Greg Goode Transcript

Greg Goode Interview

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week is Greg Goode. A lot of G’s in that sentence. So, welcome Greg, good to meet you.

Greg: Nice to be speaking to you too.

Rick: Yeah, Greg and I almost did this interview about a year ago and then somehow there were technical difficulties with equipment and so on. We almost did it last week and my computer was on the blink. I’ve got a new one coming, and, but here we are and it’s working well now. So, I’m looking forward to this conversation.

Greg: Me too.

Rick: Greg, I’ll just read a little bit of your bio here and then you can embellish it if you like. Greg has been a philosophical counselor since 1996 and has extensive experience with online consultation. He got his PhD from the University of Rochester and despite that qualification he has not been saying “Would you like fries for that?” in recent years.

Greg: It happens.

Rick: It does. But Greg is an IT professional and he is also a philosophical counselor. So, until I read about you, heard about you, I had never known that there was such a thing as a philosophical counselor and probably most other people don’t either. Can you tell us what a philosophical counselor is and does?

Greg: It’s a revisitation of one of the world’s oldest professions. Have you heard of the book called Plato Not Prozac?

Rick: I think I have, but I haven’t read it.

Greg: That’s by a colleague of mine named Lou Marinoff. It’s basically using some of the great philosophical resources as a way to look into things you might be interested in. It’s a form of therapy, not so much psychological therapy but therapy in a way of looking at the questions of life. So, It might not have the immediate effect of making you feel better that moment, or it might, but its purpose is to provide insight into how you would live life. And so, That became a profession and kicked off other books and other people. They saw Lou Marinoff doing that and said, “I can do that too.” Then, an association formed and several associations formed. Now, many large countries have their own philosophical practitioners’ association. Actually, most of my consultations or interactions with people don’t come from that group or discourse at all. They come from the same non-dual groups that we both know.

Rick: So, as an example of this, let’s say –

Greg: I can have a good example of the questions that they normally ask, which I’ve only gotten maybe two in five years. Two versions of this kind of question. What should I do with my life? Should I go to graduate school or get a job? That’s one question. Or should I quit school because it doesn’t look promising? I want to start working. That’s another version. Ethical dilemmas are a big question for that profession as well. Here’s one question that comes up several times. I’m friends with my boss at work, and I’ve gone to his or her house several times. I’ve met his or her family. They’re happy. Everything is good. Then, one day, I see my boss at the mall hugging another person. So, it looks like they’re romantically involved on the side. My ethical dilemma is should I tell my boss or not? So, since that seems like a thorny issue, it’s not a psychological issue. It’s not something you would ask a therapist or a psychoanalyst. Oh, ask your handy philosopher, your philosophical consultant. So, that’s a – I guess the most common genre of questions that that profession would get would be ethical dilemmas.

Rick: And I’m guessing that you don’t have black and white answers to questions like that. You kind of probe more deeply with the person.

Greg: You do. You do because it sort of depends on what theory of ethics you like. Different philosophers, of course, have many different opinions and ideas about these things. So, you sort of get a feeling for what ethical orientation a person feels comfortable with, and you go forth in that direction.

Rick: It’s interesting. I’m sorry. Go ahead.

Greg: Like, in the non-dual area, that particular question wouldn’t come up as much.

Rick: Right.

Greg: I did have one question from a person who said – kind of a related question. They wanted to learn the kind of non-dualism that someone like Ramesh Balsakar teaches, which is there’s no free will. So, the author of all is consciousness or God. So, one feels instantly released from all questions of guilt and pride and shame, perhaps, things like that. Because this person, this particular consultee, had someone that he had a crush on outside of his marriage. He wanted to feel guilt-free about pursuing it. So, he thought, oh, if I could learn the non-doership stuff, I’d feel okay about it, and then I could proceed.

Rick: Not only that, but he could rob banks on the side.

Greg: I told him to fix up his marriage, come to some sort of equilibrium about that, and then get back in touch with me.

Rick: It’s an interesting topic, which I hope we’ll get into during the course of the interview, the whole thing about what is really meant by non-doership. I believe it applies to a level of life that is a different realm, so to speak, than your relationship with your wife or your girlfriend or all those things. There are certain principles or rules or values which apply on the relative level, which might be completely transcended on the absolute level, but each level has its own significance.

Greg: Yeah, we can talk about that.

Rick: Sure, we’ll get into that. So, do you mind – some people don’t really like to talk much about their own personal spiritual journey. They feel like it’s too indulgent in the person, as opposed to the knowledge that they may wish to espouse, but would you mind touching upon that a little bit?

Greg: Sure. In my case, it just might be too long, too many names.

Rick: Give us the Reader’s Digest version, maybe.

Greg: I grew up as an atheist. My family had no religion as many generations back as we know about. There was no religion at all in my family, so I grew up as a de facto atheist. And I define an atheist as someone who lacks the belief in God. I just didn’t know anything about it, but I was always interested in thoughts, feelings, questions about life. I didn’t really do anything about it until college, or until my last year of high school. I was sort of lonely, so I started pursuing psychology. I studied humor as well as a way to feel happier. Then, I tripped up on the books of Ayn Rand, so I became an absolutist objectivist. Are you familiar with her writings?

Rick: A little bit.

Greg: Existence exists. She’s sort of like an Aristotelian.

Rick: More as a commentator on economics.

Greg: She’s a financial conservative, and she believed in rational self-interest, limited government, egotism is good, and rationality is good. You love that in other people, which is the most characteristic of humankind, which is reason. That was pretty good, and I got married to a lady who was also an objectivist. Then, we got divorced, and I was really depressed. I was in the army at the time, and basically, I thought I was reasonable, she was reasonable, the philosophy was reasonable, but the marriage didn’t work. I threw everything out and started over.

Rick: Love knows no reason.

Greg: Then, I became a total atheist, irrationalist, amoralist, following the writings of Max Stirner, who was probably the most nihilistic philosopher ever to have written. He was a precursor to Nietzsche, and he was actually more extreme than Nietzsche. That was okay, and then I followed that until I actually felt lonely. I was in graduate school, and I felt quite lonely, because graduate school life is quite lonely. You’re not coddled, you’re not treated as an adult yet, and you don’t have enough money to actually live a life. So, I actually went to a gospel church with my secretary while I was working in the development office. I heard this gospel singing under my skin, and it was healing a really empty, hollow, sore place in me. I sort of felt that something mystical happened, and I felt sort of complete. I didn’t feel that hollowness anymore, or that lack. That has never left, and I joined the church and became a deacon. This was like the Pentecostal, Holy Roller, most conservative church you can imagine.

Rick: Wow, that’s very interesting.

Greg: During that, I didn’t feel an integration between the life of the intellect and the life of the emotion and spirit. Here I was, going to graduate school in philosophy, and it had nothing to do with my church life. That didn’t have anything to do with the philosophy, so I was sort of wondering, hmm. There was part of me that wanted to let the intellect pursue something.

Rick: I’m surprised you didn’t end up switching to theological seminary or something, or trying to weave religion into your philosophy.

Greg: That was an option, but our church was too conservative for that. They didn’t really like theological seminary.

Rick: Too much thinking going on there.

Greg: I didn’t pursue that route. I knew it was a possibility, but I didn’t do it. I moved out of that city, and that was Rochester. I got my degree and came to New York City. Instead of joining the New York City branch of that denomination, I visited different churches. One day, I was riding my bicycle in Central Park when I found this other guy who had the same kind of bicycle I did. We started talking, and he liked philosophy and spiritual stuff too. He basically turned me on to the Western mystical tradition, which was like theosophy, anthroposophy. He was a Rudolf Steiner student. Since you know that’s a hodgepodge of different ideas from Tibetan Buddhism, Hinduism, and esoteric Christianity, that turned me on to the whole area of endeavor that I’d never known about before.

Rick: Did you have any difficulty transitioning from Pentecostal Christianity to that? A lot of guilt laid on you there.

Greg: A little bit, yes. I went to hell and everything.

Greg: In fact, when I found that there were Eastern elements in Steiner’s, Blavatsky’s thinking, their background, their literary sources, I kind of felt a little bit of “Ew,” like that. Mystical Christianity was as far as I could go for a while, but what mystical Christianity teaches you, basically, in a word, is that the metaphorical and poetical approach to the Bible, say, should be given more weight than the literal. In fact, it’s all metaphorical. That basically opens the gates and frees you from guilt, basically. So, I started feeling it was more okay. That sort of got metabolized into me. I opened up towards more Eastern sources, more Eastern kind of thinking, until the point when there was none of that guilt left. It was all okay. Then, out of all those, it was formal, traditional Advaita Vedanta that interested me the most. So, I pursued that. This was before a lot of this stuff was on the internet. This was in the early ’90s. There were some good old esoteric bookstores in New York before Barnes & Noble sort of edged everyone out. So, I found some wonderful old texts and found some places to go. I joined the Rosicrucians. I joined the Freemasons. I became a 32nd-degree Freemason. Wanting spiritual insights and wisdom, the secrets of the universe. I didn’t find them there, but I kept looking. This Advaita Vedanta and the sort of non-dualism that’s sort of the essence of Advaita Vedanta was the one that grabbed me the most. What I was interested in was what I am. What is it that anyone is? What makes a person a person? What’s responsible for your identity? That’s what I was mostly interested in.

