Summary:
- Background and Awakening:
- Fred Davis studied and practiced Eastern wisdom for 25 years before his true awakening commenced.
- His seeking ended in a profound awakening experience.
- He is the creator of “Awakening Clarity Now” and the founder of “The Living Method of Awakening.”
- The Living Method of Awakening:
- The Living Method is a process of direct pointing that encourages immediate recognition of our shared true nature.
- Hundreds of people worldwide have found freedom using this method.
- Awakening Experience:
- Fred had a significant awakening experience where he realized he wasn’t the person he thought he was.
- The truth of God woke up to the fiction of “Fred Davis.”
- This experience changed his interactions with others, including jailers and fellow inmates.
- Integration and Challenges:
- Awakening didn’t solve all his problems, but it provided breathing room.
- Fred’s ego still returned, but he had glimpsed something beyond it.
- He continued to explore self-inquiry and spiritual practices.
Remember that awakening experiences can vary greatly, and not everyone has dramatic or instantaneous realizations. Fred’s journey highlights the importance of persistence, self-inquiry, and compassion in the awakening process.
Full transcript:
Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week is Fred Davis. I began hearing about Fred a little while back. I started getting all these ravingly enthusiastic emails about him from various people. I might even read a couple of excerpts. I thought, well, I’ll have this guy on, I guess. Fred studied and practiced Eastern wisdom for 25 years prior to 2006 when his seeking ended and his true awakening commenced. He is the creator and editor of Awakening Clarity Now and the founder of the Living Method of Awakening. He is also the author of the Book of Undoing: Direct Pointing to Non-Dual Awareness, Beyond Recovery: Non-Duality and the Twelve Steps, and Awakening Clarity: a Spiritual Sampler. The Living Method of Awakening is an extraordinarily successful process of direct pointing that encourages immediate recognition of our shared true nature. Hundreds of people on five continents have found the door to freedom using the Living Method. His work has appeared on Advaita Vision, Non-Duality Living, Meeting Truth, One, the Magazine, and it also shows up frequently in Non-Dual Highlights, but so far not the Oprah Show. He is happily married, deeply loves animals, and lives as a chiefly ignored urban hermit in Columbia, South Carolina, deep in the Bible Belt. So, Fred, I’ve really enjoyed getting to know you over the course of the last week or so. I’ve listened to most of your YouTube videos.
Fred: I’m sorry.
Rick: That’s all right. They’re very good. It’s like my inner interviewer just listens along and is always asking questions or sort of thinking, “Is that right on or is that a little off?” or whatever. Not that my perspective on it would be the final word by any means, but just to the best of my lights, I kind of take all this stuff in and try to put it in a context.
Fred: We can’t not.
Rick: But I must say that I’ve agreed, again, not that my agreement is any sort of final arbiter of truth, but I find myself agreeing with almost everything you say. It resonates with me. And who knows? Next year I might disagree with it all.
Fred: Yeah, that’s right. It might even be tomorrow. We certainly don’t want to become fixed. But so far so good. I might disagree with everything tomorrow. Sometimes I read something I wrote and I go, “Eh, that’s not particularly clear, Fred.”
Rick: Yeah, yeah. And let me just for kicks read a couple little bits from things people sent me here. Here’s one woman named Georgette. You probably know who she is.
Fred: Yes, I do.
Rick: She says, “He’s a friend who’s been the most effective teacher in my 30 years of spiritual seeking”. She goes on quite a bit, but she says, “I did a direct pointing session with Fred and dived into the deep end, or is it deep beginning? Prior to the session, my life seemed contained in a bubble that bounced back and forth from being awake in and as the dream to being asleep in the dream. Not a bad life at all. A lot of joy, amazement, and okayness, with just enough suffering to lay a reasonable restriction over pretty much everything. Since the session, the apparent containment has dissolved into wide-open welcoming. I didn’t wake up. I simply recognized the infinite affluence of what has always been freely available. Now I know what all the teachers on your show have been pointing to. It’s me and not something else. It’s such a relief to see that this thought-generated non-person was looking for what it couldn’t possibly find, an enlightened self, thus the ongoing search for 30 years”. One more sentence, “There’s a conspicuous and boundless capacity to see the world without distinguishing a fish from a cantaloupe, and yet there’s a precious honoring of both as individual appearances. Being human has become most delicious.” So that was nice.
Fred: She’s a wonderful writer.
Rick: Yeah, she’s good. And then there’s another one from somebody who was like, “Eh, I don’t know. I think I’m one of those “get wet gradually” people you talk about. In some ways I see things differently, in some ways I don’t. Did it happen after I talked to Fred? Maybe. It might have happened before or just gradually over time. And Fred sped up the process. He did have a way of stopping my mind from going places.” So she’s a little bit more ambivalent.
Fred: Let’s get some of that in here.
Rick: Yeah.
Fred: God Almighty, they don’t want to pass me off as the master magician.
Rick: Right. So anyway, we’ll have plenty of time to talk about all this. And you have quite a story, quite a speckled past. I mean, everything from jail to whatnot. But yeah, the drunken stuff. So why don’t we start with that? Because people always like to hear the personal story as well as the teaching.
Fred: That’s right. So, well, it would be interesting. I can kind of combine some of that by telling you that I first got the idea to get involved in this, whatever this is, that we’re doing, in 1982, and I woke up in what I love to term an insane asylum.
Rick: You mean you woke up in the spiritual sense?
Fred: No, no, no.
Rick: Oh, you just woke up. You woke up from the sleeping state into the waking state in an insane asylum.
Fred: No. No, what I mean is that I first got an interest in this 30 years ago. I didn’t wake up until like seven years, eight years ago. But in 1982, I got the first bug. I was in an insane asylum, and all of a sudden, and I remember, because I was drawing something with crayons, they wouldn’t give us anything particularly sharp. And all of a sudden, the thought popped in my mind, you should study Zen. And this was like the most incongruous thought imaginable for someone in my condition. As I stood, because I was on the inside, I mean, I was in an insane asylum. On the outside, I was homeless, and I was a drunk, and a ne’er do well. And just the idea that I was going to become some kind of a Zen master was just totally absurd to everybody but me. And for me, it was just like perfect sense, okay. Because I could look around and see that if I started studying Zen, I couldn’t possibly do any worse.
Rick: So you sort of bottomed out, in other words.
Fred: Yeah, oh yeah. But of course, there’s a trap door to every bottom, and there was a trap door to that one too. But this is where it started.
Rick: I had kind of a similar thing. I was pretty much bottomed out, dropped out of highschool, and arrested a couple times, and I was sitting there on some drug and picked up a Zen book and thought, whoa, these guys really know what they’re talking about. I’ve got to get serious here.
Fred: It’s just the slightest little thing that enters, because from my teaching standpoint of view, from my point of view, we don’t ever make a decision to become seekers. It just happens.
Rick: Yeah, God’s grace or something.
Fred: Yeah, it’s like we’re mugged. Get him back. Okay, you’re a spiritual seeker. And of course, now as I view it, I was a spiritual seeker for years prior to that. And my chief avenue was drugs and alcohol and women.
Rick: Yeah. I would say that all 7 billion of us are spiritual seekers.
Fred: Yeah, that’s right.
Rick: Everybody’s on the path.
Fred: Yeah, everybody’s on the path. Some of our paths are a little bit more skillful than others. But I had to have an awful lot of suffering before I could come around. And so I began to study, I began to study Zen. Well, actually, I started studying with Tibetans, but right off I could see it wasn’t going to work because they weren’t going to let me be the Dalai Lama. And man, if they were not going to let me be the king, then I just wasn’t very interested. But they did teach me how to meditate, and they were very kind. They did everything right. This was just not a ripe apple at the time. And then so I dropped back into a spiritual circle I was more comfortable with, which was me. And I studied, I come from the school of bookstore Buddhism, that’s my lineage. And I was a bookstore Buddhist for many years after that, and then off and on, because that’s the good thing, I had no commitments, so I wasn’t required to do anything if I didn’t feel like it. And so I moved out to Portland, Oregon in the middle of a midlife crisis, and while I was there I spent a little bit of time at the Zen Center there. But once again they were not going to just let me lead the thing. And clearly they needed some leadership, because I knew just how things should go and they did not. So I couldn’t stay there very long either, I just wasn’t a joiner. Just to wrap it up a little bit, or accelerate it, let’s put it that way. So I just accelerate now to the fact that I tried those things, they didn’t work for me, so I went back to the old reliable, I went back to drinking. You know, there’s enlightenment there on a regular basis, it’s just that it’s only good for as long as the highlights.
Rick: Yeah, very loosely defined enlightenment.
Fred: That’s right, yeah, very loosely. Yeah, like such as “I’m not a potato”. That’s the kind of enlightenment I was getting. But the funny thing is that while I was in Portland, that’s when I actually got my first glimpse. Even though I was a drunk, I wasn’t drunk at the time, but I was living a drunkard’s life. But while I was still simultaneously living this total drunkard’s life, I was sitting a lot, I was sitting a couple hours a day at least.
Rick: In meditation?
Fred: In meditation, in Zazen, in my basement. So I was sitting, religiously sitting, I don’t know how that happened, and then while I was doing that I discovered self-inquiry. And the way that I discovered it…
Rick: Why do you call that a drunkard’s life?
Fred: Well, I mean, I was drinking, I was drunk. If I wasn’t at work, I was either drunk or getting ready to get drunk.
Rick: So you were meditating a couple hours a day, but you were also still drinking a lot.
Fred: Yeah, I would sit in the mornings before I went to work, because I wasn’t drunk, and then I would sit, as soon as I got home.
Rick: You would drink?
Fred: Yeah, I’d have a couple of drinks, but then I would sit.
Rick: After having had a couple of drinks.
Fred: Yeah, right. I still had some control over addiction at that point. Later on I had no control whatsoever. So anyway, I started doing this sitting and everything, and I hit upon this thing. I was working on a Zen koan, myself being the Zen master, of course. You know what they say about lawyers, that the lawyer that’s representing himself has a fool for a client. I was kind of like that as far as being a teacher. I was a pretty good teacher, but I had a fool for a student. But I ran across something that said, I was working on “show me your original face”, the face before your parents were born. I was going over that, and over that, and of course I was trying to make sense of it. I never did, and I never woke up from that, but what happened was that somewhere along the way I ran into a phrase that said, “This is the same thing as asking, ‘Who am I?'” Man, that was simple. I did that the same way that I drank, or did anything else, or gambled, or did anything else, which I did compulsively. I didn’t know how to do it. I had just run across one sentence that said, “Ask yourself, ‘Who am I?'” So I went about my day saying, “Who am I?” I guess thousands of times, certainly hundreds of times, because it was like, “Who’s walking across the room? Who’s vacuuming?” I mean, just over and over again.
Rick: I don’t know if you saw my Michael James interview, but he made the point that it’s like picking up a book and sitting there with a book in your lap saying, “What’s in this book? What’s in this book? What’s in this book?” It might be smarter to actually open the book.
Fred: You’re right! Yeah! But I was always big on that kind of just knock your head against the walls spirituality. So I did get a glimpse at that time, and it was authentic. I knew at the time it was authentic. I just knew, “Oh, this is it. Wow! ” But the problem is that I had no structure. I was insane. I was a drunk. So right behind that came ego, and ego just sucked that right up. It wasn’t minutes. We talk about, “Oh, ego rebuilt over a period of time.” My period of time was like you could have counted it with your second hand. It was like, “Oh, now I’m really special. Now I’m one of the wise of the world,” which is a line I stole from the trilogy about Gandalf. Now I was right up there with Gandalf. At any rate, for 12 more years, that went away. It didn’t do anything except for drive me crazy. For 12 years I then continued to drink and change, and then in 2000 it came to me.
