Florian Schlosser Interview

Summary

The discussion explores how attention, relational openness, and bodily memory shape experiences of connection and nonduality. It also examines how overwhelm and unresolved trauma can resemble awakening, and why genuine integration requires returning consciousness to the body.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can relaxing attention change our sense of separation?
• What is the difference between spiritual awakening and trauma-driven hypervigilance?
• How can unresolved trauma affect meditation and spiritual practice?
• What does embodiment mean in awakening, and why is it important?

Key takeaways

• Separation can lessen when attention widens to include the whole body and present experience.
• Connection deepens through openness, trust, and mutual receptivity rather than one-way transmission.
• The nervous system can retain unresolved overwhelm as chronic vigilance and narrowed attention.
• Hypervigilance may feel like heightened awareness without being genuine spiritual awakening.
• Spiritual practice can become a way to avoid pain when awakening is treated as an escape from the body.
• Embodiment means allowing consciousness to include the body, its history, and unresolved reactions.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer, and my guest today is Florian Schlosser. I’ve hopefully pronounced that right. Was that right?

Florian: Yes. Great.

Rick: Richard Miller put an L at the end of it. It said Schlossler. That’s not the way it’s spelled. And Florian is speaking to me from Mallorca, Spain, a beautiful island where I once spent a happy month doing long meditations in 1971–72.

Florian: It’s a delightful place.

Rick: Yeah, it was. Delightful place. They do all their construction in the wintertime, so we usually meditated to the sound of jackhammers outside the window.

Florian: That’s British now. They’re not allowed to construct anything anymore.

Rick: Oh, good.

Florian: Very peaceful now.

🕊️ Florian’s spiritual name

Rick: And Florian will explain what he teaches and all in the process of this interview, and who he is and his background and so on. But I want to just start by asking you perhaps a trivial question. I was listening to a talk you gave a couple of years ago at the Science and Non-Duality Conference, and you used the last name Tathagata or something like that. I was wondering what that is and why you don’t use it anymore.

Florian: Well, I mean, in the spiritual world, many people have spiritual names.

Rick: So that was like your spiritual name.

Florian: It was one. I had a bunch, and it was like the last one, which comes actually from the Buddhist tradition. And its meaning is, as far as I know, “He who walks on the right path.” But somehow, over the last few years, it just didn’t really resonate with me to expose the name. It has a meaning inside, in a way, so I’m carrying it internally, but there is no need for me, first of all, to show it to the outside.

And second, I have been noticing that when I started to share meetings, I still called them “satsang,” and then there was “satsang” and “Tathagata,” and “satsang with Tathagata” in only three words—two words. Most people didn’t understand what I was talking about. So there was so much need to explain myself all the time.

Rick: Just created an obstacle.

Florian: Yeah, why should I make it more complicated than it actually is? So I removed “satsang,” called them “meetings,” removed the name “Tathagata,” and called my name “Florian.” It makes it very easy; people understand what I’m talking about. I love to simplify and bring it down to scratch. So basically, that’s the reason why I’m not using that name. I was actually quite surprised that they put it on the DVD of the SAND compilation. But I think I asked them this year not to do it.

Rick: Okay, good. I got a spiritual name one time too, from Amma, the hugging saint. But I couldn’t imagine myself running around town here calling myself “Umesh.”

Florian: I can understand.

📚 Teachers, memory, and transmission

Rick: So I noticed on the wall behind you, you have pictures of Ramana Maharshi and Papaji and Muktananda. Were they all teachers of yours? Or at least Ramana—your lives didn’t overlap.

Florian: I spent quite a bit of time around Muktananda. I lived in India in the ashram for quite a while. Muktananda was sort of my real Indian guru. I also would say that the way he was expressing and teaching, in a way, has a particular impact on the way I’m sharing what I need to share. So it’s an interesting combination of what Ramana is representing to me, and on the other hand, what Muktananda represents. And maybe in the course of our conversation we’re going to clarify a little bit what I mean exactly.

Rick: Yeah, I’d like to do that. I mean, some people, when you ask questions about this sort of thing, say, “Oh, that’s just a story, that’s just my past and all.” But the people we studied with have an influence on us, and they have an influence on the way we express ourselves. So it’s kind of interesting to know what a person’s background is.

Florian: I mean, on an intellectual level, it’s true: all this is past, and it is memory in our brains, including the experience with Muktananda, and then with Isaac, who was with Papaji. All this is basically intellectual memory.

But there is another aspect that I very much like to include in this: that there are different other levels of memory, and different other levels of how our system accumulates experience. I would call it more that the body also records energetic impact. So if you have been around a person for a while, the mind may forget about the pictures and the actual experiences, but the body and the nervous system and the cells still keep on remembering.

So depending on the intensity of the experience, or how close we have been with something, we almost become that experience on a cellular level. And to get rid of this, I mean, we can say it’s all a story in our head; this is easily forgotten. But the body remembers pretty much everything we ever went through. And if you want to go further than this, our body has the memory of millions of years of human history in us. So it’s a very complex arrangement that we are dealing with. Just putting it down to “it’s only a story” sounds a bit superficial to me, actually.

Rick: Yes, it does. And it’s interesting because some people say that if you are with a teacher, it’s not so much what the teacher says, but just the presence or the transmission of the teacher is the thing that really affects some sort of significant development in you. Perhaps that takes place on a cellular level.

Florian: I would even go further. I would say the teacher’s impact is not so much the teacher or what the teacher has to offer; it’s more about how your system is capable of absorbing that information.

So you can talk to me, and if I am not open, if there is no interest in me in what you offer or what you speak, and it doesn’t matter if it is spiritual or worldly or mundane or whatever, to the degree there is interest in this system, the system will automatically drink it. It will absorb it on pretty much every level of experience. And if that openness or that interest isn’t there, you can offer whatever you want, and there will be no connection happening in which this transmission or this dynamic occurs.

For me, it’s not so much a transmission, because transmission normally would imply that there is one source transmitting something to somebody else. But for me, it’s more like an exchange. When two systems connect, there is a chemistry; there is a dynamic happening. And to the degree we can be close to each other and trust each other, in that chemistry, in that dynamic, information starts to exchange. And that’s, in my experience, more accurate than one transmitting something to somebody else.

When two systems connect, there is a chemistry; there is a dynamic happening.

Rick: No, very good point.

Florian: What it actually points at is that there is always a connection. And to the degree we are able to give ourselves to that connection, or to honor that connection, to that very degree exchange is happening.

And again, that is not spiritual or limited down to spiritual experiences. But basically, if I look into my marriage or into my friendships, to the very degree my system is capable of being intimate, of being close, and inviting the other person to that same closeness, it’s a very deep connection and a very transcendental experience, independently of the state of consciousness of somebody.

Rick: I think it’s true. To whatever extent we are receptive, to whatever extent we attune to the person we are with, whether it’s a guru or our spouse or the person at the checkout line in the supermarket, there is a communion, and there is a sharing.

Florian: Absolutely, and that is not a personal sharing. It’s not like a personality, “Florian,” connects with a personality, “Rick,” or whoever. Let’s call it like this. But if we really take a moment to tune into what’s happening, in that kind of presence we can literally feel how our nervous systems, our energies, and our bodies connect.

Even though you are thousands of kilometers away right now in America, and I am in Europe, we start to connect. It’s like—not consciously, it’s not something we do, or there is something that we need to do for it—it’s like we are just feeling comfortable with each other. We get to know each other, it’s a bit smoother, and suddenly we can relax. And in that relaxing into the bodies, our, let’s say, energy—or whatever you call it; it’s just words I am using now—starts to dance underneath the level of our conversation.

I don’t know if you are up to stuff like this, but I am very into experiencing our conversation on multiple levels, not only on the intellectual level, but also what’s happening energetically at the same time while we are talking. That’s quite cool, actually.

Attention and the sense of separation

Rick: It kind of reminds me of that poem—I think it was by John Donne—where he said, “No man is an island,” you know, a very famous line. And we appear to be these discrete, separate, isolated islands, so to speak, but we are really all kind of the underlying ocean. The islands are just sort of apparent outcroppings.

Florian: But if you are looking at separation, it’s interesting what you say, Rick, because it’s a common saying in the spiritual world that it’s called separation and non-separation, non-oneness, oneness, non-duality, duality. But let’s take a moment and clarify what we are talking about, because I think there is a lot of mysticism around this whole thing of separation.

In my experience, and as far as I have been exploring it—which is not finished yet—there is an interesting aspect that is so simple that we very easily can overlook the fact. So if we, just for one instant, are here now, you are over there, wherever that is, and I am here, then there are different ways of looking at how separation functions.

We have to take a look into how attention functions, how the movement of our focus functions. Normally, focus and attention, for me, are one. So if we look at attention, we can focus attention onto something, like onto each other, or something inside, or onto an object outside. And we can vary that; we can play with the different focuses.

We can have a narrow focus. So in the moment we are focusing on our heads, only on the sound of our voices and the eyes that look at each other, there will be a pretty much complete exclusion of the rest of our system, which is natural. It’s like a zoom: we zoom in, and then we are meeting here. And in that moment it feels like something is missing. I mean, we are having a connection on that level, but where is the rest?

So we should start to just relax the focus for a moment, like this, including the whole body. Let’s start with including only the upper part of the body, until the belly button.

Rick: Sure, and people listening can do this too. Even though it’s not live, they can do this.

