Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. We’ve done about 580 of them now. If this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P and look under the Past Interviews menu. This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there is a PayPal button on every page of the site, and there’s also a page about other ways to donate if you don’t like to use PayPal. My guest today is Doug Scott.
Doug: Hi.
Rick: Doug is down in Dallas, and I forget when we first got in touch with each other, or you got in touch with me, but we started chatting back and forth, and due to COVID I’ve been taking a lot of long walks in the woods, and more recently skiing in the woods, and everything, and Doug likes to jog and hike around outside, and so we started making a few messages back and forth to each other and talking about things. And it soon became apparent that Doug would really be an interesting guy to have on the program. He has a website here called Cosmic Christ, which I’m showing on the screen, in which he has written many, many articles that you can read, and we’ll be talking about the content of some of those during this conversation. But Doug said that he wanted to start us off with a little group meditation or something of that nature, so let’s do that first.
Doug: Oh, awesome. Thanks. Well, I think it’s always good to open up something like we’re doing right now with an invocation to just basically claim out loud what is always true, that we’re connected and that we’re one, but to make that intention is important. So I’ve got a candle here, and I’m going to light it.
Rick: Uh-oh.
Doug: Of course. Wouldn’t it be the case where …
Rick: It’s a bad omen.
Doug: Oh, there we go. And I’m going to say, just ask the Infinite Creator to be with us here as we explore important things. And I ask that whomever is listening will receive what they need to receive, feel validated, and hopefully it’ll be somewhat interesting. And we do this all in the union of the Creator’s transcendence and incarnation and indwelling presence. Amen.
Rick: Thank you. And we’ll learn more about you as we go along here, but that had a little bit of a Christian flavor to it, even though it could have been very universal. But I understand you’ve actually taught a little bit with Richard Rohr, who is the Center for Action and Contemplation, and who I think I’m going to be interviewing pretty soon. And he also works with Cynthia Bourgeault, whom I’m interviewing next week, and Jim Finley, whom I’ve interviewed. Is that right? Yeah, so you did a little teaching there in some capacity?
Doug: Yeah, I discovered Richard Rohr back in 1996. I was going through a dark time at that point, and just serendipity the way it works. Listened to one of his CDs, and it brought me into a place where I didn’t understand, but there was a depth that I completely honored, and it was new for me. And so I listened to his stuff over the years, and then we actually just connected the way the universe works. We met each other and kind of had an ongoing email exchange. I see him as one of my primary teachers and mentors. So yeah, a couple of years ago I was invited to do a co-lead retreat on the Trinity in Albuquerque for the Catholic Worker Movement, and so we got to hang out and do something together.
Rick: Great. So you had a Catholic upbringing, as I understand it, right? The reason I giggle is that the notes you sent me, it says, “Introduction, Catholic upbringing, mystical experiences, UFO.” So it wasn’t a conventional Catholic upbringing.
Doug: Yeah, well, you know, the word “Catholic” means “universal,” so I’m already dipping my toe into the universal stuff.
Rick: Okay, and so these mystical experiences, are those something you had when you were young?
Doug: As early as I can remember, the veil for me was pretty thin, and I just intuited presences. I intuited, yeah, just spiritual beings. Jesus being one, Mother Mary being another, my guarding angel being another, and certain saints that we venerate in the Catholic Church. I could really get a sense of their presence in my life.
Rick: Try to flesh that out a little bit, like what was the nature of that experience? Are you kind of looking back years ago and now putting labels on them as to who they were, or even then did you have a feeling, “Oh, this is Jesus, this is Mother Mary,” and so on?
Doug: Oh, it was more like I knew that I would want to connect with Jesus, and when I would hear teachings about Jesus, I would just get a sense of the person inside me, you know, it was this relationship from the very beginning kind of thing. But I didn’t see visions per se. Later as an adult, I learned how to see with my heart eyes, which I call them. It’s a way to kind of use the imaginal realm or being able to see through visions, but it’s not necessarily with these eyes, but it’s more something that’s over-transposed on reality, so you can kind of get a sense of seeing beings that way. But at that particular time, it was much more of an intuitive presence than I would feel.
Rick: Yeah, there’s a thing in the Vedic tradition, I think it’s from the Yoga Sutras called the Ritambhara Prajna, where you can sort of tune in to such a deep level that you can pretty much cognize anything. It’s not just a fantasy or hallucination or anything. It’s more like a real manifestation of the thing on a subtle level where there’s some real substance or reality to it.
Doug: Absolutely, and in fact, your guest next week will really go into that imaginal realm. That’s amazing stuff. But yeah, I think that the subtle realm, and hopefully if the conversation moves in that way, we will find how the subtle realm is actually larger, and the realm that you and I occupy, this third-density reality, is actually inside the subtle realm. And so, you can learn to tap into those higher realms.
Rick: I love that stuff. Not that I try to tap into them. But you know, even without trying, I think as you grow spiritually, you access those realms more and more. There’s more of a collaborative arrangement going on where they’re helping you and you’re helping them, perhaps, you think?
Doug: Yeah, and I think there’s always an exchange. I think it happens constantly, it’s just that are we attuned to it? And in fact, one of the greatest connections we will have throughout our lifetime is what’s known as the higher self. And the higher self, according to the material, The Law of One, which has been inspirational for me for the past, I guess, seven years, is who we are, it’s who you are, it’s who I am, but that being or that person is actually located in the sixth density. And so that would be equivalent to the sixth chakra of the being in whom that we are connected. So we have seven chakras, just like you and I have seven chakras, the Logos in which we inhabit has seven chakras. And so it’s beings within beings within beings, is kind of how I understand the metaphysics. And so the seven chakras of the Logos would be different bandwidths of consciousness, and this higher self exists on the sixth chakra, the sixth density, and you can actually have connection and conversation all the time with it.
Rick: Let me try to understand that better. So define the Logos again, if you didn’t already.
Doug: Okay, yeah, I sort of jumped into the cosmology.
Rick: We’ll loop back and talk more about you too. In fact, I got an email from somebody this week saying, “You know, when you interview somebody, could you please make sure to have them explain themselves a little bit so we know exactly who it is we’re listening to and who their teachers were and formative influences and stuff like that?” So we don’t want to leave that out, but since we leapt into this Logos thing, let’s get that and then we’ll loop back.
Doug: Okay, great. The way I understand this material, the Law of One, the metaphysics, is that you have an original creator. It’s called the Infinite Creator, and the Infinite Creator would be all that is. And the Infinite Creator creates, and the first thing it creates is this thing called love. Love can take on a sentience, almost like a person, capital P. And that would be the Logos now as a person ready to experience itself.
Rick: Now you used the word Logos again, but you still haven’t defined it.
Doug: I’m going to get there, I’m sorry. Yeah, well, okay, I’ll just say this. Logos would be, in the Law of One material, it’s equivalent to love, and it would also be like the word in John 1, chapter 1, verse 1, “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God.” That would be the first part of that chapter. So Logos would be a being that wants to experience itself and then creates sub-Logoi, which would be like suns and stars, and that creates sub-sub-Logoi, which are you and I. And so, like I said, if you have a holographic universe, and then inside that holographic universe you have holons, or parts of it, and each part is all united with the macro, the holographic universe, and as above, so below, as below, so above. So if what we find true cosmologically in the upper realms, if you will, in the macro sense, we’re going to find it in the micro sense too, and vice versa. So the Logos would be, Ra talks about, and we’ll get into who that is, but in the Law of One it talks about the galactic Logos. For lack of a better word, that would be the galaxy that we inhabit would be the body of our local Logos in the grand scheme of things, and then all of the stars would be different sub-Logoi.
Rick: So maybe one way of explaining it, see if this works, is that there’s infinite intelligence, like you said, the sort of Infinite Creator, and then the creator wishing to know himself, kind of the symmetries break and there’s more and more diversification. And this diversification involves varying hierarchies, like Chinese dolls, or Russian dolls, various sort of structures of intelligence that are tiny by comparison with the totality, but relatively large, like a galaxy here, or perhaps a cluster of galaxies there. And then within the galaxies, stars, and around the stars, planets, and on the planets, beings. And so all of these are different Logoi, which is the plural of Logos, I take it, and each of them is an embodiment of intelligence. It’s a mechanism through which intelligence can function or be reflected, and we can keep going down. I mean, within our body there are 60 trillion cells or something, and each one of those would be a little Logoi, Logos. Have I got it?
Doug: Yeah, and actually, oh my gosh, well you said it better than I did. And the other thing too is, not only do our cells make up our body, so we are the Logos for our cells, but we are also creators insofar as we create what’s called thought forms, or in some traditions they call them elementals, but that would be actual, if you will, in some way sentient entities in and of themselves imbued with the power and sort of the nature of our thoughts or feelings can be themselves somewhat sentient.
Rick: Yeah, and they can be positive or negative. I’ll tell you a quick story. I have a friend who lived in Louisiana and he was a teacher of Transcendental Meditation, and unbeknownst to him, some article came out in a local paper, and it was very negative. “Oh, this is Hinduism and it’s the devil” and all this stuff, and he didn’t even know the article came out. And he was sitting there in his meditation that morning and all of a sudden he felt like all these weird negative things were coming at him, and he thought, “What in the heck is going on?” And then later on he discovered the article. So obviously everybody in Baton Rouge or wherever he was, was reading that paper and projecting all this negativity onto him, and it was finding him, and he was experiencing it. And he was the kind of guy who had clear experiences like that.
Doug: I think that once we become aware of this stuff, we’ll start to see that it happens all the time. It’s not something to be scared about, it’s just how nature works, and good thoughts, positive thoughts, and negative thoughts work the same way. I mean, blessings work the same way.
Rick: Sure, there’s all kinds of stories of healings and things like that where people direct their attention. So it’s almost like we create little sorcerer’s apprentices or something who scurry about and carry out our intentions.
Doug: Yes. And I think that would sort of be the nature of what’s called “magic,” you know? Not magic in terms of pulling out the rabbit in the hat, but magic in terms of changing consciousness intentionally.
Rick: Yeah. And so what that implies, what we’ve discussed so far, is that everything is sort of seamlessly interconnected and nothing is isolated from anything else, ultimately, and that the part influences the whole, every little bit influences everything else, right? Yeah.
Doug: Yeah.
