David Thomas Transcript

David Thomas Interview

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is a continuing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done hundreds of them now and if this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to www.batgap.com and look under the past interviews menu. This program is made possible by the support of appreciative viewers and listeners. So if you appreciate it and feel like supporting it in any amount, there is a PayPal button on every page of the site. And for people who don’t like PayPal, some don’t, there is a donations page which explains other ways of supporting. And actually I should mention one good way of supporting that’s not even financial, although that’s essential, is if you leave a review on iTunes or Stitcher or one of those things if you listen to this as a podcast, because it improves the ranking of the podcast in those platforms. My guest today is David Thomas, who sometimes is known as Yogi David Thomas on Facebook or whatever. David is a self-realization teacher, speaker and writer living in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Through the practice of jnana yoga and meditation, he has acquired a deeper understanding of the inner self and true liberation. David now seeks to support individuals in their pursuit of self-realization through his writing and speaking. The insights he shares within his videos, quotes and poems are created to help nurture the healing of individuals seeking release from their pain and suffering. All of his teachings come from his personal experience, so he gives an inside perspective on being lost in ignorance to finding the truth within and experiencing nirvikalpa samadhi. One conversation with him truly has the power to change the way you see and experience life. David wrote that, I didn’t, but who knows, I’m about to have one.

David: My wife wrote that, I didn’t, my wife.

Rick: Your wife wrote that, okay. Does she always feel that way, even when you’re not taking out the garbage?

David: I’m going to leave it to her.

Rick: Okay, I didn’t get you in trouble. The love and wisdom he radiates is a blessing to all seekers of truth. She may have written that or not, but I also concur with that sentiment. I’ve listened to hours of David’s YouTube videos and I often say this when I interview people, but I’ve really enjoyed listening to David. There’s a real sweetness and genuineness in the way he speaks and he’s obviously speaking from personal experience and has a sincere desire to help people, which is always wonderful. So I think we’re going to budget our time today between hearing David’s personal story, which hasn’t always been an easy ride for him, and how he came through all that and got to where he is today. And also there’s some nice knowledge points we want to discuss about enlightenment and awakening and perhaps the dark side of those things and the difference between self-realization and God-realization, a bunch of different points like that that interest us both and I think will interest the audience. So let’s get started, and also as always this is being live streamed on YouTube and if as you’re listening you feel like sending in a question, go to the upcoming interviews page on batgap.com and there’s a form at the bottom of that page through which you can submit a question. Okay, so David, let’s kind of start with your personal story. I mean, obviously we don’t have to cover every little thing that ever happened to you, but the things that you feel have been most significant in sort of leading you toward interest in spirituality and actually enjoying some of the fruits of that interest.

David: So basically, where do we start?

Rick: Yeah, well, I mean, you grew up in a small town in Arizona as I understand it.

David: Yeah, it’s just hard for me because it’s so like, I can zoom in on all of it, so I just want to see where we start. So basically, I start from a small town in the desert, Arizona, and it’s not too much. So it’s like, if you can imagine, if you ever watch the, what’s that show, Lord of the Rings, the Shire is forgotten somewhere in the Lost Land. So imagine turning that to a desert, so then that’s, it’s like forgotten. So it’s just to itself isolated. So that’s where it all starts. Being in a desert is a different environment from being anywhere else because you’re free. Like, you can just go in a desert if you want to make contraptions, just go to the desert, do that if you want to go here, go do that. It’s open and it’s free. It’s however much space you want. So this is like my natural, it’s free, go out and be. But what happens is the human conditioning part comes into play. The way I grew up in the desert was with, I had to go through abuse from my dad. So that’s like the start of my reality. Day one, you’re abused, you’re bullied all the time and things like that. I come from a house of how many of us? Six kids, two parents, so it was eight in the house. It’s like two rooms at a time. Being poor, so poverty in the desert, being African American in the desert, just a real harsh story. I witnessed my mom attempt suicide. I was the one that found her. I was around ten or eight-ish.

Rick: My mom attempted that three times too, by the way.

David: And this is what starts a person’s reality, because if you’re young and you don’t, we pick up things as we go. So if this is where you start, this is your house, man, I was exposed to like real, real, real reality. So that’s just where it starts. So I found my mom lifeless, basically, in a bed. This is when my real, like you have to go through it to get through it to come back to understand it, how it was all moving you in a way to make who you are. But this was like what I could say a real, the first real miracle I’ve ever witnessed in my life, because it’s like I opened the door and then it was action. So I see my mom commit suicide and things like this, and I’m trying to wake her up, she’s lifeless and things like this. But then this is when there is nothing you know that can help you, but you still have to like pull. There has to be something. I can’t really put this into words.

Rick: So you were like, what, eight years old or something when that happened?

David: Around eight to ten, because there’s no clock, things like that. So I was very young. So it just hit me in my heart, literally, like, “Go check on your mom.” And we get these insights all the time, every day, but for some time it was like an urge in me and I was like, “All right.” So I just went. I couldn’t just let it.

Rick: So you wouldn’t ordinarily have done that, but you had this intuition or something.

David: Yeah, yeah, that’s like an urge. Literally like if, you know how you have an idea, “Let’s go on vacation to Hawaii.” And then the whole trip is just, “Oh yeah, that’ll be it.” It was like a strong urge in me, like a pull at me, my being, “Go check on your mom.” So I’m like, I feel that and I’m just pulled towards it. “All right, where’s my mom? I’m going to go check on her.” So when I open the door, I find the situation and instantly it freezes. Everything freezes because there is nothing you can think at this point. Because I’m aware that I don’t know what to do and it’s all on me. There’s action right now and this is the most, like coming from the household I came from, it was dark. My dad was like the bully, the dark side and all this abusive, bipolar and mad crazy. He was physically abusive, just a real bully, verbally and all these things. So my mom was literally like my light in my world. She was loving, caring. She would comfort me. She would teach me things. So when this is stripped away from you, it’s right then and there.

Rick: So what’d you do? Call 911?

David: I didn’t know that because where I’m from, see being poor, you don’t even have a phone sometimes. So who can you call sometimes? So this is real, real reality. And it just like slowed down. I know that this has happened. I’m processing what is happening, but it’s on me to do something. And right there is when the connection to I am this puppet, the avatar, the whatever, and there was something more happened, I would say. This is a memory that was even suppressed. I had to go through my awakening as when it was happening to realize that I experienced this truly, but now it’s so vivid I can even see the cover and all the things and stuff. But this was really the first time I’ve ever witnessed a miracle, because I don’t even know how to give you the words, but through me, holding my mom and everything, I don’t know how to say it. It’s just like your being attracts a person back to the thing.

Rick: So you’re saying you kind of drew her out again, drew her back from the brink of death or something by your attention, is that what you’re saying?

David: So say if your flame is going out, and I’m a light right here, and I grab you and whatever, there is no words for this, but my will, the will of me going beyond any possibility, just it is possible because I am, and I will not let this not be. So your light enters somebody else and wakes them up like a flame type thing.

Rick: Yeah, I know what you’re saying. So was there any kind of medical intervention? Had she taken pills or something?

David: Yeah, she had taken pills, but this gave my dad enough time to go get a phone to call the medics or whatever. So then when they came here, she was back, but she wasn’t back, but her heart was beating.

Rick: She was coming around, yeah.

David: Yeah, so then they did the whole pumper stomach, all the things like that. So that’s where it started. It’s like my start, my foundation.

Rick: Is your mom still alive today?

David: Yeah.

Rick: Good, good. I bet you she’s proud of you.

David: Man, no, it’s not even like that. If we talk about enlightened beings, my mom would be the most enlightened being I’ve ever met. She knows all this stuff, but lived this stuff and has no words for this stuff. It just is to her, because she’s experienced the same type of things that I’ve experienced. Going all the way over there, experiencing what it is and that you still are, and then coming back and being, there is nothing really to rattle you anymore.

Rick: It’s true, you had a near-death experience yourself and we’ll get to that later on, and that was due to an attempted suicide, right?

David: Exactly.

Rick: We’ll come back to that, but anyway, pick it up from there, from where you were.

David: So that’s just basically my foundation of who I am to start, my mom and my dad, like the dark and the light together. And seeing that you can lose it right here, right now, in this action, you can lose everything that you love, right now, that’s my foundation. And then it just grows as far as who I become. So then, like when I say my dad is the dark side of it, abusive, kicked out the house, always fighting, like fighting, fighting, but a grown person fighting a kid. So even my dad adds to my spirituality, because I remember one time getting choke slammed through a table, hitting the floor, and it’s like cement, and being choked out. And I remember telling him, “I can’t breathe,” and he’s dead on it, “Yes, this is the point.” So I don’t have no, like when I say something, I mean it how I’m exactly trying to clearly say it. My life is in danger, how clearly you can say it, you feel me? So that’s how I speak, so this is my reality. But from that, outer body experiences happen, learning to astral project and all these different type of things is because he used to threaten us, like we’ll be in a room, and it’ll be like, when I come in there, if you’re not asleep, whoever’s up, that’s it for you. So one thing about being still is that your awareness doesn’t be still, or how can I say this? This whole spirituality is about being still, not being in the game and caught in the game, so when at a young age you’re forced to play still, and you’re still being aware on the outside but you’re being still, it starts to give you the ability to consciously project yourself outwardly and things like that. So to me, all these things are just natural, I guess, my natural, and then we go into things like when you’re being pushed down, you’re waking up but you’re not moving, what is that called?

Rick: Sleep paralysis.

David: Sleep paralysis, things like that, you start to be very aware of it at a young age, so you’re like, “I’m stuck again,” so this is how I process, “I’m stuck again,” but then I have to really go back and calm down and then get out. So what I’m learning naturally is how to astral project, get out of my body, in my body, things like this, but this is just like lucid dreaming, because if you’re aware, trying to be aware of someone coming to get you, and if you fall asleep, you fall asleep with that awareness on still, so when you enter your dream, you’re aware.

Rick: Yeah, interesting. Yeah, so you’re saying that all this adversity actually sort of cultured experiences in you that many people would say are spiritual things, which some people actually try to do in order to be more spiritual, they try to astral project or lucid dream and all, and you’re saying that the difficulties you went through were actually culturing that when you were a kid.

David: Exactly, so it’s hard, but to me this is like saying dreaming, it’s nothing new, because I would assume all that is dreaming, what you’re speaking of, but when we get into the spiritual realm or the spiritual world, they start, okay, this is a flavor, this is a flavor, that is this, and I start to realize this is already, because all this is natural, it’s just people don’t have the awareness to pay attention, and that’s the only different thing, like we are all the same, it’s all one, so that’s the only difference, I just had to pay attention, and like sensing energies or auras, these are just words, but when you have a bully, and based on his energy when he comes in the room, you naturally are going to read people’s energy, going to know from how they’re reacting or acting, things like this, so you just pick this up naturally. Everyone has it, but they’re giving it the wrong idea, so they’re making it into an idea, oh, I can be supernatural when you’re already it. So my story just keeps going and getting dark, and then I just have to endure a lot, but see I don’t know where to keep going.