Florian: So take a moment now, and just relax the focus a little, like a muscle—not holding it tight, like concentrating or trying to figure out what we are talking about. Just relaxing for a moment.

Yes, exactly. Then, being aware of, we are already sensing more. We are aware of more. Simply, we could say it’s not even that somebody is sensing; suddenly, there is more showing up on the screen of our consciousness, okay?

Only because, like in the theater, when we zoom out—from the spotlight to the floodlight—suddenly we see not only the protagonist on the stage, but suddenly we see a little more of the stage. And if we keep on doing this, we just relax the focus even more, and our body will appear in it.

This body that’s called “Florian,” the body that’s called “Rick,” or whoever listens to this—suddenly we start to be aware of, “Huh, there was more happening simultaneously while we were talking!”

And funny enough, as we are letting the focus relax, let’s say, letting the focus zoom out infinitely to the ultimate opening, which would be dropping back into consciousness, okay? In India, they would call it, maybe, “The drop returns to the ocean.” The limited focus returns to the wide focus.

And we are seeing that, in that wider focus, we include the system fully, or at least a little bit more than before. And just noticing what effect that has on the sense of separation. Does it feel exactly as separated as before, or does it feel less separated? What would you say? It’s interesting.

Rick: Yeah, I would say less, sure.

Florian: Okay, so separation has nothing to do with separating from the outside, but it is how the focus separates itself from the totality of the experience of now, which is happening in this nervous system.

Rick: Now, you are not saying that focus is a bad thing, are you?

Florian: No!

Rick: Because it’s necessary. I mean, if you are an airline pilot landing a 747 in a snowstorm, or you are a brain surgeon in the midst of a 10-hour operation, you have to really focus, or lives are going to be lost. So focus is necessary.

What you are saying, though, is that it can become overbearing, or if all our life consists of is a sequence of focuses without recourse to unboundedness, then we’ve got a problem. Is that what you are saying?

Florian: There are a few distinctions that I think are very useful for everyone to play with here. So, first of all, it’s totally clear: it’s not about a wrong focus or a good focus. Basically, what we are talking about, including the whole so-called incident or process of awakening, is nothing else but a different quality of focus. It’s a shift of focus.

But let’s have a look at a few distinctions that I think are very useful. So, number one, it’s very useful to be able to focus when we have to perform something, like when we are the pilot or when we cut vegetables. If we are not focused, we are going to cut our fingers off. So that’s pretty much practical.

And this is not bothering us, because I would say it’s totally natural. It’s like a capacity that our system naturally has to perform action, to make sure that the system survives, basically. It’s a survival mechanism on a very healthy, rudimentary organization in our nervous system.

But then what happens is that, in the course of our life, for most of us, we undergo experiences where this natural capacity to focus when it’s needed, and to relax again when there is no need to focus, gets lost.

Rick: Yeah.

Overwhelm, trauma, and hypervigilance

Florian: So that’s very, very important, because there is a lot of confusion around this that is going to show up much later, including the whole spiritual search.

So we could call those experiences experiences of overwhelm. What is an overwhelm? Too much information comes in, and the system cannot cope with that information anymore.

So imagine you are a child, and you see your parents fighting—loud, yelling, and all the rest of it. Your nervous system just has a tremendous impact of aggression, sadness, sound, and energy, and the system has no way to differentiate, distinguish, or cope with that. That energy will be experienced as an overwhelm, as an invasion.

Rick: Yeah, and if we want to talk of fight-or-flight, we can’t do either of those under that circumstance either, so we just have to internalize it.

Florian: Okay, so what happens in this moment of overwhelm is that the system moves from a kind of aliveness, a relaxed state, into survival mode. What is survival? A very strong tightening up in the system, and a very strong tightening of the focus, trying to identify where the threat is and trying to protect yourself.

Because it is too much. It is simply too much. So it is an automatic biological reaction of the system that pulls the system tight, including tightening up the focus.

So what happens in these moments, if these—let’s call them traumatic experiences—I don’t like that word very much, because it is so psychologically charged. Let’s call them “overwhelm experiences.” Experiences that, simply like this…

Rick: Even traumatic. I mean, you think of the soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan these days, all coming home with PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder.

Florian: Exactly. So what happens when these experiences are not completed in the moment they are happening? The experience is like this: it is relaxed, there is a threat, there is an overwhelm, which is a high level of energy in the system trying to cope with that experience, and if this experience would just be completed naturally, it would just relax again, and life would move on smoothly.

But many of us—I would say pretty much every human being—have undergone experiences where this normal amplitude of the experience has been interrupted. It means it is smooth, and suddenly, in that high peak of energy of defense, shock, and fear, the system doesn’t know what to do. It doesn’t discharge that energy anymore, and it freezes in.

It freezes into a kind of unnatural alert state, in which alertness means an unnatural state of focusing.

Rick: Yeah, and the stuff you are saying is actually something that physiologists talk about in very detailed terms, and they work out the biochemistry of it and everything. The system stays in this sort of unnatural and inappropriate agitation.

Florian: It is agitation. It is an unnatural vigilance that makes the system alert. It feels alert, but it is fear-driven; it is actually panic-driven.

So now, what happens is that the system freezes into a very high level of energy and doesn’t know how to relax anymore. So what happens now is, if this is happening, it habituates and perpetuates all the time, and later on it feels awake.

The difficulty is that it feels awake. It feels even more awake than others, but what it is, is a pushed dynamic in the nervous system, where the system constantly looks for threat. It starts to observe like an animal that has been hunted. Maybe you have seen this on the Discovery Channel, when a deer is being hunted—it is driven.

So what happens later on is that, under these circumstances, it is possible that, through additional impact, the system activates that hyper-alertness and can have experiences of awakening. It is like, because the system doesn’t know how to cope with this anymore, there is a high tendency to disembody.

Rick: So you are saying that these traumatic experiences can actually be triggers for awakening, or catalysts?

Florian: They can be triggers for a confused understanding of awakening, let’s call it like this, because it feels awake. The difficulty is…

Rick: So it is not awakening in a spiritual sense; it is more just a hyperactivity, too much adrenaline or something.

Florian: The system is—let’s return to the basics, okay? So once the system has discharged that stress energy, the system is locked into a state of hypervigilance, of unnatural alertness, which is showing up as stress, speed, lots of thinking, yet a very high capacity to observe, because it is the fear.

It’s like the deer under threat observes its environment: inside, outside, inside, like a relay—in, out, in, out, in, out—on a very, very, very high frequency, and it feels conscious.

The difficulty is that this consciousness is quite narrow, and the system cannot relax in that, because the system is still suggesting that there is a threat going on.

So what happens is, even in the state of alertness and wakefulness, all the defenses in the system are still activated. The defenses mean fight, attack, flight, when there is too much information coming in, or freezing in, into a kind of numb state, which is still conscious, but it doesn’t feel much.

In my language, we would call it… Psychologists, they would maybe call it a dissociated state.

✨ Awakening and embodiment

Florian: So now, when we are walking down the road of spirituality, and we start to learn meditations, for example, which is like, in the beginning, that you observe yourself, for people who have been traumatized, these practices are relatively easy, because they are observing themselves all the time anyway.

So now, when there is a spiritual layer of explanation on top of it, what remains unconscious are all these disintegrated layers of dysfunctionality in our system that drive the system to these states.

What happens is, the more we are going down that road, the system disconnects from its own origin, from the valley where it comes from, including the pain and the traumatization, and claims that it transcended it.

The difficulty—and what happens—is that, in that moment, we disconnect from our bodies, we disconnect from the nervous system. I call it: we disembody.

So there is a state of awakening, there is a state of wakefulness, of consciousness, but it has no link to the actuality of what is happening in the human system. It is dissociated.

And I have seen, over the last 10 years, a lot of people with profound experiences of seeing and opening up. The difficulty that I have been noticing is that only a very limited amount of nervous systems have the capacity to handle this, to hold it, because it slips through.

Rick: To embody it.

Florian: To embody it, because what does embodiment mean? Embodiment means that your consciousness returns into your body. That’s what embodiment is. Consciousness drops into the body and includes the body again.

Embodiment means that your consciousness returns into your body.

The difficulty is that once this is happening, on that descent of consciousness into the body, we start to notice and realize all these things that have been driving the system out of the body, trying to get away, trying to transcend the experience because it is too painful.

For many people, this is so shocking that after this opening up, they say, “How is it possible that everything that was underneath suddenly showed up like a volcano on the screen of consciousness—all the things that have been disintegrated?” Let’s say traumatization, stress, fears, and defenses.

There is a very high tendency in this, let’s say, nonduality business to deny that—to use the teaching, “It’s not real, this is not true,” or “This experience is not real,” as the ultimate promise, as the ultimate exit, to never again deal with what happened, what has been disintegrated, or what is still dissociated in the system.

So it’s a bit of a tragedy, but it is also ruining the bliss game, I call it. Hanging out in that space and disembodying—it’s very beautiful not to cope with this.

The difficulty is that the moment we are touching life on a very normal basis, like in our relationships, in our jobs, where we relate with other people—because this is where life happens—all these little things that are still unconscious are touched all the time. All the time, they are triggered: bam, bam, bam, bam.

And if we don’t know about this, and if we don’t know what is triggered—it is not the personality, it is not the ego that is triggered. That is absolute garbage. It is disintegrated organization in our nervous system, where the system has lost its capacity to breathe in and breathe out in a natural way, in connecting with life and disconnecting again from life, like sleeping, being awake, breathing in, and breathing out.

