone can have Self-realization and then unity, and skip that process and not have God-consciousness until later.

Similarly, with the chakra rising, it’s a way of embodying the energy 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.

Rick: Yeah.

David: It’s divinity. It’s kind of like this little drop of pure divinity.

Rick: Yeah. But is it preparatory? I mean, could you say that it’s—

David: It’s good preparation. But there are some people who have the approach that if I can get my Kundalini up to the crown—

Rick: Then I’ll have my awakening, which has a very sort of individual-effort connotation: “I can do this.”

David: Exactly. Whereas awakening is a letting go. It’s an allowing or surrender, because it’s the divine that’s doing it. It’s not you; it’s not the person.

That’s actually a good point to mention, as I did in the last interview: it’s not the person that wakes up. We wake up from the person.

Rick: Right.

There’s nothing a person can do to awaken. They can prepare the ground so that, when an opportunity arises and that opening happens, they’re able to stabilize it and keep it. They’re able to have a smoother process.

David: There’s nothing a person can do to awaken. They can prepare the ground so that, when an opportunity arises and that opening happens, they’re able to stabilize it and keep it. They’re able to have a smoother process.

So it’s really valuable to have those spiritual techniques, but the techniques themselves will never cause the awakening, because it’s the divine that’s doing it.

Rick: Yeah. So is it sort of like the divine—if we want to, what’s the word? Not anthropomorphize, but maybe personalize it?

Does the divine sort of keep an eye on humanity and say, metaphorically speaking, “This guy’s ready. Bless him with awakening”? Or is it more like, when you’re ready to pop, you don’t pop through your own—

David: When you’re ready to pop, it’s because it’s time. It’s kind of—

Rick: But a whole lot of transformation has taken place to get you to that point.

David: Yeah. And then, when we’re going through the process, we don’t necessarily experience or recognize that a process is taking place, and that it’s going to lead to this.

It’s only when we look back in retrospect that we see, “Oh, that actually contributed, and that contributed to it.” I didn’t think that was—something like a disaster or something really nasty can be a profound healing, which leads to the awakening. It’s like that.

We can’t see, while we’re in the middle of it, what’s contributing. But later on, we can look back and see. There is definitely this kind of process where we’re being guided. But again, it’s not us doing it.

Rick: Through others, there’s that saying, “God helps those who help themselves.” There’s also the saying—

David: We’re more inclined to wake up.

Rick: Or, “Enlightenment may be an accident, but spiritual practice makes you accident-prone.”

David: Yeah, because I think there are various points where somebody might make the shift. But if they don’t—if they get a call, a movement, or a sense that they should go and see a teacher, and they resist and don’t do it, or whatever—there’s some circumstance that’s presented to them, and they’re not ready, or they don’t respond, then the opportunity goes by.

But it’s not like we shouldn’t be trying to double-guess or second-guess our life or anything. I think that if it’s meant to happen, it’s going to happen.

Rick: 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 is going to happen if it’s supposed to happen. It sounds too defeatist or something.

It’s like, to get back to Patanjali, he talks about yogis being mild, medium, or intense in terms of their determination, with degrees of intensity up to vehement. Those with vehement intensity are more likely to awaken.

David: There are a lot of little things in there. For example, in the seventh mandala of the Rig Veda, the sage Vasishtha mentions the importance of desiring unity.

Rick: Yeah.

David: So there has to be some forward movement there, too, some intention to move forward. As I’ve observed, if you don’t know it’s there, you’re not going to desire it. If you feel done—

Rick: Right.

David: Then, you know, I think that’s the concept of being done, or the concept that there’s nothing more than self-realization, which can actually turn into a barrier in itself. Because then there’s not going to be any intention, any attention—

Rick: Which highlights the value of what you’re doing and what I’m trying to do with the show: to have greater knowledge out there in terms of the possibilities. Otherwise, people can shortchange themselves by thinking that some relatively minor attainment is the end.

David: I wasn’t even really aware that some of this stuff was possible until quite recently.

Rick: But the whole thing about grace—I guess we’ve covered it, but you talked about—Okay, here’s 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?” Do you understand the question?

David: 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 a long time, was that when I started witnessing in the seventies, according to the information I had, that indicated Self-realization. But I knew I wasn’t self-realized because there was still an 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 it. It talked about this process. In the Kundalini rise, 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.

