Gary Weber interview

Summary:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest today is Gary Weber. Welcome Gary.

Gary: Good to be here.

Rick: I first met you at the Science and Nonduality Conference last year and then you kind of disappeared. I think you told me later you had a flu or something.

Gary: Yeah.

Rick: It’s good to get together finally. And you had an unusual kind of awakening a number of years ago. You were in the middle of a yoga posture and all of a sudden everything changed and never went back to the way it was. So that was kind of an interesting watershed moment. But just so people can get to know you a little bit, let’s backtrack and just give us a sketchy overview of what led you up to that moment. Why were you doing a yoga posture? What had interested you in spirituality? What sorts of things did you do up until that point?

Gary: I was raised a very conservative Methodist, western Pennsylvania person and deeply schooled in Christianity. At some level I knew or felt that there was a thing called awakening and that I could get it. I don’t know how I knew that because nobody around me talked about it, knew anything about it. It wasn’t part of the liturgy and the Christian teachings. And then that went away and I went off, did my thing through undergraduate, went off to the nuclear submarine navy and almost died in a nuclear submarine.

Rick: Wow. Some kind of accident or something?

Gary: Yeah, we actually ran into the mountain.

Rick: Underwater.

Gary: Underwater, yeah. Coming back very fast and very deep and ran into a mountain and almost killed ourselves. So that was a wake-up call. I was living kind of hard and fast and that was kind of, “Okay, now this is for real.” I came back to graduate school and I was walking down the hill into graduate school, working at my PhD, And I had one of these epiphanous moments where I had stepped back and looked back at my consciousness and saw this tremendous ongoing rush of self-referential narrative that was doing nothing except causing me unhappiness and suffering, to coin a phrase. And for whatever reason I looked at that and said, “Well, these thoughts, this must not be the way we’re supposed to live. There must be some way to be able to curtail, weaken, get rid of these thoughts that are causing me all of my problems. There’s no reason I should have been unhappy. I was healthy, late 20s, wife, two kids, graduate school, money was set aside to get through. So there shouldn’t have been any reason to be unhappy. But there I was and I said, “Well, it must be these thoughts. Can I get rid of these thoughts?” So I began, this was the 70s, running around reading stuff and I picked up a whole bunch of things. One was a book of poems. I was reading it one day at lunch sitting out on the old main lawn. And the first line, I read the first line and my whole world opened up. I had not been using any psychedelics, still a virgin on psychedelics, but this line was, “All beings are, from the very beginning, Buddhas.” I didn’t even know what that truly meant in any context other than the fact that the line just blew my mind open. Half an hour, 45 minutes later, of course it closed down. But that, I turned the book over and it had Zen on the cover. So I couldn’t even spell Zen at that time. And then went off and began doing Zen. Reading about it, practicing it myself first and finding some Zen teachers to work with. Rinzai tradition was what naturally drew me. Toni Packer and Eido Roshi Shimano at Dai Bosatsu Zendo were my main folks. And worked with them but also continued my professional life. Went to finish graduate school, went on to work at a national lab and then off in industry for a long time. And kept running these two parallel paths. I felt I had to go out and do some yoga so I could sit longer because the kind of Rinzai Zen I was doing was a lot of sitting. So I did a lot of yoga with a lot of different people to learn how to get more comfortable in my body and be able to sit longer. So I just did that and I ran across one of Ramana Maharishi’s teachings. Here was somebody who was very simple, very direct and he said, “Look, you can stop these thoughts.” Which was very attractive to me, that’s what I was looking for. The only person I could find who was unequivocally focused on that, his first book was, that’s what it was all about, was stopping thoughts. So I just did what he told me to do, which was inquire, ‘To whom does this thought arise?’. Very simple basic inquiry practices. There were also in Rinzai Zen, the 14th century, a Japanese Zen monk called Bassui who had done a similar process. It was documented in one of the big Zen books at the time. So I had some reinforcement to go ahead and pursue this thing. So I just went off and did self-inquiry. Who am I? Where am I? What am I? Who hears? What is this? Am I this body? Etc. And eventually it happened.

Rick: People listening might wonder, “Well, what’s the big deal about stopping thoughts? What’s wrong with thoughts? Aren’t thoughts natural? Why should we want to stop them?” What would you say to that?

Gary: Well, it wasn’t my perception. As I talk to people now, when I talk about blah, blah, the self-reflective narrative, that’s the part we can stop. At the time I was doing this, I had really nobody to coach me because my two Zen masters really, they understood about this path, but it was not one they had worked in themselves. So there was no good coaching available. So I was kind of flying blind for a long time. I just kept on going on and going on. It was kind of a DIY process with some check backs occasionally to them to see if I was pass/fail. And this kept looking. Well, have the thoughts gone yet? Have the thoughts gone yet? No. And they finally went away, but the concern I had as a knowledge worker, I was managing a large R&D group and my thoughts stopped. A thousand people and a quarter billion dollar budget and four research labs. And I had a very quiet mind. There were just no thoughts going around. I didn’t know when I was doing this what was going to happen. I knew my thoughts would stop, but I thought they might all stop completely. It turns out I would not lose any ability to plan or problem solve or anything else, and it turns out not to be the case, fortunately. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was able to continue doing all my research management work. Which may say something about corporate management work. I do all my research management work and still have this very quiet mind. So it’s not like you have no ability to think whatsoever. It’s just that you lose that ongoing blah, blah, which just gobbles up bandwidth.

Rick: Yeah, so in other words, you stop thinking all the useless thoughts. Those stop. Whereas important thoughts, thoughts that are relevant to what you’re doing, those are there when they need to be.

Gary: Exactly. It turns out we now know, over the course of the last seven or eight years, that there are two different neural circuits, or in fact there are three different neural circuits for problem solving, tasking, and this blah, blah network, which I call this default mode network, which we didn’t know had that name until 2001. So we’ve learned, in cognitive neuroscience, that we can parse those out. We can differentially shut those down. And we’ve learned how to do that as a species, but I didn’t realize you could shut down this one separately. But since then we’ve got lots of validation for this.

Rick: This shift to having a very quiet mind happened quite abruptly for you. It’s not like it just tapered off gradually, but you were in the middle of doing a yoga posture one day, and all of a sudden something clicked, and it was a watershed moment.

Gary: I did then still do vinyasas, yoga postures linked together in some sequence with breathing with inhale and exhale matched to the movement of the posture. So it really is a very meditative approach to doing yoga postures. It wasn’t like that wasn’t meditation, it was. And as you were saying, I went up into this posture, and it would be a very complicated one, and then came back down. It just stopped, just abruptly stopped. What I don’t know, people have asked me this, did you not have any indication, and it was 25 years in the making and 20,000 hours of practice, did you not have any indication along the way that things were getting better? I said I didn’t really look at that. My lineages were very much not focused on experiences, high disregard for experiences. Let them go, they’re just experiences, they’re coming and going, forget about them. And I just kept looking for, had my thoughts stopped yet? And they hadn’t, so I just kept on going and going and going, kind of flying blind really.

Rick: But surely over 20,000 hours of practice over however many years, your life must have been changing in certain ways.

Gary: But it was difficult because I was changing so many things. My jobs, I had many different jobs that I worked in, different companies. I did a lot of traveling all over the place, so I was not in a static environment with a very, what you call a clean experiment to run, that I could say, well this is clearly moving. Retrospectively I can go back and construct a story about, yes it was getting better and better, but there was so much else changing in my life with two kids and moving and different jobs and travel, that I just couldn’t parse it out at the time.

Rick: So it wasn’t clear to you then. You wouldn’t have been able to say, well I feel like my life is significantly different than it would have been had I not been doing all this practice. I mean before the shift, you didn’t feel like you were kind of a different person as a result of all that practice. You were just doing it almost on blind faith that, I just need to do this because it’s hopefully going to lead to this goal of stopping thoughts.

Gary: Yeah, and I had this burning feeling that I had to do this. It was nothing more important in my life than this. So even though I had family responsibilities and big jobs, I just carved out two hours a day early in the morning. I was not an early morning person to do this. No matter what, that had to get done. And I just did that over and over and over again. And the yoga was helpful. I mean my body was getting stronger and more flexible, but I just did it.

Rick: Yeah, you’re a kindred soul. I’ve been that way myself for 45 years. It’s just like once I realized how important it was. Except in my case, I really noticed big improvements and changes in my life from day one. But I wasn’t as productive a guy. I mean here you were a PhD candidate, I was a high school dropout. My life was a mess in many ways. So I noticed a huge improvement when I started to meditate.

Gary: Well, people I work with now, I work with a doctor at Harvard, and she said within two months basically she was seeing things get better. Things changed almost immediately. Just the self-inquiry, a little bit of guidance in the Skype session, and two brief meetings. So people can see stuff happen really quickly now. Maybe I was just a slow learner. But it did take a long time for me. But flying blind makes a big difference. It’s so much easier now when you talk to people and you’ve been through, you’ve made almost all the mistakes you think you can possibly make. You can help people to say, “Well, this is, you know, don’t go there, go here, and this is another possibility you might consider.”

Rick: Of course I would argue that you were undergoing lots of change, physiological as well as psychological or whatever, but it just wasn’t apparent to you. Kind of like a train going through a tunnel, progress as being but you don’t really see it until you come out the other side of the tunnel.

Gary: Right. And I didn’t have any idea how close I was or how thin the veil was between. I was doing a process of focused surrender. I could see that every place I had these thoughts that were problematic, I had an attachment. This is like Buddhism 101. And every place I had an attachment, there was a me holding on to that. So I would go into every single attachment and see if I could let go of each thing there was. I just went around systematically feeling for any place I had an attachment and then letting go of that attachment. And you can, you know, go into them and let go and surrender and they fall away. And I had held back on one attachment, two attachments, my two daughters. So I knew at some level I had to let go of them. They were the last thing I was holding on to. And I actually delayed surrendering that part until they were safe, they were some place where they were secure, they were off in school and they were going to be okay. Because I didn’t know what was going to happen. If I surrendered my attachment to them, I might be completely non-functional and lay a long time in a curb of drooling. I just didn’t have any idea. I had nothing to go on. So I wanted to make sure they were okay, that they were safe. And once they were, then I let go.

Rick: So that’s interesting. What did it feel like to let go? And I mean, how does one even… isn’t it sort of… I mean, it’s natural to love your daughters, and even now if they got killed in a car crash or something, I imagine there would be some kind of reaction. It would be different than if somebody in California, whom you don’t even know, got killed in a car crash, right? There’s some sort of bond there.

Gary: Not very much.

Rick: Really?

Gary: Really. And I’ve… people… since I’ve told this story, people have really asked me a lot of questions about that. I think it must be inhumane. But what I find, in fact, without thoughts, except for a bunch of thoughts, you live currently, totally in the present moment. There’s no place else for you to be because there’s nothing else pulling you away. And this space becomes so sweet that there’s nothing to pull you out. And once the eye falls to very… almost nothingness or nothingness, there’s nothing to hold the other end of the relationship. If you’re attached to your relationships, this isn’t going to work for you. Because you end up with the possibility, not the possibility, but the certainty that you go far enough. You don’t necessarily have to go as far as I went. But you can go a lot of the way there, but as you let go of these attachments, the whole thing does change. There’s nobody to hold the other end of compassion. One of the worry amongst my Buddhist friends was, “Well, aren’t you compassionate?” And I said, “I don’t feel that I’m being compassionate.” Often I see people who are Christians or Buddhists who are being compassionate, trying to fit their behavior into some kind of a template, a mold, that looks like somebody told them compassion should look like. But if they really watch carefully, they’ll feel that they’re getting a lot of dopamine, a lot of good feelings out of being what they call compassionate. And I’m just present for whatever arises in the moment. When people say, “Oh, you’re really compassionate,” I say, “I have no sensation, I have no feeling of being compassionate, but some of the actions I do, other people think they are.”