That’s why I’ve been noticing that many spiritual seekers, or people who have even found whatever they have found, are confused about the way their system is in life.

✨ Awakening as a shift of attention

Rick: Yeah, interesting. I’d like to make a couple of comments on that and then get your response.

As you may know, in many cases, meditation techniques of various sorts have been used to deal with soldiers who have PTSD, or they’re taught in prisons and things like that—people under stressful circumstances, often with very great benefit. So there is that.

But I have seen the same phenomenon you described, which is where awakening is used as a sort of hiding place or refuge to the neglect of the physical.

There is an interesting thing you brought up, which is that I think what you are saying is that people have this awakening, and then all of a sudden all this stuff that they didn’t realize was there starts to percolate. They start to become aware of it. I think that, too, is a natural process.

It’s like nature wants to do housekeeping when we have the capacity to do it. In other words, once the broader awareness has been established, then it’s a natural function of the body, with recourse to that, to begin to resolve stuff that needs resolving.

But what you further said was that people often recoil from that and use an intellectual sort of game—“Oh, this is not real, this is just an illusion, this is just a story”—to try to avoid the natural process that is attempting to take place.

There are people out there—in fact, I spoke with one last night. I did an interview with a guy who is in this group called Waking Down in Mutuality, who are very aware of this process and have the express intention of coming into the body and “waking down,” as they call it, and dealing with the stuff.

They have this thing they call the “wake down, shake down,” which is that very often when an awakening takes place, then the shit starts to hit the fan.

Florian: It must happen like this. Ultimately, we have to understand how that whole process functions.

In the moment, what is awakening? Awakening is a shift of attention. For one instant, the focus of attention is withdrawn from objects and experience toward that which is aware of the experience. All that, in that moment, is awakening. There is nothing else but this.

It’s a recognition of that which sees the experience instead of being focused on the experience itself. So it’s a 180-degree shift of focus. That’s all awakening is. Everything else is blah, blah.

Awakening is a shift of attention.

So we have to make that really clear. The thing is that naturally, that shift of focus is like breathing in and breathing out. As long as there is stuff incomplete in our system, as long as there are disintegrated or dissociated—or call it whatever you want; let’s call it incomplete—things that we are not at peace with, what happens?

Rick: And I might say also physiological correlates to those things—in other words, at the cellular level, in the chemistry, all that stuff.

Florian: The psyche itself is a product of disintegrated stuff in the nervous system. The psyche is a construct.

Rick: It’s correlated.

Florian: It’s correlated. So as long as there is incompleteness in our system, even though that shift has happened, it doesn’t establish. Something pulls it back.

Instead of people saying, “Well, it’s your ego. Just keep on focusing on awareness,” and all the rest of it—I know people who are suggesting this on a serious level. They say, “Just keep on focusing on awareness, and the rest is going to be solved.”

First of all, it’s a doing. As long as the focus is not establishing itself in consciousness, you have to do it all the time. You have to take the focus, shift it willingly, and play with that whole Ramana stuff: “Who is aware of these questions?” It’s all tricks. I call them tricks.

They have an effect. The problem is, they only have an effect as long as we play with that stuff. So I’m suggesting, for one instant, stop using any trick. Don’t even use Ramana and Papaji and all the questions, and “Who am I?” Just remove that trick from your library for a moment, and be aware of what the focus is doing naturally.

Does it return because it wants to deal with stuff, or does it naturally abide? There will be moments when it will be abiding, because there’s nothing to do, because it feels complete, it feels at peace.

But in the moment you’re relating, for example, you will very quickly see if there is anything—for example, in your marriage. If you now allow the focus to jump out and take notice of what is triggered, and you’re not using a trick to return it back to awareness, you start to see things that you have never, ever seen in your life before about yourself.

That is so shocking, and that is so natural. It is noninvasive; it is a non-doing, because you allow the focus to move naturally instead of using tricks.

But then you will also see other places where the system will still respond habitually, automatically, which is basically based on disintegrated overwhelm. Let’s call it like this. Does it make sense what I’m saying?

Rick: Yeah, absolutely. Ram Dass famously said that if you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your parents.

Florian: Yeah, or be a married man.

Rick: Exactly.

Florian: Reflect on a daily basis how much resting there really is—if your focus can abide there, if you can rest, or if it just takes an instant and it’s triggered.

It’s not that you are triggered. We have to distinguish this again. No one is triggered. It is that the focus swaps out, back to the experience—not because it is wrong, but because there is something to get, there is something to explore.

If you are using a trick to prohibit this, or to say, “Hey, I am consciousness. I am not dealing with this anymore,” you have to use your willpower for this, and that is you.

Rick: And it is unnatural. I would like to suggest, based on what you just said, that genuine awakening, if I can use those terms, is not something you have to be vigilant about all day long.

Once it is really established, it is natural. You don’t have to play little mind games to retain it. In fact, there is this verse in the Gita. It says, “Creatures act according to their own nature. What can restraint accomplish?”

You see that, I think, in really awakened people, if you have hung around them—if you’ve hung around Muktananda or Papaji or whoever. They are not wrestling inside their heads all day long to maintain some state of awareness.

Florian: They don’t care!

Rick: No, it is completely natural and spontaneous. They are established in that state; they don’t have to do things to maintain it.

Florian: In my own experience, the whole pressure, the whole idea of needing to remain conscious, drops from the system. So it includes moments where it feels like the system is unconscious. It’s like there is no involvement even in that process, because there is no such thing as unconscious. It’s garbage.

Unconscious means that the focus of attention is not abiding in consciousness anymore, but has naturally returned to an experience where there is exploration happening because there is interest.

If you are not interested in living, let’s say, a happy life, or having a happy relationship, then you won’t be interested in exploring what makes you unhappy in a relationship. Okay, no problem.

But for me, I feel interested, because for me there are so many aspects of life. As long as I feel like I’m not really comfortable in a certain field, I don’t have to experience everything, but if I feel like I cannot relax there, my attention naturally moves there and starts to explore and say, “What is going on there?”

So in that moment, we are giving that space—or we are the space even—for that interest, that exploration, without any concept in between. Not a teaching, not a Ramana or Krishnamurti, nothing.

Naturally, there will be an exploration happening when it is happening. And when it is finished, it’s like a cat. They come home, they have explored their thing, and the focus returns and abides again. “Ah, work done?”

It’s not you working. It’s like attention works for you. It’s like it works for you.

✨ Consciousness and the nervous system

Rick: You may have heard that story Eckhart Tolle tells about watching some ducks on a pond. The ducks got into a fight, and there was all this excitement. Then, after a few moments, the ducks just swam off a little bit, shook their feathers, and then calmed down. That was the end of it.

Florian: And then whatever has been seen, explored, felt, and somehow allowed to be there—we could call it, psychologically, in Western terms, that it “integrates itself” or “finds its place in our nervous system where it can just rest.”

That is more language. It’s like we drink it, instead of needing to defend against it and push it away.

So even those tricks—using these questions and just focusing on awareness—I mean, that sounds really lovely. But ultimately, if you really look, they have a seed of not wanting to deal with life.

Rick: I like the fact that you refer to the nervous system a lot, because it is my understanding that all these words we use—enlightenment, awakening, and all that stuff—very much have a physiological component or counterpart. In fact, I have listened to quite a few hours of you in preparation for this interview, and one thing I haven’t heard you say too much, and maybe you can discuss it, is that ultimately I believe a physiological state can be cultured over time, in which this sort of broad awareness, or whatever we want to call it, is spontaneously maintained in the midst of sharp focus. So it is not a seesaw kind of situation, an either/or situation, but even while focusing sharply, broad awareness is spontaneously maintained, without trying to do anything, by virtue of a style of physiology that has developed to enable that to occur.

And then the focus doesn’t have the same kind of overshadowing grip that it used to.

Florian: Beautiful. And I just recently discovered something that I’d like to share with you, so it’s the latest research.

Rick: Breaking news.

Florian: Breaking news that was revealed in the last couple of weeks, and that’s why maybe I’ve never really talked about it. And it’s fascinating, actually. So maybe we can approach this whole question, or that issue, or that whole subject, by connecting. What does it mean to connect? And how does connection function?

Rick: Connect with what? Other people?

Florian: Everything, just connection. So the feeling of being connected. You know this feeling of being connected? Because we have this feeling of being like an island, then we know this feeling of being connected—not with somebody, but we feel like, “Wow, this is me.” It’s like a feeling of connection, and I don’t want to put too much spiritual stuff on top of it.

Rick: I get what you’re saying.

Florian: Okay, so, like, a belly connection. You meet somebody and say, “I have something in common with you. I have something in common with life.”

Rick: Affinity, maybe.

Florian: Like a dance. So we have to again go back to this kind of disintegration, because in that moment of overwhelm, what happens is that the system disconnects. It disconnects internally.

So there are two ways. First of all, we have to go back to the very early experiences of our life. When we leave the body of our mothers, and the way we grew up—I was born in the ’60s—it was very uncommon, what people these days used to call “mother-child bonding.”

Rick: They take the kid away and put him in an incubator.

Florian: Or for 30 minutes, they clean it up, wrap it up, and give it back to the mother. In those 30 minutes, there was no connection. And they found out only in the late ’70s about the whole impact that child-mother bonding has in the first two or three minutes after the child’s body is no longer in the body of the mother. That means that in these rudimentary minutes of life, essential existential neural pathways are established in the system concerning how the system experiences connection or disconnection. It’s fragments of a time span, just minutes. And that’s why these days they take care that the child is put on the chest of the mother even before they do anything, so that the nervous system immediately bonds and connects again with the warmth, the vibration, and the energy of the mother.