Rick: Were you, at this point, adopting any practices?

Greg: Yes, I was. I had an altar. I would light incense to the altar. I was looking for a guru at the time. I didn’t know if it should be a person or what. I looked around for different candidates. I couldn’t find any that made me feel like the way people report when they find their true human guru. I tried a lot of candidates, but they didn’t strike that kind of interest in me. What I really glommed onto was the Mandukya Upanishad, the book.

Rick: I heard you saying that this morning. I was listening to a recording of you. What was it about the Mandukhi Upanishad that you liked so much?

Greg: It was so deep and so direct and so to the point. It was quite philosophical, which is sort of a language that I could speak and resonate with. So I said, “Okay, that really goes to it.”

Rick: Is that the one that has that verse, “Two birds sit on the self-same tree, and the one bird partakes of the fruit and the other partakes not”? You know that verse in the Upanishad?

Greg: No, it’s not. It talks about the twirling of the firebrand and the three states of wakefulness, dream, and deep sleep. It’s very philosophical. In fact, it’s the only Upanishad that doesn’t require any faith in the Hindu tradition. It happened to be the first one I read, and it really struck home with me. I was doing a meditation about those verses, and at the same time I was looking into regular meditation. I went to several different meditation centers in New York City and learned how to sit. It’s funny, I was looking for a meditation that was most closely aligned to the silence, quietness, and peace that it requires for you to do this deep inquiry. Where I found was Zen. For several years, I went to a Zendo in Manhattan. That kind of sitting and activity of the mind, which is like a lack of activity of the mind, was perfect for the quietness and the grasp of the extreme subtleties it takes to do deep inquiry. If your mind is jumping around and you’re trying to wrestle with a subtle point of inquiry, you can’t do it unless you can stay on track. Zen, I found, is a very good way to keep the mind without going. You have to always be careful. You don’t want to let the mind get carried away by chains of thoughts, and you don’t want to let it go to sleep. So that razor’s edge in between the two, training on that I found very, very helpful.

Rick: Yeah, and some of the more sophisticated Vedantic teachings, they actually require long trains of thought. Shankara will go on with a very long, complex, logical sequence of points, and you have to really maintain subtlety to follow it.

Greg: You do, and the better you can keep on track, the better you can get into those. The more fruitful those chains of thought will be. I also went to a traditional Advaita Vedanta teaching from the Chinmaya Mission. They have classes all over, and they study the texts in the formal, traditional ways.

Rick: Interesting. It’s kind of interesting the way you just went from one thing to the next, and were willing to not box yourself in with any particular thing that you encountered, but you take each thing as a stepping stone.

Greg: Yeah, you know, I think about that sometimes myself, like why was that possible? I think in my life, what made that possible was growing up in California, being sort of a very open, multicultural place, multilingual place. The only time in my life where I ever felt that monotonic guilt was in the Christian church. I didn’t go into it thinkin

Greg: I just kind of acquired that. It’s sort of like part of the institutional.

Rick: It’s part of the package.

Greg: Yeah, and so as soon as I got out of that, it kind of burned off, and I never had it before, and I never had it since.

Rick: Yeah. Huh. So, at what point did you encounter Sri Atmananda Krishnamenon, or am I getting ahead of the story?

Greg: Oh yeah, well there’s one step before that, and that is that my main inquiry, I was describing the practices, but I had one question that I was focusing on this whole time. It took years, and that is what is it that I am? I was truly, sincerely interested in that. I wasn’t interested in it because someone told me that that’s what it takes. I didn’t have any conception of the end point, or at all. I just really was interested in that question, in knowing, you know, in discovering the answer. I had no idea what the answer would be, or what it would bring, or what the effects would be. I was sincerely interested. So, I had it narrowed down to something, whatever it is that I am, has something to do with some very, very subtle part of the mind, if at all. Like it wasn’t any part of the body, it wasn’t anything you could see, or feel, or touch. I looked into the reincarnational teachings, very closely. So, Buddhism has theirs, you know, the esoteric Christianity has theirs, Advaita Vedanta has theirs. So, I looked into that, and it talked all about the different sheaths. You’re familiar with that notion?

Rick: Sure, koshas.

Greg: So, I looked at the kosha notion very carefully, and I thought, it’s something in the koshas that is not so gross that it is physically visible. It’s a little bit subtle, so that it’s the kind of thing that can go from one lifetime to the next, because that’s what accounts for it being your same stream, life stream. So, it’s something in there. What is it? I wanted to grasp it and hold it, and be able to behold what that is that makes me me. What I’d been doing was describing my practices, but the question that I was most interested in was, what is it that I am? What is it that makes me me, or makes any person what they are? Where does that identity reside, if anywhere? So, I was looking at, you know, I’d already sort of realized in graduate school that there’s no such thing as physicality, because I had a Barclay teacher who drilled that into our heads, and I actually grokked that and realized that one day. So, I knew it couldn’t be possibly anything physical. Then that leaves, you know, what’s the other side of that duality? Well, it had to be something mental, some sort of subtle level. So, I looked at the most subtle levels that I could find, which were in the reincarnation teachings, and I found that there were different sort of bundles and different sort of impulses and elements there. The one that felt the most, the one I got the most charge out of was that part of me that decides, that chooses. That, you know, the part that maybe is behind the free will or that chooses one option over another. That’s where I felt like, oh, there must be something there. I felt like a little buzz when I thought about that. So then, for the next couple of years, I investigated that very issue, free will or choosing. What is it that chooses? What is it, you know, where does it come from? And I examined my entire life. I found that I looked back at the times when I felt choice was most anguished and most difficult, and I also looked at the times of life when choice was almost transparently taking care of itself. Those times felt better, of course. So, it made me think, ah, that’s interesting. The parts that feel better are the parts when the choice, the part that I think is me, is not there. So, that was very interesting. I didn’t really know how to look into it, though. So, I was reading different books, and finally I read Ramesh Balsakar’s Consciousness Speaks. And to my delight, almost the entire book was about that very issue. So, basically, I was able to see that that part that chooses is just an arising in awareness. The part that chooses, the choice itself, any feeling you have about choice is just a spontaneous, choiceless, causeless arising in awareness. And that hit home really, really deeply. So, the whole notion of identity just vanished. And not just Greg’s identity, just identity as a concept. Identity as a possibility just stopped making sense, and it just vanished.

Rick: One thing I found interesting about you, and listening to audios of your talks, is the extent to which an intellectual understanding of something shifts your experience. I don’t think that it works to that degree with everybody. But, for instance, you said that when you overcame the notion of physicality, you became a lot more daring and started riding skateboards in New York and bicycles in the street.

Greg: With no brakes.

Rick: Yeah, with no brakes, and stuff that you wouldn’t have had the courage to do before when you thought of yourself as merely a physical entity. And I just don’t know if it … Ultimately, people have concepts about what enlightenment is. They read about it, they study about it, and so on. But many people can go decades just entertaining concepts without having the actual experience. And in your case, I don’t know about full-blown enlightenment or whatever, we can get to that, but at each step of the way, it seems like your path has been so much … It’s an intellectual path, I would say, and you can disagree with that if you’d like, but it’s been very effective for you as each intellectual insight has actually been not merely that, but has also been an experiential insight. It’s triggered or catalyzed an experiential shift. Would you say that’s a fair assessment?

Greg: Pretty fair, although the more you get into it, the more the distinction disappears between one category of experience and another. So, like intellectual versus what? What would you say? Well, physical versus emotional versus intuitive. What are those other categories, and without real stuff out there, what can you use to distinguish one from another? Without a brain or a mind, then what can distinguish the intellect from the body of emotions or from the heart? What is it? If you have a heart, if you have a mind, then you can pin those distinctions on them, but if you don’t, what is there?

Rick: Well, when I say intellectual versus experiential, for instance, John McPhee wrote a book about oranges, and you could read that book, and then you could become a botanist, and you could study oranges, and you could learn a whole lot about them, but if you actually never ate one, when you finally did, you’d think, “Whoa, now that’s an experience!” All this other stuff was just concepts. So, in most cases in life, there’s a distinction between the concepts we have about a thing and the actual experience of the thing.

Greg: That’s where it starts to get really shaky. When you do non-dual inquiry, that whole model of things gets very shaky. But if you want to take a step back into that model, then one of the things that Advaita Vedanta teaches is that there’s the bhakti yoga, jnana yoga, karma yoga, raja yoga, and they all have different entry points. But all of them are such that they can take you all the way. So, why is there that choice? Why are there the possibilities of four different yogas or more? It’s because people are different. People are wired differently. And so maybe I’m just wired that way.

