Rick:Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve been doing it for over six years now and if this is new to you, if you go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, you’ll see all the previous ones archived and organized in various ways under the past interviews menu. Check them out. This also exists as an audio podcast for those who like to listen to audio podcasts and the whole thing is made possible by the support of appreciative viewers and listeners. So, if you appreciate it and feel like supporting it to any degree, there’s a PayPal button on the site and if you don’t like PayPal, there’s a page that explains other ways that you can donate if you wish. My guest today is my old friend Timothy Conway. I laugh because we’ve never met in person but we’ve been friends for about years now and I interviewed Timothy about six years ago shortly after I started this show and I recently listened to that interview, and I think those who find this one interesting will enjoy that one. And in that one we went into a lot of biographical stuff and Tim’s history and everything. We’re not going to do that this time, so if you want to fill yourself in on that information you should listen to the first one. I’ll read a little bio here that Timothy sent me, just especially for the sake of the audio podcast listeners who may not have read the bio on the Batgap page. “Surely by Divine Grace in , Timothy woke up to non-dual reality, the Divine Reality or Self that is doing everything and being everybody. He has gratefully served ever since then as a simple spiritual friend, kalyanamitra, and since the s as a satsang teacher, counselor, healer, and author of over essays, as well as the book, Women of Power and Grace, and forthcoming books, the Liberating Zen Sourcebook, the enormous two-volume India’s Sages, and other works. His website enlightened-spirituality.org is a major resource on spiritual awakening, non-dual wisdom, and non-dual devotion, engaged spirituality, illustrious sages, and world religions, spiritual humor, and much more. The much more actually also includes a rather insightful critiques of some teachers who might have enticed a lot of people into following them but may have gone a bit off the rails. So I sometimes find those critiques interesting. Timothy and his wife Laura are residing in Vistancia, Arizona for at least a year to be close to her family. Timothy continues to hold free satsangs and classes on a variety of spiritual topics and also sees clients for psychological counseling services. His basic message, “Your unborn true identity is already complete, whole, and full as absolute awareness aliveness, and by graceful power of this supra-personal reality, the personal consciousness instrument can be suffused with all sorts of beautiful divine virtues.” Another thing which Timothy doesn’t mention in that bio is that he did his PhD dissertation on enlightenment. I guess I’m trying to get/wrap his arms around what it actually is. I believe it was like pages long or something, wasn’t it Timothy?
Timothy: Yeah.
Rick: I think I even heard it was a thousand and you managed to edit it down to 600 or something.
Timothy: Yeah.
Rick: That must have been tough on a manual typewriter back in those days if you didn’t have computers to work with.
Timothy: That’s right. RA; And actually that’s the main thing I’d like to talk to you about today. We’ll talk about whatever comes up and whatever people want to ask through those who are watching live, but I would like to talk about what enlightenment is, because all of us watching this podcast and thousands of people out there are keenly interested in it, and yet if you think about it, do we really all understand exactly what we mean by the word and do we all agree on what we mean by the word? And there’s several, I’ll talk a little bit more than usual for just a moment here to just get you started. There are a couple of reasons why I think it’s really important to understand what it is. Well first of all, it is not a thing that a “you” gets, we can make that clear, but the language being such as it is, it’s convenient to just talk normally. I think one good reason for understanding what it is, is that it can be an incentive, a motivation. I mean there are many people who feel that life is meaningless and empty and depressing and hundreds of people a day end their lives intentionally because they don’t want them to continue. And to me it’s like we’re all, metaphorically speaking, multi-millionaires who are living as paupers, not having been told that we have this tremendous bank account that we could tap into if we only knew it existed and had a means to tap into it. So maybe you could even just speak to that first point before we go on. As a culture, understanding that there actually is such a thing and that it’s right under our noses and that we all have the potential for the tremendous value of living it, would transform us culturally and individually.
Timothy: Yes.
Rick: You’re gonna have to say more than that.
Timothy: Well let’s get clear on some basic concepts perhaps. I mean that long dissertation was all about trying to find out what are the common areas of agreement among all the great sacred traditions and the sub-lineages within each tradition, like say Chan, Zen and Som Buddhism within Buddhism, along with say the Vajrayana Tibetan Buddhist schools of practice and thought. So Christian mysticism and Northern European Christian mysticism, Southern Christian mysticism, like in Southern European countries from Italy and so forth, going over to Eastern Orthodox spirituality, Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition, Kabbalah and the Hasidic traditions within Judaism and so forth and so on, different tariqa or lineages of Muslim Sufism, Muslim mysticism. And even within just the so-called non-mystical aspects of say Islam, not even Sufi Islam, but just Islam, you know what did the Hadith, the sayings of Prophet Muhammad peace and blessings be upon him, as our pious Muslim friends would say.
Rick: And you’re just talking about this planet in recorded history but actually if we really get into what enlightenment is it’s something that would have universal implications wherever sentient life exists in this universe.
Timothy: Right, so what are the shared features as each of these traditions, the members, the teachers, the practitioners, as they all aspire toward the acme, the summit of realization, what are the qualities, the virtues, the knowings, the realizations? So you know I’ve been devouring the literature of these traditions since I was about or awakenings that happened without any reading or any pre-formation by any concepts or anything. I was just a dumb jock, totally addicted to sports and I just kind of suddenly woke up and I had nothing to do with it, which is why I can’t claim it as like my enlightenment and start going around trying to you know, subtly imply that others are not enlightened and then presume to be charging people money. I find this one of the oldest rackets and it’s corrupt to the core. So because the one power shapeless, colorless, formless, partless, that’s being everyone and doing everything, this power is not mine. I don’t even know, like you know I get different scratches. I recently moved and was you know, say with the garden furniture and stuff, running into branches and this sort of thing and getting scratched. I don’t know how to heal these cuts and abrasions, running into you know serrated cardboard edges, over boxes involved in this move from Santa Barbara California to Arizona, you know just with my older fair complected Irish skin it cuts very easily. So you know I have all over my body now from this move, different abrasions and cuts and everything. How are they healing up? Am I the personal consciousness doing any of it? No. It’s all happening by this great power. The food you might have put in your mouth for breakfast or dinner last night, are you personally supervising digestion? No. It just happens by virtue of the great power. So this great power is somehow using personal consciousnesses as viewpoints on reality as places so to say. Think of the word locus, a place, a site, S-I-T-E, for experience, very vivid experience of bodily processes, mental emotional processes, psychic processes, rich rich phenomena by the countless gazillions of gazillions for gazillions of beings. One reality is doing all this and powering and animating all of this, sustaining this amazing dream and it is a dream because it’s vanishing moment by moment by moment. So enlightenment is really a set of phenomena for the personal consciousness and it’s all powered by and dreamed up by this one clear light source of all enlightenments, this one power that is powering the powerful realizations by different beings. Again as I always say, one reality doing everything, being everyone. Now I was wanting to get clear, it’s just this personal consciousness instrument, this Timothy fellow was given some kind of a an assignment to start researching early on what are all the greatest saints and sages in all of the traditions saying about this process of enlightenment or awakening or realization or sanctification or salvation. Different terms have different semantics for it and some more generically in the dissertation I just refer to it as spiritual realization, realizing everything there is about spirit and spiritual capacity. And so in a project like that I had to do a literature referencing, it was just massive, and also I did a whole set of interviews, dozens and dozens of interviews with different figures more or less representative of different sacred traditions, and I won’t bother naming names, quite a number of very interesting people back then in the mid criteria did emerge, different factors that definitely characterized in common so much of our shared sacred traditions, East and West, North-South, male-female, ancient and contemporary. And at my website I have very short synopses, lists of these qualities like tremendous sense of non-duality on a whole lot of different levels – cognitive and affective and behavioral, motivational, and that’s just cognitive and that’s important because if you know we have a very clear understanding and can give a good rap, a good talk about non-dual spirituality, you know that there are fundamentally no real differences or any gulf between personal consciousnesses or between personal consciousnesses and the one universal creative consciousness between form and formlessness, if there’s a clear understanding of this non-duality but it’s not also leading to affective and motivational behavioral non-duality, then something’s amiss, something’s out of balance. So I’ve always been intrigued just how spirituality, that is the realization of our formless open awareness nature, pure spirit, pristine, unborn, changeless, the changeless host for this whole play of changes for the worlds and the personal consciousnesses, I’ve always been intrigued how this spirit principle, this absolute nature is realized by beings and it’s not realized through their own power. The absolute wakes people up and then can put them right back to sleep, which is why Dogen Zenji founded the Soto Zen tradition in Japan in the first half of the th century, he said you know anyone who’s boasting of some enlightenment as if it were a done deal, a completed state of affairs for the personal consciousness, think again, if enlightenment isn’t renewing an ongoing moment by vanishing moment by vanishing moment, then it’s just a concept and it’s something that people are probably identifying with in a not so wholesome way and maybe using as a position to one-up other people, you know that whole way of presuming to be enlightened and special and presuming that others are not enlightened.
Rick: Well I have one trick question.
Timothy: True sages don’t operate from that kind of conceit.
Rick: Yeah, so speaking of true sages, if we put Buddha and Christ and Krishna and Zoroaster and Muhammad and Moses and whoever else in a room together and …
Timothy: Well some of those I would call prophets, not sages. Some of them don’t seem to be as clear about non-dual truth, you know, I’m really all the way through, really seeing that phenomena are ultimately not other than formlessness, pure noumenon.
Rick: Okay, so if we took a nice … you can pick the collection, but if we took a collection of sages who would fit your criterion of what enlightenment is and put them in a room together from various cultures, various times in history, contemporary and ancient, do you feel they would pretty much agree with one another? They would say, “Yep, we’re all experiencing the same thing.”
Timothy: More than that I think they’d just be enjoying one another, enjoying the differences of how this one can somehow appear as many, how the one formlessness can show up as Rick, as each person watching this. I mean how miraculous, how miraculous. And not just, you know, who am I or what am I, but who are thou? Surely the openness that is your true nature, that the personal consciousness functions out of, is empowered by, animated by, surely that formless, open awareness, aliveness is not other than what’s powering this personhood.
Rick: And so you said a minute ago that you’d have to always be on your toes because you can lose enlightenment, you didn’t put it quite in those words, and obviously we have to sort of agree upon what we mean by the word, and we may choose to use the word with reference to something that couldn’t be lost, but do you feel that there is such a thing as enlightenment which couldn’t be lost under any circumstances for any reason, just sort of you’re home free and that’s it? Or do you feel that no matter how exalted or deeply realized one is, there’s always a possibility of losing it?