So it has an effect on how the neural pathways in the brain and in the nervous system are established. The way we grew up—most people grew up, especially when you look into the generations of spiritual seekers—was in a way where birth was completely different and actually quite brutal and cruel. The way our mothers gave birth, in my case, for about 30 minutes there was no connection. So what happens is that the system internally, on the level of the nervous system, has no blueprint; it has not learned to connect. It is navigating as though it wants to connect, because it is natural, but it doesn’t know how to connect.

So there is a lot of confusion around this. That’s one aspect. Then, through the experiences that we talked about later, it builds up a kind of connection with life based on its capacity. But when these overwhelm experiences come—and this doesn’t mean much from the perspective of a child—even these very fragile and rudimentary connections can easily be disconnected again. It’s like the system moves from its rudimentary association to dissociation, which means neural connections are destroyed through energetic impact.

Rick: So they don’t have the strength that they would have if the kid were allowed to be with the mother immediately.

Florian: So now we have two factors. Now imagine these systems start to go out, trying to connect. If we look at that first, most spiritual people begin by trying to find connection with a partner, with sexuality, or through doing a job. When they see it’s not bringing happiness, then they hear about enlightenment and think, “Ah, let’s go for this. It’s going to unify me again; it’s going to bring me oneness.” Oneness is, “I feel connected.” That’s what it is. If I feel one, I feel connected. It’s just another word for it.

The thing is, that’s not happening, because inside, the system doesn’t know how to connect with itself. It constantly looks for its own reconnection, or, let’s say, reintegration. So the spirituality that we are drawn to is very often a disembodied spirituality.

When we look into Indian culture, for example—I was living in India for many, many years, and again and again I returned—only very, very many years later did I realize how disembodied the spirituality that comes from India is.

Most of our contemporary spirituality, including Advaita, originated in India. But India is a very disembodied country; that’s why India looks like a dead body. Because the body is considered dirty and to be avoided. Sexuality and sensuality are things that you hardly can touch people about in India.

Rick: Yeah, if somebody accidentally touches you, they do all this apologetic stuff. And there are also actual scriptures that go on and on about how the body is all full of worms, feces, urine, and all the rest of it. They try to make it as disgusting as possible to disassociate you.

Florian: It’s a cultural perspective on the human body. So now, the spirituality that has been promoted and developed there is, in its seed, in its origin, Indian. We have to understand this. We have imported this into the West, and the promise is that we just don’t have to deal with that stuff.

But we are functioning, first of all, completely differently. And second, if we don’t include all the levels that I have been talking about, and also our understanding—because in the West we have been evolving as a species, we have found out about the nervous system, we have found out what impact birth has, and how the relationship between the parents and the child determines how healthy our system develops—all this knowledge is, I don’t understand, very often excluded from these kinds of nondual teachings.

We return to some stuff that is basically Indian, and in India it means that it completely neglects the body as part of the experience. That’s why I understand that so many people are confused, because we live here, we deal with this every day, and then we have that concept in our head that somehow tells us something different, so we don’t get this together.

So it’s a very, very serious—or, let’s say, a very useful—distinction: we cannot just take this philosophy or this perspective and import it into the West and say, “That’s the way it works,” because there are layers and levels in our nervous system that don’t understand that. There is no comprehension for disembodiment, because we don’t live there; we come from another cultural background. So I think it’s very important to take this into the big picture of what we are talking about.

Rick: I think perhaps a lot of that talk of the disgusting nature of the body and all in India was intended to break the initial infatuation with the body, with its beauty, with its pleasures, and all that, for people for whom all of that was the predominant reality. But I don’t know if it was meant as a sort of end teaching that one should always hang on to. Because, as you say, you may have a disembodied awakening, but you have to come back into the body after that.

Florian: If that is clear, for me it’s totally clear that if you have an understanding of this, and if you are prepared, and if, after you have your honeymoon—I call it the honeymoon with consciousness—and you have your honeymoon, I had my honeymoon, too, reality knocks on the door. And it knocks on the door with the very basics of life. You have to earn your money, and you have your marriage, or you have to put in a relationship your family.

And if you are not using all this as a concept to get away from it, you start to, instead of coping with life, let life in. You integrate life. But it’s not that you integrate something external. You start to integrate all the places where the system has lost its capacity to be in life, to be with life, to drink life.

Natural maturity and the need to rest

Rick: And I bet you when you do this, you can speak from your own experience, you find that you have a lot more energy, because a lot of energy is sort of consumed in trying to keep life at arm’s length. And once you don’t do that anymore, that energy can be freed up for…

Florian: There is an interesting intermediate step in this, which people also don’t know much about. When you have an understanding of consciousness, of who you are, then, like we said, life doesn’t normally let you get away with this. It is behind you, and it will keep reminding you that there is still integration.

Rick: There is more.

Florian: It’s a deepening that wants to happen. Deepening, deepening. Integration, call it like this. Deepening. And in the beginning, because you are just so much in love with that bliss, you just try to get rid of it at any cost. You just push everything away, saying, “No, I don’t want to deal with that stuff, because I’m done. I’m done.” Which is the mind claiming a state, which is not a state.

So now, like you said, this costs energy. It costs you a lot of energy to keep life out, because you are defending. You are defending a state. What happens is that the mind now identifies with nothingness. It says, “I’m nothing.” But that is identification with nothingness, and it protects itself from everything. It says, “I’m nothing, and I don’t want to deal with everything.” Which is life. That costs energy.

And if you are very lucky, there will be a moment when you become very, very exhausted. I have been noticing, in traveling around the world, including in my own experience, that if you live like this and hold on to that kind of state—or to that quality; for me it’s not a state, but it’s a quality—the system gets drained.

There is a moment when you get really exhausted. Underneath the bliss, underneath the claim, underneath the teachings, and underneath all that stuff—even people prostrating in front of you, and I tell you this from what I do in life, so to say—underneath there is accumulating exhaustion. Because the system still defends, and it uses even this teaching, and being a teacher, and all that stuff, as a subtle way to keep life away from yourself.

Because there is still no rest. So before the full impact of life can come in, like you said, like energy, in a sweet way—not in an overwhelm way, but as a kiss, like a natural flow—we have to allow the system to come to this place of exhaustion. It almost feels a little bit like a collapse.

Rick: Do we have to go that route, or is that just one way it could happen?

Florian: I don’t know if we have to go this way.

Rick: Maybe people can avoid that.

Florian: Look, I think it’s a little bit… A few days ago, I read an interesting passage in a book. I’m not reading much, but I just opened that book because I had a little health issue, and I said, “Let’s check this out.” I read something interesting and related it to myself. What it said was that in our lifespan, up to the middle of our life, around the mid-40s, our system, our body and energy system, is equipped with a natural amount of adrenaline, which is masculine energy. It’s an energy that pushes the system to survive. It pushes the system to make something out of your life, to get training, to get a job, to establish a career. You need will; you need that adrenaline. But that amount of adrenaline, of male energy, slows down and empties itself.

Rick: Do you mean testosterone, or do you mean adrenaline?

Florian: No, adrenaline.

Rick: Because women have adrenal glands too.

Florian: But it’s a hormonal cocktail. Women have that same thing, yes. But it’s a certain amount we have, and obviously that resource comes to an end around the middle of our life, which is actually good, because normally, when life moves normally, in the middle of our life we have established ourselves. We have the job, we have found our place in the world. Let’s say normal, just basically, no matter what you do, so you don’t need that energy anymore, and suddenly life offers different qualities.

For example, instead of fighting your way through and using your willpower, you can rest and let life in. You drink it, which is more like a feminine energy. It’s like receiving life. It was very interesting when I read this, that again, we were talking about biology, that the body is equipped with a certain amount, which is necessary to cope with life. It’s incredibly intelligent. But it is not there forever.

In the middle of our life, that’s why elderly people start to relax a little more. So now, if you look at the different generations of non-dual teachers out there, there are some, let’s say, very young ones, and they are very enthusiastic. They have that full power of adrenaline.

Rick: Like Bentinho?

Florian: For example. I mean, it’s just like energy, energy, energy, but there is so much power.

Rick: You have quite a bit of energy yourself, actually. You must be young.

Florian: No, I’m not so young.

Rick: I know.

Florian: So you see that energy still plays, but I can notice, over the last few years, and especially in the last few months, that exhaustion underneath. It’s like the system is reorganizing. It is literally transforming itself from doing, from pushing, from not resting, to a kind of natural quality of rest.

I’ve been talking to many, many hundreds of people in the last two or three years, and I was wondering why so many people are exhausted. I could notice that they come with the same thing: underneath all the bliss stuff, take the whole philosophy away, there is tiredness in the system. It’s like, hey, and it’s not because they are doing wrong. It’s because the system still has not fully integrated and learned the capacity to drink life, to enjoy—let’s call it to enjoy.

Not enjoy with a smile and jumping around, not this kind of enjoyment. It’s like an inner… It’s like drinking a nice, sweet, good wine. It’s like you sit down and you just enjoy, because there is a sense of knowing that you already are connected.

This adrenaline has to do with connection. The system tries to connect. And there is a funny assumption in the system that it is not connected yet. But there is a place in our system where we already know that we are connected, and it’s something we can feel in our belly, I would say. If I were to locate it, it’s like in the lower part of my body.

