Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week is Dr. Gregory Tucker. And Gregory was recommended to me by one of my listeners. I get a lot of recommendations these days. I forget specifically what he said, but I remember he was enthusiastic. As usual, I don’t know a heck of a lot about my guest, but it sort of works out well that way, because then I don’t know any more than my listeners do. I ask questions that they might also ask, not presuming that we know anything. Greg, you and I were talking the other day, trying to set this up. You said you’d like to start by asking me a question, but before you do that, why don’t you just tell us a little bit about yourself. What kind of doctorate do you have and what do you do with yourself?
Gregory: First of all, I want to thank you for inviting me to be on your show. I’ve listened to almost everyone you’ve interviewed, because it’s a captive audience and they’re all professing to either be close to enlightenment or enlightened. Therefore, if they’re there, I want to see what it means to be there. You have a captive audience and they’re delightful. They really are a delightful group. Let’s see, I’ve got my doctorate in clinical psychology. I went into private practice pretty fast. I have my master’s in child psych. I started in Cleveland, where I went into practice with a psychiatrist. He invited me to join him. I was there for 22 years. My whole family, they were ardent skiers. One of my sons wanted to be, thought he might like to be in the Olympics. I said, “Why don’t we pack up and move to Sun Valley and I’ll start a practice there. We’ll be at the base of the mountain and you can ski every day.”
Rick: Geez, I wish I was your kid.
Gregory: Well, I can still adopt you, I suppose.
Rick: Okay, let’s do it.
Gregory: I’ll send the adoption papers.
Rick: I love skiing.
Gregory: He was a great skier and we moved there. It was quite an adventure going from Cleveland to Sun Valley. When I got there, there were no psychologists there. I thought, “Well, it’s going to be interesting. I’m going to probably see four or five people a week and have a little practice and write a couple of books and ski and take it easy.” Well, all hell broke loose. Within three months, I had a practice of 40 people a week. I was working Saturdays, two evenings a week. I stepped into a tornado because it was the middle of the drug crisis and all these wealthy kids were there, having all kinds of problems with cocaine and stuff. So, my hands were full. I enjoyed being there and practiced for 28 years. Finally, we got fed up with the snow, my wife and I. We said, “Let’s pack up and move,” and here we are in California. That’s the short end of the story.
Rick: Okay, good. We’ll get into the more subjective story as we go along, like the spiritual dimension of your life or consciousness dimension or whatever we want to call it. The question you wanted me to answer, and I presume you still do, is what I understand enlightenment to be. Is that correct?
Gregory: Absolutely. If you ask everyone that question, they look pretty uncomfortable pretty fast because we’re talking about the question, “Is there such a thing as truth?” Allegedly, if you recover it or reconnect with it, then apparently the outcome is something called waking up or enlightenment. I guess we’re down to the question, “Does truth exist?” Obviously, philosophers have argued about it throughout the centuries. If enlightenment is something about reconnecting with truth, what do you think that means?
Rick: First of all, I don’t tend to use the word “enlightenment” because it has so many connotations. It’s used so much, and if we’re going to use words at all, we want to be able to communicate something. If the person we’re speaking to understands something completely different by a word we’re using than what we understand by that word, then we probably should choose a different word so that we have a mutually shared understanding. But nonetheless, having said that, let me give my take on it. I’ve been giving a little bit of thought to your question, although I haven’t written anything down, and we’ll see what comes out. Whatever comes out, it would probably be a different thing if you asked me the same question a year from now. But here’s my take on it. This is to a certain extent based on thinking and reading and insight in that sense, and to a certain extent it’s based on my experience. I’m not sure where the line can be drawn between those two things. But my understanding, and to some extent my experience, is that fundamentally the basis of creation is an infinite field of consciousness which is intelligent in its nature. And that intelligence has as part of its nature, part of its tendency, for whatever reason, the desire, the impulse to diversify, to express itself. You know that saying from the Bible, “I am one, may I become many.” And over the last 13.7 billion years that we know of in this universe, that incredible creative potency has been expressing itself and evolving into what we see as the universe today. And the general trend seems to be, from what I understand it, towards increasing sophistication. So you might start out with just blobs of gas or something which coalesce into suns, which eventually spin things off and those things cool and they become rock and so on. And new elements are formed in those suns, and more and more complex elements, and more and more complex chemicals and compounds and so on evolve, until eventually we begin to see what we call life, as we define it, little tiny parameciums and so on, but nonetheless life. And then those evolve and things continue to evolve. What’s essentially happening is that greater and greater complexity is being built, and greater and greater ability in those increasingly complex forms to express that intelligence which is innate or fundamental to their existence. And then, skipping way ahead, we get to the human level, and we have an incredibly complex form or mechanism which is highly conscious. In other words, it expresses or reflects to a profound degree that consciousness which is innate to everything, whether a rock or a plant or a tree or an animal, but it expresses it much more fully than all those things I just mentioned. And as that evolutionary process continues, a time comes when the human being begins to question, “What am I really?” and begins to reflect inwardly, introspect. And again, to cut the story short, a time comes when the individual expression of the human being recognizes, “Wait a minute, I’m not just an individual human being, I am kind of this vast field of consciousness.” And I think at that point, there’s a sort of a full circle has taken place in which that field, which for the sake of play or whatever, decided to diversify, and in the process appears to have lost itself in that diversification. Each individual part has sort of lost recognition of the greater whole. That recognition is regained when that realization of consciousness takes place in the form of a human being. And when that happens, it’s such a profound thing to experience for many people that they feel that they have reached the zenith of evolution. They think, “Well, this is it, this is what enlightenment is. I’ve realized myself, I know what I am. I can give up the search, I’m finished.” But in my understanding, and to whatever extent my experience, it’s just a milestone, and a fairly preliminary one at that, given the vast range of possibilities that exist. And so evolution continues, and having established that self-realization, initially it will be fleeting and intermittent, but eventually it will be stabilized, at least that’s the way it is for most people. Having known that one is not merely an individual but is consciousness itself, a field of dynamic silence, there is still tremendous potential for growth as a human being. And we have capacities for love and perceptual capacities, and all sorts of qualities and traits that may still well be in their infancy when this self-realization dawns. And in fact, we can find examples of people who have apparently achieved self-realization but are sorely lacking in the development of some of these qualities. So in that this field of consciousness or intelligence has this drive or this tendency to continue to evolve its expressions, it’s inevitable that we’re going to continue to grow. And it’s going to infuse itself into every pore of our life, every facet of our life, and we’re going to grow in compassion and intelligence and the ability to express these qualities, to bring them to bear upon our environment. And of course, one thing that people commonly report when they wake up to this realization is that they always were that, and there’s a realization that they never had actually forgotten it, they just thought they had or appeared to have. It’s like when you finally see that the snake you thought you were seeing on the road is only a rope. You can see how it was only a rope, it never was a snake. It’s almost surprising that you ever saw it as a snake because it’s obviously just a rope. So like that, many people report that they realize that, “Oh, I’ve always known this, I’ve always known this was what I was, I had just somehow overlooked it.” Now I’m starting to ramble so it’s good you interjected, but that’s in a roundabout way my understanding of what enlightenment is.
Gregory: Why don’t we take turns interviewing each other? I’d like to ask you and then you can ask me. But it’s kind of like, let’s reciprocate on the interviewer/interviewee thing here.
Rick: Absolutely, I don’t usually go on this long, but only because you asked me.
Gregory: Do you use the concept of emptiness? And if you do, what do you think that means, to empty? Because you read it in all the literature and everyone’s talking that they’re meditating to empty, etc., etc. And I’m considering, when you’re empty, what are you emptied of?
