Eli Jaxon-Bear 2nd Interview Transcript

Eli Jaxon-Bear 2^nd Interview

Summary:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week, for the second time I’ve interviewed him, is Eli Jackson-Bear. Welcome Eli!

Eli: Thank you Rick. Good to see you again.

Rick: Yeah, I listened just this past week to our original interview, and I was kind of amazed at how much we covered in a one-hour period. So, I recommend that anyone listening to this one also go back and listen to that one. Hopefully, we’ll be able to cover some fresh ground in this one. Although there’s really nothing new to talk about is there? Same old thing. Eli has just come out with a 10 year anniversary edition of a book he wrote called “Sudden Awakening”. And I’ve read the book cover to cover and also skimmed it a second time. It’s a very enjoyable book to read. Last week I interviewed C.Y. Ramana, your brother, Papaji disciple, Yukio Ramana, a Japanese fellow.

Eli: Oh, Yukio.

Rick: Yeah. I think you used to work with him.

Eli: I told him to use the name “Yukio”.

Rick: Oh, did you? Okay. And you and he actually worked together. But the reason I bring that up, I mean years ago, the reason I bring that up is that he quotes at one point, he quotes Papaji as referring to awakening in a sense as just the beginning. And that there’s a sort of a wealth of unfoldment that can take place after that. So I thought I might start with that question since this is the 10th anniversary of this book. Looking back on the previous 10 years, do you feel like there’s been a deepening or a maturation or a refinement or something of the awakening which inspired this book?

Eli: Well, you know, I just returned from a trip back to Lucknow to my teacher’s home after 20 years. It’s been 20 years since I’ve been in India. And people say they notice a deepening. They notice a change. But as for myself, I can say that life continues unfolding, that waking up is the beginning of life. It’s not the end. It’s the end of suffering. It’s the beginning of life.

Rick: Right.

Eli: And everything unfolds from that. There’s a continual deepening, but I can’t say that the realization has deepened in any particular sense. But I guess my, I don’t know, incarnation has changed in some way.

Rick: Would it be fair to say that the realization doesn’t change? There’s a sort of a non-changing quality to it, so to speak. But the reflection of it or the embodiment of it…

Eli: That’s right.

Rick: …could deepen or refine or enrich.

Eli: It definitely does.

Rick: Yeah.

Eli: There are definitely tests along the way. And in that testing that happens, it’s like you shed. In my experience, it’s like a shedding of icebergs that you’re not even aware that are there. Everything falls away in its own particular way. And… Not being aware of it before it falls away, the realization is the same. But after it falls away, there’s “Aah”. A refreshing, a deepening, I don’t know what you’d call it.

Rick: Sort of a positive connotation to Joni Mitchell’s phrase, “You don’t know what you got till it’s gone.”

Eli: Yeah, that’s right. In that sense.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. There’s a couple of short chapters in your book which really directly address something that I’m chewing on these days. I thought I might also start with a discussion of that. On page 28 you say, “The universe is the expression of the I-thought, the reverberation of I.” And then there’s this chapter, “The One Cosmic Being”, and then they all sort of go together. A couple pages after that you say, “The universe is an intelligent design that gives rise to organisms capable of intelligently investigating the paradoxical experience of form, transcending form. The cosmic being is waking up out of its starry slumber of unconscious dreaming.” I thought that was beautiful.

Eli: Oh, thank you.

Rick: Yeah. Any comments on that?

Eli: I’m glad to hear it. I had no idea I’d written something like that. It’s good. I like it. It’s true.

Rick: Well, you know, one of the impressions I got in reading your book was that this book obviously has to have been written by someone who is living the experience. There was a depth of understanding that came through that could not be merely intellectual.

Eli: That’s good. Because, you know, my teacher said that even parrots can be taught to speak the words of satsang. But the paradox is that if you’re ripe and you’re ready, then if you even hear it from a parrot, that can be enough to wake you up.

Rick: Yeah.

Eli: And so, you know, we have Huineng, who is delivering a load of wood, an itinerate woodcutter. Here are some monks who are not awake but are chanting the Diamond Sutra. And just in hearing it, he wakes up. So, you know, the message can be conveyed in so many different forms. But if you’re ripe for it, if you’re ready for it, then the explosion of realization is calling you all the time in different forms and different ways.

Rick: Yeah. I want to talk a lot about ripening in this conversation and, you know, how does one become more ripe and so on. But before we go on to that, here’s another thing related to the thing I just said. Maybe we can delve into it. I have this feeling that oneness needs duality in order to know itself. Or to put it a different way, oneness creates duality in the process of knowing itself. And you seem to address that on page 35. You say, “The light of consciousness is ever-present. Its apparent veiling reflects its own power to create an illusion of a universe so that it can meet itself, see itself, and love itself.”

Eli: Yes. Well, that’s the experience. Whether there’s intention behind it or not, who can say? But, it’s like in the — we know there was a big bang. We know there was — certainly there was a nothing and then there’s a something. And that something is this — is consciousness that is now exploded into all forms. And from the lowliest to the most elevated. And so then as it comes to realize itself, it’s seeing through its own veils. It’s seeing through its own creation. So it’s a mystery of lovemaking, really. It’s consciousness loving itself in all forms.

Rick: The reason I find that fascinating is that usually people, when they begin to think about enlightenment, get interested in it and so on, they approach it from the perspective of the personal. They think, “I am going to get enlightened. Oh, boy, it’s going to be great.” You know? But this flips it around and kind of presents it from the perspective of the universal. You know, we are THAT waking up to itself through the instrumentality of a form that THAT has created

Eli: yes

Rick: in order to wake — and awaken to itself,

Eli: yes

Rick: really, and to have that — to sort of live it as a living reality.

Eli: That’s it. That’s right. And so then, it’s like if we realize that we’re a finger, and the finger is not separate from the hand, and yet it is different from the hand and has a different function. You can cut off the finger and you still have the hand. So the finger has a unique place and has a unique function, and it can wake up and realize the totality, but it’s still — it’s a finger.

Rick: Yeah.

Eli: And its fingerness is — it’s not a problem. It’s a joy, actually.

Rick: Yeah. I interviewed someone a few weeks ago, and we were talking about the fact that, a lot of people say, “Well, I am not the body.” But then you go — she said, “Well, go stick that person with a pin,” and they say, “Wait a minute. Yeah, I’m that also. There is this body here, and I’m concerned about not having it stuck with pins.” But I think it seems to be a matter of what one’s primary affiliation is or identification.

Eli: It’s really about identification. And when you realize the true identity of yourself, it includes everything. It includes the body. It includes everything. So the only one who could say, “I am not the body,” is a somebody that’s separate. So the somebody that’s separate is the only issue that keeps you from the realization of totality.

Rick: And yet, doesn’t that also serve as a vehicle to that realization?

Eli: It is the vehicle, yes. Our ego is the vehicle.

Rick: Right.