If we just honor that place, the system can hang out in that place of connectedness, even—and now we come to your question—in moments when discomfort happens, when focus is demanded, when conflict arises. We don’t have to leave that place of connection, let’s call it.

And I tried a lot, I mean really, Rick, and you cannot do this. No philosophy can provide this. It’s literally a natural maturing process that you cannot speed up.

Rick: So your experience is that you just have to wait until you get older. Now, what about a meditation practice, where you might be in your 20s, but you have cultured the practice of meditation? You can sit for an hour in a deeply restful state. I mean, wouldn’t that sort of inculcate the kind of more settled style of functioning that you are talking about?

Florian: How long does it last?

Rick: Well, if it’s a good type of practice, I would imagine that it doesn’t just stay there while you are meditating, but it has lingering effects. If you are doing it regularly, it lasts 24 hours a day.

Florian: Are we talking about lingering effects, or are we talking about the natural state?

Rick: Natural state, personally.

Florian: That’s a little distinction. I’m not making fun of you. It’s just that I understand what you are saying, and I understand that sincere meditation practices have an effect, depending on how serious they are and how clean they are.

Rick: And it’s not just a psychological effect. It alters the physiology in a permanent way, which runs 24/7.

Florian: I mean, I have been meditating many years, way ahead, but I’ve been noticing that the natural maturity…

Rick: That’s going to be an element too, no matter what.

Florian: …is not to be accomplished by any means.

Rick: Yeah, there is a certain dimension of the changes we go through that only has to do with age.

Ramana and Muktananda: nothing and everything

Florian: And again, it depends on what our culture… I mean, look, it’s funny enough, we live in a culture where we are winners. So a young man who has woken up and now teaches, he is a winner. And he has a lot of energy. People see his energy, people who may be 50 or 60 years old, and say, “Wow, look at this energy!” So they get a little bit of his energy, but it’s all borrowed, and it’s still part of our culture.

I think we have lost this beauty of ordinariness, of allowing ourselves to be tired, to be not great, not to be glorious, not to be the winner. And I don’t say that we are losers, but it’s so easy to be blinded by even this.

If the guys are looking good and having a good sense of humor, we are just like this, but it pulls our attention out there instead of noticing, sweetly and beautifully and consciously, what’s happening inside.

Because if you watch George Clooney on the catwalk, it’s like, “Wow, he is so charming!” And then you see one of those young, lovely, awakened guys, and they are just like, “Wow, it’s like Superman! I’m Superman!” And you are like, “Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, this is not reality. There is so much still to happen in life, and we don’t know this.”

So it’s just like, I don’t know how you are—you are also a little older than I am, probably.

Rick: I’m 62.

Florian: Yeah, so I don’t know. It’s like when you look at this stuff, it’s sweet. I enjoy it. I’m so happy for everyone, but also, inside you say, “Okay, don’t take it too seriously, just don’t take that too seriously.” Life is going to change that whole play. It just takes a couple of years and another crisis, and a little thing, and a little year, and then we are going to see how the whole thing is going to be. But people are so… they love the winners.

Rick: Sure. Look at our culture. We get all excited about what these movie stars are doing and everything.

Florian: Yeah, so now we have a new species of winners. We call them the spiritual winners. They made it, they got it, but they didn’t get anything. All that happened was a shift of focus, a realization, and a way of integration, ahead of all of us, of things that our system is carrying in the cells.

Rick: Yeah, I like to think we are all in the same boat. Maybe sometimes people wander to the front of the boat, sometimes people are in the back of the boat, but basically they are all in the same spot in the ocean, just kind of moving along together.

And also, different strokes for different folks. I noticed you are a musician there; you have some guitars. That’s an old line from “Sly and the Family Stone.” But, you know, if someone is attracted to one of these charismatic young teachers and wants to sit with them…

Florian: What people?

Rick: Yeah, great. And as you say, life goes through phases. We’ll see what they are doing 20 years from now, but it’s…

Florian: Yeah, it’s nothing wrong, and please forgive me, because I’m… It’s lovely to see. I can see there is a potential for seduction…

Rick: And there is a potential for guru worship, you know. And it can work both ways. I mean, that can not only sort of be…

Florian: And we all have to make our learnings, and it’s not about right or wrong. For me, it’s about honoring reality.

There is a reality of consciousness. This is the ultimate reality. There is consciousness here, and that is that which sees and includes everything. And then there is a human reality. We call it the embodied reality, the nervous system. It’s the biological reality, which is complex, and it has an effect on how our thinking functions, it has an effect on how our psyche is organized, and it has an effect on how healthy we are in dealing with life. And that, in my experience, cannot be denied.

If they are walking hand in hand, I would say life is like a rhythm between knowing what Ramana says, “I know that I am nothing.” That is the ultimate reality that Ramana represents. There is consciousness, there is the ultimate reality, and nothing is real.

And then there was the invitation of Muktananda, if I just take my own journey, and he said, “I am everything. All of this, the whole universe, is an experience in my own system, and I can sense this.” And somehow they are the same.

So for me, in my nervous system, there is this reality that Ramana represents, and then there is this drinking of life, this drinking of energy that Muktananda was representing, like Shakti, he called it.

Rick: Both at the same time.

Florian: And they are walking… It’s not even to say they are walking hand in hand. They are not to be separated from each other; they are one.

They are not to be separated from each other; they are one.

For me, I need to make an effort to separate one from the other, to say either to only play with energy—then I would lose myself, I would have no rest—or if I would only be resting without drinking, then God would not be recognized in all of existence. So I think this kind of… it’s a dance.

Rick: I get you. It’s paradoxical, but that’s the way life is. It’s both/and. In Vedic physiology, actually, there is this thing about there being two nervous systems, or two aspects of the nervous system, and it can develop to where one aspect of the nervous system is maintaining that “I am nothing” state, while the other aspect of the nervous system is simultaneously maintaining the “I am everything” state and the engagement-in-life state.

These two things kind of go on simultaneously by virtue of those two functions. I don’t think it’s a type of physiology that Western physiologists would acknowledge.

Florian: But if you look at how Western neurologists would describe it, they would call it the parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous systems. The parasympathetic nervous system is the organization of the system where the system abides and rests naturally, like when we sleep. The system moves from activation into rest.

The sympathetic nervous system is the nervous system that makes the system move and become active, that allows us to be in life and do the things that we need to do. Ideally, the system has found its rhythm, or has never lost its rhythm, so that these two organizations in the nervous system can swing like a pendulum.

So, pretty much what you say, but based on what we were talking about before, that natural self-regulation, or call it self-balancing, is a capacity most of us have lost. So we need to use tricks, techniques, methods, teachers, and energies to try to return to that balance.

The difficulty is that the system can only return naturally to that balance, because it already has that capacity. So, as a matter of fact, sooner or later, it is disappointing to remove the tricks, all of them, including non-duality. It is beautiful, but it is often used as a trick.

Rick: Yeah. Although I would suggest that a good teacher could offer you—I don’t know if we would use the word “tricks”—methods or something that would be natural, that you wouldn’t say were unnatural, but that can help to inculcate this sort of style of functioning you are alluding to. So it is not like I would toss all the teachers out the window.

Florian: No, no, no, no, no, no. It is not the teacher; it is what the system does with the teacher. The teacher can be a trick, or it can be a pointer or an invitation. Nothing needs to be thrown out the window. It is about being honest with oneself, to see, “How am I using all this?”

A practical approach to trauma

Rick: Let me ask you a question that would bring us to the practical application of everything you are saying. Let’s say that you were hired by the U.S. Army to come over to Afghanistan and deal with soldiers who are under a tremendous amount of stress and are traumatized by the fighting they have been involved in. And the army says, “This is a problem. These guys are committing suicide. They are killing each other. They are going home and beating up their families. They are becoming alcoholics. We want you to help these guys de-stress and decondition from the intense situation they have been through.” What would you do for people like that?

Florian: Very simple. I mean, the first thing I would introduce—and it is very simple—is just making them realize that prior to all the experiences they are undergoing—the fear, the stress, the disintegration, the panic—there is an awareness of all of this.

Rick: And how would you make them realize that?

Florian: Just asking a bunch of questions. “Is it possible that you see that thinking?” We would say, “Of course, I am conscious of my thinking.” “Are you conscious of the panic in your system?” “Yes, I am conscious, because otherwise, how could they tell me?” “Are you conscious of the vibrations in your nervous system?” because stress is a high level of agitation, of activation in the nervous system.

They would normally say, “Of course.” And it is very simple, because if they were not aware of it, they wouldn’t be able to talk to me about it. So that simple fact—that they can tell me about it—is proof that there is something aware of it prior to their capacity to talk to me.

So that awareness is who we are, which is prior to integration and disintegration. It is prior to stress and relaxation, because these are states of activation in 80 million cells. That is what we are dealing with. We are dealing with a biology; we are dealing with a physical experience, or call it a somatic experience. I think that is a better word.

Okay, so now, as we are here, imagine you are one of those soldiers, or I am one of those soldiers. So take a moment. There is awareness here, and see if we can just be conscious of the different qualities that are in our nervous systems right now. Some of them are relaxed; our feet are on the ground. We can feel a little tension in the shoulders, some energy flowing through the arms. Energy is quite active, but there is a connection with the belly.