Rick: No, you have a very good point, and I’m glad you mentioned it. And I’m glad you mentioned it in the context of Vedanta, because very often these other types of yogas or practices or approaches are dismissed as trivial or preliminary or irrelevant or whatever by various teachers. They glom onto a particular approach or angle or perspective and feel that that obviates the others.

Greg: Yes, true. And when I was reading the Bhagavad Gita very seriously, there are parts of all the yogas in the Bhagavad Gita, and each one says it’s the best. That was really confusing to me until I sort of looked at it in a sort of poetic, ironic way. I said, “Ah, yes, of course,” because you’ll glom onto one. It’s ideas to be transformational. So, you read all four, and, “Oh, it’s Chapter 3 that does it for me,” you know?

Rick: Yeah.

Greg: And so that’s what it is. So, like I did the Enneagram one time, and I did all these other tests, I tend to be like an intellectual type person.

Rick: That is.

Greg: And the other side of me, the other polarity is very, very, very sentimental emotionality.

Rick: You like old movies or something?

Greg: Yeah. I cry at the drop of a hat.

Rick: Oh, that’s sweet. Well, yeah, speaking of Shankara, we spoke of him before. For instance, he said, and you were saying before, you needed to practice Zen to get the quiet mind that would enable you to do this inquiry. He said, for instance, that not everyone is suited for jnana yoga, and you might actually need to do karma yoga or do seva of some kind, or various things to sort of purify yourself to the point where you have the clarity to do jnana yoga. And of course, a lot of people don’t like that progressive whole way of talking that you progress through stages of purity and eventually arrive at worthiness or capability to do some other thing and so on.

Greg: A lot of people don’t like that. It’s true.

Rick: No, it’s uncool in non-dual circles.

Greg: It is. It is quite uncool. And Vida Vidanta, again, has a really nice way to think about that, and that is that, think about those different yogas are at different layers of subtlety, perhaps. And so, the lower levels sort of have the power to shake up the more subtle levels. So, for example, if your body is uncontrollable, then your emotionality will be uncontrollable. If your emotionality is uncontrollable, then your ability to focus your mind is uncontrollable. If your ability to focus your mind is uncontrollable, you can’t do the subtle inquiry. So, you do the karma yoga. It makes the body and sort of the lower levels of emotionality smooth. I did that in the army, where karma yoga is doing something where the results of the actions are not for your own benefit, but for that of someone else or God or your guru. So, the army was my guru. The army got all the benefit of my actions. And then, the bhakti yoga was, for me, Christianity. The raja yoga was all the meditation and zen. So, that clears the path for jnana yoga, which is that self-inquiry stuff. And if you’re in a typical traditional Hindu setting, then you’ll have the opportunity to do all those, you know, a nice, rich mix of all those yogas, and you’ll find the balance that it requires for you. But in New York City, you know, working a day job, you can’t do that.

Rick: Right. And I might add that probably the sequence and the emphasis might be different for different people. They’re not necessarily going to go in the same sequence that you engaged in them. Probably, you know, bhakti could come after such and such. And also, the degree of immersion in one or the other is going to be different. Like you were just saying, yours has been primarily a jnana yoga or knowledge immersion, because that’s the way you’re wired.

Greg: Yeah. You know, there has to be a little… each one of those has to have a part. None of them can be totally missing.

Rick: Yeah.

Greg: But the balances are different for different people.

Rick: Right. Which is beautiful if you think about it. I mean, we’re all just sort of expressions of that one essence, and it would be a little kind of a… not like the way God operates to make us all identical in our makeup spiritually, any more than we are in our appearance or anything else.

Greg: Yeah, exactly. Look at that, right?

Rick: Yeah. Okay. So, have we gotten to the Atmananda Krishna Menon step yet?

Greg: That was next.

Rick: Good.

Greg: So, here it is, no identity. That would put…

Rick: And you really feel like, at that stage, sense of personal identity had evaporated.

Greg: Evaporated, yeah. There’s no more suffering. There’s no more basis of suffering. What is it that could suffer? Because everything that you could point to or name is nothing but an arising in this awareness. So, there’s nothing that is… nothing stays.

Rick: And that didn’t hamper your effectiveness or your functionality or anything like that?

Greg: No, because that’s part of the…

Rick: You didn’t have to go sit on a park bench for a couple of years to adjust to it or some such thing?

Greg: No, because I’d been thinking about these things for a long time and it wasn’t a surprise. It was very gentle. It was just like, “Ah, aha.” I mean, the moment was big and it had like, you know, fireworks and stuff, but after that, it was, “Ah, mm.”

Rick: Yeah.

Greg: Like that. And I had a day job and I had already been integrating these spiritual activities with my professional activities in my day-to-day life. I’d been riding my bicycles and stuff like that, so everything was sort of integrated and rolling along. And so, but… so, Atmananda’s teaching has a name for that place I was. Of course, in Ramesh’s teachings, there was… that was “be it.”

Rick: Right.

Greg: But there was something that I was not satisfied with. I mean, it wasn’t a matter of suffering. It was a matter of sort of sweet, beckoning curiosity. And that was, okay, there’s no identity. There’s no phenomenality. Everything, if there is anything, is an arising in awareness and it doesn’t stay, doesn’t go. But there seemed like this very distinction between arising and awareness itself. Like, what is that? That doesn’t seem like it’s non-dual.

Rick: So in other words, on the more, just to make sure I understand what you just said, on the more sort of abstract, absolute, fundamental level, there’s awareness, but then apparently, mysteriously, something, things were arising out of awareness.

Greg: Yeah, and I didn’t think, yeah, and as far as what it was that was arising out of awareness, I didn’t think of things like trees and cars and stuff like that. That’s not how it seemed, how it was experienced. It was experienced as, actually, they could have no name, really, you know, maybe a color, a sound, a feeling, but there was nothing very serious that distinguished them. Like I was saying before, between the intellect and the emotions, you can’t really pin that distinction on anything.

Rick: But you could certainly distinguish a tree from a car. You’d be dangerous if you couldn’t.

Greg: Well, I wouldn’t say that’s what I was doing. I could say that there was a manner of speaking according to which you could say that, but I wouldn’t say that that was the truth of my experience. The truth of my experience was flow.

Rick: Yeah, but on some more manifest, practical level, you were still able to drive cars and not run into trees and …

Greg: Yeah, I didn’t have accidents. If anything, all those functional things were actually improved. Everything improved. My getting along with other people improved. Riding my bike, as we’ve mentioned before, because it had no brakes. It has no gears and no brakes. It’s New York City.

Rick: I don’t understand why you don’t have brakes, but maybe that’s a side issue. I just rode my bike to get a haircut eight miles back.

Greg: Use the brakes.

Rick: Definitely use the brakes.

Greg: Track bikes, fixed gear track bikes. It’s a big deal nowadays.

Rick: And people ride them on city streets?

Greg: Yeah, that’s where it’s back issue best because there are no hills, and you can control your speed. You can control your cornering and maneuvering really, really, really minutely.

Rick: And if a taxi comes cutting in front of you, what happens?

Greg: You just turn.

Rick: Okay.

Greg: You don’t stop. You turn. You find a hole and you go through it.

Rick: Okay, good. Onward and ever onward.

Greg: So, yeah, there’s videos. I have a website called oldschooltrack.com, and there’s videos of how to do that stuff.

Rick: Well, maybe we’ll link to that just to satisfy people’s curiosity because I was curious. So, there was something that was still – it felt like a feeling of honey calling me, like a sweet kind of calling, and that was, what is it that – there seems to be like a distinction here between the subjectivity and this whatever it is that is rising. It’s not – it hadn’t settled all into just non-duality, whatever that would be. And for many teachings, there’s nothing to say about that. That’s just the way it is. That’s your end point. But it seemed like it was still dualistic, and maybe because I was looking at it, it’s kind of an abstract way to think about it because I wasn’t worried about cars or death or anything like that. It was just this very, very, very subtle distinction between here and that which arises to here.

Rick: Was the distinction – was the curiosity or the fascination more with a curiosity about what it is that actually causes the arising?

Greg: No.

Rick: Or was it more of the intelligence behind this, or was it more like a feeling like, hey, if everything is ultimately non-dual, how come I’m seeing two components here?

Greg: Yeah, it was more like that. There was – causality had totally dropped out of the picture because you can’t have something causing something unless the thing exists.

Rick: Yeah.

Greg: Right? Because let’s say they have one thought. Let’s say – look at these in terms of thoughts. One thought can’t cause another thought because they don’t even touch each other. There’s no contact between two thoughts, so how can they cause each other? So, if I already didn’t have objects, like physical objects, and I already didn’t have a notion of functionality like the emotions can cause the thoughts, that had all dissolved into these beneficent arisings and awareness. So, causality had no room to grab hold. So, yeah, I totally was not interested in – causality just wasn’t an issue. But it did seem like a little bit of a discrepancy. It’s almost like a challenge. Like, it seems like there’s a little bit of a two-ness here.

Rick: Yeah.