When it reaches that point, there’s a certain kind of experience. In my case, it was a brilliant white flash, and everything disappeared for a short time. Then, basically, I witnessed thereafter. There’s kind of a witness point just below that.

Rick: Witnessing thereafter included during sleep?

David: Yeah. So the witnessing, if the Kundalini is rising up and going down again, comes in and goes, comes in and goes. But once it reaches Makara, it remains stable. There’s only a short distance between that and awakening. For me, though, it was about 31 years.

The Kundalini Vidya tradition that talked about this mentioned that sometimes it can stop there to allow the body to clear out, because the crown chakra kind of manages the process and helps clear out the physiology, making it more ready.

When I did wake up, it was very clear and solid right away, and a couple of the stages came quite quickly afterward because there had been that preparation. Whereas some people will awaken earlier and have more processing to do after their first shift. As I like to say, everybody’s process is a bit different.

The point I was making was that Kundalini coming to the crown is not the cause of the awakening; it’s the embodiment. There’s a process of preparation where the Kundalini comes up. By the time someone is awake, the Kundalini is up. But it may come pretty well up beforehand, 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.

They’re tied; there’s a correlation. That’s the point I’m trying to make: it’s not causal. Trying to force the Kundalini, from what I’ve seen, is not productive. People I know who have done that have found it can be dangerous, and they have a much rougher process.

Rick: Yeah. I know some people who’ve gone through very rough Kundalini processes. They even consider themselves to have had some circuits fried permanently as a result.

David: It’s a powerful energy. If you practice appropriate practices, it arises naturally, on its own accord.

Rick: Yeah, for sure. So, just to rehash that 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 two correlate closely enough that, if it has fully risen, you are awakened?

David: I can see, from what I said earlier, some variation on that. It could come up and yet there could be no awakening. I’ve seen people, for example, who wake up, and because it’s so ordinary, normal, and simple, and they have all these concepts of what it’s supposed to look like, they don’t believe it.

So it takes a while for them to accept it, and for them to start seeing that things have changed, including how they’re responding to life and so on. There are all kinds of variations in how it shows up. For me, as I mentioned, it was really clear and distinct. There was an ego death, so there was no mistaking it for me.

For other people, it’s much softer. We talked about oozing on the last interview. Oozing is this very slow, gradual process. I’ve met a couple of people who didn’t know they had awakened, even though they had been awake for a decade.

Rick: Because they were expecting something else.

David: Yeah, they were expecting some flashiness and some skills or whatever.

Rick: Which, again, points to the value of knowledge.

David: Yeah, exactly. And once they knew they were awake, their progress kicked up. They were engaging with it and paying attention to it. It wasn’t just this background thing that was there in their life.

Rick: It’s almost like—I mean, what I sense, in my opinion, is that the knowledge component is almost as important as the experience component in the whole evolutionary process. You really can’t take that far, that big a step with one leg without bringing the other leg along. You have to keep the two apace.

David: Yeah, it’s like the map analogy. You can experience going down the road, and you can stop at a tourist attraction, a gas station, or a restaurant, and have these experiences. You can just drive down the road and 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 things as you go toward that destination.

Rick: Yeah. And again, this is my observation, subject to flaws and limitations: a person can be quite advanced in their evolution, yet, due to some misunderstanding or lack of understanding, or something that is not fully developed in that area, they can get stuck in some way. They don’t realize that there could be more.

David: Yeah, because there’s the idea of wake up, grow up, and clean up. Waking up is great, but if you don’t take care of your baggage, your junk, your garbage, and all that stuff, you give more power to it. So it’s really a holistic kind of process if you want to have the whole person.

I’m not sure—I haven’t established this yet—but I’ve seen people who 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 awakeness would be driving the bus most of the time, they can still get caught a little bit by that.

It wouldn’t surprise me if there are some people out there who have some of that, or if there’s some subconscious material. There are all those layers. When you have some unconscious junk in those subtle layers that you haven’t brought light to, and there’s resistance to going into whatever charge is there, it’s still going to influence your expression and how you respond to things in your life.

Rick: So what would you prescribe, if you would? 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 safeguarding and facilitating the path, so that one doesn’t get stuck and just continues to foster both one’s experience and one’s understanding?

David: Well, I found that being part of a teaching was useful for a while. It gave me techniques that were quite effective for clearing the ground, experiencing samadhi, and cultivating the Source within. It gave me the understanding I needed to put it all in some kind of context and understand how to deal with certain kinds of things in life.