Rick: Let me ask you a question. When you were drunk, did you actually find that that condition was preferable to being sober? Was there something actually more fulfilling about it, or even preferable to your meditative states? I’ve gotten drunk a few times in my life as a teenager and did drugs for a while, but at a certain point, when the spirituality started to wake up, it’s like those states couldn’t improve upon my normal state. They were inferior to it, and so the taste for them completely disappeared.
Fred: See, that’s because you were in a moderated state. In other words, you weren’t drinking all the time.
Rick: No.
Fred: For me, my regular life was absolutely awful. By this time, when I got in Portland, I had been a very successful guy. I owned a couple of businesses and stuff, and I was pretty well set. But my lawyer and my accountant said, “You’re going to be fine. Just don’t screw this up. You can’t.” That’s a tall order for a drunk whose job is to screw things up.
Rick: So in other words, alcohol was a relief from the way you felt most of the time, and so you took solace in that.
Fred: I did. I took a lot of solace in it. It sounds funny, but it’s like heroin addicts and alcoholics have something very, very much in common, which is that you can reach what heroin addicts call the nod, which is where you’re just in the world, but not of the world. That’s a very peaceful place, and that’s about the only peace I knew at the time. It wasn’t that my life was that terrible. It was just that my thoughts were that terrible. My thoughts were telling me.
Rick: Kind of tormenting you.
Fred: Yeah, because I had been a successful guy. I had lost all that due to my alcoholism and just natural ignorance. So I lost all that, and now the next thing you knew, I’m looking for jobs for eight bucks an hour. That’s a wake-up call.
Rick: Yeah. Got to work an hour just to buy a six-pack.
Fred: Yeah, right. Exactly. I’d hit such a low that that was just unbearable for me. What I didn’t know was that it wouldn’t be long before I’d look back at all that with fond reminiscence of what a vacation my life was just a few months ago. Because I ended up drinking myself out of all of that, too. I just drank myself out of everything. My health, my dignity, my credit, my car, my home, my wife, my whole family back here. I drank my way out of absolutely everything. I ended up homeless again. I love to tell this story, so don’t let me miss it on your show. Which is that anybody can end up homeless. There’s no shame in that. You can get sick, you can lose a job, you can have medical bills, whatever. Anybody ends up homeless. In today’s world, you could end up homeless twice, even, perhaps. But I’ve been homeless nine times. That’s not bad luck. That’s actually incredible skill.
Rick: Homeless means like sleeping on parked benches and stuff, right?
Fred: Yeah, exactly.
Rick: Because there aren’t necessarily shelters you can always go to.
Fred: Well, you don’t always want to go to a shelter. They won’t let you drink in there. You see, that’s one of the drawbacks. Plus, you’re in there with all these losers, and I personally was still a winner. Look at these people. They screwed up their lives.
Rick: Like Charlie Sheen.
Fred: Yeah, that’s it. That’s right. Winning. I know some people are screwing up, but I’m in good shape.
Rick: I bet.
Fred: So I ended up homeless again after all that. This is a couple of years, probably three or four years after the big glimpse and all of that. Which I never got out of my head. It just drove me crazy. But I could never get out of my head that something had happened. I wasn’t real clear on what it was. I knew I would have been part of God or something, but I couldn’t quite get my arms around it. And so I ended up homeless in the park, and I realized at some point, you know what? I think you may have a drinking problem. I’d been an AA off and on for 15 years, probably. But it just dawned on me that I was back in homelessness. I flashed back to 16 years before. I had been in the desert of Arizona in just such a situation where I was fixing to die. And I thought, “Damn, this thing looks like a habit, doesn’t it?” Because that’s it. I just had great skill at giving my stuff up. I overcame every advantage I ever had. And so I got sober in 2000. I came back to South Carolina, and I looked around, and I went, “You know, if you don’t get sober now, you’re going to go back to the park.” Because I’d managed to get out of the park. I was very, very good at getting myself out of the ditch that drunkenness landed me in. And as a result of that, I thought I was very clever. I had never recognized that the skill to have was to not go in the ditch. That the ability to get yourself out of the ditch over and over again is kind of a dubious ability. So when I got sober, I threw myself into the 12-step community very, very seriously and did nothing else. Because I knew that Zen would screw me up. I just knew it. I would get smart with Zen and be able to spot what was wrong with AA. Sorry about that, AA. And that I would just screw it up. That I would get drunk. And so I put all of that in the background. I decided for a year. But man, about the time that your birthday came up, here came the Zen books. I’m back in the bookstore Buddhism. The difference was that now I wasn’t drunk. So now there was actually the opportunity to pursue this thing. Oh my God. I really began to pursue my true nature. My true nature began to pursue my true nature. Looking for itself. But I didn’t have enough. I worked the steps and it just wasn’t quite low enough for me. I started becoming quite egoic again now, because I was the AA guy who had all the answers. I didn’t have all the answers to Zen and all of that, but I had to AA and all that. I had all that figured out. So what happened was that I went out and did all of my amends. All of my AA amends. I actually did that in the first six months or so of my sobriety.
Rick: Meaning apologizing to people that you had messed with.
Fred: That’s right. Which was a hell of a list because I had just been a rascal and a ne’er do well since… Well, I started drinking when I was 12 and that’s probably around the time that… What happened was that around 12 the insanity broke out. And simultaneously I found a temporary cure for it which was alcohol. So at any rate, when I made all my amends, and you know there’s nothing in the book that says that just because we made amends that other people have to accept them. And so I had some wounds that I went and ripped the band-aid off of because hell I’m on fire with this thing. Hey, hey, I’m trying to get sober. I’m so sorry I screwed with you, but you know it was a long time ago. So I hit a couple of people who were not actually happy for me in my new sobriety. And so they pressed charges. Well, I lived in hell for two and a half years waiting for my hearing to come up. And I had a wonderful lawyer. But I kept trying during that time to wake up. Really, I mean just religiously. I jumped, bumped into Eckhart Tolle. I listened to him. You’re going to have to hear this correctly to know what I’m telling you. I listened to Eckhart for 12, 14, 16 hours a day for probably six months. I was in the book business, and I just went out and I bought everything that I could get on Eckhart. And I was working all the time, seven days a week. I was traveling, going everywhere to find books that I could sell online for a dollar more than I paid for them. So in the car I had Eckhart. My mind was driving me crazy, so I had to have somebody else’s mind inside my head. I couldn’t live with mine, so I took Eckhart’s and put it in my head. I listened to him in the car, and then I listened to him upstairs, up here where I am now in my little office. I listened to every CD that I could. Eckhart Tolle, when I first started listening to him, you couldn’t even buy his book in my town. I mean, he was nobody. But he was becoming somebody.
Rick: You must have listened to a lot of stuff many times over.
Fred: Oh, yeah. I had about 100 hours.
Rick: To the point of practically memorizing it.
Fred: I did. I had about 120 hours or so of him, or 110, 120 hours of his recorded stuff. Which is the same. Actually, what I had was I had about two hours of Eckhart recorded about 52 different ways.
Rick: Yeah. Because he says the same thing.
Fred: Over and over and over. But I didn’t care. Repetition is the mother of clarity. I just wanted his soothing little baritone in the background. It was the one thing I could stand. So, upstairs I had one of these things playing, and downstairs, this is a 750 square foot apartment, downstairs I had The Power of Now playing on my little Bose radio if I was awake. In other words, I’m talking about if I’m physically awake. If I was not sleeping, I was listening to Eckhart. First thing in the morning. Because the Fred movie would start up and it would be, “God, I can’t listen to that.” So, up here I was listening to one thing on Eckhart, downstairs I was listening to another, and in the car I had yet another. And I was driving a lot. So, two and a half years, my trial came up. I had reached a point of relative surrender, thanks to Eckhart. You know, just what you were talking about with that, “Look what’s in this book, what’s in this book.”
Rick: Right.
Fred: Just before my trial, I was absolutely climbing the walls.
Rick: What crime were you on trial for, by the way?
Fred: Oh man, it’s just awful stuff from a long time ago. It’s not particularly relevant.
Rick: Okay. So, we’ll not go there. I can’t embarrass you, can I?
Fred: Right, yeah.
Rick: I want to see a blush.
Fred: I don’t think I’ll blush for this, but it doesn’t mean I’m going to brag about it.
Rick: All right. We’ve all done some things.
Fred: A little mystery. So, at any rate, right before I went to my trial, I’m sitting there thinking I’m going to go to prison, or something like this. And I was just going nuts. And I was looking at The Power of Now, and I thought, wow, I wonder what it would be like if I actually did some of this stuff in this book.
Rick: Even after a gazillion hours of listening.
Fred: Yes, I wonder if I actually did some of that stuff, if it would make a difference. Because I was just using them like Valium. And so, there was a part in there about surrender, about acceptance, whatever. And I sat down and I started doing that. It changed my life. I mean, I got free for like 24 hours. First time in two and a half years.
Rick: How do you do surrender?
Fred: Well, I don’t know how you do surrender, but in the way in that book, what they actually do, you just move toward it. In other words, I had all this tremendous fear that I had been keeping at bay for two and a half years.
Rick: So you just kind of relaxed and…
Fred: Went in. Just let it take me over. The first time I had a break for 24 hours. The next morning it was back. And instead of saying, well, that didn’t work, I knew that I had been free for 24 hours. So, that was great. I wanted to see if I could get another 24 hours. I was outside watering my lawn. And I sat down on a bench. I had a park bench out there, which was always a big joke.
Rick: Just so you feel at home, man.
Fred: Yeah, exactly. So, I sat down on that bench and I relaxed into that again. And I had my eyes closed and I was listening in a do-or-not state of alertness. And all of a sudden I heard a noise and I looked up and a flower pot right in front of me, a double flower pot, had been standing there for weeks behind my rose bushes. And it was just sitting right in front of me and it collapsed over to the left, just like this. Spontaneously collapsed and it was like, I wonder what that could be from. And I felt like it must be from some kind of release. But, you know, I was really excited about that. But I closed my eyes because I hadn’t been finished. And when I closed my eyes I’m doing this and there was another flower pot on the other side of the rose bushes. And it collapsed inward the other way. So, they hit each other like this.
Rick: Interesting. And they’re completely unconnected to each other and all.
Fred: Completely unconnected and they’ve been both standing there for weeks. Wow.
Rick: It kind of reminds me of Carlos Castaneda’s stuff where certain things would happen in the environment and Don Juan would say that’s an omen, you know.
Fred: And I knew it was. I mean, that’s true. Okay. Just so you know, it’s been, what, almost eight years, seven and a half years since then. And I’ve never had that fear come back.
Rick: Interesting.
Fred: I’ve been awake that day right there. But I still wasn’t awake.
Rick: Just to say, I’ve also been on long meditation courses where people are doing really intense meditation. And things would happen, like glasses would explode and glass doors would crumble. All sorts of strange things in the environment would happen.
Fred: Sure, because there’s just one thing going on. And, you know, you can’t adjust one part and not have it affect the rest. And some of it, they’re set up in one little situation and doing great with a nice glass. Been there for years.
Rick: Yeah.
Fred: There’s a radical shift. I mean, whether it’s me or a singer hitting perfect pitch, bam, the glass just goes.
Rick: Interesting, yeah.