Rick: I think emptiness is one way of experiencing it, one way of looking at it. And I suppose it depends on the context of how one is using it. But ordinarily one is full of thoughts, full of activities, full of desires, full of all sorts of stuff. And this emptiness experience is more one in which one finds that one rests in a silent field of awareness without a lot of content. I presume that’s the context in which people use it that you’re referring to. But there’s also the flip side of that, which is fullness. And maybe that comes later on or maybe that’s just how other people experience it, according to their makeup.
Gregory: So what is your point of view then about suffering? Who’s suffering and what is our suffering all about? Because most of those you interviewed complain of a lot of suffering, and engaging in lots of practices and doing lots of different things to see if they can’t get at the core of their suffering, at the origin of it. And some did and some didn’t. And some, when they did, it was sort of immediate. And suddenly they felt transformed. The suffering has disappeared. So I’m interested in the tipping point between suffering and not suffering. Do you have any idea what happens when that happens to them, or at least when they report it?
Rick: Yeah.
Gregory: See what I’m saying? Because in psychology, obviously I’m working with suffering all day long, because no one makes an appointment because they feel good. They make an appointment because they’re suffering. And so I’ve always kind of kept a running journal of what is the real dynamic of suffering. What is it really and how does it manifest and why does it persist? What keeps it in place even when your arm isn’t broken and the line is not chasing you, and nothing’s going on apparently? But apparently something’s going on because you’re suffering.
Rick: Yeah. As you know, having listened to a lot of these interviews, I was a student of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi for many years, and he used to like to shock people, especially in radio interviews, by saying, “Christ never suffered.” And of course, I remember seeing an interview with the Bishop of Downside in England back in the early ’60s. Malcolm Muggeridge was interviewing the two of them together, and Maharishi said, “Christ never suffered.” And what he meant was that obviously his body suffered, and he was there on the cross. No one can deny that, if that was a historical fact that that happened. But what he meant was that from Christ’s inner perspective, from his state of development, he resided in a field which was beyond suffering. He didn’t identify with the body. In fact, he so profoundly identified with his divine nature that regardless of the extreme suffering his body was undergoing, that was secondary. His predominant identification, that which he knew himself to be, was beyond the physical and therefore was beyond the possibility of suffering. So I would say that if that’s a true analysis, that one suffers in proportion to how identified one is with one’s individuality to the exclusion of one’s universal nature.
Gregory: So do you have an idea of who’s suffering then?
Rick: Me? Personally?
Gregory: Yeah.
Rick: You mean, can I evaluate whether a person is suffering or not?
Gregory: Well, I mean, suffering obviously is rampant. It’s the dominant theme in the world everywhere. You can’t barely get past it and turn on your TV set. So the question is, what is all this suffering about? And how come at the macro level it doesn’t moderate, it doesn’t diminish particularly? There seems to be almost like a constant buzz going on, and the question is, is that inevitable? Is that genetic? Is that part of our nature to suffer? Or is it an artifact?
Rick: I don’t really know. Obviously it’s happening, and so we can’t argue with reality in that sense. But I think we perhaps live in an age and in a place where suffering is more or less the norm, but there could very well be ages and places where suffering is the anomaly, where it’s the rarity, and where contentment and happiness are the norm. And perhaps we’re going to shift into such an age. Some people think so. But I think for that to happen, there would either have to be a really profound shift in just the whole external circumstances of life, but since I believe that our subjective condition creates and determines our external circumstances, I think that what’s really going to have to happen is a profound shift in our subjective development. And I think that that is taking place in more and more people. Whether or not it will take place to a sufficient degree within our lifetimes, to see a more heavenly world, we don’t know. But we can hope.
Gregory: Sure. So, take Wayne Lickerman.
Rick: Right.
Gregory: And what an allegory. His last name is Lickerman. He was a raging alcoholic. I find that fairly ironic and kind of cute. And he’s a very interesting guy. But I mean, he was a raging alcoholic, and then suddenly one day, one night, inexplicably, like a lightning bolt, he knew he was all through drinking.
Rick: Yeah.
Gregory: His suffering with drinking was over, and you asked him a question, “What do you think happened?” or “What was the transformation? What caused the shift?” And he said, “I don’t know.” And I believe it’s true he didn’t know, but on the other hand, it did trigger his becoming a seeker to see if he could find out the answer to the shift.
Rick: But he had been going to satsangs, hadn’t he, with Ramesh Balsakar or somebody?
Gregory: Yeah, yeah.
Rick: And had been doing that for a long time, so obviously there was the intention and there was the exposure to knowledge that he kept hearing over and over and over again. And perhaps at some point he just reached a tipping point where he was able to give up the alcohol. And in fact, the way I heard the story, he would go to the satsang in the morning or something and then be drunk by the afternoon, and it took him a long time to finally reach that point.
Gregory: Yeah. Have you ever talked to him and asked him the question, “So what happened to you, what occurred so that finally you knew you were done with booze?”
Rick: No, I should interview him sometime, it would be interesting.
Gregory: I mean, it’s a fascinating question, and I got instantly intrigued, but I was really intrigued by the fact that he was genuinely bewildered, apparently, why it was possible for that shift to happen.
Rick: Yeah.
Gregory: And in most of those you interviewed, half of them do make that kind of shift. My question is, can we dolly in and put the shift under the microscope to ask the question, “What is that shift?”
Rick: Well, that is a good question. I think there are people, psychologists and physiologists, who do study that. Here where I live in Fairfield, Iowa, there’s a university, Maharshi University of Management, where everybody meditates, and there are physiologists and so on on the faculty who’ve been trying to study that kind of thing for years, studying brain waves and all sorts of aspects of physiological change, trying to determine what the physiological correlates to enlightenment might be, higher states of consciousness. But personally I think that there’s always going to be an element of mystery to it, and I don’t know if it will ever be really nailed down, cut and dried. I mean, we don’t understand even how a single cell works, in its entirety, much less the entire brain, much less the entire makeup of the person. Now, there are more esoteric sources of information and knowledge who would talk to you about subtle bodies and increasing subtle energy and the evolution of the soul and so on and so forth, and so perhaps that has something to do with it, but I’m no expert.
Gregory: Have you ever read “Wei-Wu-Wei”?
Rick: No, I’ve read quotes here and there, but I’ve never actually read him.
Gregory: Well, that’s where my story begins.
Rick: Okay, good, let’s hear that.
Gregory: So, I’m a psychologist, and I’m taking close notes on suffering because I’m interested in the dynamics of suffering. What is it? Why is it so prevalent? Can I modify it? Can I assist them to modify it? Do they want it to be modified? A lot of questions flew around pretty fast in the process of working with people who are suffering regularly, okay? And most of the suffering is mental suffering. It’s in the head, so to speak. It shows up in the body, but basically it’s a function of the way in which they’re thinking or what it is they’re stuck in as a point of view that really, possibly, can’t be supported. Anyway, I was with a friend one afternoon. He said, “Have you ever read ‘Way-Wu-Way’?” And I said, “No.” And I said, “Who’s that?” We were having a glass of wine. He said, “Pretty interesting guy. I’d like to read it.” “I’ll tell you what,” he said, “I read two of his books, and I didn’t get a word.” He said, “Not a word.” And I went, “Well, I can’t promise you I’ll get a word.” But I took home his book, “Open Secret,” which I’m looking at right up there, and I read it all night. And the next morning, just like some of those you interviewed said, the book was the thing. I mean, it absolutely dropped me to my butt. It had been like I’d been punched. The reason why is that I was totally clear that he was telling the truth about something that I didn’t want to know. How did I know I was hearing the truth? It made the hair on my arms stand straight up. So being a good psychologist and aware of physiological responses and things, I concluded that my unconscious was actually hearing what he was saying, but it wasn’t registering, so there was a disconnect between what he was saying and what I was allowed to know about what he was saying. So I went back to my friend and I said, “That is an amazing book.” He said, “What did he say?” And I said, “I don’t know, but I will tell you this much. I know that’s the book I’ve been looking for. I know it’s going to change the rest of my life, and I know it’s going to revise everything I think and do about psychology.” He said, “How do you know that?” I said, “I don’t know. I just can’t tell you.” So he wrote eight books, and what I did, because now it turned into a very quick obsession, because I knew I found something that was very important. I would read his eight books and take notes, and when I got to the end I stacked them up and then I would start over again. Go through the eight, and I’d stack them up and go through the eight, taking additional notes, trying to sort of synthesize his message.