Rick: And that would be how karma works out and stuff, you know? Waves of influence going out, but it’s all an intelligent system, so it can kind of come back to its sender eventually.
Doug: Yeah, and you bring up a good point. I mean, nothing that we’re really going to say today, in my opinion, is going to be very different from what you already know and what most of the listeners already know from their various traditions, and we know on a deeper level, you know, intuitively. But my personal feeling is that there are, and I’m coming from a Christian background, I think that Christianity, if it’s going to contribute positively moving forward, is going to need to start to look at some of this meta-reality that’s really going on and not see it scary or evil, but actually see it how it can be incorporated into what Christianity’s always said from the very beginning. And so that’s sort of one of the pushes, maybe vocations, I could say, that I have, is to marry the Christian background, even conventional Christianity, with the cosmic in a way that affirms both.
Rick: Yeah, and if religions are ever going to get along with each other, then ultimately that’s the place where they would have to meet, you know? If they could all sort of go deep enough to understand the cosmic or mystical dimensions of their own tradition, they would find that there’s a perfect overlapping Venn diagram with all the other traditions once you get down there, you know?
Doug: Oh yeah, I mean absolutely. In fact, the more rooted you go, the deeper you go, it really is drawing from the same stream.
Rick: Yeah, sure.
Doug: You know, the river below all the rivers, it’s all drawing from the same stream, and what I argue a lot in my articles is that that stream is called the Law of One.
Rick: At least that’s one thing we could call it, that’s what the Law of One materials call it.
Doug: Well, I’m not saying it’s necessarily the Law of One material, you know, that’s its own material and it has its own distortions, but I’m just saying that unity insofar as that everything is connected, everything is in union with everything else, and there’s a way that God is experiencing God Self through manifestation, like that would be a perennial truth and that’s the Law of One.
Rick: Yeah, that’s good. Okay, we got off on this tangent because you were starting to talk about the higher self and you were saying something about how the higher self is the sixth chakra or something of the Logos. And I don’t completely understand that yet, so let’s finish off that thought before we keep going.
Doug: Okay, yeah, and I apologize for that.
Rick: That’s alright, I’m taking us off track too.
Doug: Okay. The way that the Law of One material understands the densities, and the densities would be another name for the chakras of God, and it’s not densities insofar as how dense material is. The Law of One talks about densities in terms of how dense love and light is, so how dense consciousness is.
Rick: So, for instance, my glasses here are a fairly dense form of consciousness. They have materiality and they have chemical components and so on and so forth, whereas a thought is a much less dense form. I mean, is that the kind of thing you’re saying here?
Doug: Well, other way around. The glasses would be not very dense form of consciousness. It’s very dense materially, but there’s not a lot of consciousness there.
Rick: No, but aren’t the glasses consciousness, having kind of crystallized into plastic and metal and so on?
Doug: Yes, well, okay, in that sense for sure. But it would be more like, to what degree do the glasses know that they’re glasses?
Rick: Right, pretty much not.
Doug: Yeah. To what degree? I mean, really, I think consciousness in the way we’re talking about density-wise is, to what degree do we know that we are one with everything, including God? And I don’t even know if I like to use the word “higher,” although I think it’s easier when we talk in language. I think “more expansive” would be the word that I’d like to use. But the more expansive we get in terms of consciousness, the more we understand our complete union with God, as God, actually.
Rick: Right. And we’re capable of becoming more expansive because we as a mind-body system or whatever are a much more refined instrument than these glasses, which don’t really stand a chance of knowing their oneness with God.
Doug: Yeah, so like the first density, for example, would be the elements. Rock and minerals, that kind of thing. And I mean, this is going to be nothing new from what we’ve all understood in terms of evolution. The second density would be the very beginning. It starts, let’s say, from the prokaryotic cells, all the way to evolved apes or dolphins or pets. Pets are highly advanced second-density creatures, as well as some trees and plants that start to take on a sentience of their own. And the Law of One states that when the second density starts to begin to awaken to a level of their own individuality, to some degree, and that can be invested by third-density beings. So, for example, if you have a dog or a cat, your relationship with that animal and their relationship with you is awakening in them a new sense of self. It’s activating higher elements inside them that when they die, their body dies, there’s a good chance that they’ll actually move into the third density in the next generation.
Rick: Yeah, I was just listening to that this morning. I’ve listened to pretty much the whole Book One of the Law of One. I don’t know how many books there are, but I can remember right where I was on the trail in the woods skiing when they made that point.
Doug: Yeah, and it’s really cool. I look in my cat’s eyes or my dog’s eyes and I just know, I just intuitively know that it is my privilege to be a part of their own evolution so they can move into third density somewhere else, some other planet. But just to finish the thought, and so that would be second density. And third density would be where you and I inhabit. Third density is our world here, and it is the density where creation becomes aware that it’s creation. You know, we become self-aware. And then fourth density would be the next one, and that’s the study of universal love and understanding. It’s the bandwidth of conscious of universal love and understanding.
Rick: Which humans are capable of, so you’re not necessarily talking about above the human level now, right?
Doug: We can absolutely be capable of that. I mean, gosh, there’s so much we can talk about. It’s really exciting. But yes, although the actual density itself will be in a way that, and who knows how long it’s going to be before the Earth shifts into the fourth density, and we are absolutely in the progress of doing that now, when that happens, there’s going to be some way in which human bodies are going to be slightly different in order to handle the kind of love and light that will be a good environment for us to learn love and understanding in a new way than we know now.
Rick: Okay, so even though there may be people on the Earth now who are very fourth density in their experience, you’re talking about a predominance of such people, which would then shift the whole planet to fourth density, is that right?
Doug: And that’s what we’re doing right now, that’s what’s going on right now. And let’s put a pin on that one, let me just finish off the sixth density and come back to that because that’s super important, at least from my perspective. So the fifth density is one in which, well let me just say this, the fourth density, the big thing in fourth density, is that just like your cells make up you and me, Rick makes up Rick and my cells make up Doug in the fourth density. Later on, all of our other humans come together and create a new what’s called social memory complex, and we’ll get to that in a minute, but that’s a new body. So it’s like everybody is online, connected, but it’s not going to be technologically based, it’s going to be a psychic heart connection, and that’s already starting to happen. But then in the fifth density, it’s a concentration of what is wisdom, and for me I think I understand that as how does karma play out in everything, like how does actually karma, the small nuances of karma. And then finally in sixth density, it is called the density of unity. So it’s love that was learned in fourth density with wisdom that’s learned in fifth density, and it is now a unified thing where all paradoxes are resolved, and from that point, incredibly advanced beings, and they’re outside of time. And so everybody, and this is what the law of one says, every single human being, you and me, we have a higher self that exists on the sixth density right now. And that sixth density is like two billion years more advanced than what you and I are, but since it’s outside of time, it’s connected with us, it is us, and we can appeal to its Wisdom, and we can call to it.
Rick: Okay, so it’s two billion years more advanced in the sense that it would take us two billion years to actually get to a level of evolution where that’s our primary orientation or dwelling place. But nonetheless, we’re already connected to it, kind of a portion of us is. So we have like a fingertip sticking into the sixth density, but the rest of us, most of us is down in the third density with some fourth maybe mixed in or whatever. That’s what you’re saying, we’re kind of multidimensional, and it’s a question of where the predominance of your existence resides.
Doug: Exactly, and we are here on third density for really good reasons. And so it’s not that third density is a lesser density. In fact, the first density is just as important, it’s just as sacred, full of the majesty of the One Infinite Creator as the highest density. So there is no condensation of ontological importance. All of the densities are God experiencing God’s self through that particular level of consciousness.
Rick: Right, just sort of vibrating at different frequencies or something like that.
Doug: Yeah, you could say that.
Rick: Yeah, that makes sense because if God is really all-pervading and omnipresent and all that stuff, then He pervades the rocks just as much as he pervades Jesus Christ’s body or some such thing. And actually, if you look closely at a rock and you see the marvelous intelligence orchestrating every little atom and molecule and crystal and everything within it, boom, there it is, staring you in the face.
Doug: Yep, and not only is that exactly true, but I also believe that the material itself is God.
Rick: Yes, what else could it be?
Doug: Exactly, and this is something for us Christians I want to invite us to consider that there has been a big push against what’s called “pantheism.” Pantheism is that everything is God, and in the Christian tradition, that is considered heresy because God needs to be separate from, it’s almost like God is considered to have a different substance, made from a different substance than creation. But that just doesn’t work anymore when you start to have non-dual consciousness.
Rick: Well, I just don’t want to go about that, because it was my understanding that the Christians say God is omnipresent, and so if they’re going to say that, how could they say in the next breath that he’s somehow separate from something?
Doug: I think that it’s a subtle, cognitive dissonance that is slowly getting resolved. You know, you’ll see some of these incredible teachers who will talk about how God is everywhere and God is manifesting as everything, and then the very next breath, they’ll talk about how “we’re not talking about pantheism here,” you know? And so, there’s still that guilt or shame they might feel, but the way I understand it is that both pantheism, which is everything is God, and panentheism, which is everything is in God and God is in everything, are both true. It’s not either/or, it is both true, because how else could it be? So, God incarnates God’s self as physical things and God indwells in everything too.
Rick: Yeah, I mean, it’s basically the two are the same, it’s just that panentheism is a bit more of an elaboration of the concept.
Doug: Yeah, and panentheism has some really good connotations because you can start to say that through panentheism, through that understanding, one can enter into a relationship with the presence that is indwelling in everything. And I think for humans in third density, that is super important to relationality, the idea of being in relationship and living from a healthy relationship is super important to activate the heart chakra. And I think that having an ability to have a relationship with the Divine, not only can we say that we are Divine and that Divine transcends us, but that we can have a relationship with the Divine is an important thing for us third density humans.
Rick: Yeah, I think maybe the reason panentheism got a bad rap is that people would go to what do they call those guys? Missionaries would go to cultures like India and various places and they’d see people apparently worshipping stones or doing things or having many gods and stuff like that, and they kind of misunderstand the deeper significance of it.
Doug: Yeah, and I think back in those times, and of course you’ll still find that today, there was this understanding that maybe every tree or every rock was its own god in and of themselves.
Rick: Yeah, and that’s okay too, because it’s a logos.