Fred: Yeah. So I bring it up just because I love that story. And just like you, I’ve got a zillion spiritual experiences. But that one ties in because it was the beginning of my actually going back and doing stuff. Because when I was in Portland, I was doing stuff. I was practicing. I was sitting. I was inquiring. I was doing whatever I could under self-direction. And when I was back here, I had just been using spirituality as a Valium. And it doesn’t mean that I hadn’t picked up a lot of wonderful contacts. I had. It was very beneficial. But it gave me a really great egoic stance, which was that I’m getting enlightened and you’re not. And you should, and therefore I’m better than you are. But if you want to come sit at my feet or something, I’ll share with you what I’ve got, even though it’s not much. I didn’t know it wasn’t much. So what I got from my wickedness was six months of weekends in jail and I got probation. And it was just awful. I mean I’d been sober now for five and a half, six years, six and a half years. And I’d just made my way back to a point of relative comfort in the world. And then, bam, this had knocked me back in the ditch, which I was comfortable with, being in a ditch. So.
Rick: That’s kind of cool that you just had to go on weekends, though.
Fred: Oh, yeah. Well, see, the thing is that years before, I’d already changed my whole life.
Rick: Right.
Fred: For six and a half years. And the judge said, well, you’re doing a lot of good in the community. And we don’t want to stop that. So go to jail on the weekends and come back and run your life in between. But it was tough because I was already working all the time.
Rick: Yeah.
Fred: And now I was the busiest guy I knew, working seven days a week. And now I got to truncate that into five days a week. And I was so busy and getting almost no sleep that really I used to tell my wife, I’d say, God, I’ll be okay if I can just get to jail.
Rick: Kind of reminds me of My Cousin Vinny, if you’ve seen that movie. You ever see that movie, My Cousin Vinny? Oh, it’s fantastic. You’ve got to watch it. Joe Pesci. But I won’t go into the details. But the only place he ever got any rest was when he finally got put in prison and then he slept like a baby.
Fred: That’s it. It’s identical to that. I mean, it would just be, oh, I would go in there and I would relax.
Rick: Check out that movie later.
Fred: I will. But that only lasted for about six weeks, that part of it, because what happened was that my life had become so awful. It looked like my prospects were very dim. My current experience was just awful under this very strict probation and going to the jail. And I just wanted to die. And so right after I went to probation, I came back and I told Betsy, my then-girlfriend, now-wife, that —
Rick: Who must be a very patient woman, by the way.
Fred: Oh, my God. Yeah, just absolutely wonderful. I met her in recovery. Instead of listening to the recovery people, I was passing girls notes. Actually, I was just passing her notes. But I love to keep up the threat that I might pass another one. So be nice to me. But she’s wonderful. And so I told her, look, I just can’t live like this. This is my mind. Because my circumstances actually are not greatly different now, except for the fact I’m a teacher, whatever that means. But what happened was I just really wanted to die. And I asked her — my wife’s business partner had shot himself in 2002, killed himself. And I helped her clean up the detritus of that kind of event. And I couldn’t do that to her again. But I wanted to die. I mean, I literally wanted to die. So I asked her if she would give me her blessing. And this was not a cry for help. Really, it was not. I just didn’t want to surprise her with a suicide. She asked me to please continue, give it a shot. So what happened, Rick, was that for about six weeks now, I had been wanting to die. But now I noticed I felt like I could not live, but now I also felt like I could not die. So you kind of lose interest in the Fred story that’s the glue for all that. And about six weeks in, I was sitting in my living room reading a book, and the author rang us with a question – Ramesh Bhalsekar. And he asked a question or whatever. And when he did, I felt something in my head, not in my brain, but in my head, something about the size of a BB. I could feel it very distinctly, very distinctly. It turned 180 degrees in my head. It just felt completely physical. It turned 180 degrees in my head, and I could feel it lock. It was almost like I could hear it lock. I couldn’t, but it locked so distinctly that it was like I could hear it. And the instant that it did, my head exploded. And I had one of those fairy tale awakenings that I’m just so sorry in a way that I had, because it’s what I have to report. So let me jump in really quickly and say that those are not necessary. The reason that we read about those things in books is because they are unusual. But as you know, none of that’s required. It may or may not happen.
Rick: Usually people who have been on a spiritual path for decades have had incidents, episodes like that, but the vast majority of the time it’s fairly normal and no fireworks going on.
Fred: Because it’s actually just a spiritual experience that’s accompanying awakening. The difference between the vehicle and the package, and what we tend to put our eyes on is the vehicle. Forget about the package.
Rick: I think that experience with your head is significant actually, because I think there is a physiological component to all this. But we don’t have to go into all that right now. But there are things that do change in the brain and in the subtle body, with the chakras and all that stuff. There’s all kinds of stuff going on.
Fred: Just one thing going on.
Rick: Yeah.
Fred: At one part without it affecting others.
Rick: That’s right.
Fred: Right. So, of course when I woke up, you always think you’ve got the whole thing. That’s what I thought.
Rick: So that was the episode which you would characterize as “I woke up.”
Fred: Yeah, I was instantly seen. Because the way I like to tell it when I’m talking to clients is that I was Fred Davis. I was sitting in Fred Davis’ living room in Fred Davis’ chair, reading Fred Davis’ book, trying to wake Fred Davis up. And determined to do so. And then awakening occurred and I went, “Ah, look at that. I’m not Fred Davis after all.” Because Fred Davis had expected to wake up to the truth of God. And what happened was that the truth of God woke up to the fiction of Fred Davis. And so many, many things collapsed. And what I noticed was I still had these problems. Because I’d been really hoping I was going to be the exception, regardless of what I’d read. I knew if I woke up that that really actually would solve all my problems. And I noticed that it didn’t, but I did notice that the problems were Fred’s.
Rick: Yeah.
Fred: Which gave me some breathing room.
Rick: Right.
Fred: I mean, it just saved my life. Just certainly took me out of that intense suffering, or took me out of all suffering there for a little while. But you’ve got to build back up in fairly quick order. I was never the same after that. You can’t unsee something like that. But I had to do some re-seeking. I had to do a lot of stuff. But that was the real deal breaker. That was for me. It was very, very clear, and it lasted for several days in real clarity, and then several weeks in moderate clarity. And then, you know, what the hell happened to that? Where’d my enlightenment go?
Rick: Well, you integrated it.
Fred: Yeah. And I did immediately, because my experience at jail completely changed. All of a sudden — you know, it makes it sound like I was shining a ray or something like that, and they could see it, and so it was all there. And that’s what I’d been hoping. I had been hoping when I woke up that there would be a little billboard up here that would say, “This guy’s awake.” Because then you guys would start treating me the way I thought you should have been treating me all along. But what happened was that I started to take an interest in my jailers and started talking to them. And in very short order, when I would get to the gate, and I would talk to the guard at the gate, because I had to check myself–talk about surrender– check myself in, 23 weekends in a row, to a jail. And I would talk to the guy at the gate about my garden, about how I had these great big elephant ears, and we would talk about those and this and that and the other. And I finally got to where I would show up, and he would say, “Hey, you know where you’re going, don’t you?” And I’d say, “Yeah.” And so I would just walk across the yard by myself, and as I approached the jail, you could see the woman who would book me every week, because they rebooked you every week. You could see her starting to wave at me. “There’s Mr. Davis! Mr. Davis is here!” And I would go in, and the same guy that frisked me, in a not very friendly manner, the first time that I ever got there.
Rick: He now works for the TSA, by the way.
Fred: Yeah, right! Exactly! That’s right! It turned out that he had a little eBay business, and so I started talking to him about his business. And we would talk. As soon as I got there, I would sit down and he’d say, “Hey, Mr. Davis, would you like a sandwich or something to drink?” “Believe I would!” Because I didn’t want to turn anything down, I wanted him to feel good about bringing me something whether I was hungry or not.
Rick: Yeah. Now it’s starting to sound like The Shawshank Redemption, where Tim, what’s his name [Robbins], was doing the bookkeeping.
Fred: That’s right! That’s right! It became much like that. It was, in a bizarre sort of way. So that guy, I became his confidant, and he might keep me there in the entrance hall for an hour, if nobody else showed up . We would be talking about his eBay thing and how he could tweak that, because I was a bookseller, had been one for years. And the next station was the booking station. And there was that woman, she just loved me, and she knew that I was working with people in recovery and speaking out at the treatment center and all that kind of stuff. And so she had no lack of drug addicts and alcoholics in her wider circle. And so she would talk to me about all that, and just loved me. And when you got through processing there, you had to go to the nurse, because I went out and did work to cut my time in half, so you had to make sure you were physically able. And it turned out that the nurse was a closet lesbian, and she had to tell me about that, and hell, she had a little eBay business. And so I became her confidant. And I would go in there, she would tell me lesbian jokes, and then we would talk about her business. And I would stay in the nurse’s thing, with people outside, standing in line, trying to get in. I’d be in there for an hour. And, I mean, it was all I could do to get to my cell. And when I got to my cell, the guys – I’m just telling you the absolute God’s truth – they were bringing me slippers and my books. People on weekenders were trashed there, because we got out five days a week. And you couldn’t get canteen, you couldn’t have possessions, you couldn’t have any of that unless you rigged it, which I did. So I was a bookseller, I mailed myself books through one of the other inmates and stuff. I’d better be careful, or they’ll come arrest me again, but I’ll deny it if they do. So, it completely changed my jail experience. And I was in a lot of physical pain, I had sciatica, and the guards had been so tough at first, and I just hated them so much, and when I changed, they did, but I changed first. And when I changed, they began to let me ride in the trucks, to give my legs some relief. It was just terrible pain.
Rick: Interesting little point here, though. You want to change the world? Change yourself.
Fred: That’s it. You know, the Buddha went after himself first.
Rick: Right. Which is not to say we shouldn’t go out and help the world in various ways, but it begins here.
Fred: It begins here. Somebody has to start first. I have a lot of friends and none do well.
Rick: Want to save drowning people? You better learn to swim.
Fred: Yes, that’s exactly right. It really does start at home. And see, that was just one of those things that I’d go, “Oh, yeah. I got that. Next.” I mean, I haven’t got any more spiritual truth than that. Because anybody can figure that out. And that’s just the kind of guy I was. I just stepped all over wonderful, tremendous spiritual truths for years, looking for spiritual truths, because that wasn’t it. Down you go. That wasn’t it. That wasn’t it. Yeah, I’ve heard that. Thanks. Oh, God. Next. So, at any rate, it changed my jail experience. But in that awakening thing, I really thought when I woke up, the first time I woke up, I thought, “Well, I don’t think anybody’s ever been here before. Maybe Buddha.” Right? But I’m not sure he came here. But if so, there surely has not been anybody but Buddha, Eckhart, and I’m third in line. But I got over that with some time. I began to develop what little humility I have today. And from there on, from the moment I woke up, really, because my situation was so dire, I wasn’t like so many people. I had clients, and I don’t know what in the hell they want to wake up for. I mean, they got a great story going. They got a wife. They got kids. They still got their job. They’re in great shape, but they’re driven by a spiritual pull. Mine just wasn’t that pure. Mine was I just am suffering so much that I’ve got to get out of this. So I was using my spirituality as a way to pole vault my way out of my life situation.
Rick: Yeah. I think some of us need a lot of suffering as a goad, but not everybody needs that.
Fred: No. Not everybody does, which amazes me, because I would have never done it. You know, alcoholism was the worst thing in my life until it became the best thing. Because if it hadn’t been for alcoholism, this wouldn’t have happened. I’d still be the same creep I would have always been. I just had to go through tremendous suffering. But, you know, if you put even a piece of coal under enough pressure long enough, you’ll come up with something pretty.
Rick: Yeah.
Fred: That’s basically what happened to me was I was just put under – of course, it was like I was put under. But this unit put itself under so much pressure by just being a ne’er-do-well and a screw-up for so long.
Rick: You know, there’s another principle here, which may seem esoteric and not everybody believes this works this way. But I think sometimes certain people come into this life and they just kind of sign up for working off a load of karma.
Fred: Yeah.