In that sense, finding a teaching that you resonate with is really valuable to support your process. Then, at a certain point—there are stages to it—you kind of step into the flow of it, so that your life is guided by the process itself. You’re able to work with it.

Having a spiritual community is still valuable, though, because you can still get caught in your stuff here and there, and it’s useful to have people call you on it.

Rick: Well, actually, on that note, how important is it to have a teacher in addition to a teaching?

David: Well, it’s good for getting the right start. But at a certain point, there’s also, right around unity, the idea of the resolute intellect. Essentially, that’s the 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.

The mind is being moved around by our emotions, our experiences, 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.

As perception refines, our ability to discriminate clearly gets better and better. There’s this idea of the inner guru coming online in that period. You put your attention on something, you experience it, and the intelligence in that is also known. Your experiences come with understanding.

Sometimes it’s still useful to have perspectives. I have a few friends whose content I read because their perspective is different, and they bring out things where I think, “Oh, I hadn’t noticed that before.” For example, the mahamarmas: I was aware of that process, and Adyashanti and some others speak of it, but I wasn’t aware of that connection to them.

Rick: So you’re saying that, as one progresses, the necessity of a teacher diminishes as a general rule? There are probably exceptions, but it’s more critical in the beginning than in the final or latter stages.

David: Yeah. Getting a good start is good, because there are a lot of people out there who are just window-shopping a bit: “I’m trying out this, and trying that.” What we tend to do is get driven by the mind, looking for the concepts we like that suit our philosophy and our approach to life.

What that does is enable our concepts, and we can get even more identified with them. We can look for a philosophy that forces our prejudices.

Rick: Or confirms our prejudices.

David: Yeah, I mean, confirmation bias and that kind of thing. Some of that is fine if we have a basic platform that’s reasonable. But when we’re basically going out there collecting concepts, we’re going to be at the SAND conference this weekend—Science and Nonduality.

It’s full of concepts. You see a lot of people there who are basically looking for better concepts and collecting them. Of course, a lot of them conflict with each other. 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 or a means of experiencing, it can become quite—

Rick: Yeah.

David: Yeah.

Rick: Like some people say, for instance—I think Maharishi used to say this—that the shift to unity kind of necessitates a teacher to dispel some basic doubt that grips you at that transition point. The teacher reassures you and dispels the doubt, saying, “This is it,” and that resolves any fear or discomfort.

David: Yeah, it’s interesting, because I had my unity shift on a Lorne and Lucia retreat. Lorne talked about it afterward, but I didn’t have the experience of doubt in that way. In some ways, Brahman may require it more, but I guess everybody’s process is different.

Rick: So maybe it’s too simplistic to try to pin it down in terms of when and how you might need a teacher. Maybe it’s more appropriate to say that it depends on the person.

David: It also depends on getting started, and on verifying an initial awakening. As I mentioned earlier, people can often have the shift and not know it, or not be sure, because they have these concepts about it.

I’ve seen a lot of people wake up, 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?” There’s also surprise at how normal and ordinary it is.

Rick: Yeah. In another vein, it can be terrifying if you have no idea what’s happening to you, like Suzanne Segal in her book Collision with the Infinite.

David: Well, that’s interesting, though, because she did have a background, but she fought it. She knew, but she couldn’t believe that was it.

Rick: Yeah, I think the concept she had formed years previously was just so different from the actual experience when it dawned that she couldn’t put two and two together.

David: Yeah, exactly. But there was definitely a risk because she had people tell her she was awake, and she refused to believe it. She went looking for people to pathologize it and went through this whole struggle. Finally, she accepted it, relaxed into it, and had her unity shift fairly soon afterward. That’s kind of an extreme example. People don’t usually fight it that way.

✨ Cosmic consciousness, God consciousness, and unity

Rick: We probably should have done this in the beginning, although we sort of did. We’ve been throwing these terms around. Perhaps, as a recap, I could have you answer this question that someone just handed me: How do you define, and what are the differences in experience between, unity consciousness, God consciousness, and cosmic consciousness?

David: Okay. Cosmic consciousness is essentially equivalent to self-realization—self realizing itself. So there’s a shift from, if there isn’t witnessing prior, which there usually isn’t—although there are, I don’t know, half a dozen people who have that—but there’s a shift from being a me experiencing the world. There might be some sense of presence or consciousness, of being behind the head, or whatever. But there’s kind of a shift back into that, and then it kind of goes out and becomes infinite.