Rick: Florian and I just had a brief interruption, a computer glitch, and I had to restart my computer. It took a moment to feed the cat and go to the bathroom, and now we are back. I am going to ask Florian to resume where he left off.

Florian: So we were playing with that idea that we meet somebody, a soldier of the U.S. Army, who is highly stressed, and what would I tell him? That was the question.

Rick: Yeah, and you were leading through a procedure that you would take him through.

Florian: Yeah, I would just start by inviting that person to realize that there is awareness here, and that this awareness is prior to even the stress, the excitement, and the activation in the system. It is the ultimate reality; it is who he is—consciousness.

It is a very simple, easy distinction. People make a huge fuss out of this, but with a bunch of interesting, simple questions, people realize this in a glance. It is nothing big.

Rick: And have you actually done this with people who are really tightly wound, who are on the verge of suicide?

Florian: Of course, on a daily basis.

Rick: Deep depression, that kind of thing?

Florian: Yes. I am also sharing Skype sessions with people around the world when I am not traveling—people with a lot of symptoms, or with different levels of disintegration, including people who have been on the spiritual journey for many, many years. I am privileged to meet them, play with them, and explore this together.

Some of them have realized this awareness as the ultimate reality already, which is not necessarily causing stars to show up. For some, it is a very exciting experience; for others, it is a very calm, smooth, natural realization that doesn’t have a lot of impact. I don’t want to underestimate that realization, but I also don’t want to give it too much significance, because that is not the end of the story.

So when I would now meet those people, or whoever, with the same symptoms, it doesn’t necessarily need to be a soldier, because a lot of people have those symptoms, I would invite them, as step number one, simply to take a moment.

Now, as we are here, there is awareness here. And just taking a moment, just slowing down time, because there is a capacity in us to literally slow down inside. There is so much speed, and we can be aware of the speed and the activation.

If you can, I would talk to you now as if you were that person. We are just allowing the focus of our attention to relax for a moment, like a muscle that we have been holding tight for years—for 20, 30, or 40 years—because we were so scared. We give it a moment to let the focus relax, like when you are tired and come home and say, “What a day! Enough for today!” Then you just let the focus hang. Let it hang loose, like this.

And notice: just the invitation has an effect on how the stream of energy starts to flow differently. You can feel a little tingling in the legs. It is like, “Ah, okay.” And in that moment, you can feel the underlying tiredness. Can you feel it? It is behind the eyes; it lives there.

And we just give it space. We allow it; we fully give it that space, because this is the most precious thing we have now to slow down. What we are used to doing is pushing it over, kicking it, and keeping going, because it feels like, “If I let go now, if I really surrender to the exhaustion, everything would break down.” It scares the worst out of us.

But interestingly, when we honor this, this is an underlying reality in most of us. And don’t underestimate that, Rick. It doesn’t matter how shiny and bright we are on the surface. I include myself in this. This is not the actual reality.

In most of us—and I would say in 99 percent of all cases—I have seen teachers and students on various levels, and when I meet them like this and we just take a moment, this is felt. Because the system—as a species, we are all still running more or less in survival mode. We could even call it a spiritual survival mode.

So this Advaita, non-duality stuff is very often another loop in our survival machinery. We are trying to survive—literally, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. Many people are also surviving in the worldly sense. This is a survival mechanism.

Rick: So when you say 99 percent of the people, what you are referring to is that 99 percent have this sort of inner agitation or disruption or upheaval, or something going on beneath the surface. Is that what you are referring to?

Florian: Yes, everybody.

Rick: To varying degrees, obviously. Some people have a huge amount; some people have a minimal amount. But you are saying there is always some.

Florian: And there is a tremendous capacity to compensate. I mean, the tricks and the ways our system compensates so that it doesn’t have to deal with this are unbelievable. And I tell you this from the perspective of what people call a teacher; I am not referring to myself as this. This is a highly developed compensation.

Because it can be used for this, if you are not taking care of what is actually happening inside of you.

Rick: You mean being a teacher can be a compensation?

Florian: It is the ultimate compensation, because you are exposed. People come to you, there is a lot of energy playing with you, and people give you a lot of energy. So it builds up a certain, let’s say, artificial reality in your own nervous system that creates a feeling of aliveness that probably is not your own aliveness.

Rick: I taught meditation for 25 years, and when you are up in front of a crowd of 100 people and they are asking you questions, and you are really on the stage, you really wake up.

Florian: And you wake up, and you wake up together, because there is so much play of energy happening. You have 100 people in a retreat, and for five days they give you attention, because that is what they are coming for.

Rick: Yeah, it is a real high.

Florian: It’s a high, but it suggests to your system aliveness, which probably, in my experience—and I am just speaking very openly, because from time to time I take breaks and want to see what the actual reality is. And it is interesting to see that there is a lot of bored aliveness.

And underneath, the system is still trying to survive even that energetic impact, because you are imagining it copes with its own experience. Now there is so much energy coming in from the outside, now it has to cope with that energy, too, and the system is just breaking down regularly, in a way.

So, to be able to, as we are speaking… It’s interesting, the way we are sensing now; it’s quite amazing. We are talking, but there is a different quality to how aware we are inside. Do you notice this? It is like we are taking care of that subtle—it’s like a tiredness, and I am using words now, but it has an effect. We are more gentle. Can you notice? It’s like it slows down, we give more breaks, and we can track more. We are connecting deeper with what is actually true in us.

And I am talking not about the ultimate truth that we are awareness; we have had this before. But there is an inner reality of this organism called “Rick,” an inner organization of the nervous system called “Florian,” and this is so often denied. And not because we are—because nobody has invited us. I mean, nobody has introduced us to a way to meet this, to welcome it, to drink it—what we are actually dealing with on a daily basis.

Interestingly, I have been meeting some colleagues, some teachers, and I have had the luck to meet them privately. And it’s quite interesting: when they are not on stage like me or having an interview, it’s very different. So I am happy to also promote this now, because you said before that you also have a lot of energy. On the one hand, it’s true, but it’s only one part of the game.

How is that now? So we are talking about this: can we invite this kind of receptive, gentle quality, or let’s call it a kind of non-pushed energy? It’s less energetic, it feels less bright, maybe it even feels less enlightened, or whatever you call this. How can we describe this? How would you say?

Rick: You mean right now, how would we describe it?

Florian: Yeah, or how do we connect? What effect does it have on the energy field that we are creating right now, together, you and me?

Rick: Well, I am not sure I completely understand your question, but when I do an interview like this, I find it’s sort of like the old teaching days, in terms of a real high of energy, but it’s also very refining. It’s sort of like your whole system becomes more finely attuned, or more subtle in its functioning.

Florian: And for me it’s interesting: it creates space. Suddenly there is a space between over there and here, in which life can happen, in exploration. Maybe even the people who are listening, or will see the interview, will feel like, “Ah, there is more space now to be, to rest.” That’s how I feel it right now.

Rick: Well, your whole thing that you started out talking about, about shifting from the tight focus to the sort of more relaxed, broad… I think when you have your attention on something like this, it has that effect. It sort of loosens the grip of the tight focus and relaxes you into a broader kind of state.

Florian: But can you notice what has an effect? This widening of the focus has an effect on how the body reorganizes.

Rick: Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Florian: The body follows the focus.

Rick: It becomes as if more coherent in its functioning.

Florian: Or transparent, or almost like it expands a little bit, as if the cells of the system would have space to breathe, to be. And it’s interesting that the experience we are having is following the focus, obviously.

Rick: One doubt that I have that I want to raise is…

Florian: Go ahead.

Rick: I wonder about the potency of what you are doing, or what you are saying. Because, as we have discussed earlier, there are many, many layers of conditioning, some of which started in our infancy. And some of these people I have been talking about are highly stressed. If you went over to Afghanistan to do this counseling, would you really be able to relax them through very many layers, or would you just be kind of scratching the surface, since it’s built up so powerfully? And then they have to go out and fight again. So how can this help them not get as stressed the next time they have to go out and fight?

Florian: I mean, first of all, it’s true. We are not talking about the quick fix.

Rick: Right, okay.

Florian: Not at all. So I have to be honest. I mean, I have been in that field for 25 years now. The last 11 years, I was more inviting people from here, from consciousness, instead of from fixing. But anyway, there is a lot of potential for integration or healing still there.

Rick: Which could go on for years.

Florian: In my experience, it is…

Rick: A lifetime.

Florian: Never-ending.

Rick: Right, right.

Florian: The deepening, or the healing, or the integration, or the embodiment—I don’t see an end to this. If people claim it’s done, okay, it’s a valuable perspective, but it’s not my experience. I would not sign this.

Rick: I think it’s good to be clear about that, because otherwise people have false expectations. Either they kind of fool themselves into thinking they are done, or they feel bad because they feel like, “Hey, I am not done and I should be,” or something. But if you realize that it’s an ongoing process…

Florian: The idea of doneness is so confusing, because having a lot of energy doesn’t mean that you are integrated. Being bright and smart doesn’t mean you are integrated. Even being awakened doesn’t mean that you are integrated. It has nothing to do with each other. I mean, these are completely two different realms.

To be grounded or integrated is another way to say, to be able to be connected without doing connection, without actively connecting. That is something completely different than knowing that you are consciousness. I mean, these are two different worlds.

And I think it’s very, very important to let people know that there is a long journey, depending on the history of that body, of meeting things in the system. Once you have seen them, you will very clearly know who has ruled the energy in your house.