Eli: So it’s like, you know, the ego is not an enemy. The ego is the vehicle to liberation. It’s only the ego that suffers. It’s only the ego that begins the spiritual search. It’s only this identification as a me that has to find the truth. So it’s beautiful. It’s all part of the integrity of the whole process. So you can’t fight the ego. You can’t kill the ego because only the killer would be left. And so it’s not about making war with any part of yourself. It’s not about separating from any part of yourself. I’m not the body. I’m not the ego. Only the ego would say that. And so what tends to happen in our culture is we tend to spiritualize the ego. And we end up with a spiritual ego that has all these beliefs. I am one. I am not the body. I am consciousness. I am love. But it becomes a spiritualized ego preaching rather than the freshness of discovery of not knowing.

Rick: Yeah. I also get the sense when I hear people talking that way that they’re very much in their heads. They’re kind of intellectualizing something that really should be lived on a more visceral level.

Eli: Yes.

Rick: It’s like you’re standing outside a restaurant and saying, “Oh, the curry is so tasty,” but you’re not actually eating the curry.

Eli: Yes. That’s it.

Rick: There’s another little passage from your book, page 59. “When the individuated unique personality returns to its homogenous source, the individuated personality knows itself to be a prism that conscious love shines through.”

Eli: Yes.

Rick: I love that.

Eli: Oh, thank you. So then that’s, again, now the body-mind is not the issue. It’s actually the expression. It becomes the UNIQUE. Only you have that particular point of view in the whole universe. That’s where conscious love shines through your body and uses your speech and speaks with your words. That’s the beauty.

Rick: Yeah, I have a friend who’s fond of saying that we’re all sense organs of the infinite.

Eli: Yes, that’s good.

Rick: And each sense organ has a different function.

Eli: It does. And each sense organ is unique and expresses the same, but it expresses that same freshly in its own particular language and form.

Rick: Yeah. It’s interesting to consider, though, that the nose smells by virtue of consciousness. The eyes see by virtue of consciousness. So there’s kind of a fundamental substratum.

Eli: Yes, I see.

Rick: Like the hand and the fingers. The palm is common to all the fingers, but each finger has its individuality and its separate function.

Eli: That’s right.

Rick: I don’t mean to be preaching here. I’m just kind of playing with ideas with you. I just listened to an interview with a skeptic, an atheist, yesterday or so. He was kind of arguing about evolution. You refer a bit to Darwin and to evolution in your book. This idea of random mutation devoid of any sort of intelligence. The more I listened to it, the more I thought, “I guess I don’t agree with Darwinian evolution. I must be an intelligent design person or something” because I feel that there’s—

Eli: Evolution is intelligent design.

Rick: Yeah.

Eli: It’s a false distinction. It’s crazy. I mean, how more intelligent can there be than evolution? It’s the brilliance. It’s the genius that’s inherent in life itself. Life itself is informed by consciousness, is an expression of consciousness, and so is evolution, the intelligent product of that. I mean, to call evolution something separate from intelligent design — it’s a false dichotomy.

Rick: It amazes me that an intelligent scientific person can fail to see that, can look at anything — that a heart surgeon could be an atheist or an astronomer or anything. It boggles my mind because they’re kind of looking at this awesome display of divine intelligence.

Eli: Because they’ve been conditioned by what they’ve been taught that God is. I’m an atheist as deeply as they are.

Rick: Oh, a big old guy in the sky with a beard?

Eli: Yeah, exactly. There’s no God.

Rick: Right.

Eli: Yeah. It’s a literary fiction. Mostly what people consider God has been made up in literary fiction, and they read about it.

Rick: So how would you define God?

Eli: Well, you’ve already done it.

Rick: I’ve done it, yeah. Just as this sort of all-pervading intelligence.

Eli: Yes, all-pervading intelligence, the consciousness that is before the Big Bang and expresses itself in the Big Bang and discovers itself through the products, by-products of the Big Bang.

Rick: Although I think some people deny that, too, but we don’t have to dwell on that. It just kind of seems so evident. Okay, here’s another point you made. “The experience of awakening is completely personal, different for each person.” We’ve touched on this already, but expound on that a bit. How their awakening could have different flavors, according to the taster.

Eli: Each one of us is unique. No one else occupies your moment in time and space. And so it’s completely fresh and unknown, and when it gets expressed through you, the same ocean of consciousness expresses itself and experiences itself uniquely, freshly, in an unknown way. It speaks with an unspoken tongue.

Rick: Perhaps a takeaway point from that is: don’t get too hung up on comparing yourself with other people’s descriptions of awakening or enlightenment, because it may not show up in the same way for you.

Eli: It definitely won’t show up in the same way. And it’s the egoic mind of comparison that keeps you separate from what it is you’re searching for. So really it’s so simple to simply stop. To stop. To give up the search. To not look for something different, to not look for something new. To not look for something outside of yourself. And that stopping is really the secret to liberation, to not go to the past, to not touch the future. And then people misidentify that by saying, “Well, I’m just being here now.” But who is where exactly? And so that we consider — see, like when Ram Dass first writes “Be Here Now,” it’s just psychedelic hippies that get it. And then when Eckhart Tolle does “The Power of Now” and it becomes on Oprah and it becomes mainstream, it’s beautiful. Now there are people, millions of people who never had an understanding, have a deeper understanding, but it immediately gets captured by the ego as trying to just be here now, as if the body is what’s here and you are the body and you’re just showing up here now. But the very process of these words going from this mouth to that ear, to your ear, it’s already past. So there is no now in this present moment. It’s already past. These sensory experiences that we then take in and interpret as being here now are already gone. So we’re continually living in the past. We’re living in the past as long as it takes the light wave to hit our retina, let alone from the retina that makes sense of it, to then decide, “Oh, that means this and that means that.”

Rick: Of course, that’s not a heck of a lot of time. It happens.

Eli: But it’s still past.

Rick: yeah

Eli: So to be here now is to be before past and future, to be present before the body, before the identity as a somebody who’s being here now.

Rick: Before perception.

Eli: Before perception, that’s right, because then the perceiver is perceived without any subject-object division. Then there’s no time involved.

Rick: Yeah, so in other words, “be here now” would not mean, “All right, I’m paying attention to this food I’m putting in my mouth. Now I’m paying attention to this TV show.” It’s more like dwelling and being irrespective of sensory experiences.

Eli: That’s it. That’s exactly right. Prior to sensory experience.

Rick: You mentioned in your book that you awoke to your true nature but didn’t know how to stop the egoic mind.

Eli: Yes.

Rick: That implies that the egoic mind can coexist with being awake to one’s true nature. It says that. My question is, doesn’t the egoic mind tend to overshadow one’s true nature? Aren’t they somewhat in competition, as it were?

Eli: They are. They’re in competition for the space and time. The tendency is, for most of us, is that with psychedelics or with meditation or with lovemaking, there’s at least glimpses or profound moments or weeks when we realize the truth. In that realization, the egoic re-identification happens. It’s like, “Okay, I know who I am, but then this continues to play out.” Then there’s a war with that, but it’s only the ego that fights with the ego. Then how to come to peace, how to come to silence, is really the issue. That happens when all the war is given up, when you stop trying to change or fix anything, when you’re willing to be still. Silence is the key.