Timothy: Always the possibility that the one Divine that’s coming over all phenomena could emanate an unenlightened phenomenal state for a personal consciousness, because no personal consciousness is the absolute. When we speak of enlightenment it is paradoxical, because the clear light awareness that we are, I mean it’s the most ancient wisdom text on the planet, the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, slightly older than the other big ancient Upanishad, the Chandogya Upanishad, the true Brahman or reality, the true Atman or true self, the unborn changeless self nature, the open being, awareness bliss, Sat-Chit-Ananda, supreme. This Brihadaranyaka Upanishad speaks of this true nature as the light by which all lesser lights are seen and known, the light of the Sun, the light of the Moon, the stars, the fire light, the firefly light, all of these lights, let alone modern areas neon and LED and halogen lights and so forth, and light shows, all of these lights and including a very luminous deity or a luminous saintly sage literally exuding light, all of these are phenomena but it’s this clear light absolute awareness prior to all phenomena, prior to all experiences which is hosting this whole cosmic light show and many lights including the light of a sage apparently enlightened but that’s still merely a phenomena and so when an apparent sage comes along kind of boasting of their enlightenment I have to chuckle and almost shed a tear because you know something’s gone wrong there. I can’t wait to the fact that the phenomenal enlightenment is just a speck, just a speck of happenstance within the absolute nature that we are. So enlightenment is for the personal consciousness, it’s getting cleared up, you could speak of spiritual realization, you could speak of again the different traditions have different names and terms for it. Usually it’s put in a cognitive sense like that Gya, that ancient Sanskrit root, it’s in the word Gyana and Vinyana and the Buddhist Sanskrit Prajna, it’s the root that was borrowed by the Western mystical tradition down in Greece and Asia Minor known as Gnosis, that GN comes from the Sanskrit JN, that all has a very cognitive semantics to it but again true realization will open you up so much that affectively, that is emotionally and behaviorally, it’s a sheer non-duality reigning. So someone like the hugging mother Amma, who you and Irene, your wife certainly have experienced so much over the years and so many people have worldwide the famous hugging mother, she sometimes doesn’t articulate on the cognitive level of understanding maybe the clearest non-dual Dharma, sometimes it’ll sound rather dualistic and yet in her actual behavior in terms of the hugging marathon sessions and certain other aspects of her life, there is a remarkable non-duality, lack of preference for her own comfort, willingness to just be there hour after hour, day after day, decade after decade for all these beings, some of whom don’t have personal good hygiene, she’ll still take them right into her arms. Lepers even. Oh of course, yeah I heard that story reported in that book chapter in the Women of Power and Grace book about Dutton. She took him to her as one of her disciples said, as if he was her long-lost lover and she licked his open wounds and sucked the pus out of them. I mean that’s behavioral non-duality in a way that the five-star hotel staying jet-set-trotting so-called sages I’ve heard about charging money and you know they’re very dualistic in their preferences it seems and in their biases but somehow, Amma, in her hugging mode she’s just off the charts in terms of a capacity that most beings can’t even dream of.
Rick: Yeah, so the question though, I want to come back to the question, which is setting aside people who may be half-baked and who may have questionable motives or whatever else, but you know taking the Buddha, Christ, Amma, whoever we consider to be sort of the king of the hill in terms of human spiritual development, do you feel that even with them that there’s a possibility of losing that state? And let me just add one more thing, you know the Gita says the self realizes the self by the self, but it seems to do so through the instrumentality of a human nervous system. Enlightenment is a living reality by definition, it’s not just, I mean it’s, well yeah it is, and human nervous systems are frail, they’re subject to disease and dementia or whatever you know, Alzheimer’s or whatever may happen to a human nervous system. Do you consider it?
Timothy: If I could interject, Rick, important not just human nervous systems but the very personal consciousness itself as an instrument, just as the moon does not shine with its own light, the borrowed light of the Sun, all personal consciousnesses is in here they have their existence in this absolute awareness which through the creative universal consciousness power, the Shakti of Shiva, that’s formless divine absolute self, through its Shakti, its creative universal consciousness and life power, it conjures up all these personal consciousnesses. So just on the level of these souls, these persons, these Jivas to use the Sanskrit word, there is frailty, there is the vicissitudes of the samskaras, the wholesome and unwholesome personal consciousness tendencies that would have been called the non-binding and binding likes and dislikes, and you know there’s innocent preferences and wholesome skills and talents, those color or characterize a personal consciousness stream of phenomenal states moment by moment through the lifetimes, subtle plain lifetimes and earthly existences, but there’s also these unwholesome tendencies and these are the ones that are kind of pulling and pushing people around especially it seems, and so that creates a frailty just on the level of the soul, not just the physical human organism.
Rick: Right, but if enlightenment has been attained so to speak, does that imply that one has eliminated all unwholesome tendencies or can there actually still be a residue of those even in someone like Ramana Maharshi for instance?
Timothy: The only kind of samskara I could find about Ramana closely closely reading not just the kind of official biographical literature but all the reminiscence literature is that he was absolutely stubborn when anyone tried to single him out as special, tried to give him anything special like certain medications toward the end of his physical life when the cancer was devouring the body, when people would bring prasadam, you know usually fruit or sweets, flowers, the edible kind of prasadam people would bring and they wanted Ramana to sample it first and then give it back, but he would make sure that everyone present got a bite of it before he himself partook. So he was absolutely stubborn if people tried to contravene him on that one.
Rick: Yeah, so we wouldn’t call that a flaw.
Timothy: No, no it was like the least kind of flaw you could possibly imagine for a being but he’d actually get irate over it and yeah that seemed to be his one major dislike but could you call it a binding dislike in the sense of a samskara, an unwholesome samskara that would necessitate future births? I don’t think you could say that at all about Sri Bhagavan.
Rick: So would it be fair to say of enlightenment that it’s possible to have attained it to such a degree that regardless of the vicissitudes that the individual mind or body goes through on the inside so to speak, nothing fluctuates. For instance, last summer I was sitting maybe feet away, well earlier this summer, feet away from Amma and she was giving a talk and she started talking about some disturbing, scary things that might happen to the world in coming years and some of the stuff was getting a little strange and people were getting a little disturbed and at a certain point she just stopped and she said, “I’m tired, I should stop talking.” So I mean a person could, an enlightened person so to speak, could be tired and maybe they would say something that they wouldn’t say if they were fresh or it might not come out as clearly and coherently as it might if they were fresh. Yeah, so we’re kind of saying, but on the inside, would it have been possible for that pure awareness or whatever we want to call it, to have been shrouded to any degree by tiredness?
Timothy: Oh there’s probably a lot of witnessing of the state of fatigue. I mean you can watch yourself fall asleep and if you’re ever having to deal with tremendous lethargy, like say it’s a situation you’re on a job or your spouse needs to converse with you about something and it’s late at night and your attempts to negotiate another time and space for discussing the topic won’t be heard of, so it has to be now and yet you’re suffering from massive fatigue. You’re driving a motor vehicle and there’s no good place to pull over.
Rick: It sounds like a personal experience.
Timothy: Oh yeah, I lost about 15-18 pounds from the move and was going many days of like three or four hours of sleep at night, so I look a little haggard. The move to Arizona took its toll. But yeah, the capacity just to notice fatigue, to notice alertness, all those different states – waking, dream, dreamless sleep – and say within the waking state, greater states of energy, lesser states of energy, states of good health, ill health for body or mind – all of that can get witnessed, but the clear light principle is always clear, always self-luminous, always self- bright, the very openness and host for whatever happens. So that’s why they, you know, one old Chan master spoke about – I mean, Laman Pang was one of them – and a number of them they spoke about, you know, the power here is I eat when I’m hungry and sleep when I’m tired, and so much of it is just happening, it’s not me doing it or suffering it. But sometimes, you know, states of personal consciousness, suffering of pain will arise. I mean, we all know with Amma, she comes from a crazy fisher, people’s village background, her father had a real anger problem, apparently, he was a rageaholic and beat his own daughter severely. Amma, that is the eldest daughter, who had to be like the little mother because her mother was very infirm, so little Amma Sudhamini, precious jewel, that’s her original name, she had to be doing all the chores and everything, but then she became this full blown mystic, she’d already had all these mystical tendencies as a youth. Well, you know, her father beat the tar out of her over and over again, and you know, it comes through, for instance, a book by Gail Tredwell, one of her longtime earliest disciples, from the West that is, Western disciples, that you know, Amma sometimes would explode in ways that seem like some raging Kali Ma, just inscrutable, and sometimes, you know, seeming more like something quite human, quite – I mean, Gail uses a whole bunch of words like petty and so forth, and apparently quite unenlightened. So where would those come from? How can profound personal consciousness enlightenment, you know, clearing of a whole bunch of samskaras for a personal consciousness, the personal consciousness of Amma, how could that occur in one way, and yet there might be unhealed stuff from her clearly abusive childhood that she underwent growing up under her father.
Rick: It could also conceivably have been a teaching strategy, possibly, I mean, although, you know, always evoking that alibi can excuse all sorts of egregious behavior in teachers. So you were mentioning in one of your satsangs a Zen teacher who beat the crap out of one of his disciples, threw him off a balcony, I mean, did all kinds of wild stuff.
Timothy: Yeah, Hakuin’s Japanese Zen master.
Rick: Yeah, and I don’t know if he behaved that way habitually, you know, with people, maybe it was just this disciple, and you said the disciple had a fair amount of spiritual ego, you know, he thought he was pretty hot stuff, and so this guy pretty much pounded it out of him literally, and eventually the man became enlightened. So that could be a teaching strategy in certain circumstances, though I think we should use that excuse very cautiously.
Timothy: Oh, very, very, very cautiously. Yeah, just like, you know, people that have invoked the idea of those Tibetan mahasiddhas and their crazy behavior like Marpa beating Milarepa and so forth, all of those stories were invented centuries later. The really tough stories of Tilopa really beating the crap out of Naropa, you know, demanding he jump off a cliff and then coming down to healing his broken body, all of those stories were invented about five, six hundred years later by some crazy Tibetan monk. So the idea of taking those literally and then using it as license or rationale for punishing one’s own disciples, that’s just such arrogance and conceit, a beggar’s description.
Rick: Don’t try this at home, as they say. All right, so my initial question was what is enlightenment? It’s a good idea to have an idea of what it is because it can be an incentive to “attain it” and most people in the world don’t even know such a thing exists. You know, there’s some series of verses in the Gita where it kind of breaks it down by powers of ten, like out of so many thousands only one even knows that there is such a thing and then out of so many thousands of those only one actually strives for it and out of so many thousands of those only one actually attains it, you know, so it seems like a kind of an exclusive club, but I kind of feel that as we evolve as a culture into a more enlightened age, which I hopefully we’re doing, it will become a better known thing that human beings can attain to, sort of like Abraham Maslow’s self-actualization as we rise up the hierarchy of needs, and you could envision a society in which school children – in fact there are schools like this already, there’s one in my town – in which school children are taught to meditate and taught about enlightenment and so on and so forth, and it just is as normal as learning about history or sociology or something. So there’s that.