Greg: It’s okay. It’s sweet. I could, you know – there’s nothing wrong with it at all. It’s just not like non-duality. So, I looked into that for another several years. That was my question for another several years. It was Atma Darshan that I was reading a paragraph of Atma Darshan, and that became clear.

Rick: Atma Darshan is a book?

Greg: Yeah, from Atma.

Rick: Oh, it’s one of his books?

Greg: Yeah.

Rick: Okay.

Greg: Yeah. It has to do with time and memory and this and that. It’s just the notion of there being an arising can’t really make sense unless there’s a past and a future and an other than this. So, there’s no way within the – let’s say within the perspective of one arising. There’s no evidence, there’s no direct experience of any arising other than this, this-ness right now, right here.

Rick: In other words, what you and I are experiencing right now, what my arising, your arising were. Is that what you’re saying? Like, no evidence of anything outside our little offices that we’re sitting in.

Greg: No, our offices themselves are arising. So, I’m talking about – give a very abstract name to thought. Let’s say a thought. Let’s say the current thought. Let’s say you don’t even think it’s a thought. It’s just like something that is appearing now. So, from the perspective of that appearance, there is no other appearance. That – for there to be evidence of another appearance from the perspective of this appearance, there would have to actually – that appearance would have to be there, but it’s already gone. If there was another appearance in the past, it’s already gone. It is not here to answer for itself. It’s not here to make itself evident.

Rick: So, if I could use a concrete example, an hour ago I was riding my bicycle, but now I’m sitting talking to you. So, from the perspective of this appearance, there is no evidence of that appearance.

Greg: Let’s say the talking appearance. There is no evidence of the bicycle appearance in the talking appearance. And even if there is a memory, let’s say that there is a memory, like a present appearance of a memory of a bicycle appearance. There’s the – say, okay, well, there’s the memory of the bicycle appearance, but where is the – outside that memory, where is the bicycle appearance itself?

Rick: Right. There might be some lingering effects too. I mean maybe I’m tired or maybe my legs hurt or something like that.

Greg: Okay, so let’s say that from the perspective of the – like the leg hurting, like a burning soreness, muscle soreness.

Rick: Yeah. They don’t, but I’m just – as a case in point, I’m just bringing it up.

Greg: So whatever evidence you’d like to bring about, let’s say that you skinned your elbow.

Rick: Yeah.

Greg: Looking at – there’s a – there’s a skinned elbow.

Rick: Fell off a bike or something.

Greg: Outside of that appearance, there’s no other appearance at all. Some people who are kind of like realist-oriented, when they hear something like that, they call it the solipsism of the present moment. I don’t look at it like that because already, by this time, solipsism is impossible. Solipsism is that notion that I am the only consciousness there is or I’m the only mind there is, but already this – we’re past the level of the mind already. We’re past the level of an individuated consciousness because there’s no borders. There’s nothing to distinguish one consciousness from another. Like consciousness can never be plural in this. So – but if you look at this arising, whatever it is, however you want to describe it, there’s – it has access. It doesn’t have access to anything else. And even if it seems to, it’s just an appearance of access. It’s not true access. So what that led me to was if there can’t be two, then there can’t be one. And the notion of arising itself just evaporated altogether, so that duality evaporated as well, and it’s never come back.

Rick: If there can’t be two, there can’t be one. I’m trying to think of a way of making this a little bit more concrete.

Greg: It’s not concrete, I know.

Rick: No, it’s not. That’s the problem, but I’m thinking of people who are listening to this and scratching their heads, and I’m scratching my head a little bit, and I’m trying to think, “How can we make this really clear to people?”

Greg: Can you think of anything that there is only one of?

Rick: The only thing I could think of is if we think of oneness itself, or consciousness, or totality, or Brahman, if you want to use that word, that contains everything within it, and nothing other than that actually ultimately exists.

Greg: That’s a level I was talking about, but can you think of anything else?

Rick: No.

Greg: Okay, that’s what I’m talking about. The else-ness disappeared.

Rick: Yeah, I mean I can think of things that there are many of, if you want to put it that way. There are many cups, and there are many cats.

Greg: That’s exactly my point. For there to be anything phenomenal at all, there has to be the ability to have more than one of them.

Rick: Yeah.

Greg: And if there is not that ability, if it’s impossible for there to be more than one of X, then you can’t even really have X, and so that goes for anything phenomenal. And so then, oneness becomes sort of a wonderful, poetic kind of thing. It doesn’t become another thing like a Coke bottle.

Rick: So say that again that you just said a minute ago. You said for there to be – say that sentence.

Greg: For there to be anything at all, like a tree or you showed me your coffee cup, there has to be the ability to have more than one of them.

Rick: Right.

Greg: Because it has to be something of a type.

Rick: Yes.

Greg: Like this is one example of a cup.

Rick: And so you’re not saying there aren’t millions of cups in the world.

Greg: I’m not saying no.

Rick: I have a cup because there are also other cups.

Greg: Right. And so I have an arising because there are also other arisings.

Rick: Right.

Greg: But let’s say there aren’t other arisings. Then I can’t even have this one.

Rick: Right. And are you saying that ultimately there aren’t?

Greg: Right. That’s what happened.

Rick: Yeah.

Greg: The idea is that there couldn’t be more than one arising like this, this, this, this all the time.

Rick: Uh-huh.

Greg: There can’t be other than this. So this can’t be one of a series of arisings. It can’t because you’d have to have a plurality of that.

Rick: Right.

Greg: Like think of arisings like cups.

Rick: Uh-huh.

Greg: We already agreed that if you can’t have many cups, you can’t even have one cup. The notion of a cup wouldn’t even make sense.

Rick: Right.

Greg: That happened with the risings.

Rick: So is there any arising at all or are you saying there is but there’s only one arising?

Greg: No. I’m saying that there isn’t at all.

Rick: So there’s no arising.

Greg: Right.

Rick: Okay. And so…

Greg: I’m not saying that as a metaphysical matter of fact. I’m saying, I’m talking about my progress of my inquiry.

Rick: Yes. And also your experience.

Greg: And my experience of multiplicity, of seriality, like this happened and this arising came and this arising came and this arising came, just evaporated. And yet you live a very dynamic, demanding life. You work in New York City. You work with computers. You navigate traffic on a bicycle with no brakes. And so obviously you’re not sitting in a cave with your eyes closed. You’re doing really dynamic stuff. And yet you’re saying that in the midst of all that, there’s no arising.

Greg: Right. I wouldn’t say that it’s certainly and definitely and truly the case that I’m doing all the things that you mentioned.

Rick: Right. Yes.

Greg: Or that you’re doing them either.

Rick: Because if you were doing them, then there’s an arising. There’s things being done.

Greg: Yeah. Let it be a manner of speaking that we’re speaking about.

Rick: Yes. Good.

Greg: I’m not against a way of speaking. Like I didn’t start talking funny or acting funny.

Rick: Right.

Greg: You know, I continue to ride. I ride a different kind of bicycle now which is called a recumbent.

Rick: Yes, I’ve seen those.

Greg: Where you lean back and your legs are forward and stuff like that.

Rick: Yeah, they’re cool. You better have a big flag on it so trucks don’t run you over.

Greg: It’s something to think about.

Rick: Yeah. So that’s interesting. So I’m just thinking kind of, you know, I mean I used nitty-gritty examples of what you apparently do in your apparent life. And you’re saying that this understanding experience thing is so grounded that in the midst of what others would perceive as a very diverse and dynamic existence for you, if I can say for you, I realize that has its problems, but there is really just no arising. And so if there’s no arising, then what is there? Just pure silence everywhere? Oneness? An oceanic sort of state with little apparent ripples on the surface?

Greg: Not even. The notion of, you asked what is there, that whole notion just evaporated.

Rick: Huh.

Greg: Like for a little while after that happened, I lost my ability to talk about this.

Rick: But not about mundane things, just about this.

Greg: Yeah, it made no more sense. And then I realized, like the notion of talking about an arising or you, you mentioned you, like for some teachings or people perhaps the word you or I is charged.

Rick: Oh, you have to really dance around that word when you’re talking to some people, you know?

Greg: Well, for me, all words are like that.

Rick: Yeah.

Greg: I mean, all nouns, they all terminate in consciousness anyway. I mean, where do they point? Well, there’s nothing, what is there to point to?

Rick: Yeah.

Greg: When a word starts up, it arises from consciousness. When the word stops, like stops. Where does it point? It points right to consciousness. It goes right to consciousness in that model. So, all words are as free or as problematic as the word you or I. That’s maybe why I didn’t start talking funny. I didn’t adopt a special language because it didn’t seem, for a while I was kind of, but it didn’t seem like there was any privileged way to talk about this. Yeah.

Rick: I think the reason people who talk that way, talk that way is they’re trying to convey the nature of their state or their experience and they don’t want to mislead people into thinking that there really is someone in here, you know, some isolated entity who is talking.

Greg: Right.

Rick: And so they kind of dance around and use, you know, this one or I don’t know, I can’t do it myself but …

Rick: Yeah.

Greg: Well …

Rick: This body or …

Greg: Why is that? Why is that?