Rick: Did you find in your own experience that you went through a phase where you seemed to — sort of — experience the “I got it, I lost it” syndrome, where there was a sort of awakening and then you felt gripped and lost again and then an awakening, and that oscillated back and forth, and then eventually something broke and there was never any possibility of losing it again, apparently?

Eli: Well, you know, in my experience, it didn’t happen that way. I woke up in very unusual circumstances.

Rick: The LSD trip in the cabin.

Eli: Yeah, that’s right. And that never left. It’s here now. That realization was permanent. But along with that realization, I had no psychological insight into my nature, into my character, into ego. I had never studied any of it. I’d never been with a teacher. I’d never had learned any distinction. I just — I knew who I was. I knew I was awake, and I was searching for a teacher. And it took me 18 years to find one. But along the way, if people contacted me, some would get it, but mostly what they would get would be my personality. Mostly what they’d get would be my own stuff that was still there and hadn’t been — hadn’t shed, hadn’t been shed, let’s say. And so the realization didn’t change, but the expression of it is what deepens. When everything is shed, then there’s a freshness of contact that’s possible.

Rick: Yeah. Some people do speak of having awoken or had this realization and then kind of going through this “on-again, off-again” phase before it stabilizes. But maybe they’re not talking about the same depth of realization you’re referring to. Maybe what you’re referring to is something which, once having realized, couldn’t be overshadowed.

Eli: That’s for sure. When you — when the whole universe disappears, when there is no earth, there’s no people, there’s no time, there’s no space, and you are completely present, awake, and clear in that, you know without a doubt who you are and where you are. You know you are a consciousness. You know you are formless, timeless, spaceless. How can you ever — it’s impossible to lose that. But that realization, while it can be ever-present, the egoic mind can then try to do something about it or try to teach someone or fix someone or do something with it because there hasn’t been this distinction between the clarity of consciousness and the imaginary doing of something.

Rick: Yeah. And then, of course, I mean the trials and tribulations that life can throw at you can be challenging. “Oh, I lost my job.” Now I’m going into foreclosure.” “Now my kid is on drugs.” And all these problems can get so taxing. I mean, I know people who have been meditating 40 years who sometimes get into depressed states or just kind of freaked out or had to have a stroke or something. And then what was this all about? I’m miserable.

Eli: Yeah, so that’s a wake-up call. If that’s what’s happening, you realize that everything before that has just been a spiritual trance a spiritual ego. And so that’s the opportunity is to use the crisis to see deeper.

Rick: Yeah. So when you were in the thick of your cancer, which was an amazing story, towards the end of your book you talk about it, and when you’re on this heavy chemotherapy, which is this kind of experimental treatment to knock it out, I mean, you must have felt like crap,

Eli: Yes.

Rick: but was that sort of inner light still unperturbed

Eli: Yes.

Rick: by all that stuff?

Eli: I was ready to live and ready to die. And either way, whatever served best is what I wanted. If it served for my death, I’m happy for it. If it serves for my life, I’m happy for it. And it was, yeah, it was definitely not pleasant. It was definitely, I mean, painful.

Rick: Yeah. You lost several inches in height because your spine was collapsing.

Eli: That’s right. Bones were broken. And the chemotherapy is nauseating and it’s painful. The whole thing, the process is not pleasant. But it doesn’t touch the truth of yourself.

Rick: Yeah, it’s interesting because some people put a fair amount of emphasis on the correlation between physiology and consciousness and the need for a physiology capable of supporting that enlightened consciousness. But it seems to me from all the records of Nisargadatta and Ramana dying of cancer and all kinds of other records, Christ being crucified and so on, that one can cross a threshold after which it doesn’t matter what happens to the body, that awakening, maybe it’s sustained by some subtle aspect of the physiology that isn’t touched by disease or injury, but somehow it’s never lost at a certain point.

Eli: That’s right. That’s what we’re here for. it’s for the realization that it’s never lost, regardless of what’s happening physically, emotionally, or mentally. So that, yeah, I mean, the cancer was a physical nightmare. And before that when my affair was turned into a scandal by a therapist, it was an emotional nightmare. And the whole people who said they loved me suddenly hated me. The whole world turned on me. I mean, it was a witch hunt. I’d never experienced being on that side of a witch hunt. It was “whoa…”. So it showed me so much. It showed me the capacity of emotions and the limbic brain, and I learned so much from it, but it never touched the truth of myself. It never touched the truth of the realization. It just — the truth of the realization gave me the capacity to stand and take it, to not fight back, not prove anything, but just take it. Just take it. Accept it. Say, “Okay, I did it, I take full responsibility.” Here I am. I’m willing for truth and reconciliation with anybody at any time.

Rick: Well, both of those things sort of served as teaching examples for other people who perhaps — who are willing to see them, because I didn’t know you too well in the past. I never met you in person even, but when I kind of read about how you went through those things and how you dealt with them and how you came out the other side, I gained a lot of respect because both of those things could happen to any of us, and if somebody thinks that’s not possible, then they’re setting themselves up for a fall.

Eli: Definitely. And and I was setting myself up because I was so arrogant. I mean, I had become arrogant because I had been celibate for 12 years. I was finished with sexuality, and I was — and I saw other teachers falling, and I felt superior on some level, and that subtle inflation — of egoic inflation of feeling superior had to be popped.

Rick: Yeah, Interesting.

Eli: And it got popped.

Rick: Yeah. And as I say, it wasn’t just for your benefit. It was for the benefit of anyone who wants to sort of observe, and take lessons from what others experience and perhaps, save themselves the same trauma by gaining a little humility.

Eli: Yeah, that would be nice. But, I had just read — I had just finished reading Richard Baker’s book, “Shoes Outside the Door,” about his fall from being the Roshi of the Zen community of America to having had an affair with his best friend’s wife and the collapse and the destruction of that, and I just finished reading that book when I fell. And so it didn’t help in any way except it inflamed me some more. Oh, that idiot. How could he be so stupid?

Rick: Yeah.

Eli: How could he be so dumb, then? What’s the deal? Come on, you’re awake. How could you do that? And as I put the book down, it happened to me.

Rick: Wow.

Eli: So…

Rick: In a way, it kind of loops back to what we started talking about in the beginning of this interview, which is, further refinement after awakening. I mean, perhaps that can take the dimension of more ideal behavior over time, although, of course, that has a lot of cultural connotations

Eli: It does.

Rick: and boxes. I mean, there are cultures in which polygamy is totally normal or whatever, but…

Eli: That’s right. But what it is, here’s what it is, Rick, is that there’s this subtle inflations of ego that can happen in the midst of realization, where you can start to feel special in any way, you start to feel superior in any way, and when that comes, it has to be popped. And then there’s some sort of — depending on how inflated it is, there’s that size of an explosion when it gets popped.

Rick: Interesting, yeah. It’s my observation that sometimes, egregious inflations of ego take place as a result of some awakening. It’s almost as if there’s this tenacious bit of ego that just goes haywire once there’s that fuel of consciousness illuminating it, and people begin proclaiming themselves to be avatars and…

Eli: Exactly.