Timothy: Yeah, I think there’s some hyperbole in that Hindu metaphor of the exclusive club, you know, one out of a thousand and then of that subset only one out of a thousand, etc. I mean the Buddha had spoken very similarly, you know, what are the odds of a blind turtle sticking its little head and neck through a little tiny hoop on an ocean of such enormous, enormous size? I mean the odds are basically impossibly against it.
Rick: So not very encouraging.
Timothy: So all of that is motivational hyperbole, yeah. It’s kind of the way like Newt Rockne would tell the Notre Dame football guys, you know, “Win one for the gipper.” It’s a big boot camp pep talk kind of thing, but in other ways because the clear light awareness, our absolute truth nature is true. It’s simply relaxing back into what is always here, closer than close, closer than your eyeballs, nearer than thought, prior to the arising of any thought about will I become enlightened, who is enlightened, how do I become enlightened, prior to each of those thoughts, prior to each of the syllables in the verbal formulations in your head? What are you? You are this openness right now. Right now you are vast, open, changeless, utterly silent and still, is-ness, awareness, aliveness, and this is playing at personifying as a personal consciousness and operationally that’s just a series of personal consciousness moments. It’s a flux, a streaming of phenomena. So you know, mind is minding in all sorts of perceptual ways with memory, concept-making, making sense out of sensations, evaluating, so forth and so on, and the body is this incredible process of bodying, like some trillion cells, most of which are friendly bacteria, so much of the rest is just like bloodstream, platelet cells and so forth. There’s only about four trillion out of the chair that are actually native tissue cells and those are dying and being renewed. So this incredible dynamism, this ever changing, evanescent streaming, and where was the body a hundred years ago? Or where will it be or years hence? It’s nothing. And yet, while it’s a rising moment by vanishing miraculous moment, it’s miracle upon miracle, as is the mind, the set of perceptual capacities. So I part company from those that are always trying to shame you for being a personal consciousness, shame you for your quote, “ego mind.” That’s a cheap trick that certain people, a lot of people in the spiritual and religious field, use to make people ashamed of personhood and then feel like you have to somehow leave all that behind for the impersonal. Our real nature is supra-personal and it’s the host for all the impersonal phenomena like, you know, atmospheric gases, cement and tarmac surface of the road, on the street where you live and so forth. That’s all impersonal but these personal consciousnesses, their destiny is not to be destroyed or suppressed or utterly abandoned for the sake of some impersonal reality. No, our supra-personal reality is supra-personal prior to the personal, beyond the personal, transcending the personal. And yet, it includes consciousness states and their interaction with fellow persons and impersonal things and so forth. So realizing all this, there’s a clarity here and anyone can realize this same clarity. Gazillions of beings clearly exist throughout the cosmos – animal beings, human beings, celestial subtle plane beings – and each one at any moment is none other than this. Each one at any moment can simply, through this radical intuitive knowingness and knowing by being, capital K Knowing, not knowing of phenomena, that’s relative knowing, but absolute knowing by being, clearly what we always absolutely are. This knowing by Being is available to anyone, anyone at any time, any moment. So we can’t be exclusive, there’s no exclusive club about this. That’s why I say many spiritual teachers out there who I find abusing or exploiting followers in numerous ways, I often find them very unenlightened compared to many of their followers who are serving selflessly and have largely abandoned all unwholesome tendencies while their figure that they put up on a pedestal when they’re worshipping, that figure is often full of self-aggrandizing tendencies. That person is often just as I sense it and hear from people’s testimonials and revelations, such persons are manifesting all sorts of states of unenlightenment, so go figure, the great paradox.
Rick: That actually gets me into a second fundamental question or fundamental reason why I think it’s a good idea for people to have an understanding of what enlightenment is, and that is that I think it safeguards the path. I mean we’ve seen so many weird things come down in terms that could be sort of loosely thrown into the basket of enlightenment or higher consciousness, everything from Jonestown to Heaven’s Gate and Scientology and you know any number of other things, and it seems to me that if someone really had a clear understanding of the goal so to speak, and again you know those kinds of words are awkward when we’re talking about what we’re actually talking about, but if they really understood what the potential of human awakening or realization was, then I mean there was a documentary on CNN last week.
Timothy: I saw it.
Rick: I saw it too, it’s like holy mackerel, these are intelligent, fairly well-educated people and you know they sort of, Irene says apparently not, but they hung out with this weirdo for decades, you know, who was like just kind of staring at them like Rudolph Valentino in an old movie, and it’s like where’s the discrimination? You know if we really understood what we’re about with this whole evolution to higher consciousness business, it seems that we wouldn’t get waylaid by things like that. And again by “we” I mean a larger culture, so there’s a real value as I see it to infusing a clear understanding of the path, the goal, into our kind of collective awareness.
Timothy: Yeah, and that’s why you know that topic for the doctoral dissertation arose. I mean later on Bill Moyer said the attempt to define what is really spirituality is the great problem of our era, because he was already hip to the fact that most people had abandoned traditional authoritarian forms of religion for a more generic kind of spirituality, spiritual living, and you know from whatever highest sense of spirit people could be awake to. So you know when we’re basically savvy about all the different qualities and virtues and wholesome aspects of real spirituality – living from spirit, finding spirit in everyone we meet, flowing, letting go, and not selfishly clinging, and self-aggrandizing with pride and greed, defensiveness and all that – when there’s authentic spiritual living then we’re savvy, we’re not capable of being duped by the profiteers, the hucksters and skeletons who have maybe some degree of profound spiritual awakening, but then it somehow gets manifested in more or less insidious or very explicit kind of twisted, distorted ways that create all sorts of problems for themselves and in relationships. So yeah, it’s sad, often people get together and there can be very powerful Shakti kind of phenomena, but in Christian Pentecostal charismatic circles would be called you know the charismatic gifts of the Holy Spirit working. You know I did my master’s thesis on that a few years before the doctoral dissertation, it was these cross-cultural examples and discussions of again what could be called Shaktipat or the blessing power of the Holy Spirit, the Barakah or Berkah as they call it in Sufi and Jewish mystical terms, even the Buddhist traditions you have a lot of instances of energetic empowerment on the subtle energy level and all sorts of powers and wonders can ensue, but you know it’s very easy for people to get caught up in what I’ve always called the grace chase about that and then they lose the sense of the absolute and they’re chasing phenomena and very addicted to the phenomena happening around a particular phenomenon, a spiritual teacher or a place or a particular group of people and then it just can become you know very toxic very quickly when all the unwholesome qualities start arising as they do in powerful situations, they’re testing situations and the selfish ego tendencies can often just start manifesting in spades but if people are still thinking oh this is all godly happening they can very easily get seduced by the whole thing and that’s why some of these cults, the dysfunctional cults, the disempowering cults will unfold over decades and you wonder and the people themselves wonder when they finally wake up and leave it you know why was I in there so long? It’s because there was subtle entrancement with phenomena but when we’re clear about our absolute clear light host nature which is prior to all phenomena and not interested in any particular phenomena as the method for God realization then there’s real freedom, there’s real freedom, you can’t be duped, can’t be seduced.
Rick: Yeah, good point. You’ve made a few references, we might say aspersions to teachers who charge money and I just want to address that for a minute. Obviously you don’t, Nisargadatta didn’t, Ramana didn’t, although the ashram received donations that supported it.
Timothy: But they lived in dire poverty for years.
Rick: Yeah, it wasn’t like a cushy scene or anything like that. And you know in some teachers these days are making a killing. I also happen to know some who are living very modestly but who don’t have another means of support and if they had to work an eight-hour day wouldn’t really be able to serve in any capacity as a spiritual teacher and they charge reasonably for their time and you know … And it would always be good even when there is charging of modest sums, have it be on a sliding scale because let’s say in this day and age we live in the most extreme period in the United States in its history in terms of have everythings and have nots. I mean the rich are super rich. I mean some of these deca millionaires not to mention the centa millionaires and billionaires to drop you know a hundred bucks here, five hundred dollars there, ten thousand dollars over there. It’s nothing to them, it’s like pennies. Whereas to some elderly year old woman who needs to be on certain medications and you know her rent is going up maybe each year, that sort of thing, you know an extra ten dollars is the difference between hearing that great so-called enlightened teacher give his evening rap that he could probably do in his sleep and you know her medication or her food. So yeah, I think most people should be free.
Rick: Yeah, the people I’m alluding to do offer a sliding scale and freebies for those who really can’t. But they have dentist bills and car repairs and you know things like that, ordinary things and rent and that everybody has to deal with and I’m just coming to their defense and saying that not everybody is positioned to just offer …
Timothy: Okay, but let’s get clear about something here Rick, in a friendly discussion of this, which is let’s look at the setup from the get-go. Why is one person presuming to be enlightened and sharing teachings for a fee which suggests, “which suggests”, in all the trappings of the situation, if you look at you know social psychology and how power is shared or not, this sort of thing, the very shape of the room, you know flowers in front of the teacher, sitting on a fancy chair usually, all of that setup from the get-go reeks of what someone like Ramana Maharshi fundamentally rejected, which is the idea that one person is enlightened and the other is not. When Ramana looked at people he saw only the self, he didn’t see a client or someone who needs to hear this message about enlightenment because you’re not enlightened and I am. He had nothing to do with that, neither did Sri Nisargadatta, Anasuya Devi and Anandamayi Ma, the Buddha, any number of truly authentically realized beings. So you know my comment about a lot of this, it really has to do with more fundamentally a power grab that’s going on and it’s a seducement you know because if you make your livelihood ability to pay your bills dependent on being a spiritual teacher then you need spiritual disciples and listeners and students and people willing to pay for what you have to share and I fundamentally reject that as a valid model for authentic spiritual sharing. Well let’s say you make your livelihood transmission model where you know some people openly speak of how they’ve been prepared you know by their teacher to share the Dharma in a certain way and you know there’s a certain transmission of an understanding and grace, all of that just reeks of phenomenality and is totally not expressing the message of the egalitarian nature of this clear-light awareness that all of us fundamentally are.
Rick: Well I hear you and I can think of teachers who explicitly articulate exactly what you’re saying right now, that they’re striving for a more egalitarian arrangement, they’re still serving as a spiritual teacher but they are trying to empower others and make it a you know kind of a learning circle and not just a sort of a hierarchical arrangement with them up on a couch and you know I mean if one makes one’s living as a psychologist or a psychotherapist they depend upon clients paying a certain fee for their time, would you put that in a completely different category?