David: Okay, I’ll ask you a question. So right now we’re talking around the age of 8 or 10 or something like that, and I heard you say that you were a bright kid, you were very intelligent, you did well in school and everything. I suppose school might have been a sort of a respite from what was going on at home, at least you could get away and get some food,

David: yeah, get a free lunch. Yeah, we could talk about school, right? So moving up, growing older, alright, this is like a regular reality of madness and chaos and then love in the chaos, my mom’s the love in the storm. It’s four boys, two girls, and we’re all like, let me see, my brother’s a year and a half older than me, then there’s me, then there’s a two year gap, and a two year gap, and then there’s a two year gap, and then my younger sister, she’s just, she’s like, so far, she’s just younger. So it’s a lot of male energy, my dad is like the dominant one to keep all, everyone here, but it’s a lot of dominant energy, and everybody wants to be the one, so when we talk about ego, it’s naturally you want to thrive, be the king, or be the one in your whole environment, but it’s a lot of boys, so I had to deal with that, like who has the biggest ego, who has the, and there is no rules to this. One of my brothers is a gangster, one of my brothers is just a hard worker, then you have me and then I have my younger brother who is like the, just the wild one, so it’s a whole lot of like, mess. So you learn to adapt and read people and adapt to different energies and things like this. But at the same time, this is when I really start to know how to use what I would say my gift is, because in school, we’re just in school, but I would have this gift to pick up things. If I go back to when, let me see how I can say this. If I start back when I was first in school, I can remember being in first grade, I can remember being aware, like when I first became aware, like a duality split, but I can remember first grade trying to learn how to read, and I remember they were teaching me the letters, and then my teacher was trying to teach me a silent letter.

Rick: Oh yeah, like knowledge, you don’t say “kuh-knowledge,” you say “knowledge,” like that.

David: Exactly.

Rick: That’s especially true in English, English is a screwy language.

David: So imagine you being aware and you’re like, “It’s not kuh-knowledge, it’s knowledge,” so and, and you’re writing it, and you’re hearing it, and you’re writing it, but then the teacher’s trying to tell me that, “Oh, it doesn’t make a sound, but yet I’m still going to put it there,” and my mind couldn’t wrap my, like, it can’t wrap around anything that doesn’t make sense. My mom taught me how to count. My first thing I consciously learned how to do was one plus one equals two, I can remember it. So based on the foundation of my knowledge, one plus one has to equal two, so when you say it’s not, it’s knowledge, but it’s not said “kuh-knowledge,” and there’s a K, it just doesn’t add up, I can’t understand it. So at that age, in first grade, I realized that this was just pretend. This is how I can just write it off to continue the game. So I realized, like, reality is not, like, really, like, something you can really, a foundation on, because the rules don’t even make sense. I said that to say, just when I, so when I got older, being in school, I wouldn’t learn the same way, like, when we say something is, if you say this is a pen, I would learn it as the concept of this is a pen, not like this is a pen. So the way I learned is I just have concepts, so in your reality, this is called a pen, the concept of a pen. So what this does is give you a lot of freedom to move concepts and, like, grow your learning. It’s like adding eight colors, but then you start mixing them and making more. So this is how I learned. So when I was in school, it really, school is like the program system. So this is the Big Bang. This is how medical works. This is how whatever works. They’re telling you reality, basically. But my reality was I’m trying to duck and dodge my dad and my house, and our lives may not be there. We may not have nothing to eat. So reality was more real than just being programmed. So I would always do well in school because I can mirror back anything. So my whole class, I did very well in school. When it comes to math, I skip a couple of grades in math class. It’s because you just taught me the formula. If you teach me the formula, all right. So cut this, take this, add this, move this, and there it is. I don’t know what I’m doing, but I can mirror it back perfectly. So I just became super intelligent just by not believing, I guess. But that means nothing in my world because then I graduated with a full scholarship and all kinds of things. But in my reality, you’re poor. Nothing happened from that. So I had to learn how to use that intellect more than, like, bet my intellect in academics because I had to use it in real life. Most people go to school and they learn the theory of, “I had to use it.” So that’s what it became.

Rick: Yeah. I mean, hopefully, I mean, this isn’t always the case, but hopefully school gives us knowledge that we can apply to so-called real life. We become a doctor, a physicist, or a lawyer, or whatever. We’re able to gain skills and all, but are you kind of saying that … well, I mean, you ended up doing electronics work in the military, right? Did you learn that in school? Did you go to a technical school to learn that stuff?

David: I went to a technical school, but the technical school taught me about gyroscope, the theory of force and gravity and protons and neutrons, electricity, the theory, but those are just concepts of something. But in reality, when you see a wire and you see a wire, it has nothing to do with the theory of it. But I think people get that confused. The doing of stuff is how you learn. The theory of it is what keeps you safe.

Rick: Yeah, okay, well we don’t need to belabor that point, but sometimes theories do lead to doing. Somebody formulates a scientific theory and then they test it and it seems to work, and then they end up applying it and creating some kind of technology out of it. For instance, computers are based upon knowledge that originally started out rather theoretical and eventually became practical.

David: But it’s just the difference between “apply” … you’re exactly right what you’re saying, “apply.” Like, if electricity … you can learn about electricity and then go apply it because you have that theory, but say, like, if we say the theory of enlightenment, if we talk about enlightenment …

Rick: Yeah, that’s good, let’s talk about that.

David: If we say the theory of enlightenment, you can learn everything about it, but it will never lead to it because the saying of it is said, it’s not in the mind. And if you didn’t catch that first part, learning and learning, you’re learning the pointers to say that exact same thing. So people … oh, go ahead.

Rick: No, I was just going to say, but I first heard about enlightenment from a book, and somebody was reading this book by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, who became Ram Dass, it was their translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and they’re reading about enlightenment. And I’m driving a car and somebody in the back seat is reading this book, and I thought, “Enlightenment, wow, that exists, yeah, that’s what life is all about, you’re supposed to get that.” But that was totally just an idea at that point, but then over time, over the years, I did various things to make it more of an experience. Theories have their value because they can give you a vision of possibilities.

David: Yeah, they’re only the pointers. People get caught on the pointer rather than where it’s telling you to go or do. People know all the pointings rather than, “Did you make the trip?” “Oh no, but let me tell you, you’re going to need gas and you’re going to have to go northwest.” And you’re like, “Did you go?” “Oh no, but I can tell you, I’ve talked to…” And it’s just a different realm. It is a mind realm that you get caught in. And that’s the biggest thing that we have to realize, that we’ve been taught to process everything in our reality through our mind, to think it. So you’re thinking about yourself as if you’re not here. “Oh me, me, me, me, and what I feel.” Aren’t you feeling it? So why would you have to say it if you’re feeling it? You should know it.

Rick: Yeah.

David: And it makes a lag, a lag of being. It’s the madness that we all have, and we share it too. “Let me tell you about me. Let me tell you about me. You want to go tell them about us? We’re just it.”

Rick: There’s a funny joke. It’s like, “Me, me, me. Okay, enough about me. What do you think about me?”

David: Exactly. The waking up part is that it is all me. Every word that can be uttered in the Aum, it is God. Every single thing. What else can we talk about? And that’s the funny part.

Rick: Yeah, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. So you did the school thing, and you got some technical training, and if we’re not jumping too fast, you ended up in the military, right? Joining the Navy.

David: So this is what happens in your reality. So they teach you, and they tell you, “If you get high scores, graduate, go to school, get a job,” and all the, “I’m grown now.” So I’m from a small city, so once you have a job, and the cost of living is low, so you can maintain. So life ran out very fast. I had a job, I had a house, I had a car, we had Xbox Live, internet, what else could you need? It was it. What would a person need in life? And it seemed so limited, like, “Now do this for the rest of your life.”

Rick: Yeah, “Is this all there is to the circus? There must be something more.”

David: Yeah, like, “It’s kind of scary,” but you have to laugh how scary that is, if you get everything you want, you’re just like …

Rick: Yeah, well, I mean, just this week, two prominent people committed suicide, and most people would have envied their lives. They would have thought, “Wow, these people have tons of money, they travel the world, live very exciting lives.” Obviously, something was missing for them.

David: It’s that connection. As a being of light, you need to be connected to that light, because the outside … This is what I’m saying when I’m talking about school. They say, “Go get these things, and you’ll be accomplished, complete, you’ll be happy,” and they’re all empty. It’s like you grab it, and there’s no substance to it, it just turns to sand. And everyone else who doesn’t have it is like, “Oh, I wish I had that sand.” They idolize. So, you get caught in that idolizing, “Yes, if I do more, if I be better, if I work out, if I get the body, if I get the car, if I get the house, I have the dream.” So when you have the dream, this must not be it, because the mind won’t let you just, “Oh, that’s it. Oh no, you have to go out and get the dream, that’s what it is.” So the Navy was my way out. It’s like I maxed out on my level being in the desert, so I have to go see what’s in the world. But I always thought that the world would have the answer for me. Most people have to know. Maybe my small town, maybe just us, but the world has to know. Look, they have all these jets, cars around the world, they have to know. So I joined the military, and the first day, this is how I know so much because I pay attention. The first day I joined the military, and soon as my drill sergeant or whatever you call it started yelling, I knew I messed up. I knew it. And I had signed for five years. So as soon as you heard it on day one, I just seen how long I’m going to have to deal with this. The thing about it is my reality was so raw. When my dad yells at me, and he’ll be like, “Whatever he says is guaranteed to happen. It’s not like a threat. It is.” And if you smile one more time, we’re going to be, and it’s already coming. So if you have a drill sergeant, I’ll pick you up by your bootstraps. You not, it’s not, you know, like the game. I know that the game, like, there’s no possible way that you can do this without having some repercussions. And therefore, since my awareness is over like that, it doesn’t bother me. But I seen people get programmed. Like, when we talk about programming, how to make someone do something that they don’t love for eternity, I’ve seen it happen in boot camp. Because I’m just aware in boot camp, and I can’t be touched. So it’s like, this is, my reality is too raw, where you can actually have to fight and all these different things. But in boot camp, it’s just like the noise of it. The noise of it is so peaceful, because, “Ah, yes, alright, it sounds nice.”

Rick: I’ve never been in boot camp, thank God, but my understanding of it is they try to break it down so that you really won’t have a lot of independent thinking and will of your own, so you’ll just be ready to do whatever you’re told.

David: Exactly what it is. Because look, it’s kind of like cells. We operate within our environment. Even in relationships, if I’m this, that person is that, and the way we are, we operate, give or take, to make what you would call a relationship of us. You have a known. You have a family, you have a neighborhood, you have your grocery store, you have your meal, you love to eat at a certain time. Things like this. This is what you call you. This is your ego. What happens when they strip you and take you away and put you in a whole new environment, you don’t know who you are in this environment. You don’t know if you’re the top, you’re the bottom, and this causes your being itself to go into this alert state, and then they maximize it by not letting you sleep and yelling, and they go even deeper by it. It’s not even you. Say if the person by you go to sleep, everyone with it around him gets in trouble, so it like maxes you out on stress. But then I see how stress opens up your mind for errors in thinking, because instead of the stress is painful, and you don’t know it’s an anxiety, so people start telling you stuff and your mind will start to accept it to be, “Okay, if I do this, if I act like this, I won’t get that.” I’ve seen people overnight join boot camp, and when the sergeants or the petty officers are around, it’s all quiet, but when they leave, we talk, like, “You out? You still you?” I’ve seen people literally change and not be them no more. So this is why when I blow this up in reality, I know why. It’s like from my personal experience, I’ve seen it like a … And it doesn’t matter who, because if you’re not set in that still place, or identifying yourself at least awareness, if you’re oblivious that you are aware silently, whatever your mind starts to grasp, and that’s why they do it for a certain amount of time, you become that person. This is why you can just teach a person with a heart and then take away all that, and teach them to go to war, and they won’t connect that they’re killing people, and then they’ll come back home, but they won’t connect the whole dots. Like, you’re a murderer, you know that, right? Just because you shot that side, it’s still shooting people. And this is what we have when we have veterans. And we’re all broken in the inside, the outside, with no awareness of it, and then they give you pills. But I’ve seen these things. So that’s the military. This is what I’ve seen. Brainwash, literally how you condition a person, take the person out and put the program in, and now you have that. So we play it and play it and overwork a person. As a civilian, you’re not even aware you have a choice. Most people, they don’t realize that they have choices. So like, you don’t like your job? Go get a new job. Nah, but you’ll go back to your job, because that’s not even a choice to you. If you’re signed into contract to go kill people and murder people, and you’re aware of this, this is something that destroys you from the inside. So what this calls for me, alcoholism. And this is when my life turns darker into addiction to alcohol, to sex and things like this, is because you’re disconnecting your humanity at this point.