Rick: And others maybe don’t have such a load to work off. So, you know, we say to the lords of karma, if there are such things, “all right, give it to me, lay it all on. I want to get this over with, you know, so I can take it”. And so then we just go through hell and high water for a certain period of time until we work through that load. And then suddenly, oh, a ray of sunshine.
Fred: That’s right. And so obviously I come from quite a black mind. And I’ll just make one point -when you mention karma – is that we don’t need reincarnation. We have DNA. I mean, I can track this body all the way back to Africa thousands of years ago. So even if don’t think there’s reincarnation of the personality, which is a one-shot deal, clearly there’s something that moves because you can trace this thing back to Africa. So there’s something that moves so that when we just look at it that way, then the concept of karma becomes really much more acceptable.
Rick: Yeah, and I don’t have a problem with the other way of looking at it either.
Fred: Oh, I don’t either.
Rick: A soul reincarnating and going through various learning experiences over the course of time, whatever.
Fred: I don’t know what it is, but I know there’s something. That’s enough for me to – once I found out there was something, then I had something to go with. There was something that was crying to be freed.
Rick: Yeah.
Fred: Going to be freed whether this thing liked it or not, you see. This current vehicle, who cares, right? It’s a passing thing anyway. I’ve got some stuff I need to get clear of. And man, I did. So I continued to still teach for several years with people in recovery. I began to teach non-duality using recovery terms, so that it was more acceptable. But other people have a talent, and we know some of them, you and I do, a talent for being able to be awake and alert and to take that to recovery terminology and do great things with it.
Rick: Sure, like Scott, for instance.
Fred: Like Scott Killaby.
Rick: Yeah.
Fred: And however, the more awake that I got, the less I began to be heard. And I had been a real fount of wisdom in AA. I was one of those guys you chased down to get their opinion on something, you know. I used to always say, “Boy, you’ve got to be pretty sick if I’m going to be the doctor. But the good news is you qualify.” And before the end of it, though, I think that everyone just thought I had lost my mind, because I had lost the ability to translate. And so on the day that I began my first website, which was Awakening Clarity, in July of 2011, that’s when I left Recovery Official, because I said, “I can’t do this.” I had sponsees I had to let go. I had a sponsor I had to dismiss, a great friend of mine back then, and I guess he still is, but we just don’t talk. But there came a point where I could only be one-pointed. For me, it’s not for everybody, just for me, I had to declare my allegiance almost. It was like, “I’m doing that thing or I’m doing this thing.” And I decided to do what I decided. So it turned out that I did this thing. And I started that blog, and that changed everything. I’d already had people around me waking up for almost a year. But this was the extraordinary part, because for a long time I’d wanted to be a teacher. And then I decided, “I don’t know.” I went to see Adyashanti, and I thought, “I don’t think so. I think I’d rather be a bookseller than a teacher.” And I came back, and within about a month, people around me started waking up.
Rick: Would this be a good time to try to define what waking up means, or do you want to keep on with your story right now?
Fred: No, we can drop the story any time you want.
Rick: I want to keep unraveling it, or maybe we’ve actually gotten to the end of it more or less. But we throw around terms like this, “waking up,” and so it’s really important to define our terms.
Fred: It is important. So what I’m going to say here is, I always reserve the right to change my mind. Whatever I say today is only good for today. Tomorrow I may question it or disown it.
Rick: Good way to be, in my opinion.
Fred: Yeah, might as well. So at any rate, the way that I see awakening now, is I’ve got a couple of terms that I want to float. One would be awakening, and the other would be liberation, which I have in the past used interchangeably. But I see now that that’s just a limited understanding at that moment, or I wasn’t being thoughtful about the language. And I’m really big on precise language, very, very big on that. That’s one of the reasons why what I do works as well as it does. Awakening is what happened to me in my living room. Awakening is when we first come to know our true nature. It’s the character that’s being played by this humanness is seen through. It doesn’t mean we’ve got to get rid of it or dislike it or anything like that. It doesn’t mean it’s bad. We just see through it. And when I say “we,” of course what I’m talking about is the fact that – y’all, excuse the shorthand, all you non-dualists, but God wakes up to the truth of itself. And so there’s no personal thing going on. It’s just God wakes up and sees itself, but it’s still seeing itself in some regard through this. But all of this is seen to be hollow and all that. And that’s the initial experience. And that may not last. My experience in Portland was seconds, and it changed my life. It didn’t fix me.
Rick: So another way of saying “seen through,” would be to say that you no longer are exclusively gripped by the notion that this is what you are. There’s sort of a glimpse into, we could say, a deeper reality, which is that you’re something much more fundamental or vast. You’re no longer exclusively overshadowed.
Fred: Yes, exclusively…
Rick: Or entirely overshadowed.
Fred: Exclusively is a good word in a sense, because what I’ve found out now, is that I’m just simply not limited to this. I’m the whole thing.
Rick: You’re still Fred. If somebody says, “Hey, Fred,” you turn your head.
Fred: “Hey, how you doing?” Ramana Maharishi would have done the same.
Rick: But you’re not only Fred.
Fred: Yeah, right. That’s it. I love to use this in teaching a lot, it’s the best teacher on the planet and it’s never said a word. There may be something in that for us. But what the mind wants to know… because I was Fred Davis sitting in my chair, I woke up and, oh my God, I’m not Fred Davis. I moved 180 degrees in the circle. And this was wonderful. It was so freeing to be the vastness. You say, “Oh, I see. Well, there’s a Fred Davis story, and there’s a lot of suffering in that, but that’s not me.” And da-da-da-da-da-da-da. And it was a great place for me to live for a while. But you’ll notice that all I did was move from being Fred to being not Fred. I didn’t actually lose identity, I just transferred it. I transferred it from this to the vastness, which was now I could see very clearly that I’m the vastness. But the problem is that after a period of time, suffering began again, it was just coming from a little higher level. And so what I came to realize since is that the mind wants the either/or. Am I this or that? Am I this or that? But truth never works like that. Spiritual truth never works like that. It’s the whole thing. There’s just one thing going on, which means I’ve got to be both. I’ve got to be both. And that took some time. You see, this thing we say, “Oh, there’s no time, there’s no space.” I get it. I get it, I promise you. But this lives in space and time. And so on this level, on the relative level, it does take time. And for me, it took work. I know it did for you, too.
Rick: I’m still a work in progress.
Fred: Yeah, me too. I love what you…
Rick: Very much so.
Fred: What you said earlier, when you say that if I ask somebody if they’re awake, it’s like asking if they’re educated. And I love that.
Rick: Yeah, yeah.
Fred: And I’m out of grammar school now, you know?
Rick: I thought of another metaphor when I was listening to you this past week. It’s like somebody who’s just passed boot camp can call himself a soldier.
Fred: That’s right.
Rick: But so can a four-star general. But there’s a vast difference between a four-star general and a buck private in terms of their knowledge, their authority, their power, all kinds of things. And so, fine, if we want to say awake, we want to define it as having glimpsed your true nature.
Fred: That’s it.
Rick: Great, yeah, but still there’s this vast range.
Fred: Right. So there is, because the opening never ends. That’s the key. See, I just taught myself or somebody, I picked it up in books or whatever. My idea was, as it is for many people now, I can promise you that, because I’ve talked to them every day, is that enlightenment is a one-shot deal. They read something famous like Eckhart Tolle’s story or something, and boy, “I just came out of nowhere and boom, and I was just like this, talking on the stage to you now”, and that was bullshit. I mean, you had to go sit in a park for a long time and get oriented to this thing.
Rick: Yeah, and I bet you if I ever get a chance to interview Eckhart, one of the main things I’d want to talk to him about would be, how is it unfolding for you even now? I bet you that today there’s some greater richness or something than there was a year ago. If I were talking to Eckhart, a year from now, even more. Because I think that’s interesting. I think it’s good to know that or acknowledge that.
Fred: I agree with you completely. Greg Good, he was the one that really helped me with that more than a great deal. Let me just say their names right quick so that I get them out there and say thank you on air, which is, my teachers really were Scott Killaby, Greg Good, and Rupert Spira. And all three of them were. But see, I had to first lower myself to accepting a teacher, and I didn’t actually do that until I had been awake for like three and a half years or something like that. But all of them were very helpful in helping me see that this thing opens forever. What I used to do with Greg – what a generous, beautiful man. I’ve never talked to Greg in person. I’ve never talked to him on Skype. We’ve only emailed, but we’ve emailed hundreds of times. And what I used to do with Greg was I would just come up with my very highest theme, and I would send that to Greg, and he would just tear it apart, just destroy it. And send it back, oh, I’d be like this. And then a couple of weeks later, I’d know something new now. And so, that was because the unfolding was continuing to happen. So I would put all that down and I’d say, I think this is it. And he would destroy it. But I kept doing that and doing that, and what the funny thing is, I began to make more and more sense, if you will. I began to get clearer and clearer, because he helped me see what wasn’t true.
Rick: Yeah. Now, you know, some of the non-dualists don’t like this kind of talk, because it implies that there are levels and gradations, and all that sounds so dual.
Fred: I know, I know.
Rick: I would suggest that if that’s their gripe, then their non-duality is probably largely conceptual. Because if you’re really tuned into the experiential quality of it, you just find that there’s this continual unfolding.
Fred: Conceptual non-duality is not a door to freedom, it’s a straitjacket. Because I wore it for some time. And that’s when we’ve got that thing on, it’s like, well, wait a minute. I shouldn’t be feeling this, because an awake person wouldn’t be feeling this.
Rick: Right, and if there’s only one thing, how could there be this?
Fred: That’s right. I’m sorry your wife just died, but she was never here, so don’t worry.
Rick: And you know, the way you can spot the people who are oriented that way, is they tend to be a bit strident and fundamentalist in their approach.
Fred: Yeah, in chat groups and stuff,
Rick: Yeah, right, emails. Advaita police, you know.
Fred: Once in a while I get an email, and I remember one that just opened up, the first line was, “You are full of shit.”
Rick: But of course there’s only one thing, so you know what that shit really is.
Fred: Yes, you don’t know what you’re talking about, but I do.
Rick: So it’s just the Fred of ten years ago coming back to haunt you.
Fred: That’s it, that’s exactly it. And once in a while I get those, because I’m very adamant about the fact that there is stuff you can do. And once again, I say one thing one day, and I say one thing another, and it doesn’t make any difference. I’m always talking about right now. And I’m always talking to whoever I’m talking to, and nobody else.
Rick: Yeah, well you know another paradoxical thing about it is that even though there is stuff you can do, there is nothing you can do, and nobody is doing anything. My general experience is that there’s nobody here, and nothing is actually happening, but I’m here, and all kinds of stuff is happening.
Fred: Nonetheless.
Rick: At the very same time.
Fred: Because here we are again, and people listening to this who have not yet had a non-dual experience, if you will, what’s happening is the mind is going, “Well, wait just a minute. I mean is it like this, or is it like this? Is it like this, or is it like this? Will you just spit it out, these guys just won’t tell me the damn truth.” Because once again, we’re back in the mind’s territory, which is the either/or. If we can describe something with a yin-yang, we are talking about the dream. This is the fundamental, this is the basis of the dream, which is the either/or, which is the two polar opposites. So is it this way, or this way? It’s both. It’s both. There’s no one here, there’s nothing to do, and try this.
Rick: Yeah.
Fred: Yeah?
Rick: You know what I find really helpful is just a layman’s understanding of physics. I’m going to interview a couple of physicists next month, because the physicists will tell you, “There’s a hand here, and it’s flesh, and then there’s molecules, and then there’s atoms. On the atom level there are no molecules, and then there’s some atomic particles, and on that level there are no atoms, and then you go even deeper, and none of that even exists or has manifested, and the whole range is simultaneously true, just sort of each reality on its own level.”
