David Gersten Interview

Summary:

• Introduction to David Gersten: Integrative psychiatrist and author.
• Integrative Psychiatry: Combines spiritual, physical, and mental health, with a specialty in amino acid therapy.
• Book Discussion: “Are You Getting Enlightened or Losing Your Mind?” explores mastering paranormal and spiritual experiences.
• Holistic Approach: Emphasizes the importance of addressing both physical and spiritual health.
• Spiritual Awakening: Helps patients experiencing spiritual awakenings, often misdiagnosed as pathological by others.
• Personal Experiences: Shares insights from his own spiritual journey and professional practice.
• Challenges in Psychiatry: Discusses the evolution of psychiatry and the integration of spiritual experiences.
• Kundalini Awakening: Talks about the challenges and experiences related to Kundalini awakening.
• Crazy Wisdom: Explores the concept of “crazy wisdom” and its implications in spiritual practice.
• Paranormal Experiences: Addresses the dark side and potential risks of paranormal experiences.

Full transcript:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week is David Gersten, MD. Welcome, David.

David: Thank you so much. Great to be here.

Rick: Yeah. Having gotten to know David a little bit and having read much of his book, if I had to describe him in a word, and I think you would agree, David is a spiritual psychiatrist. And in other words, he’s, as a spiritual aspirant himself, he has ended up attracting people who are having various kinds of spiritual awakenings and in some cases crises, which other psychiatrists might misdiagnose as pathological and end up giving them drugs. David has learned to recognize the value in the experiences these people are having, if they are indeed genuine spiritual experiences, and to sort of reassure them that everything is actually okay and that perhaps something good is happening. Would that be a fair assessment, David?

David: Close. I refer to my work as integrative psychiatry.

Rick: Okay.

David: It includes the spiritual.

Rick: Right.

David: But it includes the physical very much with a specialty in amino acid therapy.

Rick: Okay, good. I’m glad you added that.

David: So it’s a real holistic body, mind, spirit. But I did struggle with that word for years.

Rick: Yeah. And I’m glad you added that because, in my understanding at least, the spiritual can’t be divorced from the physical. The spiritual development has a physiological component, and it’s like two legs of a table or something. You pull either leg and the other can be moved.

David: Right. And people’s priorities tend to be physical first.

David: Real hard to work on the physical, I mean on the spiritual, if you’re physically debilitated.

Rick: Right. It’s interesting. Okay. So you’ve written a book called “Are You Getting Enlightened or Losing Your Mind?” I love the title. I’ve referred to it a number of times in previous interviews actually, without even having begun to read the book, just because I think the title tells so much. The subtitle is “The Psychiatrist’s Guide for Mastering Paranormal and Spiritual Experience.” Even in just reading the title, it evoked some questions in me, which I’ll just read out for fun. Kind of give us an outline of what we might discuss in this interview. “What is enlightenment and what is ignorance?” The word “ignorance” is usually taken as the opposite of “enlightenment.” “What are sanity and insanity? Do they have an objective reality, or to some extent are they just societal norms?” “Are enlightenment and insanity mutually exclusive?” “What about crazy wisdom teachers? Are they really wise or just crazy?” “Can spiritual experiences and practices make you crazy if improperly understood and practiced?” “Are all paranormal experiences spiritual?” In other words, is any old weird thing that happens to you really spiritual, or could it actually be pathological or undesirable in some way, and not really moving you in the direction of what we might define as true spirituality? We’ll probably discuss what true spirituality might be in the course of this interview. In light of all those questions I just spilled out, and it will take quite a while to cover them, is there any one which kind of grabs you and you would like to begin with, or shall we begin with a little bit of your background, and how you even came to be writing such a book and practicing psychiatry in the way you do?

David: We can start with background. All the questions you raised were really good questions.

Rick: Okay, thanks.

David: About two hours for each of those questions.

Rick: Ah, great, we’ll have an eight hour interview.

David: I will say, we chatted over the last week, you and I, and the question of what is enlightenment came up. Probably the next day, before sleep I always do spiritual reading, and I probably have three bookshelves of spiritual books. So pull one off the shelf, open it up, it says, “Enlightenment is the merging of the self and the absolute.” I went, “Thank you.” But those are the kind of synchronicities that are part of spiritual path, and just something to be really aware of.

Rick: Yeah, it’s funny, speaking of synchronicities, just today I was listening to a Skeptico podcast about synchronicities, so there you go, mentioning the words. There’s another one.

David: There’s skeptics about everything.

Rick: Yeah, the merging of the self into the absolute, is that what you just said?

David: Yeah.

Rick: Right, and in Sanskrit terms they talk about merging of the jiva with atman and atman with Brahman. So that’s, in a nutshell, the traditional understanding, the recognition that we aren’t just this isolated little flesh-bound entity, but we really are something vast and fundamental to the universe, and recognizing our identity as that.

David: Right, one of the metaphors that I use a lot, especially with patients explaining spirituality, I’ll say, “If you think of God as the ocean, the individual soul is a river. All the rivers are flowing toward the ocean, eventually merging in that ocean.” But the “God stuff” is the same as the “self stuff.”

Rick: Right.

David: Where in the West we have a notion of a huge difference between who we are and God, who’s an old man up in a cloud, taking notes, passing judgment.

Rick: Like Santa Claus.

David: Right. As opposed to consciousness, God, self, all being the same “stuff of consciousness.”

Rick: This is why I personally find modern physics to be so exciting, because a quantum physicist will tell you that if you take anything and boil it down to its essence, you end up with the same stuff, so to speak, even though it’s a non-stuff stuff. But everything ultimately is considered to most fundamentally reduce down to the same essential thing, the unified field, if you want to call it that. And going in the opposite direction, with the manifestation process, everything diversifies to multifarious diversity.

Rick: Well said. It makes me think of the Big Bang. I think of the Big Bang really a lot, like it happened yesterday, kind of thing.

Rick: Like it’s happening now. Like it’s happening now, and it’s not like it was so long ago that I can’t bother thinking about it.

Rick: Yeah.

David: And what’s pretty amazing is the Bhagavad Gita talks about the creation of the universe, the Big Bang, the expansion of the universe, and the ultimate contraction of the universe back again to zero. And that process is called “One Day of Brahman.”

Rick: Right. That is, one of God’s days. So I would assume from that, there have been a whole lot of days of Brahman, a whole lot of universes that have come and gone, which the perspective on that should make you incredibly humble in the light of the super-giant picture of the universe.

Rick: And some cosmologists say that there are multiple universes coming and going constantly, like bubbles in a boiling cauldron, just popping up and going back, and that there are virtual universes which almost manifest, but then don’t quite make it through the gestation period, and then don’t fully manifest, so they don’t actually happen.

David: Well, I think the mystery of creation is the creator can create whenever he or she feels like it. But to me, universe is everything seen and unseen.

Rick: Right.

David: So the notion of alternate universes to me is a little bit strange. Because it’s like, if everything is everything is everything, if you have a notion of an additional universe, to me it’s like, yeah, ok, it’s still, no matter how you look at it, one gigantic universe, which is both seen and unseen, and most of it’s unseen.

Rick: Yeah, even from a physics perspective, most of the matter in the universe is dark matter, we don’t see it. And this actually begins to hint at the kind of things we’re going to be talking about today, because there is a whole realm of experience in human perspective, human perception, which is unseen. And even in terms of traditional psychology, you have the unconscious and everything, but when you start getting into spiritual matters, obviously, and you can expound on this better than I, there’s a whole realm of possibilities that’s beyond the realm of our cognition, but people pop into having those cognitions and then they’re wondering, “What’s happening to me?”

David: Right, absolutely. And that difference between science and spirituality, it’s not that well understood, and there’s been conflicts throughout history of science versus spirituality. To me, science is what you can measure through the five senses. And in fact, the senses are all measuring devices. So the scientific tools are extensions of our senses.

Rick: Right.

David: Spirituality is that which is beyond the five senses, can’t be measured, unseen. Angel visits you. Are you going to put an angel in a test tube? Are you going to put God in a test tube? No, I don’t think so. So, where spirituality picks up, where science leaves off. They’re both useful. There’s no–to me, there’s no big conflict.

Rick: Playing off that idea, I would suggest that the human nervous system is a more sophisticated instrument than any instrument people have been able to create. It’s more sophisticated and complex than a particle accelerator or the Hubble Space Telescope or anything else. And using this instrument in a scientific way, we can address such questions as whether or not there are angels or all sorts of subtle matters that spirituality has concerned itself with.

David: Right, and this tool that you’re talking about, that is why I got interested in psychiatry. Both from a physical standpoint and the philosophical standpoint. I basically knew from first grade that I was going to be a doctor. My father was a doctor. It’s a doctor family. I actually never decided to be a doctor. I first wanted to be an architect, like at age three. Then maybe at four or five, an inventor. And then by first grade, I was on the doctor path. I never made the decision. I mean, it wasn’t a struggle. Now, I hadn’t decided which specialty. And in my first year of college, in Pomona College, I took a course in philosophy and the one thing that struck me was one day the teacher knocks on his desk and says, “How do you know this is real?” And I just thought, “That’s crazy amazing.” There are people, philosophers, who spent their whole lives asking questions like, “How do you know if this desk is real?” And I said, “I’m going to be a psychiatrist.” That’s got to be the field that deals with these heavy-duty questions. Now, in med school, I was on the psychiatry track all but maybe six months where I thought of neurology because I have been really, really interested in neurology. Always was interested in that. But I discovered–I mean, I loved–I hated med school. We had a 6% mortality rate.

Rick: Physical mortality, in other words, death. Yes, six of the hundred of us who started were dead.

Rick: Right.

David: It’s a higher death rate than in a rocky–soldier. So I can’t say I enjoyed med school, although my retention for it is really high. I did love the psychiatry residency. It’s what I’d waited for. But it never addressed the key issues like, “How do you know this desk is real?” or, “What is the mind?” or, “What is the mind-body?” I mean, the key questions of the mind and the brain have never been addressed by psychiatry. Philosophy and Eastern teachings have done a much better job. So here we have a field that’s–psychiatry that’s become a field of, let me say, legal drug dealers.

Rick: Right.

David: I hate saying that.

Rick: It’s true, though.

David: It’s like no matter what your problem is, whether it’s depression or chronic fatigue syndrome or irritable bowel syndrome, you’re going on Paxil.

Rick: Now, is that because psychiatrists as a group tend to think of– they tend to have a rather materialistic worldview and think of us as meat puppets and everything is basically neurological and there’s really no point in messing with the more abstract, subtle stuff?