Rick: So you’re just trying to numb it out?

David: Yeah, you gotta block it out. It’s like, if you know that you’re building bombs, and then you watch on TV that these bombs, the same bombs you’re building, has dropped on someone and killed millions or a hundred thousand people or injured some people, you gotta connect that dot all the way through and see that it’s this one. People don’t do that, they blank out, like, “A war!” The war. No, this is the war.

Rick: Yeah, I remember you saying that you drank a lot in the military and yet you actually managed to do your job okay, while being drunk all the time. That kind of amazed me.

David: It’s because if you have a certain awareness, you’re not the body. See, people get drunk and they black out, but if you ever blacked out, your body can still be moving, your consciousness is gone, so you still know how to go and things like that, but if you consciously black out, you’re in it, but you don’t identify with it, so you can see that it is drunk and therefore you can correct on it. It’s a deep …

Rick: So you had some kind of witnessing value even way back then.

David: Because for my dad, ever since that, I never really snapped back all the way.

Rick: Yeah, interesting. Yeah, cool, so to summarize then, I mean, with the whole thing with your dad, you were kind of awake, it woke something up in you in a difficult way, and there were some experiences of astral traveling or out-of-body experiences and this and that, and that kind of stayed with you, and correct me if I’m wrong, but so then you’re in the military and it’s difficult there and you’re starting to drink a lot, but still the drinking wasn’t able to …

David: Get through it.

Rick: It wasn’t able to snuff out that inner awakeness that had somehow begun to develop.

David: Yes, because that awareness is there and you can’t … because that awareness is you, but this is at the end, you find out what you really are. That awareness, I would call it a black hole, it’s because to survive where I had to survive, you have to turn off your heart, because it’s poverty, it’s gangster life, it’s thugs, it’s people, it’s states …

Rick: Even in Arizona, or are you talking about the military gangster life?

David: Both.

Rick: Oh, really?

David: In Arizona, it really is like, it’s the Wild Wild West. It’s so close to Mexico, you got the cartel, you got all these drug things happening, you have real … it’s very crazy, but then in the military, this is the deeper game, it’s a subtle game. The way I see everything now is ganga, but they’re subtle, we just don’t say it, but then we act perfectly like a gang. When we say Democrats, Republicans.

Rick: Two big gangs. Two big gangs. What else would it be? Because if you say I’m a this or a that, you really, if we sat down and talked it out, some of those ideas over here and some of these ideas over here are who you are. It’s either bloods or crips, you red or you blue, you in or you out, and that’s how the reality is. But people look at the military, if I change my gang hat and put on a new hat, I’m in the Navy now. They see the narrative more than the reality, so this is why people got to start reading narratives and actually take time to process what’s happening. But in the military, you got world gangs, it’s even more dangerous because where you’re from, like your own program, you know, okay, this is the side of the red, this is the side of the blue, I’m over here, so don’t cross the line. In the military, you got your natural gangs of people, tribalism, like, okay, we’re this color, let’s get together, this our gang. You got people, gangs from the same state, oh yeah, and then you got real gangs that I’m really a gangster in the military, where are you from, okay, we together. And then you have like Black Panther gangs, you have the KKK gangs, and shhh we just don’t tell it.

Rick: So you’re saying that among the enlisted people in the military, it’s almost like a prison where you have all these gangs within the prison that are at each other’s throat. That kind of dynamic is going on in the military as well.

David: Yeah, yeah, yeah, because human nature never changed, we just changed the name.

Rick: So it’s not all brotherly love and hey, we’re all in this together.

David: You just see it in the uniform, so we look uniform, but if you broke it down and started asking questions, you’ll see all the same thing. This is why, this is why when I speak to people, it can change their lives so much, because it’s like I had a small version of a city. In a big city, it’s you versus the world trying to figure the world out, but if they condense it, you’re very ready to pull it in very much, very fast. But we have all those type of gangs, and then you have power gangs. We have officer size who get paid way more and whatever, and we’re the doers. If you would say slave master and slave, the officers, they drive the car, they drive the jet, we gotta pull up the jet, make the tire do all the work and stuff, and they get paid more, so this makes a different gang too. And then even within those, you have your ranking, so pay grades, and power is what converts and I’ve seen it manipulate people so much. Literally if I get a pay grade, you treat me like if I just became God now. But the same person that was here yesterday that you hated, but now I got an upgrade in my rank on your collar, you literally can get people to do weird things. See, it’s beyond the uniform, but no one talks about the truth.

Rick: Okay, so when you were telling us about your family life, when you were 8 or to some kind of spiritual lesson it taught you and even feel grateful for it. So how would you summarize your whole military experience in that same way? In what way did it contribute to your spiritual development?

David: It taught me, it’s like the fast track around the world. It’s like I can’t go around the world, but bring the world to me, so then we see that we’re all programmed by the same program. Because spirituality just talks about the spirit, but you want to be a whole person, that’s holy, to be whole, to understand what’s going around you fully. If you can fully understand what’s going around you, you can apply yourself, you can adapt yourself, you can understand the person that’s trying to kill you. What the military did is break me, literally take away everything that I thought was invaluable, like family, connection, at least having friends and things like that, took all that away. Put me, gave me money, okay, now I have money. So I used the understanding of the military so you trade out for your happiness, for what life is, for the lie of happiness. So we chase these riches, these goals, and these things, and you don’t get anything. But what I got from that was experience. This is the thing I’m always on, experience, but what did I experience? If I chased the mountain of gold and then I got to the mountain and it was a lie, what did I get from that? That’s more than gold. So that just showed me it doesn’t matter your color, it doesn’t matter your race, it doesn’t matter where you’re from, it’s showing me that the program of the mind has everybody. And it could switch just like that. We could be lovers and then right now we can hate each other more than anything and literally never get off that hate, but it could just be a flip. So that’s what it taught me, and it taught me that people are lying. That’s the biggest thing, that it sounds good, make the world better again, and then you really zoom in and see that half these people are going through mental things because they’re doing this, going through so much, and then they promote alcohol. It’s what sailors do.

Rick: They drink.

David: We drink, so they give you addiction.

Rick: There’s even a song, “What Shall We Do With a Drunken Sailor?” I used to play it on the piano when I was a kid.

David: Yup, it’s a culture. One cool experience you had, which stuck in my mind, was you’re out in the middle of the ocean on a boat and you look up at the stars, and you’ve never seen so many stars as you can see out there where there’s no lights. I love that kind of experience, and you get that in the desert too actually, if you go out from the town a little bit.

David: Because look, I never realized it because that’s your natural scenery to see all the way out to the horizon, and this is what you can do in the desert, and they have mountains, so you can climb a mountain and see this above the reality. This happens in planes too. When you’re in a plane, you look down, it seems so weird. It looks like a circuit board, it looks like everybody’s moving, but then you realize, “I’m one of those ants,” and what I think as an ant really is so big to me, but when you get a bird’s eye view, it’s just happening.

Rick: I’ve had that same perspective. And then think of the astronauts who go out there in the International Space Station or even to the moon, and they look back at the Earth. A lot of the astronauts have had real profound spiritual awakenings.

David: And then, like what you said, when I was on the ocean, this is like re-seeing what you … like re-seeing things. So when you see the sky, you see, “I know that sky, like the moon, the stars, this, that.” But when I was put on the ocean, I was on a carrier, I’d never been on the ocean. I was in the desert, so it blew my mind, basically, and it stopped everything. So this is why I was able to take it in. But I realized that the ocean, I don’t know how deep the ocean is. And I’m on the edge of a carrier, so if I fall off, I’m gone. But I’m realizing, “And no way, I will be swallowed up in the abyss of the ocean, and I’m seeing it.” We read books like Moby Dick and all these things about how sea creatures and things, but seeing it, and it’s unlimited. You can see unlimited water, but the thing is, the water is darker than the sky, because it’s like black, black. But then you see the sky, and you see stars, and there are more stars. It’s like if you grab sand and just throw it up and just kept throwing it, it’s so many stars. But when you finally see this, this is like one of those views, either you got to go on a cruise ship or be on that spot, but you can’t really share how many stars there really is in this world. But every star is like a universe, a galaxy, a sun, and the number of life that you … the numbers itself will blow you back to see God.

Rick: Oh yeah. There are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches of the world.

David: But you see how we say a theory of that? Like, okay, we can agree on that theory until you see it, and it ain’t a theory until you see it.

Rick: It blows your mind.

David: And then you think about you being on one of those, and what could, and it just humbles you. It breaks, like, I don’t know nothing.

Rick: That’s beautiful. So not to drag us back down to the depths again, but at some point you ended up actually trying to commit suicide, took a bunch of pills, drank a bunch of booze or something. What brought you to that dark spot?

David: So after the military, it’s basically used and abused and tossed out, and then you’re done. So when I got into the military I knew I was getting out, because it just wasn’t … it’s not structured for a free thinker. And even rank, you can have more rank than me and not even be better, so it’s weird.

Rick: Sure you’re not wiser or more intelligent or anything.

David: I mean, you’ve been here five years more than me, so you’ve been taking the test enough so now you’re ranked up. But that right there killed me to be wasting time. We’re doing something that could take an hour, but yeah, it’s taking us three hours because who’s in charge? And basically, since he has this, we can’t do nothing about it. And I knew this ain’t for me. So I knew I was always getting out. But going through all that, being in the military, I was married, I went through a divorce, I had my kid, I had a son, my son got put back across the whole country and stuff like this, and then I had a daughter while we split. So it’s like my family and everything was in Arizona, but I was stationed across the country. So that right there starts, you gave up your humanity type thing to go play military for nothing. So it starts to become this black hole. I was born not with a lot of people that supported me. The only person that really ever supported me, I call her my stepmom, she passed away while I was in the military. But the military give you four days off, you come here, come to the funeral, and then it’s back to work. So this dark, it’s like this black hole starts to become in me. And it’s terrible. People walk around with all the darkness within them every day. When people die, go back to work because you got to survive, but it’s too much. So I was just working not to look in the dark that I was gathering. And I kept working and working, I was gathering dark. And it was starting to self-destruct. Because you can’t, what you are, you can’t lie to yourself. We all try to lie to ourselves, but it just stays within us. So what this does is you pick up self-destructive habits. Drinking, going out to the clubs, trying to find women to sex it out. I lived at a beach. Nothing could help. So we fast forward that the whole military time, and it gets to the point where I’m at that boat, at the edge, and I’d rather jump because I don’t see nowhere out. So I realized my mind flipped. It became suicidal. I talk about suicide openly so people can see that you can make it through the pain and enter into the light. But like we say, it sounds nice. I’m giving you a story, it may be touching, but in reality, when you hit the wall, there is nothing to help you, no one to save you. There is no concept, there is nobody. It’s hell. It’s a real hell. You can’t get out of it because your awareness doesn’t go off. So when your spiritual needs start to become aware that there is more in the game, that can play on you and become destructive.