Rick: That’s the same thing that Gary Crowley did, one of the people I interviewed. He just kept rotating his books and reading them all.
Gregory: For sure. What I was clear of is that what he had done was that he was a very scholarly guy, very bright, and he took all of Buddhism, all of it, all of Eastern philosophy, and deconstructed it down to its core principles. Then he synthesized that, so he ended up with sort of like jewels of wisdom. Then he put them in his eight books. The problem is, I think he identified what the truth might be. I think that’s why the hair on my arm stood up, because the truth he was trying to disseminate was something I absolutely only knew at some pre-conscious level, with no conscious awareness. But I figured if I read it enough times, I might get through, and this is the word, I didn’t make it up, but I certainly use it, I might punch a hole through my own amnesia to see what’s on the other side. Because actually fear is truth bleeding through amnesia to give you a message that you’re not in alignment with the truth. And that the problem is, if you’re out of alignment with the truth, the consequence of being out of alignment is suffering. And that when you can reconnect with the truth, so that you’re back in alignment with it, the lie you’re defending to obscure truth subsides.
Rick: I’m sorry, the lie you’re defending?
Gregory: The lie you’re defending, okay, yeah.
Rick: To obscure truth.
Gregory: Right, subsides.
Rick: Subsides. I didn’t catch that word at first.
Gregory: Yeah, it subsides. And that really got me to thinking about a number of things, a couple which I’ll name for you. Why was it so many clients came to me saying they were suffering and they need some skills and some clues and some techniques and some ways of modifying their suffering at the conscious level the mouth was saying that, and yet what came into focus at an unconscious level is that they were doing everything possible to see to it that nothing worked.
Rick: Yeah.
Gregory: So we have a paradox. The mouth at the conscious level is saying one thing and the truth coming from the unconscious is sending a different message and the two are kept obscure by amnesia. We’re not going to see the truth. Well, I had no idea when I saw that that I was possibly witnessing them working overtime to keep truth in the unconscious, out of sight and out of mind. What you begin to see is that if you take consciousness and arbitrarily divide it into two chunks, there’s the foreground chunk which is what you’re apparently doing here, and then there’s a hidden background chunk that resides on the other side of amnesia which is really dictating the truth of what’s going on, which you don’t want to see over here. So over here you’re sort of … you’re performing, you’re actually impersonating being a being.
Rick: Being a what?
Gregory: A being.
Rick: A being.
Gregory: You’re impersonating being a specific kind of person.
Rick: Right.
Gregory: Shakespeare said, “All the world’s a stage, and the men and women are merely players.” It looks like he knew what he was talking about. And on the other side, there’s the truth of who you are, who is actually dictating who you’re pretending to be. So that waking up now really isn’t about who you pretend to be, it’s about reconnecting with who you are, who’s pretending to be who you’re pretending to be. Do you follow that?
Rick: Yeah.
Gregory: Now, enlightenment is a worthless term. Why? Because enlightenment is reinforcing who you pretend to be, and you’re a seeker to try to find out who you really are.
Rick: Yeah. At least it’s often taken that way. In other words, people say things like, “I am going to get enlightenment,” as if it were a thing one could get.
Gregory: Yeah, well, it’s very clear that the “I” is part of the impostering as being a person. The “I” is actually then going to use the concept of being a seeker to get in the way of finding out what you’re seeking. Because as long as you reinforce the “I,” you’re never going to find out that the truth is not “I,” not “I.” Not the “I” you’re purporting to be, but not “I” that lives on the other side of amnesia.
Rick: Yeah.
Gregory: Okay? So, what I began to see is that my clients were stuck defending who they were impersonating as if that’s who they were. And that defending the lie you are who you’re impersonating is … First of all, it’s a perfect full-time job. Secondly, it is incredibly exhausting. And three, it’s a hoax because you can’t be who you pretend to be, so you’re always spinning your wheels in the mud. Now, amnesia shields you from the truth of what you’re up to so that you don’t have to reconnect with truth. So, the irony here is that the truth is, it looks like, amnesia is saying, truth is the enemy. We don’t want to reconnect with it. We don’t want to know what it is, because whatever it is, it will blow our cover and reveal that we’re not who we pretend to be. Okay? So, what I got from that is, how am I going to work with clients thinking they are who they pretend to be when they’re not, and I’m supporting the fiction they are who they pretend to be, because I’m a psychologist working with people who have a damaged self. And the question is, if there is no self, which Wei Wu Wei says a thousand times, then how do you repair an invented self as if something’s wrong with it?
Rick: Right.
Gregory: Okay? So, paradox and dilemma, what do I do? Do I quit the practice, because it’s obviously at some level absurd, or do I begin to see if I can figure out what he’s saying and incorporate it in some sort of a model that I’m still used to, and find a new way to work with clients? Now, let’s get to what he really said, that dropped me to my knees. He said, “All life is a dream. There are no people, not one. They’re all dreamers in the dream, and they’re featured in the dream as the main event in the dream, impersonating people.” And that as long as we impersonate who we’re impersonating, albeit a superior being, an alcoholic, an inadequate being, whatever it is we’re doing here, misrepresents who we are, because if there are no people, how can anyone have anything wrong with them? So his basic thesis is, which he abstracted from Buddhism, and he deals in the absolute, not the relative, is the problem is there isn’t anyone to have anything wrong with them, so that life, as an impersonator, is how are you going to defend the life if something’s wrong with you and make that the core of who you are? Obviously, if there’s nothing wrong with you, and you’re going to invent a self that’s damaged, in order to portray a damaged being, you’re going to have to put all your energy into your lie, without knowing you are lying. And that’s suffering. Okay?
Rick: Right.