David: I think psychiatry ended up the way it is basically politically. The field emerged out of 1800s great thinkers like Craig Fellon, Freud, Jung. Not that Freud’s thinking was ultimately that useful, but it was very much a psychotherapy field. And psychiatrists were the laughingstocks of other doctors. So psychiatrists wanted to get positioned as mainstream doctors. And I’m pretty sure the way things worked was through communications and deals with the pharmaceutical industry, psychiatry shifted into the field of, quote, “We are the brain field.” It was kind of like, “Pharmaceutical companies, if you make useful drugs, we will prescribe them.” Now, psychiatry residencies are the number one residencies in the country.

Rick: Number one in what respect?

David: The most sought-after residencies. The number of people waiting to get into a psych residency is huge.

Rick: Because it pays well? Because it’s interesting? Or what?

David: It pays well. It certainly doesn’t pay as well as–

Rick: Brain surgery, any of those things, yeah.

David: OB/GYN, plastic surgery, dermatology. But I don’t quite understand it, because the training, rather than improving, has dwindled. And I started noticing about 15, 20 years ago, that patients would come to me having seen someone else, another psychiatrist, and there was no therapy.

Rick: Right.

David: I was realizing all these people I was seeing were put on drugs by a psychiatrist and then referred to an MFC or LCSW for the psychotherapy part. So psychiatry split the counseling part off.

Rick: Is part of the reason that drugs became so predominant perhaps that it was felt that therapy just wasn’t that effective and that drugs really had a measurable influence? Or is it really a matter of time where you could drug a whole lot of people in the course of a month but only perhaps do any sort of therapy with a few people in the course of a month?

David: A couple of things. There’s only a few years ago, I was reading one of my monthly throwaway psychiatric journals, and this issue of what happened to psychiatric training came up. And what had happened was the psych residencies had literally stopped training psychotherapy because it costs more.

Rick: Right.

David: I thought, wow, that’s pretty crazy. You stop training a psychiatry residence in counseling because it costs more? That’s like training a brain surgeon in everything except the temporal lobes because it’s going to cost more. So there’s a movement now to reincorporate like five psychotherapy modalities, one being cognitive behavioral therapy. But to me that’s pretty superficial because while ultimately I thought, okay, Freud’s treatment modality is a poor modality, at least when you’re trained in that, you’re thinking about what makes people tick. What going on now relates to what was going on in childhood. So that disappeared and the insurance companies discovered, obviously, that hey, if we just have psychiatrists write prescriptions and have 15-minute visits that are pretty expensive, then we can farm out the psychotherapy and pay much less for it. So unfortunately I think money is the big player in what has happened to psychiatry.

Rick: Okay. Let’s shift the topic of discussion a little bit because that’s a good overview of what happened to psychiatry. But we really want to focus in on the whole enlightenment angle, which has largely been your specialty. We gave a definition to what enlightenment is and it’s in your title, “Are You Getting Enlightened or Losing Your Mind?” So let’s talk a little bit about what sanity and insanity are, because that’s also implied in your title, “Losing Your Mind, You’re Going Crazy.” What–is there sort of an objective measure? Certainly there’s not a clear-cut demarcation between them, it must be much more gray. But is it also defined just by social norms to a great extent, and one society is crazy and another society is sane?

David: Really good question. If I focus on the main two mental illnesses, schizophrenia and mania, those being heavily genetic, a shaman from any country can quickly identify schizophrenic from someone who has, let’s say, spirit possession. So one of the better-known shamans in San Diego was Hermana Cerita, the mother of Don Miguel Ruiz, who wrote the Four Agreements. I met her back in ’78, and she was working hand-in-hand with county mental health, because periodically someone who was actively psychotic, schizophrenic, she would know, “Hey, this person needs medication.” So she was very clear about that. Now, sanity and insanity are not very close to each other. Insanity is almost easier, because someone who’s really insane is really out of touch with reality. Their thought process is enormously disturbed. They have delusions which are not equivalent to a mystic’s view of the world, which you could look at a mystic and say, “Oh, this person’s crazy.” This person’s entire universe revolves around one thought or one omnipresent being that’s invisible, so how can we measure that? A mystic actually may appear a little crazy to normal standards, like Ramana Maharshi, who was so absorbed in meditation that he was covered with ants. Other people had to feed him.

Rick: Right.

David: So you’ve got to be able to see what’s a legitimate spiritual path.

Rick: And all of them, Neem Karoli Baba, Anandamayi Ma, and Nityananda, Muktananda’s guru, they all did stuff that was pretty nutty, by ordinary standards. And then of course, if you go to the Kumbh Mela, and you see all these naked guys with their ashes and snakes and all this stuff, the whole thing seems nutty, but we won’t go quite there yet.

David: Right. So, most people on a spiritual path don’t look that crazy. I mean, we’re talking at the extremes of success, though. We’re talking about your…

Rick: The saints, the great ones.

David: The great ones, who aren’t necessarily recognized immediately, at the time. I think Jesus is an example.

Rick: Yeah.

David: There are very few hardcore devotees, maybe 12, right? So somehow, the force of that being has persisted forever. And my guess is, will continue to persist forever. I think first is, what’s common sense and what’s spiritual sense? So, you meet someone, you shake their hand, there’s a huge download of information. So you have a sense, most people right away, “Oh, I like this person, I don’t like this person, he or she has good energy.” You meet someone who’s really crazy, and certainly as a psychiatrist, when you have sat with hundreds of schizophrenics, you can sense what’s going on very quickly. And it’s actually, by the way, not so much a description of voices, delusions, etc. There’s an international study in 1950, of psychiatrists around the world, as to what do you think… How do–what makes you diagnose someone as schizophrenic? It wasn’t the voices, it wasn’t delusions, it was… the number one thing is what’s called the “praecox feeling.” That’s how you feel in the presence of someone with schizophrenia. And you can’t describe that unless you’ve sat with quite a number of schizophrenics.

Rick: But you develop a sort of antenna for picking it up and… yeah, okay.

David: Right. So I can sense that.

Rick: It’s like the energy about them, or something.

David: The energy, the distance in their eyes, like they’re very far away.

Rick: Yeah, and you have sat in the presence of enlightened saints and masters, So you’ve–in your own life experience you’ve seen the whole gamut, you know?

David: I have seen the whole gamut.

Rick: Right.

David: And I’ve seen the saints and I’ve seen ordinary saints, that is, ordinary people doing ordinary jobs, who seem incredibly advanced on their path.

Rick: Right.

David: That is very solid, very grounded, more than loving. They’ve identified themselves as who they really are. So the light that comes out of them is huge. They tend to be, in the real world, very, very successful. And–but you can’t always identify these people. There might be some enlightened being on Wall Street, maybe. That may be a poor choice.

Rick: No, I’m sure there are. I mean, I know guys who’ve been on Wall Street for decades, who have been meditating and doing spiritual practices all that time. I don’t know if they’re enlightened or not, but I know people who work in factories and who do all kinds of normal stuff that are awakened in the sense that you and I would define it.

David: Right. One of those is Rolling Thunder, who I haven’t read about in a long time. But he was a Native American shaman, very well known, whose daytime gig was working on the railroad.

Rick: Yeah, there you go.

David: So he’s a railroad guy who got his name because he was great at creating thunder by tweaking some bugs that he would roll on the ground.

Rick: And that would create actual thunder in the sky, like a shamanistic kind of thing?

David: Oh, yes.

Rick: Huh, interesting.

David: Yeah, he was… A long time ago, he was giving a presentation, I think it was in Dallas, and the media had heard, “Oh, this guy makes thunder.” So there were a lot of slurs in the newspaper, and the skies were clear, and the day he left, the day he was leaving, he kind of wanted to prove to the media he wasn’t crazy and he wasn’t making this stuff up, and he said, “You will have your thunder before I leave.” So before his plane took off, massive thunder. No clouds, massive thunder.

Rick: That’s really interesting, because to have thunder you have to have lightning, and to have lightning you usually have to have clouds.

David: Yeah.

Rick: Don’t know how he did that.

David: Yeah, I don’t either.

Rick: So it sounds like you would define insanity then as being out of touch with “reality,” being unable to interact coherently with what we agreed upon, real world, and sanity obviously is being the opposite of that, being able to function efficiently or at least cogently in the real world. And, obviously one could be– And so you’re saying that a person who is genuinely spiritually awake should have their act together in the real world. I mean, there are exceptions. Anandamayi Ma more or less had to be fed, and Neem Karoli Baba had to be watched or he’d wander off into the jungle. But in other ways these people were highly functional and profoundly influential on the people around them, in a good way.

David: Yeah, with thei–people who came to study with them, their devotees or whatever word you want to use, these folks function at an incredibly high level.

Rick: Right, they’re masters, really.

David: They’re masters. If you look at spirituality as the foundation being human values, the masters embody those. And there’s a system of human values, of five core human values, truth, dharma, which is super-integrity, doing the right thing no matter what, peace, love, non-violence. All the other human values are sub-values of those. So someone who is enlightened, they’re not just honest and non-violent. Their behavior–it’s not just their behavior, it’s totally who they are, to the point where they are peace, they are love. Now, someone who’s actively psychotic, I’ve never met that person who embodies those qualities. They’re not peaceful. Their behavior sometimes is dharmic, sometimes isn’t. Unless you have a lot of training, sometimes you have to watch yourself to know, to be careful, who am I dealing with here? By the way, not that all mental patients are violent.

Rick: Right.

David: In terms of this culture of violence, it’s been guns versus mental illness. So I dove into the research on that with all the last six months of violence, and the research is, people with mental illness are no more violent than the average population. So that whole discussion should be taken off the table.

Rick: But then we have institutions for the criminally insane, who are insane and criminal in their behavior. So there must be a sub-category of mentally ill people who are, by definition, violent also.

David: Yeah, your paranoid schizophrenics, who are actively psychotic, are your most dangerous folks. Your sociopaths are equally dangerous, but it’s questionable whether you call that a mental illness. I mean, your psychopaths and sociopaths do not have a conscience.

Rick: Isn’t that illness right there, being devoid of conscience? Isn’t that an aberration or kind of a severe handicap in terms of functioning as a human being?

David: It’s a severe handicap, but see, I believe there is moral illness and mental illness. So there’s so many trials where the insanity plea comes into play–

Rick: Right.