Rick: Yeah, what you’re describing here is the difference between trying to act a certain way, because that’s considered to be humane or spiritual or the way to act, as opposed to just spontaneously acting a certain way by virtue of a certain perspective or a certain level of consciousness or a certain degree of realization or liberation or what have you. You’re not trying to act a particular way, you’re just doing what you do, and it flows naturally and spontaneously from whatever state you’re in.

Gary: Yeah, there’s such a presence, there’s all kinds of words, I use “stillness,” because it is so quiet. But there’s just nothing going on in there, so there’s no agenda. Somebody comes in, everybody’s equally important. Everything looks like the same thing at one level, but you can recognize people are different from plants and chairs. But everything just comes into your space, and whatever is there is met completely openly, fully, without agenda, without history, you’re just there.

Rick: But it’s still natural to have preferences, is it not? I mean, if someone put two plates in front of you, and one was just a pile of lard, and the other was a delicious, well-prepared meal, you’d probably go for the meal.

Gary: Oh, sure.

Rick: But by the same token, a couple of women over in China may not mean the same to you as your daughters.

Gary: It’s a lot closer than you might believe.

Rick: I mean, the world is my family and all that, that’s Sanskrit saying, but we still have an individual life, despite however cosmic we may be, and aren’t there still preferences in that individual life? However faint they may be, by comparison with the heaviness and the dominance with which most people are attached to things.

Gary: As far as preferences, I like green tea better than black tea.

Rick: Yeah, there you go.

Gary: And that hasn’t changed. Food preferences are like that, I’d rather be warm than cold.

Rick: You’d rather be a hammer than a nail?

Gary: I don’t know about that part.

Rick: To quote Paul Simon?

Gary: Yeah, Paul Simon. As far as those kinds of biological preferences, the body naturally has those. But as far as intellectual preferences, not really.

Rick: Yeah, there’s a Sanskrit saying you may have heard of, “lesha vidya,” which is faint remains of ignorance, and it’s said that that’s kind of essential for actually living enlightenment or living Brahman, that there has to be some kind of semblance of discrimination and discernment and preferences, so you can distinguish your mouth from your ear or the door from the wall. Even though ultimately it’s all one and there are no distinctions in ultimate reality, we live in a world of distinctions and we have to still be able to make choices among them in order to function.

Gary: Yeah, I don’t step in front of buses or walk off a cliff or pick up poisonous snakes and shake them around.

Rick: Some people do.

Gary: Some people do. I’m not one of those people. But it really seems like all the self-protective, the really protective fears, limbic protective fears, you don’t lose, thank goodness. You do recognize, you don’t put your hand in a fire three times. Once is enough, it’s hot, I take my hand away. Those are all retained and I make no effort to try to develop an ability to stifle those. I think that’s just being an alive person. And yet you feel function in the world. It’s surprising that, given this situation I’m describing, that you do. You just go out and you can function in the world. I can pass for being coherent. You go through your day and what has to emerge comes out of no place. And people told me, “Well, you can’t possibly talk without thinking.” I said, “Really? Really?” Because do you actually pre-think, pre-self-referentially think up everything you say, or does it just come out of no place? If you watch your thoughts, watch where your next thought comes from. Can you predict your next thought? If you can’t predict your next thought, then why do you think you’re going to suddenly become non-functional because you get very still inside? You don’t. You really do not. In fact, you increase functionality because all the bandwidth was being gobbled up by this parasitic blah, blah, blah, went on all the time about nothing. It used to be for tigers and bears and lions, but you don’t have tigers and bears and lions. So those thoughts are all made up. Yeah, I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit in reading your book and all. You alluded a few minutes ago to different, I think you called them tracks or aspects of brain functioning, one of which is the blah, blah track, whatever it’s called, and the other is perhaps responsible for the more pertinent thoughts that we need to think in order to do whatever we do. I was reminded of something I learned a long time ago about different levels of speech. As I recall, the Sanskrit were like vaikhari, pashyanti, madhyama and para. I don’t know if I have them in the right order, but it had to do with the gross level of speech that I’m doing right now where you can hear me, then the subtler but still gross level of thought, where it’s like voice in your head kind of thought, but then there’s the subtler thought, which is just a faint, subtle impulse, and then there’s para, the transcendent. In that model at least, it sounds like what you’re describing is the gross level of thought, the chatter level of thought more or less completely shut down. But I would argue that when you go to pick something up, there is still, it might not be the gross voice in the head, “I want to pick up the glasses” case, but there’s a subtle impulse that could be defined as thought. There’s just a sort of a mental impulse that precedes the physical action. Do you agree with that or no?

Gary: Well, the neuroscience would tell you that when you go to pick up that glass, before you even are aware that you’re making the action, your motor cortex has mixed the chemicals and you’re in the process of moving that arm to pick up that glass. Because if you had to mentally articulate, you’d actually describe precisely, neurochemically and anatomically, how you rotated all those muscles and nerves and nerve endings and mixed the chemicals and turned the bones, and how you synchronized, you couldn’t do it. So the motor cortex does that, and we can be aware of it or not, but we go through our day 99.9% of the time doing actions we’re completely unaware of. We’ll walk across the room, we pick up a glass, we walk across again, put water in it, without thinking about that. We don’t process anything. The motor cortex and the brain just does that.

Rick: Yeah. You could also say, “We don’t think about digestion, and if we had to, we’d die.” If we had to micromanage that, there’s a lot of things that the body just takes care of. But let me pursue this a little bit further. It’s been my understanding over the years, through my own spiritual practice and study and whatnot, that there are levels to the mind, and I alluded to them just now, just as there are maybe levels to an ocean. On the surface level of the ocean, you see the waves, and maybe you see bubbles popping if some air has been released from the bottom. You could dive down and trace a bubble, let’s say, way down to the bottom of the ocean where it emerged, and maybe the bubble would get smaller as it went down due to the pressure or something. By a similar token, thoughts as they emerge on the surface of the mind are relatively gross. They’re louder. If I were to shout what I’m saying right now, people would hear it in the other room. Speaking in this tone of voice, they don’t, but you do. I could think what I’m saying right now, and you wouldn’t hear it, but I still would. Going in the same direction, there are subtler impulses or subtler levels in the development of a thought which ordinarily people don’t perceive because they’re too subtle, and the mechanics of perception are kind of coarsened or made gross over time, such that we lose the ability to cognize thought at the point of its emergence or throughout the subtler ranges of its development. This whole thing about acting and not being aware of the thought which preceded the action or which motivated the action, it strikes me that perhaps it’s because people’s awareness is ordinarily confined to a relatively restricted area of comparatively gross phenomena, and that if the full range of awareness were there, then one would be open, consciously aware of the subtlest impulses of thoughts as they arose. This would give one great freedom. We’d be much less of a slave to things which arise in the mind without our being aware of their development. It would actually be possible to choose, “Am I going to pursue this or not?” Not in any kind of deliberative fashion, but more with just a faint, subtle intention. Go this way, go that way. There would be an intuitive faculty that would arise. I’ve meandered a little bit, but go ahead and respond to what I’ve said and we’ll take it from there.

Gary: Well, there are a couple of things, three or four different things in there, which is what I heard. The one about being able to go down and watch thoughts. If you’ve meditated a lot, you can get more and more perceptive, as you get quieter and quieter. You can go down to where you can actually, it’s easier for me because it’s very quiet, see like the surface of a lake, a very still lake. And if you’re present, watching for that, you can see the thoughts begin to form, just like a little bump on the lake, a little slight bump on the lake. And if you’re present for that, you tend to it, it will just go back down again. So you can be aware at that very first beginning of initiation of a potential thought.

Rick: You can nip it in the bud.

Gary: You can nip it in the bud and you can have that be completely still. That to me is different than the other things about the intention. I don’t look at emotions as being thoughts, some people do. They don’t strike me in the same way there is the movement of sensation through the body. I don’t make any attempt to suppress that. What do you want to call that? I don’t call it a thought. Those sensations arise and pass away. Emotions can rise and pass away. For me the problematic thing comes, an emotion comes up tagged to a sensation. If you are fully present, that doesn’t go into thinking. There is no arising of an attachment. However, if the first thought comes up and hooks onto that, maybe a storyline about something, it just begins. If that is a sticky thought, some thought that has Velcro to it, it can pull all kinds of memories and all kinds of things. You can spiral up into these horrendous things that we have seen where this thought just runs out of control. You turn a simple desire into wild craving and lust. We have all seen that happen. You just don’t have that second part. That is where the problematic part is. If it isn’t self-referential, it doesn’t, in my experience, get the power to be able to spin up these big spirals. I don’t try to shut down the front end. I don’t try to shut down sensations. I don’t try to shut down… There are some limbic emotions. I don’t try to shut those down.

Rick: Why would you? Because you are functioning in a very spontaneous, natural manner from a settled state of awareness. You don’t need to manipulate.

Gary: I don’t have that. Something else that happened, and you touched on it too, is that I was very much convinced that I had achieved what I had achieved in the corporate world and the academic world by my genius and my hard work and intelligence and cleverness. When this thought stopped and the I stopped and fell away, there was nobody to hold the “I make this choice, I make this decision, I have been in control all the time.” So I was left in a situation where, even though I had been very much convinced I had made all this take place, I was now saying there was no “I” there to have made it take place. So I just fell into, logically, the fact that I had no free will because there was no one to have it, and I had no control because there was no one to hold control. And so I just found myself in this space of living now, now, now, and surrendered into what happened because I had no other alternative. I found that to be a very sweet space, actually.

Rick: Yeah. It’s funny, each of us says something and the other can see three or four things in that. Well, what I get from that is, first of all, I’ve heard it described that emotions, that thought as we ordinarily define it, little voice in the head type thought, is actually a subtler aspect of the sense of hearing. Emotions are a subtler aspect of the sense of touch. Some people have visual things in their minds, they think in images, they say. That’s a subtler aspect of the sense of sight. You may have, at one time, been meditating and all of a sudden tasted a lemon or something like that. Subtler aspect of the sense of taste. So each of the senses has its gross manifestation and outward directedness, but it also has subtler correlates in a subjective thing, not using the senses, the eyes, the ears, the physical senses. So anyway, there’s that. It’s just something interesting to throw into the conversation. Then this thing about the doership, of course, as you know, you’ve been a study of Vedic things. There are verses and verses in the Gita and other scriptures about how one really isn’t the doer. One takes oneself to be the doer, but upon adequate awakening or realization, one discovers that, “Oh, I don’t do anything. It’s the gunas of nature that are doing it all.”

Gary: Yeah, absolutely. One of my favorite verses is, “naiva kiñchit karomīti yukto manyeta tattva-vit” which is, “The wise know that I do nothing at all.” “paśhyañ śhṛiṇvan spṛiśhañjighrann aśhnangachchhan svapañśhvasan pralapan visṛijan gṛihṇann unmiṣhan nimiṣhann api indriyāṇīndriyārtheṣhu vartanta iti dhārayan” which is, “Seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, sleeping, moving, grasping, letting go, even opening and closing the eyes, speaking, I do none of these.” It’s just the senses moving amongst the sense objects, ingrown in direct issue.