Rick: All kinds of crazy stuff.

Eli: Crazy stuff. I mean, the guy was really nuts. Egomaniac. Really an egomaniac.

Rick: Yeah.

Eli: Let’s speak the truth about it.

Rick: I guess we know who we’re referring to in this case.

Eli: Right. The avatar.

Rick: Right. There have been other — there have been numerous examples, I’m afraid.

Eli: Yeah.

Rick: Which is not, to my mind, to say that there couldn’t be avatars, but, most of the people who claim it probably aren’t.

Eli: One of the things my teacher said, which I really enjoy, he said, “Be careful about people who give themselves spiritual names. Either you’re named by your students or you’re named by your teacher.” When you start giving yourself inflated spiritual names, that’s really a dangerous signal.

Rick: Interesting. So, obviously, Gangaji got hers from Papaji and accepted it and could have kept calling herself Toni, but, you know, Gangaji. I actually got a spiritual name from Amma, the hugging saint, but I just felt like I can’t run around calling myself that. I’d just as soon stay with “Rick”.

Eli: Right. Yeah. My teacher said to me, he said, “You know, if you shave your head and call yourself ‘Swami’, you’ll have a much bigger following, but then people will think you’re different in some way. They’ll think you’re separate. They’ll say, ‘Oh, he’s a Swami. He doesn’t have to go through what we go through.'”

Rick: Yeah, and I suppose if you’re really sincere about this game, then why would you want to create obstacles for yourself by setting yourself up in that way for all kinds of pitfalls? I mean keep it simple, stupid.

Eli: Keep it simple. Keep it simple. Keep it silent. Silent is the simplest. Quiet is the simplest.

Rick: Yeah.

Eli: Not touching the next thought.

Rick: Let’s talk about practices for a bit. You mentioned in your book that you engaged in a lot of practices and you say you still practice some of them. And in the book you say, “Awakening happens suddenly after lifetimes of gradual ripening.” And of course the title of the book is “Sudden Awakening.” But what if a person isn’t sufficiently ripe for sudden awakening? Wouldn’t practices perhaps be helpful for many people to kind of bring them to the ripeness that is going to make sudden awakening feasible?

Eli: Possible, sure. Everything’s useful in its own way. Everything’s useful in its own context. It’s just practice may help you mature in some way, it may help you refine yourself or control your mind in different ways. Ultimately it won’t lead to realization, but it can be useful along the way.

Rick: Perhaps there’s some Zen guy that said “Awakening may be an accident, but spiritual practice can make you accident-prone.” So perhaps it can sort of ready you for the — make you more..

Eli: Possibly. But if you look at all the ashrams in India with millions of people doing yoga their whole lives and

Rick: Yeah.

Eli: never waking up.

Rick: Right.

Eli: So the problem with any practice is that it reinforces the idea of a practitioner. And the practitioner is someone — is the egoic identity trying to get something from the practice. And that’s the trap. So yes, they can be useful. I mean, I love my Taoist practice. I mean, I loved Zazen when I sat in Zen temples.

Rick: Did those reinforce the notion of a practitioner?

Eli: Sure.

Rick: How about the notion that it takes a thorn to remove a thorn? I mean, can’t there be practices which actually dissolve and diminish the notion of — and maybe it depends on the practice. I mean, some practices might sort of be…

Eli: Any practice, there’s someone practicing. And the someone practicing is the only obstacle to what you want. It’s always a search into the future. Whatever you’re practicing is so that you’ll be better or different next time.

Rick: What if the nature of the practice is that during it, the practicer dissolves into sort of no-someoneness?

Eli: Then why call it a practice? Why not just live it? Stop practicing and start living, I’d say. If that’s your practice, if your practice is dissolve into nothing, then be nothing. Why practice? Because the practice assumes that that’s only going to last for a certain period of time, and then you’re going to pick up the practice of me. So just stop the practice of me and everything else will take care of itself.

Rick: How do you stop the practice of me?

Eli: As you said, by fully stopping. By dissolving.

Rick: You said that.

Eli: No, you said you could have a practice where you fully dissolve and everything disappears, or whatever you said about it.

Rick: Actually, I’m alluding to my own experience here, and I might as well pursue this a little bit, because a friend of mine is always bugging me about this and saying, “Ask Eli about that, because you’ve been doing this for 44 years.” When I was 18, I learned Transcendental Meditation, and my experience of it was that I’d sit for 20 minutes, and I’d just dissolve into an ocean of bliss, an ocean of being, or whatever, and then I’d come out again, of course, and then I’d un-dissolve. But over time, I began to find that the analogy of dying a cloth and bleaching it in the sun and dying it and bleaching it and dying it until it becomes colorfast, even when it’s in the sun, began to play out in my life. So there was an example of a practice which sort of didn’t, at least in my experience, didn’t seem to reinforce, but actually began to dismantle and dissolve the rigidity of my ego and individuality.

Eli: Beautiful. Yes, everything’s useful.

Rick: Yeah.

Eli: Everything is useful. But then, at a certain point, you have to say, “Okay, enough.” I don’t want to come back out of it anymore. I don’t want to end the 20 minutes and come back to me, the practice of ‘me’,” because “me” is a practice. You have to practice “me”. And so finally, yes, you have a maturity that comes from those years of your deepening through your practice to say, “Okay, I have to stop the practice of me,” and then you don’t have to rematerialize.

Rick: Well, that’s actually what I found over time, is that I don’t come out of it anymore,

Eli: Beautiful.

Rick: but I still do it. Why do I do it? Because it’s tremendously restful for the body.

Eli: Sure.

Rick: It seems to have this refining influence and so on, but whether or not I’m doing it, there’s that sort of continuum.

Eli: Sure. I love sitting. I love meditating.

Rick: Yeah.

Eli: It’s wonderful.

Rick: And yet I have friends who say, “I don’t bother meditating anymore because it really makes no difference whatsoever.” So maybe that’ll be my experience next year, but right now, it’s this.

Eli: Listen, all you have is your attention, and then the question is how are you going to spend it? And why not spend it meditating instead of spending it hanging out in a bar?

Rick: Yeah, or watching TV or something.

Eli: Or watching TV or having a beer, whatever it is. It’s like give yourself the best quality. Why not?

Rick: Okay, I think you covered that well. I appreciate it. One thing that’s often said, and you use the analogy, I guess you were quoting Papaji, about the intensity of the desire for freedom being important. I think he used the analogy, if your hair is on fire, you’re running to the river, and you’re not going to sit down with some friends and have a card game or something like that.

Eli: That’s right.

Rick: But by the same token, if your hair were on fire, you wouldn’t eat or go to the bathroom or watch a movie or do anything else. You’d be running to the river. And yet in normal life we do these things. I’ve seen people who get so extreme that they were fasting to extremes and just pushing themselves. I’ve actually had a friend or two who went mentally ill because of that strain of extremism. Where do you find the balance between firing up the desire for enlightenment and being a bit of a normal, natural, relaxed person?