David: –which I’ve written about several times. I don’t like the insanity plea, because it gives a message that you’re not fully accountable for your behavior. My position has been, try someone for the crime. Did they do it or not? Don’t allow insanity into that first trial. If they’re guilty for the crime, then sentence them for whatever it is, Then if they want help, their attorney can push for a second trial, namely an insanity trial. They’re found to be really insane. Then they go to one of the state hospitals for the criminally insane. And if the point comes where they’re considered to be “cured,” they then are transferred to the prison to serve out the rest of the time. Now, there’s probably some–I’m sure there are exceptions to that concept. But I’ve found with the craziest person, if you treat them as if they’re responsible, they act very differently than if you treat them as if, “Well, this person couldn’t help it. They’re crazy.” I mean, I’ve worked with really, really crazy people. And this happened in the first three months of my psych residency, where a very psychotic, paranoid schizophrenic was admitted to my service. Before I met him, he was locked in seclusion, and he was grunting like an animal. He was sitting on the floor, banging his elbows into the walls of the seclusion room. And so this little window to look in to meet my patient, the nurse on my team is standing next to me, and she says, “That’s your new patient.” I go, “Nice.” Then she slips a container of liquid Haldol, an antipsychotic medicine, into my hand, opens the seclusion room door, and throws me in, and then locks–shuts the door behind me. I take a few steps toward this fellow, and he utters his first words, which were, “I’m going to kill you,” except said with an intensity that was really pretty terrifying. Now, some greater force must have entered me, because instead of freaking out, I walked right toward this guy, and I said, “You have a choice. You can drink this liquid, or I can have the nurses come in and give you a shot.” He goes, “Oh, really? I have a choice?” I mean, the change was incredible. I said, “You have a choice.” He says, “I’ll take the liquid.” I said, “Here you go.” He took the liquid, and after I walked out of the seclusion room, my legs gave out.

Rick: Wow.

David: I’ve never had that feeling of legs turning to rubber before or since, but it was like, “Whoa.” Well, that turned out well, but I wouldn’t know that I would reflect back on that the rest of my life, because I saw that by giving this totally crazy, violent guy a choice, he behaved very differently than if you just came in and said, “Okay, nurses, tie him down. Give him a shot.”

Rick: Interesting. So this implies that no matter how crazy, there’s still some kind of, at least in this guy’s case, and maybe in all cases, you would say, there’s still some sort of leeway we have in terms of guiding our behavior this way or that.

David: There is. I think with almost everyone, there are degrees of choice.

Rick: Yeah. And I mean, these guys who’ve done some of these mass shootings recently, there’s a whole lot of planning and decision-making involved leading up to that. And of course, they’re crazy in many respects, but there’s a lot of rationality that enabled them to make such elaborate plans.

David: Yes, I think Jodi Arias is the most recent example of that, someone who struck everyone as being a con artist, who couldn’t feel the other person. I mean, if you–from a spiritual standpoint, if you’re coming from that place of “the core of me is the same as the core of you,” then you can’t harm another person.

Rick: Right.

David: These people who are capable of these murders are so disconnected, they don’t have a sense of other people, other than how they can be used for their purposes.

Rick: So that’s interesting. That does actually get us back into the spiritual angle of this interview, which is that perhaps one measure of sanity is the degree to which you are tuned into your essence, which is our mutual essence, all of us. And if you’re totally estranged from that, then your behavior is–will probably be pretty crazy, to use a simple term. And if you’re totally in tune with that, then your behavior will be very sane. So we can use that as a measure on the whole sanity to insanity spectrum. We can say, okay, I’m stating this, but it’s really a question. Could we use attunement to experience of our essence, our pure nature, our soul, our self, as a measuring stick?

David: I don’t know about a measuring stick, but I know that the people who come into my practice who are very spiritual, they’re going to do better than those who don’t see themselves as spiritual. But I mean spiritual in a universal kind of sense

Rick: Right.

David: not in a fanatical, religious kind of sense.

Rick: Well, in the sense that we were just discussing, spiritual in terms of attunement to some deeper inner reality. Right?

David: Right.

Rick: Right. Okay.

David: So those people have done their own inventory. Someone on a spiritual quest, until they’re enlightened, they’re going to have a mind that has some separation. But these are the folks who are always asking themselves, “How do I improve today? How do I live in alignment with people? How do I make the world a better place? How do I live in gratitude?” And that’s one that a lot of people just take– That’s a practice. It’s like, “Okay, I can practice being grateful.” So those people, they’re conscious of those positive qualities, and they’re conscious, we’re all conscious of where we’re weak.

Rick: So it sounds like they have some introspective quality or self-reflective quality, which the others don’t, which someone like Jodi Arias didn’t. There’s no inner attunement whatsoever.

David: Right. The attunement for a lot of those other people is about other people as opposed to themselves.

Rick: Right. And that’s where spiritual practice comes in, does it not? It’s a method of becoming inner-directed rather than totally object or outer-directed.

David: Yeah, definitely. Which is why, for example, in prayer or in church, you close your eyes. There may be a symbol up on the wall, but when you’re trying to make contact, you close your eyes.

Rick: Right. Yeah, withdraw the– And the Gita, which you referred to earlier, is full of references like that, like a tortoise withdrawing its limbs, that said that we withdraw our senses from their objects and go inward.

David: Right, absolutely.

Rick: So can we begin to define sanity then? I’m just kind of going at it from different angles as we go along, but can we define it by that criterion, that there’s a sort of an inner-directedness, which is not exclusive of outer-directedness, because you have to have both to function in the world, but there’s a balance, and there’s that saying in the Vedic literature someplace, “a lamp at the door,” which would illuminate both the inside and the outside. There’s kind of a counter–a balance between self-referral quality and object-referral quality.

David: Right. You might think of it in terms of, let’s say, a schizophrenic versus a mystic. Like, okay, how do you sort out? Because one of those is crazy.

Rick: Right.

David: One of them is enlightened. And if you were to write a description on paper, they could both look crazy. That is, if you didn’t understand enlightenment or a spiritual process, or the dark night of the soul, or all these other spiritual experiences, if you just write a checklist, okay, a mystic can look on paper similar to a crazy person. And I do want to say I have great respect for the mentally ill, so when I use the word “crazy”…

Rick: Yeah, you’re not insulting them or anything, yeah.

David: No. So…

Rick: It’s not derogatory.

David: No. I’ve been really good friends with my schizophrenic patients, which is to say I’ve been able to deal with the medical side and then go beyond it. But that’s because I’ve been really interested in the inner world, everyone’s inner world. So I was always interested in the inner world of a schizophrenic patient, because it’s really a different world.

Rick: Well, just when you were saying that thing about how would you contrast a mystic from a schizophrenic, what came to mind is, well, if you’re just trying to go by observable external criteria, you’re a little bit handicapped. But if you could somehow magically, completely step inside each of them and see the world as they see it, from their inner perspective, then you’d see a world of difference.

David: Yes. But there are a lot of externals. And it’s easier, by the way, to make the distinction with a paranoid schizophrenic versus non-paranoid schizophrenic. So the paranoid schizophrenic, his life is organized around one thought, which is a super crazy thought. Now, a mystic’s life is arranged also around one thought, which might be “God is omnipresent, me and God are one and the same, every creature is imbued with its life force, and my life is dedicated to the service of God.” Okay, that could sound pretty crazy. Just sit down and talk with a psychiatrist for 30 seconds, he might stop you right at that point, okay? And say, “Why aren’t we talking about your marital problems?” or something like that. So, the paranoid schizophrenic, see the delusions, there are many categories. The paranoid delusion might be, “The CIA monitors everything I do. My phones are tapped, they’re trying to kill me so they poison my water.” Everything gets swallowed up into their delusion. Okay, a mystic also, everything gets swallowed up into their delusion that everything is one. So their love just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. So as we’ve met these various enlightened people, or regular people who don’t say they’re enlightened, they’re becoming more and more loving of more and more people, so that there’s no one who’s really not part of that belief, and it’s more than a belief, but their existence of–in being in a state of love. So they’re more and more connected. Schizophrenic is more and more and more disconnected because of that central belief.

Rick: Also, it strikes me that the schizophrenic is obsessed with or controlled by just a lot of delusory mental activity. You know, “aliens are zapping my brain” or whatever, whereas the mystic, it’s not so much about his mental activity, it’s really sort of a deep abiding in his true nature that characterizes him as a mystic. And mental activity is somewhat superfluous to that. In fact, some mystics say they don’t have any, that they’re virtually in no thoughts in their mind, that they’re just abiding in pure presence, and then that radiates and shines. So it’s really a radically different subjective state we’re talking about.

David: It’s a radically different subjective and objective state.

Rick: And objective. Yes, so what you’re saying is that the evidence will be there in their behavior, not just in terms of their subjective world. You’re not going to find a mystic doing the kind of things a paranoid schizophrenic would do and vice versa.

David: No, you’re not going to find many paranoid schizophrenics who are high-level functioning people, people who you are attracted to, who you want to be around.

Rick: Who are doing the work of Mother Teresa or something like that.

David: Right.

Rick: Right.

David: The paranoid schizophrenics, all the information that comes at them gets swallowed up into their delusion.

Rick: Right, it’s all, yeah.

David: And there’s one incident in a psych hospital that kind of solidified this idea for me. I was chatting with a patient in the day room at Mercy Hospital. Over there, there’s a pillar and behind that is the drinking fountain. And my patient is like right here. So I see this other patient drifting over to get a sip of water. Turns on the fountain and I’m looking at my patient and his eyes go… And he looks back at me and I can’t describe this but I saw that he incorporated the sound of that water turning on. It wasn’t just a passing thing that the rest of us might blink for a second and then we’d have no memory of it. I saw this guy incorporated that little event into his delusion. So that everything became part of it.

Rick: He read some significance into it.

David: Significance that was crazy significant,

Rick: Right.

David: part of the paranoia.

Rick: Yeah.

David: Now, I do want to say that while someone who’s actively psychotic is someone who I want to be careful of, okay, I’ve run into schizophrenics who displayed something spiritual that kind of blew my mindset even further about, let’s say, mental illness. The guy was a street person, schizophrenic. And when I met him in the hospital, first thing I noticed, the guy has no teeth and he’s walking with a cane and he’s walking incorrectly with a cane. He’d stepped out into the street and got hit by a car years prior. So the first thing I noticed is no one taught this guy how to use a cane. So before I go very far with him, I say, “You’re not–no one taught you how to use the cane correctly. Mind if I show you?” So he gives me the cane and I show him the correct way to use a cane. So that was just the practical thing to do. That’s how I connected with the guy. Now, he was discharged Christmas Day and as I was saying goodbye to him, he gives me this huge toothy grin. He says, “Hey, Doc, you got a no bullshit aura.” I was like.. And now what’s coming at me is love, OK? Not craziness, like this clarity, like the sun has popped through the clouds. I go, “No kidding. What’s a no bullshit aura look like?” He says, “Well, yours is all glittery and shiny and stuff.” I was like, “Wow, Chuck, thank you. Appreciate that.” So the contact made there was really, really genuine contact. And this blip of spiritual insight just popped through and the craziness disappeared.