Rick: Yeah, so it all depends on where you take your stand. Personally, I see it as a lens, how a lens can focus in small or it can zoom out. Most people are in the focused state and stuck there, such that there’s this feeling like, “This is what I am. I’m doing this. When this body dies, I’m gone,” that kind of thing. But then in the zoomed-out state, one realizes I am that consciousness which pervades and constitutes the entire universe and everything is contained in me. Now, there’s a whole range in between those two perspectives. My take on enlightenment is it’s not either/or, it’s a kind of a both/and situation where there is still a sense of individuality and there needs to be in order to function, but it’s a question of where is one’s primary identification. Is it going to be with the tiny pinpoint value or is it going to be with the vast, unbounded, fundamental value?

Gary: I can’t detect much of anything of the one end of that. To me, there’s nothing there, it’s just vast, still emptiness. You still have a GPS locator. Ramana didn’t bump into trees and stuff or fall down the well at the ashram. So you are functional, you can talk, walk around, you put your food in your mouth and not in your ear.

Rick: If you stub your toe, it’s your toe. The pain is somehow localized, it’s not over in the other county, it’s there in this body.

Gary: So there is, and Adyashanti called it the scent of an I.

Rick: That’s the Lesha Vidya idea.

Gary: There is some very faint residue that’s necessary because you are embodied. To have something that keeps this thing protected so it can function, the body has to have some kind of a locator.

Rick: Yeah. I guess the reason I’m dwelling on this point a little bit is that, I have a quote from Adyashanti in front of me. There’s a kind of a syndrome that he dwells on quite a bit in his teaching. He said, “Many spiritual seekers get stuck in emptiness, in the absolute, in transcendence. They cling to bliss or peace or indifference. When the self-centered motivation for living disappears, many seekers become indifferent. They see the perfection of all existence and find no reason for doing anything, including caring for themselves or others. I call this taking a false refuge. It’s a very subtle egoic trap. It’s a fixation in the absolute and an unconscious form of attachment that masquerades as liberation. It can be very difficult to wake someone up from this deceptive fixation because they literally have no motivation to let go of it. Stuck in a form of divine indifference, such people believe they have reached the top of the mountain when actually they are hiding out halfway up its slope. Enlightenment does not mean one should disappear into the realm of transcendence. To be fixated in the absolute is simply the polar opposite of being fixated in the relative. With the dawning of true enlightenment, there is a tremendous birthing of impersonal love and wisdom that never fixates in any realm of experience. To awaken to the absolute view is profound and transformative, But to awaken from all fixed points of view is the birth of true non-duality. If emptiness cannot dance, it is not true emptiness. If moonlight does not flood the empty night sky and reflect in every drop of water, on every blade of grass, then you are only looking at your own empty dream. I say, wake up, then your heart will be flooded with a love that you cannot contain.” Nice, huh?

Gary: Yeah, the idea of dancing emptiness, which is how it’s thought of in one of his books, “The Emptiness Dance”, is very much that way, in my experience. It keeps dancing. He’s absolutely correct. I’m a big fan of his.

Rick: Yeah, me too.

Gary: After the page turned for me, I couldn’t find anybody that was saying anything that made any sense to me, that represented anything like what I was going through, and I went and heard him talk, and I said, “You know, he and I are crazy in exactly the same way. Maybe we’re both crazy, but he seems to be like I am. But the emptiness dancing thing is very much how it is. It’s emptiness, but the dance still continues. And I do see people exactly as he described. But I’ve challenged him. I say, “Well, what if I just do nothing?” I said, “Go ahead and do nothing. Go upstairs and lie in bed and just see there. See how long you can just lie in bed and do nothing. And watch what happens.” And he very quickly said, “Well, I tried it.” I said, “What happened?” “Well, I laid there for a little while, and then I saw my leg getting up and moving out of the thing, moving out of the bed, moving out of the…” You can just see whatever it is. The dance beginning. The dance just keeps moving you along. You don’t need to be in there to have the dance take place. In fact, they’re almost like two parallel paths. There’s this blah, blah going on, this identity, and it thinks it’s doing the thing. In fact, there’s a beautiful dance happening that it isn’t even present for. It doesn’t even know it’s aware of it. It is this emptiness dancing. It doesn’t need this narrator. We use this metaphor of a rider and an elephant. You’ve got this brilliant elephant going around doing a dance, an elephant dance. And on top of that, you’ve got this press secretary who’s running around talking about things and imagining it should be, “I’m this or I’m that, or I’m awakened or I’m not awakened.” It’s just a press secretary. It formulates a bunch of the, “Here’s how to solve this problem,” blah, blah, blah. Here’s a question to ask. Tell somebody else about the answer. But it’s just a press secretary. The press secretary somehow, and it’s only about 75,000 years old evolutionarily, this press secretary, the whole concept, we broke off from chimpanzees 6 million years ago.  It’s a very recent development, and it’s taken over. It was probably very useful for 30,000 or 40,000 years as we got more socialized and more complex work allocations and such. But now, it’s turned into a problem. It’s not helpful to most people. It’s really causing a lot of their problems. One of my speeches right now is, “We need a new operating system.” We’ve got Homo sapiens 1, which has been running for 75,000 years, and Homo sapiens 2, which is time for, with this reduced self-referential narrative which causes so much of our problems, we can just somehow get that reduced in intensity, stickiness, duration. We can live much happier lives. You don’t have to go where I am. To me, and maybe the only value I have, is saying, “Look, you can go all the way, and it’s not a bad place.” People start and say, “What if I end up with no thoughts?” I say, “Well, not a problem. Not a problem.” “What if I want to give up my this or that? I want to keep my car or my stock options or something.” “Fine, keep those things.” But recognize, every place that you’ve got an attachment, you’ve got an attachment you’re going to have suffering around that particular attachment. So the more you can get rid of those attachments, the less you will suffer. If you want to pick some things to suffer over and obsess over and enjoy and have pleasure in, fine. But you’re going to suffer there.

Rick: Well, obviously, and there’s a difference between having things and being attached to things.

Gary: Oh, absolutely.

Rick: You probably have a car, you still have daughters, maybe get together with them for Thanksgiving. You have a couch behind you there, stuff like that. So this whole notion that you have to give everything up or that you’re not going to be able to function, after you’re awakened, you continued for years, right? Performing very complex, demanding, responsible tasks.

Gary: Yeah, I mean, that’s one of the old Indian stories, is these two fakirs are on the beach and they’ve given up everything. All they have is their loincloths. The big argument ensues about whose loincloth is more special. My loincloth is less special than yours, so I’m further along than what you are. It’s not about that. It isn’t about letting go of having the thing. That’s too easy. It’s not that simple. Letting go of the attachment is so much more difficult than letting go of the thing itself. You can let go of it and still be deeply attached to it.

Rick: Yep. Then there’s that great Zen story about how an older Zen monk and a younger Zen monk are walking along and they come to a river or a stream and there’s this young pretty girl standing there and she can’t get across. So the older monk picks her up and they walk across. He puts her down and they keep on walking. A couple of hours ensue and finally the younger monk can’t stand it anymore. He says, “Monks, we’re not supposed to touch women. Why did you pick up that girl and carry her?” The older monk says, “Oh, are you still carrying her? I put her down a couple of hours ago.”

Gary: Exactly. That’s how it gets to be. You just don’t pick up anything and carry it around. If you pick her up and carry her, you put her down again. You don’t think about it for hours later. That’s the difference. Without that self-referential spin-off, you just don’t go back to her again.

Rick: I know you’ve correlated a lot of this understanding with the physiology in studying that. Have you heard that analogy that’s very handy about line on stone, line on sand, line on air, line on water, in terms of impressions? It really relates to the physiology. A physiology which is very rigid in its functioning and easily impressionable and holds on to impressions is perhaps correlated with the unenlightened state or the ignorant state, whereas enlightened physiology functions quite differently and experiences things very deeply and clearly and richly, but there’s no lasting impression. It just keeps moving on.

Gary: The biggest surprise for some people is that your pleasures are actually more acute. They’re actually much more powerful because you aren’t having a pleasure thinking about, “Is this as good as the last time I had this pleasure?” or “Should I get a better pleasure than this next time?” or “Can I be sure I can get this pleasure back again?” You’re just totally present for the pleasure.

Rick: And the senses are unencumbered. They’re not conditioned.

Gary: Absolutely. It’s a totally different, much more intense experience. And the amazing thing is that it’s lost and it’s over. It’s just gone.

Rick: It’s like using that analogy, you can pass your arm through air a lot easier than you can pass it through water, a lot easier than you can pass it through sand, a lot easier than you can pass it through stone. So if the nervous system is like air, using this metaphor, then the experiences can be very profound and deep and rich and all that, but again, there’s no attachment, no lasting impression.

Gary: There’s no big longing to get it back again and begin scheming about how to have it happen again. It was so fantastic. We spent our lives. Was it Lennon? I think it was Lennon who said, “Spend your life being someplace else.” You’re never here right now.

Rick: He said, “Life is what happens when we’re busy making other plans.”

Gary: Other plans. I didn’t pull it off yet. And that’s what it is. You’ll be sitting at the plate.

Rick: That was John Lennon, by the way, not Vladimir.

Gary: Oh, no, John Lennon. But you’re like that. You’re in the place you wanted to be. You’re on vacation. You’re with the right partner, with the right whatever. And you’re sitting there thinking, “Something else, some other plan. How do I get back to this? This is great. I’ve got to make sure she never leaves me.” Whatever it is, you’re just never there present. And it’s amazing when you relate to people and you are present for them. Because almost nobody is really with somebody fully. They’re off someplace else, someplace in their head. And that’s why the self-referential thought of not being there leaves you in now, now, now, because there’s nothing to pull you out of that space.

Rick: You’ve used the word “self-referential” a number of times. Could you elaborate a little bit on what you mean by that phrase?

Gary: Yeah, this is Ramana Maharshi. Ramana Maharshi put this out, “The Shield of the Eye.” What I’ve done is you can do little buckets, experiments with thought buckets. You can say, “Okay, we’ll do a three-minute experiment.” We have one bucket which has “I me my thoughts” in it. The other bucket has thoughts that don’t have an “I me my” in them, implicitly or explicitly. And we’ll just do three minutes and we’ll say, “Okay.” Which bucket is full? Sheepish grins on their faces. It’s all in the “I me my.” It’s all about me.

Rick: So that’s what you mean by self-referential, referring to the individual self.

Gary: You actually have this obsession with worrying about yourself, what’s going to happen to me, what’s in it for me. That’s what the whole business is about. So once you’ve got that, then you’ve got an angle of approach to these thoughts. You can say, “Okay, those self-referential ones, those are the ones that are causing the problem.” I can go after those.

Rick: I wonder because sometimes self-referential is used with reference to the big-S Self, so it has a completely different connotation.

Gary: A little s.

Rick: In that sense, it’s a positive thing because if one is self-referential with reference to the big-S Self, then one is not object-referral in one’s orientation and life flows as we’ve been describing. In fact, it’s also a very creative way to be, being self-referential to the big-S Self. There’s a verse in the Gita where Krishna says, “Curbing back on myself, I create again and again.” Haven’t you found that when the awareness is settled and rested in the big-S Self, that there’s this sort of wellspring of creativity that you have at your disposal?