Fred: And that’s identical, of course, to what I’m talking about. Because what’s happening is that even worse than not having seen the non-dual state is to have seen it, and then it goes away, and now I know. Now I know, because I remember that there’s just one thing. I’ve seen it very clearly, and so none of this stuff counts. Because what we’ve done is we’ve had a glimpse there. What you’re saying is true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. So what happens when we have that awakening, initial awakening, which is, as opposed to liberation, which is what we’re moving toward, if you will. So when we have that awakening, it is seen from the non-dual state, no one here, nothing to do, everything’s fine as it is, because there’s not really anything happening anyway. So there’s this, but we notice that on the relative view, there is stuff going on, there is somebody here, there is a doer, whatever, and the mind again is, “Which is it? Which is it? Which is it? Which is it?” It’s both. So we’ve got a foot in each world, that’s what I would describe this, there’s a foot in each world, and so we’re living that simultaneously. But the mind is always looking for the one way to be, and it doesn’t really work like that.
Rick: I just spent the last few days with Amma, the hugging saint, and someone asked her a question about how do you reconcile detachment and compassion? Because it seems like they’re kind of counter, they’re kind of paradoxically opposed. And she said, “If you’re really detached to the fullest extent that can be, then you’re also infinitely compassionate, because you see everything as God.” And so you have just sort of infinite love and appreciation for every little particle of creation. And she kind of used examples of like, if your finger accidentally pokes your eye or something, you don’t punish your finger, it’s part of you. And so everything is part of you when that kind of realization has dawned, and there can’t possibly be any kind of coldness or that kind of…
Fred: No, like Mother Teresa used to talk about the fact that, “I’m not actually helping all these people, I’m helping Jesus.”
Rick: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Fred: And everything she saw, that’s what she saw.
Rick: And that’s not just a belief, you know what I mean? It’s a living experience.
Fred: I put people through kind of little tests when we’re done with a session, and one of the things that I’ll ask them is, I’ll say, “So have you ever heard anyone say that they woke up and everywhere they looked, they saw the face of God?” And they’ll say, “Yep.” “Well, here it is.” [laughter] I don’t know what I was… when I used to read that, it was like, “Well, that’s really going to be cool. I guess it’s going to be like a million little masks or TV monitors or something.” “Hey, Fred, I’m God from up here.” [laughter] It’s infinitely simpler.
Rick: Nice. So I’ve been throwing in a little bit too many questions maybe and throwing you off your game in terms of…
Fred: Oh, no, no, no. You’re doing great.
Fred: Okay, well, so where should we go from here? You were kind of…
Fred: You want to track up my life?
Rick: Yeah, let’s keep tracking.
Fred: As a background thing for us to jump on as the bus moves?
Rick: Sure.
Fred: So in 2011, I started Awakening Clarity. And I didn’t… I mean, the funny thing is, is I say, “I started Awakening Clarity.” Awakening Clarity started itself in July of 2011. And the way that that happened was that I sat down at this desk to the one that monitor’s on. I sat down at this desk to do some work on my book business, my online book business. And it was at 9 o’clock at night. And that was what I came in the room to do as far as I knew. And I sat down, and I guess something else grabbed my attention. And I stood up seven hours later. I don’t even know if I’d gone to the bathroom. Seven hours later, and I had a blog. And I didn’t know any… I wasn’t… I didn’t know I had any idea about a blog. I had no idea how to run one. I didn’t know how to set one up. Nothing. I found out everything that I needed to know to get started on that one night. And when I did that, I had no idea what I had done. Because up until now, I had sort of been the awake guy in his living room. Because I had woken up a few people that had never… When I say I woke up people, let me just be very clear on that. That’s shorthand for the fact that I helped some people come to recognition of their own true nature. But I didn’t need to wake them up. I can’t wake anybody up. It’s not something that I can do to somebody. I can just help somebody that already wants to wake up very much. I can help them wake up. That’s what I mean when I say I woke somebody up.
Rick: You’re a catalyst.
Fred: I’m a catalyst.
Rick: You know what a catalyst does in a chemical reaction. It sort of just facilitates the reaction.
Fred: Facilitates the reaction. That’s right. If I’ve got 51% cooperation, I’m a pretty damn effective catalyst. If that person doesn’t want to wake up more than they want to stay asleep, I ain’t going to be able to do that. And that happens once in a while. Not often. So, there were a couple of guys in recovery with me. These are not non-dual folks. These are like Christian folks, right? Not that you can’t be both, but I’m just saying that they were traditional Christians. Actually, they were both fairly dyed in the wool, but one of them was not active and one of them was. But they had never heard the word non-duality. And while we were talking, and I started doing this…
Rick: Unless they happen to read “I and My Father Are One.”
Fred: Yeah, right, right.
Rick: Then they’ve heard it.
Fred: Yeah, yeah. Also, the “I Am That I Am” or any of that stuff. Right. But they had not knowingly come across these teachings. And I took them through a little bit of inquiry. The first guy was a total surprise. I knew what I was doing, but I had no idea he would actually wake up. I was just actually taking him through some inquiry, but I was just playing with him more than anything else. I was sitting in my living room, and this guy weighed about 350. It certainly was better than 300, 600, 500, I don’t know. Huge guy in my little tiny living room. And he woke up like with an exploding mountain. And there was some egoic pleasure in that, let me just tell you. I mean, there just was a lot of egoic pleasure in it at that time. Wow, because screw him and his awakening. Look what I did, right? And it stayed that way for a little while. I was taken aback, because I’ve been a fraud all my life. You know, just an alcoholic. You can’t live an alcoholic life and not be a fraud, because you’ve got a secret life you’re covering up. So I’ve been a fraud all my life, and when I woke up, I even questioned my waking up, you know, at times and everything. But then when I became, okay, this is real, and da-da-da-da-da-da, I still had not actually given any thought to the fact that I was going to wake anybody else up. I figured I could give them pointers, but I never dawned on me that anybody else would wake up due to this catalyst. And this guy clearly did. And then about two months later, I had another guy in the front yard, and this time I did it deliberately. I knew what I was trying to do. And he woke up.
Rick: You’re just standing there in the front yard?
Fred: Yeah, we’re standing there in the front yard talking. And then we moved to chairs, I remember now. We moved to chairs, but we talked for a long time. He had come to me as a recovery sponsor, you see. And the next thing I knew, he woke up. I mean, very clearly. Very clearly. And just really clearly. Both of them have been changed forever. But actually, neither one of them got fixed. Neither one of them stayed sober forever. There’s no happy ending to all of that stuff. But I do think it’s been helpful to them. But I still had not recognized what I was doing. When I started Awakening Clarity, I did know what I was doing. When people started waking up, it was the first time I took myself seriously. In the sense of, “God, you could be teacher material.” Because it’s funny, most of the fantasies I had about being a spiritual teacher occurred prior to waking up. Even though there was some egoic pleasure in helping other people and, “Look what I can do.” There was still an opening or beginning to pay attention to the fact that something real might be taking place here. Even though I was a fraud. And I became willing. This was huge. It sounds insignificant, but for me it was huge. I became willing to be called out as a fraud. In other words, I was willing to just openly live this. And you could think what you wanted to. Your opinion had always been very important to me. It was more important that you think I’m awake than for me to be awake. Right?
Rick: Yeah.
Fred: Suddenly I began to recognize something’s really going on here. And as for Awakening Clarity, I started that and I started writing about it. And some of that early stuff is pretty good. Not always as clear perhaps as I am today. And I’m not today as clear as I will be a week from now or a year from now. But it was pretty good stuff. But it didn’t have a big audience. So then I went out and I started getting other teachers to contribute stuff. And I grew an audience. And I stepped into the background and just did introductions for about 18 months or so. But my introductions became more and more and more involved. I began to get to know the community. In 2012, because I’d been working with them, the good folks at Non-Duality Press, we came to an agreement for me to write Beyond Recovery. Once again, see the game keeps changing, keeps changing. There are these points of acceleration. And when I wrote Beyond Recovery, it was the first time that I noticed, my God, there’s a pattern here. You’re doing a little bit different way, but you’re basically doing the same thing every time somebody wakes up around you. And so I began to write those points down in that book. I based that book around the 12 steps of recovery. So I had 12 steps, and within that I kept giving descriptions of what it was that I had been doing. Some of them clearer than others. But when I recognized I had a pattern, I said, “Hell, you’ve got something to say now.” Because I’d always wondered, what do spiritual teachers say when you call them? And I had worked with Scott, but Scott used Inquire. And I didn’t have an Inquire, so that’s the way that we talked. We didn’t just howl around. He took me through. Scott does stuff, just like I do. And suddenly I had something to share, which I thought might transfer. And I started talking to people on the phone, people that were writing me because of Awakening Clarity, because I was setting myself up as the big teacher guy. But I was beginning to get a hint of just a little humility with it. Not much, but a little. And so I started responding, and I was writing a fair amount of email. And I started with a couple of people that had really pushed me on things. I said, “Do you want to talk on the phone for free?” I wanted to see if this thing would transfer. And we did. And right from the start, I had about a 50%–and I know that this is all very anti-non-dual, but I’ve got to just tell you, I’ve got to report what I’ve got to report. And I had about a 50% success rate with people that I talked to on the phone. In other words, about half of the people who had never had an initial awakening before, when they talked to me, they started to wake up.
Rick: Yeah. I mean, it doesn’t seem non-dual to me. It just seems like as long as we throw in the word “initial,” I’m cool with it. If we say they talk to you, and they’re all of a sudden the most enlightened being on the planet, then–
Fred: Yeah, they’re elbowing Adyashanti off the stage.
Rick: Right. Yeah. But you give them a kick in the pants, there’s some kind of glimpse, there’s some kind of recognition that they hadn’t had before, and it sounds like you’ve got a formula for that.
Fred: And the funny thing is that that’s true, and I’ll go into that. So I began, I had about 50% like that, and then I began to get skillful. I began to do it. And now I’m really doing it. And then I got to where I was doing it more often. And then, at one point, I was doing it seven days a week. I was doing a couple of these things a day, seven days a week. But it was crippling the unit. I like to kill myself. But I was so taken with it, I couldn’t believe it was possible. And the funny thing is that people began to have–I mean, not everybody went right back to sleep. By a long shot. A lot of people,it’s not like they woke up into clarity, but they certainly woke up into their true nature, and became okay with the fact that there was misidentification within that. Okay? So, I mean, and it had nothing to do with the size of the explosion on their end. I’ve had people that just did what I did. Oh, God! And I have a guy in Switzerland now who’s one of the most awake people I know, and when he woke up, he went, “You’re kidding me.” [Laughter] But he had been doing TM for 30 years and all of that, so he had a lot of context.
Rick: I might know him.
Fred: Yeah, you might. So, he had a lot of context. And those are the only people who think that context doesn’t matter are the people who don’t have any. [Laughter] Right? Because context does matter. It’s not absolutely critical in that it’s happening, but I like to liken it to snow. When snow falls, it doesn’t need a tree. It’ll just fall right on the ground. But when it does fall on a tree, the tree of context, if you will, man, it’s got so many little things that it can fall on. You’ve got a whole different thing when there’s a tree for that awakened snow to fall upon.
Rick: Yeah.
Fred: And the people who have a lot of context, very often this has been the little thing, because everybody’s a hard case that talks to me. I’m not famous, and they don’t say, you know, they just go, “Well, I tried Byron Katie. That didn’t work. Let me try Fred Davis.” You know, I’m way down the line. And so they are right ready, and they find out the only thing that they were missing is the only thing that counts.