Timothy: Yes.
Rick: Yes, why?
Timothy: Yes, because psychotherapy and I’ve certainly over the years done a lot of pro bono counseling for people about charging any fees. Here and there you know people wanted to pay and were comfortably able to and so I’d take that as a donation but it’s one thing in a psychotherapeutic context where someone comes in with a presenting problem and soon enough through brief therapy, we’re not talking about psychoanalysis where you seduce people into one, two, five, fifteen, thirty years of therapy and countless thousands of dollars. In brief therapy you can very quickly bring people home to non-dual awareness and then their problem is obviated. In spirituality from the get-go the message is one of completeness and wholeness as you are right now, closer than close, your true nature, spirit, has no problems, has no lack, has no warping or trauma or disfigurement or distortion. So in spirituality this should be the upfront message. When money is brought in and then people adduce the psychotherapy model as a rationalization or justification for it, what we have here is still the model that something is wrong with people, they’re not yet enlightened. Oh that woeful ego mind or that terrible little personal consciousness, it’s still so unenlightened. Here come to me, I have the answers for how you can outgrow all that and grow up and become enlightened and no longer be a problem. I fundamentally disagree with that entire message and approach. It’s not the message of the great sagely non-dual tradition but here in the United States and it’s spread back to Europe and back to India itself people operating right at the foot of Arunachala, you know right outside Ramana Maharshi’s old ashram. If they had their druthers they’d be right in there sitting on his couch presuming to be teaching in his lineage some of these characters. I won’t mention any names but I think anyone who does a little reading will find out who they are. Such characters completely betray the great wholesome spirit of wholeness that Sri Ramana lived and saw and shared. So I have to fundamentally disagree with anything that tries to use a psychotherapy model as a model for sharing non-dual spirituality because true non-dual spirituality will not admit fundamentally of any flaw in who you really are.
Rick: True, but you know to take an extreme example you walk into a room of psychotics at a mental hospital or something like that and say who you truly are is the pure unchanging universal.
Timothy: They’re not ready to hear that in most cases.
Rick: They’re not ready to hear that.
Timothy: Shankara made it very clear, Shankara made it very clear about years ago that the pure Advaita teaching is only to be shared with those who actually have already grown on the personal consciousness level such that the personal consciousness won’t be all full of trauma and mental emotional disorder and pain that will then hijack the message or ignore it or distort it, the non-dual message about who we are. So there’s states of readiness. I don’t deny this stages of brightness.
Rick: And there are many things.
Timothy: That’s why for many it’s kind of a healing thing, a kind of form to use psychotherapy jargon of re-parenting to have like devotional practice. But the sooner the devotion can be realized, it’s non-dual devotion, realizing that what’s the power by which I sing the praises of or bow down to the great living God, surely that power is God, the power by which I express praise and gratitude or ask for help for suffering beings, that power by which I devotionally ask the great deity, that power itself is God. So when the true devotee realizes that only God’s power is here, I have no power of my own even to be devoted, then the devotion is non-dual devotion and it’s far less problematic, doesn’t have all those kind of painful aspects of devotion like why does God seem near today yet tomorrow God maybe experiences more distant and remote, and today my heart is elated and today my heart is depressed. If you read the literature and the classic religious traditions of devotion, dualistic devotion, you find all those vicissitudes, the ups and downs and people even getting suicidal and so forth, but when they realize there’s only one reality here, doing everything and being everyone, all of that falls off.
Rick: Sure, so you know having interviewed well over people now and having taken some interviews down eventually because I felt like, Irene and I both felt like, well this person is really sort of getting carried away with themselves, we don’t want to be contributing to their popularity. I nonetheless feel that a great number of people I’ve interviewed are approaching this in a very sincere, honest, down-to-earth, humble way.
Timothy: Hallelujah!
Rick: Yeah, and that obviously people can get suckered into all kinds of things, but the sincere ones, you see some of the people who have been spending time in their satsangs and whatnot and they really seem to have their head in the right place, their heart in the right place, and they really seem to be genuinely benefiting from the process. So I’m just a little bit more forgiving and supportive than you are, I think.
Timothy: Well I’m very supportive of wherever truth is shared in a heartfelt, sincere way.
Rick: Yeah, so I mean I just don’t want to paint the whole thing with too broad a brush, you know.
Timothy: I would agree with that sentiment Rick.
Rick: Yeah, there’s some really good eggs out there, yeah, and some of them actually are charging a fee for their retreats and whatnot. I mean I went to a retreat last September with a guy that has become very popular even though he actually tries to keep a low profile, just because of the word of mouth, and it was a real nice experience. And the course fee for the retreat is basically exactly what the retreat place charges for the room and board and all that stuff, and if anybody wants to donate anything extra they can, and he never says how much you should donate or anything like that, and I don’t know how to like, you know, so he’s approaching it in that way. Yeah, I mean so, okay, so that’s I think we’ve covered that topic. And one other thing along those lines, Background;
Rick: (answering background) if you send it to Backgap I won’t get it, you have to send it through Dan.
Rick: Okay, good. One other thing along those lines is that the readiness of a person to become a spiritual teacher, I mean I’m told, and you can corroborate this, that in Zen tradition you’re supposed to wait at least ten years after awakening to take on the role of a teacher. And what I have seen…
Timothy: Plus there’s nothing fixed about that particular…
Rick: Yeah, but you’re supposed to wait a while, you don’t just jump in with both feet as soon as you’ve had some sort of awakening. And what I’ve observed is that in many people there’s a sort of a lot of inner Velcro still, that you know, they’ve had some awakening, they feel marvelous, they start teaching and suddenly without their even knowing it, the praise, the adulation, the attention starts sticking to that inner Velcro and the ego kind of begins to get more and more aggrandized and then they begin to get in trouble. So maybe you could address that point a bit.
Timothy: Well I think you’ve described it succinctly, Rick, yourself there. Yeah, I mean can one not be a teacher if one obviously has a vocation as a teacher? I mean I remember sitting with Annamalai Swami, a very beautiful spiritual son of Sri Ramana Maharshi. You won’t call him a disciple because Ramana said he had no disciples, everyone was the self. But Annamalai Swami really consummately manifested the simplicity and clarity among all the people I’d met who had personally known and sat a lot with Sri Ramana Maharshi. And Annamalai Swami, among other things, like most Indians, he knew how to read palms, so he looked at my palm and said, “Oh, you see it invited me, it invited me to stay there in India and live with you.” And just as a simple, you know, sadhu on the jnana way. And it was very tempting, very tempting. I was a grad student and broke. You know, it had been easy to just let it all go and stay there and live on bhiksha, on any donations of food, rice by the villagers. And there was an ashram there, Annamalai Swami, had an ashram there that Ramana himself authorized to be built and maintained. Never did that for any other of his followers, but for Annamalai Swami he did. So Annamalai Swami read my palm when I said, “You know, I should be getting back home and I have family there. We lost my sister. You know, my parents would be very grieved if I stayed here in India the rest of my days and all of that. So I should at least go back and maybe finish graduate school.” They were helping invest in that along with my own working and paying for it. So he looked at my palm and he said, “You have to go back. It’s just in your pradabdha, karma, your destiny, karma, what’s just prescribed, ordained by the universe. It just has to happen.” I said, “But I’m so mental already, you know, a graduate student, everything, I have this huge library on sacred traditions and psychology and science. Shouldn’t I just be a farmer? Wouldn’t that be a far less problematic way and least chance of the ego coming in?” He looked at my palm again and said, “You don’t have any choice about it.” So there are going to be people, they have no choice but to somehow be in some kind of teacher role or sharer, presenter role. And I would simply, simply encourage, really check out the motivation. And would you be just as happy, you know, working, you know, in some store like Trader Joe’s market. I mentioned them because I know they pay their workers a living wage with benefits, they’re not exploited like certain corporations with their workers. You know, or could you be a farmer? Could you live simply? Could you be just a “housewife” or “house husband”? Could you live without the glamour?
Rick: Yeah, we try to interview people like that actually, you know, it’s hard to find them sometimes, they don’t have a public profile, but we do try to, you know, mix in some people who are living lives like that, who don’t want to be teachers. Sometimes
Timothy: I think there are many, many such beings.
Rick: Sometimes they aren’t as articulate as people who are practiced teachers, you know, because teachers are used to teaching, but there’s a sort of innocence and simplicity and it’s one of the original motivations of this show to demonstrate that awakening is not for special people, it’s for everyone, and that there are all kinds of people who are driving trucks. I mean, I interviewed a truck driver, he’s still a truck driver and that’s what he likes to do, he doesn’t want to be a teacher, but he had this beautiful awakening. So they’re out there.
Timothy: Absolutely, Rick and Irene and Jerry and everyone who makes BATGAP possible, because this is exactly what needs to happen, is the realization that this one clear light, absolute awareness, open is-ness, is always here, omnipresently here, and everyone we meet, and anyone can be living this. I think there’s many, many, many beings living from this beautiful simplicity and openness and real freedom.
Rick: Yeah.
Timothy: It’s infused with all sorts of beautiful divine qualities and that’s why I harp over and over on how enlightenment is not just some cognitive understanding. In many circles they make a fetish out of this understanding and then as soon as you learn the concepts and the language and can do the rap, I mean I could teach anyone in about three minutes how to have the most stupendous kind of profound sounding enlightenment rap. You can use negation language, negate everything, just speak with a “Paramartha Satya,” absolute truth level parlance, negations and superlatives and certain use of metaphor, and you can sound very impressive on a conceptual level of the understanding. But we learn that there’s all sorts of folks that have that knack, eloquence, loquaciousness, they can run with a kind of a rap that could be learned in as little as five minutes or an hour. But the rest of their life is the equality of their relationships and so forth. The presence of the divine virtues, it’s just not there.
Rick: Yeah.
Timothy: So meanwhile you find people like your friend the trucker and many, many, many other beings who I think their lives are suffused with beautiful, beautiful divine virtues, a whole array of virtues, and yet they may not have the conceptual understanding let alone the loquacious ability to speak absolute-ish.
Rick: Yeah, good point. So I mean you can put two people next to one another, just to summarize what you just said, one of them might be genuinely realized and not be very clear in being able to express it, another might be able to express it beautifully but not be actually realized.
Timothy: Yeah, inwardly they’re thinking, “Now, how can I turn you into a paying client, I want that extra mansion I want”, you know.