Gary: That was one of the really astonishing things that I found. I kept on working in big jobs and I got more big jobs after that, different complexity jobs. I just came off the Board of Trustees of the Regional Medical Center here, as Vice Chair. You’d read the exhibits ahead of time, all the things you were supposed to talk about and all the financials. You go to the meeting, you just be there and you’re very still and present and quiet. You don’t do anything, you’re just still on the meeting, just sitting there. And suddenly something just comes up out of no place, out of a deep stillness, something just emerges. And you just say it, “Oh, OMG, my God, that’s brilliant!” People look at you like, “Whoa, that’s incredible!” There’s no sense of authorship, you know you didn’t think it up, you didn’t create it. But just by being in that complete emptiness, the elephant offline high-speed processor, comes up with these solutions that are so much more elegant and so much more intelligent than I was, I am. And so people go, “He’s the smartest guy in the room!” And the other thing that happens is because you’re in the room, in the meeting, 100%. Nobody else is there 100%. Nobody else is there some fraction of that, some of the very small fraction of that. So not only are you present, but you’ve got this space out of which some unbelievable creative things can arise. If you talk to the big painters and the sculptors and the big athletes and the jazz musicians, they’ll say the same thing. I mean, their best efforts come out of this flow state, which Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi talked about, where you do have emptiness. You’ve got your skills in place, you know how to do this task, you get out of the way. And that’s where real art emerges, that’s where real music emerges, that’s where creativity happens, science happens there, big science happens there.

Rick: Yeah, it’s interesting to ponder this because when we talk about ultimate reality or what’s really going on, Everybody is in reality in that space of not being the doer, and it’s really cosmic intelligence, if we want to use that phrase, that’s doing everything, and we’re just little instruments of that. But most people regard their individual instrumentality, their small-s self, as the doer. So it’s a mistake of the intellect, it’s a mistaken identity kind of thing. But really that’s what’s going on, and so it’s interesting to kind of just play with this, because what you’re saying is the fulfillment of that bumper sticker, “Let go and let God.” You’ve finally become a fit vehicle through which that much more vast intelligence can function.

Gary: It’s like the old Rumi quote about “I’m just a reed through which the wind blows.”

Rick: Beautiful.

Gary: And it’s very much that sense of, I tell people, I look out, I gave some talks in Europe last week, and tell people, “Look, I look out and I see just the self, I see a her,” I use it, “a her,” I like a “her” as a metaphor, I said, “It’s just her dancing, everything that you see is just her dancing, everything is just her dancing, there’s nothing that isn’t her dancing. Some of you think you’re doing this thing, you’re just making it complicated and difficult for yourself. It’s just a dance that she is articulating, she’s moving, she’s the actors, she’s the play, she’s the playwright, she’s the director, she’s the music, she’s everything. You just let go into that space, and I tell people, you can’t believe how beautiful and how freeing it is to let go into that space. There’s another beautiful verse, “ananyāśh chintayanto māṁ ye janāḥ paryupāsate  teṣhāṁ nityābhiyuktānāṁ yoga-kṣhemaṁ vahāmyaham,” how much says it, you probably know this verse. It says, “As you surrender unto me, as you become me, you will find that I will take care of everything you need, I will preserve what you have.” And I have found so much that to be a confirmation of the path, that the more I surrendered, the more I felt something was holding me. And I didn’t really have any reason to think that, but I surrendered more, I was held more. Ajahn Chah has a good quote on this, the same way. When you surrender completely, you find out you’re totally held. It’s hard to imagine, hard to believe, when you first hear that Gita verse, you think, “Oh, it’s just philosophical BS.” But it really has turned out to be my direct experience. The more you let go, the more it’s obvious you’re held, and it seems like the more you are supported moving forward.

Rick: It’s beautiful. It’s a good sales pitch for this, to use a correct…

Gary: No, no, it’s my direct experience. I’ve done nothing else.

Rick: Yeah, for people who think they’re going to lose something, or their life is going to become sterile or weird, or this sort of impersonal thing that we allude to means they’re just going to be a colorless blob of some sort. All those notions are dispelled by what you just described. And by that beautiful Gita verse. That was a great one.

Gary: Yeah, and it’s so beautifully rich. One thing that does happen, also I didn’t expect, was that we have found, and these are anecdotal now, trying to compare why I stay in this space, others are staying in this space now more and more, you say, “Well, don’t you get pulled out by X, Y, or Z?” I say, “Well, let’s talk about that.” And so I ask people at work, “Let’s look at your typical dual experience, your typical life experience, sex, drugs, and rock and roll.” And rock and roll, what would be this stillness space? And so I say, “Okay, these men and women have been in this rock and roll space for some period of time.” Not continuous, but for some days, weeks, and some through an entire work day, or maybe even a month. And so I say, “Okay, well, compare how you felt pleasure-wise in that space to how you felt with psychedelics.” Many people are big psychedelic users. Or sex, to your normal state. And to the person. Rock and roll was highest, and psychedelics was second, and sex was third. And your typical dual state was fourth, down low. So, as the Buddha had said, if it weren’t that way, nobody would be meditating. If sex were 16, and everything else was no higher than 7, it would be the end of meditation. But that’s not the way it is. And these people are all reporting the same thing. Rock and roll is better than sex and drugs.

Rick: I mixed you up by throwing in rock and roll. There was that 60s phrase, “Sex, drugs, rock and roll.” But by rock and roll, in this sense, you’re alluding to the experience of pure being, right? The absolute.

Gary: Yeah, and that pure being state is sweet. It isn’t like you fall into a void.

Rick: It’s Ananda.

Gary: Yeah, exactly, and the Heart Sutra is often translated as, Srimad-Bhagavatam often treats you as being some kind of an awful, dark, void, unknown, “Eww.” And it’s nothing but that. It’s really such a remarkably sweet space, I call it “emptiness” or “empty fullness.” You can’t imagine bringing anything in that would improve it, or taking anything out of it that would improve it. It’s just so sweet.

Rick: There’s a verse, you may know the Sanskrit, I don’t know it, but it’s “Contact with Brahman is infinite joy.”

Gary: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah, so this bears emphasis for a number of reasons. Firstly, it explains why we’re drawn to it, and why it’s possible to go in that direction. It explains why you did spiritual practice for X number of years, even before your awakening, because whether you knew it or not, there was some deeper sweetness that was drawing you, that was attracting you. And also, I have a friend, Francis Bennett, you may have watched my interview with him, and at a certain point he was getting a lot of flack on Facebook, because he kept talking about bliss, and how blissful this state is. And people were sort of, kind of like, fundamentalist non-dualists, who obviously hadn’t really studied non-dualism, were getting on his case for that, because what is all this talk of bliss? It’s just the bliss denotes some kind of relative pleasure or something, but it’s beyond that.

Gary: Absolutely. And one thing we’re kind of pondering, or trying to come up with a solution right now, is how does the brain do this? How do we have 16, 17 hours a day of bliss? Because most experiences, pleasure experiences, are much shorter than that.

Rick: Not 24? How about during sleep?

Gary: Well, that’s a lot of discussion.

Rick: Bliss then too.

Gary: Bliss then too. But I was saying, just while you’re conscious, you can be conscious in sleep too, but just while you’re conscious, how does the brain manufacture enough dopamine or endogenous opioids to be able to support this thing? Somehow it does. We had a commenter, a woman from Hopkins, who’s doing a lot of psilocybin work, on a paper that talks about, okay, do we have endogenous opioids enough to keep this thing going all day long? Because somehow the brain, instead of the state being a still, flat place, if it sees things moving, it’ll stay attentive. If it isn’t moving, if there’s no stimulus being handled, then the brain gets… So there must be something that’s happening, and there is an aliveness, a presence of this space. In addition to this big sweetness and this great stillness internally, there is a great aliveness to, vitality and energy to, everything that you see. And so that appears to be enough, or what keeps the brain engaged to keep supporting this thing. I think the brain, this is anthropomorphizing now, the brain likes this space. It likes this not being in chaos, not being in confusion, not being unhappy. It says, this is Krishnamurti, this is really a cool space. The brain likes it. You give enough pictures of this space, the brain will refunctionalize to support this. And it does.

Rick: Entrains or something.

Gary: It does.

Rick: Well, you know, depressed people manage to stay depressed for 24 hours a day more or less. The schizophrenics manage to stay crazy for 24 hours. The brain takes care of those things, so why shouldn’t it be able to manage to maintain bliss?

Gary: Give enough pictures of Maui, it will map out a route to Maui. You have no problem staying in Maui. It’s the only place where your pleasure place is. But the brain is, and most people I work with on this thing get further along, they say it’s obvious at some point that the brain is running the show. I mean, the brain has taken over. I guess, and that’s hopefully materialistic, but it’s just a way to talk about it so people can deal with it. That, you know, this is what is supported ultimately. I mean, this is what I believe we were meant to be, we were meant to do this thing. Or it wouldn’t be supported the way it is, it wouldn’t be the most desirable thing, it wouldn’t be something this transceiver brain of ours could functionalize into. I mean, to me, I think we’re just reconnecting with the infinite. There’s a lot of stuff out now, you’ve heard a lot of this from folks you know, about, you know, there is an infinite field, there is an infinite all-pervasive field. We do not know for certain if it’s intelligent, but we know that every, we deconstruct ourselves down to the finest, we’re just energy patterns. And there’s a huge field, Higgs field, dark energy, call it what you want to call it, that penetrates everything. It’s all through the books, but it’s also what we’re seeing in physics now. What we don’t know is that self-aware and this is intelligent. If it’s intelligent, it’s a lot smarter than I am. So, it’s unlikely we’ll be able to be as smart to understand it, and even from a physical standpoint, we can’t stand outside of it. I mean, if it penetrates us completely, we cannot get a space away from it to be able to look back on it, to be able to talk about it.

Rick: But it can know itself.

Gary: It can know itself, and that’s what we think it is. We think it is knowing itself.

Rick: And there’s the higher purpose, higher definition of the term self-referral. And the Gita, there’s a verse, “The self realizes itself by itself,” some such thing. And regarding the intelligence point that you make, I love that idea. I mean, pretty much all day long, when I’m not busy doing something else, I’m kind of marveling at the intelligence of nature. If I’m cutting the grass, it’s not like I’m thinking about it, but there’s just this sort of appreciation of how much intelligence is imbued in every particle of creation, every blade of grass, every leaf, everything. It’s like there’s this marvelous… It’s like we just kind of ignore it because we live our lives, but if you just contemplate for a moment what’s going on, on the molecular level, biological level, sub-atomic levels, everything is this orchestra of incredible intelligence and complexity. And you can deduce from that that there’s just this omnipresent ocean of intelligence.

Gary: Exactly. I agree with you. They say, “Well, the scientists become reductionist materialists, and you don’t see any beauty.” But the big scientists I know say, “On the contrary.” I mean, the deeper you go, the further you get, the more you’re just in awe.

Rick: Yeah, and the great ones. There’s great quotes from Einstein and Niels Bohr and people like that, who really appreciated that kind of stuff. And since we’re having a spiritual discussion here, it’s not impersonal intelligence, it’s God, and that’s ultimately what we are. I mean, the word “God” is not little old man in the sky with a beard. It’s that ocean of infinite intelligence that’s all-pervading.