Doug: And actually it’s true, it’s true, but it wouldn’t be considered the infinite creator god, like the macro god. It’s a part of the macro god.
Rick: Yeah, just like some great football player is a part of the team, it’s just he’s playing a particular role in the totality of God.
Doug: Well said, yeah. Especially in Texas, you said football, so I think a lot of people understand that.
Rick: Go Cowboys!
Doug: I haven’t watched a Cowboy game in 15 years, I’m not a very good Texan.
Rick: I guess another point there, you were mentioning the notion that God is within us and so on. I think that, well you can explain, why does that trip up Christians? Are they thinking we’re kind of glorifying the ego and claiming divine status or something which we don’t deserve?
Doug: No, Christians would believe that God is in us. That is, that notion from a Christian standpoint, from a conventional Christian standpoint, would say that it was through Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit afterwards that we could learn that God indwells in us. But that’s not how I understand it, and I don’t think that’s how a lot of Christian mystics understand it. That’s conventional Christianity. And I’m not saying it’s necessarily wrong, but what I would understand it as is that that has always been true. It’s not that the Jesus event created something new that didn’t exist before.
Rick: No, I mean throughout the whole universe, God dwells in all beings.
Doug: Exactly, from the very beginning.
Rick: But there seems to be this notion in Christianity that we have some kind of deep intrinsic evil, you know, that original sin and all that, and I’m not sure how that relates to the idea of God being within us.
Doug: Okay, there’s a really cool tangent we can move into, and maybe this is where we want to go. If you’re wanting to talk about original sin, I definitely have some thoughts on how to synthesize that with this non-dual aspect. So let me just briefly say it this way. This is all according to the Law of One material, but also other esoteric stuff that I’ve read in the past, so there’s some collaboration here. And originally, let’s say 14 billion years ago, now who knows how many universes there are? I mean, Ra talks about how it’s an infinite creation, so there’s never been not creation.
Rick: Yeah, and good old Western physicists speculate the same thing. Cosmologists, yeah.
Doug: Yeah, yeah, I mean people are starting to talk about the multiverse as being how it is, which is beautiful. But let’s say at the beginning of this universe, there would be a way in which all of the previous lessons, like the Infinite Creator, all of the previous lessons of all the other universes and experience, packages all that together and creates a template, and then imbues that into this new creation, our universe. And so the universe starts to unfold, first density, second density, third density. But what the Law of One says, and this is really interesting, is that at the beginning of third density, and Ra would situate this at the stars close to the center of the Milky Way galaxy, so when those stars, planets around them started to form third density, there was not what’s called the veil of forgetting in place. In other words, the third density humans that emerged from that through evolution would have always understood that they were completely one with each other, completely one with God, and it would be as if the baby was never separated from the umbilical cord. There was never a separation, so therefore there was never a catalyst or experience that was very intense. There was never a fear that was an intense, there was never a joy that was an intense love, anything, because you already were given everything. And the Law of One material talks about how the third density experience then was so slow it would be the equivalent of a turtle racing a cheetah. And so that was how …
Rick: Because there weren’t any challenges, because we were so connected with God, is that it?
Doug: Yeah, but what would be the catalyst to grow to fourth density? Because the natural desire of the Creator, no matter what level, is to seek and become one, to go through this evolution slowly, and in third density it would be kind of already bliss. There’s no catalyst to kind of have faith.
Rick: Yeah, I’ve heard from a couple of sources that the angels or those who live in celestial realms don’t have a lot of impetus to evolve because, you know, things are nice.
Doug: There wouldn’t be, yeah. So what the Logoi kind of decided as one voice, the univocity of the Logoi, kind of decided that, you know, we love the idea we have always given free will to everything, but we realize like we’re awakening, because God is evolving through us. God is always in evolution. So God is starting to say, the Logoi are starting to say, “What if we were to create a veil between the conscious level and the unconscious level of third density beings, so that an unconscious would be connected to all there is?” You know, there would be a way in which through the unconscious you could understand everything, and that would be the umbilical cord. So they created this veil of forgetting that happened, and that would be what Rod talks about, the equivalent of going where you could see a multi-faceted diamond, completely beautiful, you know, before the veil, you understood everything, and then it would be the equivalent of lights out, you’re in a cave, and what do you do? Maybe the only thing you have is a lighter in front of you, a candle to kind of lead you. And some really, really interesting things happen. As you can imagine, with the veil in place, something new happened that wasn’t available in third density prior to the veil. And that new thing was what you and I call “faith.” Faith would be, and how I define it is, “hope plus trust,” you know? And Rod talks about faith as being the faculty of the heart and throat chakra, so we have love and understanding, wisdom, and the sixth chakra of unity, of being able to connect with this idea that “I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m trusting,” and through that trust we get to slowly pierce the veil. But all of these catalysts started happening, the catalysts were very, very intense with the veil in place, and then you could progress through third density a lot faster.
Rick: I have three questions at this point, and let me know if I’m taking you off track, you know, because you might have a few points lined up in your head that you intend to express, and I don’t want to sidetrack you. But based upon what you just said, I have three questions. Two of them are small, and the other one we might want to get into. But the small ones are, you were talking about the center of the galaxy and the beings who lived there, and there was no veil, and they were in touch with God. Were you implying that towards the center of galaxies it’s a higher realm, a more evolved place? That’s question number one.
Doug: Well, when we’re talking about linear time, yeah. So it kind of started out that way. They would have gone through third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh densities, because there’s an evolution outward too.
Rick: So where we are, about three-quarters of the way out in the Milky Way galaxy, is this sort of like the armpit of the galaxy and not such a …
Doug: Different part of the body, that’s actually … No, interestingly, what the Law of One material says is that our particular area, how far we are out from the center, we have received, the Logoi have received all of the instructions on how to create from previous experiences. So we are actually, the Earth and whatever band is around in our area through the galaxy, we are experiencing a really, really advanced way to live through third density.
Rick: So just to follow up on that, so can we imagine concentric rings and we’re in a particular ring at this distance from the center of the galaxy and pretty much everyone in this whole ring is kind of on the same level of development or something?
Doug: That is not said anywhere in the Law of One, but that’s sort of how I understand it.
Rick: Okay, yeah, and a lot of these questions, it’s like, “Who knows?”
Doug: “Who knows?” And it’s really not all that important.
Rick: Yeah, okay, so then the second thing is, you said, “Okay, these humans who live near the center of the galaxy, they didn’t have a veil,” and I thought, “Humans? Why do they have to be humans? Aren’t there a gazillion different races and most of them non-human? Or is the human form, according to Ra, kind of ubiquitous?”
Doug: Yeah, that’s a great question, I should have qualified that. Again, the way I understand “human” is not necessarily the way you and I look. It’s just beings who are self-aware.
Rick: So they could look like anything. They could look like Obi-Wan, like C3, not C3PO, who’s the big furry one? Yeah, Chewbacca, they could look like him, but the same principle applies.
Doug: Yeah, in fact, the Law of One material says that, that question was brought up, and I think the questioner, Don, said, “So, in our galaxy, if you were to add up all of the percentage that would be able to pass on Earth as Earthlings, and nobody would shake their head at, like, ‘What is that? Who is that?’ Only something like, I don’t know, 5% would look like humans?”
Rick: Yeah, I would think.
Doug: The rest? And they say that the way that we look is not important at all, it’s more of just, do we have a physical vessel to house the kind of consciousness work we’re doing?
Rick: Right, okay. So then the bigger question I was getting to, you mentioned that God is evolving through us, and I have this sort of on-again, off-again debate with Tim Freak, who’s a British philosopher and friend of mine, and he’s kind of shifted from having written a bunch of books about how consciousness is fundamental and everything arises from consciousness, to kind of believing that he had put the cart before the horse, and that consciousness and God and everything else somehow evolves as the universe evolves. And my main point back to him is, well, God can’t pull himself up by his own bootstraps. All the intelligence necessary to create the universe must be there at the outset in order for laws of nature to begin to form and everything, but I will grant you, and so that must be in some kind of unmanifest repository of intelligence, but I will grant you that the manifest value of God evolves and we’re seeing it happen in the form of the universe evolving and all the beings in it.
Doug: Well, I’ve listened to a little bit of him talking, and his accent is so great that I could just listen to him reading a phone book and I’d be happy. He’s way smarter than I am, but I’ll give you my way I understand it. The way I sometimes explain it to people is if we can imagine infinity as white light, complete and total white light, which would contain all of the different colors, but white light is not, white light doesn’t experience itself because there’s no hue, it contains all potentiality. Of course, it’s infinite, there’s infinite omnipotence, infinite knowing, but to have some sort of way to understand itself, there had to be a, what I call a subtle subject-object, all contained within unity, all contained, but there had to be a subtle I-Thou, and even if the Thou understood itself as complete in union with the “I,” there needed to be some hue to have experience. And so you can imagine we’ve got this white light, and then the white light at some point says “Let’s come up with this crazy, novel, totally crazy novel idea that from the backdrop of infinity is really new, and that idea is limitation. That idea is finity or finitude.” And so the way I try to imagine it is that idea, let’s say, becomes a prism, and so now the white light shines itself through the prism, and what you have is seven densities. You’ve got the rainbow, you know? And each density is light, it’s completely ontologically one with the white light, but now we have differentiation, and in each frequency of the light would contain different ways to understand, different forms of consciousness, different wavelengths of consciousness. So that red, the very first density, would understand itself very basically, and then it kind of moves up. So yeah, through that, oh, and then I should say that all of these hues then get to relate and connect with each other and form new combinations and all of this stuff. So there’s an evolution, and it’s through evolution that God gets to experience what infinity is, infinitely. But everything that is manifested was already in potentiation from the very beginning.
Rick: And I think it’s maybe good to throw in there that in going through this whole process, God doesn’t create anything other than himself. It’s more like within the totality of God, apparent forms and diversity arise in order for this play, this evolutionary process to take place. But it’s really the knower, the known, and the process of knowing are all God in different roles.
Doug: And what you just said, I mean, isn’t that part of the perennial tradition that most religions at their mystical levels would understand?
Rick: I guess, I don’t know.
Doug: I mean, I think so.
Rick: Yeah, maybe so.
Doug: I mean, I think that at the basic levels, yeah.
Rick: Okay, good. So I have some notes here that I could start taking us off in different directions, but is there anything on the tip of your tongue that you want to say before we do that?