Rick: Well, it sounds like the guy really had something going on in terms of subtle perception, you know, to be able to see auras.

David: No kidding.

Rick: Yeah.

David: And clearly.

Rick: Yeah!

David: His description was a very clear description.

Rick: Interesting.

David: So you’ve got to be prepared. As a psychiatrist, you have to–like any craft, you have to learn your craft.

Rick: Do you think he had ended up in a mental hospital because he was spiritually evolved and was seeing things that others weren’t and he was misdiagnosed and therefore hospitalized? Or what?

Rick: Was he really out of balance in other ways anyway?

David: Yeah, he was a really out of balance street person.

Rick: Yeah.

David: Hearing voices, not functioning well. He’s someone I don’t think I would clearly say, “Okay, here’s–this is definitely his diagnosis.” I think it’s more complicated. But he did well on medications and as he cleared, the spiritual part came through. But see, if a psychiatrist doesn’t believe, for example, that an aura can exist–

Rick: Right.

David: –then everything gets treated with medications.

Rick: Yeah.

David: And so, as a spiritual psychiatrist, just being aware makes a huge difference in your work with patients. I remember along the lines of auras, I was working in another psych hospital, Mesa Vista. And at 10 o’clock at night, I get a call from one of the nurses there. Referring to one of my patients, she says, “Hey doc, I’m calling you because your patient needs more medication.” I said –as in anti-psychotic medication– I said, “Why?” She says, “Well, I walked in and she said she’s seeing auras.” I said, “Yeah, she probably is.” She goes, “What?” I go, “She probably is. Don’t medicate her.” Don’t medicate her. Don’t give her more medication. Because, you know, a psychotic person, they can see auras like anyone else, but you’ve got to distinguish an aura from a delusion or a command hallucination that says, “Kill that person.” You know, something crazy.

Rick: Right.

David: So I did walk in the next day and I said, “So, tell me about your auras. I got a call from a nurse last night about it.” I think she probably said, “Yeah, I think it freaked her out.” “Yeah, I think it freaked her out too.” So then you’re dealing person to person as opposed to simply doctor to patient. And when you create those openings, then you get at the heart of what makes people tick and what inspires people. You get this, like Chuck with, “You got a no bullshit aura.” I mean, it was like so down to earth. This wasn’t a guy who’d been reading metaphysical books, cause those books don’t talk about no bullshit auras.

Rick: Right.

David: This was just another person having–

Rick: his experience.

David: –his experience, right.

Rick: Yeah. My mother had all kinds of cute sayings she used to say, and one of them was, “Everyone is crazy except I and thou, and sometimes I think thou art.” She generally didn’t have a mental breakdown. After years of verbal abuse from my father, she ended up getting hospitalized. I think initially it was described as a nervous breakdown, but preceding that she had this kind of spiritual thing happen where she felt like she was a saint and she was seeing auras around everything and she was doing stuff with a Ouija board and so on, and talking to her mother who had deceased. She ended up getting hospitalized at Payne Whitney in New York and I guess was diagnosed as schizophrenic and later as manic depressive. This went on for years and years. Finally I got her onto a regular meditation routine, or she finally got herself onto it after much insistence from me, and came over and joined me in Switzerland for nine months and hung around Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and really underwent a huge amount of strengthening. It was like his gift to me because I brought it to his attention a number of times over the years because it was weighing so heavily on me. And by the end, I remember when she left, she had a final meeting with him before she left, and she said that she just saw his whole body bathed in light, like she could really see his aura very profoundly around him. So here she went from seeing auras on the brink of insanity to seeing auras in a much more spiritual and stable state. I guess the question I’m leading up to, aside from telling that little story, is to–what percentage of people do you feel are diagnosed as insane and are hospitalized or undergo some sort of treatment, who are in fact highly spiritual and just haven’t somehow come to terms with it, or in spite of their high degree of spirituality have a lot of imbalances, which actually do make them kind of crazy by anyone’s definition. How many people well along on the spiritual path are locked up in our society?

David: Boy, I couldn’t give you a number, but the description you gave of your mom is such a spiritual description, or it’s a description of someone either with a spiritual emergency or spiritually emerging. There wasn’t anything in your description that said, “Oh, a crazy person.”

Rick: Yeah, I mean she really was losing it after all the abuse she’d undergone. She kind of reached a breaking point. She’d reached a point where she’d stand in the middle of the kitchen and she couldn’t decide whether to go to the refrigerator or the stove. It was like she was fried from everything she’d been through, but there was still this core of spirituality which later emerged to a profound degree. She even completed half of her training to become a TM teacher before she died. And even towards the end of her life there were still some screws loose. She had still some serious neuroses and instabilities and all, but she was a very spiritual person, and yet had all kinds of problems like that.

David: Well, there–I couldn’t give you numbers, but I can give you examples. This lady has now departed, but this is probably 15 years ago, 20 years ago. Her husband, at the age of, like, 65, had been hospitalized for depression. Put on medication. But I knew this guy, I know this guy. Very cheerful, normal, sociable, functioning guy. Right when he’s about to be discharged, she calls me. She says, “I want to run this by you, what’s going on with Ray.” I said, “Okay, tell me.” So she tells me, and a light bulb goes off and I say, “Does Ray, has he had a problem with his big toes turning blue?” Okay, strange question, right?

Rick: Yeah!

David: She goes, “Yes!” And I said, “And I assume they’ve tested him for gout,” which is the only blood test you would run. She goes, “Yeah, they didn’t find anything.” I said to her, “A suddenly darkened big toe is one of the signs of a Kundalini crisis.”

Rick: Ahh!

David: Because Kundalini is like body, mind, spirit. It’s the great masquerader. It can look like anything. And just something in her story made me go in that direction of, “Okay, I know these people. This is a funny story.” And those were the first words out of my mouth. “Does he have darkened, painful blue toes? Big toes?” I said, “Tell Ray he’s had it. This is a Kundalini crisis.”

Rick: Of course, he hadn’t probably heard the word “Kundalini.”

David: Oh yeah.

Rick: Oh, he had, okay.

David: Yeah. When I shared it with her, she was like, “Of course.” Then I asked about energy surges, other Kundalini phenomena. Now I think there are lots of people who’ve had a Kundalini awakening and didn’t know anything about Kundalini.

Rick: Right.

David: And that could put you in the back wards of a mental hospital forever.

Rick: Yeah. Can you give us a quick definition of Kundalini for those– Most, 90% of the people listening to this probably know what it is, but just in case they don’t, just give us a quick..

David: Well, we have energy running through our body. In India, it’s called prana. Chinese medicine, it’s called qi. We call it vital energy. Acupuncture works on that system of working with energy. We have a core to that energy, though, which debatably is between–internally between–at the lower thoracic area. That energy stays pretty contained for most people, but for various reasons, which can be intense spiritual practice or fasting or lifetimes of spiritual practice, that can erupt on you. And when it does, if you’re unlucky like Gopi Krishna, that process took about 30 years to unfold.

Rick: And was agonizing, right?

David: Yeah, it was agonizing. Now, I don’t know if you read this in my book, but I had a full Kundalini awakening in 1976. So, it’s–when I talk about it–it’s not something theoretical. And that experience remains the most powerful experience of my life.

Rick: Go ahead and talk about that for a bit. That will loop us into a bit of a personal bio on you, which we haven’t done much, and then we’ll keep coming back to all these other things.

David: Okay. I was married at the time. My daughter, Rachel, was two, something like that. Yeah, she was two. And she crawls into bed, and she’s tossing and turning, and then she lets out–she kicks, and her kick lands right in my solar plexus. Now, only later, years later, would I make a connection of where that kick landed. But I just said, “Okay, time for me to move to the couch.” So I move to the couch, I fall asleep, and I have a dream in which someone says, “Do you believe in forensic psychiatry?” And I say, “Yes.” And then in the dream I step back and I say, “No. I don’t believe psychiatry should play God.” And then I am hit with a blast of this energy, this light, that immediately takes me into a state that’s neither asleep nor awake. It’s a third state. Now, I had heard about Kundalini maybe two months earlier, and I’m really lucky I’d heard about it. So this energy was like a hose of light about three feet wide, which I can only describe as blasting upwards. But the energy–the Kundalini energy–was so great that if the strongest emotion I’d ever felt in life was being dragged around by Saint Bernard, okay, with this experience I was being dragged by a hundred wild horses. So to compare it–you can’t compare it to anything. So a lot is going on in less than one second. I know it’s Kundalini. I know I have a choice. I can go for the ride, whatever that ride is, or I can fight it. And if I fight it, I end up in the back wards of some psych hospital. So I had all those thoughts quickly, and immediately the decision was, “Don’t fight this.” Seconds later, I heard my mind and maybe my ego burn like fall leaves in a fire. I heard my mind go, “Tsss.” And for a moment it was painful, just a moment. And then the energy just continued to blast me up and out, and just more, just nothing but being in light and then being light. And at the time, it may not have been upward, because when the experience was over, one of the first things that came to me was the importance of the word “ineffable.” I really got the meaning of that word, that something ineffable you can’t begin to describe in words. So when the experience was over, I knew that in six months I’d be describing it differently. So at any rate, I was blasted higher and higher, until I reached this kind of clear space in the process where I was this far from the face of Michelangelo’s David. And it was radiant.

Rick: You’re seeing that as a vision.

David: As solid as this table.

Rick: Right.

David: I’m right next to it, except it’s luminous from the inside out. And I’m just hanging out, watching the right side of the face of that statue for five minutes. I mean, I couldn’t tell you anything about time. Then the statue disappears, and now I’m really in a state of incredibly high-energy samadhi. I literally have no mind. My mind was burned on the ashes of the couch where I was sleeping. Just fizzled, gone. And then I’m in a state of love, peace, bliss, zero thoughts. I’m so far from the thoughts, it’s like I was a hundred miles away from having a thought. And it was like I was a hundred miles above the earth in terms of my perspective, and I saw that all human suffering is unnecessary. That in the state I was in, suffering does not and cannot even exist. But that’s probably the only thought that entered my head, because this was such a mindless state. And so then that was my thought about suffering, and then I remained in this samadhi state for about, I don’t know, five hours. And slowly came back to normal consciousness, where I’m still very, very blissed out. Eventually I wake my then-wife and tell her the experience. And she says, “That’s nice, honey. Good night.”

Rick: “Go back to sleep,” yeah.

David: Yeah, “I need to go back to sleep.” That’s not an unusual response to those experiences, even with your nearest and dearest, which poses a lot of problems for people. If the person you’re closest to thinks you’re crazy, then who do you share it with?

Rick: Right, or isn’t interested, or whatever.

David: Isn’t interested.