Gary: Absolutely. And the conceptual relation to that is the problem. We have all kinds of the history of mankind, we have all kinds of strange ideas of what God might be, but when you get back to the deep end of the Upanishads and pull them out, I’m not pitching the Upanishads, you can pull out the Upanishads for a long time, but there was this sense that there is something that is penetrating everything, this basic intelligence that underlies all life. And we’re now beginning to curve back into that again with our physics and saying, “Yeah, it could be. It really could be.”

Rick: Yeah. Well, you’ve heard some of these physicists speak at the S.A.N.D. conference, Menas Kafatos and John Hagelin, these guys. There’s some great insights being proposed by these guys. Getting back to the point of bliss, one of Maharshi Mahesh Yogi’s favorite, one of the pillars of his teaching was that, firstly, nothing new. This is ancient Hindu teaching that the essence of life is bliss, Ananda. But he emphasized a lot that there’s a natural tendency built into us, natural tendency of the mind, we could say, to seek a field of greater happiness. And that’s how meditation ultimately works. The mind is allowed to discover or explore finer levels of experience, and in doing so, encounters greater happiness. And that’s what leads it on. That’s what motivates it to keep moving in that direction.

Gary: And we all have the experience that everybody runs around trying to fill up the space inside themselves. There’s a sense of an emptiness that I keep trying to get pleasures and jam them into this thing and make the emptiness go away. And I get the pleasures and I look at it and I say, “Oh, it’s still there.” And I get more pleasures and I think, “Oh, it’s still there. It hasn’t gone away.” And then we just never seem to think, until we do a lot of spiritual work, turn inside and look at that. Maybe it’s not horrible. We keep trying to fill it up. Maybe it may be really a sweet space. You consider the possibility and just begin looking deeper. As Maharshi Mahesh Yogi said, just start to go into that thing and begin to explore it. You find out, once you get past the initial noise levels, that it is an incredibly sweet space. And it keeps, this is Ramana now, it keeps pulling you in, deeper and deeper. No matter how hard you think you are trying to find it, it is trying so much harder to pull you in. And it just pulls you forward. You just let go, surrender, let go, do your thing, and move into that space. It is really pulling you into that space.

Rick: Yeah. And zooming out a bit here, what is this universe all about, after all? Why did these bodies evolve after billions of years? What is the purpose of it all? Seems to me it’s for, just my own world view on the thing, is just that Brahman wanted, he anthropomorphizes when you talk this way, but the sort of creative impulse that gave rise to the universe, it’s all well and wisely put, and it did so such that there could eventually evolve forms of life which could experience this as a living reality. So the reason I’m saying this is in reference to what you just said, that we’re fulfilling a cosmic purpose by doing this, by participating in this process. We’re kind of, in a way, fulfilling the purpose for which creation arose in the first place, which is this evolutionary adventure that has led us to the point where living, breathing life forms can talk about and experience that which preceeds and lies at the basis of the universe.

Gary: Yeah, and to me, it’s her learning about herself.

Rick: Exactly, so much better put.

Gary: She wants to learn about herself in every possible way. So why do I have all these different kinds of people and all these good things and bad things? She’s trying to learn about herself, and what we are, are just sensing exploratory pods on the infinite. And she’s going around testing, learning about this, learning about that, trying this out, trying that out, and as she does, she expands and knows more and more about herself. It can be Lila, it can be this divine dance for pleasure, but it can also be an exploration for her, trying to understand herself in so many different ways.

Rick: Beautiful. You put it much better than I did. To quote Saint Teresa of Avila, “It appears that God himself is on the journey.” Or we could say, “God herself.”

Gary: Exactly. God herself is on the journey. I hadn’t heard that quote. That’s absolutely it. She is the journey, she is dancing the whole thing, and she wants to understand better and grow.

Rick: Great. Let’s shift gears a little bit. In your book you talk a lot about Ramana Maharshi and a lot about the importance of practice. You yourself were and are a practitioner of many decades. I suppose you’re still doing some sort of practice, I don’t know. There are a lot of people who claim to be in the lineage of Ramana Maharshi, even though I’m not so sure he established the lineage, who de-emphasize practice, who say that it only reinforces the notion of a practicer, and who seem to represent him as not having advocated practice. But in your book you quote a lot of instances in which he recommended all sorts of different things to people.

Gary: Absolutely.

Rick: Tell us about some of that stuff.

Gary: This is one of the baseline themes of the Science and Theological Congress in Europe I spoke at, and was on two panels in. There were some neo-Advaitins, which is kind of a good word, bad word, but you talk to, who say this. Tony Parsons is one of the most prominent ones. He wrote a great book, As It Is was a great book. I listened to Tony, I talked to him, I’m a big fan of that understanding point. But disingenuously, he comes back and says, “Well, see, nothing you have to do, just be here.” Yes, but he had to do a lot of stuff. There’s a whole chapter in As It Is devoted to all the practices he did. So how could you possibly, and I asked him this point blank, one on three, I said, “Tony, how can you say this? You’ve got a whole chapter in your book devoted to your practices. How could you say walking across the park is what woke you up?” It wasn’t that at all. We know from tons and tons, Malcolm Gladwell’s book, there’s a lot of good research, I did a blog post on this, that mastery takes something like 10,000 hours, whether you’re playing golf or chess or rock climbing.

Rick: He cites the Beatles, having put in all that time in Hamburg, and Bill Gates having done all this programming time as a teenager.

Gary: The brain takes training.

Rick: Neuroplasticity.

Gary: Neuroplasticity. We know it, it’s well documented, we’ve had some great scientific research, even more than Gladwell’s book, the basis for Gladwell’s book, called Derrickson, that did all this research for it. No matter what you talk about, surgery, pick anything at all, it takes 10,000 hours to become really good at it. It doesn’t mean you don’t play the violin at all, at 100 hours, you can play something, but to get really good, you’ve got to practice 10,000 hours, roughly, on the violin. There are some Mozart’s, even Mozart’s, his dad was the number one teacher at the time, and so he came from a lineage, even the four year old, he’d been taught and taught and taught. He practiced and practiced and practiced. There aren’t many cases where somebody steps out of the stream of having done a lot of practice and to get to where they are.

Rick: So what did Tony Parson say when you asked him that?

Gary: He said, “I didn’t do that much,” and got up and walked away.

Rick: He did? He literally walked away?

Gary: He literally walked away.

Rick: Oh, man. In the middle of the forum?

Gary: No, no, no, we were out on a course. Oh, okay. This was in La Jolla at the Unidirection’s gathering. There were probably 300 people at the Art Institute there on the bluffs of La Jolla, and it was nice because you could have a break and the seekers would be out there and you could talk to them. Eckhart was walking around and Gangaji and all those people, and you could see them. Gangaji and Adyashanti. And Tony was right there. So the two people were sitting and talking, and I walked over and talked to him. I said, “Tony, there’s a question for you. I don’t understand.” And he jumped up and ran away.

Rick: Interesting.

Gary: I mean, there is that. People get the wrong message. This often happens, you know, in this game. They hear, “I don’t have to do anything,” when in fact it would be like saying, “I can get to the top of the high board at the Olympics, and I can just do the perfect double-twisting backflip with a knife.” And you can’t. You had to do a lot of work to get there. Cezanne says this, Matisse says this, the big jazz musicians say this. It’s all the same thing. Practice, practice, practice. Picasso, practice, practice, practice, practice. And then they’re in a transcendent space. But you have to do the brain training up front.

Rick: Yeah. Let’s play with this a bit more. Do you have any other – well, can you give us any theories as to why people say this? I have a few, but I’d like to hear yours first.

Gary: I have some cynical ones.

Rick: Yeah, I have a few of those too. But why do you think?

Gary: Well, I mean, they are speaking. I mean, people like – I have no doubt Tony Parsons knows. He really speaks very clearly. He does understand the space. He talks about it. But they are – and Poonjaji also speaks of the same thing. There’s nothing you have to do to practice.

Rick: And he did tons of practice.

Gary: But he did tons and tons and tons and tons and tons of practice. And then he was the one saying, “Call off the search.”

Rick: Right. His viewpoint, that’s true.

Gary: And perhaps – and this happens – your memory of those old things fade. Not just they fade normally for people, but in fact it seems to be with this kind of situation of losing this eye, much of the eye, that you lose a lot of episodic autobiographical memories. And so they probably can’t even remember what it was like.

Rick: Or it might be – yeah, I think that’s probably true. And it may also be that you’re just living in that state. You can see that it’s uncaused and unconditioned and independent of anything anyone could do. Kind of like the sun. I mean the sun is always shining. And it really doesn’t matter to the sun that there’s clouds down there or not. But for someone on the other side of the clouds, it matters a whole lot because you’re not seeing the sun. And so wind is important maybe to blow away the clouds. That’s the practice there. And then once the sun realizes, “Oh, I’ve always been shining.” It’s like the whole issue of wind and clouds and all that must seem very distant and irrelevant.

Gary: Yeah, and it is. From the vantage point, further on out, you look back and say, “Well, why doesn’t anybody see these things?” It’s so close, it’s so obvious, it’s right here. How can you possibly miss this? It was there all along. It’s different when you can’t see it. When there’s a bunch of clouds in a way, you can’t see that. But it is so astonishingly self-evident, but not if you can’t see it.

Rick: A couple other ideas of why people might dismiss the relevance of practice, and these are along the more cynical varieties. One is, they’re just conceptualizing this thing. And if you conceptualize non-duality, if your whole appreciation of non-duality is as a concept, then your practice seems absurd. Why should you be sitting on your butt thinking a mantra or doing whatever you do when it’s all just one, and it’s already that, it’s always been that. But they’re not necessarily enjoying the living experience of it.

Gary: I had this great experience 25 years ago, and I read about non-duality for 25 years, and I’m now convinced I’m awake. It isn’t like that. There isn’t one experience that you…

Rick: He is not convinced or is now convinced?

Gary: He is now convinced. He had that experience 25 years ago, and he’s read about non-duality, so he must be non-dual. But he has no ongoing experience. He just has this memory of something from 45 years ago. I think there’s a lot of people who have had, many, many, many people have had non-dual experiences. But the question is, do they understand them, and can they make that a reality?

Rick: Is it sustained, regardless of whether you’re awake, asleep, watching a movie, falling off a bicycle? Is it sustained under all circumstances?

Gary: Exactly. If it isn’t, there’s a lot of fuss in some quarters about, “You must have this experience, then this experience, then this experience, then this experience.” I think that is really non-useful. I think that doesn’t help people at all, because there’s a lot of… We’ve talked about scripting a lot in this thing. If you tell somebody at the university, for example, that the answer on the test is 14, and they come back and you give them the test, they say, “Well, I’ve done 14.” We know how to do that. You have to be very careful working with people to not give them the answer in a way that they can give it to you without understanding it. That’s very important.

Rick: Yeah. There’s another reason I think that sometimes practice is poo-pooed, and that is that a person actually has never experienced an effective practice. Maybe they’ve tried something and it wasn’t very gratifying, so they say, “To hell with that. Practice is a waste of time.” But if you really experience an effective and gratifying sort of practice, you realize there’s really something to this.