Rick: Yeah, I’m glad you’re talking about it openly because it is in the news lately and a lot of people commit suicide, especially a lot of veterans, and I think there’s another alternative that they should be aware of. After Robin Williams committed suicide, there was a 10% jump in the number of suicides. It’s estimated that about 2,000 people killed themselves emulating Robin Williams, who otherwise wouldn’t have. And right now, since it’s in the news, they’re flashing all these news stories with the suicide prevention hotline. This topic isn’t directly relevant to the purpose of this show, but it is in a way, because life has such tremendous potential and possibility and it can be so wonderful if you know what to do, and it’s just really a shame if somebody throws that away.

David: I was going to connect it by saying my near-death experiences.

Rick: Yeah, let’s talk about that.

David: You feel me? This is how that goes into it. Because I just don’t want you to … because I feel like if we don’t talk about how it feels in those things, people won’t recognize that they’re in those spaces to understand. If I just said, “Oh yeah, I had suicide thoughts, it was crazy,” and then we move on, I feel like people …

Rick: No, just go into it.

David: So things like that. This is the only way I’m getting into these things like this. So having that mindset, that mind frame, when I got out of the military, it was so different because now I’ve went across the world, I’ve seen a lot of things, I’ve talked to a lot of people, I’m back home to get everything that I thought I lost, like my house, my friends, my known, I’m getting my known back. I’m putting my ego back where it was created, right there. But then you change. Nothing stays the same. Everything that I experienced grew me. You cannot stop growing, so when you put yourself in circumstances, situations, you grow more. So what this causes me to go home and not fit, and then that’s more depressing. Because now that my life is put together, at first I had it and it was nice, and then I left and I broke it all down, lost it all, and I built it back and now I’m out, and now I’m here, I’m done. It’s like if you retired, and then it became the most destructive time in my existence because now I’m just at home, I’m chilling. There’s nothing to do, everybody’s struggling around me, I’m not aware why, everybody’s struggling, I became more, I’m still less, it’s like what’s the point at this stage in my life, what was the point? So then it gets very dark and destructive, so then it comes down to suicide, like I need God or I’m not making it. And this comes from a personal judgment, like I’m not the type of person to be rotisserie. I just rather get well done and be over, jump in the grease and then pull me out, I’m done. I’m not going to live a long life and be lost forever. So that’s the scariest thing when you’re at such a low point, tomorrow I got to go through this thing, anxiety and all that. So it came to the point of suicide. So I attempted the same thing I witnessed my mom do, and it wasn’t even playing to me as I was doing it, but I was just so fed up. And this is what I think, you only pick up programs and they play back in you. So I couldn’t live a life without knowing what was the purpose. I would ask preachers, pastors, I would look for God, I was in college classes taking religion courses, like I’m about to get to the bottom of this, I’m about to figure this out. Nobody knows. Everybody says like they know, but if you ask, “Do you know?” “Oh I don’t know, I can tell you what they know.” So how do you know? No one knows. It became like I was very aware that nobody knows and this makes you become very alone. And then I was like, it’s either me and it’s God. So then my suicide attempt, it sounds so bad, but it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I experienced seeing myself dying. But I was aware that I was seeing myself die and it was so weird to see myself die, but it wasn’t even like, there ain’t no words.

Rick: Was it like an out of body experience where you saw your body lying there?

David: It’s like, if you play a video game or if you play a car game and you push a button and then you get to see the car in front of you like that. But I became aware that the car was the everything. My reality was, like if I pushed pause and I jumped out of my reality and it was still going and I’m very aware of it still happening. And I’m very aware that that one is me and it’s dying, but I’m not. And this is the craziest thing ever.

Rick: So just to clarify, if someone had found you there, and maybe somebody did.

David: I’m dead. I’m gasping out like a fish.

Rick: You’re thrashing like a fish? Were you unconscious?

David: Oh yeah, yeah.

Rick: I mean, if somebody had slapped you in the face, would you have felt it or you’re just out of it?

David: At first, but I’m watching it. So, when we start, I’m like dying out. I know I’m dead because I can’t get saved at this point, but I’m watching it and I’m like, “Well, this is it.” But I’m watching it, not like, “This is it, ain’t it?” But I’m watching it.

Rick: From a distance, so to speak.

David: But split screen, in it and like this. Very much in it and very much watching it. And I’m like, “It’s done.” But then I’m like, but I’m watching it and that right there connected and then it just, it goes into this whole, I would call it curiosity thing. Like Divergent the movie. When the glass is filling up with water and you’re going to die. And you start to, but how is this happening? More than the death, this is that awareness thing that you can’t take off. Instead of the death, I’m dead, I’m dying. That’s crazy. How did I start living? I’m starting to question it. So then it’s just like, that’s crazy. I get, what do you call it?

Rick: Resuscitated?

David: Yeah, resuscitated.

Rick: By some medical personnel or something?

David: Yeah, yeah. They do the whole …

Rick: They found you.

David: Yeah, yeah. And then I had to do all the things, but I was like, I was there. That doesn’t leave, right?

Rick: Were you watching that too? Did you see them resuscitating you?

David: Yeah, but it’s exactly like, I don’t know how to explain it.

Rick: Was there any kind of, a lot of times people have these near-death experiences. It’s like some voice or some, their father or somebody comes to them and says, “It’s not your time to go. You have to go back. You have something to do.” Did you have any kind of sense of that?

David: That was felt in me like my intuition. The same thing that told me, “Go check your mom.” But it’s centered in me, even if I don’t have a body, it’s centered. From within you it comes out and it’s known. It’s not words because who is no speaker. It’s just a knowing. I don’t know, people, if you could get an insight, a whole insight, a whole package of everything. The way to go, where to go, when to go, how to go, it just is. I get this feeling like there’s something more I’m not done and stuff like that. It was like pulling me, I’m pulled to the body. I come back to the body as if I was like, when you dream, you come out of a dream. I came back into it, but then it’s all that stuff I have to go through. But that wasn’t even the most profound thing that ever happened to me. That gave me the understanding to teach about death, that if you die unconsciously, you will be unconsciously when you die, so this is why you have to wake up. If you wake up before you die, you will know when you die, or you don’t die, when you cross over, what to do next. That’s why I give these teachings like this.

Rick: I think the Buddhists say something like, “Die before you die.” In other words, die to the small awareness and into the big awareness before your body dies.

David: And that is what enlightenment is, when you die before you die.

Rick: Alright, so you had this suicide attempt. You came back, you probably felt like crap when you first came back, because you just tried to kill yourself when you were full of drugs and booze. But then it’s almost like you started a new life at that point.

David: That’s the start of all of this, because now, I don’t have to go … for somebody who wanted to know something, the truth of something, this is the only clue that the game is not even part of where you’re looking from. The game has nothing to do with what you’re seeking type thing. It’s the only personal clue of my reality that gave me a higher perspective. Without that, I’d just be in here shaking people, “What do you know?” And all these things. Once that happened, I knew that there was another level. I never thought of it like spirit, because people talk spirit and you hear ghost, but as awareness, it’s different. That started this search. Even more than anything, it just lit this will of God, this fire within my spirit to like, “I will know this.” I don’t even know how to say it. When you know, you know. It’s pulling at, it’s calling you. I don’t know how to say it, but it is felt. I need to know. I just processed every idea that I ever had. I know that sounds crazy, but to me, they’re just like bubble concepts. I went into what you call Samadhi. This is before the word, this is before meditation, this is before all these things. I just was so curious and stuck. I had read an article that was just breaking my mind. It talked about the Titanic and the book being written before the Titanic actually happened, but yet the things that happened in the book, then it happened. It was just like stories like that. A person going to the Grand Canyon in Arizona, taking a picture with a camera that wasn’t even created yet. Then years later, he goes there and sees this picture with the camera he just bought already there. Stories like that. These are stories, and you can see the proof. The book is published before the Titanic, so you can catch it. It just starts to unravel my mind. I don’t know what reality is. The reason we don’t experience raw reality is because the belief of, “I know what this is. It’s gravity. Yeah, yeah. Gravity. But what is gravity? You know. No, I don’t know. What is it?” Then that opens up. This is what started happening. Then there was a lady by, I think her name was Christy. She does energy work, and she was talking about the different levels from fear to enlightenment and all the different levels to go up. But then she said, this is what caught me, “I had a belief in money that I couldn’t get money or things like this, but then I changed my belief, and then I got a six-figure check.” To me at that time, I’m working hard. You working in a different … You thought it didn’t have … That didn’t fit in no reality I had. Pull it towards you. How is that happening? My mind had no concepts for that, so it made me still … Literally, I went over, and this is when we say the practice of not this, not that. I literally didn’t know who I was, and I became aware I didn’t know who I was. I’m African American, so I don’t have no history. I don’t have no culture. I don’t have no language. I don’t have no God. For me, this is very, very strange. I never thought, because you never think about that. You’re running on no programs. You don’t even know who … You don’t know who you are. You don’t know where you come from. You don’t know what the capability of what this is. You don’t know how much power this can put out. You don’t know what’s capable, and this became the truth, truth to me. I did not know, but then I start to go through myself. Well, I’m David, but David’s something they call you. I’m not David, and it evaporates. I’m the body, and then, no, the body already experienced death. No, the body stays. You go. Literally, I kept going, and I kept going, “Who am I?” until I experienced, and this is what the self-realization is. When we talk about self-realization, I am nothing. Everything that I’m paying attention to has nothing to do with what I am. I thought I was the things I was paying attention to. I entered being peer awareness. This is when that samadhi starts.

Rick: Yeah, this is a key point. I mean, so you did self-inquiry, and what you just described is actually reminiscent of teachings and teachers and things they’ve said, like Ramana and people like that. You know, so not this, not this, not this, not this, and you boil it right down to the essence, and then there’s that self-realization, self-recognition, samadhi.

David: Exactly.

Rick: That’s something you did over a course of months, or was that in a single sitting? Like the Buddha under the tree, you just sat down there and got right into it. Exactly like that, because you can’t … When I say I teach people, if you want to know, see there’s different levels, and if I tell you we’re talking about self-realization, then we’re going to the higher level, but I’m talking about you have to want this more than your reality, and nothing in your reality, like literally, and this is what the words can’t convey to a person, because what you have to do is cut every single thing that you’re attached to. So when I was like, “I’m a dad, I’m a father,” well, the same way I am, “Am I my dad?” I go, “Am I my dad? No, but he does have nothing to do with me, so what I do, does that have to do with my kids?” No, they’re just them. I’m attached, so I’m not that, and I have to throw it. Literally you have to cut every single thing that binds you to this reality, but people are scared of that, because literally everything in this reality that you’re bind to makes you you. This is what you say, “I’m the job, I’m the person, I’m the politician, I’m the preacher, I’m the pastor, I’m the parent, I’m the mom, I’m the dad, I’m the human, I’m the thoughts, I’m the fit.” You have to cut all of that. How am I aware of it then? If I can be aware of it, I can’t be it, so you cut it, and you have to literally let it go, but you don’t know where you’re going with this.

Rick: ; So how old are you now?

David: I’m 31.

Rick: Wow, you’re young. And so how old were you when this Samadhi thing happened, when you cut through everything?

David: This happened in 2015.

Rick: So about three years ago or something.

David: Yeah.

Rick: Okay, and in those three years you started talking about this, and I want to have you tell us more about that actual experience, but I just want to ask, in the last three years since you’ve been talking about this and telling people about it and all, have you met anybody else who’s been able to do it the way you did, just sort of like with this kind of finality, where you just cut right through everything, got right down to the essence?

David: Yeah, this is able to be … I’m able to teach it, this is why I started teaching this for real, because I just thought it was me, and I never knew that it was real, because I would have never spoke about this ever, because if you experience … you can’t talk about it, but you cut through it, you have to … I don’t know.

Rick: You want to share it.

