Enza Vita Interview

Summary

The conversation explores spiritual experiences, realization, and the difference between transcending personal identity and embodying divine awareness in everyday life. It also examines how suffering, compassion, spiritual practice, and the uniqueness of individual experience fit within a nondual understanding.

Questions This Interview Explores

• What is the difference between self-realization and God-realization?
• Does spiritual awakening mean becoming detached from feelings and ordinary life?
• Is spiritual practice necessary if everyone is already inherently free?
• How can unusual spiritual experiences be understood without confusing them with mental illness?

Key takeaways

• Realization is not the end of growth but the beginning of deeper integration.
• Transcendence must be brought back into ordinary life through love, compassion, and participation.
• Nonduality includes both unity and the reality of distinct people and experiences.
• Awakening does not erase feelings, relationships, suffering, or care for others.
• Spiritual practice can arise naturally, even when no separate practitioner is ultimately found.
• Denying personal suffering with lofty ideas can delay genuine transformation.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer, and this is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. There have been nearly 300 of them now, and if you’d like to check out the archives, go to batgap.com. There’s also a donate button there, which I always mention at the beginning of interviews in case people don’t make it to the end, because this whole thing depends upon and relies upon the support of people who enjoy listening to it.

My guest today is Enza Vita. Enza is in Adelaide, Australia, where it is almost midnight now, and she heroically has stayed up late and drunk more coffee than she’s accustomed to drinking at this hour in order to participate in this conversation.

I met Enza about three or four years ago at the Science and Nonduality Conference. At that time, it was in San Rafael, California. She came to a presentation that I was moderating, which you can find on Batgap. It was a panel discussion with—well, it doesn’t matter, it’s a panel discussion—and she was noticeable in the audience. She was very bright, and afterward she came up and participated in a very deep conversation with one of the participants in the panel.

And so I met her husband or partner, Leo Drioli, who is a musician, and the two of them had flown all the way over. I always had it in the back of my mind that I’d like to interview Enza, and finally we’re doing it. So, welcome, and thank you.

Enza: Thank you.

Rick: And it’s good we waited, because in the years since we met, you’ve written this book, Always Already Free, which I read in its entirety this week and really enjoyed.

Enza: Yes. Actually, that book was ready five years ago; it just never got published until now.

Rick: But I hear you were something of a perfectionist in terms of really making sure it was clear.

Enza: That’s how the book started, basically. It wasn’t meant to be a book. All it was was just my journals that I kept as I was going through different experiences prior to realization and after realization.

Basically, one day Leo said, “Can I see what you’ve been writing in those journals?” I showed him some, and he said, “You know, they’re good. You should consider getting them published.”

Obviously, they were just jumbled-up notes of everything. In the middle of it, there were quotes from Nisargadatta and quotes from other teachers. I also have the bad habit that when I hear something from somebody or in a book, I write it down in my journal. Sometimes I don’t even give it credit.

So it was a little bit of a mess, trying to get rid of all this stuff. I had Jennifer, my really trusty assistant. I went to her, she typed it all, and she put it through different copy-editing, making sure everything was correct. She would say, “Miss Enza, we found another one.” She meant that it wasn’t mine. I said, “Oh, who is it this time? Nisargadatta? I knew that I didn’t write that.”

Anyway, I went through a process like that of trying to get rid of all this stuff. But then it was still very thick, and some of the material wasn’t really appropriate anymore because I had changed. So I kept on revising and revising and revising it until it got to the present format.

Rick: Good. Well, I thought it was really clear. Lately I’ve been in the habit of just reading people’s books or listening to their talks and stuff and not taking a lot of notes. I just kind of feel like I get to know them by reading their book or listening to their other talks and interviews. So that’s what I did.

As I read, if you had been sitting in the room, we could have had conversations about just about every page in the book, because there are all sorts of interesting points that come up, some of which concur with my experience and understanding and some of which differed a little bit. I thought, “Well, I’d like to question her about that.” But I think all this will come out during the course of this conversation.

So you’re from Sicily originally, which is an island off the southern coast of Italy, and it’s part of Italy. It’s where the Mafia is from.

Enza: Yes. You want me to start with that?

Rick: You might as well start. So the Pope said the Mafia can’t be considered good Catholics anymore.

Enza: Yeah, we do have the Mafia. Actually, I wasn’t going to talk about this, but some relatives in my family were involved. We never were, because my dad didn’t really belong to it. It usually passes through the male lineage. My dad married my mom and he wanted to have nothing to do with it.

But actually, I remember my grandmother being visited by some guys when I was a kid, and he seemed like a very nice guy. I found out afterward that he wasn’t that nice.

Rick: So you grew up in Sicily, and there’s a pattern that I have recognized among many people I’ve interviewed, and other spiritual people that I know, which is that very often they have stuff going on when they’re little kids. They don’t necessarily have a normal childhood; they have unusual experiences.

My explanation for that would be that we all come into this life at varying degrees of spiritual evolution—some very highly evolved, some maybe close to realization, some very far from it—probably due to development in past lives. Therefore, some kids are just inclined to be different from their peers and to have interesting spiritual experiences at a very young age.

Enza: Well, I definitely was different, and my family didn’t really understand what was going on.

Actually, when I was probably five or six years old, they took me to a psychologist because one of my dad’s sisters had some sort of mental illness. They were obviously very afraid that that’s what was going on with me, because I would be talking about lights and out-of-body experiences. I didn’t use those words; I didn’t know what they were. I would be talking about lucid dreaming, where I would be awake in the dream state, and so they thought there was something wrong with this child.

As a kid, it was actually traumatic for me to see how worried my parents were, and I decided that I wasn’t going to talk about my experiences after that time. My mom was crying and worried that there was something wrong with me, so I zipped it from then on because I thought I couldn’t really talk about it.

But I had all sorts of experiences like that. First of all, I thought everybody was having them. But when I talked to my sisters or my friends, that wasn’t happening.

I also had what you might call memories of past lives. I didn’t know back then what they were, but I saw monks with red robes whom I had never seen before.

See, I grew up in this little village. There were only about 1,400 people, and we didn’t even have a library. I used to catch the bus to go to school, so there was absolutely nothing. There was a church and there was the local priest, and that was the closest I could get to spirituality.

I would love to sneak back into the church, even when nobody was there. We had this really old priest, and he wasn’t very friendly. He was like, “What are you doing here? Go home.”

After he left, there was a young, friendly priest. So he became my first teacher. I would go there and ask questions, and he was very nice. He would just try to answer however he could. But eventually, even he had to say, “Okay, just one question.” So I had to think really carefully about which question I wanted to ask.

Rick: So you were full of questions?

Enza: I was full of questions, because I was having all these experiences and nobody seemed to know what they were.

Rick: What sort of experiences were you having?

Enza: Well, apart from the experiences I had every night, I would go over the roofs of the houses in this sort of transparent ball. I would also sneak out at night onto the roof, sit there, and just look at the stars. I would feel so amazing. I would fall asleep there sometimes and wake up in the morning.

I would have lucid dreams where I would be awake in the dream. There wasn’t much difference between my normal everyday life and the dream state. I would be fully awake.

Rick: And this was pretty young—five or six years old?

Enza: Very young. Also, I was a pretty strange child. When I was born, the nerve of one eye was damaged, and by the age of one, that eye was blind. It is still blind, so I can see a little bit. But back then, the eye also became cross-eyed.

In Sicily, there is this belief that people who have this sort of condition, because they can’t see, actually have psychic powers. So together with what they heard about the experiences I was having—I was talking when I was little, because I didn’t know that I had to shut up—I was like the little witch of the village.

Rick: It’s a good thing it wasn’t a few hundred years earlier.

Enza: No. Well, and that’s the thing: when you’re a girl and you have, I guess, a facial disfigurement, back then it wasn’t socially accepted either.

In retrospect, and through the way the kids teased me and stuff like that, I realized that it made me closer to people who were different, who were imperfect, because I considered myself imperfect because of this problem.