Rick: Yeah. If I understand your use of the word “context,” it’s sort of like if a person has…correct me if I’m wrong, but if a person has been a seeker, like your friend in Switzerland, or if they’re even well advanced on the path, like I have a whole thing here that Mandi Solk sent me, and you, and she’s somebody I’ve interviewed twice, but in any case, they’ve sort of been marinating in this for some time.
Fred: That’s right.
Rick: Then I guess we could say they’re ripe.
Fred: Yes.
Rick: They’re in a state where it’s not going to take a sledgehammer to get them to shift, whereas if somebody who basically spends all their time at NASCAR races and drinking beer, and they just haven’t even given a thought to this, then they’re going to be a tougher nut to crack.
Fred: That’s right. They are. And I sometimes talk to people like Mandi, who are awake. I mean, in other words, they’ve had that initial awakening long ago. They know truth. They talk about truth. But what happens is that we understand very, very clearly what we’re not. But we don’t yet understand what it is that we are. We’ve moved, we’ve done what I call the 180. We’ve moved over here to not Fred, and we understand the absolute position beautifully.
Rick: Yes. There was something Mandi said. She said, “It was the clearest way of directly pointing to the I am of my source that I have ever experienced. I think he’s an amazing teacher”. There’s an ego stroke for you. “I already felt that I was pretty well awakened and clear about who I am not, and somehow clear about who I am. But since this session, I have huge clarity about who I am. Who we are, of course, is infinite, limitless, and beyond understanding on one level. But Fred’s approach really does blow the doors open wide and clearly illuminates the unlimited expansiveness of I, and it is very instant.”
Rick: Yes. I remember I had a woman in Washington, D.C. I’ve never done this before or since that I can remember, but I had a woman in Washington, D.C., and we were talking or whatever, and you could see that she was still like, “Am I going to get it? Am I going to get it this time around?” I looked at her, and I said, “Don’t worry. You’re going to wake up in about 20 minutes.” And 20 minutes later, bam! Words just come out sometimes that terrify me. I’m not a youngster myself, and I had a woman in England as a client one day, and she was not in great health. She was quite old, and she had been depressed and everything else. Actually, her children bought her a session with me, children or grandchildren, I forget. And during that, she had a lot of fear, and I was helping her work through that. She said, “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t go any further. I just can’t. God, it’s just too much.” She said, “I’m just scared to death. My heart. My heart.” The words just came out, man. I was terrified. And I said, “Well, I’ll tell you what. Instead of resisting that fear, why don’t you just let it take you over, and we’ll just see if you have a heart attack and die or not.”
Rick: Out of the mouths of babes, huh?
Fred: Oh, man! And I’m sitting over here going, “Oh, my God. Can they trace this? Can they find out?”
Rick: Yeah, the NSA, the NRA, what is that thing that tapes everything? They’ve got you.
Fred: Yeah, right. Oh, yeah, sure. Right, right, right.
Rick: They’ve got you in some vault in Utah now saying that.
Fred: Right. I need to get on the phone with my lawyer! And what happened instead was that she just had such drive, just had such courage, because she just let that happen. And you could just see her. She was just shaking like this, and then she began to shake a little less, and she began to shake a little less. And about two or three minutes into doing that, she opened her eyes. She said, “Well, I guess I can’t hide there anymore.” And two minutes later, she came to an awakening. And when I say an awakening, another way to put that is that she simply recognized her true nature. I have people that come here to visit me at my home, and every time I open the door for somebody that’s on the porch, I just think, “Well, that must be Ted. He’s already awake. What’s he doing here? Why would he come see me?” And then there’s the practicality kicks in. “Take the money and the credit. Let him in.”
Rick: And so just to rehash it, when you say someone awakens to their true nature, like this lady, what exactly are you saying? What did they experience?
Fred: Well, the experience is going to vary seven billion ways, because that awakening is coming through seven billion different units.
Rick: But we all have the same true nature.
Fred: We all have the same true nature, but it’s still coming through this. And even when I describe this to you, you’re going to hear it one way, because it’s coming through you. First, it has to fight its way through my conditioning, which I still got some here. This unit’s got conditioning. It’s going to have to work its way through this unit’s conditioning. And then I hear it over there, but I hear it through Rick. But what is essentially experienced is the recognition, because I’m already awake. I’m this. All of my attention has always been on this, on the solid things. The game I like to play with you is I have people put their hand out, and I’ll say, “Okay, now move it in real close and close your eyes. So open your eyes and tell me what’s the first thing you notice”. They go, “My hand.” I say, “How about all that space in between?” Did you notice that you didn’t notice that? So it’s noticing that I’m this, that I’m looking for oneness, the unit’s looking for oneness, but it’s already in oneness. It can’t find oneness so long as it looks. So the recognition that I am already always awake, that’s what we discover, it’s that I’m the one thing, there’s one thing going on, and I’m it. And I do that in the process that I use in The Living Method, as I take them very – most of that is actually deconstruction. It’s to take them through absolutely clearly, working particularly on the body, for them to understand what it is that they’re not. And I have them tell me “before we go into what you are, so you’re very clear on what you’re not, is that right?” And they say, “Yes.” And I say, “Okay, well then here comes the fun part. I’m going to help you find out what you are.” But until we see through what we’re not, we think we’re limited to this little unit here. Oh God, because we’re sitting with them. I mean, I love mine, I love to dress it up in clothes. I thought about what it was going to wear on batgap today. Get its hair right, all that. But it’s the discovery that this is just another object in the room. In other words the camera of our lives starts here and moves there. And look at those people, I can see very clearly, it’s just what they say, it’s a dream. And all those people out there, they’re dreaming. How about that? I hear, “I will ever.” And the one thing that is outside the circle of oneness, and I’m not in that dream. This unit is not in that dream. But the unit is in the dream. It’s just another object. It’s not even a special object. It’s just another object. It’s not an unspecial object, but it’s just, you know, there’s no difference really. I mean, there’s no fundamental difference between me and my dog or me and this.
Rick: Yeah. Of course, you know, you’d be more inclined to throw that cup into a fire than put your hand in a fire. There’s a certain association with this object.
Fred: Yeah, just notice that that’s the truth from the absolute view, but from the relative view, that there is a guy here and I’m him, and I’m not going to put my hand into the fire. You know, the funny thing is that when I was drinking, you would discover that the stove top will burn your hand. But then what we do is we end up, when we’re that crazy, we say, “Well, damn, that was terrible. I wonder if the back one will do it.”
Rick: The what?
Fred: I wonder if the back burner will do it.
Rick: Oh.
Fred: Put your hand on the back burner. Oh, my God. Well, those two really burned. Let me try the other two.
Rick: You’re speaking a metaphorically here, right? In other words, you do such stupid stuff while you’re drinking that you keep doing it and looking for solutions where you’re not going to find any.
Fred: And we also do that seeking.
Rick: Right.
Fred: Because I went from having a drinking problem to having a thinking problem. And what I find is that because getting sober is kind of like enlightenment light. It’s such an incredible shift. And the parallels, that’s the reason so many of us got here through recovery, because the parallels are just incredible. But here it’s just a little bit different perspective.
Rick: Yeah. What always amazes me when I talk to someone who’s done a lot of drinking and then they’ve had a spiritual awakening is just how kind of resilient the human nervous system is. I mean, the fact that you can put it through all that and then still have enough brain cells to come up with a kind of a–
Fred: Yeah.
Rick: Yeah, it’s amazing.
Fred: That the brain cells can still be available. And what I like to say is that God and St. Peter were having a discussion and God looked over and said, “You know, I think I could even make that work.”
Rick: “Oh, yeah, let’s see you try”.
Fred: And St. Peter said, “No way”. So they have a bet, you know, that they can even make this into a spiritual teacher if they want. They could probably make a goat into a spiritual teacher if they want. Because I was only one level up from a goat when they did it.
Rick: That’s pretty good.
Fred: So, you know, even the rustiest of tools, even the poorest of tools, can be with enough willingness. See, and that’s what I try to talk about. But see, my willingness, I don’t get any credit for my willingness. Because my willingness came from simply just not being able to handle that suffering.
Rick: Yeah. You’d kind of run out of options or something.
Fred: It’s what I call the vice of suffering, Rick. And because I knew for 20, 25 years that I was alcoholic. I could watch as it took everything away. It took away my first wife and my second wife. It took away the rest of my family. It took away everything that was ever any good. My credit, my cars, my job, my businesses, everything. So I knew I couldn’t drink successfully. For 20 years at least, I knew I could not drink successfully. What I hadn’t noticed was the other side of that pattern. See, that’s the only part I got was I cannot drink successfully. Damn, I just can’t. I just can’t. For 20 years, I was going to quit drinking tomorrow. I’m going to start drinking less. I’m going to drink liquor instead. I’m going to drink beer instead of liquor or wine instead of beer. I’m only going to drink on Tuesdays or I’m going to drink every day but Tuesdays. And then, well, what the hell’s a Tuesday? So what happened was I knew I couldn’t drink successfully. What I hadn’t yet noticed was that I couldn’t quite quit trying. In other words, this is the vital part of the pattern. And exactly the same thing happened when I woke up, as happened to me when I got sober. When I got sober, there was a recognition, I cannot drink successfully and, oh, my God, I can’t quit trying. So now I can’t quit drinking and I can’t fix it. I’m completely screwed. And then under that understanding of that I’m completely screwed, then I became willing to lower myself to listen to somebody else.
Rick: Yeah.
Fred: Right? I was just fresh out of ideas, first time in my life. And it’s only been two times. The second time was that morning when I woke up, which was because, see, I had lost all interest in the story. I didn’t want to live and I noticed I couldn’t die. So right in the same exact place, I can’t live and I can’t die. I’m completely screwed. And as soon as I was–and I recognized that I’m just hung.
Rick: Sounds like Old Man River, “I can’t stand living but ‘fraid of dying.”
Fred: Yeah, that’s it. That’s it. But I was looking forward to dying. I just couldn’t get there because I was staying alive for Betsy. I was awake for Betsy’s sake, not for mine. I loved Betsy more than I hated living.
Rick: Well, you know, taking it back a step, I would say that the whole universe is one big evolution machine. And there’s a sort of evolutionary imperative inherent in everything, from the tiniest amoeba to the most sophisticated human nervous system. And there’s something that drives us. There’s a seeking, a desire for more and more, which might manifest itself as more toys, more money, more relationships, but which eventually, since those things don’t fulfill, has to take the direction of self-recognition or spiritual awakening.
Fred: I think of it as like this, that in my case, I catch some flack once in a while because it’s a self-promoting unit. I’m stuck with it. It’s just what it does. But the reason that we’re talking is the fact that I started talking some time back. In other words, if I had just sat in my living room, still being the awake guy, you know, in my living room, that might be very pleasant, but there’s a lot of people who are awfully glad I did not. So there’s a fine line between little-self-promotion and Big-Self-promotion, and you kind of got to walk both lines. The way that I look at this, actually, is that it looks like a drive toward, and it’s not really. It’s a pull toward. It’s being pulled, but the way that that pull happens appears to be drive. Because I’m teaching because I have no choice. I quit trying to teach as late as earlier this winter. It was just like I got tired of it. It was just killing me. I was working too many hours. I wasn’t making much money. And I mean, I didn’t have no life at all. And it was like, man, I don’t think I want to do this. And I’ve tried. So I deleted all my videos and I took down the things from my website, and I thought I was going to, you know, I’m out of this biz. I figured I wrote a book, and I’m done. I did my contribution. Now I’m going back to Fred’s life. I’m going to garden and sell books. And that went really great for about three weeks. And then it started making me miserable, and I realized I had no choice. And then, bam, back to that vice of suffering. I don’t want to do this, and I notice I can’t not. And when I saw that this time, I just abandoned myself completely to this. And I will tell you just a quick little interlude, which is that at that moment of that vice that I’m talking about, which occurred last winter, the winter of 2013, was that my book business died. When I left teaching, my book business plunged, because I didn’t really need it to make a living or anything else. My book business died, and I could tell I wasn’t as sharply clear and all this because I was pulling away. I didn’t initially see it that way. But at any rate, when I finally got to that vice of suffering, I said, “Okay.” And I think I said this out loud, which I think is just acceptable sometimes for a human being to say a little prayer. And it doesn’t matter who you’re praying to or how you’re doing it or whatever. Just do it if you feel like it. And so on this day, I humbled myself enough to open my mouth and say — and I said this out loud– which was, “Okay, I got a real good idea, a very clear picture of what I’m not supposed to be doing. I need you to tell me what I am supposed to be doing because I’m not smart enough to figure that part out.” That evening, I began The Book of Undoing, and that changed everything.