Rick: Yeah, Irene just sent in a question related to this fees business, she said that, “I believe in traditional Indian culture doctors and spiritual teachers do not charge money, however their society is set up to support them, if not lavishly. Other cultures are not set up such as this and thus teachers do need to charge to survive but that does not justify outrageous fees, etc.” Okay, here’s a couple questions that came in, let’s see.
Timothy: If I can say one more thing.
Rick: Oh yeah, please, yeah. Good day job for many so-called teachers, it would be very good for humility and really for instance generating more of that engaged spirituality kind of empathy for how so many workers of the world disunited and united are faring. There’s massive, massive wage exploitation going on and you know lack of benefits and so forth that traditionally we’re very much part of the usual kind of living wage job in the United States. Now those living wage jobs paying benefits are few and far between. You hear stories from the Economic Policy Institute, my favorite economic think tank, very progressive, that you know for like every single living wage job, like say a job as a custodian, so-called janitor at a school or hospital or something, for every one living wage job there’s like applicants.
Rick: Wow.
Timothy: What are the other folks doing that aren’t lucky enough to get that job, where do they go?
Rick: We need to make America great again.
Rick: Just kidding.
Timothy: The dignity of labor can be reinforced and yeah we could have a lot more jobs. You know every billion dollars that goes toward the big racket of lobbyists and defense contractors and they’re bought and paid for a congressperson. You know for instance producing far far more tanks and fireplanes and obsolete kind of technology that the pentagon itself doesn’t even want. .
Rick: Right.
Timothy: Many former top brass and current top brass at the pentagon outraged by this racket that goes on between the lobbyists, the contractors and the congresspersons to vote these procurement projects. Well every billion dollars going for those you know make the contractors and lobbyists rich and the congresspersons rich because it’s a revolving door, the congresspeople go right into those industries they’ve just legislated on. For every billion dollars you spend on so-called defense technology you could create like double or triple the number of peacetime jobs and education and so forth.
Rick: That’s a great point. I’m glad you’re bringing this up. I mean it might seem like a rather abrupt segue to some people listening, like why is he talking about this all of a sudden? But I think that spirituality and practical realities such as economics and social justice and all are inextricably interconnected and that spirituality has something to offer these more practical realities and perhaps bring about some real change that we, you know, perhaps with a lot less pain and bloodshed than changes had to have in the past. And let’s talk about that a bit more but maybe before we do so why don’t you just explain your three levels model because I think it’s really good. I read it every couple of months you know just to clarify my I send it to people and I think it would help explain why you were able to make this segue all of a sudden into talking about economic justice.
Timothy: Sure. Yeah and if I could just say you know back in what was like April of the National Sun Magazine, that’s a journal of thinking on current events and psychology and spirituality and poetry and politics and so forth. The Sun Magazine did this full-on interview with me and I basically distinguished between mystical spirituality and engaged spirituality and most of the interview the bias in the editing of it was to emphasize more of the engaged spirituality. But most of what I’ve been talking about today thus far and much of my teaching and sharing and writing is about mystical spirituality but we cannot leave aside this engaged spirituality and the three-fold model you refer to is simply an elaboration of the old Dvaya Satya, the Sanskrit phrase meaning the two-fold truth. It’s there in the Upanishads the Buddha speaks of the Dvaya Satya, Nagarjuna the father of Mahayana Buddhism, Shankara speaks of this two-fold truth level. It’s basically, I made reference to it earlier, Pardhamartika Satya, the absolute truth level understanding and parlance or discourse and the relative or phenomenal conventional and we could say pragmatic level of discourse. So for instance the absolute level language is all about negations and superlatives. It’s like none of this really exists right now, this is all just a dream. Only awareness is. Formlessness is always transcending and it’s the only reality. Nothing has ever happened. You don’t exist. . Nothing exists. Only the great no thing is real. That’s absolute language and you can stop any conversation in its tracks. And unfortunately some people have learned that. That’s why I said I could teach people to sound really profound in just a few minutes just using the language of Pardhamartika Satya, absolute.
Rick: Yeah, you could be sitting at dinner with a Neo-Advaita person and say, “Please pass the salt,” and he could say, “There is no salt, you know, there is no passing.”
Timothy: No table, no people, no time, no space.
Rick: You say, “Would you cut the crap and pass the damn salt?”
Timothy: Well the Chan and Sun and Sun Masters had a field day with any unripe folks who felt or presumed that they were enlightened because they had this realization of the absolute. Chan Master Guo Jun would say, “Something wrong with you? Go have a cup of tea. I think you need to eat something.” They just immediately saw all that as just a power play, an attempt by someone to up-level themselves above everyone else’s level of conventional relating and speaking and interacting by again, speaking absolutish as I call it. And Nagarjuna himself said, you know, in his classic treatises on Sunyata, better translated as openness but usually translated as emptiness, he said, “You know, this great teaching of Sunyata, absolute openness, emptiness, no thingness, it’s a medicine for those who are sick on worldliness and thingness, but for those who get sick on this medicine of Sunyata, what medicine can we give them?” Well the Chan Masters had medicine, it was like, you know, go scrub the floor or go read the sutras or go work with the non-monastic laborers out in the garden, in the farm fields. Yeah, they wanted folks to really realize the non-duality and that privilege, the absolute, the silence, the stillness and then get all uncomfortable about the so-called messy world of the ten thousand things, the myriad upon myriads and gazillions of phenomena. So this threefold model, it’s basically positing a level and it’s not a level, it’s the absolute nature, the absolute truth level. And then in the old two- truth model you simply have the absolute and conventional or pragmatic, but I felt the need to insert a second intermediary level. It’s like the – let’s put my hands up here – level one, the absolute, there’s level three, I don’t know if the camera’s picking up, that’s the realm of phenomena, light and dark and positive and negative charge in the atom, you know, the good and evil, justice and injustice, male and female, you know, Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Sufi, you name it, all the differences, the different kinds of flora and fauna, cultures, you name it, all the phenomena of all the sciences. That’s level three. Level two still acknowledges multiplicity but in the absolute perfection of how the absolute knows all phenomena and beings. It’s this idea that timelessly we are all living Buddhas, timelessly all, including bad boys of history like Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot and Mao Tse-Tung and Stalin and and Timothy, all the bad boys of history, there all still intrinsically and innately pure, innocent personhood, personal consciousness, emanations of the one absolute. And so what you wind up with is a model in any moment of experiencing. Let’s say, you know, you’re in one of the camps at Auschwitz or something or in Darfur, you know, these last whatever many, too many years, or in a home where a husband’s gone ballistic through being a rageaholic or an alcoholic or something, unhealed, untreated, and the family members are taking the brunt. It feels like hell in that moment. On level three, yeah, that’s a hellish situation. There needs to be an intervention. Let’s bring in social workers, say in the case of the abusive family situation or in the case of the Nazi death camps, death marches, let the Soviet soldiers come in and the Allied soldiers come in and liberate those poor hapless people who are so hideously, hideously abused and tormented and slaughtered. So level three is all about justice and injustice, right and wrong, appropriate and inappropriate, skillful and unskillful, to use old Buddhist language. You know, how does compassion get manifested? Skillfully, maybe not so skillfully. Let’s always be aiming for more skillful manifestation of compassion. But on level two, you could say that whatever is happening is somehow, you almost have to allow for a big silence. The only way I could say this, for instance, about the Nazi Holocaust is because some of the greatest Hasidic Jewish rabbis themselves said it. Level two interpretation or hermeneutic level of say the death camp at Auschwitz or any member of the camps is that it’s all perfect. The souls playing the roles of the Nazis have extraordinary lessons and tests and challenges facing them of how compassionate or how, you know, obedient and conformist and cowardly they were going to be. On the side of the Jewish and other inmates of those camps, gypsies and homosexuals and others who were considered undesirables, it’s like, you know, how selfless and courageous are they in sharing their little morsels with people that couldn’t even get out of bed that day and were probably going to be exterminated later that day, but they wanted to give them a last little tiny bit of food just to please them. You see the whole gamut of evil and good, courage and cowardice, the whole play of the opposites and there’s something intrinsically perfect about the extraordinarily stupendous drama of that kind of situation and because souls are undying, this one Jewish Hasidic Rabbi, Yonatan Gershon, who’s been going all over the world, he worked with hypnotherapists and then he learned hypnotherapy skills. He was regressing people who felt that they had lived during the Holocaust and died during the Nazi Holocaust. The first thing they would experience as soon as they dropped the body was I’m no longer cold, I’m no longer hungry, I’m no longer in pain or in fear, I’m in bliss. That was just an earthly manifestation. I am a soul. So level two is all about souls, the intrinsic perfection and innocence, blissfulness of souls, their imperturbability, their incapacity to be touched by the phenomena of the worlds of pain and denser illusion.
Rick: It’s also all about God.
Timothy: Yes, exactly.
Rick: Is God making mistakes? Is He screwing up? Is He not omniscient? I say He, again, it’s the limitations of language. Yeah, I like to think that we can actually see all these three levels in a sense. I mean the most manifest level is obvious and the needs for social justice and all that stuff and the laws of mechanical laws of nature and all that stuff that sciences study and we deal with as a society. Level two, the subtle level, science again, if we look closely we see divine perfection in every molecule, it’s every atom, every biological entity is just operating in complete harmony with laws of nature that are so vast and so intricate and so abiding that it’s beyond human understanding. We’re just groping along trying to understand them better.
Timothy: I went into that in some length in a interview with the Sun magazine. I have that whole thing up at the website. But yeah, there’s so many books by so many amazed scientists who just appreciate the stupendous miraculousness of these consummately fine, fine, fine, fine-tuned balances where you know it’ll be a fraction, so many decimal places over and if you move the decimal place just one point to the left or one point to the right we’re talking like trillions of a trillionth.
Rick: We wouldn’t have had a universe.
Timothy: Yeah, like if the force of matter just so happened to be just a little bit stronger, a little bit weaker than antimatter. And mind you, it’s something like, I can’t remember, but it’s like If you move it over one decimal point to the left or the right just a little stronger, a little weaker, you don’t get a physical cosmos.
Rick: Yeah, I believe Robert Lanza is one of those who writes very eloquently on that. Yeah, so there’s like this, you know,
Timothy: there’s proof of it.
Rick: Yeah, it’s staring us in the face, we’re swimming in it all the time, there’s just this sort of marvelous play and display of vast infinite intelligence and God is in his heaven and all is right with the world and on that level.