Gregory: So you can begin to see then that suffering, through his eyes, which is his synthesis of the hardcore, absolute Buddhism, the dreamer in the dream is suffering from impersonating a person. Now, that sounded, initially, quite crazy to me. I thought maybe the man was certifiably bonkers. And yet, I kept going back to the hair standing up on my arm, saying, “What if, what if what he’s saying has in fact some validity?” Then he’s talking about an entirely different view of reality than the one all of us show up to support, in which we’re reinforcing the fiction life is about people, and that there are people to suffer. Because what he’s saying is, the dreamer’s suffering in defense of the lives of persons, and that there are no people to suffer. Now, you wonder if Christ knew that. Did Christ know this is a dream? “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.” They’re bonkers, Dad, they’re bonkers. Did he know that there was no one to suffer, and therefore he didn’t suffer? If he knew he was a dreamer in the dream, and there are no people, then there are no people to suffer. Did he know that? Well, Wei Wu Wei says he did. And Wei Wu Wei says, “The ones that woke up are the ones that got it. There was no one to have anything wrong with them.” So, the dilemma for me wasn’t working with clients. I finally caught on. They didn’t want to part with suffering, because that’s what they used to play the part of a victim. The dominant theme in reality, if you finally statistically take a good look at it, is that the vast majority of us are filling up time, in one way or another, reinforcing the idea that the self we have is damaged, and that we’re some kind of a victim. Now, there’s a kind of collective consensus on this side of amnesia, to support that fantasy. We listen like, “Oh.” You know, we know how to all reinforce the idea that someone has something wrong with them. And it rarely crosses our mind that we’re impersonating that, and that there is no one to have anything wrong with them, because there is no one, period. Why? Because mind is dreaming you in the dream, doing what you’re doing in the dream. So, I reasoned, “How about if I assemble a brand new way of working with people, and forget the concept that there are people to work with, and work as a dreamer to another dreamer in the dream, about what they’re doing in the dream, to keep suffering in place, in order to impersonate a person.” And I slowly began to put that together. And I called it the recovery process. That’s all I do these days. I don’t work with people. And I’ll tell you something interesting. The more you work with information on the other side of amnesia, you really see that there’s a huge body of stuff there, information, which really coheres, makes sense, finally, and seems factual, if out of sync with the traditional views that we support on this side of amnesia. So, there are really two worlds going on. There’s the world which we love to call illusion, which really isn’t illusion. There’s no such thing as illusion. Okay? That what there really is, is that the dreamers in the dream, in defense of the lighter people, call what they’re doing an illusion to reinforce the idea that someone could be stuck in an illusion. It’s fairly funny, if you think about it. So, the work I do is to see if I can’t… The normal process is to go 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0. Zero being, zero duality, zero drama, zero reactivity, zero emotionality. Then you end up what Wei Wu Wei says, in a state of benevolence. When duality disappears, you’re not using emotion to play the part of a person. And most of us are endlessly, a la Shakespeare, exaggerating the part we play, because we’re working silently in league with one another, to keep reality in place as we define it and want it to be, as opposed to what Wei Wu Wei says it is. So, what I do is the recovery process, and what I do is, instead of going 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, which is the normal progression, isn’t it? You start with where you are now, you start, go through layers of confusion, layers of deception, and finally, inch by inch, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, you begin to pass through the other side, and find out that what wakes up is not a person, but the dreamer wakes up when he lets go of the lie of the person. Instead of a person becoming enlightened, the dreamer drops the lie, the person it’s impersonating, and the dreamer wakes up, and he calls that the end of bondage. Bondage ends, and the dreamer really realizes, one, it’s not possible to be a person in a dream, and two, defending the lie you can prove you’re a person in a dream, is what suffering is all about, particularly if you’re going to document that something’s wrong with you because you have a damaged self. And so that my question about emptiness is, emptiness is letting go of the lie you’re a person, and we usually do it because we’re featured in the dream, reluctant to let go of the lie, we do it piecemeal, one piece at a time, until finally on the other side of amnesia, you’re actually then centered in being a dreamer in the dream, right? Who’s having fun watching others portray people. And so you end up being whimsical, you end up being spontaneous, you end up not being reactive, you end up not being judgmental, because all those concepts reinforce the idea there’s someone to assess someone and judge them. If there’s no one to judge anyone, then judgment obviously at some level is comedy. Okay? And believe me, on this side of the equation, time is filled with judgment. Everyone’s judging everyone, everything’s assessed, everything’s dualistic, good, bad, right and wrong. Now, what he says, in the process of, in the dream, creating the lie we are people, you have to do it with duality. We’re featured creating duality, and this is tricky, to defend the fiction, it’s possible to exist outside of the dream, mind is dreaming. Now, if right now is the mind is dreaming, like right now, how are you going to step outside of it? You can only do it with the trick called duality, in which you’re going to really argue that you’re not in the dream, you’re outside of it, and you’re having a life. Wei Wu Wei is very clear, if there are no people, dreamers are purporting to have a life, as if they’re outside the dream. And in reality, there is no one having a life. Now, what’s intriguing about him, what he’s very intrigued, what he’s intriguing, what’s really intriguing, is that he, what he’s saying is, the last thing the dreamer wants to recover, is that it’s not possible in the dream to be a person. So, literally then, truth is treated in the dream as the enemy. You don’t want to go there, you don’t want to hear that, there are certain gurus out there that are sort of alluding to it, and instantly when you’re around them, you get a little nervous, because they’re sort of already challenging the credibility of your reality as an actual being. And what they’re saying is, they’re alluding to it, whether they’re, whether Wei Wu Wei or not, or just have studied a lot of Buddhism, or have done a lot of meditation, because in the process of meditation, pretty soon into the process, the self starts disintegrating, disappears, vaporizes. That’s the exact moment when many dreamers posing as people, meditating, quit. Because as they start, as the invented self starts to vaporize, they get really nervous, because the next consideration beyond that is, maybe there isn’t anyone to have a self in the first place. Or even funnier yet, what if there isn’t anyone at all? What if the whole thing is happening in the dream mind, is dreaming including inventing the self to play the part of a person believably? Okay? So, what I finally decided was, shall I work 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, which I already know means that by the time you reach 3, you’re going to run into a wall of resistance and amnesia, because there’s going to be a fight. Dreamers don’t relinquish their grip on the lie they’re a person easily. It comes real hard. And that’s built into the dream. That’s not that people are a problem, because there are no people to be a problem. It’s built into the dream that the dreamer is going to hang on to the lie he’s a person, come hell or high water. And if the dreamer persists in sort of insisting that I am going to wake up, because something’s not right with me, I’m engaged in something that feels phony and unreal, and I believe I can get past that and experience something which Wei Wu Wei refers to as liberation. What the dreamer is liberated from is the lie that goes with defending the lie you’re a person. Now, I reason, why work 5, 4, 3, 2, 1? Why not start with the truth and find out what you do to pretend you can cancel truth? Start with the truth that this is a dream, and you’re in the dream or in the dream, and why don’t we take a look at what you’re doing in the dream to defend the lie you’re a person? So I’ve already bypassed some of the resistance, because I said, “Are you willing to play at this level?” We’re playing a game. I’m not asking you to buy it. I’m asking you to consider that, are you willing to consider that this is a dream and you’re a dreamer in the dream, and that you’re doing certain things over and over again to sustain the fiction that you’re going to successfully prove in the dream you are a person. And I’m getting good results. All I can tell you is that the results are fascinating. I work with a group of artists, celebrities, people who have some money, who have heard about what I’m doing, want to do it. And this much I can tell you, on this side of the equation over here, everything’s mythology, because there are no people, there’s dreamers impersonating people to the extent they think they are the people they’re impersonating. So the blank on this level is all metaphorical. As you cross over the line on the other side of amnesia, it is no longer metaphorical, it’s direct language from the truth. This is a mind-generated dream and you’re a dreamer in it. So all the language changes. Now, when I’m working with a client, they start to realize that the old language doesn’t cut it, and they start shifting to the new language, albeit reluctantly. But slowly as they use the new language, then what comes into focus is maybe what we’re