Rick: Yeah.

David: Now, there were other synchronicities. That morning I was meeting with the chief resident who lived on Vision Drive.

Rick: Oh, I see.

David: Just interesting. And in the afternoon I drove to L.A. to visit my sister and her family, and I could see that every blade of grass contained that same energy I had experienced. It was like the hills were alive in a very different way, at the level where I really felt every blade of grass contains the equivalent of atomic energy.

Rick: It’s true.

David: There’s so much energy. And with those experiences, they remain as clear. How many years later is this? 34?

Rick: Something like that, yeah.

David: It’s definitely as clear as it was six months later.

Rick: Nice.

David: And I knew that a lot–there had to be a lot of people in mental hospitals who would have the same experience I did, but no knowledge of kundalini, and maybe no spiritual support, I don’t know. But I know that energy either was going up or was going to take my mind out in a very destructive, insane way.

Rick: Yeah.

David: I was lucky and blessed.

Rick: Yeah, you had enough knowledge and stability to handle it. Barely, perhaps, you’d say.

David: I had only heard the word “kundalini” from one of my supervisors, a spiritual psychiatrist, Sam Sandweiss.

Rick: Right.

David: He had mentioned this maybe two months earlier. We spent maybe 15 minutes, he brought it up. Definitely part of the divine plan, because if he hadn’t mentioned it, I would have been lost when this experience hit.

Rick: Yeah. There’s a whole clinic in Tennessee run by someone named Joan Harrington, which specializes in kundalini problems, and which teaches people various breathing exercises and so on, to clear or redirect blocked kundalini. They say it gets stuck in certain ways, in certain channels, and this causes all sorts of grief for people until it’s redirected properly. It’s interesting. As a psychiatrist, then, for several decades since then, have you encountered many people in your own practice who have had kundalini awakenings and didn’t know what to make of them?

David: I wouldn’t say many, but the ones I’ve worked with are very, very clear.

Rick: Yeah.

David: One guy, I think he came in because he was feeling anxious. He owned a restaurant, bar and grill, really stable guy, really happy guy, the kind of guy who can run a restaurant and happily connect with everyone, which is a good personality to run a restaurant, right?

Rick: Sure.

David: He’d been doing a lot of, I think it was qigong, but this was a long time ago, it was some kind of martial art, that he believed he’d been doing to excess, but the kundalini erupted. Now, I’ve never met anyone where it erupted like it did for me, like totally, fully, and completely with no problem. Again, I was fortunate. Now this guy became anxious. The energy was too high. The world, perceptually, was different. All of his senses were heightened. Visually, things were coming at him too brightly. He was picking up other people’s energies, and it was really overwhelming him.

Rick: Sounds like an LSD trip that you can’t come down from.

David: Right, but underneath it, there’s nothing psychotic about the guy. He’s easy to talk to, he was clear, coherent. He was worried about the marriage, because he’s now struggling with this difficult thing.

Rick: Yeah, and he had a sense of what was going on, right? But he just, there was too much for him.

David: He did.

Rick: Yeah.

David: So, I didn’t work to redirect the energy. I worked to bring the energy down.

Rick: Right.

David: Some of these people will try to meditate more, or go on fasts for a few weeks, which is really dangerous.

Rick: Yeah.

David: And a lot of spiritual seekers who are not familiar with psychiatry think that kundalini is just a super great thing. Well, it can be. It also can be really messy.

Rick: Yeah.

David: Now, the area that I think is the most interesting is the overlap between mania and kundalini. I have seen some manics who started out with a kundalini experience. One of them was this lady from New York, who’s, she was probably 40 when I met her, something like that. But when she was 14, she had a major kundalini awakening. And she became, she was living in a state of bliss. She was functioning quite well in school. She was a magnet. So, she attracted people. It was like she had followers without asking for them. She was very popular, very wise, had healing abilities, incredibly psychic. Nothing problematic until she was 18. And the energy reached a level which was too much for her. But also, she had a sense of what this whole process was, that there was kind of a calling for where this was taking her, which I can’t quite remember the details of, but it’s like she had to turn back. She made a decision, “I have to turn back.” At which point, the kundalini energy went straight into mania. Now, she had the gene in that family for mania. So, she became very psychotic.

Rick: It’s kind of like what you were saying earlier, when you had your experience. Either I can go with this or I can resist it. And if I resist it, I’m going to get fried. So, you went with it. And it’s almost like the moment she started resisting or not going with her destiny, as she called it, she had problems.

David: Right. And then the family gene manifested.

Rick: Right. Which perhaps it wouldn’t have had she continued to cooperate with it.

David: Might not have. So, she was very psychotic. She moved to the Southwest, where she basically was a street person for five years, in and out of psych hospitals, major drugs, bipolar drugs, antipsychotics, lithium, that sort of thing. By the time she made it to the San Diego area, she’d been stable on meds for many years. Actually, it was due to the first release of “Are You Getting Enlightened or Losing Your Mind?” that she made contact with me. She had researched some of the other… She knew the Kundalini experts in this country. You know, Lee Sannella being one. So, she’d done her research. So, my work with her was a balance of dealing with the spiritual side. The psychic stuff was back, like, really big time. Almost all of her dreams were lucid dreams. They’re all highly spiritual dreams. But she would go through various states. Occasionally psychotic. Occasionally, mainly, spiritual, samadhi-type state. But she labeled her internal states in ways that psychiatrists don’t, which, frankly, was pretty cool. So, I won’t give the name of her state. But let’s say one of her states was the door. Okay, it wasn’t. But it was the equivalent of that. Instead of saying, “I’m really depressed,” it’s like, “I’m stuck in the door.” So, I worked with her spiritually. Lots of guided imagery, nutritional therapy, which, by the way, is risky with mania, I’ve found.

Rick: Oh.

David: That amino acid therapy, you’ve got to be really careful because a manic’s brain is a brittle brain. So, even if you’re doing something natural, I’ve found natural therapies don’t work with everything. It helped tone things down. She was a wonderful person to work with. Her trust level was incredible. So, there wasn’t anything she didn’t share with me. And when she moved back to New York, we continued consulting for several years. Now, part of my work was to send her to a local doctor of oriental medicine who is a really, really extraordinary guy, really amazing. And through pulse reading, over several sessions, maybe more than several sessions, when he felt her pulse, he could identify which of her five main mental states she was in. And again, a lot of these were states that weren’t words like depression. And he could always bump her up at least one level through his treatment.

Rick: Nice.

David: So, I thought for Kundalini, someone who, like a great acupuncturist who works with the flow of energy, is the right person to be teaming up with.

Rick: Yeah. So, you brought up an interesting point here, which is that for some people, Kundalini awakenings happen spontaneously. And they can result in a great deal of fear and difficulty if a person doesn’t know what they are. And if they’re not handled properly, it can result in a lifetime of mental illness. But on the other hand, there are people who, obviously millions of people, who devote themselves to spiritual practice with the very real possibility, whether they know it or not, that they might be prepar- they might be eliciting a Kundalini awakening at any time. I used to go to courses, long meditation courses where we’d go for six weeks, two months, six months, meditating eight hours a day and stuff. And you’d increase your meditation and then you’d level off for some time and then you’d spend a long time coming down from it, depending on how long the course was. You might spend a month or something just coming down from it. And if you ever had to go into town to buy a toothbrush or something in the middle of the longer meditation, it would be too much to handle. So, you really became very open. And I remember one of those courses, there was a whole, there was like an epidemic of Kundalini awakening going on. And at one point, Maharishi invited all these people up on the stage and they were going through all these physical gyrations, twitches and jerks and crazy stuff. And it was like…

David: Oh yeah, Kriyas.

Rick: Yeah, Kriyas. And so there’s this whole group sitting on the stage just gyrating around, going through all… And if anybody came in from the outside and saw that, they would think, “What is going on here?” But I guess the point I’m making is this stuff has to be treated as the powerful thing that it is. And if someone gets bitten by the spiritual bug and decides they’re going to start doing four hours of fast pranayama a day or something, they could really be getting themselves into trouble. So, you really have to do this… All these spiritual practices are best done under the supervision of somebody who knows what they’re doing and safety first. This is a marathon, not a race. And I’ve seen people who push it too hard who just go nuts.

David: Yeah, I’ve seen that.

Rick: Marathon, not a sprint, I meant to say.

David: Right. I’ve worked with one guy who presented with a paranoid psychosis. He’s on a spiritual path and he’d gone on a three-week fast.

Rick: Right.

David: And he comes in the hospital with something that looks identical to paranoid schizophrenia. Put him on Haldol. Two days later, he’s cured. Unheard of. I then discharged him, maybe two days later. Followed him in the office for another eight or nine months. And I think it came up again. It might have been fasting or something. And this guy was working in his spiritual organization, working in a restaurant in town here, vegetarian place, cheerful, cool guy, someone you’d want to know, right? He ends up back in the hospital with the same severe paranoid psychosis, delusions, same deal. Put him on Haldol. Two days later, cured. Now I should explain. If you’re lucky, maybe three weeks into treating someone with schizophrenia, you’re starting to see the voices go down. The delusions are going to take, if you’re lucky, months to break. Sometimes you don’t break them. So again, in two days on this medication, this guy’s normal. So one of the nurses on the psych ICU comes up to me and says, “Look, how can he be schizophrenic and be cured in two days?” And I looked at her and I said, “He breaks the rules.” She goes, “What?” I said, “He’s breaking the rules about how to be schizophrenic.” She goes, “What?” I just said, “I’ll leave it at that. Yes, he does have a schizophrenic process. And yes, he’s responding differently than anyone you or I have ever seen.” But see, it’s important for a doctor to be able to see this person who breaks the rules and not stuff them into a different box and not say, “Well, gee, maybe he’s an atypical schizophrenic with a bit of– maybe he’s schizoaffective” or some other kind of nonsense. It was like, “No, I stick by the diagnosis. He’s a guy who has not responded like anyone you or I have ever seen.” But those are the people who teach you the most, It is the ones who are breaking the rules. And his, again, was this mixture of spiritual process, ending up in a psychotic process, and someone whose underlying personality was very sweet and good integrity.

Rick: Sattva.

David: Yes, very.

Rick: Could we posit at this point that psychoses that are triggered by spiritual practices might be more short-lived than ones that develop over a lifetime or that are as a result of some genetic or biochemical thing, and that you can therefore recover from them more quickly, just as perhaps you would recover from an LSD trip more than you would from some kind of psychotic state that had just occurred to you without taking a drug? Does that make any sense, that theory?

David: Well, I think what’s important is not to give people the impression that if they engage in spiritual practice, a vast majority are going to end up in trouble.

Rick: No, that’s important. We’ve been talking about that so much. It’s important to emphasize that.