Rick: From here it is seen that such and such, you know.

Greg: Right. Yeah. But I think that’s kind of an incompleteness because why would other words be unproblematic but that would be problematic?

Rick: Yeah.

Greg: Like why is it not across the board?

Rick: I think I agree.

Greg: Some teachings kind of target one particular issue and if you’ve come up through a teaching that targeted the I or the self or those personal pronouns, then you might want to dance around those but not feel you should dance around the other stuff. But I’d either always dance or like not dance.

Rick: Yeah. I think it’s cool that you’ve actually gone through so many teachings because it’s given you an adaptability, it seems to me, you know, an ability to kind of accommodate any level of people’s experience wherever it may be without having to kind of play word games with them.

Greg: Yeah. I remember when non-duality first hit the internet in like mid to late 90s is when it was really hot. People were discovering this non-dual ways of speaking.

Rick: Yeah. The whole gang was coming back from, you know, Lucknow and so on.

Greg: Right. And then there were their students, you know, maybe people younger than them were like discovering the internet and they were getting on there and, you know, talking and taking the teacher position with each other.

Rick: Right, right.

Greg: Who’s asking? Well, who’s asking who’s asking?

Rick: Yeah.

Greg: And then you found a lot of, you know, I wrote an article about the Lucknow disease.

Rick: Oh. I might have read that article at some point. I’d like to read it again actually.

Greg: Yeah. There’s something on Sarlo’s website about satsang hijinks.

Rick: Right.

Greg: You know, some of the dramatic issues that come up during those things, you know. But that kind of, that was a thing for its time, you know, kind of melted away in the early 2000s.

Rick: Yeah. There’s still some remnants of that around actually.

Greg: Yeah.

Rick: I think.

Greg: Yeah, I think so too.

Rick: I kind of run into it interviewing all these people and people getting on my site and leaving comments and having discussions with each other. I mean there’s still kind of flavor of that.

Greg: Yeah, and you know what? I noticed something about the – I’m interested in rhetorical studies, and I see something about the rhetoric of these comments. And that is that it’s all people adopting the role of teacher versus the other. Like I’m telling you something. And I sometimes think of that as being a product of their own experience because their own – the teachings that they have consumed have been these oracular little pointers. Maybe they’ve spent years with I am that. So, if you look at – so what has a person done? You know, for five years they’ve read little bits that tell you what to do and what to do and how to see things and where to go and what to ignore and stuff like that. So when you go to start talking to others – because there’s almost very compulsive urge to start sharing this when something like that.

Rick: Sure. It’s human nature. We see a good movie, we want to tell our friends about it, whatever.

Greg: Yeah, and so someone does this here, and how have they learned to speak? Well, they’ve learned to speak by what they’ve read, and what they’ve read is do this, do that, don’t do this, do this, see this. And so that’s how they speak vis-a-vis other people.

Rick: So how do you feel that – or why – that in your case, the path you pursued, studying what you studied and doing what you did, was fruitful in terms of bringing about – terminology is clunky here, bear with me – bringing about a kind of a non-dual realization that enabled you to continue functioning in a very normal way, where a person wouldn’t even detect it unless they actually got into this kind of conversation with you, whereas the kind of people you were just alluding to on these discussion groups never seem to make that kind of progress. They seem to have gotten stuck in terminology and entertaining themselves in squabbling over who’s more non-dual than whom.

Greg: Yeah. That’s a very interesting question. I think part of it is my pluralistic background and my openness to these different approaches and teachings, and that I snuck up to non-duality. I went through these different teachings and different layers and levels pretty much on my own, and I didn’t kick any of them in the pants when I changed to something else. I remained friends with them. I saw them as just alternate routes. And there’s something else too, that I did this at a time before it was on the internet so much, and so I didn’t have people to compare myself to. So, it never dawned on me to compare, like to think of myself as having a state, and to have that state compared with someone else’s state. It never dawned on me to think about things like that.

Rick: Did you have any friends or many friends during this whole path that you could sit around and chat with and hash this stuff out?

Greg: My friend, my bicycle friend, the Western mystic, the Steiner fan, he and I lost contact after about a decade. And then, the people I used to go to satsangs with, I went to satsangs after the Ramesh incident because I wanted to talk about this stuff. Like you said, I wanted to share and talk, and I did meet a lot of people, but the conversations were always one way. It was always them telling me about their experiences. No one ever asked me about mine.

Rick: So, when you went to satsangs, you met well-known, advised teachers or non-dual teachers who would come to the city, and you’d go and sit in there.

Greg: I met scores of them, yeah.

Rick: Probably all the well-known names.

Greg: Yeah, and the attendees would be friends with each other. We actually helped host and sponsor many of the teachers as well. And so, yeah, the conversations, I’m friends today with many of those people still.

Rick: Sure. Did you ever get tempted to do satsangs yourself?

Greg: No, for a couple of reasons. I don’t know if the format is that effective, actually.

Rick: Why?

Greg: Because so much of the focus of the satsang is being like the teacher or wanting to be close to the teacher.

Rick: Do you think that the better teachers dissuade that kind of attitude? Discourage it?

Greg: I think they do something in addition to that. I think the private teachings are good because you can really narrow down what’s going on with a particular person. But just open questions and the amount of transfer of benefit from one person’s question to another person’s answer might not be effective for a particular person. If that’s all that’s done, if there’s stuff in addition to that, I think it could be wonderfully effective. And another thing is I don’t have that much time. I’m still working my day job.

Rick: Oh, yeah, sure. Of course, some teachers say that the main thing is not so much what they say, but the energetic transmission that takes place in that setting. And somehow it’s contagious.

Greg: Yeah, they do say that. And if that were transmittable the way that HIV is or something…

Rick: Then the satsangs would really be wild scenes.

Greg: Then we don’t have it, right? Whatever it is, it would not be so difficult.

Rick: I think there is something to that, though. It may not be as… It might be some people get it, some people don’t, and there are degrees to which people get it and so on. But I think there is something about sitting in an atmosphere that’s saturated with a certain kind of energy. It can kind of attune you to that same energy, and for some people that can actually be a major transition thing.

Greg: It can. The energy is sort of like any kind of charismatics at all.

Rick: Yeah, like when you went to that church and heard the gospel singing, it shifted you irreversibly in a certain way.

Greg: Like one particular guitar string, the strings all around it are vibrating in a certain way, and that will start to vibrate in the same way.

Rick: Sure.

Greg: But then when the strings stop vibrating, they stop vibrating. So if it’s a matter of vibratonics or something like that, there has to be something in addition to that. It can’t be the whole thing.

Rick: No, but metaphors break down, but perhaps with human beings something is retained, or maybe not always, or perhaps as you were just saying, if supplemented by other things that are also necessary, it can be one engine on the train that will help to bring about realization.

Greg: Because that’s very important to the bhakti yoga path.

Rick: Yes.

Greg: The being in the presence of is very important in that particular.

Rick: Sure.

Greg: Some people are put together such that that’s their resonance.

Rick: Yeah.

Greg: They can read. I have a friend who spent ten years with I Am That. He didn’t follow teachers too much.

Rick: Just reading it over and over?

Greg: Yeah, and it really, really, really helped. Other people, it’s just so much lettuce leaves.

Rick: Yeah.

Greg: It’s just so much word salad. They need to feel something in the heart. They need to see a human presence in front of them that they can identify with and be close to.

Rick: Yeah.

Greg: Without that, nothing will start moving.

Rick: Right. So people naturally gravitate to what they need, ultimately, I think. And if they don’t, then they’ll gravitate to something else.

Greg: And so something will hook.

Rick: Yeah.

Greg: Something will kind of like hook on. Ah! And they’ll feel it and they’ll go forward in that direction.

Rick: Right. Now speaking of the heart, you said a little while ago that you’re still a softie. I mean you watch some movie or something, or I don’t know what, but things that could easily make you cry. What’s going on there in terms of there being no arising and it’s all one and nothing ever happened, and yet there’s kind of a – I hate to use the word “abnormal” because there’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s a sensitivity or an emotionality that is a little bit uncommon, maybe.

Greg: Yeah. I guess there’s two questions. What is it like – like how to talk about this? I don’t think talking about this is any different from talking about day jobs or bicycles. It’s not a special kind of category of stuff.

Rick: It’s just part of the way Greg ticks, just the way you –

Greg: Yeah.

Rick: The way you’re wired.

Greg: I have a sort of well-developed feminine side, as much as I look like a tough guy. There’s a feminine integration with me there too.

Rick: Has always been or something that evolved over time?

Greg: It’s always been. It’s always been. Like many of my best friends have been women through my life, and I’ve always liked talking about thoughts and feelings, which I remember when I was growing up, “Oh, guys, don’t talk about that stuff.”

Rick: Right.

Greg: I can talk about that stuff with my sister and female friends and stuff.

Rick: Did you ever re-marry? You said you got divorced at a certain point a long time ago.

Greg: Oh, yeah. I was married ten years ago. I married, yeah.

Rick: You married again, so you’re still married?