Gary: How could you possibly practice as much as you do? I said, “I love it.” It’s the sweetest thing I can imagine. It’s just such a sweet place to be, even when I’m up before nap. It was a great part of my day. It was still, quiet. I loved doing yoga. I loved doing meditation. It was a sweet place. So you get to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s quote, “You do get sweetness along the way, and it pulls you into the practice.” If you’re really doing a good practice, it will get sweet with time. It will get better and better, and you will get pulled into this. That’s why people say, “Oh, I can’t even do practice.” You just haven’t done a practice to begin a good practice.

Rick: Yeah, it really works for you.

Gary: It really works for you.

Rick: He used to say, “The goal is all along the path.” He used to use these phrases, like the pathless path. He didn’t originate them, but he really liked those kinds of phrases. Because there’s gratification, there’s reinforcement, so to speak, at every stage of the game, if you’re actually proceeding effectively.

Gary: I’m very open about practices. I’ve written a book, and so I have many, many practices. When I start working with people, I say, “What do you want to do?” I say, “What works for you? What do you like to do?” Find something you love to do, and we’ll do it. If it’s chanting, if it’s asanas, if it’s breath work, if it’s self-inquiry, we’ll do that. They can find something they like to do, and it starts to be a sweet practice for them, and then they begin to pick it up and find something in this that really nourishes them.

Rick: In your book, when you were talking about Malcolm Gladwell and the 10,000 hours and all that, I actually got out the calculator and I thought, “How many…I’ve been meditating maybe on average of three hours a day for 45 years. What does that boil down to?” I thought, “This is about 50,000 hours maybe, which is six or seven years sitting on my butt with my eyes closed.”

Gary: But it’s not…you know very well. It’s not like you’re sticking pins in your eyes.

Rick: No, no. It’s like I would never have traded it for anything. Six or seven very delightful years, which were time well spent. What else am I going to do? I could have been watching movies or eating food, but it’s just a component of life. It becomes a component of life which is just as meaningful and as productive as anything you might be doing externally.

Gary: That’s right, and much richer, much more fulfilling. So you are getting feedback all along the line, even if there isn’t total awakening yet.

Rick: Now some argue that, “Okay, yeah, fine, but at a certain point you should drop practice.” A friend of mine went to see Pamela Wilson and she somewhat proudly said, “I’ve been meditating for 20 years now,” and Pamela said, “Oh, you poor soul. Let me help you.” I kind of understand where Pamela is coming from and where my friend is coming from because at a certain point one can become so well established that practice becomes irrelevant. But there was something in your book on page 72, which I thought was kind of nice, that pertains to this. You said, “A famous dialogue between a 20th century Zen master and his student addresses this issue. The student wrote, ‘Truly I see that there are degrees of depths in enlightenment.’ The master replied, ‘Yes, but few know this significant fact.’ Their discussion goes on to describe in classical Zen fashion and metaphors what those stages are. The Zen master states that what these people, contemporary Zen teachers, fail to realize is that their enlightenment is capable of endless enlargement.” And you say these are virtually the exact words used by Adyashanti. You go on to talk about it a bit more. Endless enlargement. Let’s talk about that a little bit.

Gary: I was fortunate. My first yoga teacher’s training class, of course, was with Amrit Desai. I think you recall him. I was just getting started.

Rick: Yeah, I’ve interviewed him.

Gary: It was a very different practice back then. It was a different person back then. But to me that was really surrender. The idea is to get energy into your body and then let your body do what it needs to do. The body has great wisdom. So it was a good practice to learn how to surrender, sensation by sensation. That’s been something that’s been really important. Now when I do my “practice,” I just come down in the mornings, my usual time more or less, and just come there, sitting quiet. And then something manifests. It can be sitting meditation, it can be chanting, it can be chanting and sitting, it can be pranayama, and an asana practice will happen. And the asana practice will be whatever the body finds itself moved to do at that particular time. So there is a holistic, natural unfolding out of emptiness of what the body is going to do to work on this now. And it does really feel as if this process which you believe couldn’t get any deeper, it does get more and more still, deeper and quieter and more sweet. It does get deeper and deeper and deeper. To Harada Roshi’s quote, “It does enlarge and enlarge and enlarge.” And without a doer. If you bring a doer in, you’re going back in their direction. You start giving out rewards for having achieved levels, you’re going in their direction. But without a doer, this thing spontaneously, naturally unfolds and she’s just dancing the body through whatever she wants to do that day to do the next step of the awakening process.

Rick: Yeah, and so that answers the question people might be asking at this point. Well, if this guy has realized, why does he sit down and do a practice? Why does he chant? Why does he do asanas? Why does he meditate? Or whatever. And you just answered it, because it seems to be able to enlarge all the more.

Gary: Yeah, and I was anti-Sanskrit. Gary Kraftsow, a buddy of mine, one of the big yoga teachers, tried to get me to learn Sanskrit for a long time. And I was, “Oh no, no, I don’t need that.”

Rick: Not an easy language to learn.

Gary: Not an “Oh no, get away, hide away.” And then after the page turned, I found myself. People said, “Well, is there anybody else that’s ever done this? Is there any text talks about this, any ancient texts?” I said, “I don’t know, I’ll go look.” And the only thing I could find that really spoke to it was Ramana Maharishi’s teachings and the Gita. And the Gita to me was so beautiful, that I just found myself being drawn into learning Sanskrit. So I took a bunch of Sanskrit courses, and I’ve got a book coming out. I’m not saying this is in the book pitch, but I’ve got a book coming out now, with 60 selected verses that are in Devanagari, and transliterated, translated and commentary, on the Gita. Because the Gita is such a powerful, beautiful thing to chant. And the more you learn the Sanskrit, the more you get to really, like with good poetry, you get to feel what’s underneath and within the words, more than just the translation of them. So to me, I love Sanskrit. I do a lot of chanting with the people I work with. They love to do it. It’s sweet.

Rick: You probably know this, but for the sake of the listeners, it’s said that in Sanskrit there’s a one-to-one correlation between the sound quality of the words and the forms to which they correspond. Whereas in English, let’s say the word “apple”, the actual vibratory quality of the sound “apple” may not correspond to the vibratory quality of an apple itself. But in Sanskrit, there’s supposed to be that correlation. And so by chanting Sanskrit shlokas, you’re actually evoking an influence, or creating an influence, by virtue of the sound quality of those words.

Gary: Yeah, even if without a little imagination, you can look at the Sanskrit, the Devanagari characters. The characters actually look like how you make those sounds. If you look very carefully and look how you make those sounds, Sanskrit is the most… if a scientist were designing a language, it would be Sanskrit. It’s exactly, precisely, intelligently constructed around five different places you can make sounds, six or eight different ways you can make a sound. Everything flows scientifically and logically to what they came up with. It’s a beautifully tight language.

Rick: Yeah. So just to wrap up a point we were just discussing a minute ago, in your own experience, you feel that there’s an ongoing… what was the word we used? Enlargement or deepening or refinement or something. There’s some kind of growth taking place, despite the fact that there was this threshold you crossed. And once having crossed, there was some kind of sameness to the fundamental nature of your experience. I’m putting words in your mouth, but you can elaborate. So in other words, that which you essentially know yourself to be, can’t be enhanced any or made more shiny or something. But somehow the embodiment of it, the fullness with which it is being appreciated or expressed, knows no end to development. Is that true to say?

Gary: That’s correct, even materialistically. We have 50 trillion synaptic interconnections, 50 trillion. Those can all be nodes for passing information or storing memories. If only 10% of those have to do with this “I need my thing”, you’ve still got 5 trillion of these things to unwind. It’s a good thing they don’t unwrap all at once. I think that’s what’s happening. The brain is cleaning out, getting this like riding a bicycle. The more times you ride the bicycle, the tighter that network gets to be, the less energy it consumes. I think the brain goes around, and you’ll be sitting for a long time, and there’ll be some little memorable pop-up from long, long, long ago. You say, “Where is that?” It pops up. There’s nothing to trigger, it just pops up. And so you just don’t take a flipper in a package and the thing goes away. It doesn’t come back again usually. And you say, “Well, how did that possibly happen? That’s been so long ago.” It didn’t even matter, even then. But I think the brain goes around, this is more pleasant again, hunting for places that are not being used. The brain is very parsimonious, so it goes around and finds this. Here’s an old thing over here that you’re not using anymore. Do you care about this? And nobody takes a flipper in the package. There’s nobody that cares about the package anymore, so it opens up. It’s vacated, nobody wants it, so it just goes away. I’m just guessing now how this increased deepening goes, but it does get deeper and deeper and richer. It can’t go any deeper, and it gets more and more still. Yeah, that’s one thing I would conclude from having interviewed 180 people. I don’t think I’ve talked to anybody yet who is not still getting deeper or kind of developing in some way, even though a few of them denied it when I asked them that question. I suspect that if I talk to them ten years from now and ask them the question again, they’ll say, “Well, sure enough, there’s actually been some development.”

Gary: Absolutely. There’s an awful lot of brain circuitry that gets rewrapped and repurposed.

Rick: Yeah, which to me is not at all a discouraging notion. It’s exciting. It’s like, “Cool, let’s keep exploring.”

Gary: Absolutely, and she keeps learning about herself, and she keeps going in that direction. But it keeps it vibrant. Almost every day something will feel like it’s… something shifts just a little bit. Another key in the lock just turns a little bit. Some other door you didn’t know was the door, opens. You didn’t know why it opened, but something just goes click. You just don’t know what it is or why it is or how it is, but something changed. A lot of explorers like Lewis and Clark, when they finished their big exploration, their lives really went to crap because they didn’t have that sort of adventure anymore.

Gary: That’s the great thing about the way this thing comes out. It stays such a beautiful exploration. You just keep… every day is a delight. Every day is just fantastic. It gets sweeter and sweeter. It’s just such a beautiful thing to do.

Rick: Was it you that quoted Pablo Casals in your book about… he was in his 90s and he was still practicing, and someone asked him, “Why are you in your 90s? Why are you still practicing?” He said, “Well, there’s room for me to improve.”

Gary: Absolutely, absolutely. There’s nothing you have to do. Look at the great artists, the really magnificent artists, Cezanne, Picasso, Casals, and those people. They keep going. They don’t step back and say, “I’ve painted four or five good pictures. I’m done now.” It’s not like that. The really great ones keep on going because it’s such a delight for them. It’s an exploration.

Rick: I’m kind of presuming here, but I think if you had a conversation with Papaji or Ramana Maharshi or Nisargadatta or some of these guys on this point and really got into it, they would concur with what we’re saying.

Gary: Oh, absolutely. Manas said, for all of his way, his path, when he said, “Perseverance. It’s all about perseverance. The successful few owe their success to their perseverance.” It is just you keep on, because the practice is not complicated, it’s not hard, but it requires perseverance. You have to keep going back and going back and going back.

Rick: Are you aware of anything that Ramana might have said about his own experience in terms of its ongoing deepening or enlargement?

Gary: I don’t recall anything. I’ve read a ton of his stuff. As the story goes, when he was 16, one of his relatives died. He laid down in his uncle’s place where he was staying and visualized himself dying. Out of that came this great awakening.

Rick: It was a trigger for him.