talking about could be true, Greg. I’m not saying it is, it still could be crackpot, but you know what? I do find I’m intrigued and I do find it’s something I want to do. And we’re having fun because we’re both talking about how we imposter being people. See what I’m saying? So you’re already in the same ballpark, you’re already learning to use the same language, you’re already considering that suffering is a consequence of unsuccessfully trying to document that you are some kind of a person, and more often than not, someone who’s ruined, someone who’s damaged, someone who’s defected, someone who needs repair. Think of how many self-help books sell predicating the assumption that someone has a damaged self and this book will fix it. Now, if the self is invented, how is a self-help book going to fix an invented self? They all end up as doorstops. Every self-help book, you finally run on it, for three months, six months, nine months, and then finally they will end up as doorstops. At some point you have to ask, “Why is it that way?” Because how can a self-help book repair a non-existent self in which you’re defending the life, the one you have is broken, when there isn’t anyone to have a broken self? When you see that, those books are laughable. So what are you working on, on the other side? You’re working on accepting the fact that you’re in the dream mind is dreaming. You’re not running the dream you’re in. You’re in the dream and it’s running. The thing that’s most alarming about that is that if you’re in the dream that mind is dreaming and it’s running, then you’re not running a damn thing. Ever. You know what that does to the concept of control? It blows it out of the water and I’m telling you, if you want to see someone get upset real quick, just to live to the possibility, not only that they’re not running anything, but they’re not running anything because it doesn’t exist to be run. It’s delusional. Okay? The shift from the truth on this side of the equation to here is delusional. On this side you end up objective. I don’t mean as an object, I mean aware. Objective, rational, appropriate and non-delusional. The minute you depart, using duality as the trick to try to confirm you are a person, from T, which is truth. At T1 you’re already slightly delusional. At T2, oh my God, you’re picking up steam. By the time you reach T5, you are quite nuts, but you’re in the majority who’s nuts. We’re all quite nuts, depending on why we’re people. At T10, you’re certifiable. You think you’re Jesus and you’re walking down the street and whatever. So, the truth is, on this side of the equation, if mind is all there is, and mind is dreaming this dream just the way it’s happening, then there is no duality. Of course. How could there be? There’s no such thing. So it’s the dreamer in the dream who creates duality to defend the lie, it’s the person that’s impersonating. And literally, as you see, the more you use duality to defend the fiction, you are the person you’re impersonating, the more you suffer. Why? Because you’re trying to use something that doesn’t exist, as if it will work for you to prove you are who you pretend to be. I mean, we’re talking madness. Now, on the other side of the equation, as you start to let go of the lie you’re a person, there’s a tipping point at which you start to having fun, comedy, with who it is you pretend to be, because you’re not who you pretend to be. And you can even make fun of your own self, the fiction you have on, okay? And in fact, what comes into focus, and Wei Wu Wei says, by the way, if you read his books, he’s outrageously funny, unbelievably funny. He’ll double you up with humor, because like a good comedian, he catches you in the lie you’re disseminating, but not in a mean way. It’s just like he snaps you around, so you kind of go, “Whoa!” “I didn’t see that, but I am really quite an imposter.” Okay? So that’s kind of where I’m coming from, and that’s the kind of work I do. And I have no idea what you think about it. And I gave up caring what dreamers, posing as people, think about anything.
Rick: My initial thought is, I keep wondering, to what extent this is an intellectual construct based upon thinking about it so intensely for so long and reading those books over and over and over and over again, and to what extent it has shifted your actual nitty-gritty, moment-to-moment experience of life. Walking down the street, going in the supermarket, stubbing your toe, getting the flu, breaking your leg, making love, whatever you do, how is your orientation to all those experiences different than it was before you embarked on this whole exploration?
Gregory: Well, most of the time on this side of the equation, on this side of amnesia where you’re busy impersonating a being and using a broken self to sort of document that, you’re really stuck in the lie you are who you appear to be. And you have no conscious awareness of what you’re really doing, okay? When you start to shift from this side of the equation to this side, which I call the movement from here to here, is that the dreamer wakes up to let go of the lives of person, you suddenly realize that every second the dream is on. For instance, right now mind is dreaming us talking. There’s no one talking. Mind is dreaming us talking right now, okay? And you can say that intellectually, but there’s a funny tipping point where suddenly what I just said becomes a fact, and you experience it to be the truth. Like the Skandhas, you know, no one’s talking. The dreamer is talking in the dream, and if you’ll pay close attention, most talking services the lie dualistically that we are the people we impersonate. Most talking services duality. So that talking on the other side of the equation is non-dual. Now what is mind dreaming? Now what are you doing in the dream? Oh, my leg hurts. Well, you have a leg, and you’re in the dream, and you have a leg that hurts. That’s right. So it’s not personal anymore. Look, it’s the end of personalizing anything at all. Because if there are no people, how could anything be personal? Not telling, experiencing that is transformative. It really feels very different. So that the concept of criticism disappears, judgment disappears, and if you’re more interested in the dreamer’s plight as to how he’s suffering, trying to document and sustain the fiction, that he’s going to successfully prove he’s a person, and he’s not going to pull it off. You have compassion. You know, you’ve been there. You know what that feels like. You know what sustaining that lie feels like. So I am saying it is a very spiritual experience to be in the dream, aware that the dream is on and you’re in it, and that you don’t run it. You’re flowing with what’s happening. You give up thinking that you’re… It’s okay to pretend you have plans. I say that to clients, “You don’t have plans.” But for God’s sake, don’t assume they’re going to turn out the way you planned.
Rick: So let me just interject there. There was some emergency while you were doing all that where the dog came in with a dead animal or something. I got a little bit distracted.
Gregory: See, now look, if the dream is on, the dog came in in the dream with something about a dead animal.
Rick: Right.
Gregory: Is that in reality or is that content in the dream?
Rick: Oh, of course. I mean, we can say… We’ll explore around this whole thing, but I mean, if you’re driving your car and a kid goes in front of you on a bicycle or something like that, you slam on your brakes, you do what you can to avoid him, and in that nitty-gritty moment, you’re not sort of thinking about whether this is a dream or not. You’re reacting and doing the best you can not to hit the…
Gregory: The dream, in all probability, will picture you slamming on the brakes.
Rick: Yeah.
Gregory: But the question is, did a person slam on the brakes or did the dreamer in the dream, stuck in the fiction, it’s a person slam on the brakes?
Rick: Yeah, but my question is, is that a concept? After the near-miss or maybe you hit the kid or whatever, is that something that you sit down and think, “Whoa, the dream really got intense there”? Or is there something in the nature of your experience throughout that entire little incident which is radically different from the experience of someone who has never considered this stuff? I mean, an intellectual understanding or a concept is easily thrown off by…
Gregory: Okay, on this side of the equation, what goes with sustaining the fiction you are the person you’re impersonating is the concept of intellectuality. See, if there are no people, please explain to me intellectuality. From the perspective of reconnecting with the possibility that we’re in a dream that mind is dreaming, you understand that that’s the truth, and truth doesn’t sell. If 99.9% of the dreamers are purporting to be people on this side of the equation, mostly playing the part of the victim, they sure as hell don’t want to hear that they’re dreamers, because they’re busy defending the lie that there’s some kind of a person and that they’re having a miserable life and their money and their house and their children.
Rick: Right, they take all that very seriously.
Gregory: Yeah, you see, everything serious on this side of the equation as you reconnect with the fact that this is a dream, seriousness disappears. It’s not that you don’t care, it’s just that you’re not reacting to it anymore, as if it’s content in something called life. It’s content in a dream.
Rick: Yeah, so I mean that sort of speaks…
Gregory: By the way, I’ve worked with… we can get to it, but I’ve worked with post-traumatic stress disorder, and I’m telling you, the psychiatrists have the wrong view of how to treat those guys. I promise you.
Rick: Well, what you said sort of speaks to my question, which is that for all this to be of practical value, I feel it has to be experiential, and one can read a thousand books and still be very much caught in the dream, as you put it, and very much caught in suffering. But if it has really seeped into the pores, really kind of into the gut, then it does profoundly shift the entire quality of your life, the entire nature of your experience. I mean, when I was 18 years old, I was reading Zen books, and I could pontificate for hours, and I didn’t know what the heck I was saying, but I could go on and on with a conceptual rap.