I realized that everybody felt imperfect in some way or another, and that this one was just an exterior thing. It just showed how everybody felt there was something wrong with them. So it was a great gift and a great teacher.

Rick: It’s interesting, the whole thing about insanity and spirituality, and how sometimes they’re mistaken for one another. Some people might have thought you were crazy.

I know in my own life, my mother actually did go insane and spent years in mental hospitals, but she was also a very spiritual person. This all started with her messing around with a Ouija board. Then she thought she was talking to her mother, and she started seeing auras around things. She started seeing auras around trees and everything, and yet she was really flipping out.

Did you ever have times when not only your friends, but you yourself, thought that maybe you were kind of going crazy because you were in such a different state?

Enza: Not when I was young. Later in life, just prior to my realization, there was a period in my life when things were going on in my mind that I felt were scary. I would tell one of my teachers, “I feel like I’m going nuts,” because at night I would watch my mind spinning by itself. I was just watching it, and I couldn’t do anything about it.

Rick: Was that when you were asleep or awake?

Enza: Awake, fully awake. I would just see the mind machine going faster and faster and faster and faster, as if I was almost locked out. So I was having all these strange experiences leading up to the realization.

Rick: Yeah, well, we might be getting a little bit ahead of ourselves, but it seems to me, from what I’ve observed over the years—and probably you have too—that realization necessitates and actually can be defined as a huge transformation. When you go from point A to point B, from an ordinary state to a realized state, all kinds of stuff has to get rearranged in your psychology, your physiology, and everything. Sometimes that can be quite tumultuous.

Enza: It is, and still is. I’m still going through some of that, some of the remains of that, because as that realization comes into the body, people think that the realization of our transcendental state is it, that it’s finished. So you go up the mountain and you have all these amazing experiences. You can have amazing experiences; some people don’t. Your mind stops, your thoughts stop, you’re blissed out all the time, and all this stuff. So it’s very easy for us to think that we’ve reached the ultimate state, but it’s not the end.

The transcendental state is just the first bit.

Rick: In a way, it’s just the beginning.

Enza: It’s just the beginning, yeah. It’s just the beginning. In the first few years after my realization, after the first stage, I guess—the realization of my transcendental nature—all I wanted to do was actually sit in my backyard and just immerse myself in this amazing love. I think that’s what people do, and they think, “This is it. This is the end.”

But it’s almost like you’re allowed to stay there for a little while, and then something within yourself—if we’re talking like that, if we’re talking in dual terms—then we say the Divine says, “Ah, time to get back, time to go, time to descend back from the mountain into the worlds of time and space.”

Rick: And I’m reminded of the Zen ox-herding pictures. You’ve probably seen those, the different stages. There’s the transcendental stage where there’s nothing to be seen anymore; it’s just a blank canvas. But then eventually the guy comes back into the marketplace riding the ox, with a big smile on his face.

Enza: Yes, yes, and the descent is very important because, you know, first you resist, because you don’t want to leave the space of absolute beauty.

You descend, and as you descend, you don’t descend as a god; you descend as a human being, and you take on again the garments of human limitations. So you start feeling the fears, you start feeling the thoughts, you start feeling the emotions. But now you know that all thoughts and all emotions are not arising in a separate person here called Enza; they’re arising in that one being in which everything shares.

And so when we realize that, I guess our life takes on a deep value and sacredness, because we realize that the Divine is experiencing itself as everything—as the world, in and as the world, in and as all others, and in and as us.

And I guess when that happened, with the descent and also with the conscious suffering—because up until now we have suffered, but the suffering was mostly unconscious—and when we choose to come back and be a conscious participant in that divine play, then something else starts happening. I guess a love and compassion that doesn’t come from the body-mind unit, but comes from that source, starts coming in.

And when this love and compassion marries with the power of transcendence, it becomes like the divine impulse—the will and the wish to help other people into the realization of their highest potential, which is enlightenment.

So the transcendental state is just the first bit. There has to be that maturity that then sees the Divine in everything, and I guess this is what we call true bhakti. True bhakti is the love that sees the beloved everywhere. This is when it starts really maturing, because then we are conscious participants in life, or in all of life. We are the transcendental, but we are also everything here, and there’s no separation.

Rick: There’s a lot of great stuff in what you just said. I was reminded of a Rumi quote where Rumi says, “God sleeps in the rock, dreams in the plant, stirs in the animal, and awakens in the human being.”

Enza: That’s right.

✨ Self-realization and God-realization

Rick: And the implication is that God is immanent, God is all-pervading in creation, in all those things, but these different mediums—rock, plant, animal, human—have different capacities to reflect or express the Divine. Somehow, I was reminded of that as you were speaking.

And it’s funny, because before we started, I was remembering a conversation that you were having with Mark McCooey at the Science and Nonduality Conference, after our little presentation. I overheard you guys talking about God-consciousness as opposed to self-realization, at least that’s what I thought you were talking about.

Your friend Leanne from Adelaide sent in the question: “Do you believe the terms self-realization and God-realization are the same states? If not, how do you see the difference?” And I think you’ve kind of just laid it out, because you were saying that there is a transcendental phase, which is like self-realization, but then it seems to have matured into a much more devotional, divine-oriented, service-oriented, Divine-in-the-world kind of orientation. Do you want to elaborate on those points?

Enza: Well, we seem to think that realization is somehow bringing the story of the me, of the separate self that we believe ourselves to be, to a satisfactory conclusion. But actually, what happens is that it is realized that the me that we believe ourselves to be—the separate person—is not an aware being.

Rick: Not a what?

Enza: It’s not an aware being.

Rick: An aware being, I see.

Enza: Yes. The only aware being is the one being in which everyone shares, in which everything shares. So that’s the only aware being. This aware being expresses itself through everything—the world, stars, you and me, everything.

And so, when people say there is no one here, I guess that’s true in one sense: there is no separate person. And I guess that’s God-realization; there is only one being.

When people talk about nonduality, they think that means just one, one, one thing. But nonduality is that we are that one being, but we are also everything else as well. Both apply.

Rick: There’s a line from the Incredible String Band that you just reminded me of, which was, “Light that is one, though the lamps be many.”

So it wouldn’t be true to say there are no lamps. Rather, it’s the same light shining through all lamps, but that doesn’t mean there are no lamps.

Would you agree that it’s not true to say there are no people, that your children are an illusion or something? It’s like, okay, you are a person, but just not only a person. There’s a much vaster reality to what you essentially are, but that sort of shines through the person.

Enza: Absolutely. There is a huge difference between saying that there is no one here—which, in a way, is narcissistic and insensitive to others and also to the beauty of the world—and actually realizing that directly in a way that opens the heart and dissolves the apparent separation between transcendental and ordinary reality.

Realization doesn’t mean that we are disconnected from our feelings.

Rick: That’s nice. Yeah, because there are teachers running around, or who have been saying that sort of thing. If someone comes to them with a heart-rending story like, “My child got hit by a car,” they might actually respond by saying, “There is no child, there is no car… this is just a story, nothing happened.” Maybe on some ultimate level that’s true, but it’s not the whole picture.

Enza: No, definitely not. Realization doesn’t mean that we are disconnected from our feelings. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have any feelings or that we’re disconnected from the world.

It’s not as if we are sitting in this space where there is nothing, where we don’t have to care about anything. Who wants to become that? Who wants to become that kind of an idiot?

And so the point is that, of course, there are people, and all this is happening, and it’s all one being. Ultimately, it’s all one being experiencing itself through everything.

Rick: No, that’s okay. I can, or you can keep going. I mean, how could it be anything other than one being? Because if we analyze anything, what is this? It’s paper. But then what is paper? Okay, it’s molecules. What are they? They’re atoms. What are atoms? They’re subatomic particles. What are they?

Well, you get down to something that’s not even physical. And you know that some scientists actually call it the vacuum state. Some scientists, such as John Hagelin, who was in that presentation I referred to, equate it with consciousness and make a really good argument that the essential nature of what appears to be physical is consciousness. That is obviously your essential nature.

But having gone through all that, that is not to say there is no book and that we couldn’t read this book and get something from it. So there’s kind of a both-and appreciation of the universe.