David: You fill it with light and you can’t hold it, but you know they won’t understand it, but it’s still filling you up, so you have to let it out, and it’s just … I used to tell … I told my wife, “I experienced God,” and we just left it at that, and the way I am, I’m not a person who just make up … I don’t have no reason to make things up, so she already knew that something happened to me. My friend Terry, I call him my brother Terry, I told him … there was a little more awakenings to this, but I told him I experienced the absolute, and I can tell you these things, and he knew that I was telling the truth, because he knows my character. We grew up, so he knows my character. So I went out there to Arizona one time with him, and I broke him out of the thing, and his mind was blown. His mind was blown. He could not grasp it, but he grasped that he could not grasp it, and that was what he had to grasp, and then I was showing him the stars, and it was so much for him, and then … so he had a full awakening type thing, but it was an awakening. I wasn’t practiced at this. I was just like, “Let me hit you with the truth so much until you can’t deny it. Let’s see what happens.” And then what happened was that, so I realized I could consciously from experiencing it, reverse engineer it, and come back with some steps and understandings to dissolve, I guess, your ego, your soul, or not the soul, dissolve your idea that you think you’re an idea.

Rick: Yeah, you’re able to help people get disentangled, get them out of the cocoon.

David: It helped them because now his mind is able to grasp that he can do anything or be anything, and it’s not like an idea. This is an idea until you have the reality.

Rick: Yeah, so if you could, elaborate a little bit more on what your actual experience was when you had that initial samadhi experience. If you could try to describe it a little bit more.

David: Okay, so when I talk about my experience, I always have to make it clear that I’m talking about two … it’s a progression experience, but it’s going through self-realization, and that’s when people say, “I am no thing,” and then, “I am everything,” and then you’ve got to keep going beyond that, and it’s hard to explain because …

Rick: So what did you realize? You realized self-realization. What does that mean? Obviously I’ve heard the term, but try to describe it to people.

David: All right, so basically I’m like, I could even help you … all right. So you sit down, or you don’t have to sit down, but it’s the stillness within you doing this. It’s like you’re meditating, even when you’re walking, you’re meditating. You are one-pointed on the one thing in existence, and what caught me in this is that the idea that people … things were written before they happened. They took pictures before people, before they even took the picture. People are using their thoughts to pull everything I’ve been trying to work. I couldn’t put that in no … like when you have … I have a sun. When you put the little things, and the circle goes in the circle, and the triangle goes in the triangle.

Rick: Right.

David: One piece don’t go, I couldn’t make it go.

Rick: Square peg in a round hole.

David: So my whole game’s filled out, and I have three pieces, and I don’t know where these pieces go. I’m trying to … wait, how is this possible? My mind can’t get past things because of what I experience. So I really … like I had no way I could formulate my theory of everything to fit this. No way could I understand this. So it caused me to be one-minded, one-focused. Even when I was moving around, my body was doing what it was doing, but I was like focused inwardly. What the heck? How is this possible? What am I then? What’s really going on with me then? So then it starts to focus inward. So the first key to this is concentration. Can you be concentrated inwardly, even when things are moving, just focus inwardly on one thing? What am I? What is really going on? So it focused my inner eye to become aware of this. So then I’m starting to throw in everything. I’m not David. I’m not my body. My body will go. I’m not my thoughts. My thoughts change. Who is the one aware of the thoughts? I’m not my relationships. I’m not the people. I’m not this. I’m not that. And I’m just going on, on, and on, and on. And it’s like I’m emptying everything I think I could believe I am. And this is basically my mind, how I think. All my marbles are concepts. And I’m pulling this one. Nope, not this. Not this. And then it gets crazy. It starts to go to groups, because then I start to connect all this. If I’m not the body, anything that goes with the body, we can throw out. So I’m not any smell, any sight, any touch, any taste, any feeling. So all of those, anything I’ve ever touched, anything I’ve ever tasted, anything like a group, throw all that out. So then we get, I’m an energy. But who’s aware of the energies? And when they change, what are you? Where are you? Who’s that? And all that goes. Who’s the thoughts? All that goes until I became, I’m my mind. Who’s aware of the mind? Who is talking and who is listening? And then it became something so aware. Why am I talking to myself and listening to myself as if I’m not the self? Then it splits. Who’s talking to me? Who’s the one aware of that? And then it gets like, my mind. Like I catch the one pretending. And then I’m like, so what is that? If I’m not the mind, everything I know is my mind, but I’m not the mind. We throw away the mind and what’s left is just you are pure awareness. But since you do this in a reality, and it was like over nine hours just being, like I’m moving and stuff, but I’m not, like I’m staying on this inwardly. So then what happens is nothing’s left and literally you’re only left. So what happens is, it’s like if you open your eyes for the first time, when you see your reality, your reality is not a known, your reality is literally you. Because you realize the only one that has ever experienced you is you. Every sound, every taste, every touch, every single thing was you. Every problem is the mirror effect. You put your belief on it, it was not like that, and then you experience what you put on it. The one that experiences anger is the one that creates the anger, puts it on something, gets mad and experiences it. It’s all a mirror effect right back at you. So I was able to get out the mirror and realize that. And then I became everything. Like everything, everything. Because you already are everything. You’re not a body. So if you believe you’re a body, you have to believe you’re the floor that the body’s on. If you believe you’re the floor, you have to believe you’re the ground. The ground gives you food, so part of you is the food. What makes the food? The rain. If you’re the ground, you’re the rain, because it’s the whole system. So literally everything in my reality got connected to oneness. It is one, all of it. It’s not a thought though. Like this is why I can help people see it, because I’m not thinking. I’m happening within your mind right now, within your heart right now. I’m happening within you. And you’re happening within me. We’re in each other, it all is.

Rick: I have to tell you something funny. Somebody just posted something on Facebook, it just popped up in the corner here. Somebody named Lori, she said, “Holy shit, Rick, he’s so good!” So I thought you’d like that. She said, “David, phew!” So you have a fan out there, you’ve got a new fan.

David: We’re all reflections. This is why I call people my reflections, because literally I am you, you are me, it is all. And this is how easy, when you know you know, and if someone knows, you can tell that they know because the only thing they can point to is you. You’re it, you’re it. I can’t give you nothing, I’m going to give you what you already are. But the more people know who they are, the more they know what we all are. So this is the freeing thing of this. If you wake up, we all wake up. So that’s just self-realization. So this is self-realization, realizing everything that ever happened to me is me. Who’s mad? Who made up that? You. What’s mad? An idea, a concept. So who’s holding that and putting an experience to it? Me. I’m doing all this to myself. I set myself up in myself. So once you know that, you’re able to be at peace with everything, all the beings in the world. And this goes beyond physical. Even in my dreams, like nightmares. I have a dream that some monster is trying to get me. I am so self-aware of who I am. Even in a thing, I feel compassion for the monster. I hug the monster in my sleep because I know it was me and if I was in that predicament, I would need love. So therefore, you get out of all the traps out of this. But your greatness becomes the trap. This is at that level because now I am God. It is God. And then this is the trap that people get caught into spiritually. When we talk about spirituality, the more you’re giving up, the more you’re becoming. No one thinks to give up everything and whatever’s left is the pure experience of everything. You’re never going to keep anything. So if you think you’re going to keep anything, you’re slowing yourself down. But thinking you’re going to keep it, so you’re stagnant. You’re slow. If you know that it comes and it goes, I’ll die one day and I don’t know when that is, I better enjoy it all. You get in and you enjoy it all. You lose wives, houses, you lose cars, you lose your life. You lose, ah yes, but did you live life? And that’s what it’s about. Everything becomes a reflection of you. So the same way you use Samadhi to experience oneness, this never stops. So when I see you, if I keep looking at you, I will start to see God in you. Or I see God in you, but I’m trying not to focus it or we’ll fall in some type of love. If you look somebody in the eye, you’ll see yourself looking at yourself if you’re self-realized, if you know what you are. All of this is you. But then, who gave you this? I think some people get so into this, I am. That is the I am. This is what God is, I am, self-realization. But if you don’t get caught in it, you enter, it’s another level. So I break it down like this. First we have the duality, everybody’s duality, me versus you, my stuff and your stuff, this is how it is. And then we transcend into what we call oneness. All is one, I am you, you are me, we are one. But then beyond that is the noneness. And this is no, it just killed me trying to think about some language to put, there is nothing. And you can give up being aware, and this is when you gotta have a drive for this. Every single thing, the way I try to convey this is, put every future life, every past life, and this life, everything you will ever be in your existence right here, right now, and jump, fully jump into the dark. And it will even, like even your awareness, the way I experience this is my awareness as if it went into itself, like evaporated into itself, so I unbecame, but see these words don’t convey that.

Rick:That makes sense. There’s a thing in the Bhagavad Gita which says it’s like a tortoise drawing its legs within its shell.

David: Exactly how it is. I never knew that, exactly like that. So you go within yourself, but you’re not this anymore, you’re everything, you’re just awareness though, but awareness going into awareness. And then that’s when it happened, there is a God, there is a light.

Rick: So when this first happened to you, did you kind of lose it again and then you had to rediscover it, or did it stick with you?

David: When they say, “Those who know do not say, and those who say do not know,” what they’re trying to say is that you can’t talk it because it’s like saying yes and no on every single question you say. So if you say all negatives, all negatives. If you say all positives, all positives. Is it that? No. So it’s caught in between yes and no, is and is not. But you see, I can’t even articulate it, but I can tell you what it feels like. So if you want to experience what I call God realization, you have to even give up your self realization of being pure awareness and all that. So I don’t know how to say you give up, you just have to have the desire to know who created you. So first we want to know what am I, then we understand what we are, but who created such a magnificent thing? It’s beyond, it’s like if I give you heaven and everything in it, can you turn away heaven and say, but who created heaven or would you get lost in heaven? So if you can not get lost in heaven, which is a crazy thing, you implode, you don’t implode, but you go inward even deeper to unmanifested and what is there. The way I experienced it is like as if I went in and then a sun was just on me. The way, the way as if the sun was right here, literally on your neck. And you know how you get chills? It’s right there and you know, so your awareness, you don’t have, “I’m killing this.”

Rick: You’re doing good. As a matter of fact, you may not know this, but a lot of the things you say are things that have been said for centuries in these spiritual traditions. Like for instance, the thing about heaven, some traditions say, well, it’s really hard for angels to get enlightened or even want enlightenment because heaven is so wonderful that they don’t want to close their eyes, you know, and you actually have to somehow go beyond that. But it could be so alluring that you don’t want to go beyond it or you don’t even think of going beyond it.

David: It’s just that, because look, people think that when I tell people to enter the absolute, you have to pass a guardian. What I mean by that is if fear rules your life, you will have to face whatever fear that is. Like if you believe that there’s a devil, if you believe in that, those things, those things will manifest because they’re of your mind. Your mind is trying to keep you there. So then if you go past fear, your mind plays this last trick, give you heaven. You never prepare for heaven. I get to do anything, everything, all of this being, everything, and whatever you can conceive of everything is even beyond that because it’s infinity everything you being. The words get different. But you’re very aware that you are everything in existence, everything, every moment, every taste, every touch. All of this is happening within you anyway, but you just get to experience it. But that can catch you because how is this? So we go into the unbeing. Man, it’s as if the sun went right here and you turn around. The thing about this is that it is the most scariest thing that can ever scare you. And this is the greatest thing. To find that the absolute is real, you could never imagine that. You cannot fathom that. But it breaks you. Literally it breaks anything else. Everything else that was going to get you to be not what you are, it strips every single thing away. I’m going to start crying if I keep thinking about it.

Rick: You can cry.

David: Because, nah, you don’t understand. I won’t be able to speak.

Rick: It will make the video even more popular if you cry.