Timothy: And so on that level it’s like, it makes all the difference in terms of how, for instance, engaged spirituality in the form of activism gets carried out, say on that level three, the level of pragmatic relativism. You know, Gandhiji, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Mahatma, great soul Gandhi, who’s really the, I see him as the father of the modern era engaged spirituality movement. He perfected so many of the aspects of the approach. For his satyagraha, those trained in in his way of satyagraha, truth force, a mysterious word that has a lot of connotations but it would take too long to go into it. He trained them in total love and respect for the essential goodness of whomever the perpetrator might be and he forbade people from using sarcasm or the kind of dualistic mocking, sloganeering that goes on. So much in our, say, American political process could be healed by that but you know, being ready to quite live that level of impeccability and integrity. But he always wanted his satyagrahas and everyone to see that even the worst perpetrators, the worst monsters of perpetrating injustice, that fundamentally they are innocent souls underneath all that complicated conditioning, all those unwholesome samskaras that seem to be pulling and pushing and driving their behavior. They are on level two, absolutely innocent, pure emanations out of this one single reality doing everything and being everyone. So if we live all three levels spontaneously there’s a balance. If you get a little too into just one level like say A Course in Miracles, I had to be critical of because it almost always only speaks on level two, that intrinsic perfection, and it’s very imbalanced and undermines and provides no support whatever for an engaged spirituality of level three, of actually talking about certain problems and how you know here are the apparent causes and here’s the evidence for what might work you know to help solve this problem, a whole set of problems.
Rick: So I have a number of questions I’d like to ask you, some that have come in from online viewers as we speak here and some from our friend Thomas Rossetto, your student whom I interviewed a couple of months ago. And so let me just go through them, they’re not necessarily in a logical order but we’ll just take each one and see what you have to say. So the first one is from Bobby in Griffin, Georgia. Bobby asks, “Timothy can you speak to the topic of patience on the path? I have been meditating for six or seven years and have felt many changes and beautiful experiences yet many habits in my life remain fixed. Seeking has fallen away a good bit and I’m much happier in general but I can’t help but want the big shift. I know that desire can be a hindrance and yet also propels us forward. It feels like a bit of a balancing act like avoiding sweets yet really at the core desiring a big piece of cake.”
Timothy: It’s a fun question Bobby, thanks for your sincerity in closing it. You’ve said a lot of the seeking has fallen off and in fact all of it could fall off because right now what you are intrinsically closer than close, not at all like a human being, nameless, formless, pure, pure, pure spirit is whole, has no parts, nothing lacking, no structure, seamless, full, openness. So there need not be any seeking. As soon as we make who we truly are, our vastness into an it or a that, many teachers continue to use these kind of pronouns it and that which are very impersonal. Moreover they suggest a fundamental dualism between who I am and what I’m seeking, the great reality. The great reality is the reality. It’s your withinness and withoutness, inside, outside, you’re up and down, you’re in and out, everything and formless. So right now there can be completeness in your open formless nature and spontaneously and paradoxically your formlessness is host for this whole play of forms. Your supra personal nature is hosting, witnessing and animating. Have no manifest for a moment, your true nature is manifest in this whole play of the body.
Rick: Timothy, your last sentence broke up, just repeat that last sentence.
Timothy: Yeah, I don’t know if I never repeat things verbatim but you know your supra personal nature of body is hosting and manifesting and powering this whole play of personhood, well Bobby. Now for the Bobby personal consciousness there can be not seeking but a divinely infused aspiration. One of my teachers Sri Nisargadatta, his teacher Sri Siddharameshwar Maharaj, we do have some beautiful records of what he wrote and spoke and he always was speaking about let seeking drop off but let there be the holy aspiration, let the personal consciousness insofar as it seemed to have any power or free will or choice, again like the moon’s light, it’s all borrowed from the sun, all that power, the sentience, the choice, it all comes from the absolute. Let it manifest through the personal consciousness in a full aspiration, a beautiful lively aspiration to allow all the divine qualities and virtues and capacities to express through the Bobby personality and with this it’s not a matter of patience or impatience, you are so wonder struck moment by vanishing moment that anything can arise at all, a world of experience, a Bobby personal consciousness which is just a speck upon a speck of who you truly are and your vastness. There’ll be such wonder, such curiosity, such just openness and sincerity that you won’t have literally the phenomenon of time to be impatient, you won’t be measuring this moment against some imagined future moment when you are truly God realized. All those notions are just not here in the present unfolding in the formlessness that you are.
Rick: On this seeking note, let me read you the last few sentences of an abstract I wrote up from my talk at the Science and Nonduality Conference this year.
Timothy: Yeah.
Rick: It relates to this, “If we see spiritual development as never-ending, will we be forever chasing the dangling carrot or can we rest in our true nature, the seeking energy having dropped off and yet acknowledge that compared with what might be possible we are relative beginners? Many spiritual teachers make statements such as ‘this is it, you’re that which you are seeking, realize this and you are finished.’ Is such advice helpful or does it shortchange spiritual aspirants?”
Timothy: Well I find this question becomes problematic for a lot who’ve been influenced by the Hindu Vedanta and the Advaita formulations of Sankara and his lineage of followers. In the Chan and Son and Zen traditions which is part of the great Mahayana Buddhist development dating back to like the century before Christ, the Ashtasaharika Prajnaparamita Sutra, the Prajnaparamita, perfect wisdom sutra or scripture in , lines, Ashtasaharika. That’s the earliest Mahayana Buddhist text we know of and already the paradox is there and stated fully and later in works like the Vajracchedika Prajnaparamita Sutra, the diamond cutter, perfect wisdom scripture and many other works. They really bring this paradox to the fore that is right up front and it’s all about how beings, personal consciousnesses are always in process of evolution. Even the highest, highest Bodhisattvas and perfect Buddhas are always delightfully finding new powers, new capacities, new ways of being virtuous it seems. It’s all this spontaneous Buddha play of such extraordinary splendor and beauty, divinity. You know works like the Avatamsaka Sutra, powerful profound work, I don’t know somewhere like around the second century of the common era, just went on for pages and pages and pages of descriptions of these amazing Buddha activities of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. So yeah, let the enlightening and the infusing of divine virtue and the learning of new capacities for helping and more intelligent, powerful ways of being compassionate and effective, let all of that continue but fundamentally what we are is this intrinsic pristine openness, imperfectible, nothing wrong, not a matter of becoming or developing. So Sri Nisargadatta for instance said to us, I think it was the first night I was there in Bombay, Mumbai back in January of , he said, “What you are you can only be, what you are not that you can become.” It was his simple way of referring to the fact that in our absolute nature it’s perfection and fullness unbounded, incomparable, but on the level of the personal consciousness there will be all sorts of growing and developing and in fits and starts there can be tremendous tests and challenges and in a one lifetime there might be post-traumatic stress disorder and one’s nerves feel like they’re just afraid beyond healing. There might be all sorts of situations wars and rapes and terrors that the personal consciousness kind of signs up for. Again it’s all one divine reality orchestrating everything because it’s the one divine being everyone. When a being is suffering intense physical or emotional pain who is experiencing it? Only God. God is the one sentience, the supreme self or Shiva or the Buddha nature. The absolute is the only sentient one here. It’s experiencing life from the Rick viewpoint, the Irene viewpoint, the birds and the bees and the celestial beings. So anything that any being is experiencing it’s not their experience separate from God. God is kind of looking down or the great immobile self of Shiva stillness. No it’s not that. Shiva is Shakti and is playing as each being experiencing each experience. So Shiva has compassion, infinite compassion. Our Buddha nature has infinite compassion, not just wisdom but compassion and empathy and loving kindness and sympathetic joy for all that each being is going through.
Rick: I like to think of the metaphor of light bulbs in the electrical field. I mean let’s say we could say you are the electrical field, the ubiquitous omnipresent field which powers all light bulbs, and then individually you’re also a light bulb, and as an individual light bulb you can maybe upgrade from a watt to a watt to a watt to a something like that. And as you upgrade you get brighter and brighter but you’re still from all along that same ubiquitous electrical field in your absolute nature.
Timothy: Yeah on the relative level that metaphor works very beautifully to suggest and also too light bulbs get smashed.
Rick: Yeah they do, they do.
Timothy: If the Timothy utterly vanished it wouldn’t make a difference to the cosmos as far as who I am is concerned and yet for some reason the Timothy personal consciousness is allowed to continue as is every personal consciousness. So I think our divine nature finds each of these personal consciousnesses, the light bulbs so to say, quite adorable.
Rick: Yeah.
Timothy: There’s an interesting paradoxical flip that happens devotionally in spiritual life with non-duality and that’s that instead of trying to seek out a separate above everyone most beautiful deity to worship instead you realize you are the absolute and you find all person G’s like Babaji or Swamiji, I like to use that G, that suffix of endearment of the beloved, I like to use that for all persons, Jiva G’s, person G’s, ego G’s, I find all of them adorable. I find all our manifestations of who and what I absolutely am and so no one can be a stranger to you and no one can be lesser and everyone is equally important.
Rick: A minute ago you referred to Buddhas and Bodhisattvas and divine beings and so on like that continuing to evolve and become, explore new realms of possibility
Timothy: and all of that
Rick: and yet you also referred to you know well this Timothy personal consciousness can be snuffed out and some say that the individual is snuffed out like a drop going into the ocean when enlightenment happens and doesn’t exist in any way shape or form anymore. Others refer like the Buddhist tradition refer to these Buddhas and Bodhisattvas that are hanging out on some level and people receive visions of Jesus or you know some various beings come to them in sort of subtle realm experiences. So is your sense that there’s some sort of integrity to what we are that continues on eternally and continues to evolve or do we just at some point you know merge into the ocean and no longer cease to exist in any distinct way shape or form?
Timothy: Well the ancient texts speak of the Maha-Pralaya, the great absorption of all phenomena
Rick: at the end of the universe
Timothy: that transcendently dreams them conjures them up moment by vanishing moment so ultimately all phenomena including personal consciousnesses are in that sense expendable but no it’s quite clear that all sorts of beautiful beings sagely saintly beings avatars they become almost like beautiful archetypes and the divine just continues to animate them as they did in the first place bringing them into different lifetimes and into a sagely kind of realization that helped drop all the unwholesome samskaras and make them pure and beautiful fonts, cascading fonts of virtue and goodness and loving kindness and compassion. So yeah being like Ramana Maharshi was dead to himself, he was just ash.
Rick: And yet I’ve interviewed at least half a dozen people who say that Ramana came to them in some cases before they even knew he existed.
Timothy: Yeah. .
Rick: They showed up in very tangible, he showed up in very tangible form and then later on they saw a book with his picture on it say, “Wow that’s the guy I saw.”