Gary: It was a trigger for him. As well as that, there’s an example. He had no teacher. Interestingly, Ramana Maharshi, the only spiritual teaching he had was the Psalms and Gospels, the Christian Psalms and Gospels. He had read the lives of some Shiva saints. That was all he had when he woke up. His mom sent him off to Scott’s Middle School, and they taught English. He was supposed to learn English. That’s all he knew, the Psalms and Gospels, when he woke up. He maintained later, “I never learned anything out of the text. People come and ask me questions subsequently, being 35, 40 years, but I learned all my stuff from people asking me questions about it.”

Rick: Because the questions evoked some knowledge to come forth from him.

Gary: He’d say, “Here’s a Gita verse. Tell me the Gita verse.” He’d say, “What does Gita verse mean?” He’d say, “Well, it means this.” He’d say, “Well, that’s great. That’s what it means. That’s even better than what I read it was meant.” A lot of this stuff was evident to him as an answer. But as far as no practice, he was in Virupaksha Cave for 17 years.

Rick: Yeah, there’s practice for you.

Gary: The first 10 years of it, he was in complete silence. Not because he was in Mauna, which is a forest-style silence, but he was just in there, just absorbed in this thing, and I’m guessing trying to work it out. He did not talk about the details of what he did, but he talked about how he was in deep absorption, and he was trying to work this thing through. So there was 10 very intense years, and then 7 more years in Virupaksha Cave, according to Dr. Hill, that he was doing incredibly intense practice.

Rick: I wonder if even as an old man, if he ever spoke about or would have spoken about ongoing enrichment of his experience, or if there’s a point at which, in someone like him, it really does come to a terminus.

Gary: I don’t know.

Rick: I don’t know. I’m curious to know. I suspect not, but I’m just curious if you knew any quotes about it.

Gary: I don’t recall any.

Rick: There’s another thing in your book that’s a little bit out of context, what we’ve been talking about here, but I think it was in the latter part where you had some Sanskrit verses and commentaries and translations on them. But you spoke about not undertaking an action with a goal. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I kind of took exception to that, because there’s that verse in the Gita which says, “You have control over action alone, never over its fruits.” I thought of an example, like let’s say I want to go on a trip, and so that’s my goal, and I sit down and I research plane tickets, and I book a flight, and so on. Those are all actions with a goal. But then let’s say the day of the trip I come down with a really bad flu and I can’t go, so I lose the money because it’s a non-refundable ticket, and so on and so forth. So I had no control over the fruits of the action or the consequences which resulted in my cancellation, but I definitely was motivated by a goal in setting up the flight in the first place. So it seems like we do have goals and we don’t just do things without any reason whatsoever, but it’s the fruits we have no control over.

Gary: Well, that’s karma yoga. The whole chunk of the Gita on karma yoga is exactly that. You show up, you chop wood, you carry water, but you’re not attached to the fact that you are doing the chopping or you are carrying the water, nor do you get upset because the pile is only this big or not that big. You just keep chopping wood and carrying water.

Rick: Yeah, nor do you know how things are going to turn out. I mean, all the things we do, we do them for a purpose. It’s not like there’s no purpose in what we attempt to do, but we really have no control over the outcome.

Gary: People ask me, “Should you make lists?” I say, “Sure, if you want to make lists, make lists.” I just recognize that what it will do is it will take that out of the brain’s concern. In the brain, it gets excited about, “Oh, we have these six things to do. We have to go to Denver or something.” And so you make the plans to go to Denver. Like as you say, you make the plans to go to Denver, but they may not work out. You go down this path to go to Denver, but you may find out that in fact it’s not going to work out. And you just let go of that. You just let go. So that was more the karma yoga part of it. And there are some great Gita verses towards the end, 18, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, where it’s, “You’re not in control.” Totally not in control. They’re beautiful verses, and I’ve got a video of them on YouTube. But it’s really taught in yad ahankāram āśhritya na, “yad ahankāram āśhritya na yotsya iti manyase mithyaiṣha vyavasāyas te prakṛitis tvāṁ niyokṣhyati,” which says, “Even though you resolve, I will not fight.” The resolution is insane, because you will find you will do exactly as you’re supposed to do. And the next three or four verses are the same tenor. It’s really that you may believe you’ve made a plan to do this, and you absolutely will not do anything except this, but you’ll find yourself doing something else.

Rick: Yeah. And Krishna says, “I’ve already killed all these people.”

Gary: Exactly, they’re already dead. Don’t worry about it. It’s already in the bag. So you’ve made references a bit to neurophysiological research, and so on and so forth. Is that a focus of yours? I somehow am aware, but only vaguely, that you’ve really made a study of this, a lot more than we’ve actually discussed in this interview.

Gary: I got put into a bunch of studies.

Rick: As a subject?

Gary: As a subject.

Rick: I see.

Gary: And I ended up being a collaborator as well. One that’s ongoing is the one at Yale, which is looking at long-term meditators. The study that was published was 10,000-hour Theravadans, Jud Brewer’s paper. And it was very useful in that it showed what centers get deactivated with long-term meditation, what centers get up-activated. That there was perhaps a controlling, a watching and control network activated to be able to watch over this shutdown, default mode network that supported this ongoing state. So I was in that study and keep collaborating with those guys. I’ll see Jud this Thursday. To me, there’s great value in it, because you’re just a reductionist materialist, you’re just trying to make this thing all into cognitive neuroscience. I say, “No.” But the more we can understand about what we can understand, the more you make that easier. I mean, if the brain is just a transceiver, And we understand how it operates, we can make practices more easily get into other modes. We can understand what are useful practices, what are not useful practices, what might work, what might not work. And many people now insist on knowing that there’s some scientific basis behind things. I mean, it can’t just be me reciting the Gita to them. Some like that, I don’t want to say, “I want to know, give me some reference papers, peer-reviewed papers.” And that’s what I did for a living. I did that for a living for decades. I generated research, launched a property, wrote papers. That’s what many people did. I know that world, and so we’re kind of trying to say, “Okay, how much can we learn from science to inform our practices, and what’s happening to us, so we can steer better other people down this thing and save them a lot of time?”

Rick: That’s great. I have that orientation too, having had a TM background. Maharishi was really big on research, and here in Iowa, there’s a whole group of people, Fred Travis, who’s doing neurophysiology of higher states and so on. I’m not in the TM movement anymore, but I think that it’s a valid issue, because it can cut through a lot of crap, I think. If neurophysiological parameters of enlightenment could be established, then you could separate fantasy from real attainment, and it could really lead to a much deeper appreciation or understanding of how we’re wired and what the potential for human life is. They are beginning to see, and you probably know this from your circles of study, that the brain of a person who’s been meditating for a long time, or who’s awakened in however we define it, functions radically differently than the ordinary brain.

Gary: Yeah, and the one caveat or just a footnote, I’ve had a very difficult time getting the major traditions to come and talk and lay out, “OK, let’s talk about a secularized, scientifically based definition of awakening.” How would we define that? I’ve done five studies now. I mean, we can write down a lot of the things that are necessary, but maybe not sufficient. We can at least start talking about what might be a neuroscientifically based understanding of awakening. Nobody wants to touch it.

Rick: Why?

Gary: If you were a Rinpoche, and somebody said, “Crawl into that fMRI there, we’re going to see if you’re really awakened or not.” Not going to happen.

Rick: Because he’s afraid that he might not be by that.

Gary: Yeah, exactly, by that. And if you look at talks of Tibetans, I’m just picking on them, I’m just doing numbers, there are many things there that are scientifically not verifiable. I mean, in my humble opinion, they’re religious. I’m not going to take that’s what religions do. But if you want to try to say, “Can we make this clean, scientifically secular?” And admit that at least these things are common, and maybe some other things are non-common. Can get no traction on that discussion.

Rick: Interesting. I mean, sure, let’s say you look at a rose, and it’s a beautiful experience. And then you’re hooked up to an EEG machine while you’re looking at the rose. The little squiggles on the EEG paper are a pretty poor substitute for the actual experience of the rose. So, scientific measurement is really comparatively crude compared to the sophistication of our subjective experience. But nonetheless, I think that it is the language of the age, so to speak, scientific measurement and so on. And personally, I think these guys should embrace the enthusiasm, the opportunity, to try to bridge the two worlds and to have the two world views understand each other. I don’t know.

Gary: I absolutely agree, because there’s so much vested interest in things as they are. And so much fear that things might not be as they are if we really get science into this thing. It harkens back to the Catholic Church taking 350 years to recognize Galileo. Might have been right after all.

Rick: Yeah. I think they just apologized a few years ago.

Gary: Yeah, exactly. It wasn’t long ago. Well, yeah, yeah. We have to somehow, and I think people are going to demand that there be some scientific basis for some of this stuff, or they aren’t going to buy it. And I think the brilliance that Jon Kabat-Zinn did with mindfulness meditation was to make it secular. It made it so much more accessible to different kinds of people. But you’ve got to allow science in some place. It’s a great thing Maharishi Mahesh Yogi did, because he was after science, that we have to understand this thing scientifically.

Rick: Yeah, and they published. I mean, there’s a certain amount of propaganda, motivation in that research, but there’s a lot of legitimate research by some pretty serious guys, and several hundred of these peer-reviewed studies that have been done. I think that’s good. I think it not only helps the understanding of the scientific world, but I think that the spiritual world has something to gain from it, because there’s such a kind of a vague understanding. You just don’t see a clear-cut understanding in any of the traditions, at least I, from my perspective, don’t, of what the range of possibilities is, and whether this tradition concurs with that tradition. I mean, is it all different, or are there really milestones on the path to higher consciousness that all traditions would agree on if they could speak the same language, and if there could be some physiological corroboration of what was going on? It’s not happening right now.

Gary: It’s not happening, and there’s a lot of, I mean, I won’t go through it, but there’s a lot of resistance from the institutions. And you just try to get somebody who’s way up the food chain in one of the big traditions to come in line fMRI. It’s not going to happen.

Rick: Ah, well, well, they’ll die off.

Gary: Einstein said that too, “Physics advances by funerals.”

Rick: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, in light of this, one other thought that fascinates me is just the notion that this nervous system we have is actually the ultimate scientific tool. It’s the ultimate telescope, microscope. It’s far more sophisticated than any physical tool that man has been able to build, and you can actually use it in accordance with the same scientific principles As you would use a microscope and a telescope and a particle accelerator and so on and apply the sort of criterion of the scientific method to spiritual exploration using this as the instrument.

Gary: Absolutely. And that’s where the next journey is. That’s where the current journey is, it’s going to be for quite a while, is doing exactly what you said, using all the tools that we have internally, with this beautiful machine we have, to explore this inner space.

Rick: Yeah. And so this has implications for the whole science versus religion, materialism versus spirituality debate. The materialist’s insistence upon scientific procedure can be satisfied using the instrument of… I mean, you can take a hardcore atheist, let’s say, and give him certain practices, if he’s willing to participate, and have him practice them for X amount of time, and let’s see what he discovers, let’s see if his atheism changes by virtue of discovery of a spiritual dimension.

Gary: Exactly. If you go down this path, if you give him to do this for very long, he would get to an OMG experience, he would get to a “What is this? I don’t know what this is, this is not my normal experience.” And it’s this great vastness that comes upon him, where he’s like, “I don’t know what this is, but it’s not what I thought I was.” And out of that comes a whole different, from the roots, understanding of what spirituality is about.

Rick: And of course that’s helping with psychedelics. I mean, there have been people who have been atheist materialist types that have dropped acid or something, and a whole new world has opened up for them. It might be a little bit harder to get them to sit down and do a regular meditation practice, but the principle is the same, nonetheless.