David: Yes, it’s a very, very tiny percentage.

Rick: Yeah.

David: It’s just a psychiatrist who’s going to see anybody, anything that’s really out of the ordinary. So even if it’s going to happen once in a thousand times, hey, if you had a rare cancer that your doctor had never seen, you’d be happy that he was familiar with that incredibly rare cancer. So it’s important not to scare people.

Rick: I think that it might be valuable to point out that in traditional spiritual paths that have stood the test of time, there’s a certain emphasis on stability, making sure that there’s a foundation for what you’re trying to build. Purification, that you don’t just pour new wine into old wineskins, to use Jesus’ phrase. There has to be–the vehicle has to be fit for the thing that you’re trying to awaken. Integration, that every step of the way there’s–you need to integrate it with the real world and not go off into la-la land. All those things are essential if there’s to be genuine growth and any kind of stability to that growth. Again, it’s a marathon, not a sprint, and it has to be approached in a balanced way. That’s why you see things like Patanjali’s “Eight Limbs of Yoga” advocating all sorts of things that I’ve just mentioned. Various purificatory processes and behavioral modifications and ethical adjustments and so on, to really make you qualified for samadhi, qualified for enlightenment.

David: Right. In fact, I was thinking of Patanjali maybe ten seconds before you mentioned his name.

Rick: Synchronicity again.

David: Yeah. I was thinking back again to the kundalini experience I had, and over the years I started to feel like that was kind of like a rocket ship taking off. Without… It was like a vertical take-off without a horizontal foundation.

Rick: Right.

David: So I realized, I don’t think I need more rocket trips right now. I think in terms of what Patanjali talks about, your yamas and niyamas, human values, social norms, commitment to truth, dharma, love, nonviolence, etc. Understanding everyone as the way Native Americans describe it, with the phrase “Mitakuye Oyasin,” which literally means everyone is part of an interconnected web of life. So becoming established, that’s your launch pad. I’m sure I wasn’t at that point where my rocket took off. So I realized, OK, I need this–the only way to explain it–this horizontal foundation. And Patanjali, I think one of the important things in his Eightfold Path, and I may get this wrong, yamas and niyamas, then yoga asanas, yoga postures,

Rick: Pranayama

David: pranayama, breath control,

Rick: Pratyahara

David: pratyahara, sense control, which is really to say you stop being controlled by your senses pulling you out into the world.

Rick: Right.

David: Then comes dharana, number six, which is concentration. Dhyana, which is meditation, that’s number seven. And number eight is samadhi.

Rick: Right.

David: So a lot of people think of these last two steps as where you want to be spiritually, like meditation and samadhi.

Rick: Yeah, go for the–

David: Yeah, go for the goal. So Patanjali’s path is like, OK, take things slow, develop a foundation, go from there, and then you’re going to be physically fit, mentally fit, and in a good position for meditation and samadhi.

Rick: Yeah. There’s one way of looking at it, which is that it is called Ashtanga Yoga, Eight Limbs, and when limbs grow, they grow simultaneously. You don’t just grow an arm and then grow another arm and then a leg. Everything kind of grows simultaneously to the same degree. So one way of looking at it is that all these things–that samadhi only grows to the extent that all these other things have grown. And you really can’t get growth of any one of the eight limbs that’s way out of proportion to the others. They sort of are tied together, maybe like a rubber band. Sometimes a rubber band seems very loose in some cases, but there’s definitely some correlation that can’t be broken.

David: Yeah, I haven’t heard that metaphor before, but that makes sense. You would be evolving multiple aspects of your life at the same time.

Rick: Yeah, which kind of leads us into the whole notion of crazy wisdom teachers, people who use crazy wisdom, in my opinion, as an alibi for inappropriate behavior. There are so many teachers and gurus and so on that have gotten caught with their pants down, literally, or done all kinds of stuff. In some cases it’s really egregious and very sick and very harmful to people. I guess I won’t get into naming names. Sometimes these people and their followers use this crazy wisdom notion as an alibi for that behavior. They’re trying to teach us something. They’re breaking our boundaries. They’re busting our egos. They’re above the laws of human morality because they’re so transcendent, and so on and so forth. I’ve toyed with accepting those notions, but when you get right down to it, I don’t buy it. I feel like there’s– Ken Wilber talks about lines of development, and this contradicts what I was just saying about the eight limbs, but you can get fairly far advanced along certain lines and really be quite immature in other areas of development. So go with that for a bit.

David: Yeah, and I definitely know one of the people you’re talking about.

Rick: Yeah.

David: The sad thing is if someone has been a devotee of someone who is really not a legitimate guru, they could be spiritually wrecked for life. Because if it’s really a system where there’s serious boundaries that are crossed, and clearly the teachings are not part of ancient traditions. I mean, you’re gurus of India. You may have some behaving strangely, but the foundation is very similar over thousands and thousands of years. I think that’s true, the Christian mystics and all religions. So if you end up with a guru like that, you can be wrecked, and you will find it very hard to recognize who’s a legitimate guru from who isn’t. But if you’ve been around the real deal, the difference is pretty great. Years ago a friend of mine said, “Hey, I want you to join me watching this video of this really cool lady.” I said, “Tell me more.” She goes, “No.” She said–I said, “What do you mean, ‘no’?” She says, “You’re going to love it.” I said, “I’ll go, but we should take two cars. Because if I don’t like it, I’m leaving at the break.” I won’t say who this person was, other than the behavior was so bizarre, and so unlike the real teachers that I’ve either met or read on this planet. But I’ve got people in this small room, men behind me sobbing, like they have found their personal savior. I was trying not to laugh out loud, because it was like, “Man, this is not the real deal.” But this is a semi-crazy scene. There’s people in this room, it’s like, “I have found my personal savior.” So there was an intermission, and I went up to my friend and I said, “I’m leaving now. Do you want to—” Maybe we came together. She said she could get a ride back if she needs it. I said, “I’m leaving. What do you want to do?” She said, “I’m staying.” I said, “Cool. Enjoy yourself.” I said, “I’ve really seen enough. I enjoyed myself,” and I said,”and I had a lot of really good laughs, quietly.”

Rick: Yeah. Well you know Charlie Manson was a very charismatic character to the people who were attracted to him. Maybe this is something you can touch upon, is that sometimes crazy people have a lot of charisma. One of his rationales for doing what he and his little group did was that, since everything is one, there is no morality. He used a Vedantic perspective, or a skewed understanding of one, to justify a horrific murder. What about this thing that a person can really be off kilter and yet have a fair amount of charisma, at least to certain people’s perspective? It can radiate a lot of something.

David: Yeah, well–

Rick: Adolf Hitler, for that matter.

David: Correct. Who, by the way, was a very metaphysical person.

Rick: He was. A vegetarian.

David: Yeah, I mean Hitler studied ancient Egyptian and Vedic lore.

Rick: The Nazi symbol of a swastika is an ancient Vedic symbol. You find it in all kinds of things in India, although it’s reversed. It’s in the opposite direction of the one the Nazis used.

David: Right. But it’s very strange, the first time you go to India.

Rick: You see all these swastikas.

David: Right, there are swastikas all over the place. So the people like Charlie Manson, okay, we’re dealing with crazy people, or very sick sociopaths. Because your sociopaths can be very likable. They can be magnetic.

Rick: He had the Beach Boys in his circle at one point. They were kind of sucked into it for a while.

David: Yeah, that’s right. Or Jim Jones.

Rick: Yeah, there you go.

David: He fed off the fears and desires of people who were not spiritually…

Rick: Discriminating.

David: Not discriminating.

Rick: Right.

David: So they just went for the ride of this guy who promised, you know, whatever, salvation through him. So I don’t see sociopaths as having mental illness, as opposed to huge moral illness.

Rick: Well, you know, Ravana of the Ramayana, who was Rama’s adversary in the Ramayana, was said to be a very charismatic character, very well-versed in all the scriptural knowledge, full of all kinds of siddhis and powers and so on and so forth. In other words, a very evolved person, if he was a person, by most definitions. And yet he was supposed to be the epitome of evil in that age. And yet, what happened was, and as often happens in those stories, when Rama killed him, he attained enlightenment. And it was like he was, according to the story, actually a great being who chose the role of a demonic life in order to meet God in human form as Rama and be killed by him in order to achieve his salvation. And he just sort of played his role as a negative guy, because I guess in the whole balance of the universe, some people have to play those roles, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re lowly evolved.

David: Well, Ravana certainly had among the greatest siddhi powers on the planet, almost equal or equal to Rama, said to have created this thing I don’t believe in, alternate universes–

Rick: Right.

David: –which existed and collapsed because the foundation underneath it wasn’t great. Yeah, that was his story. Was he spiritual? No. Spiritual in the sense of… how do you define spiritual?

Rick: Well, your thing about non-violent and loving and all that stuff. No, but he was apparently at a high level of evolution. He just wasn’t manifesting it in terms of those qualities.

David: Well, he was at a high level of developing siddhi powers. It’s not uncommon in world politics to have a battle of the psychics behind the scene. This went on in Noriega’s Panama, with Colonel Diaz as his assistant. A friend of mine, Shama, is a psychic who’s consulted to like six heads of states. She happened to be in Panama, where she’d go I think every couple of years. She’d become very popular. She’d be like on the equivalent of the Oprah Winfrey show of Panama. So, she’s there for a while, hanging out with a friend of hers one morning, and Colonel Diaz, the VP of the country, shows up at where she’s hanging out.

Rick: And Noriega was Nicaragua, right? Not Panama.

David: I’m sorry.

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

David: Yeah.

Rick: Okay.

David: Wait.

Rick: Yes, he was like the dictator in Nicaragua.

David: Okay.

Rick: Right.

David: So, Colonel Diaz shows up, says, “I want a reading.” Shama says, “I don’t do readings Wednesday mornings,” or whatever it was, right? He says, “Do you know who I am?” She goes, “I don’t really care who you are.” He says, “I’m the Vice President of the country.” She goes, “Nice.”

Rick: “Come back tomorrow.”

David: “Come back tomorrow.” So, he says, “Well, what are you going to do–where are you going to be this afternoon?” and she tells him. So, he shows up a few hours later at this new location with his bodyguards and their semi-automatic weapons, and says, “I’d like my reading now.” So, she doesn’t have any choice. She gives him a reading, tells him, “Oh, well, there’s going to be a very major revolution in your country very soon. The good news is you live.” Now, she introduced Colonel Diaz to her teacher and my teacher, Sai Baba. Diaz becomes just connected very quickly. So, he has pictures of Sai Baba in his office suddenly. Noriega has pictures of the devil and Hitler. So, he’s into psychics also, but he’s very much a dark side kind of person. That made it to the New York Times with an article called “Battle of the Psychics.”