Enza: Yeah. And there are obviously paths and teachers that say that there is nothing that we, as the separate person, can do to awaken. And this, of course, is absolutely true.

But if there is still a person there, if we’re still identified with the apparent person, then to say that there is nothing, or there is nothing to do, or that we’re already enlightened, is like deluding ourselves and just putting a veneer of lofty thoughts over our suffering—our suffering of separation.

Usually, I find that these people are even in a worse position than they were before they started seeking, because now they have started with the denial of their suffering. They just live in a world where disconnection is interpreted as peace.

And sooner or later—God is always very merciful—sooner or later, our suffering will resurface in full measure, and we will be forced to confront what we thought we had left behind. So it’s just a stage.

Rick: Yeah, it’s a stage that some people stay in for a long time, but it’s a stage. And actually, in the big picture of things, considering how vast the span of time really is, I guess it’s not a long time—just a blink of an eye.

But yeah, I run into these people who say there’s nothing to do. Usually, what they do—I don’t know—it becomes sort of an excuse not to do anything, really. If you think there’s nothing to do, then, well, you’ve got to do something, so you might as well get on the internet and start telling other people there’s nothing to do.

Enza: Yes, yeah. I always see them. They even come sometimes on my Facebook, and there are little wars on Facebook or social media between the two camps: “There is nothing to do” and “You have to do something.”

And even this is a stage, because I guess when you see that everything is that, then you lose interest in telling people, for example, that they are doing bowing and mantras. These people say, “Oh, well, that’s a dual practice.” But it’s like you don’t care about telling them that these practices are not necessary. At the same time, you don’t go around telling the real radical nondualist that says there is no practice that practice can be as natural as breathing.

So everyone is trying to find their path, and every path is valid for that particular individual.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, sometimes I say, well, people say, “Well, you shouldn’t do any practice because it reinforces the notion of a practitioner.” And I respond, “Well, then you shouldn’t eat because it reinforces the notion of an eater.”

Enza: That’s right. There are two provenance stories: you have to meditate to get enlightened, or you don’t have to meditate. In some places they tell us, “Oh, you just need to drop the search, drop it, because you’re already there,” like some type of enlightenment or declaration, I guess. It might work for some, but I guess for me it didn’t work. I just traveled the road of suffering, seeking, and studying, and then one day it came to an end.

Rick: And then you dropped the search. It dropped itself.

Enza: That’s right. Yeah, and I guess ultimately awareness, our true nature, accepts everything. If somebody says that practice is needed, usually awareness will say, “Yeah, okay.” If somebody says the practice is not needed, awareness is able to embrace paradox and say, “It’s not needed.” Only the mind can’t do that.

I guess this is the point: if we are in a state where something has been excluded, whether it’s the ordinary world or something else, this is a good sign that we’re probably still in a dualistic state, even though we might think that we’ve reached the ultimate.

Rick: Yes, I meant to mention a Ramana Maharshi quote. First of all, he was fond of using the old saying, “It takes a thorn to remove a thorn,” meaning that even though ultimately practices might not make sense or be necessary, they have a function at a certain stage.

But he also said that it’s a very rare individual who is just on the brink of realization and doesn’t need to do anything. For the vast majority, there are all sorts of things that one might benefit from and make progress through.

Enza: Yeah, I mean, Ramana Maharshi basically would give people the ultimate truth at first. He would tell people that there is nothing to do, but not everyone could immediately understand that.

Rick: A small minority.

Enza: Yeah. If that wouldn’t happen, then he would give them other things: mantras, meditations, and so on.

Rick: Shankara talks about the fact that not everyone is ready for jnana yoga, or the highest non-dual teaching. Various types of service and meditation and practices—karma yoga and different things—can purify one to the point where the highest teaching becomes appropriate.

Again, people might hear this and say, “Yeah, but there’s nothing to do. Why should we go through all these stages, purification, and all that stuff? It’s all one. It’s all… Nothing is real,” yada, yada, yada, yada.

But you remember that thing at the Science and Nonduality Conference that you attended? One of the main points was based on this Tibetan saying: “Don’t mistake understanding for realization.” And then the second part was, “Don’t mistake realization for liberation.”

I guess we’re dwelling on this because it is somewhat popular and common to read a lot of books, get good with the words, and then somehow convince yourself that you’re actually living what all these words are referring to.

Enza: No, it’s not the same. If this is only intellectually understood, it’s not going to remove the separations. It’s just going to be a temporary measure, and eventually the separation is going to surface again.

🛤️ Past lives and finding a path

Rick: Let’s backtrack a bit. You left home at the age of 17 because you had an aunt in Alice Springs and you decided to go there. You didn’t speak a word of English, and your parents didn’t want you to go. You were too young and everything, but you insisted, and so finally you went.

Enza: That confirmed to my village that I was crazy.

Rick: And then you just got odd jobs, washing dishes and this and that. Tell the story a little bit about how you eventually found a spiritual book and learned English by studying a spiritual book and looking up the words in a dictionary.

Enza: Yes. When I was little, one of the things that I used to do was draw two symbols. I didn’t know what they were, but if you go to my house, they’re carved into every wall and on the roof, everywhere. There were two symbols there, and I kept drawing them and saying to my parents and my friends, “I have to remember these two symbols. They’re very important.”

When I got to Alice Springs at 17, I was walking down Todd Street, which was the only road—it didn’t even have asphalt; it was just a dirt road—with my cousin. There was a tiny little shop, and I looked in the shop window. There was a book, and on the cover of the book there was one of the symbols that I’d been drawing since I was a little child. He and I bought the book.

Rick: It was like a mandala or a lotus or something?

Enza: It was a lotus flower. There were two symbols. One was what I know now to be the lotus flower, the thousand-petaled lotus. I kept drawing it, going on and on and on forever, until it would go off the page.

The other one was a geometric shape that I used to call the diamond. I’ve got an idea now what that is, but I know that I brought them back from past lives where I had been in Tibet and India—different past lives that I lived there. I know that this sounds crazy to some people who don’t believe in past lives.

Rick: Well, to this audience, I think it doesn’t sound crazy. People are used to the idea. Although, since we’ve been talking about the radical non-dualist perspective, some of them say there couldn’t be past lives because there’s no person. If you’re going to have multiple lives, who is this person that’s having them? That’s not possible.

But that sort of denies the whole notion that there are relative realities, or at least apparent relative realities, and that there are subtle relative realities as well as gross ones. If the physical body dies, there’s still a subtle body, which doesn’t die, and you can go into another physical body. So it seems pretty logical to me.

Enza: Yes, yes.

Rick: And so you remember some of those past lives. You must have been doing spiritual practices and living spiritual lives and all that in past lives.

Enza: Yes, I remember some really hard lives I lived, you know—one in particular.

Rick: Austere.

Enza: Very austere, yeah. In one, I was a sadhu living in a mountain and just eating grass. I was so skinny. You couldn’t even tell whether I was a man or a woman.

Another one that really affected me in this life was that I was a wandering monk in a group that never stayed anywhere. We had nothing. We just begged and went around like that, praying and devoted to God.

I was a young man, and I did everything. I was so devoted. I loved God so much. But then, when it was time for me to die, I remember lying down on the ground. Some of the other monks went near me, and my last few words were to the old monk: “I’ve done everything for God. I’ve sacrificed everything, and he has never visited me.”

I was heartbroken. I died heartbroken because I’d done everything for his love, and I never got it. I think that had an effect in this life that surfaced in my teenage years, where there was a bit of rebellion against God.

Rick: Well, you’re getting it now, though. And it’s interesting because, on God’s time, a human lifetime is the snap of a finger. Here you are dying, saying, “I’ve never gotten God’s love,” and God is patiently just overseeing the universe. And in the snap of a finger, here you are realizing God.

Enza: And on another level, time and space—it’s all happening at the same time.

Rick: In a fresh body.

Enza: Yeah. And on another level, time and space—it’s all happening at the same time.