Doug: Well, I think there was two loose ends that I didn’t totally tie up, so let me just do that really quickly if I could. We had originally talked about original sin, and when humans here on Earth, you know, with the veil of forgetting in place, and what I mean by veil of forgetting, it is the veil of forgetting that we are all one, and we are all in union already with everything, including God. That’s the veil. So, with the veil of forgetting in place, there is this deep restlessness, angst, fear, all of these things that humans subconsciously feel and intuit, and it is this, it’s almost like we were exiled. There’s a feeling of being exiled. So that’s where you get the archetype of the Garden of Eden and being kicked out, and people are wondering, “Why were we exiled?” There’s a deep knowing that we should be connected with God, but what did we do? From my perspective, from the Law of One, is that there was nothing done, it was simply a way for God to experience God’s self by putting down the veil of forgetting. But from our side, from this side of the veil, it does feel like an exile. And so Christians intuited that as original sin, that we must have done something. But really, it is, the veil is actually, in my opinion, the veil is a blessing, it’s a grace, it’s a beautiful thing, because it is a way that we can all learn very quickly about oneness and God and love through learning how to process our catalysts really well.
Rick: Okay, good. And was there another loose end?
Doug: The other loose end was moving into the fourth density. And so I think that, you know, like your own show here and people throughout the world, you will hear spiritual teachers talking about this mass awakening, you know, everybody awakening, and people are talking, I mean, even psychologists that are just conventional are talking about awakening.
Rick: Even QAnon’s talking about it.
Doug: Yeah! So everybody’s talking about this awakening, and from a Law of One perspective, this is absolutely happening, and we are being inundated with the fourth density energy, the fourth density love and light that’s coming in. Earth has somehow moved into a metaphysical realm where we are in fourth density proper, but we are still third density conscious. And that incongruity of having a collective thought form, you know, collective mindset of being in third density while we’re in fourth density love and light is causing a lot of some of the chaos that we’re seeing, and the Law of One talks about that specifically.
Rick: Yeah, kind of like you put the Jiffy Pop in the microwave oven and it’s getting blasted but it hasn’t popped yet, but people are starting to pop and they’re feeling the pressure to pop.
Doug: They’re feeling the pressure, and a lot of people, this has been my personal experience with younger people too, but a lot of people have incarnated, have chosen to incarnate here early, let’s say early in their shift of third density to fourth density, to help be midwives. You know, like they’re here saying, let’s say prior to incarnating, like, “I’ll sign up, I’ll be a part of the team,” to help midwife the collective into fourth density.
Rick: Yeah. Let’s dwell on this for a little bit. So,
Doug: Sure.
Rick: …not shifted, but they’re being sort of irradiated with that energy of fourth density, to put it that way. And yet, there’s a tremendous inertia, you know, because you don’t just sort of, “Okay, fourth density, boom, I’m there.” You know, there’s a lot of, on an individual, economic, political, you know, so many different technological, so many different levels, there’s so much transformation that would have to take place in order to fully align with fourth density values, whatever they may be, and you can enumerate them. So how do you kind of see this playing out? I mean, and do you see the current situation with the pandemic and everything as somehow indicative of this process?
Doug: Okay, let’s see. This is all my opinion, and I’m just basing it on my own studies and thoughts on it. I think that it’s going to be a process, and it’s not going to be something overnight. It’s not going to be, I don’t believe that there’s going to be some sort of one great thing that happens.
Rick: Yeah, we’re all going to wake up one morning and, you know, blah.
Doug: Yeah. Yeah, in fact, one of the things that the Law of One talks about is a lot of people are being born with what’s called double-bodied material, like their actual bodies are able to handle third density and fourth density at the same time.
Rick: Like an AM/FM radio or something.
Doug: Yeah, and exactly, yeah. And so, eventually, as more and more people are being double-bodied, and people who are only third density bodied, you know, as we all die out and the double-bodied comes and they start having children, eventually there’ll be a sort of a natural progression into fourth density. But how that looks in terms of the pandemic and all of that stuff, again, my opinion, that I have found the pandemic as bad as it is, I mean, it’s, you know, I am not, I’m very privileged to have it not affect me so much financially, but I know a lot of people it has, but I see it from a global standpoint as a huge invitation to move into love and light more, to be able to have a pause in our life, to be able to look inside, to not have so much of a busy schedule, and to allow us to not numb out so much and start listening to our inner lives. So I think in some ways it’s one of those global catalysts that is an invitation. I don’t necessarily think it was given to us by God like, “Hey, this is a gift.” I think in some way our collective way we are as humans may have allowed this to come about.
Rick: Well, you know, these things happen every hundred years or whatever. I mean, I don’t know if we need to read karmic significance into it, although we may, but they do happen cyclically. And I realize that a lot of this is opinion, and a lot of what we’re saying here is just sort of interesting philosophical hypothesis, I would say. Neither of us, especially you as the interviewee, are not stating this as some kind of dogma that people have to accept or anything. But it’s interesting to play with these ideas, because I think, as you said earlier, I think a lot of people intuitively resonate with a lot of things we’re discussing. I myself sometimes wonder, “How do I know this?” or “Why do I believe this?” You know, “Why does this feel so resonant with me, so appropriate?” You know? There’s kind of a knowing on some level.
Doug: Yeah, and what’s really strange about that is, as a counselor, because that’s my primary job, I’m a clinical social worker, so you’d ask me for a little bit of my background, right after graduation from undergrad, when I majored in psychology and Spanish, I joined a lay missionary program and went to Nicaragua for two years with the Franciscans. And I was there, and that changed my life in so many different ways. And then I came back and worked at a nonprofit for a while, and then I saw that there was a dual master’s degree program at Boston College in Boston. So I enrolled there, and I got clinical social work master’s and a pastoral ministry master’s, and I got that in three years. And so from then on, I’ve been primarily a counselor, but I’m always informed by the spirituality because for me it’s two sides of the same coin. So where were we going with that?
Rick: Well, we’re talking about how we know things.
Doug: Oh, yeah, yeah. So as a counselor, what I have found for the past five years specifically, you know, there’s a saying that when a student is ready, the teacher appears, I also think it works the other way, too. When the guide is ready, the students appear. Not that I feel like I’m a great guide, but I’m maybe an older brother to some people metaphysically. And so what I have found in the past five years is that a lot of my clients will somehow be led to me, and it becomes really apparent to me within the first, I’m going to even say first few minutes of me connecting with them, that there’s some sort of soul contract prior to this incarnation that is being honored at this particular moment, and that my job is to simply help them blast through the gravity of whatever is holding them back from awakening to the level that they want to. Maybe that’s somehow connected to psychological issues, maybe it’s a belief system that is not resonant with them anymore, but they don’t have the words or concepts to make sense of how they’re actually feeling. So I’ve gotten at that a lot.
Rick: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So you got that double masters and so on, you got it. Now in your notes it says, well it says something about UFO. Did you have some kind of UFO experience when you were young? What was that?
Doug: When I was in first grade, it’s really strange, I was always into sci-fi, but when I was in first grade I had this really, really strong feeling that, and I think a lot of people have this, that I wasn’t necessarily, like out there was home somehow. It was just this really, really strong intuition, and I really couldn’t talk to anybody. I grew up in rural Texas. I really couldn’t talk to anybody about it. Although it’s still a joke today that my family used to tell me that I would go around saying, “I’m an alien, I’m an alien.” But what ended up happening is when I was in first grade, we were out visiting some family in Oklahoma, and I had this, in the evening, I had this really strong nudge that I’ve come to trust as intuition, and the nudge said go outside. And so I went outside and I immediately was drawn to what I saw in the sky, way above me, and it was a kind of blue orb about the size of a full moon, and I couldn’t tell how high it was or anything. But there was some sort of connection that I felt, a presence that I felt. And I really can’t tell you what it was, I can’t tell you who they were except that there was a familiarity there.
Rick: Okay, that’s interesting.
Doug: That was the only UFO experience I’ve ever had, no. And it also said in your notes something about alcohol recovery. Did you become an alcoholic at one point?
Doug: Yeah, and I have found this to a lot of spiritual people. We are so intuitive, we don’t know how to deal with a lot of the emotions that are going on collectively and inside us and so we’ll numb out, and alcoholism is in my family, and so I began to drink slowly, you know, in grad school, and then it got a little bit more later On, and once I got married, or I guess when we started having kids, I was a stay-at-home dad. So the monotony of changing diapers and just everything that’s there, stay-at-home parenting is very difficult. It’s a great gift but it’s also very hard. And so I would numb out to alcohol, and in alcohol recovery they call it, did you hit rock bottom or where was it that you turned around? So for me it wasn’t rock bottom, it was a high bottom, if you will. So I didn’t have to lose anything, thankfully. But I did end up one night really, really drunk, and I ended up sleeping in my son’s room on the floor just sort of feeling a lot of shame, and I made a decision there that I didn’t want any of my kids to really grow up. I mean, he was still 10 months old, to grow up with that as me. So that was the last time I had any drink. But it’s a great gift, being in recovery is a great gift because it allowed me to see all the other areas that I have chosen to numb out on instead of meeting life straight on.
Rick: Did you join AA or did you do it on your own?
Doug: I did for six months, and it was very helpful for me to learn how to live soberly. But I’d also had a lot of training. I was just in a place where I could take what I had learned and then re-connect in all these other different areas of my life. So I feel completely supported, and I know AA is there if I ever want to come back, but I’m grateful for it.
Rick: Cool. I’m just going through some of these notes because we’re filling in some personal details about you, but I’m sure we’ll spin off into these philosophical things again in a minute. You mentioned mystical experiences in 2013.