Timothy: Yeah, no I’ve had these subtle playing manifestations of Sri Ramana and numerous other beings and it’s like the one actor playing all these characters all these persona, you know the old Greek word persona, it means literally the mask, sound through, persona, hold up this mask and sound your voice through it and your eyes would peep through the peepholes and so that’s what person means, it’s the mask of the absolute infinite by which it can differentiate into different loci, different places of experience. So Rick’s experiences are not Irene’s experiences, are not Timothy’s experiences, are not that bird on the branch, that bird’s experiences. There’s all this differentiation for gazillions of different kind of beings, human, animal, celestial, and yet one being, one sentience, one awareness playing as all of these consciousnesses through the universal consciousness play, Shakti.
Rick: Every time you say gazillions I’m reminded of a George Bush joke, one of his advisors came to him and said, “President Bush, three Brazilian soldiers were killed in Iraq” and his face went ashen and he said, “How many is a Brazilian?” Okay, another question for you here. Mark Peters asks, “Do the increasing levels of nationalism seen both in the United States and globally and inaction denial on climate change trouble you or is everything seen as well and wisely put no matter what arises?”
Timothy: Well definitely on the level three, so to say, of this threefold model, justices and injustices harmful and helpful and all of this, play of the dvandvas, the opposites. Oh, there are extreme conditions, there’s massive denial. For instance, it’s been shown by two World Bank scientists, one of whom has passed on, Robert Goodland and his younger colleague Jeff Anhang still at the World Bank. They did this remarkable study for Worldwatch Institute, it was published in fall , which shows clearly, shows clearly that it’s our eating habits, our massive consumption of meat, poultry, dairy, fish, farmed fish, that is the number one, number one factor in climate change and they estimate at least gases, carbon dioxide and methane are responsible, I’m sorry, it’s a livestock industry that’s responsible for at least % of these GHGs as they’re called. And so Robert Goodland, before he passed away, he was strongly, strongly encouraging at least Now this is just about climate change.
Rick: Yeah, before you go on, I encourage people to watch the movie Cowspiracy.
Timothy: There’s a whole lot of films
Rick: documentary about that subject.
Timothy: Educated, many others, earthling. I mean read also the works of Gary Francione at abolitionistapproach.org about you know this what is now being called the greatest social justice movement of the modern era and that’s namely realizing and science has increasingly realized just in recent decades the personhood nature of creatures, not just cows that we abuse in the dairy industry and meat industry and so forth, poultry but even like fish. As more and more scientists realize these beings aren’t just units of some kind of production for us for our food. No, they are consciousnesses that are associated with intense feelings and social bonds. They are persons, they are animal persons. There needs to be an abolitionist movement just like there was an abolitionist movement and the enslaving and torturing and exploiting of humans. The same with animals and it’s never been easier, never been easier to eat vegan and you know so many of the Chan and Zen and so on monasteries amongst the nuns they all eat vegan, most of them live to be well into their s and s. All sorts of scientific studies show you live longer, it’s better for you know the environment in about factor in trying to mitigate woeful climate change. So there are solutions but are people really sincere and willing to respond in an intelligent, compassionate way? That remains to be seen.
Rick: Okay, here’s a question Eli from Denver asks, “Do you feel that you are able to observe tendencies in yourself or samskaras as you would say? What do you do when you notice such things in your own personal consciousness?” Thank you Eli for that question and most certainly I’ll notice things arising and all that is “to be done” is to see them off sooner than later and sometimes there will be you know patterns of old traumas or whatever or just outrageous things happening and then one might be kind of reeling with an unwholesome samskara for a little bit and there’s always just the realization that God is powering all this. God you know our true nature, the Shiva Shakti formless and all powerful forming nature can let this go. And so it’s all a matter of how open are you willing to be in your absolute fundamental openness. How much can the personal consciousness be transparent for our fundamental supra-personal, meta-personal nature?
Rick: Here’s some questions from our friend Thomas Rossetto whom again I interviewed about a couple months ago if people want to check out his interview.
Timothy: And his infinitely mystical website.
Rick: Yeah he’s a good one. Is Samadhi something that is required to become fully awake to the correct identification of the self as pure open source awareness? If someone has had this quote-unquote experience even if only once, does that mean that they are fully enlightened?
Timothy: I would say you know there’s different kind of Samadhis recognized in yogic literature and even among the Vedantins like Sankara. Samadhi basically the old Sanskrit means the sameness or oneness Samma of the D – the highest intelligence, highest cognitive principle. And so it basically means the absorption of the mind in a trance state and then they differentiate like Patanjali does in Yoga Sutra differentiates between Samadhis based or centered on some form getting more and more and more subtle subtle subtle and finally Nirvikalpa Samadhi Samadhi without seed or form the others oriented to form are called Savikalpa Samadhi. And you know the yogic traditions of later Kundalini Yoga, Gaurak Natha who kind of seems to have come up with our first Kundalini Yoga texts about a thousand years after Patanjali that is you know somewhere maybe around a thousand years ago, he specifies other kind of energetic kind of Samadhis and then the devotional traditions have different Bhava Samadhis where you’re very for instance absorbed just in the essence of Krishna or the essence of Shiva for instance. So there’s all these different kinds of Samadhi, they are just experiences, they come they go. As Ramana Maharshi always invited what are you prior to all the comings and goings of states and phenomena visions and Samadhis, what are you changelessly prior to the arising of all these, what are you after all of these leave and all of them leave. So it’s also true that like in deep dreamless sleep that’s a Nirvikalpa Samadhi if you were clear. Most people are non-clear during their deep dreamless sleep and so it doesn’t have the kind of glow and clarity and just dazzling quality of conscious Nirvikalpa Samadhi. But you can learn to have fall asleep and watch yourself through the visionary states all the way into deep dreamless sleep and that’s a hint of Nirvikalpa Samadhi. And then you hear people like Ramakrishna up in Bengal in the th century, he spent like six months in that state, he had to have someone just putting little bits of liquid and food into his mouth just to keep soul and body together.
Rick: I remember Ramana sitting down in that pit beneath the temple with worms chewing his legs you know and he was out of it but he was into it.
Timothy: He spent a lot of time in those early years at Arunachala in states of Nirvikalpa Samadhi and then one day as he himself spoke about and it was recorded in the literature on Bhagavan Sri Ramana, he had a kind of a death experience, it was a second death. It was years after the one that initially woke him up in his uncle’s upper room down there in Madurai near the Meenakshi temple. Later on, the second death when he was at Arunachala, just felt like the total end of the need for any kind of Nirvikalpa Samadhi after which he just only spoke of Sahaja Samadhi, the natural oneness which didn’t matter whether there was a world or not, whether forms were happening or not, whether he was talking or not. People should also in this context disabuse themselves of the notion that Ramana only sat around just like the mountain itself, just quiescent silent. You know he spent a lot of hours of each day and week talking with people, editing texts, reading the newspaper.
Rick: Working in the kitchen?
Timothy: Yeah, he was the first one up masterfully chopping the vegetables and preparing the sauces. Some of the old ladies had been cooks their entire lives. They wondered where did he get these skills? You know it all just flowed spontaneously. Action or quiescence, you know dynamic movement or literal physical stillness, it all came from the same source and so Ramana was not attached to states of silence or words. He could be very eloquent and loquacious on occasion.
Rick: Yeah.
Timothy: He was very personal and yet not impersonal but you had the strong feeling of this kind of supra personal source nature prior to all persons inclusive of all persons. People felt intimate with Ramana because he did not distance himself in any way as the supra personal. Again not the impersonal but as the super personal. He was inclusive of all persons human or animal who came to him and that’s why the animals spontaneously gravitated to him. They sensed someone who was one with them not other than them.
Rick: I heard an interesting thing when I was listening to some recordings by David Godman whom I interviewed a couple of times. He was saying that Ramana said that in Samadhi, in deep I guess you would call it Nirvi Kalpa Samadhi, senses withdrawn from their objects, he could dissolve the sort of impurities that he tended to absorb from his devotees. But at a certain stage he stopped doing that and people around him said he noticeably aged much more quickly after that. And at one point when he was suffering from his cancer someone said to him, “Well why don’t you just apportion your suffering among all of us, we’ll gladly each take on a portion then you won’t have it.” And he said, “Where do you think I got it from in the first place?” So it would seem that physiologically even that Nirvi Kalpa Samadhi could be an opportunity for the physiology to restore itself and purge itself of anything, any accumulated dross.
Timothy: And that’s why deep dreamless sleep itself
Rick: has that value.
Timothy: Stanford University sleep clinics from the s onward, deep dreamless sleep is what restores or helps regenerate the physical body, whereas it’s the dreaming sleep, the so-called rapid eye movement or REM sleep that helps restore the psyche. When you deprive an organism of REM sleep you’ll start causing psychological disintegration, you know, mental disorder, emotional disorder. And if you deprive an organism of the deep dreamless sleep, well, they know with certain organisms they killed those organisms, they had to stop doing it with humans. That’s why, you know, on the personal consciousness level, you know, one reads one of the greatest health things is eight hours of sleep.
Rick: Yeah.
Timothy: Maybe twice a year I might get as much as seven hours of sleep, but for most of my adult life it’s been about five, four hours of sleep, you know.
Rick: Yeah.
Timothy: So I don’t think this Timothy fell live very long, he already looks about years older. R Some people don’t know actually,
Timothy: I was joking, big secret here, my wife, and I think she’ll get a kick out of this, it’s humorous, she’s actually months older than I am, but twice now she’s gotten mistaken for my daughter.
Rick: Oh, that’s funny.
Timothy: And I predicted several years ago that would be happening, now I’m predicting honey, just a few more years people will be mistaking you for my granddaughter.
Rick: Arianna Huffington is on a campaign these days to encourage people to stop burning out and get more sleep, she just wrote a book about it. On this point of, well something that this discussion reminds me of, as I was listening to your recordings, there were several points at which you seem to be speaking somewhat disparagingly of meditation, yoga practices and things like that. Like you know, quiescence, you just mentioned quiescence, as you know the first couple of verses of the Yoga Sutras are, you know, the yoga is the cessation of fluctuations of the mind, then the seer is established in himself. And I’m not sure if I agreed with everything I heard you saying. Obviously when Krishna advocated being without the three gunas to Arjuna on the battlefield, he then a couple of verses later said, “Established in yoga, perform action,” and in that case a very dynamic action, a battle. So I think that there’s a sort of a, in ancient India, you know, they used to dye cloth by dipping it in the dye, then bleaching it in the sun and repeating that process alternately until it eventually became colorfast. So I think there’s something to be said for meditative periods where the mind and body become silent, and obviously you’re not going to remain in that state, but it produces physiological change and it also sort of infuses the mind, if you will, with being, with pure awareness in a way which over time accumulates and becomes stable under all circumstances.