Eli: If you look at the Buddha’s experience, when he went out he was on fire from waking up. He saw the suffering of the world, and he tried extreme.

Rick: Yeah.

Eli: He tried fasting. He tried extreme fasting. He tried extreme yogas. He did lots of extreme stuff. And finally he said, “Okay, I’m just sitting here until I get it, no matter what.” He sat down under the tree until he got it. Day and night, “I’m sitting here until I get it.” That’s the steadfastness. That’s the willingness. That’s the desire that is unshakable. Then forget about ordinary life. Ordinary life takes care of itself. If it comes back, it comes back. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. That’s not your business. You’ve given yourself fully to the truth of yourself. And then how that expresses itself is unknown. Maybe you stay as a naked sadhu in a cave somewhere. Maybe you live the normal householder life. It’s not about your doing it either way. It’s really just surrendering yourself so fully that it expresses itself naturally through you.

Rick: I once heard of a saint who lit an incense stick and said, “If I’m not enlightened by the time this incense stick burns down, I’m going to kill myself.” He got enlightened before it burned down. That obviously would be an extreme example. Even the average person listening to this, it would be extreme for them to go sit under a tree and say, “I’m going to sit here until I get enlightened.” But the Buddha, obviously, after his enlightenment, came out with the Middle Way. Didn’t he call it? It was a balanced path with the right livelihood and this and that. The other thing is that it was sort of an antidote to extremism.

Eli: His Eightfold Path, my teacher said, comes as an expression of realization, not as a path to realization. So you can practice right thinking, right action, right livelihood, right “yada yada”, and you never wake up. But if you wake up, then those things will naturally express themselves through you.

Rick: Does it work both ways? I mean, if you pull a table leg, all the other legs come along. If you wake up, all those things are going to be expressing naturally. But also, if you kind of bring your life more into alignment with things like that, can that be conducive to enlightenment? Can it work both ways?

Eli: Well possibly. Everything is possible. Anything is useful. And yet, if you look at all the monks and nuns that have cloistered themselves in order to search for God, very few of them actually find it.

Rick: Yeah. It’s true. Perhaps because they’re kind of out of their dharma in a way, just living a life which, I’m sure there’s a legitimate reason for monks and nuns and some who are cut out for it, but look at the Catholic Church. I mean, a lot of people who are

Eli: Exactly.

Rick: trying to live it aren’t apparently cut out for it.

Eli: The Buddha ends up setting up monasteries and doing all this stuff for his people because that’s what they want. It wasn’t his teaching. It wasn’t really what he was speaking. But then, okay, you want to do it, do it.

Rick: And it helps to have a structure.

Eli: That’s true.

Rick: I mean, you have the Leela Foundation, and it has, you know, a certain PAC status and certain, you know, you have an accountant, and you have to do all that relative stuff to provide a vehicle to make it available.

Eli: Yes. But that kind of happens on its own. It’s like you don’t have to really force it. You don’t have to work at it, or at least I didn’t. And when I went out searching, it wasn’t about foundations or anything. I mean, I just gave myself over fully. Being in that cabin in Colorado, it was like I was willing to die if that’s what it took. I didn’t want to die. I was afraid of dying. I had fought it. And I was willing if that’s what it took. And then that woke up. And then after I woke up, I left that — I had already, as a federal fugitive, I’d left everything behind. I’d left my career. I’d left my family. I’d left all the normal pursuits that people think give you a happy life. And then when I went searching for my teacher, I went off into Peru where I lived for six months. I had $50 in my pocket when I left, and I never looked back. And so from there, it’s like life unfolded in such a mysterious, full way. I mean, I’ve had life experiences I never could have imagined or wanted, and unbelievable. And it’s not because I worked for them or I did them or because they had to be there in order to support. It was just life unfolding itself quite naturally, quite mysteriously.

Rick: Seek and ye shall find. Knock and the door shall be opened. You see that. When a person kind of makes the decision to move in that direction, circumstances start working out in ways they couldn’t have anticipated.

Eli: It does. The whole universe is in support of awakening. And so you give yourself to awakening, and the whole universe supports it. Not giving us little happy smile rainbows. It can be a total tragedy. Here is a tragedy. It can be whatever it takes. Whatever it takes, the universe will provide it. And if what it takes is death, then the universe will provide death. If what it takes is life, then it provides life. So you can trust love. You can trust consciousness to such a degree that you don’t have to worry about setting up a foundation or having an accountant or any of that stuff. That takes care of itself. Those are byproducts. That’s not something to be pursued.

Rick: Interesting. Harkening back again to the beginning of the interview, we talked about how often usually this is looked at from the perspective of the individual. I should trust this, and I should intensify my desire, and then the universe will help me. But flipping it around again, we are that universal intelligence which has cultured this particular expression to the point where it’s able to begin to recognize itself. There’s that bumper sticker, “Let go and let God.” Perhaps since most people do still have a sense of individuality, all you really have to do is be cooperative when those stirrings start to happen and enjoy the ride.

Eli: I saw another bumper sticker when I was in Austin that said, “If you love something, set it free. If it doesn’t come back, hunt it down and kill it.”

Rick: Huh. That seems a little cynical or something.

Eli: I never wanted a relationship. I never wanted children. I made a vow when I was 10 years old not to have kids, so I was free of that. I never had to get entangled in career and family and all of that. I never wanted to settle down. When the universe presented me with the goddess in a human form, I wasn’t interested. I wasn’t interested in long term. I loved sex, of course, and fun, of course, but commitment and settling down, what for? That was 1975 when I first met my partner, and we’ve been together ever since. It’s not something that I ever searched for or ever wanted, but it was one of the gifts that was bestowed by the goddess of love. I’m so lucky and grateful.

Rick: I met mine that year, too, and for 11 years I said, “Absolutely not. I want to be a monk.” Then finally, 11 years later, my life was kind of falling apart. It had to happen, and it happened, and it was great.

Eli: Yeah, 13 years for me, before we got married. We lived together for 13 years.

Rick: … My wive was was hearing me saying “falling apart”. I said it was falling apart before we got married, actually. Really, I was just so pushing myself to such extremes. I had a big boil on my neck, and I was eccentric and obsessive, and all this stuff, and I needed balancing in the worst way. “You were the one falling apart. [said by Ricks wive from the Background]” I know, that’s what I was saying. She said, “You were the one falling apart.” All right, we’ve resolved that. You have a bit in your book about wounding as a spur to seeking, and we’ve sort of been addressing that, but maybe we can dwell on it just a little bit more. When bad things happen to good people, so on and so forth, there seems to be a kind of a loving hand at work, even when bad things happen.