David: I’m going to put the tears out. See what it is! No, but literally because, look, as a human, you’re taught that you’re unworthy of things. You’re taught that you lack. You’re taught that you’re broken. You’re taught that you’re missing out. You’re taught that the judgment on you. We all walk around unknowingly with this judgment, this grudge, the weight on the world of I got to be perfect. I got to do perfect things. I’m not good enough. What about the things I did last year? What about the things I did — all these things, this never goes away. The mind doesn’t let it go. Think about what you call memory is just hate myself, hate myself, hate myself, all like that. But when we get to the absolute, with one word, but it’s not a word. I’m just trying to give you some way to communicate this. Through every cell, you don’t have cells. I’m trying to say it is known through your being in every single level because like I said, if you put your past, your future, everything into one and jump through that one, that perfection of being pure awareness, it will heal. It will fix every single thing. You are liberated, enlightened, because what God is as an experience. If I can give you an experience, if every son in the universe got together and then you jumped into that and that was pure experience of pure bliss, pure love, pure joy, names for things you can’t even name, happenings and non-happenings, just everything in existence compiled up into one sun and that sun is who we all are. We all stream out of that sun and we all go back. If you knew this, you would be free because no man, no demon, no angel, nothing in existence could bind you because what those demons, those angels are is the same thing that you are. You literally become liberated because you enter the light. God is the light and all is God and it’s your birthright. That’s the point of this. The way you feel that, “I don’t know the point of this,” and it sucks and you in pain and it hurts, there is something gathering all of that just for you. It is multiplied over and over. The way I tell people is like, jump in pure ecstasy and it’s time a million now, now time’s and realize when you just realize that this thing is not going to stop, you lose it. What’s the point of counting when you can’t count and it’s still going as if it just started? It is everything. It’s God. People say, “Don’t use the word God.” It’s because you don’t know God. You don’t know what you are. You don’t know it has never left you. This is the love of true love, non-attached and when I see the sun every day, so I’m always taking pictures of the sun, exactly like that. It has nothing to do with you. It’s still shining for you because your heart is beating with it. It is breathing you. It is thinking you. This is what you will return to and all of this drama and all these things, all these things you care about that’s limiting, holding you back, the idea of an ego or not an ego trying to be good or bad, all of this rent is up. It doesn’t matter if you’re good or bad or evil. All you know is the light. That’s it. It’s the power, it sets you right because it’s like a drug. I can’t wake up without thinking this. I can’t go to sleep without thinking this. I go to my dreams and then I’m trying to ask, “Y’all know where the light’s at?” It overwhelms you, everything. It’s not like I voluntarily want to be a spiritual teacher. I just wanted the truth, happened to find it and now this is the catch. If you know the light, what else you can talk about? Everything. Shallowness, no, everything. Let’s talk about everything, every day, all day and that’s who you are. Then you’re enlightened not by, “I am enlightened and I studied it.” You have no choice because your freedom is enlightenment. Who you be, if I’m walking around running, if I get naked and run on a hill in the expression in which I do it, the light of me doing it, my presence itself becomes that light. Even bad things become blessings. You just sit still, you watch it, I’m about to lose everything and literally that’s after because it’s weird because when they say a wisdom, human has seen knowledge. If I can’t label it, I don’t know it but if you go to the wisdom of I am sight, where you speak from is your heart. There’s no thought process no more because you know it all ends well. It all is perfect. We’re having this conversation, this interaction because it was already manipulated for it to be and from this happening, sprouts more happenings that will either talk to people in the world or give people the light, it spreads. You don’t own this, you are this. This is why when people try to obtain it, how do you obtain letting go? The more you put into you, the more you’re hurting yourself. “Yeah, but I really know what it is.” But it’s not a theory. “Yeah, I know but I’ll find out some more.” Then you just be. So then I’ve seen the effect of me just being, it breaks them out of the dark. Literally you are it. You are walking light. You don’t know why, you don’t know how, it just is. Like me and you can do the exact same things, right? Or even me and me, me before and me after. If I mimicked and said the same thing, did the exact same things, two different outcomes because of what is moving me, what is saying me, what is beating me, living me, it is in full control now because when they say, “Let thy will be done,” who else’s will is there? Who else is here but the one? It’s all the one. You can iron this all out and it’s just, and then blessings and blessings and then the crazy parts of stuff start happening. Go ahead. Reality will start to literally play with you like a kid, make you laugh and different type of things. This becomes dangerous because you’ll say something then it’ll happen. Happen, happen. You’ll start to, I’ll give you an example. I was going to the park the other day, I had my backpack and then I was thinking, it’s so crazy how everything is perfectly divine order because it’s impossible for you to go somewhere and meet the right person when there’s seven billion different situations and even more than that because seven billion is giving you a thought of it. It could be however, you don’t really know. How do those things happen? Straight when I was thinking about this, I ran into my friend that I met in the military from seven years ago. I had to be on that hill right at that time and if I would have came earlier or not, I would have missed him and I got right in contact and I was like exactly like that. People see it and then they idolize it but you can’t idolize these things because if you copy me, you don’t copy the human. There’s nothing human. You got to see that you are the spirit and let the spirit be and then that’s how you fully get everything that you are. Your child, the child in you was the perfection of you. It didn’t have, “I got to do this to get profit. How’s my profit margin? Who’s going to like it? Who’s going to?” No, it was action. You’ve seen the cat, you’re after the cat and that’s what you did fully with your heart and that’s that joy but doing things in that joy, it brings success with you. It brings joy with you in everything you do and you’re not really doing that. That’s how everything is done by not you doing it. You just show up like, “What’s up? Man, you’re making me feel good. How are you doing this?” “Oh, because there’s no pressure. There’s no gravity on you. When I’m around you, I’m looking at you. I want to be interested in the things that you are.” You become a mirror, a perfect mirror and when you look in the mirror, if the mirror is clean or been clean going through all this, it reflects back the light that is you. I’m normally you and that’s the light for people. Not like, “I have been through things and you’ll never make it.” No, because I made it, you’re definitely going to make it. That’s what changes the teaching, I guess. Sharing love. Being love. That’s it. Be love. What would love look like in your capacity? Whatever you think that is, be that with no holdbacks and you will have the perfect life that you always dreamed of because this is how God did it. It made you perfect. “Oh, you’re just plain human. That’s another thing. That has nothing to do with God’s plan.” What you are innately pulled to. “Oh, bugs. Oh, look at trains.” “I wonder how the bugs are.” Whatever it is, whatever your gift is, if you go all the way in it, it will become one of one because you’re one of one in the one. That’s the beauty of this. Individuality in the oneness. You get to be you and you get to be God. People who jump and forget the other, you got to do like this. I’m perfect with it. I’m happy. It doesn’t take anything. It doesn’t … You just be. Can you be right here? We don’t need words. You know that I know and I know that you know and I know that we are so that is it. It’s a silent conversation. It’s just … It’s felt. It’s always telling on my video. Do you feel me? If you’re processing and analyzing me, you will not feel me. It’s energy before the words. We got to lose the words and feel the energy. People get caught up on the words. “Did I say it right? Did you feel what I was trying to point to?” That’s really what it is because the words ain’t really real. It’s A-E-I-O-U. Um and clicks and sounds. God’s not a clicker of sound and God is but first you got to let it go to get it back. Then you complete. You can even be bad but you won’t be bad as like, “I’m evil and I’m winning.” You can just be bad like, “I will destroy it all.” You’re free. You can destroy it all because it’s you but you’re free. Who cares what they’re saying? They won’t understand me. I’m one of one. I don’t understand me. How can I get someone else to understand me? You don’t even think about those things no more. You just … You in the live now. Right here, right now and it is. I only know that I am and I know that there is God that is. That’s all you need to know. You got the coach and the game, the light. There’s nothing else. Then you plan and whatever your divine destiny is because now I go around the world finding my own reflections, waking them up but not waking them up like, “You need to get up and be better.” Walking around being up makes people want to, “I want to be like you. You seem to be happy.” All right, do this. It’s simple. It’s all about stillness.

Rick: Nice. You had such a nice roll, I didn’t want to interrupt and say anything. You’re just really …

David: Just getting in streams.

Rick: Yeah, no, it’s great. Love it. You gave me some nice points that we could discuss. I think you’ve covered some of them but let’s dig into a few of them. One thing that you thought you’d want to discuss is the dark side of awakening and enlightenment. What’s the dark side of those things?

David: The dark side of this is believing that it will fix you. If you talk about enlightenment, first of all, if you’re talking about enlightenment, that’s questionable to the ego. Like, “Oh, who knows if he is or not?” What’s crazy about it is that if we can get past that and you can continuously try to help someone, liberate somebody, or even teach them … This is why you can’t really teach someone that isn’t seeking it themselves because what they do is they make up something. When I’m enlightened, then I’ll be ready to start my career. When I’m enlightened, oh, then I’ll have a magic power. When I’m enlightened, then I’ll fix my relationship. When I’m enlightened, oh, I won’t even have to do it. It will be. I will be a guru. I’ll put myself … I’ll get all these powers. It’s not like that. That’s one thing I don’t like. The more we say it’s very difficult, the more people make it difficult in their minds when it’s actually the most simplest thing. Before you think what is happening, nothing. That’s exactly what is happening, nothing. It’s simple. People make this thing, “Oh, yeah, I’ve seen an enlightened being.” People put all these things on gurus and mark the face up and all this. You come in there and you’re a human to act up and be like, “Oh, this is one.” You see the president, it’s only a person with a name. It’s not like he knows more and he has a power. I’m the president. It’s just a dude. Everybody’s just the same. When we start to idolize these things, put people above ourselves, we got to get through that. From it, the dark side of it is that you can’t stay in the light. This is one thing. You can’t stay in the light. It becomes like a drug. This … It’s hard to talk about the light. When you experience the light, it will consume your whole being. Everything in your reality will be pulled towards this. But you cannot stay in the light because it’s absolute. You won’t be able to function. I won’t be able to move this because I will be absorbed, literally absorbed into it. Even it’ll start to take part of your life energy if you stay into the absolute. But the thing is that you have to come back down. This is like any drug. After you get super high, you got to deal with being super low. That right there is the most depressing stage of your whole awakening. I thought I was depressed. I thought I was low and depressed before that. After that, this is when the spiritual practices have to come in. This is when you have to start gettig in nature and staying in presence, staying in these things. This is why you have to balance all of this because you will know that there’s a truth. You won’t be able to convey it. You will know that everyone else in this world is suffering and you will be able to feel their suffering because the self-realization never leaves. You still are everything. Everything is. But when you go back into that, you open your heart that what you call pain is the only pain that ever existed. So you know that your pain is the closest thing you can understand to anybody’s pain. So you realize how bad it was for you is how bad it is right now for everybody on this planet. And that right there is the dark side of this because you connected too many dots. You cannot stop looking at the dots you connected. You know it is very much there. So when we talk about, man, this is what can split your being because you see that we live in caveman times when people will not acknowledge a person for their color. That’s like having an eye color that, “Oh no, your eye is the wrong color.” And that’s literally how crazy that is. People will kill for that. Realizing that people put people’s intellect down. Every single thing is being stunt. This is why you have to know the whole system to understand it all completely. It’s like when you see slavery, we talk about putting women down, we talk about even religion telling you you will go to hell and all these things. We don’t ever ask where did these things come from. All of this is revealed to you but then you see how maddening the world is. You see all of your reflections living in hell, dealing with that, isolated by themselves, going through the same thing. The gift and the pain is you to experience it, realize it and then wake up and then you realize that from your personal experience. Now you can go back to heal the pain that you experienced. I can’t do something I never experienced and this is what people need to realize. They’ve been shown so much things on TV, wars and hunger and things that they just put this on themselves and it makes them feel like they can’t move. But you can actually help your situation. If you were overweight, if you were depressed, if you deal with anxiety, whatever your personal demon was, if you overcome it, now this is why you’re in the game now. So now I’m in the game to help fight depression. Why? Because I experienced it. I know what it’s like to be on that other side literally and that right there gives a connection to actually make change. Not someone I studied it. As I was saying, the theory of studying it, oh yeah, here’s a pill. But do you know what these pills are doing inwardly to me? It says, see only until we take the pill and now let’s see. See what I mean? You understand. So this is the whole, you got to come all the way back around to the circle. Go to the light, come back to the ground and not just, I’m going to a cave, I just need to get back to the light. People get addicted to even having the self-realization. They get addicted to, I just want to be oneness. They don’t want to be in it too. So you got to, the dark side of that is you got to learn how are you going to put all this and still maintain your sanity in this world? Because I can feel your pain even when you’re trying to deny it because the way you act, the way you, your mannerisms and the way you speak, it’ll be a flow and then it’ll change, it’ll drop or it’ll go higher, it’ll drop. It’ll be like, oh yes, I’m David. My name is this. What’s your favorite color? Um, green. You see, it’ll drop, it’ll be felt. But you got to be crystal clear to understand this. But until we acknowledge that dark side, we’re going to have a lot of people lost and putting in, what’s those homes?