Gary: Well, in Hopkins right now, they’re starting a study on psilocybin, magic mushrooms, plus or minus meditation, beginning and advanced meditators. And that’s the kind of stuff that will begin to tease out, OK, is there something useful here within psychedelics that can make this path easier and faster? And anecdotally, it appears as if people have done psychedelics, I’m a complete virgin again, as if it does make the path easier. We don’t know why that might be the case, and I know there are some people strongly opposed to even talking about that, but it does appear to be that that may make the trip faster. And some people, as I say, who would never touch this stuff, have a psychedelic experience and recognize that their brain, that this reality is not really real the way they thought it was. And it really is a brain-constructed system, and it’s subject to modification and re-understanding.

Rick: Oh yeah, I dropped acid when I was 17, and that was the big wake-up for me. I was still a totally confused, messed-up kid, but I was just hit so clearly with the realization that it all depends on your perspective. Not everyone sees the same world, and the whole game is to alter your ability to perceive the world. Not to just rearrange external circumstances, but to change your consciousness, change your perspective. And I could never forget that.

Gary: Yeah, absolutely. That’s the common report from people I run across who do psychedelics, there’s a lot of them, is exactly that. I thought the world was real, but I see now it’s just a perceptual illusion. It’s just the way my brain arranged these things to represent them to me, but it’s not real. It’s not real in that sense.

Rick: Yeah, and on the other hand, I would say that, at least my opinion is, that once you’ve gotten that message, it may be time to drop the psychedelics, because they’re not a long-term solution to really altering your perspective.

Gary: Yeah, and I’m open to being contradicted, but I’ve not met anybody who’s gone all the way on psychedelics.

Rick: Right.

Gary: And I’ve met many people, one fellow in particular, I won’t mention his name, but I was with him and done a Yucatan in ’12, ’12, ’12, at a thing, and he’s done literally thousands of acid trips, and he’s done them with high levels, 300, 400, big numbers of such. He’s still stuck. He’s still…

Rick: Yeah, and how did he strike you as being… Did he seem to have a few neurons fried there?

Gary: He’s not so much fried. I mean, he’s very lucid. He’s kind of a rock star in the “Who can take on the psychedelics” world. He’s written a book, he gets interviewed a lot. And I said, look, you’re caught in a loop here. You’ve developed this fantastically powerful ego, who is identified now as being the psychedelic king. And this thing of you trying to die over and over again. You’ve died now thousands of times, but you’re not dying at all. You just haven’t let go of your egoic identity. Until you let go of your egoic identity, you’re going to keep doing loops for another thousand hits of acid. He just is stuck there. Too bad.

Rick: Was he open to that message? Well, no.

Rick: Another thing I throw in here is that I have a young friend who grew up as a meditator basically since early childhood and was having marvelous experiences. And then in her early 20s, maybe late teens, took ayahuasca, and it really put her over the edge. She’s been in and out of mental hospitals ever since. So I would be very, very cautious and would advise caution to anyone considering experimenting with this stuff. The brain is a very delicate instrument, and it’s sort of a crapshoot taking this stuff.

Gary: Absolutely. And ayahuasca is very much in vogue right now. But as people all know, composition is a highly variable, concentration is highly variable. A lot of additives in some of the brews that are very dangerous. And cautionary tale, Hopkins is very, very careful in their psilocybin research. Psilocybin is chemically pure. They know what they’re doing. They have trained facilitators. They screen people ahead of time. They do follow-up. They have doctors standing by, evening and day. You need to be very careful.

Rick: Yeah. One of Maharishi’s teachers, who’s a great sort of Shankaracharya of Jyotirmath in India, Gesundheit, his kind of catchphrase was “safety first”.

Gary: Yeah. And Ramana did not endorse psychedelics. There was a lot of ganja around at the time, at least that part of India. And he said, “You don’t see anything. You’re not going anyplace with this stuff. It’s not going to lead you to the end.” So there was no psilocybin or anything, but they had that around.

Rick: Right. Yeah. So it’s worth touching on that. One final point I have in my notes, and you mention Sindhis in your book, and how you spontaneously began to develop some Sindhis at a certain point. I believe you were mainly referring to just a sort of remarkable fulfillment of desires. You would have a desire for something and it would fulfill. Is that the sort of thing you were talking about? Or did you discover you had the strength of an elephant or something?

Gary: No, I didn’t have elephant strength. It was amazing how you could get what you wanted.

Rick: Yeah.

Gary: You really could get anything you wanted. And the good news/bad news was that once you got anything you wanted, you found that it wasn’t such a great a thing after all and didn’t want it anymore, which was a real teaching in the end. And you also saw yourself getting trapped into, “Oh, I can do this.” It’s very hard to have the Sindhis, exercise them, and not get trapped into an egoic ownership of them.

Rick: Was it happening spontaneously that you were getting what you wanted, or were you doing something to make it happen?

Gary: I can do something to make it happen.

Rick: Okay. Now even now, do you find that you tend to get what you want?

Gary: But there’s no need to get anything.

Rick: It’s spontaneous now, right?

Gary: Yeah, I’ve completely let go of the whole siddhi. I just let go of that. But it wasn’t moving things forward. But as far as get what I want, I don’t want it.

Rick: Yeah, but you still must have desires and intentions. You’re interested in scientific research, you travel places, you want to meet people. You have a normal life on the surface anyway. Do you find that desires are fulfilled much more effortlessly than they might have been 20 years ago?

Gary: I honestly don’t have them. I’ve been astonished what happens. As far as the research stuff and the people I’ve met, if I go back two years, I had no desires of any kind about any of this stuff. But amazingly, stuff has manifested, astonishing stuff has manifested. People I couldn’t have imagined I would ever meet have just appeared. I get fantastic people come along and work with me. I don’t know where they are, I don’t know how they get here. They just show up, they come and stay and go. It’s just all ananyas chintayanto mam. It just comes in from who knows where. But stuff way beyond anything I could have desired or even imagined that I could desire. It’s just beyond my imagination.

Rick: Okay. Well, I don’t know. Last week, for instance, I mentioned this in an interview. I was at an Amma gathering in Chicago. There was a car park next to mine that left its taillights on. I know, I told the story last week. I just said that. As I was walking back to the hall, I thought, I just had this desire. I want to meet the person who owns that car so I can tell him he has his taillights on. I dropped the desire. Then I went into the men’s room and the guy standing next to me there, I asked him if he knew who might own such and such a car. He said, “It’s mine.” I would consider that a fulfillment of desire. I actually had the desire to meet the guy and it happened spontaneously. It didn’t go to my head or anything. I don’t think I’m a really special person because that happened. But it’s just an example of what I would call supportive nature or innocent fulfillment of desire. But that’s not the way you’re wired?

Gary: I see those all the time. My life is nothing but those things.

Rick: Serendipity.

Gary: Serendipity. It happens. But I don’t have a desire about any part of it. I might have seen the lights on the car, walked into the place, and I found myself asking, “Who in here might have their lights on?” And the guy said, “I’m the head of the lights office.” Those happen so often to me. That’s just how my life goes. It’s just a whole bunch of those things strung together, serendipities. But they just happen. She’s just dancing those into being. To me, they’re a great confirmation of the validity of the path. There’s something here because you see these incredibly improbable events occurring and they happen with such regularity. You say, “My gosh, who can believe this is accidental?” Or it’s just a random bunch of events like that situation. Just imagine how much work has to go in to get everything lined up to have all that guy in the bathroom at the right time you walked in there, have you see it and walk in. It’s just so unlikely it’s impossible to even conceive of it. Yet those happen all the time.

Rick: Yeah, so that’s kind of the nature of your life these days.

Gary: That’s what my life is. These people I meet, I won’t bore you with all the things that have happened in the last two years. Beyond my imagination, I’m just a kid from the soft, cool country of western Pennsylvania. I’m meeting people I just can’t even know they existed. You just surrender, let go, and it happens.

Rick: Yeah, there’s a saying in the Vedas someplace, “Brahman is the charioteer.” So it’s like that larger intelligence which is governing the universe is governing your life, as far as it’s yours, because you have gotten out of the way.

Gary: You’ve gotten out of the way and it’s all you have to do. People are so afraid of, “Oh, what if I’m not here?” Get out of the way, really. It is so much easier. She’s so much better at doing this than I was, and so I have no problem letting her do it. She just is astonishing. Day by day, week by week, the stuff that comes up is just beyond imagination. And it’s all her doing, not me.

Rick: Yeah, and perhaps we can conclude by just dwelling on the point that just the desire to surrender and let her take over doesn’t just mean it’s going to happen just like that. That surrender may have to happen by degrees, in stages, through a methodical process. God helps those who help themselves.

Gary: But there is also, this is Ramana now, asking about desire, your desire for awakening, for understanding.

Rick: Yes.

Gary: He said, “You must be like a man being held underwater with your head held down and your desire to get up.” The Zen Center I was a co-leader on for a while, a regional Zen Center, we had a painting, had this fellow standing there with his hair on fire. And it’s that sense of, “Yes, absolutely,” and it’s all grace happening to you. But if you come with the desire, if you come to the thing with great desire, then you will be successful. It may take a while, not by the path you want or as fast as you want, but if you really, really want it, it will happen.

Rick: Yeah. And that to which you give your attention grows stronger in your life. So we can actually, a person might say, “Oh, that sounds great, but my desire seems pretty lukewarm.” But if you kind of keep that as a priority, it intensifies.

Gary: That’s right, exactly.

Rick: Yes. Which again, contradicts the notion of just give up the search, which implies kind of a jellyfish like, “All right, whatever.”

Gary: Not like that, not like that at all.

Rick: Okay, good. This has been really fun, as I knew it would be. So let me just…any final remarks you want to make, or have we pretty well covered it?

Gary: We’ve covered it well. We’ve done good research, that’s your reputation, good background.

Rick: Thanks. All right, so let me just make a few wrap-up points in general. This has been one in an ongoing series of interviews. I’ve been speaking with Gary Weber and I’ll, as usual, be linking to his website, whatever his book, whatever else he wants me to link to, from his page on www.BATGAP.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, which is an acronym for Buddha at the Gas Pump. If you go there, in addition to Gary’s page, you’ll find 180 other interviews at this point, and more as time goes on. There are two ways of checking them out. There’s an alphabetical index in the right-hand column, and then there’s a menu item called “Other Stuff,” and if you look under there, there’s a chronological index of all the interviews. Each interview has its own discussion area, which is in a forum that we created recently. So there will be a link to Gary’s page in the forum from his main page. There is also an audio podcast of this, and probably even more people listen to the audio than watch the video. A lot of people listen while they commute and stuff. So there will be a link on Gary’s page and on every page to the iTunes podcast. There is a “Donate” button, which I really appreciate people clicking. It keeps things rolling with this whole thing. There is also an email sign-up thing. So if you’d like to be notified each time a new interview is posted, you’ll see a tab there which you can do that through. So that’s about it. Thanks for listening or watching. Thanks again, Gary. There’s been some funny video artifacts during this interview where you look perfectly normal and then it looks like your hair is on fire. So, you know, very appropriate. And also I have this weird eye thing going on. I don’t know what it is. So no cause for concern. It’s just some sort of allergy or something that I’m suffering from just today. So don’t worry about that. It will be gone next week. So thanks for listening and watching, everybody, and we’ll see you next week.

Gary: Thank you.