Rick: Speaking of sadhus, this friend of mine who lives in the Himalayas sent me a nice little story. He said that there’s a beautiful sadhu in Gangotri—Gangotri is way up in the Himalayas near the source of the Ganges—who loves your Buddha at the Gas Pump stuff. He lives in Gangotri year-round much of the time with no electricity. His kutya, which is a little hut, is buried in snow, but somehow he found your site and loves it. So hello to that guy if he’s watching.

Enza: Fantastic.

Rick: So when you had these memories of past lives, was it like you were walking down the street and all of a sudden you had a memory? Were you meditating, or how did these memories come to you?

Enza: Both. Sometimes they would come in dreams, lucid dreaming. I was having that since I was a little kid. Sometimes they were like lucid dreams, and sometimes it was just like remembering something—like when you remember something from childhood and it just comes. You see the old thing, and you can go in there, and it’s real. There is no difference.

Some of them came through meditation, meditation retreats, and things like that.

Rick: Okay, so you’re walking down the street in Alice Springs, you saw this book with a lotus on it, and you bought the book and started figuring out how to read English. How did things progress from there?

Enza: Well, after that I was on it, and then I moved to Adelaide. Basically, over the years I flirted with and fell in love with lots of spiritual traditions. I know that people tell you that you’re meant to stick to one thing, but that wasn’t my case. What happened is that it seemed like the right teacher and the right teaching would appear, and all that I needed to do was stay open and just work as hard and as sincerely as I could.

And they did appear. They were very varied, from Nada Yoga to Dzogchen to Sufism, Tibetan altars and shamanic things, and Aboriginal spirituality. One of my cousins is married to a full-blood Aboriginal, and somehow I got a little bit of a taste of that. It was great. I was actually blessed to be able to do that because it gave me the opportunity to see that one truth that sits at the core of every path.

It taught me not to cling to one way or one idea of it. In some of my past lives, I remember that I’ve done that, where I stuck to one idea, grabbed one concept, and stuck to it. I vowed never to do that again. I guess that has been the gift of being able to see this truth in so many different traditions.

📚 The teacher, the student, and spiritual energy

Rick: There’s a saying that you should dig one deep hole rather than a dozen shallow holes, but here’s another way of looking at it: take a dozen tools to dig one hole. That’s kind of what you did.

Enza: It’s almost like I didn’t do it. I didn’t go out of my way. It’s like the teachers would just appear.

We’ve been publishing different magazines since 1998—spiritual magazines. For example, one particular teacher was a dervish, a Sufi mystic from Iran. We met him at a Vipassana retreat.

After the Vipassana retreat, he was just wandering around the world, like they do. They’re similar to the wandering monks of India. We started talking about his love for Rumi, and Leo had this dream that he wanted to get a poem of Rumi’s in the Farsi language and translate it. Obviously, we don’t know Farsi.

Suddenly, while talking to this guy—we didn’t know he was a dervish or anything like that, a Sufi mystic—somehow the subject came up. He said, “Yes, I love Rumi, and I can speak Farsi.” Then he said, “When can I move in?” That’s what he said to us, and he did move in.

He lived in our house for probably six to eight months, and it was amazing. We would be woken up at three o’clock in the morning because he wanted to teach us different practices. Even though we were familiar with some Sufi practices, we didn’t know about some of these particular practices that he was showing us.

One was the obvious one, the twirling, but there were some other practices that were quite secret, and somehow he was passing them on. He was a strange man in the sense that a dervish is meant to be always very humble and never show how advanced they are. That’s the old tradition, and so he never showed it. He was always saying, “Oh, this is just the grace of my master, my teacher, my guru.”

But when he spoke to his guru on the phone, his face became luminous. Sometimes, when he was in the backyard and thought that nobody was watching, I would see that his face was luminous and his eyes were full of love. As soon as he would see me, he would say, “Oh, I was just watching the tree.” It was lovely.

Rick: That points to an interesting principle, or an interesting point, which is that the sincerity and ardency of one’s search often correlate with the fullness of the results—at least, that’s what I’ve seen.

People who are sort of lackadaisical about it—“Whatever, maybe I’ll meditate someday or read a book”—don’t get much. But people who are just on fire usually end up having much more profound realizations.

Enza: You know, people tend to worry more about the teacher: Is this a good teacher? Does she have the right career? Do they have the right lineage? But it’s really nothing to do with the teacher. It’s to do with the student, how earnest they are.

It’s almost as if the teacher is there to help. Personally, my way of teaching is that I try to tune in to the person and help them discover what they need. I feel that sometimes, if a teacher tells someone what to do, it just doesn’t work.

Rick: There’s a story from the Mahabharata where Arjuna, the great warrior, had this great archery teacher. His archery teacher was supposed to be the best, and Arjuna made the teacher promise him that he would make him the best archer in the world.

But the archery teacher had this other student named Dhruvya, and Dhruvya was a very sincere and dedicated student. He kept getting better and better and better at archery, to the point where he was beating Arjuna.

Arjuna said, “Hey, teacher, you made me this promise. You’ve got to get rid of this guy.” So the teacher had to abide by his promise. He sent Dhruvya away, and Dhruvya built a statue of the teacher. He worshiped the statue, dedicated himself to it, and kept practicing archery.

He got to the point where he was really good—way better than Arjuna—just from having the statue as his teacher. But it was really his determination as a student that yielded the results.

Enza: Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. After realization, there is definitely an energy that comes through the body of the realized individual, but this energy has nothing to do with the teacher. It’s not something that you can turn on and off.

What I’ve noticed is that this energy is sometimes very strong. When it’s very strong coming through this body, Leo can’t even sit next to me or sleep in the same bed. It upsets him too much; it stirs him up.

But it’s nothing to do with me. It’s not a conscious thing. I’ve noticed that this energy seems to respond to the openness of the other person to this energy.

Sometimes I look at someone and my eye starts watering, they feel really hot, and I know that there is this energy. But I know that it’s the other person who is drawing it out. It has nothing to do with me—honestly, nothing. That’s the pure truth.

It reminds me a bit of something that women who have breastfed probably relate to. When I was in my twenties and had my child, I was breastfeeding him. The child was in another room, and as soon as I heard him crying, the milk started flowing.

It was nothing to do with me thinking, “Now I have to feed the baby.” It’s just inbuilt; it’s spontaneous. It works the same way with this energy.

Rick: The principle here, obviously, is that it’s the openness and willingness of the student that elicits the giving from the teacher. That’s the principle you’re trying to make.

Enza: Yes. And it’s not from the teacher. It’s the giving from that divine impulse that, once awakened, can awaken anybody who is ready to be awakened.

Rick: It’s like a reservoir of water—a great, big reservoir. If you put a drinking straw up to it, not very much water can flow. If you put a bigger pipe up to it, then more water can flow. If you put a great, big pipe there, then a lot of water can flow.

The reservoir is the same, but a lot depends on how big the pipe is, so to speak—how receptive the student is.

Enza: Yes. The role of the teacher really is to try to be out of the way as much as possible, to open up to this energy and let it do what it wants to do instead of trying to direct it.

The teacher is just a vehicle.

Rick: So this brings up a beautiful point: What is a teacher but just divine consciousness, a vehicle, we could say, through which divine consciousness can flow unimpeded?

You just said, “Be out of the way,” and most people are kind of in the way of divine consciousness. They’re not really an obstacle-free conduit through which divine consciousness can flow and express.

Enza: Yeah, and it’s never-ending, this process. It’s not as if, after a realization, I have to be the perfect conduit for God. You just learn, and you keep stretching and keep growing. There’s no end to the process.

👁️ Lucid dreaming and instant presence

Rick: A question came in from Dan in

London: “You have talked a bit about lucid dreaming. I have also had a lot of lucid dreaming as a child and always wondered how it was different from waking reality. In later years, I’ve realized that perhaps the exploration of lucid dreams can be a tool to explore reality. Do you think that lucid dreaming can be a tool to be used on the path to enlightenment? And if so, how might this be the case?”