It’s kind of like you’re out here in this infinite, experiencing through this body. But from there, yeah, it’s much more back there. And it depends on how great the contrast is because, as we talked about, some people have a much milder shift, and so it kind of goes much more slowly or quietly.

We shift from experiencing ourselves as being the doer and the actor in the world to observing, witnessing the doing going on. There is often a sense of freedom or liberation because it’s like we were in this little box, and suddenly we’re out of the box and in this much bigger place.

Ego is a very small thing, a tiny kind of set of little concepts. We play these kinds of roles in our life, acting out these things as the parent, the friend, and the worker, and all these little roles we have, with our concepts about what that’s supposed to look like, and so on. You step out of that, and it’s a huge relief, a liberation.

As it gets established and deepens, and you settle into what’s commonly called nirvana, or satchitananda—absolute bliss consciousness—there’s a sense of being this consciousness. But that consciousness is awake.

I’ll be talking at SAND about the koshas, as I mentioned. There’s our usual experience of life, where we’re living predominantly in the physical, emotional, and mental bodies. But after the clear awakening, as it becomes established, we’re living in the top three: consciousness, Chitta Maya, the field, and the bliss body. So, sat-chit-ananda. We’re sort of living that, while we’re still living in the body as well. But who we are is kind of outside that, in the upper three koshas.

So it’s kind of this flip in where we are. It’s a very different experience of the world. There may be that sense we talked about before, where the world gains a sense of illusoriness. That can be really strong, or it can be very slight, just like, “Oh, this doesn’t seem as solid as it used to.” Or, like I say, it could be really strong: the world is meaningless, and there’s nothing, and that kind of thing.

Sometimes, for some people, there’s no real change in their life itself. For others, various things change. It kind of varies. In my own case, a whole bunch of things 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, and he’s gotten busier, more creative, and more active in all kinds of ways.

There are huge variations. There’s no way of knowing how your specific unfolding is going to unfold.

Okay, that’s cosmic consciousness. Then from there, consciousness kind of wakes from itself in the world. A lot of people these days are going straight into unity. So there’s a shift from experiencing myself as here to experiencing myself as—it’s kind of like you become the container of everything. All of this is within myself. There’s no longer an inside and outside.

It’s not necessarily very conscious, but there’s usually a distinct experience of, “This is in me. 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. There’s no longer inside and outside; it’s just kind of a continuum. This is all inside, too. That’s another way of framing it: it’s all inside.

Usually, there’s a progression with that. Because of that, there’s a profoundly different relationship with the world, and everything becomes very intimate.

You can also take on a reality where, because you are infinite consciousness, and this kosha is infinite consciousness, and it’s myself, the world can actually become more concrete than it ever was before. It is absolute, nonchanging, changing in appearance—indestructible, but in appearance. So what, at a surface value, may be seen as illusory can then take on this sense of reality, not because of its appearance, but because it’s all just consciousness, or all just absolute Being.

Rick: “I know that to be indeed indestructible, by which all this is pervaded.”

David: Yeah. Well, it’s kind of interesting. It was an interesting thing. There’s a whole series of stages, and sometimes unity is talked about as coming in stages.

If there is sufficient refinement going on—and it’s worth noting that 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: the mother’s line, the 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.

Two of those are Atman and sattva. Essentially, what it means is that the development of consciousness and the development of refinement are cumulative. What develops over prior lifetimes, we bring forward into this life. We build on it from there.

This is why you see people coming in and basically waking up without any real practice, spontaneously, out of nowhere. And you see other people cranking away for years with good practices and not really making a lot of progress, apparently, but they’re still building their bank account, you could say. So it’s a mixture.

If there is sufficient refinement and we continue in that process, then a God-consciousness stage unfolds. Essentially, what that means is that perception refines. We become aware of those layers between the physical and consciousness.

We all experience our emotions, but we can also experience that level of reality in the world. We can experience the flows of energy, the prana, and those kinds of dynamics. People talk about auras, and there’s kind of a series of different layers.

The kosha means “sheath,” so essentially we have our physical body, annamaya, which basically means the food body. Then we have the energy body, which is a little bit bigger. We’re immersed in the energy body. It fully penetrates the physical body, but it sticks out a little bit around the body. People can see that a little bit, because it sticks out a little bit.