Gregory: Yeah, so you were a dreamer, playing the part of an intellectual kid, who could rap at an intellectual level.
Rick: Yeah, I could talk about spiritual concepts, and I could even talk about them as though I were experiencing them.
Gregory: I bet you were still featured in the dream thinking you’re a person who’s pontificating.
Rick: Yeah. Now, this whole thing about being a person or not being a person, I tend to not take a sort of a this-side-that-side attitude, but more an all-inclusive thing, where on some level, yes, you’re not a person, on some level, yes, it is a dream, but on another level, the dream has to be… If you’re a scientist, for instance, and you’re studying biology, and you’re looking into the way cells work, and so on and so forth, or you’re a baseball player, whatever you are, there’s a… Go ahead, what were you going to say?
Gregory: This is a dream. How many scientists are there?
Rick: Of course not. From the perspective of this being entirely a dream, the whole thing is an illusion. As Shankara said, “When the elephant chased him, the illusory elephant chased the illusory me up the illusory tree.”
Gregory: But what happens to your consciousness and to your sensitivity and to your humor and your goodwill, when you no longer are trying to compete with others as to who’s going to successfully prove they’re a person? I mean, everything drops out of the equation, because you understand, if there are no people on this side of the equation, and all the dreamers are competing to see who’s going to successfully document that they are one, often through suffering, by the way. Suffering’s really popular. You know, we go, “Whoa, it’s me, isn’t it awful, all this suffering’s happening.” Don’t be so sure about that. Without suffering, how does a dreamer substantiate that it’s a person? So it reconfigures the whole way you look at suffering, instead of being upset about it. What I do with clients is I say, “Why don’t we use your suffering constructively as indirect proof that you’re trying to prove you’re a person, and you’re failing in suffering, because you’re failing.” And they go, “I never thought of using suffering constructively. That is crazy, but you know what, it kind of resonates.”
Rick: Yeah.
Gregory: You know what I’m saying? So, it’s not that you don’t witness the scientist working. You witness the dreamers on it, and it has a scientist in it. It’s not that dreamers don’t get– that marriage doesn’t occur. Marriage is an event in the dream in which two dreamers, for whatever reason, often for mischief and trouble, find each other to engage in something in the dream called marriage. And I also found out, because I did thousands of hours of marriage counseling, that dreamers unconsciously find each other to make life awful, really awful. In fact, I coined the phrase “awfulization.” And when you really wake up, you can listen to someone awfulizing. It isn’t abstract. In fact, it’s transparent. And I can get a couple in marriage counseling to laugh, because they’re going at it, and I’m saying, “So, who’s winning the contest today?” And they’ll burst into laughter and go, “We’re doing it again. I’m trying to prove he’s bad and I’m good.” And I’m going, “What if there’s no one to be either? Aren’t you funny? You are really funny. You’re cracking me up.” And they begin to go, “So we’re both trying to prove we’re people, and we’re taking it out on each other.”
Rick: Yeah, they’re locked into sort of being– into the individual perspective to the exclusion of their non-person, universal nature.
Gregory: Well, I mean, if you’re surrounded by non-persons, and they’re all going to try to document they are persons, it gets pretty wild out there in terms of grandstanding, name-dropping, who’s got the biggest car, who has the biggest tits, you name it. I mean, it’s outrageous. And at some point, you see that that’s not a quality of people, that we’re absurd people. That’s the absurdity that goes with defending the lie we’re a person. It’s dreamer-centric activity.
Rick: I think I– my sort of– I haven’t worked all this out yet, Greg. And I know there’s the whole sort of neo-Advaita non-dual community, which I don’t know whether you consider yourself a part of or not, but there are a number of teachers who have a similar kind of way of presenting knowledge. And then– and I sort of feel like there’s something incomplete with it in the sense that, yeah, I get the idea that everything is a dream, but at the same time, there’s sometimes too much of what Adyashanti calls getting kind of stuck in the absolute view, where the relative nature of things is, you know, albeit ultimately illusory, is discounted too much. Like, let me give you an example.
Gregory: I just want to say one thing. I’m not really clear in retrospect. That’s what really attracted me to Wei Wu Wei. His description of what’s going on is absolute. This is always a dream, and it’s not relative. See, if I listen closely to all the dreamers talking and the guys and people, they’re all arguing for the relative. And you know what? That’s not a defect. That’s not because they’re evil. That’s not because they’re nasty. It’s because dreamers argue for the relative because they don’t like the absolute. They don’t like it. The absolute says, “There’s not a chance in hell you’re going to prove you’re a person, and when you wake up and get that, guess what? You’re going to start dancing. You’re going to start having a little fun.”
Rick: Yeah, and what I’m saying is that in the larger …
Gregory: Are we having fun now? Look, see.
Rick: Yeah, yeah, I love this.
Gregory: We’re having fun. I’m noticing fun happening.
Rick: Yeah, yeah, we’re having fun.
Gregory: We are having fun.
Rick: As I understand it, in the Advaita tradition in India, there’s … well, maybe I shouldn’t even speak in terms of the Advaita tradition because I’m not an expert in it. But the term “Brahman,” which is considered to be the penultimate realization in that tradition, is thought to be inclusive of both the absolute and the relative. In other words, it’s not just the absolute view. That actually takes place several major stages before the realization of Brahman. But it’s the realization that there’s a larger wholeness, which is more than the sum of its parts, that includes both the absolute and the relative. And someone with that realization would agree with you that ultimately the relative is an illusion, is a dream, but at the same time, paradoxically, it has its significance, it has its value. It’s not just utterly dismissed and …
Gregory: Does the relative exist or is it nested in the absolute? See, what I’m saying is the absolute is absolute because it’s true. Right now it’s the dream mind is dreaming, and the dream mind is dreaming includes the dreamer arguing for the relative. So that really, the lie is part of the truth. We can’t dualistically separate the lie of the relative from the absolute that’s constant. This is always the dream mind is dreaming, and guess what? Surprise, it features the dreamers in the dream arguing for the relative. You better believe. We’re willing to die for the lie. We’re willing to die for the lie we’re people. What do you think suicide is? We’re willing to die for the lie we are a person. And I’ve seen it. I’ve worked with it.
Rick: Sure. Let’s say that you have … let’s talk in terms of physics for a minute. Molecules, or atoms, might say, there’s nothing here but atoms. Because looking around, that’s all there is. Maybe there’s subatomic particles or whatever. We’ll just start with atoms. And anything that … someone might say, well, here’s a rock. The atom says, it’s nothing but atoms. There is no rock. There’s only atoms. Taking it up another level, molecules might say, well, there’s nothing but molecules. This rock is all molecules. And fine, we’re composed of atoms, but really there is a level at which there are molecules. And then you can take it up another step. Cells in the body might truthfully say, there’s nothing but cells. There is no body. And they’re right. Where is the body? It’s all just this cell, this cell, this cell, trillions of them. It’s all just cells. But then on a more macroscopic level, you have organs and all. And at every level, you could boil it right back down to nothingness, to the absolute, to consciousness, or whatever you want to call it, to the vacuum state, which lies beyond all particles. But that …
Gregory: But if you want to hang out, even at the level of entertainment, with the idea that this is a dream, then you start thinking of the wave-particle thing. The wave is more … whatever this is, this thing, this dream, seems wave-like, but it has the capacity to particulate as an apparent object. And cohere. What is it that makes a Rick cohere? Why don’t you just stop cohering and just not occupy space as a Rick, see? Because the dream includes that the wave will particulate. And by the way, that drives physicists nuts. Because they’re trying to figure out how that works.