Enza: Absolutely. Lucid dreaming is a very valuable tool on the path of awakening. There are some traditions that I’ve studied, like Dzogchen, where it’s a big part of waking up, mainly because we can get a glimpse of our nature more easily in lucid dreaming than we can in ordinary life. More or less, the mind is out of the way, and our nature is more directly accessible.

Also, when we start having regular lucid dreams, we start realizing that there’s no difference between a lucid dream and ordinary life. It’s the same. It’s all one thing. It’s all one consciousness.

Rick: Yeah, the most powerful and dramatic awakening I ever had was in a dream, actually. It was really profound.

Enza: We tend to dismiss dreams, but in some traditions, like Dzogchen, they’re actually used very much for unfoldment and awakening.

Rick: It would seem that during dreams, or even during sleep, if sleep is wakeful, there’s a much more innocent state where there’s much less tendency to be controlling or gripping.

Enza: Yes, yes. The mind has got less power.

Rick: So would you actually advocate somehow cultivating the ability to dream lucidly as a practice?

Enza: What I actually do is tune in to what people need, and I help them discover for themselves what they need for the next step. I find that this is the best way.

Rick: So it may be lucid dreaming, but it may be something else.

Enza: Yes, yes.

Rick: In your book, and I think maybe also in your talk with Jerry Katz, I heard you talking a lot about effort versus non-effort and how, as you understand meditation, it’s a very effortless, natural process.

Enza: I’ve attended many meditation retreats in the past with different traditions. Sometimes you look at a person and they’re all very genuine, but you see some who are sitting there very rigid. Their faces are really hard, and you think they’re trying to do something. You can see it in their face. They’re just trying to nail something down.

On the other side, you have some meditators who are really loose and relaxed. Some almost fall asleep, and they’ve got this strange smile on their face. You think, “Oh, they must be having good dreams.”

There is something in common with these two types. The minute that you brush them or touch them on the shoulder, or there is a sudden noise in the room, they jump, startled. To me, this is proof that they were not here. They were just fabricating something in their mind.

The first person was fabricating something really hard to hold or grab—some state, some mind-state—and the other person was fabricating something nicer. But it just proves that we’re not here. The old meditation practice is to be here. If you have to come back from somewhere, then it’s not really it.

It might be good for concentration purposes, or it might be good for relaxation. You know, what I call “snoring meditation”—that’s fine. But a person can meditate like that for many years and not make any progress.

I guess the practice is this: Our awareness is composed of two qualities of mind. One side is luminosity, what we call the cognizing aspect—the intelligence that allows us to notice everything that is happening. The other side of awareness is what in some traditions is called emptiness, or relaxation: an openness that allows everything to be in it.

If we stray too much in one direction, we become controlling of our experiences, and we tend to fall into thoughts because of it. If we stray too much in the direction of emptiness, we become too vague, spaced out, and dull.

Awareness is neither controlling nor dull. It’s brightly alert, but also relaxed, because there is nothing we’re trying to do. There is luminosity, that cognizing aspect, brightly alert to everything that is happening, but also deeply relaxed because there is nothing we’re trying to nail down.

This is the secret—and the only secret—of this entire interview and of the entire book.

Enza: This moment of pure wakefulness, if it’s left as it is, is pure awareness. Our natural state is that close.

But if this moment of pure wakefulness moves toward a thought, an emotion, or a judgment, it becomes our ordinary mind, which also perceives, but now is split in duality: subject and object.

In our day-to-day life, what do we do? We are constantly chasing thoughts and constantly judging everything. So the practice of instant presence—or any practice that does this—is to reverse what the mind does.

The mind’s existence depends on this continual movement. Awareness at rest is your true nature; awareness in movement is your ordinary mind. So we want to reverse that, and we want to just rest.

We just rest in this moment, and we are aware of sitting in the chair. Maybe we are aware of sounds happening around us. Now, we don’t move from sound to sound; we’re not trying to nail anything down.

It’s better to have your eyes open. We want to be able to do it all the time, not just on the meditation cushion. When we’re walking, when we’re eating, or whatever, we want to open up to everything.

It’s almost like a 360-degree opening, as much as we can, and we also want to be fully relaxed. The right balance is probably 50/50. If you go one way, you become too controlling; if you go the other way, you become too dull.

The right balance is brightly alert and deeply relaxed, and you can actually adjust that in yourself. If you start becoming dull, you sharpen the wakefulness aspect by becoming brighter and perhaps putting your body a bit straighter. If you’re starting to become too controlling, just allow more relaxation in.

Obviously, because awareness is always used to becoming the mind, at first we might be able to maintain this balance for only a few minutes or seconds. But that’s all right. We keep going back until this becomes longer and longer.

This is basically the practice. This is all we’re doing, and we do it with our eyes open because we want to be able to do it while driving. It makes you an excellent driver because you’re very alert, and it also makes you a nicer driver because you’re relaxed. You’re not going to abuse anybody who cuts you off or anything like that.

Rick: Did you practice something of this nature yourself prior to realization, or is this something that you came up with to help people afterward?

Enza: This was probably four or five years before realization. I’d done other practices, and at that time I was doing breath meditation, the Zen type of meditation.

One day I heard a sound in the valley. This meditation center was in a beautiful part of the Adelaide Hills. I heard a dog barking, and somehow it felt like that dog was barking within myself. Then I heard another sound—somebody coughed in the room—and again, suddenly, it was like I was the space that contained all these sounds that were arising.

It only lasted a very short time, but what I did was try to repeat it by opening up to the sounds around me. It was as if I were being guided. I was also having dreams about this technique.

Rick: There’s a Vedic saying: “Be easy with gentle effort.”

Enza: Yes, yes, exactly, absolutely.

Rick: When I learned to meditate back in the ’60s, the principle was that it had to be effortless and that effort would only interfere with the process, because effort tends to agitate the mind and keep it from settling and becoming vast. The mind does have a natural tendency to seek a field of greater happiness, and the more settled state is more charming and more fulfilling to the mind. So, if you’re making an effort, then you prevent yourself from settling into that.

It’s kind of like the difference between wanting to keep a dog at your door: you can either chain it up, and the dog is straining against the chain, or you can put some food there, and the dog just comes and sits at the door.

Enza: Yes, exactly. And we must remember that the mind is not the enemy. The mind is actually awareness in movement. Awareness at rest is its natural state. Awareness in movement is the ordinary mind. So, it’s not the enemy.

✨ Awakening and the body

Rick: However, the way you presented it, you said, “Well, you could be in this state,” and that is self-realization, at least a brief glimpse of it. But as soon as the thoughts percolate, then you get drawn off, and so that implies that it’s very delicate at first, or very, very tenuous.

Enza: Very delicate, yes.

Rick: And that it has to be stabilized in some way.

Enza: The stabilization happens by bringing it back every time we find ourselves somewhere else with our thoughts. We just bring it back, with no judgment. We don’t judge ourselves: “Oh, I should have done that. I spaced out,” or whatever. Also, the moment that you remember to come back, you’re already back. So, there is no effort.

It’s just like little drops, little drops, little moments of wakefulness, and then another, and then another. They get longer and longer. Then the whole thing switches. Right now, most people have this thing where the default position is the mind—thinking, judging, everything. Eventually, the default position is the mind at rest, awareness at rest, and we can still use the mind.

It’s not as if we become a sort of mush and can’t do anything. We can actually become a lot more efficient in life: more efficient, more alive, more connected.

Rick: There’s a verse in the Gita which goes, “Yogah karmasu kaushalam,” which means, “Yoga is skill in action.” Yoga, of course, means union, and so the principle there is that if you can get established in a unified state, then on that foundation you can actually be much more skillful in action than otherwise.

Enza: Absolutely. There are some things after realization—and I’m not sure whether this is something that happens to everybody—that I’ve noticed seem to deteriorate. Memory is one of them.

Somehow, I find myself—my job is quite detailed, with publishing and stuff—and I’ve done these things for years and years and years. Every time I do them again, that action feels like I’m doing it for the first time. It was really shocking when it first happened.