Rick: Wow.

David: So, both of them were into metaphysical stuff, but Diaz was basically evolving very quickly as a spiritual person. Noriega was continuing to evolve as a really pretty evil person. The rest of the story is too long to go into, other than to say that when Shama left and came back to L.A. and Colonel Diaz was now in prison, he was hot-wiring the phones in the prison to reach her in L.A. One day, she gets a knock on her door in L.A. from Noriega’s thugs, saying, “Okay, here’s what you need to tell your friend if you want him to live.” So, they ask her to write a letter. She writes a letter knowing it’s not going to Diaz first, that letter is going straight to Noriega. So, she writes a letter with that intention. Colonel Diaz is freed as a result of that. Now, also as a result of that, Shama stopped consulting for politicians, heads of state, because she realized Noriega’s thugs would not have hesitated to kill her.

Rick: So, what’s the moral of the story in terms of the whole theme of our discussion here?

David: You can have psychic powers and people interested in psychic phenomenon. The paranormal is essentially neutral. In this story, one of the people interested was very much on a spiritual quest, path.

Rick: And the other wasn’t?

David: The other was on essentially a demonic path.

Rick: Yeah, well that kind of leads into my final line of questioning, which is that there’s a whole section of your book that’s about all sorts of paranormal and extrasensory things, seeing ghosts and having visions and ESP. You don’t get into extraterrestrials, but you cover the whole gamut of out of the ordinary experiences that people have. Without a really clear understanding of all this in our culture, it might be easy to lump all those into the basket of spirituality, but perhaps I don’t think you do that. There’s some things which could lead you down towards the dark side, and others not. So, let’s talk about that for a minute. Yeah, well that whole section of the book was really what the book is about. Are you getting enlightened or losing your mind? Really, one of the subtitles could have been, “Most of you don’t need to worry, you’re not losing your mind.” But at least 70% of the population has had a paranormal or spiritual experience, and it all gets lumped into either, “I have no idea what it was, I’m crazy,” but people need to know what their experience was. Because when you can name something, then you gain power, and you can move forward. If you’ve had some experience, you don’t know what to call it, well your doctors aren’t going to know what to call it, so it’s all going to be lumped into, “Well, this is craziness.”

Rick: Yeah.

David: I want–

Rick: And there are other disciplines too, which might lump it that way. For instance, fundamentalist Christians would say, “Well, all of that stuff is of the devil, it’s all bad.”

David: Correct.

Rick: Right

David: So I wanted to write about every spiritual and paranormal experience I could think of, and not just like quoting from an encyclopedia, but from personal experience, legitimate texts, patients, etc., etc., so that someone who’s had an unusual experience is going to find it in this book. Then they can go, “Oh, so I have this, and I’m not crazy.” Now, there’s another section called “The Lost Mind,” which describes all the major mental illnesses. Partly so that people wondering what their experience is, they can read through the section on mental illness. Most of them are going to discover they’re not schizophrenic, they’re probably not bipolar, it’s not that that’s not going to happen. But most people having these experiences are just everyday mystics, whoever used that term, they’re just everyday mystics. I wanted them to be able to look through the mental illness section and go, “Oh, okay, I’m a little bit anxious, but that’s really not what this is about.” So then they could go through that section, “Are you getting enlightened or losing your mind? Miracles vs. Madness,” and go, “That was my departed father who visited.” That’s normal, it happens all the time. Now, yeah, I did write about a few things that are on the unpleasant side. I would say which psychic attack and spirit possession are the most difficult. Definitely the most difficult to understand enough to write about in the book. This is really poorly understood stuff. There’s a lot of stuff I wrote about where I didn’t find good references in any other books. So sometimes my patients taught me a lot, and sometimes friends who are either spiritually evolved or great psychics or both would give me their insights. And I did have patients who taught me a lot in this area of psychic attack and spirit possession.

Rick: And you would agree, wouldn’t you, that those two things are not inherently spiritual in any way? It’s a problem, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with genuine spirituality, or would you not agree with that?

David: No, I think it’s a problem.

Rick: Yeah.

David: It’s a problem…

Rick: It’s an out of the ordinary problem, but it’s… just as spirituality can be out of the ordinary, but it’s not spiritual merely because it’s out of the ordinary.

David: Right. It’s a paranormal experience which is generally dark and destructive.

Rick: Right.

David: Now, it frequently occurs along with addictions, by the way.

Rick: Because you’ve weakened yourself and made yourself vulnerable to such things.

David: Right.

Rick: Right.

David: So, some of my more gifted patients have told me they… like in a bar, they’ve seen entities popping in and out of very drunk people.

Rick: I see, yeah.

David: They’ve also seen entities popping in and out of schizophrenics in the hospital. And they’ve described that schizophrenics, like an addicted person, can be like an open target.

Rick: Yeah, they’re an easy mark, yeah.

David: They’re an easy mark.

Rick: Right.

David: So, that makes a full psychospiritual diagnosis a wee bit more complicated. Because then people ask me, “So, is schizophrenia caused by spirit possession?” And the answer is, “No, basically no.” I mean, for that illness, the genetics of schizophrenia are super high.

Rick: I remember one time I was stoned with some friends in a graveyard because it was a nice place to go to get stoned and not get caught by the cops. And I was sitting on a gravestone. And for quite a while, this was like I was 18 years old, for quite a while I felt like I was engaged in a battle with something that was trying to take me over. And that kind of thing didn’t usually happen to me when I was smoking marijuana. But it was a very memorable experience. It was scary. I was vulnerable, you know.

David: Marijuana can cause that kind of opening.

Rick: Yeah.

David: It can definitely cause it–when the Native Americans use it as a spiritual opening.

Rick: Right.

David: So that you could have really clear insights. But it also can create an opening for negative forces, or what I call “lookie-loos.” Sometimes people just want to pop in. It’s like, “This looks like an interesting party. I thought I’d join.”

Rick: Yeah. Well, if you’re a disembodied spirit who’s kind of in some limbo state, you might want to get embodied whenever possible.

Rick: Right. So a spiritual person, even smoking marijuana, will say, “You, out.” You met a stronger force.

Rick: Right. I eventually got out of the situation, but it felt like a battle for quite some time.

David: Scary.

Rick: Yeah. I don’t know what would have happened if I’d lost the battle. Actually, I’ve had a little bit of this myself, but much more vividly with some friends, where during long meditation courses, they felt like some major embodied entity has left them. They had been in there for a long time, and it was, “Okay, you’ve had enough. You’re out of here. I’m strong enough to cast you out now.” Of course, there’s the whole story of Jesus casting out demons with people, because he had that authority.

David: Yes. But, yeah, there is that issue of, “Do you have the strength to do that?” It’s like, I worked with a nurse for years in a VA hospital outpatient clinic. I’d probably known her for years before she shared this experience, Which was that for very long, years and years and years, she would be woken by this kind of male dark force at the foot of her bed, literally shaking and rattling her bed. It would wake her up, and she’d be looking at this thing.

Rick: Scary.

David: Scary. And she just… it went on for a very long time, until she reached the point where she had enough strength. One morning, this thing woke her up, shook her bed, and somehow she summoned the strength she needed. She sat up and screamed at this thing, and just said, “You, get the hell out of here. Never come back.” But she had mustered that level of clarity that, “If I don’t do something, this thing is wrecking my life.” And when she had that clarity and the strength, she was rid of this thing forever.

Rick: Interesting.

David: And so many people have these stories. So many people.

Rick: Well, you know, and again, the whole theme of your book is, you’re not losing your mind. These things are legitimate issues, and you need to sort of, first of all, come to terms with the fact that you’re not crazy and something really is going on, and then secondly, obviously, there could be ways of dealing with them. Like, if someone came to you and said that was happening, you might advocate some practice or something which could strengthen them and get them to the point where they could tell it to stop.

David: Yeah, actually, I did develop a treatment for unwanted visitors, which was a… it wasn’t a drug-based… I mean, it was a Milton Ericksonian kind of paradoxical treatment that I write about in “Are You Getting Enlightened or Losing Your Mind?” When I put that technique together, though, I wasn’t really thinking that this person’s uncle was really visiting. I just knew whoever was visiting or whatever the experience was, he didn’t like it. So even if it’s some beloved person who’s passed on, if you don’t have a frame of reference for it, suddenly that can become very scary for you.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. There’s one other thing I want to talk to you about, which is that, with reference to my own experiences, but it applies to many perhaps, when I first started on meditation, started on the spiritual path, it was tremendously strengthening for me. Before that, I had dropped out of school and couldn’t live with my father and was just doing all kinds of crazy stuff, getting arrested and this and that. Within a couple of weeks after learning, I completely dropped all my druggy friends, made a whole new circle. Actually, I didn’t make new friends. I walked the dog for a few months without making any friends because I just needed to get my feet on the ground. But I got a job, got back into school, so it had this incredibly wholesome effect on my life. But then over the decades, I went through a long stretch, which I could consider decades, where I feel like looking back on it, I was really kind of crazy at times, but in the sense that.. I wouldn’t have struck people that way. I could get up and give a perfectly coherent lecture and take courses and this and that. But there was this sort of inner transformation taking place, this inner catharsis, which had me in a state of eccentricity, obsessiveness, idiosyncratic indulgence, just really nutty in many ways. One of our criteria that we discussed early in the interview was being well integrated with the world. I wasn’t. It’s because there was such an inner orientation that the world was kind of unreal to me and I didn’t interact with it well for that reason. Then eventually I got married and that was a tremendous help in getting more grounded and more real and more sane. My poor wife had to do a lot of work to help me get there.

David: I’m sure she doesn’t think of it that way.

Rick: No, maybe not. But does this ring a bell with you? As a spiritual practitioner yourself for decades and as someone who knows many of them, do you see people as going through a kind of, maybe we could call it, dark night of the soul, really, in a sense, where there’s just a long period of inner rearrangement, which kind of leaves you in a limbo state until you finally come out the other end and things get more integrated and stabilized and you’re in a much nicer state, but you’re more normal again.

David: Well, yours is definitely a transitional experience. From here’s this, for want of a better word, a dark life that you recognize, like, “Oh, not good.” And here’s a much more positive life that you recognize and you move in that direction, but then everything is being reshuffled inside.

Rick: Yeah, there’s so many things that had to be purged or changed or strengthened or whatever.