Even the drive to teach, or the drive to share, or to be bright and to let people know what you have found—I mean, there are so many things in the background that are still like the remote control. So, to be honest, if I met those guys in Afghanistan, that would take time. A very huge factor on that journey is time.

Rick: Yeah, and obviously you are just one man and you can’t sit and meet with millions of people in the world. So do you have something that you say to people that would just enable them to do this on their own without you?

Florian: I mean, the main thing is that people are learning to listen to their nervous system.

Rick: To tune in, sort of.

Florian: To listen to it. We have not learned to listen to the body, to the intelligence of the nervous system, the intelligence of the body, to all the things, to all the tightening, to really listen to what the system tells us.

There is such a high intelligence in our system that communicates with us, but we have not learned to receive this information, because we tend to interpret that information. It can be either psychological, but it can also be spiritual. One interpretation is, “It’s just not real. Why should I deal with this?” It’s an interpretation. It is an interpretation as if I say, “Just focus on it all the time and try to fix it.” That’s a psychological interpretation.

But can we really listen to and receive the information of what our system tells us without a filter? The precondition for all this is that you know that there is awareness, and only that enables you to finally, at least, begin to listen.

And I mean, there are meditation practices that promote this, like Vipassana. The thing is that they do it with a particular focus. I would suggest receiving the information without a focus, without doing anything with it. It’s like literally learning to become passive.

So I can imagine if I tell those guys in Afghanistan, “Hey guys, just receive what your body tells you,” most of them would never return to the battlefield.

Rick: Because their body says, “Don’t go there!”

Florian: It’s pure violence. I mean, what they are doing to themselves is pure violence. So then they have the concept of duty and all this stuff. Okay, that makes them maybe go back to the battlefield, but if they would just learn to listen, nobody would ever go back to a battlefield. It’s because it’s pure violence against your own being.

No matter what philosophy you are using to justify this, or whatever politics you are using for this, it’s nutcase. So, I mean, it’s easier said than done, or easier said than played with in daily life.

Rick: Let’s say a person says, “Okay, this sounds good. I want to learn to listen to my body,” and so on, “and I’ll devote whatever time you recommend—15 minutes, half an hour, or little moments throughout the day, or whatever.” What specifically, practically, would you prescribe to such a person who could just start doing this on a daily basis?

Florian: Very simple. Every time you notice that you are disembodying, which means that you are losing ground, simply that you are losing ground contact and you stop feeling yourself properly, take a moment—take two, three, four, or five seconds. That’s enough. Bring your attention back to your nervous system. Feel it, feel the vibration, feel where it’s comfortable and where it’s not comfortable, feel your feet on the ground, take a breath, and then move on.

And it may only last for 60 seconds until you feel like you are disembodying again, and you start again. It’s like you are learning to walk.

Rick: It becomes a habit after a while, maybe.

Florian: You have to, because disembodying means not paying attention, jumping over, denying—it is a habit. And it is even a spiritually justified habit; it became a spiritually justified habit.

So, in another way, through repetition, this habit becomes like your reality. And all that I am introducing is giving that habit little interruptions and double-checking with your system: “Am I really here? Am I in touch with…” Normally spoken, do I have my feet on the ground?

Basically, that’s where it all begins: Do I really have my feet on the ground? Am I just flying high? And when I fly high, I don’t feel much. Then take a moment, and this is like an ongoing little—let’s call it a play, a game.

You start to pay attention to yourself, which is, for me, the practical aspect of giving love or attention to yourself. Not here, not with your head, “I love myself.” Not as a suggestion or like an affirmation, but you really take a break and say, “How is the system right now? Is it well, or am I claiming that it is well?”

Every time you notice that you are disembodying, take a moment. Bring your attention back to your nervous system.

Rick: Yes, so in other words, just be a little bit more self-aware on a physical level, just tune in periodically.

Florian: Listen, listen. It’s not so much observing; it’s not observing yourself. It’s also not being aware of self. I would say it’s like the awareness, the focus of awareness, or the focus of attention, just includes the body and receives information that, in my experience, is essential to live a healthy life, or an integrated life.

A spiritual life is not necessarily an integrated life.

Rick: Ideally it should be, but often it isn’t.

Florian: Yes, and integration doesn’t mean it’s a big, big, big super word. For me, it’s basically that you know how to make your living, that you have somehow intact relationships, and, if you are lucky, you have a partner you can explore with.

I mean these basics: that you feel comfortable, that you feel safe without being completely neurotic and spiritualizing your own detachment because you don’t know how to live. It’s just the simple science of an integrated human being.

It’s not that you have to be Superman or go out and teach all kinds of stuff. That’s bullshit, sorry to say. It has nothing to do with integration. It’s just really very ordinary, and I’m just taking care of this in my own life as well as I can.

I’m noticing that when my wife and I bump into each other, there’s always an invitation to have a closer look at what’s there and all that stuff. Then life becomes very simple and very easy, and there is no need to use anything to move away from that. It’s not necessary. You don’t even have to talk about it, actually.

You drink life just the way it comes in, to the degree you can. And that’s important—to the degree your nervous system already allows that. That’s a key for me, because I was so frustrated sometimes. I wanted to really let it all in, but the system said, “I can’t,” because there was still so much overwhelm in me that even certain experiences were just too much.

So it was like a battlefield inside of me, with my heart telling me, “Of course I like to open up, I like to be one, and I like to drink all of it,” while the nervous system said, “Baby, slow down, this is too fast for me.” To bring this into an alignment in a way that really works, that is a yearlong process.

Rick: And have you found, though, that over the years your capacity to take it all in has continued to increase?

Florian: Yes. It’s like a humbling process of knowing that your energy is not unlimited, that your adrenaline is not there forever, and that you are somehow—from the perspective of a man, I would say—starting to honor more female virtues.

It’s more receptivity, not like, “Waah!”—not this kind of style. I like what the Dalai Lama said in a beautiful speech, I think last year, and I really like that. He said, “What the world needs the most is female moderation.”

Rick: Moderation?

Florian: Female moderation. And I think we are on a journey there, including us as men—not becoming women, not becoming wimps, but learning to pay attention to life in a way that a woman or a mother would always do, because she is dealing with life in a different way, with the body.

So I think we are on a journey from this kind of masculine approach more toward feminine qualities. Even our spirituality, I think, is going to change, because if you look at Advaita, it’s a pretty male-dominant philosophy. That’s why I think the whole issue of integrating, giving time, and tuning in has a lot of headroom for maturity, even around this.

I think Advaita is not the end of the line. It is a suggestion. It is two thousand to five thousand years old, and it is still evolving. Consciousness is not a fixed position, as is unfortunately often claimed. It is a movement; it is an ongoing revealing that is happening through us as we are talking right now.

Advaita discovers itself in its deeper truth, and I think if we see it like this, then we really start to explore instead of claiming and exchanging opinions about what’s right and wrong. That’s my point.

Beliefs as protection mechanisms

Rick: Yeah, that’s a good point. Let’s touch on one more theme, if we have a moment, that I heard you discuss a bit in your talks with Richard on Never Not Here. You talked quite a bit about beliefs and belief systems, and the impact that, I suppose, harboring certain unexamined assumptions has on a person’s life. You know what I am talking about?

Florian: Yes.

Rick: You want to just kind of address that for a minute?

Florian: Yeah. I mean, if we talk about belief systems, they are basically compensation organizations that make us not deal with experiences that are incredibly painful in our nervous system. We don’t know how to meet them.

When the system has been under the impact of a painful experience or an invasion, which is mostly connected with a life-threatening moment, what happens is that the system needs to survive that situation. It starts with that energetic impact, and what happens is that the system builds up rudimentary beliefs around life.

For example, “I can never trust.” When your mother was invasive, the system learns, “I cannot trust closeness. I cannot trust intimacy,” or, “I cannot trust a woman,” because that belief is connected with an invasive experience.

So the system builds up a belief. It is very simple: “I cannot trust a woman,” for example. And that belief protects you from the repetition of another painful experience. Beliefs are subtle protection mechanisms that prevent the system from reexperiencing something that it didn’t know how to cope with. Very simple.

How they manifest in the body is through contractions. So every contraction we have is an unconscious belief that the body holds tightly to, such as, “I can’t,” or, “I must,” or, “It’s impossible,” or, “I know it’s true.” These are beliefs.

All these rigid positions, or another way to say it, pull the focus tightly into a rigid focus, and the body follows the focus. As we found out, it tightens up. So we feel these unconscious beliefs or rigid positions as all kinds of tension in the somatic organization—in the tissue and in the muscles.

Solving it mentally, trying to find that belief, doesn’t actually make a big difference. Psychology has tried a lot of things like this. Byron Katie, for example, is doing a lot with this kind of turnaround, changing belief systems. It has beautiful value, but only when we give the body time to drink that in, to see the correlation between the muscular structure, the tissue, the cells, and how the psyche—a belief is a psychological organization—correlate all the time.

Through changing belief systems, it is not necessarily that the cells start to relax. It has an effect, but it is a dynamic, I would say, like an information exchange from the cells to the mental, to the psyche, and back to the cells.

What was very useful for me was to understand that these beliefs or positions are protection mechanisms. They are survival mechanisms of the system in order to cope with certain experiences that it doesn’t know how to cope with naturally, or in an appropriate way, for example. Does it make sense?

Rick: Yeah. It’s funny; when you were saying that, I was reminded of the lyrics of “I Am a Rock” by Simon and Garfunkel. “A rock feels no pain, an island never dies, I touch no one and no one touches me.” A very appropriate song.