Doug: Yeah, that’s where I sort of pinpoint the chapter that I’m on now, or maybe the book that I’m on now. Prior to 2013, I had really explored a lot of conceptually-wise non-dual Christianity, mainly through Richard Rohr, Richard Rohr’s work and all of that, and I was really happy about it. But I felt like there was something I wasn’t seeing that I wanted to know more. There was this deep desire to explore more what spirituality was. And that particular night, I had seen 10 clients, it was a Sunday, I’d seen 10 counseling clients, and I was doing my notes on the computer, and I heard again that nudge, and the nudge said, “Listen to a chant.” And I had never listened to anything but a Gregorian chant, which is monks singing, Catholic monks singing. But that’s not what the nudge invited me to do. It was a Buddhist chant. So I typed in “Buddhist chant” in YouTube and just clicked on the first video that came up, and what came up for me was a video of “Om Mani Padme Hum.” I’m not sure if I’m pronouncing that correctly, but “Om Mani Padme Hum.” And as the chant unfolded, something new I experienced, and it was as if a golden dew of energy just sort of descended around me. I didn’t see it with these eyes, but I absolutely saw it with my heart eyes. And it was very real, and as it’s descending, I felt invited into a more expansive bandwidth of consciousness, if you will. And from that point, I was intrigued by larger metaphysics, like New Age stuff, Buddhist stuff, Hindu stuff, all this other stuff that I had never been curious before. And so I sought out a spiritual director to kind of help me understand all of this stuff, who was very open-minded. And, he was intrigued by what I was saying, and he met me well. And then one night, he just simply sent me an email and it said, it gave me a link to where the Law of One material is, and said, “This is something that has been interesting for my wife and I.” That’s all he said. And when I clicked on that link, when I started to read the Law of One, it was a powerful experience for me because it was as if I was remembering things that I had sort of known in the past, putting it into words, instead of actually hearing the words, because I listened to it through YouTube. I was almost seeing images in sort of the geometry or the energy behind the concepts that the words were giving. So it was a bit of an engrossing experience, and that’s launched me into where I’m at now.
Rick: What are the Daskalos materials?
Doug: Right at the same time that I discovered or was led to the Law of One materials, I was led to Daskalos, who was a Cypriot mystical Christian. He died in 1996. But he was able to remember all of his past lives. He taught for many, many years on this expansive understanding of Christianity, and he’s got books out there that are a little hard to find, but his metaphysics, though in very different words, for me was totally congruent with the Law of One. And so I had both these different metaphysics that were congruent with each other right at a time when I was exploring things like the astral realms and interested in reincarnation and all of that stuff. So it was a cool synchronicity.
Rick: A couple of questions came in. So here’s one from Dan in London. He says, “We were talking about double bodies before. Can someone that is not double-bodied and is third density only, can they still evolve to fourth density or will they find it much harder?”
Doug: Well, everybody’s going to fourth density no matter what. I mean, that’s just the nature of evolution. So a lot of people who are third density bodied here, when we die, if we are able, there’s some sort of metaphysical measuring stick. I mean, that’s a clumsy way of saying it, but if we are able to handle the density of love and light that would be compatible with fourth density living, then we would, next time we would incarnate, would be in a fourth density environment, whether it’s here on Earth or some other place that could host fourth density life. But if someone is not able to handle that fourth density light, that’s perfectly okay because it’s not that God or anybody else is saying, “You don’t pass. You have to go over there.” It’s simply us evaluating ourselves along with our guides and so on, and so we would then go elsewhere that would have a third density environment to continue our learning the lessons of third density.
Rick: I can understand how a third density person wouldn’t do so well in a fourth density world, but it seems like the other way around would work better, that if you’re at a higher Density, fourth or fifth or whatever, you could function in lower densities, kind of like a 10-story building, let’s say, or a 7-story building or whatever. The view on lower floors is contained within the view from higher floors, but not the other way around.
Doug: Yes and no, because there is this phenomena called “wanderers,” and that’s in the Law of One material. And wanderers are fourth, fifth, or sixth density beings who, through service, through a desire to serve third density humanity, choose to incarnate as third density humans. But as all third density humans experience, they also go under the veil of forgetting, so they forget everything. There is no ready access to anything learned in the higher densities, let’s say.
Rick: So Jesus or Buddha or Ramana or all of them could have been fourth or fifth density beings, but they had to sort of, because they incarnated on a third density planet, they had to forget and then rediscover.
Doug: Have to forget, have to forget, because otherwise it wouldn’t be a bridge of free will for other people around them, because they would then sort of be worshipped as gods and so on and so forth. Plus, it is not in the nature of a positive being to incarnate in third density as a god. They’re doing it in terms of wanting to serve humanity, and then the big lesson there is can you blast through the veil enough to start the mission? And it’s a risk, it’s a gamble because a lot of wanderers never fully awaken, yeah, into the sense that they’re from elsewhere. But I want to make an important point here because this is really vogue right now in the New Age community, like I’m a star seed, I’m a wanderer, you know, and this can become such a trap, such an ego trap for people who are, this is my opinion, I’ve seen this, for people who want to claim that they are a higher density being incarnated here in third density. The wanderers that I have met that I believe would be, are people who would not really care if they’re wanderers or not. All they want to know, all they want to do, is serve. And this kind of thing is not all that interesting. Yeah, they might be able to be able to say, yeah, I feel like I am, but for them it’s not at all a title to hold on to. It’s like a bodhisattva wouldn’t say, I’m a bodhisattva.
Rick: Get a t-shirt with a big B on it, or a W as the case may be.
Doug: Yeah, and what’s interesting about wanderers and anybody who can penetrate the veil, so even Law of One group that brought in the Law of One, they call themselves the L and L Research, the way they define wanderers is not necessarily people coming from higher densities to incarnate here in third density, but even third density beings who have progressed on their spiritual evolution, let’s say, more expansive enough to feel like they don’t fit in, that the chaos that’s going on doesn’t make sense, that they’re not interested anymore. Maybe they were, but they’re not interested anymore of, let’s say, third density things that most of us are interested in. And what they feel really, really called to is just this extreme desire to delve into spirituality. And so that’s something we can awaken to, so it’s not an elite thing we’re trying to talk about here. It is one of service.
Rick: Yeah, yeah, got it. A question related to this came in from Wesley from Salem. I don’t know, Wesley asks the question every week, I don’t know if it’s Salem, Massachusetts or Salem, Oregon or Salem, England, but anyway, it doesn’t matter. His question is, “Ra states Jesus was late fourth density when on earth and is now in fifth density relative to our time-space location. Ra also mentions that some of the wanderers now on earth are fifth or sixth density. So do these beings now incarnate have greater realization than Jesus? If so, it seems they would have great siddhis. Also if Jesus is in fifth density, what explains his presence in so many people’s lives?”
Doug: Yeah, okay, big one. This one was hard for me when I first read that in the Law of One material, to start to see Jesus in a different way than conventional Christianity might see him. And the Law of One material says that Jesus was a fourth density wanderer. Really he had graduated from fourth density and was moving to fifth density, but sort of was invited to do a particular mission, and he came in as a wanderer. And the Law of One says that he remembered more than most wanderers did, so that he was able to awaken to some very powerful gnosis, and gnosis would be lived experiential knowledge early on. And his was in line with his own mission that he was specifically, I don’t think that for me, I don’t think Jesus was uniquely the Son of God, but I think he had a unique incarnation for a specific purpose on earth that was unique. Now that’s my opinion too. The Law of One says that most of the wanderers, at least when they were channeling in the metaphysically, but the sixth density wanderers don’t remember much, they don’t penetrate the veil, their vocation is different. And the primary vocation for a wanderer, Ross says, the very primary one is simply to be embodied here. What you do with that, what your vocation is, the actual occupation you have is very secondary. The primary thing is simply to be embodied so that there can be almost conduits of the love and light of fourth density that we’re moving into to kind of come through the physical embodiment and then up and out into our third density.
Rick: Right, so you could be running a shoe store or something, but just the very fact of your being on earth embodied, you’re like a conduit, like you said.
Doug: Yeah. And the other thing about siddhis, which is really fascinating, this is going to, I’m hoping I’m going to speak to a lot of people when I say what I’m about to say, because I really feel strongly about this, but it also might be something other people disagree with and that’s totally fine. For me, the wanderer or anybody, not just a wanderer, but anybody who’s on the spiritual path, I think the greatest thing we can do is not so much focus in on the subtle realms, although if that’s your gift, awesome, or they are traveling in the astral realms, but if that’s your gift, that’s great. I think that one of the greatest gifts we can do is actually to fully awaken as much as we can to the idea that everything that you see in this what we call so-called mundane normal world you and I are in is actually the full plenum of the Infinite Creator right here expressed fully to us right now. That there’s, in other words, and I have done experiments and explorations of the higher realms, out-of-body experiences and things like that, but I can tell you from my experience, there’s nothing “up there” that’s not fully present right here. And there’s something absolutely gorgeous and beautiful about being in third density where we can enjoy what looks like mundane as being God in disguise and engaging in that way.
Rick: Yeah, that’s great, very well put. Okay, so I made the type larger on your notes that you sent me and printed it out double-sided, and I haven’t even quite gotten past the … I’m about three-quarters of the way down the first page and yet we’re three-quarters of the way through the interview. So let me read some of these things and tell me if you want to go into them in more detail or whether you feel you’ve already covered them, or you want to just skim through them so we can get through more points. But there was a section called “Five Foundational Pillars.”
Doug: Yeah, okay.
Rick: Triune nature creator, cruciform shape, all that stuff. Do you want to get into that or is that not …
Doug: Yeah, I do because I think it’s super important. I’m pulling up the same thing here. I got it myself. So what I would like to say is this is for me how to fully live out this third density experience. So whether someone is a wanderer or not, it doesn’t matter, but for me a fully, really, somebody who’s really open to spirituality and awakening is someone who is going to start to, like I said earlier, use their experience here and now as their ministry. And so you have to have something to stand upon first, some sort of what is the nature of reality. And for me, what is important is that the Creator is triune. So this would be one of the five foundational pillars. And what I mean by triune, we talked about it earlier, but it’s this sense of a transcendent quality of the Infinite Creator that there’s always going to be some level … You talked about the Russian nesting dolls. There’s always going to be some level of the next level up that you always are chasing. Then there’s going to be this incarnational aspect of the Infinite Creator that the Creator manifests and incarnates as things. And then lastly, there is this indwelling presence that the Creator indwells in all things. And just as a side note, I have started to, in my own prayer, I’ve started to use this in a bodily way. So I’ll just do it really quickly because it makes sense to me and if other people are interested in it. So I take my palm of my hand and I’ll put this on the sixth chakra in between my eyes, and then I’ll put the fingertips on the seventh chakra, which is the crown. And I’m going to say, “In union with the Creator’s transcendence,” and then I bring my hand all the way down to my second chakra, so just right below my belly button. And then I say, “In union with the Creator’s incarnation,” and then I cross my hands and I put, “In union with the Creator’s indwelling presence.” So it’s sort of an honoring from a bodily way, the triune nature of the Creator. And then the next pillar is that the shape of reality, the way the reality actually works, is what’s called cruciform. And what I mean by cruciform, you could almost be symbolized by the ink, you know, the Egyptian ankh or ankh.