Timothy: Yes, there’s definitely good habits for the psyche, like eating wholesome healthy plant food
Rick: Yeah.
Timothy: and maintaining all the different kinds of sattvic elements as Krishna identifies in the Bhagavad Gita where he’s talking about the three gunas, you know, the three different gunas, the qualities of agitation or staleness, that is, rajoguna and tamoguna, and then the way of sattoguna, the quality of sattva or refinement and harmony and upper-level kind of experiencing and behaving. So definitely good. What those kind of remarks of mine over the years in satsang that have sometimes been critical of the yogic way, it refers specifically to something I’ve seen over and over and over, heard, I should say, over and over and over from aspirants as they present their state in satsang when they’re being very candid and honest and sincere and humble. I’ve noticed too often what’s happened for many beings is they have a huge dichotomy, a huge split or fragment in their life, a fragmentation between when they feel peaceful and meditative and then all those other times. And I’m aware that so much of this has to do with also one’s home life and one’s vocation. You know, the CEO of a for-profit or non-profit organization or corporation, they have to accomplish about tasks before lunch and be answerable to dozens if not hundreds of people. It’s not going to be so easy for them to live the kind of yogic serenity and bliss, bliss, peace, peace, streaming purely evenly consciousness states. There’s going to be sudden stuff happening, you know, emergency workers going into a crisis area. What kind of yogic calm will they have? Now if they’ve spent a lot of time in meditation they have that as a baseline, that kind of a backdrop they can operate from, but sometimes there needs to be real adrenaline rush.
Rick: Oh yeah.
Timothy: From all those early studies of meditation, the yogic kind of meditation that came out of a tradition you’re well familiar with, TM, that there were certain kinds of psychophysiology going on, but there are certain vocations in life where the whole hormone flow, the whole cascade of psychophysiological chemistry, biochemistry, is going to need to be chock-full of like adrenaline.
Rick: Sure.
Timothy: And that kind of stuff. So are those people not spiritual? Are they in not a spiritual state when they’re say rescuing people from the rubble after a horrifying earthquake? And so also like someone comes to a satsang and says, you know, all day today or for the last year I’ve just felt you know not as peaceful as I used to when I used to be able to do retreats and so forth. And it’s at that point I realized people have confused their spirituality with states.
Rick: Yes.
Timothy: And so much of yogic orientation is about perfecting and maintaining states. And that’s why many of the yogis have to become recluses and leave society, go off and live in solitude, get a routine kind of existence. You know, where they eat their meals at a certain time, they have bowel movements at a certain time. If you think it’s all very regulated and routinized so they can just dwell in some kind of samadhi or near samadhi, this what seems to them some kind of seamless state. But if a bunch of kids moved into a little hamlet, and let’s say families into one hamlet from another one fleeing out on a rock slide or something, and suddenly that yogi’s meditations every day are being interrupted by little children playing and laughing and crying and screaming, what would the yogi do? I mean, that yogi having made himself slave to a state of phenomenal peace, does not awaken to their supra-phenomenal nature which would find all the cries and laughter of the children to be just other aspects of the one own Om vibration.
Rick: Yeah.
Timothy: So the sagely way is to awaken to our true absolute host nature which is host for all vibrations, all worlds, all kinds of experiences, all kinds of vocations and states and demands of compassion. To be a spouse, for instance, a family person raising children or grandchildren is much more difficult in most ways than being a yogi who has his needs basically provided for by the villagers who look up to that yogi as some kind of superior being. But could that yogi trade place with, say, one of those “lowly villagers”? I’m not so sure that yogi could because that yogi has bound him or herself to a particular state and our true reality, the true self-nature, Siva, is state-free prior to all states and host for all states.
Rick: Sure, well I understand all that and what I’m saying though is that I know plenty of, we could call them yogis, who are householders, businessmen, who live active lives yet who through a lifetime of practice have integrated the silence into dynamic activity. So they could be an emergency room doctor or are someone who’s raising a family or whatever and yet the serenity and clarity that might once have just been a moment, a temporary glimpse in deep meditation has become a / feature of their awareness.
Timothy: I see.
Rick: And on the outside it might not be so noticeable, they might be just, you know, really busy, but on the inside there’s that rock solid clarity and silence.
Timothy: And that’s real freedom. So the whole question comes for how does that freedom best arise through years and years of yogic kind of retreat experience or can it happen through this sudden awakening? And this is where the Chan and Song and Zen tradition made a huge contribution, I think, to the non-dual traditions and I often find myself needing to talk in this language with the Chan and Zen reference here as a kind of a corrective or something to complement the yogic traditions of India which have colored even some of the Advaita sagely traditions of India, still sometimes a little too yogic. In the Chan and Zen tradition they speak strongly of the need for this sudden awakening, the old Chinese term is dun wu, a sudden awakening, and then zengo, gradual cultivation. And it’s all about that aspiration I was speaking about earlier and nothing to do with selfish seeking. There’s this sudden awakening right now, right now, it takes no time. . Timelessly you are this changeless openness, this fullness of the absolute, pure pristine spirit, not at all like a human being, not at all like anything or state or energy or world or condition.
Rick: And yet as you said of Sankara earlier not everyone is ready for that sudden awakening, there may need to be gradual cultivation before the sudden awakening becomes possible.
Timothy: Right, and then it’s in the context of that sudden awakening that the rest of the cultivation and it can be unending for eons can occur, the spontaneous practicing of spiritual practices, the manifestation of certain virtues and learning of different skills and so forth and so on, but it all happens not out of the problematic sense of “I’m an unenlightened me and I need to do these practices in order to realize that the great state of freedom.” No, that whole illusion is just wiped clean from essential freedom one freely is practicing this and that virtue, this and that strength
Rick: Yeah
Timothy: in this situation or that situation and it’s all happening gradually and there’s the realization that the sudden awakening is kind of the realization of your innate Buddha nature, your unborn timeless, boundless Buddha nature, but the gradual cultivation is what it actually means for the personal consciousness to start manifesting Buddha-like virtues and qualities and capacities over time, over the eons, and that’s that whole process of becoming. And so Sri Nisargadatta said what you are not you can become. People may not be expressing all the Buddha qualities, very conventionally, I don’t know how to speak Tibetan, I’m not a Tibetan speaker, but some years of training I could become that. But more importantly in terms of all the great virtues, not just a skill like language, I could become a supremely loving, loving, compassionate being. I could become that but what I am is this which is prior to all developmental practices, all cultivation, all wholesomeness or unwholesomeness of the personhood. So the Chan Masters were real clear, let there be tremendous energies and dedication and efforts exerted for cleaning the monastery, growing food, being a villager, being a monastic, let there be tremendous effusion of qualities and wholesome behaviors, yet it all happens from the context of there’s not an ego in here trying to do all that, trying to become better. So I find that a very important model, the Sankara interpretation of Advaita the way most people have interpreted, it suggests this quality of awaken to the absolute self and you’re finished and it doesn’t allow for – I’m not saying Sankara didn’t allow for it but I’m seeing the way his message has been interpreted by many – there’s this quality of finality that seems to me just silly
Rick: Yeah.
Timothy: and it leads to these people saying they have realized this self and then trying to market themselves with the finality of that and that strikes me again, silly.
Rick: I agree as my friend Francis Bennett puts it, “How do you know you’re done? Did someone stick a fork in you?” So on that note I think we better wrap it up. There are more questions from Thomas but I’m sure he’s asked those of you before and you know we’ll end.
Timothy: Thank you Thomas. Thomas has put very unselfishly, he’s so with tremendous generosity and spirit, not only recorded and figured out the sound levels and so forth of many digital recordings of the satsangs that I would present over the years but he’s put them up on the internet and all of it’s available for free so people can experience all that.
Rick: Yeah they’re nice. I encourage people to listen to him and
Timothy: Satsangs Santa Barbara
Rick: it’s sweet because you can sort of hear as the evening progresses the frogs start croaking. First there’s birds in the background and then the evening starts to come on and then there’s these beautiful frogs singing and it gives you a real feeling for being there. So
Timothy: Yeah, sometimes there wouldn’t be any frogs, just crickets or some nights it was the owls,
Rick: Yeah.
Timothy: two owls that would sing to each other. We lived in houses right up on the northern edge of the city of Santa Barbara so the whole back was wilderness, we had lots of creatures up there.
Rick: And that’s at enlightened- spirituality.org, right? People can find those recordings as well as as well as hundreds of pages really of things you’ve written. It’s amazing how prolific you are, all kinds of things. I especially encourage people to read that Three Levels article that you mentioned, maybe I’ll link to it from your Batgap page. It’s I think a very handy teaching tool and way of understanding and reconciling the paradoxes that we sometimes encounter in spiritual practice or spiritual pursuit.
Timothy: But you’ll find all of this right in yourself, anyone who without even reading. I never read anything when there was a you know major awakening and life changing boom in the th year or whenever it was. So anyone can open to this and then you’ll be creating your own websites or something freely sharing and and it’ll all be realized to be the activity of the One streaming us all.
Rick: Alrighty, So apologies to those whose questions I didn’t get to, I’ve noticed a few have come in that haven’t been forwarded to me yet but maybe I’ll forward them to Timothy and if you have.
Timothy: Yeah, people can freely email me at [email protected].
Rick: Do you want me to post that on your BATGAP page?
Timothy: Sure.
Rick: Okay, I’ll do that, I’ll post your email address, people can email you if they didn’t get a chance to ask their question online. So let me just make a couple of wrap-up points. I’ve been speaking with Timothy Conway, it’s my second interview with him, check out the first one if you like. You’ll find them both and many, many others on batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P. I encourage you to explore the menus and see what else is on there, some interesting things. There’s an audio podcast as I mentioned, the previous interviews are categorized in four or five different ways. There’s a number of them have been transcribed if you’d like to actually just read them. And there’s some other, look under the resources menu, you’ll find some useful resources and tools and this is a work in progress, there will be many more. I think we’re going to take a little vacation for a couple of weeks now and when I come back the weekend I’ll be interviewing Radhanath Swami who is leader of the ISKCON, Hare Krishna movement, and Rick Weinman who is the founder of something called Vortex Healing. And then a week after that Sri M and then I believe I’ll be going off to the Science of Non-Duality Conference and having some conversations with Adyashanti and Susanne Marie and other people. So, thanks for listening or watching and we’ll see you next time. Thank you, Timothy.
Rick: Thank you, Rick, for the chance to be with all dear souls here. Best wishes in all the work that you, Irene, everyone involved with that gap are doing. It’s a great service bringing forth greater wisdom and compassion.
Rick: It’s great fun. Namaste.
Timothy: Namaste dear Rick-ji. Thank you.