Greg: I’m married now to the one I got married to ten years ago, and we’re very happy.

Rick: Great.

Greg: I had an article about – she came from China, and she was in the immigration process after we got married. She got put in jail two times for a month each.

Rick: Because they thought she had violated some immigration law or something? Yeah, even though we were married. It takes a lot to get a person out of immigration jail. You don’t even know sometimes where they are because they move you around.

Rick: There was a great movie. I forget the name of it, but it was set in New York, and somebody went to the immigration jail. Oh, yeah. That’s the one where the guy learned to play drums. He learned to play conga.

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

Greg: I like that very much.

Rick: He was this uptight guy living up in Westchester or something. He had an apartment down in the city, and he came down. He found some people were in it, and he ended up making friends with them.

Greg: I can’t remember his name right now, but he was a long-time character actor for whom that’s his first starring role.

Rick: I know, and I think he was actually nominated for an Oscar for that role.

Rick: He might have even won it, but at least he was nominated.

Greg: Anyway, we’re together, and we’re happy. I wrote an article about Kwan Yin. She had prayed to Kwan Yin every day. She didn’t have incense to light, so they rolled up cardboard toilet paper tubes and had that as their incense. She did lots of chants and praying and stuff like that. I wrote an article on the Internet saying Kwan Yin helps my wife get out of jail.

Rick: Wow.

Greg: People said, “Wait! You’re non-dual. How can you believe in Kwan Yin?” That’s not very non-dual. It’s okay to talk about my wife. That’s not non-dual. That’s not a violation, but Kwan Yin – have you noticed that there’s often a kind of materialist bias in non-duality?

Rick: Very much so, and I actually often try to counter it by things I ask and say during these interviews because I feel that life in all of its mystery and richness has many strata, and if we want to acknowledge that there is a wife or there is a cup or there is a bicycle, then who knows what other wonderful things there might be, many of which we might not even be able to perceive. For all I know, there really is a Kwan Yin, whatever that may be exactly, and the existence of that doesn’t in any way conflict with the non-duality of life in its ultimate value.

Rick: Yeah, that’s a wonderful kind of openness, and especially if the basis of this – I mean, this kind of non-duality that we’re talking about has a basis in awareness. There are other kinds of non-duality, but that’s this one. So for a person who thinks that everything is awareness, why are cups more permissible than bodhisattvas and angels? I mean, the angels are less – they’re more subtle than cups, so why are cups okay?

Rick: Very good point. And in fact, if you respect – if people respect traditional teachers and so on, most of the ones you can think of had a very devotional side to them and kept it, or perhaps even became more pronounced after their realization.

Rick: That actually ties into another question you asked about my sentimental side.

Greg: My company sent me to Tokyo for work for about 3-4 weeks one time, and so I went to one of the places I toured to was Kamakura, which is the heart of medieval Buddhism in Japan. So I saw the Kamakura Buddha, the 34-foot statue of the copper Buddha, and for the first time in my life, I broke down and started crying in front of a spiritual icon. All the time in Christianity, it never got me just like that. I had respect and a softness in my heart, but it never made me break down and start crying.

Rick: It’s beautiful.

Greg: I sort of adopted that as my devotional idol and image after that, to this day. We play chants at home. It’s called Pure Land Buddha, so there’s a Pure Land chant that you can get. In China and Taiwan, they make these little audio boxes that are about that big, like a cigarette pack. You turn it on and you can adjust the volume, and it can be AC/DC, and it plays the Pure Land chant, like saying the Buddha’s name over and over again. I’ve had it playing for 10 years.

Rick: In your house?

Greg: Yeah.

Rick: It never stops, day and night?

Greg: When we moved, we took one in the car with us. Yeah, it’s all… And that’s the focus of my love and devotion. I was never able to find that before. Remember I was telling you the best I came up with was a book?

Rick: Yeah.

Greg: Because nothing else struck me. Well, that struck me.

Rick: It’s interesting. So, Ramana Maharshi had his mountain, and it was his object of devotion, and I heard that Nisargadatta used to do pujas and stuff, often after the crowds would leave. Was it to his teacher?

Greg: I think so, yeah.

Rick: Yeah. And I’m kind of interested in the whole phenomenon of devotion, which, as you say, you actually have gotten flack for, because it seems so dualistic.

Greg: Yeah.

Rick: And perhaps you could elaborate just a little bit more on what you feel is the significance of devotion, even after a complete non-dual realization. Does it add sort of icing on the cake? Does it sort of add sumptuousness or more bliss or whatever?

Greg: Well, it does. It does all that. It does all that. It’s not something that you… It’s something that sort of comes automatically.

Rick: Yeah. You didn’t calculate it or think, “This is what I need.” You need more happiness or anything like that.

Rick: Right.

Greg: It’s not something I do for the joy. It’s sort of a…the heart wants to pour out, and it’s sort of… You could think of it as a poetic metaphor for that which is, so that it was one single focus for all of consciousness’ energy. So that the emotion sort of gets to highly, highly focus itself in one direction, and that would be towards that object.

Rick: Kind of like a laser light as opposed to diffuse, incoherent light.

Greg: Yeah. And that’s just one of many, many, many different ways of speaking about it. I wouldn’t say that any of them is an accurate description of what happens.

Rick: Yeah.

Greg: But it makes some sense that there’s the mind, there’s a heart, back in the world of language, and the heart has its direction to pour out as well.

Rick: Mm-hmm.

Greg: The mind can appreciate all this stuff. The heart can feel a very openness when it encounters or approaches the symbol of all that is, and that’s the symbol for me. That’s the symbol.

Rick: Mm.

Greg: Do you have one yourself? A symbol? Like a symbol or devotional object that does that same thing for you?

Rick: Not really. I mean, I had a, you know, I was with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi for many years, and I felt a good deal of devotion for him, and eventually I left that movement. And these days I go to see Amma, the Hugging Saint. I’ve been doing that for about 10 years with my wife, and I have a little picture of her right here on my desk.

Greg: Oh, cool.

Rick: But I don’t feel like I’m a highly devotional person for some reason, even though there have been times when that was very consuming. But in the times when it was, there was a sort of a dependency or a yearning or an emptiness or a sort of a, “Oh, God.”

Greg: A grasping kind of thing?

Rick: A grasping kind of thing. Now I feel complete and content, and for some reason, a great degree of devotion or quality hasn’t arisen out of that. Maybe it will at some point, but maybe that’s why I find the topic fascinating. Maybe I’m a little flat emotionally, actually.

Greg: Mine was the opposite. Yeah, mine, when I felt like empty and grasping back when I encountered Christianity, the whole thing is what helped heal me. It wasn’t like Jesus or God. It was the church, the kindness of people.

Rick: Right, the whole congregation and everything.

Greg: It’s very nurturing, very, very, very nurturing.

Rick: Yeah.

Greg: And so the whole thing was wonderful and kind, and the music itself, it takes you to a spiritual place. One time we saw the Holy Ghost. We actually saw visually the Holy Ghost.

Rick: Well, the natural question here is, “What did that look like?” What did it look like? It looks like a gray mist, and it was inside the sanctuary, a gray. And the Bible speaks of it as a mighty mist.

Rick: You said we saw it. Did other people see it too?

Greg: Yeah.

Rick: Everybody in the congregation, more or less?

Greg: Well, the folks that were sitting around the area that I was sitting in, we all saw it. It was like a cloud descending through the roof. It’s like assembling in the air. The spirit of the service was very high. You could look at it, if you only saw the emotion part, then you could say, oh, there’s emotionally, people were dancing in the aisles. They were speaking in tongues and stuff like that. The music was really nice, and people looked really excited. But on the spiritual level, there was a lot. It had its level of description as well, and one of the things was that Holy Ghost came as a rushing, mighty wind.

Rick: Interesting. At this point, half the people listening have said, okay, he’s a nutcase. On to the next one.

Greg: Back to the abstract consciousness. But I remember talking on one of those forums a while ago, describing that. I’m talking in the language that Christianity talks and scribes about. Why not? Why in the world not? Someone said, oh, what really happened was a kundalini arising. That’s the true description of that event. Now, what in the world sense does that make? How can one of those, you know, language which is actually outside the experience itself, be a truer description of the experience than the one that was integrally related with the experience?

Rick: It sounds like that person was just trying to couch it in his own conceptual box, his own terminology.

Greg: His box was reality.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, everything we’ve been saying in recent minutes in this interview points to the fact that in my father’s house there are many mansions. I mean, the whole field of spirituality is diverse and there are so many facets that pertain to so many people. I mean, there are 7 billion of us in this world and it’s never going to be that everybody sort of latches on to one particular angle. So, it’s just… and who knows? I mean, we’re just talking about this world. I don’t even like to think about how many worlds might be out there and how many forms of expression of spiritual life there might be that we haven’t even seen here.

Greg: Of course, if there can’t be more than one, there can’t be one.