Eli: The ego has to be wounded. The egoic shell has to be pierced. In that piercing, it can be very painful, and in the very pain of the wounding can be the start of the spiritual search, the start for relief, the start for the end of suffering. It’s like a chick hatching out of an egg. There’s a pecking from the outside, and then the chick has to peck it from the inside. The pecking from the outside is experienced as a wounding, because suddenly your impervious shield has been pierced, and there’s pain, there’s suffering. It’s like the Buddha waking up and seeing old age, sickness, and death were all kind of woundings that happened into his shell of egoic identity. And so each one of us has those woundings. We have this time where things pierce, where we are shattered, we are broken. And that’s really the — before that happens, really, there’s usually no spiritual search. There’s no need for it, because you’re already content and full on in your egoic identity. And so the cracking of the shell from the outside is the first step. And then you, as the chick on the inside, have to peck it, have to peck at the shell, to burst free from it in some way.

Rick: There’s a saying that angels aren’t interested in enlightenment because their experience is too glorious. And as a human being, we have a much greater kind of opportunity, because human life is a school of hard knocks, and we’re not going to just be content with it. We’re going to be goaded until we seek something deeper.

Eli: Yes, my teacher said the same thing. He said, “In the realm of the gods, there’s all too much noise. They’re all talking and boasting and doing all their things.” And so when a human comes to silence, all the gods come to sit at your feet to receive the transmission of silence, because that doesn’t happen in heaven.

Rick: There’s a beautiful phrase in the Hindu puja, which is, “At whose door the whole galaxy of gods pray for perfection day and night.” It’s with reference to the Guru.

Eli: Yes.

Rick: I’m going to interview a guy in a few weeks named David Gersten, who wrote a book called “Are You Getting Enlightened or Losing Your Mind?” I think you referred in your book to “madness” or “fear of madness”. I’ve seen there seems to be a sort of a cohesiveness to the rigid egoic personality, which sometimes in the process of transforming to a liberated state can be a tricky business, because that cohesiveness on the one hand keeps us bound, but on the other hand it keeps us sane. I’ve seen people flip out, go into mental hospitals and whatnot, who are doing devoted spiritual practice on that path.

Eli: I would say that what you’re calling sane, I would call a kind of controlled madness.

Rick: Bottled up madness.

Eli: Yeah, people are crazy, egos are crazy. It’s like we’re living in a crazy world. We’re living on a slave planet. Everyone is somewhat insane. The ego gives you a structure to appear sane in an insane world. Yes, there is that tendency. I remember this one woman who had a brain tumor, and because of her brain tumor she lost her sense of I.

Rick: Suzanne Segal?

Eli: Suzanne Segal. Suzanne was a suffering person, filled with fears, anxieties, and a loss of sense of I. The community embraced her as a spiritual teacher, so she seemed to have something to impart, but she didn’t She had a brain tumor, and she ended up dying suffering and afraid. Madness is very different from silence. Silence is sanity. So if you just stop following this train of thought, it may seem like a train wreck, but you end up in silence. And silence has clarity, wisdom, intelligence, sanity. That’s what true sanity is. All of the talking to ourselves is just a kind of madness.

Rick: My wife just wrote me a note saying, “Selfless service keeps you grounded and is a path in and of itself. Seva.”

Eli: Yeah, selfless service is so beautiful. The problem is there’s usually someone trying to do it, and the one who’s trying to do it is the only obstacle to it. And so when you stop trying to do selfless service, your life itself becomes an expression of selfless service.

Rick: That’s another one of those cart and horse conundrums. Because I could argue the flip side and say, “Well, if a person is all just about me, me, me, how can I gratify myself?” That tends to continue to reinforce the ego,

Eli: It does.

Rick: whereas when there really is a selfless service, even if a person is somewhat egotistical to begin with, it can have the effect of diminishing that egotism and putting one in a larger context or perspective than just all about me.

Eli: I just saw Bill Clinton, an interview with Bill Clinton, where he said, “Selfishness is the same as selflessness because really what I’m doing for the world I’m doing for myself.” You could say he’s doing that kind of selfless service, but it’s not diminishing his ego in any way. It’s not making him any more transparent as pure consciousness. Yes, better to be selfless than selfish. Better in your practice to practice selflessly than practice selfishly. But it’s not even about a search for enlightenment. That’s selfish also. It’s really a search for truth. If you search for truth, forget enlightenment. It doesn’t matter.

Rick: Oh, aren’t they synonymous?

Eli: No. A search for truth, it doesn’t matter if you’re enlightened or not. A search for enlightenment isn’t necessarily looking for the truth. It’s looking for me to wake up.

Rick: Yes, but when you actually do, isn’t that truth? And then you realize it’s not the me who woke up? We’re almost at the semantical.

Eli: I’m talking about the search. I’m talking about the search. So if you’re searching for the truth, the truth will set you free. If you’re searching for enlightenment, generally you’re searching for an experience that isn’t here in this moment and you’re going off somewhere else. You’re practicing something or you’re working on something or you’re trying to get somewhere. And so what I’m speaking about is what’s already here that needs no practice and needs no search and that the practice and the search actually obscure the presence of what’s already here. And when you’re willing to find the truth of what’s here, that truth itself sets you free. And then your being itself is selfless service. It is an expression of consciousness. Not because you want it to be or it should be, but just because that’s who you are already.

Rick: Yeah, we spoke earlier of being sense organs of the infinite. In a way we become organs of actions of the infinite.

Eli: That’s right. Your life is an expression of consciousness.

Rick: Serving in whatever way the infinite moves us to serve.

Eli: Exactly. And it’s a mystery. It’s a complete mystery. I never expected to write a book. I’ve written a bunch of books. I never expected to travel. I didn’t like traveling. When my parents took the family to Europe, I didn’t go. I wasn’t interested in traveling. I liked being here in the United States. And I’ve been on the road now for nine months a year for years. I’ve traveled all over the world to places I never expected to go, never wanted to go. And yet, what a mystery it is. It’s really beyond belief.

Rick: Looping back again to another point we brought up in the beginning, here’s a question for you. When seeking ends, do exploration and discovery and deepening end? And before you answer the question, I want to quote a couple of people. Adyashanti said, “Even now with me, the mystery is just beginning, always still beginning.” And Saint Teresa of Ávila said, “The feeling remains that God is on the journey too.” That’s it. You can respond.

Eli: You said several words there that were not necessarily compatible. You don’t need to be seeking for the freshness to be here. The seeking actually overlooks the freshness that’s here.

Rick: Oh, yeah. But my question was, when seeking ends.

Eli: Oh, ok.

Rick: So in other words, when you no longer have that seeking energy anymore, does that necessarily mean that there’s going to be an end to exploration and discovery and refinement and deepening?

Eli: That’s what it is. Exploration is very different from discovery. So you don’t have to explore.

Rick: I see.

Eli: You can realize freshly, deeply, and that happens quite naturally. It’s like you don’t have to be an explorer. You just have to be still.

Rick: So exploration has the connotation of, “I’m still looking for something,”

Eli:Yes.

Rick: whereas discovery has the connotation of just kind of finding things

Eli: That’s it.

Rick: as they present themselves.

Eli: That’s what it is. That’s the difference.

Rick: Yeah, it’s a subtle distinction. I mean, we say Columbus discovered America. He was actually looking for — well, he was looking for India, actually.

Eli: Actually, he was looking for China. He was looking for Cathay.

Rick: Oh, was he?