I was having weird experiences. Leo knows. We’d be meeting in town, and afterward he would come back and wait for me to get up to join him, and I’d just be looking at him. Honestly, it was like I didn’t know him. “Who is this man looking at me? Who is this strange man?”

Rick: You should have had a little sign: “Hi, I’m Leo. I’m your partner.”

Enza: No, I was like, “Who is that old man looking at me?”

Rick: I think this is just a phase, though, right?

Enza: It is a phase. It’s not happening as much anymore.

Rick: It’s an integration phase. A lot of people—Byron Katie had to learn how to brush her teeth again after her awakening, and Eckhart Tolle wasn’t good for much other than sitting on a park bench for a couple of years. Sometimes, when the transcendent comes on very suddenly and fully, it can take quite some time to learn to function again.

Enza: I didn’t get that bad, mainly because I’ve got a very demanding job. I’ve got more than one job. I’ve got 30 different hats that I have to wear every day, and so, in a way, it was a rude shock. I had to make it work.

I had notes everywhere, trying to remember things and stuff like that. I think that, in a way, it was good because it got me to be a bit more integrated.

Rick: If you had been able to just sit in the garden and stare at the flowers…

Enza: I wanted to do that. I just wanted to go into a cabin in the middle of nowhere and live the rest of my life there. I realize now that that would have been a very selfish thing to do, but that’s how I felt.

Rick: The Divine had other plans for you.

Enza: Yes. And when you’re asked to descend, you might refuse. Eventually, you come down partly because of the love that you feel for the beloved, and partly because you know that if you continue to resist, you might be kicked down here again.

Rick: Wouldn’t you say that true realization is something that’s going to be there under all conditions, whether you are doing something, driving in heavy traffic, or sitting looking at the flowers? If it can’t be maintained under all conditions, then it’s not really true realization, or not really a mature realization.

Enza: Absolutely. It has to be lived. I’ve met these amazing monks from different traditions. The ones I’m thinking of right now are Tibetan monks. They must sit and meditate for hours, and when the bell rings, they are fully here—alert. They get up and get on with their task. There is no adjusting. There is nothing. They’re just in the world, and they’re so efficient.

Sometimes, in meditation, you see people after a couple of hours of meditation. They come out, and they’re all spacey and soft. They have to readjust to the world. There’s none of that with these monks. It’s just here, here, here—fully integrated.

✨ Enza’s realization

Rick: Tell us about the actual experience of this realization that we’ve been discussing.

Enza: What actually happened is that I was doing this type of meditation, what I now call instant presence, and I’d been doing it for several years at a local meditation retreat. We used to meditate Tuesday and Saturday for half a day, and then once a month we used to have a four-day retreat, and then a seven-day retreat every second month.

In the last few months before the realization happened, I started getting lots of energy in my body. Sometimes the energy was so strong it was shaking the body. Naturally, I told the meditation teacher, and she said, “This is a good sign. Keep going, keep going.”

Then we did this seven-day retreat, and it was the last day of the retreat, in the morning. I sat for the last session, and then we had lunch, and then everybody would go home. The minute that I sat—within maybe the first few minutes—I started feeling this intense energy coming up, and it was so strong that it actually scared me.

Then I closed my eyes again and I saw what I can only describe as a black, reflective surface. My attention was caught by it, and when I looked at it—still, the whole thing happening internally—I just realized that I was watching myself moving. But this self wasn’t the self that I knew myself to be. It wasn’t this self; it was something so big and terrifying—terrifying—that my mind just fainted. I just couldn’t. Even now, I can’t actually talk about it. I just say it was like dark radiance.

Rick: You can’t talk about it because it’s hard to describe, or you can’t talk about it because it brings up feelings of the terror that you experienced?

Enza: No, it’s just I don’t know what words to use. It’s very hard to describe. It doesn’t make sense—a dark, reflective surface. And yet there was so much…

Rick: Contradiction in terms, really.

Enza: Yeah. Anyway, all I remember—the next thing that I remember was the bell that announced the walking meditation. I heard the bell, and then I didn’t even know what was happening. I noticed my hand; I didn’t know what was my hand. I noticed a hand move, all this sort of stuff—weird stuff.

But then somehow, even though I didn’t know what was going on, my body actually got up by itself, as if it had an intelligence independent from the brain, which wasn’t there at that moment. The body got up and went outside, and then slowly I started seeing everything appear bright. There was just love everywhere, and this unity.

I sat there. I didn’t go to do the walking meditation. Then lunch came, and there was this thing where we prepared lunch in turns. This lady who had meditated there for many years came out and asked me a question because I had done the salad the day before, and she wanted to know whether I had put something in it.

I heard the words come out of my mouth. She seemed to accept that. She didn’t think there was anything wrong with me, so obviously I still looked normal to her. The words came out without me thinking of anything, by themselves.

I wanted to talk about it to the meditation teacher, but there were too many people, so we decided to go home. Obviously, I told Leo on the way home, and he was like, “What was it? What was it?” I said, “I don’t know. My mind can’t even comprehend what it was.”

Rick: But it was still going on even on the way home, right? This isn’t just an experience which came and went.

Enza: It was going on, but by nighttime it was almost gone, and so I didn’t think anything of it because I’ve always had experiences like this, and they always had a beginning, middle, and end. I thought this was another one of the same kind.

Then I remember that night I started feeling really sick in bed and started coughing up this mucousy stuff. I was sick for almost a month. I was in bed, and a few times the meditation teacher rang me because she was concerned. We were always there, and I couldn’t even talk to her. I was coughing and coughing and coughing.

Then one morning, I woke up, and we had a dog—my grandma’s dog. We decided to take him for a walk because I was feeling better. Leo was walking in front, and we live in a sort of hilly area, in the foothills of Adelaide.

I remember that he was walking in front with the dog, and I just looked over the valley. As soon as I did that, suddenly it was like I saw that everything I was looking at was all inside me, like those many experiences that I had already had.

But this was a bit different because there was no actual separation between what I was seeing and the person seeing it. It’s as if everything was arising and dissolving, and everything was me. Everywhere I looked was me. That was it.

Everywhere I looked was me.

But while this sounds fantastic, there was also this thing: this has always been like this, and I never noticed. How could I miss that? I remembered that when I was a child, I was seeing things like that, and I just pretended I didn’t because I wanted to fit in.

So it wasn’t like a fantastic thing. Some of the experiences that I had previously were fantastic; this felt very ordinary, very much like when you see those things that change between two images, and you go, “Oh, there it is.” That’s how it was.

I rushed to tell Leo, and he thought, “Oh, she’s still sick. She’s not making sense,” because I couldn’t find the words to describe what I was seeing. I was saying, “I’m everywhere,” so he thought I meant I was confused, like spaced out.

This is what I also told the teacher a few days later, and she was like, “Oh, what do you mean, you’re everywhere?” She couldn’t understand at first what I was trying to explain.

Rick: You feel that that month of sickness was some kind of purging that had to take place before the realization could happen, some kind of preparation?

Enza: I think so, because the doctor came to the house and gave me all this stuff. I was taking antibiotics and all this, and they weren’t doing anything. They weren’t doing anything until I was done, until I coughed up all this stuff.

Rick: This kind of thing has happened to other people. Saint Francis of Assisi went through something like that. He got really sick before his awakening. There are a lot of other stories in various spiritual traditions of people going through a really intense catharsis, physical stuff, and then, when they work through that, there’s a clarity.

Enza: I find the body—for me personally—the body is the one that gets affected, usually, like that. Some people I’ve talked to, it was more like their mind, or depression maybe. I never really had any of that. It’s always my body that seems to suffer, getting adjusted to the energy.

Rick: The body is the instrument through which this is lived, is it not? As Jesus said, the body is the temple of the soul, and the brain, nervous system, and body are the instruments through which we live realization. You can’t pour new wine into old wineskins, so to speak. The vessel has to be fit to hold the new wine.

Enza: Yes, absolutely. Ramana Maharshi said it’s like an elephant entering a tent. Sometimes it does a little bit of damage.

Rick: Or else the tent has to be expanded to accommodate the elephant.