Rick: Good point. Well, this is fascinating. Do you want to say more about Atmananda Krishnamen? You haven’t said much about him. There’s a whole nice interview you did with Chris Hebert about this, which I have here. But would it be germane to this discussion or do you feel like we’ve sort of covered those points?

Rick: I presume you’re kind of… when I watched this I thought, “Well, that’s his focus,” but now we’ve gone over all kinds of things that I wouldn’t have anticipated.

Greg: Oh yeah, I’m kind of like Groucho Marx, you know, “If you don’t like my ideas, I’ve got other ones.” So we can talk about other focus if you’d like to. But that was the answer. I had a question at that point, and that was about how do you explain this sort of subtle sense of dualism, this arisingness that seemed to happen, when it’s not supposed to be non-dual? So there’s more to cover, there’s more to go. So Atmananda was able to answer that question.

Rick: He was your bridge for that. Yeah, he was my bridge for that. And I think in Atma Darshan, which is there’s something about sort of problematic about that text, and that is that the publisher doesn’t let people talk about it too openly for copyright violations.

Rick: Oh, I see.

Greg: So if people quote passages from it, they’ll get a letter, a takedown letter. Like on the internet or something.

Rick: You can voice it verbally, but you just can’t put it in writing or print or even on an interview like this.

Greg: An interview like this, I think, because the interview is something you could download and repeat, then if you gave a long quotation or if I read a passage.

Rick: Verbatim.

Greg: Verbatim, right.

Rick: Right.

Greg: So that’s why you don’t hear more spoken about with Atmananda. Most of the people who have some kind of Atmananda mention on their websites have heard from the publishers.

Rick: He’s a foolish publisher because that would popularize it, and people would probably buy more books.

Greg: That’s true.

Greg: I had some commentaries and stuff like that. They told me to take them down, and I did.

Rick: So here’s a question that I always ask people towards the end of an interview, and it’s interesting to get their answers. Do you feel that in your own experience – and again, please bear with me in terms of the limitations of the terminology – but is there a continuous growth in some dimension or deepening or clarification? Or is there sort of a static finality to your experience that doesn’t seem like any new ground is broken anymore?

Greg: That’s a really interesting question. I’d have to choose a way to talk about it.

Rick: Take a stab at it.

Greg: Like, from once everything is consciousness and consciousness is all there is, that’s it, then you have to go somewhere else conversationally to start talking about anything. I mean that’s actually – if you take that at its word, that’s the last word.

Rick: And where can you go if everything is consciousness?

Greg: Right.

Rick: Right.

Greg: So, I actually had that question as well. What can you do with this? So, I started looking around and reading and being kind of an intellectual kind of person. I started looking at different ways of talking about talking, different ways of explaining why it’s not a violation of non-duality to talk about stuff.

Rick: Right.

Greg: And so I looked into, you know, a lot of things about language and stuff, and I looked into the emptiness teachings as well, which had always interested me. Even when I was studying along the lines of Advaita and non-duality that way, I was looking into the emptiness teachings, you know, the classic Buddhist Madhyamaka teachings. And they have a lot to say along these lines, a lot, lot, lot. And so I did more growth and sort of learning and metabolizing of that kind of viewpoint. And that sort of came at a time, kind of a handy time too, because over the last three or four years, I’ve been studying that for like 12, 15 years. But in the last three or four years, I’ve noticed that there have been people who’ve written to me and some other teachers I’ve heard from who don’t grok the whole consciousness notion. The oneness, consciousness, awareness is the basis of all things. They don’t get it. It just doesn’t strike a chord with them. And so what can you do? I mean, if they’re interested in the sort of the fruits, the lack of suffering, you know, the ending my suffering, the ending of, you know, having such a jumpy, anxious mind that I can’t think straight, that I want to have relief from that. What can you do when non-duality has some pretty interesting, pretty authoritative-sounding discourse about it, but if you don’t grok the main idea, what can you do?

Rick: Yeah. So maybe you’re not their guy.

Greg: Well, I mean I don’t think I’m being someone’s guy. I became a different guy. No. There’s other teachings.

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

Greg: And so I’ve been sort of teaching people the emptiness teachings, the Buddhist teachings. And in that teaching, it’s okay to talk about everything, including your question about continual growth. There’s a way that sort of within the bed of that teaching, there’s room for that. There’s no room for that. I remember a friend of mine asked one of the non-dual teachers at the S.A.N.D. conference, is there any end? He was, it was a trick question. Is there any end to the consciousness notion? Does it remain something that is always there? Like is it always something that is going to be part of your language from the rest, you know, from then on? And the person said, well yes, it is, because if it ever disappeared, that disappearance would have to happen in consciousness. And so that sort of seemed like a sort of, maybe a rigidity in one’s attitude towards language. I mean, could there be other ways to talk about this stuff? I mean, like you said, house of many mansions, and one of the mansions would be this other teaching that I have started to help people with, is emptiness teaching. Basically, that one allows for lots and lots and lots and lots of continual growth with no, the only end point really is full Buddhahood, which no human being has accomplished. So it leaves lots of, it basically takes the pressure off everybody and leaves lots of growth for anyone.

Rick: That’s interesting.

Greg: You know, like you’ve heard of the Zen teachers and perhaps the Vipassana teachers who said, after 20 years of teaching meditation, I needed psychotherapy.

Rick: No, I had not heard of that. I’ve heard of people who had been teachers for a long time or something who ended up needing psychotherapy or flipping out, but I hadn’t heard that specific reference that you just gave.

Greg: There’s a Zen teacher, and one of the, Joseph Goldstein I think maybe was one of the Vipassana teachers, you know, the insight meditation teachers. So have you ever heard of a non-dualist or a satsang teacher who has actually had something like that happen and has integrated that into their teaching? It would be like almost…

Rick: Yeah, I know there are teachers who are just very all-embracing and who would recommend it and so on, but I can’t say…

Greg: You wouldn’t find anybody who said, “I am consciousness,” and “Oh yeah, then I needed psychotherapy.”

Rick: Yeah, not so much.

Greg: There’s no room, what I’m saying is, I’m making actually a point about the discourse, not about the person. There’s no room in the discourse for that to be spoken of, because there’s no after.

Rick: Right. I know that there are teachers, like for instance, Adyashanti is very open about this. He says, “Oh, maybe you need psychotherapy, maybe you need drugs.”

Greg: Yeah, but would he say that he ever needed it?

Rick: No, he probably wouldn’t.

Greg: Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. I’ve known lots of teachers who’ve gone to resources like that, but it never ends up being part of the teaching.

Rick: Yeah.

Greg: But in that other teaching, there’s room for it.

Rick: Yeah, that’s interesting.

Greg: So what I’m making is not about people, but about the discourse and what resources the discourse actually gives you to work with stuff.

Rick: It’s interesting that you are able to put on the different hats of slightly different teaching methods, rather than just referring people to that.

Rick: You know, saying, “Go to that,” rather than saying, “Okay, I’ll teach you that.”

Greg: Well, some things, yeah, if a person wants to learn about… I’ve had a lot of people ask for something I was not qualified at all to teach them, and that was kundalini yoga.

Rick: Sure, so you just referred them to somebody or whatever?

Greg: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah. I’ve had several people that I’ve interviewed who told me that earlier in life, sometimes before they even got on to any kind of interest in spirituality, they actually had an experience where Ramana Maharshi came to them, and they didn’t know who he was, but they had this vision. They’d be walking down the street or sitting in their bedroom or whatever, and Ramana Maharshi would come and think, “Whoa, what is this?” And then maybe ten years later they’d be in a bookstore and see his picture and then get interested. So I find that interesting. I wonder what’s actually happening there. I wonder whether Ramana Maharshi in some way, shape or form is still an entity that is coming to trigger people’s evolution or something. And I’m wondering what you would say about that and what you would say about what you expect to happen to Greg Good after this body dies.

Greg: I don’t really have anything to say about that. Nothing like that has ever happened to me.

Rick: Right.

Greg: As like talking from the viewpoint of a person. I’ve never had that kind of thing. And there’s also something that is kind of tricky with that, that those reports always come after they know about Ramana Maharshi.

Rick: Well, no. Several people didn’t. Who’s this Indian guy? In fact, there’s this one woman.

Greg: You’re breaking up again.

Rick: I think it’s recording. OK.

Greg: OK. I can’t hear you very well.

Rick: Oh, sorry. There’s this one woman. She was rather young at the time. She just had this fervent desire for truth. She sat on the edge of her bed and said, “I want – I just demand that whoever knows the truth come through this door.” And then she kind of went to bed. She woke up in the middle of the night, and Ramana Maharshi was sitting on her bed. She didn’t know who the heck it was. She threw a pillow at him and didn’t discover until years later who he actually was.

Greg: Is that someone in India?

Rick: No, it was an American. Someone I interviewed. I forget which person it was.

Greg: Oh, I know who it was. Pamela Wilson.