Rick: Right.
Gregory: And it may be another 50 years before someone says, “You know what? This is really beginning to look like a dream that has the capacity to manifest as apparent things!” Which would then take care of the void-form thing pretty good. The form, the wave can particulate as form, but if you look at it, it’s still void, because it’s just dream content.
Rick: Yeah. I agree with you. As long as, I mean, for instance, if a person took this view and thought, “Well, it’s all a dream.”
Gregory: Wait, wait, wait. A person, people, there is no end to that. People don’t have points of view. Dreamers have points of view to impersonate people.
Rick: Right.
Gregory: And do we have belief systems in this dream? And when you understand they’re all made up, I’m telling you, it’s all you can do to keep from laughing at it. Because, and I don’t mean you’re being mean, you’re just aware that dreamers can’t defend the lie of their people without belief systems. Dreamers can’t.
Rick: Right.
Gregory: And you know how much we love to part with the belief system? Whoop! We will fight tooth and nails. Because the belief system actually inflates the self or the ego and gives it something to represent. It represents it, you know what I mean?
Rick: Yeah. Now, so would you say, for instance, then, that you don’t have a point of view about anything?
Gregory: Yes I do. And what I’m saying is that apparently, if everything takes us to mind, then the only point of view I have is that apparently mind is all there is. And it’s dreaming.
Rick: Is it mind or is it consciousness?
Gregory: I don’t know. Wei Wei Wei says you can’t even use the word mind, and I understand what he’s saying. Apparently if we’re going to be dualistic, we’re going to have to use the word mind, or the discussion’s over. We can’t even talk, okay? But what I’m saying is there’s something that’s unknown, which we’ll probably never know. It’s the dreamer of this dream, and why don’t we give it the name mind so we can talk?
Rick: Why is it unknown and why would we never know it?
Gregory: Because there’s no one to know it.
Rick: Can it know itself?
Gregory: Knowing reinforces the lie that there’s a knower to know something.
Rick: Can it know itself?
Gregory: Ah, well yeah. And are we it knowing itself? Well if there’s no duality, my guess is yeah. That’s as close as we’re going to get. But not as a person who’s a knower, we’re it knowing itself.
Rick: Right, it knows itself. Now don’t you think that’s what enlightenment really is? When the Buddha awakened, wasn’t it … in fact when the Buddha awakened he said all beings are enlightened. When the Buddha awakened, wasn’t it the self waking up to itself through the sort of mechanism of the Buddha?
Gregory: Well, was the self waking up to recapture the fact that the infinite self, mind, is dreaming reality just the way it’s manifesting? But it’s content in a dream, and the dream it’s dreaming includes the dreamers, that’s us.
Rick: Actually when he first woke up, as I understand the story, there was, for the time being, there was complete loss of awareness of any manifestation or creation or dreamers or anything else. It was just pure self-awareness, self awake to itself.
Gregory: Yeah, yeah. I mean isn’t that the essence of the concept of mindfulness? Back to the word emptiness, as all the personhood stuff falls away, and you’re emptying out, you’re in the dream defending a liar person, you’re letting go of stuff that supports the fiction you are a person, and it gets emptier and emptier and emptier until finally what you’re left with, mind’s going on. And what is it doing? This! It’s doing this! It had the dog thing happen a few minutes ago.
Rick: Yeah, yeah. What I’m getting at is, when people meditate, for instance, very often their experience is there’s a settling down and, as you were saying earlier, a dissolution of individuality. To use the analogy of an ocean, the waves settle down and it’s just pure ocean, pure still, silent, unaware, consciousness without an object. It’s not experiencing something, it’s just pure awareness. And then you get back to activity after that, and you’re engaged in activity and the whole dream world arises again.
Gregory: Well, as the self starts to disappear in the process of meditation, that’s off the end of meditation, we’re not doing that anymore.
Rick: Or, let’s say the person doesn’t give it up, they keep doing it, then they become accustomed to this experience, they become comfortable with the dissolution.
Gregory: Yeah, maybe they begin to have fun with the awareness that there isn’t anyone to have a self, and isn’t it funny that I spend all my time arguing for ones if I have one.
Rick: Yeah, and so it’s no longer a threat to them or an alien experience to allow the individuality to allow the drop to merge with the ocean, you know?
Gregory: For sure.
Rick: For the snowflake to land on the water and dissolve.
Gregory: You know what Wei Wu Wei says?
Rick: What?
Gregory: If you’re going to meditate, for God’s sake don’t pretend there’s a person to do it.
Rick: Right, but you might start out very much feeling that there’s a person, “Okay, I’m sitting down meditating here.”
Gregory: Well, I’m just saying, I’m a person, and guess what? I am meditating, you’ll actually brag about it, we love to say, “I’m a meditator.”
Rick: Right, but if the process is successful though, then you discover that there is the individual is really cosmic.
Gregory: For sure.
Rick: The particular …
Gregory: Here’s the meditator stuck in the picture and it’s a person. Now it’s meditating and suddenly it settles down and this self sort of vaporizes and then what comes to the folk next is, “I don’t have a self, maybe I’m a dreamer and a dreamer is playing the part of a person with the self and that’s why I have it and I’ll be just fine without it.”
Rick: Well even all that dialogue wouldn’t be going on, it would just be the pure, innocent experience of selflessness or pure awareness.
Gregory: You know, if the meditation works, the dreamer comes out of the meditation less invested in the lie it’s a person.
Rick: Exactly, right. And over years of practice, if that’s what the person does, the grip or the convincingness of the lie of a person just becomes more and more feeble.
Gregory: Exactly. You know, if it’s true that we’re dreamers and dream impersonating people, then you understand the only real addiction is to the fiction you are a person. We’re addicted to the fiction, we can successfully argue using duality and the self to document that I am some kind of a person and guess what? Proof for that is I feel like shit. I must be a person. And if you reverse the whole process, I can’t prove I’m a person unless I feel like shit. I mean that’s why I got interested in psychotherapy, that a lot of the clients said, “Well when are you going to pay me good money for me to intervene and see if I can’t interrupt their suffering, how they feel like crap?” And yet I was actually becoming increasingly aware that I was getting a mixed message. I feel like crap, but don’t you interrupt the process because I need it because it documents the lie the self is real because I have a broken self that’s ruined.
Rick: Well that’s what the ego does, I think it becomes addicted to … well it has an innate tendency to try to perpetuate itself and controversy and suffering and arguments and conflict and all that are very powerful tools for keeping it intact.
Gregory: I mean how can a dreamer argue for the lie it’s a person without a self, without the concept of self? You can’t do it. Now instead of being upset about that you can see that is part of the dream mind is dreaming that the dream includes the dreamer will invent the self to engage in the relevant. The truth includes the lie which is the relative. Now if you investigate Buddhism, there are some 18 schools of Buddhism, and if you pay really close attention and you’re a good scholar you’re going to find out they all rotate around whether things are absolute or relative. And not only do they go at it, some of them hated each other. They didn’t kill each other but they got pretty close. They would talk to others, those in another school’s point of view differ from their own, which is very egocentric even then, wasn’t it? They were Buddhists.
Rick: Right. Well there’s a similar kind of situation in Hinduism where you have the different schools of philosophy and the six systems of Indian philosophy and some people argue that those are just competing doctrines and that they’re actually at war with one another, but others suggest more wisely that they are just perspectives at different stages of development and each is appropriate at its own stage but each gives rise to the next as this person evolves.