Rick: That’s like the cross with a little circle on it?
Doug: Yeah, yeah. So the cross, the circle itself could be sort of seen as infinity itself, and then the line down could be seen as infinity manifesting, and then the cross part of it could be seen as the level of consciousness that it is. So it kind of comes up and up and up and up, right to the very level of infinity. But the way that the Infinite Creator, the way the manifesting of the infinite Creator unfolds throughout time is always going to be in the pattern of dying and rising, death, rebirth, of losing to find. So it’s this pattern of surrender and then transformation. And that is true from the atomic level, it’s true at the galactic level, but it’s also true in our interpersonal experience as third-density people, that we are always in some ways invited to surrender our experience in order to go into the next level. So for example, if I’m having a problem with alcohol, then I surrender to the fact that I have a problem with alcohol. That surrendering, that losing, that dying to myself allows me then to be reborn, rebirthed into another level of being that would be sober living. And so that’s sort of how it plays out. So everything that you see in every aspect of the manifested universe follows the same pattern of dying and rising, dying, and rising. And the emblem, that sort of symbol of that would be the cross or the ankh.
Rick: Interesting. Okay, serving the Creator by being myself?
Doug: Yeah, serving the Creator by being myself, and then the next two below that, liminal space is home base, as well as lastly becoming holy feelers. I think that those are all sort of the same thing. So let me just say it this way, and this is an invitation to all of us here, all of us listeners participating in this. To be fully yourself right now is to give the Infinite Creator glory. It’s to serve the Infinite Creator because it’s through our lives the Infinite Creator learns about itself. You know, God is experiencing God’s self as Rick and as Doug. And I think as we mature spiritually and psychologically, what we learn is the liminal space that is in between the old room of what the status quo was and the new room that has not yet emerged in our life. This space in between, which is always uncomfortable, that’s the place of the dark night of the soul, that’s the place of growth. That actually can become, when you leave the old room, whatever way you were acting or I was acting or my way of thinking, and when we travel through whatever liminal space that was and we get to a new room, a new way of understanding life, a new way of understanding myself, a new way to live, then that becomes the old room in the future and will eventually transcend that and go through liminal space and then get into another new room. And that liminal space is, we end up realizing that that is actually home base, that’s the place of constant becoming as joyful and as awesome and even ecstatic as that can be, simultaneously you experience anxiety and confusion and fear and they don’t cancel each other out, that they’re held together in a graceful way to say that this full way to hold these paradoxes is liminal space and it has its own glory. And I think if we can hold those things together graciously, then that actually can lead us into a balanced, humble place emotionally and spiritually that is really, really advanced and mature. And the last thing I just want to say on that, and this is an invitation for all of us, is I don’t think that we necessarily need to be looking, of course if you feel called, go for it, but need to be doing lots and lots of different techniques or learning how to do the siddhis, if you will, because that can be a super duper distraction in my opinion. I had been distracted on that before because you start to want to have that all the time, and you start to feel like if I’m not experiencing those things, then I become bored with this third density life and some discrepancies can happen. But the way I have, I think a type of service that we can do that I don’t hear a lot of people talking about, and maybe I’m wrong on this, but I think it’s a good vocation, is learning how to embody, remember those paradoxes we talked about, the pain and suffering that we might be going through right now. Almost everybody that’s out there right now listening to us is going to be going through something that they’re experiencing discomfort, and maybe it’s a lot. And I think that if we can hold that and even offer that as a sacrifice or even offer that as in union with all other people that are going through the same thing right now, that that offering, that offering of love, that radical statement of solidarity means something metaphysically, that love counts, that solidarity heals. And I think that if we can feel, truly feel our feelings, feel, not run away from them, but go through the pain and feel them out, then we are offering some sort of metaphysical enlightening in the collective that will allow somebody else, either in the future or somebody maybe in a different part of the world, some enlivening too, that they may not even know why they had some sort of breakthrough, but it was caused by somebody else, somewhere else, some other cell in the larger body, processing their own pain and offering it up as a sacrifice, as a statement of solidarity, and that in doing so can help cleanse or let’s say grease the wheels, metaphysical wheels, that connect us all and help us to process the catalyst that we’re all going through. So I think it’s a real service to hold liminal space as sacred.
Rick: Yeah, so in other words, we become like a little washing machine where we process, we could say, stuff that’s out there in the collective consciousness that’s influencing everybody or that’s influencing a number of people, and we can dissolve it and thereby lift the burden for many people or for everyone.
Doug: I think that is probably, right what you just said, I think that is the greatest service that we can do, is not live a crazy, extraordinary life, or not look for that, but actually in the ordinary to offer our own ability to process our emotions and then process the collective’s emotions through our ability to process them well does indeed filter and recycle this energy back into the collective and the whole collective is then enlightened. It’s a beautiful vocation.
Rick: And groups can do it too. I mean, I participated back in the 70s in a lot of large groups that were attempting to do just that, sort of neutralize the stress or whatever you want to call it in collective consciousness.
Doug: And that absolutely makes a big difference. I’m also inviting us to see that when we ourselves are in a crux where we cannot solve the paradox inside us that we feel, and there’s lots of paradoxes if we’re looking for them, that to hold that paradox, not something that we have to solve, but simply hold it with a grace, and then offer our own perplexed state, one in solidarity with the rest of people who are going through it, that that in and of itself is a service through solidarity. And I think that that can help too.
Rick: So the next section in your notes is on the Law of One, but we’ve already talked about that a lot, and then we possibly wanted to get into spiral dynamics. So what more is there to say about the Law of One in an introductory sort of sense here for those who are not familiar with it that you want to be sure to cover?
Doug: There’s so much there that I don’t know if I want to just jump into it and open up another can. I think the bottom line for the Law of One is to know that everything is one, and we are indeed invited to live out as the Infinite Creator here in our human bodies, and to live in a way to create a reality that is already metaphysically true. You see, in our reality, in the third density, everything feels and looks separate, and that illusion as we talked about in terms of the veil of forgetting is purposeful, but it is an illusion, and if we can live in a way that helps make manifest what is already true, that we are one, that’s good third density living, and that leads to fourth density. That’s also fourth density living, you know, it’s at the same time. And for me, I think things like social justice, I think things like learning about the inequities of privilege that, let’s say, me as a white male have, and so on and so forth, I think all those things are important that’s coming to the consciousness now for us to look at, not just in an individual way, but on a political way, how can we help see how our own way of living has been oppressing our other selves, our other cells in the body, and it is a global awakening that affects all of the different areas of our life, including religion and politics.
Rick: So you’re kind of saying here that social and economic inequities need to be ironed out, need to be balanced out, if we are to really shift into fourth density as a civilization. Is that kind of what you’re saying?
Doug: Absolutely.
Rick: And if we resist balancing them out, then it probably creates some kind of tension or pressure because, like you said, we’re already in fourth density or very quickly shifting into it, and those who drag their heels create a tension.
Doug: I mean, that’s exactly right. That’s how I see it. And so, people who are really looking at change from a political policy level and social justice, I think that they might be people who have incarnated to do just that, to help loosen the grip of third density ethos of consciousness that has created hierarchies, you know, and are loosening that grip. And this goes all the spectrums. Marginalized groups are now awakening to their own dignity and saying, “We’re not different than you powerful people,” and so now there’s a loosening there, there’s an awareness there, and as that continues to grow, that would be morphing into that fourth density living.
Rick: Okay, good. So if people want to find out more about the loved one, what are some good sources for that? I know Aaron Abke, whom I’ve interviewed, covers it nicely and has a bunch of videos on it, but what are some other sources?
Doug: Well, I think that the first thing is you should go to the material itself, and that’s easily found on www.lawofone.info, and so you can find that there.
Rick: I’ll link to it in the show notes also.
Doug: Yeah, and there’s books. They have books, the Law of One books, too, and you can order them. And that’s one thing I trust. I really love this about the Law in One, the L& L research group, is that everything they publish, they always offer it for free online, but if you want a copy of it, you can pay for that. So that’s a neat service. So that would be, I think you should probably dive into that. And I’m going to include myself in this. Every teacher that I’ve ever seen talk about the Law of One brings their own lenses and distortions. And so some of the people that I see teaching the Law of One are talking about it, you know, I hear them and I think, “Oh my gosh, that’s skim, that’s not getting to the depth that could be explored here.” So at this point, anybody who’s interested in different teachers, try them out, and if it feeds you, great. If you want more, ask the universe and it will be given.
Rick: Okay, good. So section three of your notes, well, I don’t know. You’ve got the notes in front of you too, I just want to make sure we cover all the points you wanted to cover. Anything else in section two that we haven’t covered that you want to hit on?
Doug: Maybe, no, probably not. But people who are interested, they can go and just explore my site, cosmicprice.net.
Rick: Oh yeah, you have tons of stuff there. Yeah, I just want to make sure we pack as much as we can into this interview. All right, so then you have a whole section here, and we’re going to mention spiral dynamics, I want to save some time for that, about tools for living third density well. And so let’s skim through some of those and devote as much time as possible to spiral dynamics.
Doug: Yeah, sure. Well, why don’t we just jump into that, because the other stuff that I have there is just different topics we can move into.
Rick: Sure. So you sent me some notes and there was a graphic about spiral dynamics, which I’m showing on the screen right now, you can’t see it but it’s up here, and it’s very complicated, like snakes going back and forth, and arrows and colors and all that stuff. And I’ve interviewed some other people who have talked about this, like Ken Wilber and Terry Patton, I think. But it’s a really interesting way of looking at things, and it’s not necessarily the only way obviously, but it helps understand a lot of stuff, including politics and the various fragmentations that society seems to be splintered into these days. So let’s talk about that.