Rick: Yeah, Pamela. There you go. Well, if – I mean if someone can appear at one point, why can’t they appear at another point? Like if you look into physicality and you can’t find physicality, you can’t find a true physical locus for personhood. You can’t find a molecule. If you really, really look, you can’t find something that is brutally physical with no sentience and no awareness attached to it at all. So if that’s the case, why should Ramana Maharshi only be able to appear like later in life rather than earlier in life? Why would he only be able to appear in the physical sense and not in the subtle sense?

Rick: Right.

Greg: What would – I see no limitations to that at all.

Rick: Yeah. Well, it kind of harkens back to what we were saying about Kuan Yin. Is that the right pronunciation?

Greg: Yeah, Kuan Yin.

Rick: If there can be cups, why can’t there be Kuan Yin? Why can’t there be subtle phenomenon?

Greg: It’s totally open.

Rick: Yeah.

Greg: It’s totally open. In fact, that was one of the ways that I sort of started learning Advaita Vedanta. I was interested in why so many people were so convinced about these levels and these layers and these subtle entities when it had not been part of my childhood or my adolescent or my college teaching at all.

Rick: Right.

Greg: So I looked into it a great deal, and I took some classes in clairvoyant training and stuff like that. I did really well at it. And I thought, yeah, there’s nothing to object to. It’s as real as a cup.

Rick: Yeah. So that leads me back to the question, and this may be regarded as a frivolous question, I don’t know, but do you feel that when you die, when Greg dies, there will be any continuation of some seed of individuality, or as is apparently the case with Ramana Maharshi, if those people’s accounts are true, or do you feel like it’s the old sort of drop into the ocean thing and that’s it for, you know, or is this just a kind of philosophical speculation that you can’t really touch?

Greg: These are all parts of orthodox teachings, like these questions and the answers to them are all part of the orthodox teachings. And what the orthodox teachings say is that before realization, there will be some kind of continuity, and they have different ways of talking about what’s responsible for the continuity and where it will go. And after realization, that continuity stops, like for Advaita Vedanta, it stops altogether. That then the drop goes back into the ocean, it stops being a drop because it doesn’t think of itself as a drop anymore. And in Buddhism, it stops being a drop unless you want to continue as a drop to help other drops.

Rick: The bodhisattva thing.

Greg: Right. So those are the orthodox answers, and then there are the, what I would call the deflationary non-dual answers like Nisargadatta would say to people in certain, according to the question, he would say, well, what makes that continuity yours? So what makes you think that even if there is a linkage, that it would have anything to do with you?

Rick: Yeah.

Greg: So in other words, like don’t worry about that stuff.

Rick: Yeah. It does seem a little bit of a —

Greg: It would just be another phenomenal chain that happens.

Greg: So to talk about this question, to me, doesn’t seem like it’s independent of adopting one of those discourses.

Rick: And you have no particular intuitive insight into it yourself aside from traditional teachings that you’ve read or anything like that?

Greg: Yeah, because I don’t see a possible way for me to detach my intuition from some traditional teaching.

Rick: Okay. It’s not the kind of question I usually ask. It seems a little esoteric and maybe even frivolous, but I just, for some reason, I was curious as to how you would answer it.

Greg: Yeah, well, I think that the — I did have intuitions along that line before when I was really inquiring along these things, along the lines of these things. And it seemed to me that the difference between one arising and the next arising was very analogous to the distinction between one life and the next life. So in other words, one arising, it arose and then it subsided back to that global witnessing awareness. Then another arising came. So its home is awareness. It never gets, like, detached from awareness. It’s nothing other than awareness. So then you’ve talked about the arising — is that second arising the same as the first or is it different? Like, how would you talk about that? And so that, for me, that pacified the whole question of what happens after I die. Is that different from deep sleep? Like, can you really ask that question seriously unless you think you’re the same person on Tuesday as you were on Monday? Like, I hadn’t thought that for decades.

Rick: Yeah.

Greg: I’m the same today as I was yesterday. So the question really is the same. You can sort of collapse that into what happens in deep sleep. Like, to what extent am I there? Do you have any experience of your body or mind during deep sleep? No. By definition, no. So you have no way of saying that even the world is there when you wake up. How do you know it’s not a new world? So that’s very analogous to being — what happens after you die. So, you know, between every thought I die, between every day of the deep sleep I die, and that which arises next is neither the same nor totally different from that which went before.

Rick: Cool. Okay.

Greg: That’s a conversation stopper.

Rick: It is. I mean, you know, I could keep badgering you with all kinds of little questions that come to mind, but I think we’ve covered a lot of ground.

Greg: It’s fun talking. Yeah, I love this stuff.

Rick: Yeah, it’s interesting. And I find you particularly enjoyable to talk to because you’re not afraid of — I mean, you don’t have this sort of monolithic message. You’re not afraid of exploring. You have explored so many things in your life so far, and I think it kind of made you what you are as an exponent of knowledge, somebody who is kind of like malleable and flexible and open to all kinds of possibilities.

Greg: Yeah, I think that’s good. I’m glad you said that. I value that. I think it’s useful. It’s helpful, and it sort of — speaking as a person, it feels good.

Rick: Yeah.

Greg: It feels good to not have a barrier with, like, a person or an approach that confronts you.

Rick: Mm-hmm.

Greg: You know, there’s always an engagement, you know?

Rick: Yeah. I feel like you’re one of the most non-fundamentalist people I’ve ever spoken with. I mean, there are plenty of fundamentalist non-dual people around.

Greg: There are. It becomes its own religion. It really does.

Rick: Yeah, and they get into these heated arguments with each other and so on, defending their particular flavor of it.

Greg: Yeah, I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rick: Anyway, but that’s life.

Greg: Yeah, yeah.

Rick: Okay. Well, thanks, Greg.

Greg: Okay.

Rick: This has been great. I’m glad we finally got it together to do this.

Greg: And thank you for pushing me to get better equipment because, well, it made this better, and maybe I’ll interview you someday.

Rick: Great. People keep saying somebody should. I don’t think it’ll be as interesting as my having interviewed you. I think you’ve got a lot more.

Greg: Well, I don’t know. I could dig. I could dig. Who knows?

Rick: All right. We’ll do that sometime.

Greg: How many have you got? You’ve got, like, how many hundreds do you have?

Rick: Oh, how many have I done? I think you’re, like, 103 or something like that. You’re number 103.

Greg: Okay, and then there’s the part of you that is not the interviewer, which is your own exploration.

Rick: Right, right.

Greg: Yeah, that’s fascinating.

Rick: We’ll do that. Well, you said you were thinking of starting an interview show, right?

Greg: Yeah, something along the lines of that emptiness teaching.

Rick: Yeah.

Greg: Because more and more people had been interested in that approach because there’s a lack of fundamentalism about it.

Rick: Yeah, and I think that’s good.

Greg: And people sort of – maybe, like, I’ve noticed that some people who used to talk about awareness as the basis, like using that word “awareness,” don’t mention that word anymore. Like, I think …

Rick: Have they substituted another word for it?

Greg: Yeah, the great freedom folks. Now it’s clarity. It used to be awareness. Now it’s clarity.

Rick: Well, that’s kind of interesting because awareness sounds more like an object.

Greg: It does.

Rick: Clarity sounds more like a quality.

Greg: It sounds like a real thing, like awareness. And plus it’s sort of – when scientists talk about that, awareness and consciousness, they key it to an individual biological entity.

Rick: Right, to the brain.

Greg: Each one has their own awareness.

Rick: Right.

Greg: So, yeah. Maybe the time for that word is kind of like past.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. Well, if you end up doing your own interview show and interviewing various people, I’ll be sure to tell people about it and link to it, and so on. I think that my viewers will be interested in hearing it.

Greg: Good, good. All right.

Rick: Thanks. So let me just make a couple of concluding remarks. Those of you who have hung in with us this far, you have been watching or listening to an interview with Greg Good. And Greg lives in the New York City area, I guess we could say a non-dual teacher, and you are available for consultations. So they can go to your website if they like, and I’ll be linking to that from batgap.com. And through that, they can get in touch with you and set up an appointment if they’d like to do a consultation.

Greg: Yeah, I have less time to do face-to-face and verbal ones, but email, I have lots of time for email. And then email questions are free.

Rick: Oh, okay, great.

Greg: There’s nothing – don’t charge money.

Rick: Cool. Well, your email address is right on your site. It’s [email protected], and people can go there. They’ll see it. And I imagine you’ll get some input as a result of this interview.

Greg: Cool. All right.

Rick: So I just want a couple more concluding remarks, and then I’ll let you go. Just that those who are watching, if you go to batgap.com, which you may not be at. You might be on YouTube. You might be listening to an audio file. But if you go there, you’ll see all the interviews archived. And there you can sign up for a newsletter notification. Each time I put up a new interview, you’ll get an email. You can also participate in a chat group that evolves around each interview. And there’s a “Donate” button. If your finger gets itchy, you can click on that. And that’s about it. So thanks for watching, and we will see you next week. It should be Lisa Carnes next week from Australia if things go as planned.

Greg: Okay. Thank you, Rick.

Rick: Thanks, Greg.

Greg: Okay. See you later.

Rick: Talk to you later. Bye.