Enza: So, in a way, it’s good that this stuff happens for some of us. It has happened slowly and gradually, as we’ve expanded our ability to contain this energy. Some people get it all at once without any preparation.

Rick: It can burn them out.

Enza: Sometimes it really throws them. I’ve got a friend who works as a nurse in a mental hospital in Adelaide, and she’s tuned in to spiritual stuff. She tells me that a lot of people there have had premature awakenings, and they couldn’t contain it.

Rick: Kundalini awakening can be very difficult. A lot of times, those things are dismissed by some spiritual seekers as just being a fixation on the physical, or as not really going for the essence of the spiritual teaching. But they’re really part of the package, and they have value in enabling people to sustain the shock of awakening.

Enza: Yes, absolutely. You really need to look after the body. Right now, I have to be really careful what I put into this body, especially when there is an abundance of energy, because it does all sorts of things to the body.

Rick: There are people who have spontaneous awakenings and don’t know what it is. But there are also spiritual seekers who get all gung-ho about awakening, start doing three hours of fast pranayama or some kind of intense practice, and end up blowing fuses. So you have to have the “safety first” principle when you’re approaching this stuff.

Enza: Absolutely. You need to know what you’re doing. Personally, I wouldn’t necessarily play around with Kundalini without knowing exactly what you’re doing. It can be very dangerous.

Rick: Gopi Krishna wrote a book about Kundalini—his own experience—and it was just hellacious, the stuff he went through. In a way, we’re playing with fire. It’s divine fire, but there’s real merit to having proper guidance and proceeding in a sensible way.

Enza: When I was young, I started exploring a practice that was meant to awaken the Kundalini, and I immediately started having experiences like this fire coming up onto my head. I thought my head was going to explode. As soon as that happened, the teacher came there and was trying to help me. I think I sort of squashed it down, and it happened a few times.

That night I had a dream, and it was a lucid dream. A teacher gave me a blow-up thing, and I started blowing into it. It was a snake at first. I was blowing up this toy snake, but then all of a sudden the snake became alive, and I couldn’t control it anymore. It was a huge python. To me, that was the teacher saying, “Don’t play with this,” and I stopped.

✨ Living as awareness

Rick: So this realization, this awakening—was it five, six, seven years ago? Eight years ago?

Enza: Yes, probably about seven or eight years. I can’t remember exactly, something like that.

Rick: And so what is your normal experience now as you go through your day? Describe it.

Enza: Well, I haven’t become a perfect human being. Nobody does. In a relative sense, we all have imperfections and blemishes. I guess that’s the paradox: On the one hand, we are that one being, which is pure and perfect, and on the other hand, we have a body-mind with karmic patterns and karmic conditions.

Even the most enlightened teachers in the world are still human beings. So nothing has really changed. You would have to ask Leo because he’s lived with me. He probably knows better than I do.

It just feels that all that has happened is that I’ve lost some ideas about what was. Before, I always tried to be perfect and strived for perfection, and now it’s okay. There is nothing wrong. We always think that there’s something wrong, but what if there is nothing wrong?

There’s never been a mistake since the beginning of the universe. What if there is nothing wrong with the way we are? And what if the Divine just uses our idiosyncrasies? My experience has been that it uses everything. It uses everything to experience itself through that vehicle, the way it is.

Rick: Do you find that there’s a sort of continual multidimensionality to your experience where, on the one hand, you’re active, doing these things, but on the other hand, there’s a sort of silence—a continuum of silence—such that it almost feels like, in a sense, you’re not doing anything?

Enza: When I’m by myself and I don’t need to exteriorize myself, there is just this profound stillness, profound silence. When I need to exteriorize, there is the appearance of someone who is talking to you now. This movement between that and the appearance of the person still happens, but now it is no longer believed that it’s actually a separate person living in this body.

Rick: And does the silence go away?

Enza: The silence is always the base that contains everything. The example is the ocean and the waves: The ocean is still there, containing all the waves, all the time. But there is still the appearance. The appearance of the person still happens—it always did—but now I don’t feel that somehow I have to maintain some position in order to be a spiritual success. I can just let it happen. It’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with the appearance of the person. It’s useful.

Rick: So would it be fair to say that now there’s the appearance of the person and there’s also this abiding silence, and the two get along very well? Whereas 30 years ago, there was the person, but there wasn’t the abiding silence. It was just the person, and that was the only reality.

Enza: Yes, absolutely. But they’re both the same. It’s like the sun and its rays; it’s the same thing. It’s still all sun. It is realized that everything is ultimately that dark radiance of the Absolute. Everything. And when you see that, life becomes amazing. Life—our life, sometimes messy, sometimes out of control—is always miraculous.

Rick: Would it be fair to define enlightenment or realization as the realization, the awareness, of presence, of being, of the dark Absolute, as you put it, of pure awareness, regardless of whatever else is or is not going on?

Enza: Yeah. There is always the sun. The sun is the primary source of all light. The rays of the sun, and also the sun on a puddle of water—it’s all sun, it’s all one being, and yet it appears as different things.

✨ Deep sleep, awareness, and further unfoldment

Rick: I heard you quote Ramana Maharshi as saying, “That which does not persist during deep sleep is not real.” Is that the right quote?

Enza: Ramana Maharshi said whatever doesn’t exist in deep, dreamless sleep is not real. And actually, when I first read that teaching, it was like, “Whoa, there’s nothing in dreamless sleep.”

Rick: Right, so nothing could be real.

Enza: So everything is an illusion, right? And I guess that deep dreamless sleep which we all go into every night, all of us, there is something in there. What that something is, is that pure awareness unaware of itself.

So basically, it’s like if we go back to the example of the sun, the sun needs an object. If the sun is in space and there is no object, there is no light. The light happens when it hits an object, and that’s when consciousness happens. Consciousness is a bit different than awareness, even though it’s all one thing.

Rick: Is your experience of deep dreamless sleep different now than it was before your realization?

Enza: There was nothing in dreamless sleep before. It’s not a nothing; it’s a something. It’s the potentiality of the Absolute. It’s where awareness comes from.

It’s pure awareness unaware of itself because there is no object which it can reflect. But it’s not something that the mind can understand or even see.

Rick: A number of people I’ve spoken with say that after realization, sleep has become different because pure awareness is never lost. And even though there’s nothing to be aware of, pure awareness itself abides during the sleep state. Is that your experience?

Enza: It’s the substratum of everything. So it’s ongoing. See, this is where I’m saying there is a difference between awareness and consciousness. Consciousness comes and goes—consciousness, unconsciousness. Sleep—you wake up. Death—after you die, you’re not conscious. But awareness is the substratum that always is.

So if you’re tuned in to this substratum, then there is no change. On the surface there is change; at the bottom there is no change. So there is no change between what we call our waking life, our dream life, or deep dreamless sleep. It’s just how many waves are happening. That’s the only difference.

Rick: Sometimes this Absolute state, the substratum as you put it, is called Turiya, which is a Sanskrit word meaning “fourth.” Waking, dreaming, and sleeping are said to be one, two, three—the three states of consciousness. And then this fourth is said to be one which has the capability of underlying the other three, of being there perpetually as the other three cycle through their routine.

Some say that a further development would be that pure awareness is there all the time as waking, dreaming, and sleeping come and go. Initially, pure awareness could be there by itself; that could be the fourth. But then having it all the time, regardless of whether you’re awake or asleep or dreaming, that could be the fifth.

Enza: The difference between self-realization and God-realization—I think it’s mainly that when we experience self-realization, there is still a little subtle—not duality—but it’s still something resting in something. And so it’s almost like, “I know myself to be this.”

With God-realization, you don’t experience anything else but that. You don’t experience anything but God. And whether this keeps going forever, whether there are subtler and subtler levels—every time you reach a level, you always think it’s the end, but I know now that there’s always a further step. So how far, how deep can you go? Who knows? I don’t know.

Rick: No end to it.

Enza: The many, many, many infinite faces of God. That’s how I like to see it. So you go deep and you see something else, and you go deep and see something else. If God is infinite, then that would be infinite as well.