So how did you, with this understanding, unravel beliefs that you were using as protective mechanisms, or somehow relax them?

Florian: Again, a very practical example. I’m a married man, I love my wife, and from time to time we get into trouble, like everybody. So there is a dynamic happening.

In the moment, what everybody can notice is that when the trouble begins, my system loses its sense of ease and rest and becomes activated. I call it an activation, a slight leap. I’m not resting in my body; I become like a speed in the system—fear and all kinds of stuff. We don’t have to label all that stuff.

With that sense of losing rest, there are interesting movements happening: defensive movements, protective movements, like fight, flight, and freeze. We were talking about this. Just to realize this and to take a moment to really see how the system has moved from ease to a habit to—

Rick: Agitation.

Florian: Yeah, activation. In that moment, when you are not moving with the psychology, because normally when the energy starts to disembody, what happens is that it pushes the energy up into your head, and the mind starts to be activated, too.

You start to think more than before, because when you are resting there is not much thinking. So the mind starts to try to find the cause of the difficulty: Is it she? No, it’s me. There is something that has happened.

When you take time to examine that, to really see without following anything—not the sensations, not the thinking—you will see that there are a few, funny enough, musts, don’ts, have-tos, no-nos, and absolutes that show up.

All I am doing is asking myself, “Is it necessary?” I can protect, and it’s not wrong to protect. It’s not wrong to defend. But is it useful? Is it necessary in this moment to meet or to solve?

Funny enough, I never found it necessary. So in that moment, it’s not necessary. Again, it’s not “no.” It’s not pushing it away or suppressing it. It’s just, “I can do this now. I can keep on, but is it necessary? What’s the function of it?”

Rick: So recognizing that you can kind of relax out of it and not persist in—

Florian: Exactly—not moving with the fight, flight, and freeze defenses.

Rick: Yeah, kind of step back.

Florian: It’s like, yeah, you give it space. It’s not so much detaching yourself. It’s not so much withdrawing or stepping back. It’s more that suddenly there are options that were not there before.

Because if this remains unconscious and not seen, there is no option. There is nothing we can do. The habit kicks in and moves us, no matter how conscious we are. We are even seeing that we are moving with the habit; we are even conscious of this, but there is no other option. The system just moves habitually.

So it’s important to notice that we can be fully conscious of habitual functioning. We are conscious of it, but as the system has no other option, there is only one option, which means continuing to repeat pain patterns or destructive patterns that we know are not working.

We can even say, “I am fully aware of this,” but it doesn’t change anything. And not to justify this or use anything to cover it up, there is an interest, at least in my system, to see: Is there an option, or is there freedom of choice?

Because as long as—and we have to also clarify this—as long as unconscious habits are playing out, there is absolutely no option for us. We cannot do anything. The moment you are aware of it and the system has taken a moment to really tune in and see what is happening, options arise.

It’s like a space, like a gap, in which a moment of freedom is like a space. In that space, options arise. Alternatives. For me, freedom is nothing else but having options to my habitual functioning. That’s freedom. That’s all that it is: that I have options, that I can experiment.

It’s not a guarantee that it’s going to move on nicely. It’s not a guarantee that it’s moving perfectly in the next step. But at least I am not going down the old highway, which is just repeating and establishing beliefs into deeper truths, so to say.

That’s very practical for me, and my relationship, or these kinds of things, is a perfect playground for me to play with that stuff. Is there an option?

For me, freedom is nothing else but having options to my habitual functioning.

Rick: That sounds great.

Florian: So there are options when we are conscious. As long as we are unconscious, and we are even using a philosophy to cover that up, it’s true, there is nothing we can do. But in the moment we are conscious, there are options.

Rick: I am reminded of what Christ said as they were about to crucify him. He said, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.” They are unconscious.

Florian: They are unconscious. So we have to see it from two different perspectives. We can look at reality and at life from the perspective of unconscious patterns that play out. Unconscious means we don’t see them. We don’t even know that they are operating, and from that, of course, we cannot do anything.

Rick: Right.

Florian: So it’s even true when people say, “There is nothing you can do,” but only from the perspective of unconscious habits playing out. And I would not claim that even in this moment there might not be some unconscious patterns playing out. But as long as I don’t see them, there is nothing I can do.

But in the moment I am conscious of them, no matter how it comes along, options show up. “Hey, I can experiment with this, I can try it another way, I can play, I can dance.” It’s like suddenly you have two steps. Before you had one step, and now you have three, two, four steps, and say, “Hey, wow, that’s cool. That is smooth.” Isn’t it?

Closing thoughts

Rick: Yeah, that’s good. And I guess everything you have said today, it seems to me, boils down to culturing the habit of self-referral, or self… tuning in to your body.

Florian: Just simply not denying anything.

Rick: Not denying, and culturing the habit of just stopping the habitual drive outward, and just turning within for a moment to see what’s going on.

Florian: Yes, just taking a moment—two, three, four, five seconds—tuning in to the nervous system, into the habits, because you know yourself already. You have lived with yourself for 62 years; you know all your habits. And it just takes one moment to say, “Okay, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second. I know this now. I know the whole story.”

And what happens when I give a moment of gentle, gentle, gentle, gentle quality of attention to some maybe valuable information that my body wants to give me, and I just couldn’t hear it up to now? I could just say, “No way, no!” That’s how we mostly are: “Don’t, don’t talk to me like this!” Very funny. It’s so funny how we’re functioning.

Rick: Yeah, it’s like the old saying, “Don’t confuse me with the facts; I’ve made up my mind.”

Florian: Exactly. Because the body tells you some facts that may interfere with the truth of your mind. And to bring them together, I would describe it as being like an integrated human being, or the capacity to enjoy, even when life comes in. And life is not always pleasant; it cannot be. It’s a lollipop fantasy. Yeah, lovely.

Rick: Great. Well, thank you very much, Florian. I think this gives people a lot to chew on.

Florian: I can imagine.

Rick: Yeah, and if they want to chew more, I’ll be linking to your website, and they can read things, listen to things, and even talk to you in person over Skype, if they’d like to do that.

Florian: I’ll be coming, if nothing happens unexpectedly, I’ll be back in…

Rick: In the States?

Florian: Yeah, soon, starting in Seattle, and then at SAND again, at that conference, and then just traveling around in the U.S., and having a finalizing retreat in Florida, I think around mid-November.

Rick: Great.

Florian: I can imagine that quite a few people in the States listen to your programs.

Rick: Yeah, quite a few, all over the world, actually. And you’ll have a schedule of all that on your website, I presume.

Florian: There will be a new website coming out in the next few weeks, so it’s still the old website, but it provides all the necessary…

Rick: Redesigned and all, yeah.

Florian: It’s a whole relaunch of the whole thing, and it would be lovely to also link this video, once you put it on your website. Maybe I can put it on my website.

Rick: It’s easy to do. Your webmaster will know how to do it. You embed the code and it just shows up.

Good. Well, thanks. Let me just make some points in summary. I’ve been speaking with Florian Schlosser, and this is, I don’t know, number 87 or 88 or something, in a series of interviews that I’ve been doing on a show called Buddha at the Gas Pump. I do a new one each week, and if you go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, you’ll see the whole collection.

You can subscribe to an email newsletter to be notified when new ones are posted, and you can subscribe to a podcast if you like to listen while you’re commuting or something like that. There are discussion groups that pop up with each new interview. It’s like a place to leave comments, and people often get into lively discussions. Sometimes I’ll even call the author in, or the person I’ve interviewed, to comment on questions people have asked and so on.

So, batgap.com, please visit there. My next interview will be with Karen Richards, who’s in the U.K., and you’ll notice that she’ll be wearing the same headset as Florian. I have several of them out in the field, and people send them one to the next. So, thanks for watching or listening, and we’ll see you next week.

Florian: Okay, thank you, Rick, for inviting me, and love and hugs to you and to everyone who’s going to listen to this.

Rick: Thanks, and I look forward to meeting you in California.

Florian: Oh yeah, you’ll be at the conference, you said?

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

Florian: Oh, very good, I’m happy to. I’ll be having a pre-conference workshop, and then all the other people will have a presentation, I don’t know exactly. It’s a fun happening, a lot of information.

Last year was interesting, because I felt like people didn’t really take a lot of time to integrate what came into them. At the end of the day, the people were so in their heads; there was so much information coming in, and there was no reason to rush from one event to the other.

So this time I took myself two more days to slow down and not to rush through the whole thing.

Rick: Yeah, and incidentally, if people are interested in that conference, there’s a link on my website to it. There’s an icon on the right-hand side. The dog is getting excited. There’s a link on the right-hand side called “Science and Non-Duality.” If you click on that, it’ll take you to the site where you can see more about that, if you want.

Florian: And I would recommend also that people come, because it’s a great event: a lot of different voices, a lot of different energies and tastes that people can play with. So, I’m looking forward to being back. I put it on my website, too, and on Facebook, too.

Rick: A lot of people I’ve been interviewing will be there. In fact, that’s part of the reason I want to go. I mean, Bentinho Massaro and Pamela Wilson, and all kinds of people, and also people I’m going to be interviewing, like Rupert Spira and others.

So, anyway, I guess we’ve plugged that conference enough. So, thanks, Florian.

Florian: Great. It was a pleasure to talk to you.

Rick: Yeah, I’ll see you soon. [Music]