Eli: And he thought he was just south of China, and that’s why he was in India.

Rick: Aha. Interesting. It seems that Ramana and Papaji had either a belief or an experience in what we would call supernatural beings, such as Shiva, for instance. The mountain was the embodiment of Shiva, and a few minutes ago you referred to Papaji, referred to the realm of the gods and so on. So they kind of acknowledged the existence of these strata of creation,

Eli: Yes.

Rick: which maybe we could even just think of as laws of nature in a subtle sense. Do you feel that there’s — maybe we could discuss that a little bit. I mean, Ramana was devoted not just to the mountain as a mass of stone, but to its function as the embodiment of Shiva, I suppose.

Eli: Yes, yes.

Rick: So how does — and he was well-ripened in his realization, obviously. So what is the significance or relevance of devotion to some higher being or higher power or whatever post-realization?

Eli: Devotion is an act of love. So we stay with what we love. And whatever it is, if it’s your holy mountain, if it’s your — it’s always an embodiment of love. So love loves love. So if Ramana, it’s Shiva is a holy mountain, that’s what he loves. It’s not — the devotion is a practice. It’s not devotion is something…

Rick: A spontaneous expression.

Eli: Yes, it’s just a spontaneous expression of love. And then that’s quite — why not? And everything’s present. There’s so many — how many dimensions are there and how many beings in every dimension? It’s infinite. We can’t know the number of beings. And we have — I don’t know, string theory says, what, 13 dimensions wrapped inside each other. So if there are 13 dimensions of being wrapped inside each other, it’s an infinite possibility of freshness and realization. But you don’t have to search for it.

Rick: No, I wasn’t implying that necessarily.

Eli: Or explore for it.

Rick: Right, but it may be something that blossoms at a certain stage.

Eli: Sure, why not?

Rick: Yeah.

Eli: When I first met my teacher, he took — when I first met Papaji, it was in Haridwar, and I told him he wanted me to do Satsang. And I said, “No, actually, my wife is a Satguru. You have to meet my wife.” And he was like “It’s absurd.” “Wow, is it two of you? “Great.” I said, “But my wife is not a yogi. She’s a goddess, and I have to find the best place for her to stay.” And so we took a train together to Haridwar, because he was going to meet her at the banks of the Ganga. And when we got there, it was Shivayatri. It was a Shiva festival. And so there was loud speakers, Shiva chanting, 24 hours a day for the first few days that we were there. And then, when I was sitting at the bank of the Ganga one night, and suddenly the music went off, the chanting went off, and it became completely still. And I was sitting at the bank of the Ganga meditating, and I could hear the chanting in my head. And when I listened to it and put my attention there, it disappeared. And I heard it on a deeper level. I heard it more subtly, still chanting in my being. And when I put my attention there, it disappeared. That happened on a third level, a very subtle level, where this chanting was still happening. I put my attention there, and it disappeared. And then, as I fell into this blissful emptiness, it’s like this — suddenly a gust of wind came up along the Ganga as it came down towards me. And as it touched me, I became frozen, and I became shivering. I got into like a fetal position. And I felt like Shiva was coming down the river. And as the hymn of Shiva’s cloak touched my being, it’s like suddenly I was plugged into 220 instead of 110. I was like — my whole body became electrified. My hair stood on end. I was shivering and shaking beyond belief, not at meeting Shiva, but at having the hymn of his cloak touch me as it passed. And that was a supernatural event. That was a meeting of Shiva that — I’ve loved Shiva from my first awakening. Shiva has been part of my consciousness. But I don’t worship Shiva. And my heart is with my Satguru, with Papaji. Papaji is an embodiment of Shiva. It’s like Ramana is an embodiment of Shiva.

Rick: Shankara said the intellect imagines duality for the sake of devotion. So you almost have to imagine it to create some kind of dichotomy. Otherwise, it’s all one.

Eli: Yes. That’s what the universe is. It’s the cloak of imagination. So the consciousness can love itself, find itself, be devoted to itself.

Rick: What do you feel is the importance of a teacher? These days, some people brush it off — ah, gurus… And there’s that old saying, “The teacher appears when the student is ready.” Obviously, a teacher has been very important in your life. Do you feel like there are exceptions to that rule? Or ultimately, does everyone kind of really need to have a final teacher to seal the deal?

Eli: You have to have a final teacher. It’s beyond your ego. Now, how that teacher appears, who knows. I was one of those who said, “You don’t need a teacher. Do it yourself.” I was part of the “Do it yourself” movement. And I needed a teacher. I didn’t know that I needed a teacher. I knew I needed somebody more awake than I was to pass on what I didn’t have. And so that’s who I was searching for. I wasn’t searching for a teacher in the sense of a guru. I didn’t want a guru. I was just searching for someone more awake than I was that could transmit to me how to pass on the realization I had realized.

Rick: That’s a guru.

Eli: That’s a guru. And so the last place I looked was India, because I wasn’t interested in gurus. I wasn’t interested in being a devotee. I didn’t like the whole guru scene. So I looked everywhere. When I started my spiritual search, I went to Peru. I went to the back Andes, where I was the first Gringo they’d ever seen. I was looking for a secret, hidden brotherhood somewhere.

Rick: Did you do ayahuasca?

Eli: I did ayahuasca, yeah.

Rick: Back in those days?

Eli: Yeah. And then with the cancer, I got brought to an ayahuasca ceremony.

Rick: Interesting. Now, there’s a question. This is post-awakening. It’s self-realized. And yet you did ayahuasca. So what was the experience of doing ayahuasca in an awakened state?

Eli: I wasn’t looking for it. I was actually looking for my acupuncturist. I went searching for him, and I heard there was this Brazilian shaman in town with him. So I went up to his place, and I got there, and everybody was dressed in white, and they were clearly all very stoned. And I got invited in. They gave me clothes. They put me in white, and they gave me a bunch of ayahuasca to drink, and they all prayed for me for my cancer. So it was a very psychedelic experience, but it was phenomenal.

Rick: Yeah. So in other words, in the midst of that psychedelic experience, there was that silence which…

Eli: Yes, there was a certainty. I was gratified. And I was grateful. I’m so grateful that they put all their energy into praying for me. It was beautiful. And what amazed me about the way they’re using this ayahuasca these days is that after it was over, I was able to drive home that night. I was totally sober. That was mind-blowing to me. Ayahuasca in Peru was very different. We were tripping for three days. You couldn’t drive home that night. I went blind, actually, from it after three days. So it was very different. I mean, beings appeared in the room…

Rick: All that stuff.

Eli: Yeah, different experience. So yeah, why not? I mean, ayahuasca, what’s the problem? LSD, why not? It’s like there’s no rules. There’s no rules. It’s like you drink coffee or you drink tea. You eat chocolate or you don’t. You avoid sugar or you like sugar. What difference does it make?

Rick: Yeah, it’s just that what you put in your body does have an effect on it and on your brain and so on. I got so fried on that stuff back in the ’60s that I have a bit of an aversion, but I’m open-minded to the whole thing. I’m cautious, safety first.