Doug: Let me give a really quick overview with the caveat of I am not a spiral dynamics expert. I’m not an amateur student, but I do find its value and wisdom incredible, and I teach it to my clients that are interested, and they love it too. So spiral dynamics is a model that began to form back in the 60s with a psychologist named Clare Graves, and he started to interview I think it was like 4 or 5 thousand people at that time, now it’s hundreds of thousands of people. And basically what he started to see was that there were different levels of consciousness that people were viewing the whole world, their whole reality, their whole paradigm could be defined within a certain value system, levels, rungs on a ladder if you will. But the thing is that nobody knew that they’re in their own paradigm, because mostly we’re associating with other people in the same level. And what’s remarkable is that there’s certain characteristics about the different value systems that can be in conflict with each other. And so one of the things is that a lot of the wars that have been started throughout history, maybe 90% of the different conflicts that we’ve had, both micro conflicts as well as macro, can be sort of plotted and understood through a spiral dynamics lens. So basically one of the things you can understand it is there are different levels and it begins with the most basic, which is beige, and the colors weren’t chosen to go with the chakra system. They were chosen simply, randomly, but they do have a warm and cold, sort of warm and cold thing. So beige would be the simplistic bandwidth of conscious, of basically surviving. So it’s seen in babies and maybe people with high degrees of mental illness, or early, early hunter-gatherer societies, first when humans were kind of coming online there. And then that eventually moves into tribes of very small people, but the tribes begin to have, it’s not individual consciousness, but it’s kind of a group consciousness at an early, early level. Not too different, let’s say, from a pack of animals. And you have shamans that kind of arise in the purple realms, leaders, different roles. And then at some point though, the next level up from that would be the red level, and that is the power balance.
Rick: Boy, you jumped way the heck up. I mean there’s turquoise, yellow, green, orange, blue, and then …
Doug: No, no, no. You’re looking at it from the other side. We’re going beige, it’s the earliest is beige, then purple.
Rick: Oh, I see, I see. I’m sorry, I was going from the bottom up. Got it, all right.
Doug: So you’re so non-dual, Rick, that you’re already starting from one place.
Rick: There we go. And also I’m looking at a fairly small version of it on my screen. So there’s beige, now okay, we’re trickling down. There’s purple, then boom, into red. Got it. Okay, proceed.
Doug: Yeah, and red would be the power at all costs. This would be the emergence of the ethos of dictators, of warlords, of … You’re going to find this in certain cultures, like Spiral Dynamics teachers would talk about prison cultures as being red. And it’s the mafia gangs where there’s a tight group, but it’s strict hierarchy and there’s going to be a king on top, always male usually, and it’s going to be where kill or be killed. And the king will always be deposed because there’s somebody below them always wanting to overtake them. But it’s violence and all of this stuff. And we are fascinated by this. The Narcos, the show on Netflix, Narcos and all of that would be very red. And we love it for entertainment. But the problem is that you can’t really form civilization from that kind of heavy handedness because eventually people are going to get tired of being killed. And so that moves into this new level called the blue level. And blue level is home to where most people, I would say the greatest gravity of people, are finding themselves in the blue ethos. And this is where it’s real important to understand what I think is going on religiously. And it’s been helpful for some of my clients to understand that maybe while their family understands life from a blue level, they might be moving into the orange or green, which are even higher, and so that there’s a real conflict. But blue would be
Rick: You know what I might do is I might put this, if you don’t mind, I could put this on your Backgap page when I put it up, so people who are listening to this could go to your page and look at this in some detail and read all the text and everything. I’m just flashing it on the screen now, but it’s hard to read.
Doug: Yeah, and there’s a lot of really good stuff online about it. But blue is important because this is where a lot of the religions emerged. You know, it started about 5,000 years ago, and this is the civilization, agriculture, you have specialties, and you have religions start to really emerge and take hold. Doctrine and dogma is very important. And God is understood as out there. We are here. God is always male, you know, in the blue conformist culture, and it’s a very safe place to be. Spiral Dynamics teachers call it the “happy blues” because when you’re in blue, man, it’s just so comfortable.
Rick: Because you’re right, and everybody around you in your little group is, they’re right. They’ve got the truth.
Doug: And God is on your side.
Rick:Yeah, God is rooting for your team.
Doug: That’s right. And blues will fight other blues, blue cultures, because my God is right, your God is wrong. And it’s absolute loyalty to not just the king or the leader, but it’s loyalty to the whole culture, the whole religio culture. So this is where nationalism is kind of coming from and all of this stuff. So a lot of religion, especially institutional religion, is going to be very blue. And that’s not a cut down, that just seems to be how it is. Blue has strong understanding of what would be heretical. And heretical would be to not question what the doctrine and dogma is because this is how it’s always been. This is how God gave it to us. So you cannot challenge this. And so oftentimes, blue will use shame and guilt as tools to demand conformity back into the group, you know, or shunning once it doesn’t, once you’ve said, “I’m done here,” then they’ll shun you. So we cut you out of the group. But again, inside the group, it is very comfortable. But what happens when you’ve got two groups together, two blues, and then this place in between the frontier, that can’t fight always. So you end up having a new culture that forms in the frontier. And the frontier cultures can be a little bit more advanced in a sense, because they’re a marriage of two different groups. And the frontier groups start to have a different value system. And that value system is, “Well, all right, you can believe what you believe, I believe what I believe. Maybe there’s something, maybe there’s not, but let’s do what works.” So this is the birth of the mindset of efficiency and science and enlightenment, not in terms of like Buddha enlightenment, but Enlightenment Age. Like Enlightenment, yeah. Yeah. Progress, capitalism, let’s create, grease the wheels of stuff, and let’s make life happy here. Blue is very, very comfortable about, you live your life sacrificially now, so that you can go to heaven and be with God then. Orange, which is the next level up, is sort of seeing, “Let’s enjoy life a little bit now. Let’s create some things here so that we can make it nice.” But you also have this preference for rationalization and experimentation. So it’s very needed. It’s a good thing. But it has its very big shadow sides. And I should say every level has its own shadow sides. And the shadow sides actually are what fight each other. So each group will only see the shadow of the other group, whether it’s the group below you or the group above you. And when you see the different levels, the ethos of the different levels, you either think if they’re above you, “Oh, you’re aloof, you’re wrong, you don’t know, you’re a heretic,” and so they attack you. Or if you’re below, “Oh, you’re a knuckle-dragger, you don’t know anything, you’re ignorant.” So they always attack the shadow sides of the different levels. But eventually, Orange starts to see that their exploitation of the planet or of other people is actually really problematic.
Rick: And in seeing that they shift into Green, right?
Doug: Yeah.
Rick: 01:51:50.640 –> 01:51:51.640 Green.
Doug: I would argue that this is when really the first, the heart chakra starts to really open up in more of an activated, stable state or stage, rather. And the Green starts to look at ecology as important. It’s a greater understanding of the social inequities that are out there. And it’s sort of the birth of social justice understanding and so on and so forth. So what you have right now, as far as I can see, in our political sphere, is you have a lot of people who are in Blue who hate Green because they see the shadow side of Green. And the shadow side of Green, though, is there is no truth. See Blue is there’s absolute truth and we know it because God has given it to us. Green, which has already gone through Orange and back into Green, Green says, you know, all of the belief systems can be challenged scientifically and maybe there is no such thing as absolute truth. And so from that perspective, you end up having a skeptical mind where you’re just skeptical about everything. So it’s kind of the liberal who is always against everything. Like, what are you for? They can’t really tell you what they’re for, they’re always against everything. “Oh, that wouldn’t work.”
Rick: You know what I find is a lot of times there’s scientific types who would consider themselves to be Green, there’s no absolute truth and this and that, and yet they become fundamentalists in their scientific understandings and refuse to even consider things that are outside of the box that they’re comfortable in. So I don’t know how you’d color them, but there’s a lot of that. There’s this sort of materialism and scientific dogmatism that in a way seems to retard the progress of science, although I realize that some of that is necessary for stability.
Doug: Yeah, and a lot of people would put that as an Orange thing, that the scientists that are dogmatic in that way would just be really Orange, right-center, middle and Orange thinking. And it doesn’t mean that if you’re an Orange you don’t believe in God or anything like that, but I’m saying that inability to respect or honor anything that’s transcendent to what you can physically measure, that’s Orange thinking. And then, but Green is starting to sense that there are larger realities and that there’s inequities and things like that. So I talked about the Happy Blues because it’s happy to be in blue, but Green, they’re actually called Mean Greens because there’s this sense of, it is a liberation because you are fighting for justice and all of that stuff. There’s a liberation, but on the other hand, it can be marked by a lot of against or conflictual energy, “What are you against? And let’s fight for this, and let’s fight for that.” And so they can be kind of mean in a way they approach the other systems, elite, if you will. And they’re criticized by everybody, let’s say, below them as being just that, elite liberals who don’t know crap, they’re hypocritical and so on and so forth. But here’s the thing, and this is the last piece I’m going to talk about on spiral dynamics because it’s super important. There is all of what I’ve just described is the first tier, the first tier that contains these different levels. There’s a second tier that is above that, and the gap in between the first tier and the second tier is so difficult to overcome that only about maybe 5%, 8 to 5% can get there. But that’s where we want to get to.
Rick: Is that where you get into yellow, turquoise, whatever?
Doug: Yeah.
Rick: Yeah.
Doug: So I’m just going to describe yellow importantly because what happens with green, the area where they start to transcend into yellow is when they begin to realize, “I am not necessarily agreeing anymore that there isn’t such a thing as truth. Everything is not relative. Maybe there is such a thing as a hierarchy of truth, but all truths can be true for that particular bandwidth of consciousness, but maybe they belong inside a nested Russian doll as we talked about earlier.” And also they start to reevaluate all of their belief systems that have gotten there. And it’s very difficult because it requires a lot of dark night of the soul, that liminal space that we talked about. But when somebody merges into yellow, they see the world again with new eyes. And this time, this is the really neat thing about yellow, and this is where I think we need to get everybody if we can, and shows like yourself actually doing this, is it’s helping people to realize that all of the levels below belong. That you can’t get to the hundredth floor without having the 99 below and a really stable, strong foundation. And yellow can hold paradox. It’s really the first level that can hold paradox together. And they don’t necessarily ask what is right and wrong in terms of the blue moralism. They’re asking about what works so that everybody can enjoy and realize this freedom. And they start to also organize companies, they organize universities, different things, so that there is an integral approach that combines all holistic aspects of things. Not just one thing, but it’s a holistic aspect. And it is fluid enough to say, well, maybe for person A, this needs to be emphasized, and this other aspect, this other part of the holistic aspect can be helped to support the main thing that needs to be emphasized. But in person B, maybe it’s the complete reverse. There’s not going to be one prescription that matches everybody. And yellow is really, really interested in helping people meet them where they’re at. So they’re going to meet somebody who’s blue, they’re going to learn how to, let’s say, put on that archetypal energy, that mindset, talk as blues, use the vocabulary, blend in, because blue is not one to be, let’s say, shamed and saying you’re horrible, but rather validated for the truth that it is. But then, if you’re a leader, you guide people to start asking open-ended questions of other things that they haven’t considered for their own movement forward. And that can help them move into orange or move into green. So you end up being able to blend in with any of the types, match the energy, not to dominate but to serve their highest good, whatever their energy.