Then the mental body is a little bit bigger again. It’s a little more subtle, a little bit more generalized, and less specific, and so on, going out until consciousness is essentially infinite.

Rick: With God consciousness, why is the word “God” in there?

David: Basically, there’s this refinement of perception, and those layers become apparent. The heart awakens—the Hridaya Mahamarma—and that refinement leads us to become aware of the doers, those devata.

Again, if the heart awakens, then the capacity to experience them as beings arises also, or it’s tied into that, anyway. Or we may be more scientifically oriented, leaning more heavily on the intellect. We can go into the refinement and experience them as principles and functions, looking at geometry, fields, and that kind of thing, depending on how we experience it.

People also have a dominant sense. I’m very visual; I see stuff. Some people feel things, or they’re more auditory, or whatever. They experience it in different ways. They hear vibrations, the music of the spheres, or they feel the layers. They can kind of feel the layers in the body, having different kinds of densities and consistencies, different kinds of flows, and so on. There are different styles of that.

Once you become aware of 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 acting in the world, and so on, as gods. People would call them gods. Angels are a little more gross, but at that level, it’s more like what I mentioned in the first interview about experiencing Krishna, for example, and then later Christ, and so on. There have been a bunch of them.

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.

For example, if I’m in a plane and it’s really rough, with a lot of turbulence, I can have a conversation with the vayus, the wind devas, and ask them if they could move off a little. Sometimes you have to go up the ladder, and you have to be very respectful, because they’re being told to do something, so they’re doing it. But you can kind of pull them out a little bit and express respect. So you can have this—

Rick: That’s an interesting point. Some people think that sounds kooky.

David: Twenty years ago, maybe—not more than that now—but at one point in my life, if I heard myself saying something like this, I would have thought, “Oh, my God.”

Rick: I mean, in that same vein, there must be devas involved in volcanoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, and all those things.

David: Actually, that ties into what we were talking about earlier as well. When we’re suffering, we’re caught in our stuff. Sometimes people repress it, and sometimes people spew it out into the environment. If it’s not being processed, it retains our energy signature. It doesn’t go away in that sense.

As it builds up in the environment, at a certain point it has to release in some way. So nature will—that’s one of the things that motivates riots and natural disasters and wars. It’s this buildup of stress in the environment.

If we can alleviate that through enough people being awake and so on, through working with the devas in such a way that they help with that kind of thing, then we can—like my friend who works on Washington—

Rick: He’s not doing such a good job.

David: Well, who knows? If he wasn’t working on it, who knows? It could be worse. We’ll see.

Rick: That’s kind of fascinating, because people would say, “Okay, earthquakes: tectonic plates. Hurricanes: pressure variations or whatever causes hurricanes.” And, sure, all that kind of stuff.

David: There is the physical mechanics. I don’t object to that. But what’s actually driving it? You can say, “Oh, there’s pressure under the earth,” and I’m sure that’s part of it. But part of the dynamics, if you look at the energy or feel it in an environment, is like when you go into someone’s house to visit and you can feel that there has been a big fight, or it just feels really kind of—ugh—you don’t want to be there.

It’s kind of like that on a larger scale. There are places you can go where it just feels nasty. At some point, that energy has to resolve.

Rick: Yeah. You make a very important point here, really. 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, 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: Yeah. I would add that they’re also caused by the ways people are relating to the world and the kinds of things they’re supporting. It’s also driven by people who are motivated by power and that kind of thing. But the buildup of stress gives them an opportunity to move in.

Rick: Well, yeah. And also, if it’s true that there are sort of Asuric and Devic forces playing tug-of-war with one another—which is literally depicted in the Vedas, with the snake on the mountain—then certain people are aligned with one camp and certain people are aligned with the other. Those aligned with the Asuric camp are more consumed by greed and promoting their own agenda, regardless of the consequences and things like that.

David: And not recognizing that there will be consequences—which there will be. That’s actually an interesting dynamic, too, because when you’re smooth and you do something that’s not so good, you see the result quickly. You get smacked.

Whereas, if you’re not seeing consequences, it actually indicates that there’s a backlog, and so there’s more of a time delay. Although it’s complicated, because there are different layers of that and different areas of life where we might have some emotional stuff we haven’t dealt with, but we’re cleaner on the mental level. Or we might have a bunch of mental deviations and be a little cleaner in some other area of life. Everybody’s a little different that way.