Eli: Well, I say, “Full caution for the winds, man.” Sounds like you’re ready. [Shared laughter] I actually had some guy get in touch with me and offer me to buy me a plane ticket to Peru because he was going down there.

Eli: I’d say LSD is the way, more than ayahuasca, for awakening. There’s an icy clarity to LSD. You don’t get the dreamy-like stuff that you do with ayahuasca.

Rick: What do you feel are the planetary implications of individual enlightenment? I know that since your young days you’ve been a political guy and wanting to change the world in various ways. I suspect that the flavor of that remains, despite your primary orientation just being awakening. But do you feel like there are going to be effects of awakening as it becomes more common on the world?

Eli: That’s been the purpose of my life since I woke up, was to bring the world to peace, that we all live as brothers and sisters in peace. I knew that if everyone had the realization I had, the world would come to peace. So that became my mission. Whether that will actually ever happen, probably not in my lifetime. You never know. These floods of awakening can happen and get wiped out in an instant. Or it could take over and the whole world could wake up. Really, there’s no way of knowing. All you can do is give yourself to it.

Rick: No one really predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall. They took everyone by surprise. Sometimes societal changes [happen suddenly and unexpectedly] Look where we are with civil rights today as compared to the ’60s. That new movie about Jackie Robinson is just coming out. Look what he had to go through. Now most of the star athletes are black. So changes happen.

Eli: Changes happen. And you know the tragedy of that, because I was, as you know, involved fully in the civil rights movement and I gave my life to it. It was my first step towards freedom. I just saw something now where — I forget the movie where the woman says, “Now there’s no more black and white. It’s all green.”

Rick: Environmental?

Eli: No, I mean money.

Rick: Money, money. Oh, of course.

Eli: It’s all money. And so, that’s it. It’s like now everybody has their civil rights, but are they more free? Are they — I mean, better, definitely. Definitely we don’t want apartheid. Definitely. But ultimately, ultimately, it didn’t bring more freedom. It didn’t bring more love. It didn’t bring more peace. And in fact, I found probably more love and more humanity when I was in the segregated ghetto surrounded by the Ku Klux Klan. And you find in a prosperous green community where everybody’s going for the money. So it’s all a mystery how it unfolds.

Rick: Yeah. But the point we’re sort of touching upon, though, is that there does seem to be a kind of a… a bit of an epidemic of spiritual awakening taking place.

Eli: Yes, there is.

Rick: And technologies such as this are helping it to..

Eli: It’s mind-blowing.

Rick: Yeah, and it’s got to have some kind of impact. I mean

Eli: It has had an impact.

Rick: Yeah, already, yeah.

Eli: Sure. I mean, satsang all over the world, people waking up all over the world. It’s really — it’s the first time. And it has to pass from heart to heart. Each person catches fire and passes on the flame. And in that, then it will spread exponentially. And Weatherman used to have a slogan about a prairie fire. It takes a single spark to start a prairie fire. And that’s really what this is. It’s the spark has been lit. It’s alive in so many hearts, and it’s passing from heart to heart. And so already the world has changed. I mean, there’s now yoga in every corner, and people meditating, and the Internet having every teaching possible. People are waking up. That’s so beautiful. That’s what we’re here to support.

Rick: So what do you feel your track record has been? You’ve been teaching for, I don’t know, 20 years or something. Do you find that a lot of your students, a certain healthy percentage, have woken up in the sense that you define it? Are you satisfied with the results?

Eli: You know, satisfied with the results, I’d say I’m blown away that people have woken up. It’s true. It’s people have woken up, people, ordinary people, people you never would have expected. The least likely people have woken up and have stayed awake over a period of time and are now teaching and passing it on. That’s mind-blowing to me. And never the ones I expected to be. I mean, people from very straight, Republican, ordinary lives that have not had practice, not had psychedelics, not had yoga or teachers, wake up and stay awake and stay true to their realization.

Rick: Did they stay Republican?

Eli: No. [laughter]

Rick: Atta boy. I have a few friends.

Eli: The world’s changing right there.

Rick: Yeah. I have a few friends who have been on a spiritual journey for decades and they’re still very conservative politically. It boggles my mind. I don’t get it. But variety is the spice of life, I guess.

Eli: It’s a mystery. It’s all really a mystery.

Rick: Great. Well, that’s all the questions I had written down. I’ve kind of been thinking about this for a while and I wanted to draw some new points out of you that we hadn’t discussed in the previous interview. Is there anything… How’s your health? Is the cancer still in remission?

Eli: You know, it’s not called remission, but, yeah, the cancer’s manageable. I’ve stopped doing my chemotherapy after five years of chemotherapy.

Rick: Oh, great. You don’t have to do it anymore.

Eli: Well, we’ll see. Nobody knows. It’s like the radical intervention by these doctors worked so that now — it used to be everybody would be dead by now. I’m still alive, so who knows how it will play out.

Rick: That’s great.

Eli: Yeah, I’m happy. I’m healthy. I really appreciate you for being part of this global awakening that’s happening and for helping to spread the message around so that everybody can wake up.

Rick: Thanks. I’m doing what I feel is something I can do to make a contribution. It’s kind of like various skills that I’ve developed over the course of my life have just all come together to enable me to do this: computer skills and spiritual things and public speaking experience and all that stuff. It just feels like the next logical thing to do.

Eli: It’s beautiful. That’s how we all get used in our own particular way. We each have our own particular strengths of mind and character and purpose. We all get used in this universal play of consciousness awakening to itself.

Rick: Yeah. Great. Well, keep at it. I hope you stay healthy and happy well into your 80s, if not 90s.

Eli: I expected to die before I was 30, you know. So it’s all a mystery to me. I never — I’m an old man. Who ever would have guessed? I mean, I live my life as many of us did in the 60s. I said, “Hey, I’m not going to be 30. I’m never going to make it there.”

Rick: Right. Never trust anyone over 30.

Eli: That’s it. So live your life now fully. And so in that, here I am, an old man. What a mystery. What a surprise. So thank you for keeping the light alive and passing it on from heart to heart.

Rick: Yeah. Let me make a few concluding remarks. I’ve been speaking with Eli Jackson Bear, and this is an ongoing series of interviews. So if this happens to be the first one you’ve seen, at this point there are about 170 others you can see at the time. You’ll find them all at batgap.com. And there also you will find a link to a podcast, if you prefer to listen to this kind of stuff in audio rather than sit in front of your computer. You will find a chat group that crops up around each interview and gets quite lively at times, as well as a sort of a general discussion group. There is also a donate button, which I appreciate people clicking if they have the inclination and ability. And there’s a link to signing up for a newsletter to be notified each time a new interview is posted, which is about once a week. So that about does it. So Eli, thanks again. Give my love to Gangaji.

Eli: I will. Thank you, Rick.

Rick: Yeah. I hope to meet you in person one of these days.

Eli: That’d be nice.

Rick: Yeah. And to those who have been listening or watching. We’ll see you next week.

Eli: May all beings be happy and free. Thank you.

Rick: Thank you.

Eli: Namaste.

Rick: Namaste.