Rick: Cool. That’s a beautiful story. I really think that it’s an intelligent universe. Jim Morrison said, “You can’t petition the Lord with prayer, but in fact you can.” And I don’t know if it’s the Lord you’re petitioning, but when you have an earnest, ardent desire like that, whether you speak it out or just…
Fred: Don’t let the straitjacket of non-duality stop you.
Rick: Yeah.
Fred: Like, “Oh, I can’t do that because I have people that have heard that thing,” and they’ll say, “Who were you praying to?” Does it matter?
Rick: Well, there’s a being with a capital B and beings with a small b. The universe is teeming with life, and much of it is too subtle for our perception. I don’t care if it doesn’t sound non-dual, but there are angels and devas and all kinds of subtler impulses of intelligence governing this whole thing, and very much involved in our individual lives and concerned for the evolution of the planet and so on. And knowingly or unknowingly, we’re in league with them to one degree or another, cooperating or not cooperating or whatever. But if one has a sincere intention and can place oneself in a position of usefulness, it’s like, “Oh boy, here’s another one for the team.”
Fred: Intention is everything.
Rick: Yeah, you’ll get support.
Fred: Intention is everything. Even when I got sober years later, I could see I really worked the steps very quickly and very poorly, and I used to admit that in recovery. I said, “But apparently my intention was clear, because I got sober and I’ve stayed sober.” That’s been quite a while now. So now it’s 13 and a half years, something like that. In recovery, we’re just like baby children, which is that, “How old are you?” “Well, I’m two and a half.” “I’m not two. I’m two and a half.” And in recovery, it’s, “How long have you been sober?” “13 and a half.” “33 and a half years.” “52 and a quarter.”
Rick: Yeah. And regarding this whole thing of, “What should I do?” and, “Should I be teaching?” and this and that, I think there are people who get up on a soapbox too soon, and there are people who probably should be on a soapbox and aren’t. But the way I see it, as long as one is honest and humble enough and realistic and all, you’ll find your niche.
Fred: If you just stay out there and you’re willing to take the licks. Because I didn’t have a teacher when I woke up for several years, and I now know absolutely everything that you can do wrong, in early waking..
Rick: You tried it out?
Fred: Yeah, I tried it out. I gave it a spin. And I suffered for it, and that’s how I learned. Suffering was my pointing. Always has been. It’s getting a lot less so now, in the sense that I don’t have the threshold for suffering that I had when I was in the park. And now there’s just a little bit of a hint of something, and it’s like, “Oh.”
Rick: Well, you get more fine-tuned. It’s like when you’re on the highway, you’re just making these real subtle corrections in the steering wheel.
Fred: That’s right.
Rick: And it gets more and more like that, where you just… There’s a saying, how does it go? “For the wise, only an indication is necessary.”
Fred: Yes.
Rick: So just a subtle indication.
Fred: Yes.
Rick: Whereas some people really need to be smacked upside the head, you know, because they’re not going to take the subtle hints.
Fred: That’s right. That’s what I needed. And fortunately, I don’t need so many licks anymore. But I’ve still got quite a few indications.
Rick: Now, from what I hear, from what you’re saying, you seem to have a knack for facilitating an initial awakening.
Fred: Yes.
Rick: But then I’ve heard you talk on your YouTube videos about oscillation and all. Do you have sort of ways of helping people to stabilize a bit?
Fred: I do. Besides helping people with an initial awakening, I help a lot of people who’ve had an initial awakening, and they’re now in oscillation. Or they had an awakening three years ago, and it was great, and I want to be just like that again or whatever, but I can’t seem to be able to do it. They come. And what I do, and there are certainly things that I do that are not unique to me. In other words, I didn’t invent this whole thing. I didn’t invent any of this. I mean, this whole thing just arrived here. I promise you that. But as far as practices, I’m a fan of meditation. I meditate on a regular basis myself. I don’t do it every day, but I do it when I do it. And I like the results that I get from it. I don’t meditate to get a result directly, but I still notice that one occurs. And sometimes I do meditate to directly get a result. Lately, I’ve been meditating again, because for two and a half years I have been on a path of being pulled so fast that it looked like I was driving.
Rick: Yeah.
Fred: And the unit is exhausted.
Rick: Sure.
Fred: I’m kind of done in a way as far as all of that part. And so I’ve been meditating again to get this mind quieted down and slowed down, so that I’m just aware of myself more acutely all the time.
Rick: Yeah. Well, you can always fine tune the instrument. As we know, Ramana Maharishi spent decades in some sort of meditation after his initial awakening, doing whatever he was doing, but there was a purpose to it. The Buddha, after his enlightenment, spent the rest of his life, he meditated a couple of hours a day or something, so we’re told. And it has an effect on, you like to call it the unit, it’s like the carbon unit from the first Star Trek movie. It has an influence, and that influence, I think, and there’s research to back it up, is conducive to refinement and stabilization, integration and all that stuff.
Fred: Yes, yes, yes. I’m also a big fan, before and after awakening, of non-dual inquiry. But the difference is that I still do inquiry all the time, but I don’t do it consciously anymore.
Rick: Spontaneous.
Fred: But it’s spontaneous inquiry. One of those is just the fundamental inquiry, the willingness to question whatever’s going on in my mind. Is that true? Because all I have to do to move back into a place of suffering is believe a thought. It doesn’t make any difference whether it’s a big thought or a little thought, a significant thought or an insignificant thought. If I’m believing that that thought is true, there’s got to be somebody there to believe that. And I want to always be willing to question, “Is that true? Is it really true? Do you know that?”
Rick: Yes, I can tell you’ve been a bit of a Byron Katie fan at some point.
Fred: I love Byron Katie. She’s wonderful. I think that her work is very, very good for clearing people up. I’ve had a lot of her students who have come to me, who still needed that last bit.
Rick: Right.
Fred: But they had wonderful context, and I often, very often recommend her work. That’s another thing. Byron Katie’s worked for five years in my house and some of my own stuff too. But actually, I think in the end, I prefer hers. But it was for questioning what I call beliefs, opinions and positions, BOPs. BOPs. Because we’re actually, everything’s always okay, but suddenly, here comes a belief, an opinion or a position, we get BOPed. It’s a beautiful day, I go out of the mailbox, I’ve got a bill there from the IRS, and it’s like, “Those idiots! What are they thinking, $5,000 I owe them?” I get BOPed. And I think that my belief, opinion or position is true. And I can believe that as long as I want to suffer, as long as I’m willing to suffer for it. Is that true? No, but I’m willing to suffer for it.
Rick: It polarizes you, it locks you into a sort of a little, boxes you into a corner.
Fred: Because what I talk about is that, I mean, doubt is our friend in this thing. Doubt’s our best friend. The first two-thirds or three-quarters of an awakening session is spent raising doubt. All it is is just raising doubt. So are you sure that that’s how this works? So I know you believe that, have you actually looked into that? And no, because what I talk about, what I do, is that it’s not talk and tell. It’s show and tell. Because talk and tell certainly works, I’m a product of it. But it doesn’t work as often as show and tell does. When I can actually take you and show you, have you experience your true nature right now. It’s self-promoting in it, I would be lost on that.
Rick: So back to the true nature thing. So do you find that it’s sort of like pretty much a 24/7 reality for you? It just sort of cruises along and you’re going through your day and all, but there’s this sort of vastness or silence or whatever. And even during sleep or does it kind of get blotted out during sleep?
Fred: No, I still don’t know. I know there are people that have other reports. But sleep is the same way for me as it always was. Waking up in the morning is a little different than it used to be. But the sleep part is the same.
Rick: I’m pretty much that way too, although there have been times when there’s been glimpses of inner awareness during sleep. Some friends of mine say it’s just bright as a light, so to speak, metaphorically speaking, throughout the night. There’s never any diminution of inner awareness despite the depth of sleep. But one thing maybe you do notice is that when you wake up from sleep, there’s a sense of bliss or like the awareness has been there. Or maybe somebody wakes you up in the night, “Hey Fred, you’re snoring.” And you realize, “Hey, I was snoring? I was awake.” You ever have anything like that?
Fred: Yeah. The other thing is that it used to be when I woke up in the middle of the night, it was like, “Ugh.” And now it’s like, “Oh, I can really…” My wife and I wake up frequently in the night and we’ll kiss or do whatever. We tell each other, “We love you,” because it’s just great. Whether I’m asleep or not asleep, it’s great.
Rick: The clarity is there from the moment of waking up, you’re saying?
Fred: There’s no shift there really at all, because that being is always there and always knows it’s there. So don’t get me wrong, when I talk about when I’m sleeping, I’m talking about this. This sleeps, because I don’t ever sleep, but this sleeps. When this sleeps, it doesn’t have any memories of deep sleep or anything like that. I don’t ever go anywhere. I don’t sleep. Like the cab company or something, we don’t sleep.
Rick: So is that kind of a conscious recognition throughout the night, or is it more of an intuitive knowing.
Fred: It’s intuitive. It’s just intuitive. Because it’s there, it’s there upon that instant…
Rick: Of awakening.
Fred: It’s just right there. Honestly, it’s gotten to where, now that I’ve started meditating again, it’s slowing this thing down again. Once again, I’m getting back to the fact that it’s getting very difficult to get out of bed in the morning, because I can’t come up with really good reasons. And there is a physical bliss.
Rick: Yes.
Fred: Right? You’ve got energy and it’s just “God Almighty. Can it get any better than this?” Yeah, it will tomorrow.
Rick: I thought of that when I was listening to some of your YouTubes, because I think at one point you were saying there isn’t necessarily going to be bliss, or great happiness accompanying this. And I think my response was, yeah, not necessarily, but at a certain point there probably will be, as this develops.
Fred: But it’s not necessarily through the unit. You may still be having a difficult time, but it’s just not taken very seriously.
Rick: Yeah, but somehow even through the unit, bliss becomes more and more of a characteristic. Remember Ananda Mai Ma, that great Indian saint, her name actually means bliss permeated mother.
Fred: Oh, I love it.
Rick: And there does come a time…
Fred: I still have some things to look forward to, which is fine with me.
Rick: There’s always something to look forward to.
Fred: Yeah, but at this point…
Rick: There’s a saying in the Vedas…
Fred: There’s an undercurrent of what you’re talking about there, I think. There is an undercurrent of all is well, that never leaves. And it doesn’t make any difference what this is involved in. That’s all that’s here, but it’s subtle.
Rick: I know what you mean, yeah. It’s very good, it’s called santosh, contentment. It becomes a sort of foundational quality, so to speak. But this thing about bliss, there’s a saying, “Contact with Brahman is infinite joy.” And I mention it because sometimes people want to dumb down enlightenment, and sell it short, in my opinion, as being just this sort of flat, emotionless…
Fred: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Rick: …this dispassionate kind of thing. But I fully believe it can become extremely rich and saturated with joy.