Rick: Retirement homes?

David: Not even retirement, well when you–

Rick: Care homes, mental institutions?

David: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you can experience this and then you get people saying, I’m Jesus. Things like that, but they could be halfway to the truth, but until you, you got to fully ground this back to the whole circle of this. If you can do that, you can walk around in the world but not of the world, helping the world, realizing you are the world. That’s the whole point. Because what would be the point? Oh God, oh, and just get back to work. There’s a story about Ram Dass, you know who Ram Dass is?

David: Yeah, yeah, I know Ram Dass.

Rick: His brother was in a mental institution and because his brother thought he was God, and so Ram Dass went to visit him and he said, “I think I’m God too, but the reason you’re here in this institution and I’m not is that you think you’re the only one who’s God and I think everybody’s God.”

David: Exactly, that’s the key right there. The ego, the brain locks you up and that’s the thing, the determinative factor is, do you see this for everybody or do you just still say a “me”? If there’s a “me” there, then you’re still, you need work. But if you say, “We are God, God is all, all is God,” oh, you’re complete. You should have a way, but you can tell because people should have a way of explaining this. If they can’t verbalize it or articulate it, they should be like, “Let me show you, close your eyes,” and then they can get you to what they’re talking about. But we got to be open. This is how they explain enlightenment. This is how he’s experiencing it. This is how it is. We have to be open that it’s not like one thing, one size fits all. We have to like, one of one. If a fish experienced enlightenment, he’s going to do something in the water. If a bird does it, he’s flying, doing flips. And if you’re doing it, you may not be a bird or a fish. And if we can understand it like that, it’s the full thing. It’s all about pulling it all back together, one. Every great guru, Buddha, Jesus, I am you, you are me. When we see Jesus getting hung, Buddha’s in a state of he’s the nail, he’s the cross, he’s the person, he’s the one. It’s no one there. But you’re like, “Yeah.” Forgive them for they don’t know what they do. They don’t realize that they’ve taken away the light in their lives. People get on the concept of Jesus. No, Jesus was a concept, the Buddha was a concept. It’s not like that. There are beings showing you that there is so much more here, you should highlight that part and come for that gain.

Rick: I heard you say earlier that it was sort of like spiritual practice became useful for you after this awakening experience to kind of process and begin to work through all the stuff that was getting stirred up, if I understood you correctly. I’ve heard in some of your videos saying that you start your day with like 20 minutes of just really concentrated gratitude, gratitude, gratitude, gratitude, and then you also meditate a couple hours a day. Is all that still the case? What do you advocate or encourage people to do along those lines?

David: You’ve got to do you. There ain’t no way, but your way is the way. What I do is that since I experienced death, I know that this could come at any second. You don’t lose this type of awareness. So when I wake up in the morning, I’m here. I arrived again. So I’m here to play round two. I can get better. I can get more. I can have these things. So for you to have more, you already got to appreciate the stuff you already have. So what’s the most precious thing that you have? I am my life. I am. My mind is still here. I’m still able to process these things. My health is still here. I still have a voice. I’ll be writing this down. I still have a mind and a way to write this down. You got to get lost in this appreciation, and it stumbles into your day because it sets the way your consciousness sees reality. So when you start and you just pause, as soon as you wake up, my first thought is, “Thank you, God. I’m here again. Round two.” And then more. I am thankful for whatever. It just starts shooting out. Whatever I’m thankful for. For this beautiful day, for the sunshine, for the dark. I wake up in the morning, it’s like four or something, three sometimes. I’m thankful for the silence because in the silence you see the gift of everything. I’m thankful for the bird. The bird giving me a beautiful song. I’m thankful for the wind, the spirit that moves all that is in all that never is able to be caught. I’m thankful. I’m thankful for the rain that is aiding me. I drink clouds. I’m thankful for the tree, the other side of my lungs. I’m thankful for the planet. I have a home. I’m thankful for the solar system that makes my … It just goes and grows. And then you wake up, or you get up, and then you just like, you in that vibration, you just sit in there. You sit and marinate in it. And that’s like just practices. But depending on … I don’t have to do any of that. It still is, but that’s my respect. Somebody gave me a car and I can go do anything, drive it around, break it, crash it, build something with it, all these things. And then they gave me an earth, and then they gave me seven billion reflections, then they gave me the awareness to know that within every single being is God’s potential to be everything. So if everybody’s Einstein, if everybody’s the Buddha, everybody’s Jesus, you see on that level the potential of humanity, we all can wake this up and the world is going to transform. So you see this and you know it, and you know you’re a part in this. To be me is to cause this. I’m thankful. I could have had a job. It’s talking the truth to people and changing lives. It’s perfect. If you could say, “What would you want to do if you had to do anything?” And what I am is what I do, and I am that. I’m thankful for it. I remember there was a time when I hated my life. I’m in the military, I’m in the store, I’m in this and this job. So we always do this. I want more. I wish I had a better situation and things like that. But when you have it, do you catch it? So I catch mine in the now every time. Frees me up, sets me in the right mood. When I’m out in the world, now people talking, even if someone’s talking whatever, you’re so within that spot. You send them love, you send them compassion, you understand. You can’t even see that you’re here. And nothing bothers you. And then just find it. If you’re depressed, staying out in nature. I go skating. I’m staying at the beach. I’m always walking on the trail. You have to get your mind to where it can see the open sky because this is when your intelligence is going to open up. Look into the clouds and start to like, look. No one looks up. We’re just all on the ground looking at you. Look up and see the amazement. Go out to the beach and see how far the horizon is. How deep does the ocean go? How far is the moon? Look into the galaxy. Open, open makes you open.

Rick: Nice.

David: That’s what it is.

Rick: Yeah. Do you have a job? I heard you say at one point that you worked as an electrician. Do you still do something like that?

David: I gave all that up because of this.

Rick: How do you support your family?

David: I don’t even understand. How would you say it? I created a business out of this and that provides …

Rick: By talking to people and consulting them?

David: Yeah. I guess it’s like … I don’t know. That’s why I call it a … What do you call this? I just help people. In my perspective, I just help people. So it’s like coaching.

Rick: Coaching, yeah. That’s one word.

David: So enlightenment coaching type thing. Kind of like that. Just make a business and stuff. Even my clothing right here, I made clothing lines and then that started to go. But then I just … Literally, I just quit it all to test. I don’t know how to say this. If you walk with God, God will walk with you. But I’m so aware of that that … What do you want to do? It’s like no compromising on your goal. If this job is getting in the way of your goal and your dreams, don’t go to this job. This is the only truth that you can know. And if you say, “What’s going to happen after, before?” You’re not working with God. If you say, “This ain’t me. Cut it. I’m leaving. Give it all to God,” you move like this. But what happens is that … How do you say it?

Rick: It’s beautiful. It reminds me of that beautiful thing that Jesus said, “See ye not the lilies of the field? They neither toil nor sow.” They don’t prepare for tomorrow, but even Solomon in all his glory was not adorned as one of these. And so if God will take care of a little flower like that, certainly He’s going to take care of you.

David: The same one that gave you today will take care of you through today. But I’m having a hard time to explain it because it’s not explainable. It’s an awareness thing. This is part of the waking up, going through this. Me and my wife, we already, through internet money, basically, even like stocks or setting certain things up, you can make income over the internet. So having that, it actually frees me, my intellect about that. But testing it. Last year was the test of this. Will we sink or swim? And nobody … God is God. So if God is God, let’s play this. If God is God, God should be able to provide anything and everything I needed as I need it. And this is something I must know. So how do you know anything? You got to test it. So I cut going to a certain job. I cut going to doing certain things. And I sit still. And I just did what I love. That started to make income. But it’s even crazier because I call it magic money. Like literally, well, I guess we’re going to lose my truck. This comes up in reality. Well, I guess I’ll sell my truck at the eighth. On the fifth, you get a job or something. You randomly in the mail, we overpaid or you overpaid for this or that. And then $2,000 unplanned, perfectly what you needed. And then you start to see it. The more you become aware of that, you can just rest in that. And then it just allows you to be. But it’s not like denial. I still do things, but it does, it takes care of what it is, I guess.

Rick: Yeah, I understand what you’re saying. That’s good. We could dwell on any one of these points. You know, we could go on for half an hour talking about each one, but I want to move through several other ones. You’ve kind of talked about the difference between self-realization and God-realization. You keep touching upon that. Is there any fairly concise comment you want to make about that? Because I mean, there’s a lot of spiritual people who don’t even believe in God. They can relate in terms of self-realization, you know, you’re a pure consciousness, or maybe they think of it in terms of you are nothing, you know, there is no personal self and there’s just an emptiness and realization involves knowing that. But then they might say there is no such thing as God, the universe is random and accidental and arbitrary and that kind of thing. And to me that’s kind of a very half-baked spirituality, you know. There’s so much richness if you take it the next step, as you have been implying in what you’ve been saying.

David: So let me think. What would I say? It’s kind of like you can’t really say anything about that because this is like, if you’re a person, if we even talk about self-realization, to even get into self-realization actually you have to get into that to open yourself to the possibility of God-realization. Because if you’re talking about the self, you don’t even believe that you are everything, you don’t even know what you talk.

Rick: Yeah, if you don’t know who you are, how are you going to know what God is or anything? How are you going to know what an apple is?

David: Is it right there? That’s how easy that is. Like, how can you know if you don’t even know who you are? If you experience who you are, this should be like a highlight, like, “Yeah, I felt there was some more.” Because if you can still go, you’re not there. If you still can ask a question, even in oneness, who is the one aware? I am the one aware of all. Every single thing is one, it’s one thing. But then you, or one thing and one no thing, but it just the most, it just goes with the way your consciousness has to get there. If you’re on a rope pulling at a string to realize who you are and then you pop out and then you realize you’re nothing, the string, if the string is still there to ask the question, you’re not done yet. Until you cannot ask the question, because all answers will be given and given and given, you don’t want no more, and still you just started, it will flood you and flood you. So what I would say is that, you’re just showing your colors. Anybody who says something like that, they’re just showing their level. It’s not nothing to argue, because how can you argue?

Rick: It’s relevant for them at their stage of development or their stage of experience.