Rick: If we think of our being, our body and makeup, as a reflector, who’s to say that even this one reflector couldn’t be refined to a much greater extent? And even if there are limits to how much this reflector could be refined, there could be other reflectors, other types of bodies, which from the outset are far more refined than a human body could even become.

Enza: Ultimately it is all decided by that divine principle that creates it all, creates it all so that it can discover itself more through a different configuration. Each one of us is really providing a mirror for the Absolute to see itself through us.

Rick: A friend of mine likes to refer to us as sense organs of the Infinite.

Enza: Nisargadatta said, “This body is the body of the Absolute,” because he was at that stage where all that was left was it, the Absolute.

✨ A new era of awakening

Rick: One thing I find interesting is that you felt that perhaps this epidemic of awakening that seems to be taking place in the world is nature’s response to the severity of the problems we face, and hopefully holds the potential for enabling us to surmount these problems and shift into a better world.

Enza: Ultimately, this is just an idea, but I have seen through our work, through talking to different teachers, that this is happening worldwide. A lot of people—something that was quite rare—people are popping up everywhere, waking up. So there is definitely a divine plan behind this, and ultimately I’m not sure exactly why, but this is what’s going on.

And I think we’re moving into an era where maybe the guru is dead. By this I mean not that spiritual teachers would disappear, but maybe more the guru who is some superhuman being with super-special qualities and perfection—that is moving away. What is coming is the era of waking up together.

So there might still be somebody, a teacher there, but more like a friend, not like a superhuman, perfect being.

Rick: My guess is that there will always be extraordinary souls, but even the extraordinary souls have all told us throughout history, “Hey, you can be like me.” Jesus said, “All these great things that I do, you too shall be able to do these things and even greater things.”

Enza: If we’re all the one being, why not?

Rick: I think the point is that if you’re a human being, then sure, there are always going to be some kinks, some glitches, but there are great heights to which a human being can rise.

Enza: And those kinks are the ones—why are they there? Because that one being wants to experience itself through those kinks. That’s how I see this.

Rick: A little salt makes the vegetables sweet.

Enza: Yeah.

📚 Teaching, service, and staying humble

Rick: I’ve heard you say that when you first had your realization and started telling some friends, they got mad at you and thought, “Who are you to say this? How could it possibly happen?” And you just look the same as you always looked; you’re not floating two feet off the ground.

Enza: Your family and friends are the worst, which is all right. It keeps you humble.

Rick: “A prophet is not without honor except in his own home.” But actually, that was one of my motivations for starting this show. I have a lot of friends in town who have been meditating for years, and a lot of them are having awakenings—really genuine and profound ones. They would tell friends, and friends would say, “Oh, are you kidding? You’re just being egotistical. It couldn’t happen to you, and you seem like the same old jerk that you always were.”

And so they thought, “All right, I’m not going to talk about it anymore.” So I thought, “All right, I’m going to start an interview show, and I’m just going to start interviewing these people and show people that these awakenings are happening to people just like them.” Maybe that will embolden them to believe that it could happen to them too.

Enza: I must say I love the way you do this show. You bring so much openness, and I know that probably you don’t agree with everything that your guests talk about, but it’s like you’ve got a really open heart and you give the person a lot of openness. This is great, because only awareness can do that.

Rick: It’s more like, “All right, this person and I have slightly different perspectives on this, and maybe we both are like blind men feeling different parts of the elephant. We don’t have the picture of the entire elephant, so let’s kind of rub these perspectives together and see if we can both expand each other’s perspective.”

Enza: We can learn from each other because all these are the different expressions of God. And if you want to know more about the Divine, then by sharing with each other, we can learn those faces we might not know yet.

Rick: You say you haven’t been teaching much yet, but you’re probably going to experience what I call the “BatGap-Bump,” where people will watch this and people will start getting in touch with you. So, what do you have to offer people who would like to get in touch with you?

Enza: I’m open. I don’t make any plans, really. I haven’t made any plans. This is my second interview. The first one was with Jerry, and for me it’s just about flowing with what life presents. If there are people interested in these teachings, I’m willing to do whatever I need to do to get to them.

Rick: So, physically, you could travel to a place if that were arranged?

Enza: If there are enough teachers, yeah. If somebody can arrange it, I’m willing to go anywhere.

Rick: Or you could do Skype consultations. You would do that?

Enza: Yes, I could do that.

Rick: And do you have any idea what you would charge for those?

Enza: No. I’ve actually set up a nonprofit organization because what I want to do is try to work out some kind of sliding scale. I don’t want to somehow prevent or exclude people.

I was thinking of a sliding scale, with a very minimal cost—or maybe even free—for some people, and going higher for people who can afford it and stuff like that, so that everybody can participate.

We’re actually starting meditation for kids and for people who have a handicap, and also offering it perhaps to troubled teenagers. This is all part of what’s going on, and also for people who can’t really afford to go to very expensive retreats, and for older people.

Rick: You could make a meditation CD or a download.

Enza: Yeah, that’s a good idea.

Rick: We like to interview a mix of people. It’s fun to interview really established teachers like Adyashanti and people like that who have a great deal of experience and wisdom. It’s also really fun to find people who haven’t done much teaching, and even people who have no intention of teaching—they’re just ordinary people working at a job or something—and they’ve had this spiritual awakening.

So, you’re somewhere in between, because you definitely have stuck your toe in the waters of teaching people, but it sounds like it’s very much in the early stages, and who knows what it might evolve into.

Enza: When I first started thinking about teaching, my first reaction was, “I’m not sure,” mainly because I see myself as still having, in a relative sense, imperfections and making mistakes. But then somebody sent me a little quote that said:

The life of a Zen master is one continuous mistake.

Now, I’m not saying I am a Zen master, but I guess that little quote gives me the courage to keep walking and trying to do what is being asked of me.

Rick: There was a humor group back in the ’60s called Firesign Theater, and one of their phrases was:

We’re all bozos on this bus.

Enza: That’s right. We’re all a mess, and also we are that unconditional love that holds everything.

Rick: I can’t think of a spiritual teacher who doesn’t make mistakes. If they were to insist that they are beyond the possibility of making mistakes, I’d be a little bit suspicious.

Enza: We like for our teachers to be perfect, and we like ourselves to be perfect, but in reality we are a work in progress.

Rick: I like the idea that we’re all friends, kind of helping each other these days. That’s the culture that seems to be developing. We’re kind of holding hands, marching forward together.

Enza: Yes, it’s wonderful.

Closing remarks

Rick: I’ll be making a page on batgap.com about you, as I always do, and people will read a little bit about you and be able to link to your website and anything else that you have. Your book will have a link to the Amazon page for it.

And just to make some more general concluding remarks: This interview has been one in an ongoing series. Go to batgap.com, and there’s a “Past Interviews” menu. There are about five different ways that the past interviews are categorized, so check that out.

There’s a place to sign up to be notified by email, about once a week, each time a new interview is posted. You can always unsubscribe.

There’s an audio podcast, which we’re still having problems with, but I’ll send out an email when that gets fixed.

And there’s the donate button, because obviously this takes a lot of time, and it’s still not my full-time occupation. I have a day job a couple of hours a day, so any financial support people feel inclined to offer is appreciated.

So, thanks for listening or watching, and thank you again, Enza. It’s really been a delight. I really enjoyed this conversation, and we’ll meet again.

Enza: Me too. It was wonderful, yeah. Thank you for making us so joyful.

Rick: I hope you can sleep tonight.

Enza: Yeah.

Rick: Now you need to take something to counteract the coffee. I don’t know—have a beer or something.

Enza: A beer? Yeah. Okay, what is it?

Rick: Cardamom. Irene says that cardamom counteracts caffeine, so make yourself some hot milk and stir some cardamom into it, and maybe that’ll help you sleep.

Enza: I will try that. I have some cardamom. I like to cook with different spices.

Rick: Good. All righty, so thanks. Talk to you later. Bye.

Enza: Okay. Thank you. Bye.

[Music]