Fred: I really think what they’re describing there, when they’re talking about that flat, dry place… Generally speaking, what I discover is that that’s with people who have discovered what they’re not, but not yet people who have not yet discovered what they are. In other words, they’re halfway home. And there can be a lot of bliss in halfway home, and you’ve got to go there and stay there and enjoy it while you do. But just know that it’s not the end. And it’s often not only experienced as the end, it’s often taught to be the end. And we hear a great deal about that. And welcome to my straitjacket.
Rick: Yeah, and it always rubs me the wrong way when I hear that. So I’m kind of on a little bit of a mission to just sort of popularize the notion that there is a vast range of potential development.
Fred: Yeah, the same issue.
Rick: Yeah, and let’s not sell ourselves short, let’s not dumb this down. It shouldn’t be discouraging to think that perhaps you have a long row yet to hoe. It should be exciting and encouraging.
Fred: Because it’s always being, always becoming. This is great! It can’t get any better than this! But oh wow, it did!
Rick: It did, yeah.
Fred: And that’s not the whole thing. You mentioned levels earlier, and I know that I mention it in one or two of my videos, and I know that we’re not comfortable doing that. And you and I are not talking about level one, two, three, four, five. “I’m at level five”, whatever, at least I’m not. What I’m talking about is the fact that there are certainly gradations in this. And the idea that I am going to move from total ignorance of my true nature to 30 seconds later, elbowing Ramana and Adyashanti aside, I mean, it’s just insane. This is what Greg Good beat me up with. It is the height of arrogance.
Rick: And even Adyashanti, mentioning him, has a famous quote that he’s just beginning. He just feels like, I’m always just beginning.
Fred: Yeah. What I see is that you take somebody like that, who’s been awake longer than I have and taught so much, and I do have a lot of respect for him, and some other teachers as well, but what I notice is that there’s just less Adyashanti there than there is Fred here. In the sense that there’s that continuous thinning of the conditioning. That’s what happened in 2010, when I began to talk for the first time in years, because I’d been trying to say this for years, I’ve driven off every friend I had. But now, suddenly, when I started talking in 2010, people started waking up. What I was saying actually made sense. It’s because that conditioning and the clearing process is really simply the thinning of this. Because it takes some time, since this occurs in time, it takes some time for awakeness to colonize the body. That’s the process that you and I are in, and everybody else, for that matter.
Rick: But you know, ironically, even though, as you say, there’s a thinning of the conditioning, it’s my observation that the more it thins, the more actually vibrant and charming and charismatic and whatnot the personality becomes. So on the one hand, there’s less of the person, but paradoxically, there’s more of the person.
Fred: Yes, there’s more of the person, because there’s more light coming through. Think about it like layers of paint on the glass, or dust. What I’m trying to say is that in every moment, awakening is like a window pane. And at every moment, we’re either wiping the glass or breathing on it.
Rick: Yeah.
Fred: So, what we do after initial awakenings, for some people, they’ve got what they want. I don’t know how far they go with it or anything. That’s fine. I never hear from them again. Other people will come back, use me to help clear, and we’re just always wiping the glass. And when we talk, we’re both wiping the glass. It affects me too. I’ve just got the great position they pay me. But it works both ways. There is certainly more clarity here than there was a year ago, before I did however many hundred of these things I’ve done.
Rick: Well, that’s why I say I like listening to your videos, because I sort of resonate with this guy. Because that’s my orientation. Like you say, your website’s called Awakening Clarity, right?
Fred: Yes.
Rick: And “awakening” doesn’t mean “awakened clarity.” It doesn’t have a finality to it.
Fred: And let me say just one quick thing about websites, because I have a brand new one, which is that you will find the Google roots for Awakening Clarity are much stronger than they are for the new site, which is AwakeningClarityNow.com. Got to say it.
Rick: Yeah. Well, as an SEO professional, I should tell you, you just don’t want to go changing domain names too often.
Fred: No, I sure don’t. I pay on that app. But either way, if I’m to be found, I’ll be found.
Rick: Yeah. So, you mentioned a number of times that you get paid for doing this. How much do you charge for a session, and what does a session consist of?
Fred: Awakening session lasts anywhere from – I like to say two hours, but I’ve gotten a notice that they usually run a little longer. But somewhere along in that line, if we do it over Skype, it’s $250. If you do it at my house, it’s $300, because I can go to Skype in my pajamas and don’t have to vacuum.
Rick: Yeah. You have to hire the maid to come in and do that.
Fred: That’s right. That’s right.
Rick: Yeah.
Fred: And clarity sessions are half that. So, basically, it’s $125 an hour, because clarity sessions often run long too. So, my hours are loose. My picks are not, but my hours are loose.
Rick: And do you still have any other job, or this supports you now?
Fred: No, this is what I do. Well, I actually still have the residue of my book business, which is constantly unwinding. I just donated a bunch of boxes the day before yesterday as I unwind it, but it’s no longer my primary income. It’s now just sort of a part-time deal.
Rick: I don’t want to open up a can of worms, but if there’s somebody who’s on welfare or some such thing, do you cut them some kind of break, or what?
Fred: I don’t. I don’t have a sliding scale at all. There are plenty of people who do, and that’s who they need to talk to. Just because I know they don’t need to talk to me, because I charge what I charge. Because my website is free, and it’s been free for two and a half years. I mean, Awakening Clarity, I only put a few thousand hours into that. You know how that goes. And that’s free. And when I talk, I talk, currently at least, I do talks for free. There’s a donation basket if you want to donate. If you don’t, that’s fine, because it’s whatever you want to pay, including zero. And my books, the ones that I control, are cheap. So something’s got to pay the bills.
Rick: Yeah, I mean, somebody might gripe about how much it costs to go to a doctor, and there are the $60 boxes of Kleenex at the hospital, but on the other hand, the doctor did have to go to medical school, and that cost him a pretty penny, and he put in hours of studying. And even now, outside of his appointments, he better be spending time keeping up with his craft and all.
Fred: That’s right. What drives me, just as a capitalist non-dualist, I just watch the market. I started out at $25 a session, and I didn’t have many takers. But I began to have enough, and then I moved to $35, and then I moved to $50. I can only talk to so many people. I can’t do two of these a day, seven days a week anymore. I like to do just a few a week, because they are physically exhausting.
Rick: I wonder why that is. I should think you’d find them enlivening. When I do these interviews, I feel more energized than before I started.
Fred: If the person wakes up, yeah, there’s an enlivening that comes. But my God, if they don’t, there’s just – I don’t get the rush after we win the game. Actually, it does. Because of what we do, even if I’m enlivened immediately thereafter, which is usually the case, there’s a yang to that end, which will be in an hour or two. The other thing is that there’s apparently an intensity of some nature, which I don’t quite understand, but my throat is always on the edge of a sore throat.
Rick: In life in general, or when you do these sessions?
Fred: It’ll stay that way. Now, because of the sessions, it will be there – I have what I call on-camera days and off-camera days. I do four days a week on camera now. During that entire time, I’ll be able to feel where I am in regard to a sore throat, whether I’m going to lose my voice or not. What happens is, particularly once in a while, if I get into a very difficult DPS – I had one this summer with a woman that –
Rick: What’s a DPS?
Fred: I’m sorry, it’s an awakening session, a direct pointing session.
Rick: Oh, okay. I’m sorry.
Rick: Didn’t know the acronym.
Fred: Yeah, I get it. All of these sessions are direct pointing sessions. Some of them are awakening sessions, some of them are clarity sessions. They’re all essentially direct pointing sessions. If I get into a difficult one, or – the other thing is, a lot of times it’ll be with someone who is not a native English speaker, it’s more difficult, because I’ll try to enunciate everything much more clearly, make sure that they understand, and that’s very taxing. Sometimes I’ll get with someone where they’re just not quite there, oftentimes at the two-hour mark. But I can see that it’s there, that this is somebody who’s just on the cusp of waking up. I don’t know how to look at my watch and say, “Well, our two hours are up. Sorry.” So I will typically pursue that until I just know that there’s nothing there, that I’ve been mistaken or we’ve moved past it.
Rick: You’ve done all you can do at this time.
Fred: Done all I can do at this time, and that’s actually always my job. It’s never my job to wake somebody up. It’s only my job to present what I have to the very best of my ability, and remarkably enough, when that happens, something else comes into play, and people wake up.
Rick: I’m glad I brought that up, because some people might say, “Oh, 250 bucks. This guy’s a money-grubber.” But obviously, you throw yourself into this, and you can only do so many a week. You’re not making some big, fat, six-figure salary at it.
Fred: People who will say that, they have an advantage over me anyway. They know how much a spiritual teacher should make. I don’t. I don’t know. They also know what I should teach. I don’t know. I just get on air and teach what I teach, or I get on there and I write what I write. I don’t have the same idea.
Rick: It’s probably less than a psychiatrist’s charges,125 bucks an hour, and this is arguably more valuable than many of those might be.
Fred: I’ve worked with several psychiatrists who might take issue with that, but I do notice they did come to me.
Rick: Yeah.
Fred: I do know that not only have they come to me, they’ve come back. If I had one occupation that is at the head of the list of the people that I talk to, it’s mental health professionals, psychologists and psychiatrists. More psychologists than psychiatrists. But also just a lot of straight medical doctors. I would have never dreamed. I don’t know why that is, but boy, I sure talk to a lot of them.
Rick: Interesting.
Fred: Yeah.
Rick: Well, they can afford it.
Fred: Well, that’s one thing, yeah, because they can afford it. And they will afford it because if they’ve got this on their mind, then I’m just the latest thing. I mean, because I get those, and I get emails that say, “I can’t believe this, but I’ve got to try it.” And then they try it, and it’s like, “What a bitch! You’re for real!” And if once that really gets figured out, that what I’m doing is really for real, I’ll be booked from here to death.
Rick: Well, you’re going to experience the batgap bump, I can tell you that.
Fred: Well, I’m looking forward to that, but I don’t think I can have much more fun with it than I already have, I’ll tell you that.
Rick: Okay, great. Well, I’m sure if I were to listen to all your YouTube videos again, I think, “Oh, I wish we’d talked about that. I wish we’d talked about that.” There’s always something, but this is probably a pretty good dose for people.
Fred: Yeah, I would think so. Maybe about as much of me as they can stand in one session. It’s about like a DPS. It’s been a couple of hours.
Rick: Yeah. And so I’m going to put up a page on batgap that will have links to your website and anything else that you told me to link to, your books and stuff like that. So people will go to, those who are listening, if you want to get in touch with Fred, go to batgap.com and then from there you can go to his website, link to his books and all that stuff.
Fred: That’s great.
Rick: Yeah, and also on batgap you’ll find a number of things. You’ll find a discussion group that I’ll set up for Fred’s interview. I set one up, a separate one for each person. And a donut button, a donate button. We don’t buy donuts with the money. And we just became a 501(c)(3) this past week or so after a long application process. So that has tax implications for US citizens. There’s a place to sign up to be notified by email whenever a new interview is posted. So you can sign up for that if you like. And there’s a link to an audio podcast because almost as many people just listen to this as actually watch videos because they don’t want to sit in front of their computers all that time. So feel free to sign up for that, iTunes podcast. So thanks. That was great, Fred.
Fred: I really, really enjoyed it. Thank you so much. It’s a great pleasure and an honor to meet you.
Rick: You too. I feel like we’re kind of spiritual brothers or something.
Fred: Yes, yes.
Rick: Good. We’ll meet in person one of these days.
Fred: I’ll be at the Theater of the Science of Non-Duality probably next year.
Rick: Oh, great. I’ll be there.
Fred: Yes.
Rick: Unless I get abducted by aliens or something. All right. Thanks. And thanks to those who have been listening or watching. We’ll see you next week.