David: You just have to send them love, because it’s not even a fair fight if you try to break this down to them, because they don’t know who they are. You can ask them that question, then who are you? And then here we go. It’s literally like a science. If you experience this, you can just step by step, walk yourself out of creation, be out of creation, and then go inward and then there you are. And this is oblivious if you never even did any soul searching. It’s easy being a bleacher, like, “Oh, he should have made that shot!”

Rick: Right, let’s see you make it.

David: Exactly.

Rick: This is another point we could go on about, but I’m going to just keep moving through some other ones that you’ve sketched out for me. One is millennials and self-realization. What do you have to say about that?

David: When we talk about realization, everybody refers to the books, right? The Buddha. I only use concepts that your mind has already absorbed so you can understand where I’m pointing at. When I say the Buddha, I’m directing you in, “Okay, if I know the Buddha, what was the Buddha about?” And that just saves time. When I say Jesus, when we say God, you realize every word is a loaded word that already comes with this pre-applied everything. When we talk about today’s awakening, what is happening is that the language is not switching for people to realize it. They’re still stuck in the paradigm. I deal with this all the time. So if I say God, you already assume you know what God is. But then I say, “Oh, but you don’t know who you are,” and assuming God is not what I’m saying, they’ll hear it, but they can’t get over that word. This is why people don’t like using words like God and Brahman and things like certain things because it already comes with so much whatever.

Rick: Baggage. But even if you actually experience it, you’re like, “No, I’m talking about God,” it still put a smudge on the mirror. They can’t really see it past that cultured, that conditioning.

Rick: What does this have to do with millennials?

David: I’m going to tie it in. So when we talk about millennials, you got to realize that the people that teach millennials don’t realize that millennials within two years, like my son, could have absorbed more information about the whole world, about all these things. My 10-year-old son, he told me about every crystal. He was just naming them, this, this, this, and this property. I’m like, “How do you even know?” It’s just like my mind is blown. How do you know this? He’s like, “Oh, I watched the show that talked about the crystal, so I did this, and then I looked it up, and then I got interested in it, and now I know them all.” And he’s like 10, so that’s more knowledge. So when we talk about, if we don’t change the practices of yesterday to fit the kids or the people of today, we’ll always have this culture gap. You got to realize we’re a world culture. If you can look back, if we go back a couple hundred years, even I would have been in a cage. So if we go back a thousand years, that mind frame in which they operate and talk about a lot is wrapped around a culture. Because it used to be your culture, your culture. Everybody used to be their culture, not mixed. But now that we mixed it, we have to have a different type of teaching that is exactly from the truth because you water it down. Their minds are going higher, and if their truth is not reaching their mind, we’re going to have imbalance. Imagine a 15-year-old that knows about nuclear science, but he can’t catch that he is. It’s like making super weapons. So we have to come back to the time, and it’s not a look type thing. I feel like enlightenment is, even in mainstream, is marketed. To be an enlightened person, that sounds, “Oh, you’re just a person that knows who you are.” See, when we see all these gurus and gold and all this, and with all this and that, as a youth, you look up and then you take in the whole, “Oh, that’ll never be me. He sat there and meditated for this, I’ll never get that.” So what this does, if we want the world to change, we have to invest in the ones that are going to change the world. We can’t fix what’s going out to get what’s new. We have to find the truth and teach the truth to the youth so they know the truth already. They’re not programmed all the way, and then that right there is the switching of the dark to the light. It’s a one-generation type thing.

Rick: So since you have a 10-year-old son and he has a bunch of friends whom you probably know, are you kind of optimistic when you look at the way he functions? That there’s going to be a whole new crop of kids that are going to make a difference?

David: Yeah, a beam. Because they have the internet. All their friends, they’re connected to their friends on the Xbox with their friends. And it goes beyond color, race. I’m playing with my friend in London. We play at a certain time because his hours and my hours, and it’s beyond culture or anything. So we have to teach beyond culture or anything. It has to open up. If we don’t open up, you, “Oh, this is my set.” It goes back to the game type thing. I have to go learn enlightenment from my type of person. But if everybody’s learning the same truth that we all are it, it is all of us, the minds of a self-aware kid at this point change the world. Because they have a group of them, oh my God. One person made Facebook. That’s one person. Think about if you have a group of 100 people, that’s what is coming to them. This is why it’s always being done without doing. Even technology is just what consciousness is either way. It’s all connected and it’s regardless.

Rick: Yeah, you said in your notes the importance of a spiritual community, and then you mentioned a whole group of them, and then you were mentioning the internet. So there is kind of a spiritual community, it definitely is, but it doesn’t all have to live in some ashram. It can be connected electronically that’s dispersed throughout the world.

David: Yeah, it’s better like that because if you look at every spiritual leader that came that tried to awaken people, they got the person. If you say, if we talk about Jesus, Jesus was killed by the believers. If we talk about MLK, when it happens to them, when they die, the whole movement stops. But in today’s time, we can teach this. You can be up and you can be at your place, I can be up at my place, but the whole world can start waking up through the internet and that’s just being real. You can’t stop it at that point because where is it? It’s everywhere. You take one hit and it just comes back. You don’t want to piss them off. They all start coming out. That’s what has to happen. These cameras and stuff, you got to see what’s being presented, opportunity. I could be right here and however many people can zoom in or that is zooming in, we don’t even have to talk about what could be, what is happening right now. People can be anywhere, watch this conversation, learn from it, evolve from it. We’re just sitting here. That’s what’s going to happen, but more, we’re going to put that in action too. This is what the difference is, the action that comes behind this too. Who doesn’t want to join a team that wants everybody to be better?

Rick: Yeah, that’s great. Well, the team is pretty big and getting bigger.

David: But everybody’s invited. The weirder you are, if you come with love, let’s see what we can do with you. It’s not like you have to change for the team. We need you to be how crazy you are for the team because that’s a part of the puzzle. We’re trying to put the puzzle together. Humanity, the puzzle comes together where everybody fits in their place because they are what they are and it’s needed. We need the eye, we need the hand, we need the mouth, we need the brain, we need it all. So what you do matters.

Rick: That’s nice and you talk about God a lot and when you look at the way God operates, God’s not really into monochrome, it’s like there’s just explosive diversity. There’s so many species and no two people are alike and no two cats are alike and there’s just infinite variety and creativity.

David: It’s on purpose.

Rick: And yet it’s all part of one large wholeness that’s integrated within itself.

David: That’s the point of it. For everything to cover every base, that’s one shot, big bang, every base covered all at once. We hit every space, we got every single thing at once. This is why everybody comes back and we experience us. So it’s like on three we’re going to break out, we’re going to do whatever we want and then we’re going to come back and meet in the middle. Alright, one, two, three, bang, and then all that and then we come back. You see what we know about ourselves? We have this, we have the technology, we have everything, we just don’t have the understanding of who we are. We’re just missing us at this point. You have the button to make paradise, but we don’t know. Who’s in charge of the button? I don’t know. Just push the button, that’s what it all comes down to.

Rick: That’s a good point, you know, I mean there’s enough food in the world and means of producing food to feed everybody, but there’s a lot of people starving and that’s because the self-realization aspect is missing, which means the compassion aspect is missing and so on. And there’s all kinds of marvelous technologies, there’s technologies which can eliminate global warming but narrow-mindedness and greed are blocking those. So again, the self-realization aspect is missing because then you wouldn’t have the narrow-mindedness and greed. So it’s really sort of the common denominator, ultimate essential ingredient that if …

David: If what we’re doing right here happens, then it all falls into place. This is the last piece of the puzzle, us. Who am I? If you know who you are, because look, this is how the game is, the pain is going to make you serve so much. Even if you have a billion dollars, you still want more. I want the moon now, because it doesn’t go away, it just makes it more. I should be happy, I own the moon, I own the whole world, I own everybody. I’m still not happy. So what are you going to seek? You’re going to seek that inner happiness, so it always turns you back to inwardly. So then that’s when they start their spiritual journey. Who am I? And if you find that, because the more you go outward, it’s going to give you the power to come back and really search for it. So it’s a setup. So once you realize that, like, I can’t win, you’ll give it up. And once you give it up, you’ll realize who you are, then you’ll realize everything is one, I am one, and then you’ll come back to the understanding that, and I’ve been stingy to myself. Literally, yourself, how you love yourself, you will love this world the way you love yourself, because it will be you. So now love yourself and win for yourself. And you don’t have to apply something new, you don’t have to change nothing, you just got to keep winning, and just passing it out is different. Uplifting, and with that, knowing of yourself changes, because you give different. It’s different from being a billionaire and giving money, that yes, I’m giving y’all money, I’m the one. And then, I have to give to myself, what do you need, how can I help you with the heart, the compassion of it? Now that’s different, because you make a connection, and you give. Then it comes back. The more you give, the more you receive, and you start to receive, not money, you start to receive connection from people who see you now. People who connect with your heart, your understanding, whatever you’re doing, now the people want to do it with you, because they don’t feel that pressure to be judged, or I’m lower than you or whatever. They say, “Oh, he’s in the mud, let’s get in the mud.” They jump in there with you, and now you become a whole being, because now you have really found out what real riches are, a connection with yourself. Everybody’s God. The more gods you connect with, it intensifies. Your brain is unlimited, mine’s unlimited. If I point the mirror at you, and you point it back, we don’t know what we can make. See, that’s the fun part. We don’t know what’s going to happen, but if we say what we’re going to attempt, that’s the process. Anything after the attempt, if we make it, it works, oh, that’s cool. If we kind of make it, we need more people. It’s just ideas, and let’s get more of us, and then somebody comes on the, “Well, you should have did this,” and they tweak it, and then we have something new. We’re supposed to be unstoppable. Whatever someone likes, the world should have, like your other reflection. We should have an ant colony. I have you as much as you have me. Anything to try to get into this has to deal with all of us, so nothing can ever get in. At the same time, we can … It’s just like the Big Bang again. Once it’s taught, self-realization is taught, like you go to school, and you’re taught one, two, three. Everything that is taught, known, what happens from there is what we would call heaven on earth, literally, because you are earth and you are heaven, one walking. That’s what it’s about.

Rick: Nice. Well, that’s probably a good stopping place. So how can people connect with you if they want to?

David: If you want to connect with me, go to my YouTube, it’s Enlightened Minds at YouTube.

Rick: My N-D-Z, and I’ll be linking to that from your page on BatGap, but how can they connect with you personally if they want to? I mean, you want me to put your email address on your page or what?

David: Yeah, we can do that. The way I do it is I just give videos, so you can go to my YouTube, follow my channel, and I do Skype, so I can put the Skypes in my videos or things like that, because I’m about talking to the people personally. I like to really know you.

Rick: Well, we can talk about it later, but however you want people to contact you, I’ll put that on your BatGap page.

David: So we just put my email and my YouTube, so either way.

Rick: You can put your Skype ID there if you want people to be able to. You might start getting a lot of invitations. I don’t know how you want to handle that. If you want, we can do that. We can always take it off again, too, if it gets to be too much.

David: I’ll always know how to use this.

Rick: Okay, good. Well, David, it’s really been a lot of fun getting to know you and talking to you today. I think you’re less than half my age. I think you’re going to live a long life and make a wonderful contribution to the world. You’re already doing that, and you’re an inspiration to a lot of people, so keep up the good work.

David: Appreciate it, man.

Rick: So, let me just make a general concluding remark. I’ve been speaking with David Thomas, and as always, he’ll have his own page on batgap.com with a little bit about him and necessary contact information. And this again is part of an ongoing series of conversations. Next week I’ll be speaking with a visionary cosmologist, and if you don’t know what that is, then tune in next week and you’ll find out. So thanks for listening or watching, and we’ll see you for the next one. Thanks, David.

David: Thanks, everyone.