David: Yeah, and that could be looked at as, “Oh, this person’s crazy,” as opposed to, “No, this is a journey that’s unfolding and it’s not always a pleasant journey.” I mean, as Larry Dossey said, “The spiritual path is not for wimps.” I like that quote. There’s a term that I started using around 1998 that I call “karma surfing.” Now, for years, part of my night-time prayers were, “I pray for liberation.” Then I read a book by this lady I mentioned whose husband had this Kundalini black-toe experience. In one of her books, she talks about the moment she switched from praying for liberation to liberation no matter what. And I read that and I went, “Oh, that’s a big difference.” I mean, I could just feel, “I pray for liberation. I pray for liberation no matter what.” You take a deep breath, it’s like, “Okay.” And for at least the next ten years, that was part of my evening prayers. Now, the stuff that started coming at me, the challenges I had to move through, were like grade 6 to 10, and probably 35 of them over the last 14 years. It’s a lot of them. So they would hit you and it’s like, “Whoa,” and knock you for a loop. After a while, I started to see that I was surfing through them. It was like, “Oh, here’s more karma. It’s part of that I prayed for liberation no matter what stuff.” And by the way, folks, don’t pray for that unless you’re ready for the consequences, because it means you’re going to burn off your mind, your ego, any karma that’s left from this life or past lives. You don’t know what you’re asking for. I’m not saying don’t do it, but be prepared.

Rick: Know what you’re getting into, yeah.

David: So I got better at just surfing through them and over them.

Rick: Interesting.

David: To the point where the office manager at one point said, “I don’t know how you do this.” I said, “Do what?” She said, “This thing you had to deal with today,” she said, “I would have flipped out.” I said, “Yeah, I know. I’ve gotten so used to it, I’ve learned how to surf through karma–”

Rick: Interesting.

David: or “surf over karma.”

Rick:Yeah

David: It’s all part of that a process, a different process than yours, but still my version of my journey, my version of THE journey.

Rick: Yeah. Maharishi once said, “When the postman knows you’re going to move, he tries to deliver all your mail.” In fact, a lot of people say, a lot of people I’ve interviewed and all, they say, “Awakening is not by any means the end of the game. It’s really the beginning.” Because once a profound awakening has taken place, especially a really abiding one that’s kind of stable foundation, then all hell can break loose, because there’s just so much in the relative structure that’s not in congruence with that awakening that’s taken place, and it’s all got to rearrange itself in order to come into alignment.

David: Yeah, and that awakening is very much an inner awakening. So we’re very attached to, “Here’s how our external life is going, our relationships, our finances, our health.” But the spiritual path, it doesn’t ignore that stuff at all, but it says, “You’re not going to find the answers out there. You need to find how to dive deeper and deeper internally.” And so everyone’s journey is going to be very different, but usually with challenges.

Rick: Yeah.

David: Because in spiritual organizations and spiritual seekers, I’ve seen this a lot, their lives didn’t get easier, at least not for a while. I would say over time they got much better. It’s like they passed through something like the dark night, or just more challenges than they thought they could handle, except it really wasn’t more challenges than they could handle. It’s more than they thought they could handle, which is the point when you think you’re going crazy.

Rick: Right.

David: Where you’re hit with so much stuff, you feel like, “This is beyond my ability to cope.”

Rick: Yeah, there’s a sort of spiritual cliché that God doesn’t give you more than you can handle.

David: I think that’s true. Although, you have to stay committed to some fundamentals. You’ve got to be committed to what I call honesty–really profound honesty, which isn’t just I’m telling the truth, but it’s more subtle. It’s like, “Okay, I don’t exaggerate at all.” I mean, being aware, “Oh, I told this person this story, and I didn’t mean to, but this little piece here wasn’t 100% true. I’ll go back and correct that,” which will seem trivial to most people. But it’s like, no, truth is kind of you’re either committed to truth or you’re not. So if you’re committed to truth and dharma, which is you can kind of summarize the Vedas in a phrase, “Satyam vada dharmam chara,” “Speak the truth, practice dharma.” That little equation is enough to see you through your spiritual path.

Rick: Yeah, that’s good. You know this theme of awakening and then having all hell break loose because your individual life has to realign itself to that awakening. I wonder whether something like that may not be happening to the world at large at this point because there does seem to be a mass awakening occurring, and I wonder if we’re going to see or are already seeing societal upheavals that will be necessary in order for the society, the world, the economic systems, the political systems, the military systems and all that to come into alignment with higher consciousness.

David: Yeah, I–

Rick: And whether you’re going to see some kind of epidemic of insanity as those who are unable to handle the energy are hit with it.

David: I think we already have the epidemic of insanity, not psychiatric insanity, but kind of societal, global fracturing of the foundations of everything.

Rick: And I don’t think everything has collapsed yet, but the foundations are cracking badly.

David: But there are areas, parts of the world where things are shifting.

Rick: Yeah.

David: Where Americans tend to think that we’re the cutting edge of everything. If I can share just a little bit about what’s going on in this little country Trinidad and Tobago. So I’m a devotee of Sai Baba and I’m blessed with a center where just incredible people are passing through like once a month. So we have these speakers who are inspiring, like one after another. So a couple of months ago there’s this fellow from Trinidad, born and raised Muslim, and he starts to get interested in Eastern spirituality, which often, well, Hindu, or it could be Tibetan Buddhism, but involves a form. Okay, in Islam you don’t worship a form. This guy’s kicked out of his mosque, but from a very early age this guy had a yearning for God, which went way beyond any religion. Incredible yearning. Now, a friend of his turns him on to Sai Baba. He reads the book and goes, “I’ve got to go meet him.” So he goes to India, meets Sai Baba, has a very profound experience with him, comes back to Trinidad and Tobago, and people start asking him just to talk and give presentations. Now he’s still knocked out of the mosque, okay, but he’s such a humble, loving, integrative guy that ultimately what happened was Hindus, Christians, and Muslims are now praying together in the same place in Trinidad and Tobago.

Rick: Nice.

David: And the judgment of…

Rick: A group of them, presumably, not the entire country.

David: The entire country is shifting.

Rick: Really? Okay.

David: The entire country has now picked up an educational system Sai Baba developed called “Education in Human Values.” So the educational system is now… I guess it goes by SSE now, Sai Spiritual Education. So there’s a harmony between forces that have been really fighting each other. Now there’s five Sai Baba radio stations, there’s two government stations that have one hour devoted to Sai Baba discourses per week. And I’m like, “Why don’t I know about this?” And then right across, like from Alaska to Russia, bad political reference there, from there to Venezuela you can…

Rick: Oh, I got it.

David: You can see Venezuela.

Rick: Yeah.

David: The new president of Venezuela is a Sai Baba devotee. So we’ve gone from a dictator to a very, very spiritual guy in one election. So, I don’t know if I’m right at all, but I said to myself, “This is a very interesting positive pot that’s brewing in Trinidad and Tobago.” Where now I have friends going back and forth just to experience what’s happening. So I thought, “This makes sense to me.” You would think, “Let’s change the United States” as an example, or Russia, or whatever, Brazil, China, “instead of some rather small nation.” But it looks like there’s this rather small nation that is changing in a very powerful spiritual direction to the point where at the services you now have Muslim chants being sung, Christian chants, Hindu chants and hymns, all side by side. When I heard that, it’s like, “OK, heavy duty.”

Rick: That’s nice.

David: Really nice. I’m very positive about the future.

Rick: Yeah, and you need a bigger motor to get an ocean liner going than to get a rowboat going, so it might take a bit more for the United States or Western Europe. It’s not all going to be Sai Baba. There’s obviously a huge diversity of spiritual influences and teachers and whatever that are all in this together, each doing their thing. But I’m optimistic. I really feel like this awakening, world awakening, age of enlightenment, new age, whatever that’s been predicted, there’s signs of it manifesting. We’ll see to the extent to which it does manifest within our lifetimes, but our lifetimes certainly aren’t the end of our lives, so it doesn’t really matter.

David: Right. And we’re all doing our part.

Rick: Right.

David: You’re doing your part towards this global awakening.

Rick: Yeah.

David: These things are important. It’s not a question of, “Is this person reaching 10 million people or 10 people?”

Rick: Right.

David: It really isn’t. So it’s important stuff you’re doing here.

Rick: Yeah, and you too. I mean, we all have our little spheres of influence.

David: Yeah. And then we surrender what we do to the universe and say, “Okay, here’s what I’ve shared. Now it’s out of my hands what the universe does with what we’ve done here.”

Rick: Yeah. Great.

David: Although I think it’s all good stuff.

Rick: Yeah. Well, that’s a nice note to end on. Unless you have any final thoughts, I could wrap it up at this point.

David: Oh, you can wrap it up because I could go on for another eight hours.

Rick: Me too. I mean, I’m that way. I won’t have enough hard drive space to process the interview if I don’t stop this.

David: Oh, yeah, I understand that.

Rick: It takes a whole terabyte to process a long interview. That’s a thousand gigabytes.

Rick: But anyway, let’s not get techie. This has been great, David. I really appreciate this conversation. I think it’s given a lot of people a lot of food for thought and a lot of–might help a lot of people who thought there was something wrong with them. Perhaps some will come to see you. Your contact information will be on–is on your website, and I’ll be linking to your website from batgap.com. Unfortunately, we didn’t really get into the amino acid therapy. That’s what it is, right? Amino acid therapy?

David: Yeah.

Rick: But they can find out about that on your website.

David: Sure.

Rick: and that might be of great benefit to people too.

David: People can get the book, Are You Getting Enlightened or Losing Your Mind, anywhere.

Rick: Yeah, it’s on Amazon or any bookstore or whatever.

David: Yeah, and it’s on my publisher’s website, Wisdom Moon Publishing. Yeah, and I’ll be linking to the Amazon page of the book itself from batgap.com. So people know what to do.

David: Perfect. All right, thank you so much.

Rick: Before you hang up, let me just make a few wrap-up points. This has been an interview with Dr. David Gersten, or David Gersten, M.D., and it is one in an ongoing series. The entire series is archived at batgap.com, which is an acronym for Buddha at the Gas Pump. It’s also all there on YouTube, but it’s a little bit easier if you go to batgap.com because there’s an alphabetical index, there’s a chronological index, and you can read a little bit about each person and so on. There also you’ll see a discussion group that crops up around each interview. There’s usually several hundred, sometimes nearly a thousand posts in the course of a week with each interview, people discussing things that have been brought up or going off on tangents, as the case may be. There is also a link to an audio podcast, in case you like to listen to this stuff while you commute and so on, not just sit in front of your computer. There is a link to a page where you can sign up for an email newsletter to just be notified by email whenever a new interview is posted. And there’s a donation button, which I appreciate people clicking on if they have the desire and the ability. So, that’s good. So, thanks, David.

David: Thank you. My pleasure. That was fun.

Rick: Yeah, lots of fun. And thanks to those who have been listening or watching, and we’ll see you next week. [Music]