Rick: Yeah, there’s a saying in India that when the mangoes are ripe, the branches bend down so that people can easily pick the fruit. So it means that a good teacher is able to meet the student at whatever level he’s at and provide what’s valuable for him at that level.
Doug: And how I use this in counseling, for example, is if I’m teaching somebody spiral dynamics, then maybe they’re a green thinker. They’re really into social justice and all this stuff that I love too, but they’re always really, really angry and they hate their family, and they hate all of things that’s not in their little paradigm of what reality is. And so they’re miserable because they’re feeling anxiety, they’re feeling depression, they feel isolated, all of these things. So we will explore what yellow looks like. Try it on for a couple of weeks. What does yellow feel to you? Get to know that bandwidth. And then I will ask them, “Okay, so what you’ve just said is a very green statement.” Maybe they said a very green statement. Now I’m going to ask you, “What would your yellow self say to your parents?” Or if you’re in that dinner place with your parents or family and there was this conversation, how would your yellow self respond? How would you feel if you were able to hold paradox there? Could you affirm them in something and then challenge them compassionately in this?
Rick: How easy is it to teach people like that and to help them shift their color, so to speak? You know, you’d think that “Okay, well, really the way one thinks is a function of one’s level of consciousness and not the other way around,” you know? That just by sort of explaining the way yellow works, you can’t necessarily elevate your level of consciousness to the point where it would be spontaneously yellow without having to think about it. Or, you know, I’m just very yellow of me, but … or maybe it would work that way. It’s like you pull any leg of the table and all the other legs will come along, but then certain legs might be easier to pull than others.
Doug: Yeah, and this takes a yellow approach as a counselor because you have to be able to intuit where the person is at. You wouldn’t want to really apply this to somebody who’s in blue or orange because they’re naturally not ready for that.
Rick: And you probably can’t skip a level. You’re probably going to have to go from, you know, blue to orange to green. You can’t just go from blue to green, right?
Doug: Absolutely, you can’t. There’s no non-stop flight to enlightenment. Not that yellow is enlightened, but you do have to go … so a lot of the people that I do this with are already high-vibe and green if you will. They’ve been in green for a while, but they’re angry and they don’t like it. But what’s interesting, and I’ll say this too, is when … let’s say you’re at blue, or if you’re at orange or green or yellow, doesn’t matter, it’s not that you bypass or you leave off the other thing, ethos below you, the value systems below you. Now, the truth … when you’re in the first tier, we talked about the first tier, the highest level is green, the ethos is this: transcend and exclude. Transcend … I transcend the level I was and I exclude all the levels below me or all the levels above me because they don’t exist. But the yellow becomes the first level that says there are levels, and their ethos of the second tier is include and transcend, that you’re including it all, and because you can include it all, you’re transcending to the next level, you’re holding it all together.
Rick: And obviously, I mean, just to shift it to God for a second, that’s obviously what God would have to do, is incorporate all the levels and sort of harmonize them within His totality, you know? Can’t be cubby-holing or pigeon-holing off into one particular perspective because then there wouldn’t be that omniscience and omnipresence and universality.
Doug: Now, this is what I’m about to say I’ve not seen anywhere else because I think maybe other people just think that it’s crazy, but I’m just going to say it. So I think if I’m going to synthesize the Law of One with spiral dynamics here a little bit, I’m going to say that a fourth density place that’s a planet is not really going to begin with beige, where we talked about the very first. People are actually going to be incarnating and born into almost the yellow, like it’s going to be real quick where they get into yellow and then progress up.
Rick: And there could be, I imagine, fifth density and sixth density planets or places where even yellow would be too primitive to be there.
Doug: Oh, of course, I mean, absolutely. I think, in fact, I would argue that the Law of One is the beings that transmitted the Law of One are so advanced that they’re way above any level that we’ve even identified. But I would say that for me, green level is going to be the beginning of a steady activation of the heart chakra where you can start to handle the love and light required for fourth density living. But there’s still a lot of shadow work, the shadow work all the way through, of course. But yellow is where you’re going to be able to start having that universal love and understanding that doesn’t exclude, but rather includes, and that sees that everything belongs in its own way, you see. And that is real hard to understand unless you’re at yellow kind of cognition, but also living it out in your daily life.
Rick: And then we have turquoise and coral, it looks like, and then the arrow keeps going.
Doug: Yeah, well, turquoise would be the next level up from yellow, and turquoise is truly cosmic and global. It is the lingo of a lot of New Age people or mystical levels of religion. I’m not saying New Age people are actually at turquoise states, but the language of being one would be very turquoise. But at that level, there is a way in which you can hold your individual ego not as something to blast through or kill or eradicate, but actually use it as a teacher and tool and it doesn’t master you. You become a way to do good things in the world. And then you’re able to connect with other people, you can put on energies however you want to, to meet people where they’re at, so it takes that yellow ability and then amps it up. And so there’s not a lot of examples out there of what turquoise living would be, but I think when you have some groups that are able to connect, maybe some of the stuff that you saw in the 70s that are meditation groups that are praying in this kind of way, not for changing people’s consciousness, because that would be an infringement of free will, but being those washing machines to wash things through and then offering love and light to the planet and then people get to choose to use that or not, that would be a very turquoise kind of thing to think.
Rick: Yeah. And then finally, what is coral there?
Doug: Coral has not been explored very much, and the teachers that I’ve seen online on YouTube that teach it, I would say that they’re not tapping into coral, in my opinion. But the way I would understand coral is it would be somebody who could not only sense that everything is one and intrinsically know that they are God here incarnated as who they are, but they are able to, maybe I can’t even explain it very well, I think that for me the esoteric and the exoteric are one thing at that level. That there is nothing that is not seen in the esoteric, the most hidden teaching, that isn’t fully realized and explored and explained in the exoteric, the outer teachings of something. That they’re all saying the same thing. So it’s an open book kind of living, and they’re able to use consciousness in pretty amazing ways that would be a form of service, and they would be doing consciousness work. But as you can see, I can’t even describe it very well.
Rick: Yeah, I’m getting a sense of what you’re saying. So if a person wants to learn more about spiral dynamics, what would be a good source for that?
Doug: Well, I would say that you can go and look up spiral dynamics. Just type it online, you’re going to get a lot. On YouTube there are different teachers that teach spiral dynamics that have videos. The one that I like, and I don’t think he’s, you know, I think he’s a really good teacher. There’s some things that I think he’s not as deep on, but I send it to my clients, and that would be a guy named Leo, I think his last name is Gura.
Rick: Oh yeah, you sent me one of those things and I watched it. He did a good explanation.
Doug: He did a really good explanation, and that video that I sent to you is the one that I send to my clients to kind of get them to know. So it’s actualized.org.
Rick: Yeah, I think it is. Okay, good.
Doug: Yeah, so I really honor and respect his work.
Rick: All righty. Well, so we’ve covered quite a bit, and you know, can’t cover everything, but it’s a smorgasbord. You know, we can’t eat everything on the table, but we had some samplings of all kinds of interesting stuff over the last couple of hours.
Doug: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I would say if people want to go deeper into this stuff, you know, they can certainly check out my blog and they can check out, I would go to the source of Law of One, but I would also say this. This might be the last thing I really want to say, whatever belief system a person has, inside your belief system is going to contain, at the very depth of it, the mystical depth of it, is going to contain a really, really beautiful explanation of the Law of One through its own lens. And so there’s not really a, one doesn’t need to jump into esoteric things at all. One can be very fine in the conventional religion, but to move to the level where you start to really see and live as we are all one, in union with each other and in union with God. And that is ontologically true before any belief system tells you otherwise.
Rick: Well, that’s a good summation. Alright, so you said you wanted to do some kind of a little prayer or ceremonial thing as we close?
Doug: Yeah, yeah, and thank you, Rick, for the invitation to come on and talk.
Rick: Yeah, it’s really been a lot of fun. I love it.
Doug: Cool. So, I’m going to blow out the candle here that’s been going on this whole time, and I just want to close by saying, in deep gratitude, thank you to the Infinite Creator who is giving us the ability to connect today, and we are the Infinite Creator connecting. And we have created something new, this conversation that didn’t exist before, which is also the Infinite Creator. And we want to acknowledge the Infinite Creator and the participants that will hear this today and in the future. We honor your presence as the Infinite Creator. And I want to invite everybody, if you want, to put your hand over your forehead in union with the Creator’s transcendence, down into below the navel, second chakra, in union with the Creator’s incarnation, and then crossing over in union with the Creator’s indwelling presence. Amen.
Rick: Thank you, very nice.
Doug: Thank you.
Rick: So next time I miss a connection and get stranded in the Dallas airport, I’ll give you a call and you can come pick me up.
Doug: Please.
Rick: That happened, actually, a few years ago. Alright, so thanks so much, Doug. I really enjoyed getting to meet you. You feel like a friend, and I’m sure we’ll be in touch as we go along, you know?
Doug: Absolutely. I look forward to that. And thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching. As I mentioned in the beginning, next week I’ll be interviewing Cynthia Bourgeault, who I’ve interviewed before, and I guess we could categorize her as mystical Christianity. And there’s some other good ones that are scheduled. If you look at the upcoming interviews page on BatGap, you’ll see what we’ve got scheduled. And always I usually remind people to just go to the site at some point, if you haven’t yet, and explore the menu, see if there’s anything in there that interests you, like you might want to sign up for the audio podcast or whatever. So thanks for listening or watching, and we will see you for the next one.