Nonetheless, one of the reasons people don’t recognize the consequences is because they’ve got a backlog. So there’s a time delay in there. We try to teach our children about that because they don’t recognize the consequences of some of the things they do. If you stick your finger in a fire, it’s going to hurt.

✨ Awakening and the world

Rick: All right, so we’ve meandered into a number of little points here which are profound and significant. Is there something you could say by way of a wrap-up that would be a nice conclusion to this whole conversation?

David: Good point. Personally, I’m really inspired by what’s going on, watching so many people wake up. I’ve been writing about this online for over a decade, and I get a lot of contact from people who have woken up and are trying to understand how to support it. Or they’re thanking me because they didn’t have the language. Now there’s some language they can use, because the mind has to digest the experience for it to be integrated. If there’s no language, it’s very difficult for that to take place.

I’m also inspired by seeing the processes happening in the people I know who are quite awake, these devas waking up, and the divine sutras coming out. People are going through stages now that you didn’t hear about not so long ago, and there are profound shifts going on.

The issue, though, is understanding that dynamic, because when consciousness rises, it pushes what hasn’t been resolved to the surface. What we’re seeing a lot in the world right now is that some things may seem to be getting worse. If you look at the statistics, they’re actually getting better, like crime rates and murder rates.

Rick: Steven Pinker writes about that. There’s a whole lot of good stuff going on.

David: Somebody recently sent me something on Box.com, and it was this long list of statistics. Infant mortality rates are going way down, people’s wealth around the world is going up, and all these markers of things are improving. But if you look at the news, it’s almost like both are happening at the same time.

Rick: Yes, exactly.

David: 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, recognized, and cleared.

The way that men in power have been treating women, for example, has been going on for a long time. We wouldn’t talk about it, but now it’s coming to the surface. It’s being seen and adjusted, and we’re coming to a more balanced place in terms of appropriate relationships, both personal and professional, and in those kinds of fields.

All these things are there as a process to help purify. But if we see them as a growing problem and get invested in them, then we’re actually amplifying them. It’s important that we recognize 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.

What you put your attention on grows stronger.

It’s like the idea of being antiwar versus being pro-peace. Antiwar basically amplifies war, whereas pro-peace amplifies peace. What you put your attention on grows stronger. Understanding the dynamics of how that works is very important at the current time, so we don’t enable the issues that are coming to the surface, but rather help to heal them.

Rick: Yeah. Our friend here was just telling me about Antifa up in Portland, I guess they’re called, which is some kind of far-left radical group, and the Proud Boys, which is a far-right radical group. They’re kind of clashing with each other. I don’t know where I was going with that, but just the polarities—if you really want to introduce something good into society, taking 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.

Wasn’t it somebody who said, “Be the change we want to see”?

David: Yeah. It’s even energetic. I remember going to an energy workshop some years ago. We got paired off, and they had one person become really angry while the other person monitored their state. If you resisted the anger, it amplified. They got angrier, and you felt the anger more. Whereas, if you were transparent to the anger and just allowed it, it would basically go through and dissipate.

Rick: Yeah, I experienced that with my wife.

David: It would dissipate. So how we are with this stuff makes a huge difference. It’s not about what’s happening; it’s about how we are with it that makes the huge difference.

Becoming more conscious of our own internal dynamics helps us become conscious of where we’re resisting and holding on. That allows us to go in there and try to heal. If it’s showing up in your life, it’s—if it’s out there, it’s in here.

Rick: Okay, so you have your blog, Davidya.ca, and I’ll link to it on BatGap. I’ve already linked to it from your previous interview, but I’ll also link to it from the page for this interview. I highly recommend that people go there. There’s tons of stuff already written. You’d probably never read it all unless you don’t have anything else to do. 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: It’s coming up on 2,000 articles. There’s a Key Posts tab that has articles organized by subject. It explains some of these perspectives, like the koshas and the stages and things. There’s also a Media tab where I have some of my previous talks and interviews.

Rick: 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. I’ll have a link to that on your webpage.

Thanks. Thank you. It’s been a good conversation. Thank you for listening and watching. I’m here at the SAND Conference and will be doing some more things while I’m here. I think the next interview I’ll be posting—well, we’ll see. I imagine that could end up in a different order. But there’ll be some nice material coming out over the coming weeks. So thanks.