Gregory: You know, Wei Wu Wei would say that they’re all content in the dream mind is dreaming, having levels of awareness about the truth that this is a dream. I really recommend you read some of him. First of all, he’s a kick. Secondly, he’s really funny. And third, he’s probably the brightest guy whose path you’ll ever cross. I mean, he’s outrageous, just outrageous.
Rick: I probably will. I’ll try to get it.
Gregory: I started Open Secret again this week for the 56th time and here it is. And you can get it at Amazon because all of his books now are available at Amazon. And just let him blow your mind because he’s succinct. In the guise of being a person, he occasionally becomes esoteric and arcane and you sit there and go, “There he goes, bye bye.” But then he has the capacity because of his range of awareness to snap back into the truth. He’s going arcane on you. He’ll even make fun of it.
Rick: Yeah, I hardly ever find the time to actually read. I listen to a lot of audio things, but I’ll try to find the time or maybe I’ll be able to get a hold of some of his books on tape or something.
Gregory: Yeah, for sure. Once you read one, you’re going to be hooked because you don’t have to read them all. And it’s true. If the truth is, “Mind is dreaming this dream called reality,” then that’s the only message he has and he has 500 ways of saying it. And he does say it over and over again and he keeps trying to get you to get it. He’s trying to get the dreamer to get it, that aren’t you having fun pretending to be a person even if you’re using suffering?
Rick: Yeah, I still have this doubt and I don’t suppose we’re going to resolve it in this conversation, but I have this doubt that a lot of people read that stuff and listen to that stuff and end up convincing themselves on an intellectual level of what he’s saying, but it’s different than really living it on an experiential level as perhaps Buddha or Christ or any truly enlightened person has done. It’s like a person can say over and over to themselves, “I am a king, I am a king, I am a king, I am a king,” and eventually perhaps convince themselves that they are a king and all really have that in mind, but they’re not actually a king, they haven’t actually attained kingship.
Gregory: There’s a fly in the ointment.
Rick: What’s that?
Gregory: If this is a dream, your status in this dream is fixed.
Rick: What do you mean?
Gregory: You’ve never been anything but a dreamer in this dream, busy trying to pretend to be a person. Your status is, and that’s funny, is fixed. You’re a dreamer in the dream and you’re laminating on that from all your experience and duality and all the stories that are running around in your head, you’re laminating on top of a fixed fact this huge homunculus, this cancer that you’re going to drag through time to try to advance the fiction. You’re going to successfully prove you’re not this, you’re this. What he’s saying is as long as you hang on to this, plan on suffering because it’s a lie. When you let this go, you go, “I’ve never been anything but a dreamer in a dream. This is something I have to wake up and get, it’s something that was always there and it’s never been anything but an established fact.”
Rick: Yeah, now if a person really gets that …
Gregory: No, a dreamer will get it because if what he’s saying is true, it’s a fixed fact, it’s not arbitrary. You’re going to be a dreamer today, you’re going to be a dreamer tomorrow. Now, to what extent is Rick going to get into his Rick suit, his Archer suit, and do Rick stuff? And I’m not criticizing that, I’m saying plan on it.
Rick: What do you mean plan on it?
Gregory: Plan on the fact that you’re going to probably be featured in the dream shifting from what’s constant, you’re a dreamer in the dream, into the fiction you’re some kind of a person who’s got troubles and problems and aches and pains and the dogging or whatever you’re up to.
Rick: I’m not locked into that anymore, years ago I was, but there’s always now an awareness of that which is beyond the dream, even when I’m asleep pretty much. Although sometimes when you sleep you just sleep, but I’ll be snoring, my wife will wake me up, “Hey, you’re snoring,” and I’ll realize I was already awake, awareness was already there even though the body was snoring. So for me the whole importance of this whole discussion, the whole consideration of awakening or enlightenment or whatever terminology you want to use, is very much an experiential thing. And I’m just expressing this as a cautionary note because people go to weekend seminars these days where they hear someone talk about non-duality and they think they’ve got it. And I’m not suggesting that that’s the case with you because you’ve been devoting decades to this.
Gregory: The problem is if you think you’ve got it then you still think there’s a person to get it. What the dreamer gets is, “This is a dream, I’m a dreamer in a dream,” and that’s a fixed fact that has never changed since the day I showed up in the dream. What showed up is that what got laminated on top of that is I’m featured in the dream arguing for the relative. That I’m something other than a dreamer in this dream. And the dreamer inside of you is saying, “Are you really going to do that? Are you really going to grandstand? Are you really going to put on that absurd show?” “Yes I am.” There’s a dialogue going on all the time. Truth is looking at you and kind of going, “Have fun!” You know, you are a jerk.
Rick: Well there is something these days which some people call the neo-advaita shuffle, where people use terminology and concepts to argue this perspective that it’s all a dream and that there is no person and so on and so forth. But they haven’t actually realized that experientially, to the extent that it can be realized, to the extent that Ramana Maharshi realized it or Shankara realized it or any of the great seers. And yet they think, they convince themselves …
Gregory: If you’re a dreamer in this dream, the only thing you can do is pretend you’re not that. So if you’re a dreamer in the dream and I’m a dreamer in the dream, we’re equal. We are absolutely in the dream, wide awake, arguing for the relative periodically. You will get beat in the dream arguing for the relative that I’m not a dreamer in the dream. That is ridiculous, that’s a strange concept. And I’m saying, “But what if it’s a fixed fact that’s the only thing you can be if this is a dream?” What if tomorrow suddenly you went, “Oh my God, I’ve always been a dreamer in this dream. I always knew it was one and I’ve been busy playing the part of some kind of a person with problems,” or whatever you’ve got going. We all get featured doing it. And the ability to wake up to the extent that you can see you’re a dreamer who’s featured in the dream putting on this show, like Shakespeare said, is the essence of humor. I told you originally I pay a lot of attention to comedians.
Rick: Because?
Gregory: Because I’m trying to discern, one, who is the good one, whatever that means, and two, what is it that they’re saying gets the whole audience to actually crap their drawers laughing so hard? What is going on? And I’m listening to that dreamer, somehow in a way that’s not me, waking the audience up to the fact they’re all phonies.
Rick: Unless it’s Don Rickles.
Gregory: Yeah, well, I mean there are good ones and there are ones that are pretending to be funny and they’re not funny.
Rick: Comedy I think can be a spiritual technique because it creates this leap across a chasm of … it suspends our ordinary calcified, locked in condition and that’s why we laugh.
Gregory: Yeah, I mean a good comedian reconnects you to the fact that you’re a dreamer, impostering, being a person. And people start pulling your chain and you don’t know why you’re feeling uncomfortable but he’s getting dangerously close to the fact you impersonate a person which is reason enough to feel embarrassed. Embarrassment is the sign we already know the truth, we’re not who we purport to be and that we might get caught today. The worst fear we have is public speaking.
Rick: Not mine. I did a lot of it so I’m okay with it.
Gregory: But I’m saying it’s number one.
Rick: Right.
Gregory: Number one fear. And if you ask, “Well, why should that be?” You’re knowledgeable, you know the topic, you’re able to talk, you’re interesting, you’re engaging, you have good language, you have good presentation. That’s not the issue. The issue is someone in the audience might catch on that you’re putting on a show and you’re not who you appear to be. People have panic attacks and I’ve worked a lot with panic attacks. And the panic attack is that you’re very close to finding out the truth that you’re an imposter.
Rick: Yeah, also in my terminology I would say that the person who’s terrified of public speaking is kind of locked into an individual perspective which feels threatened by being up in front of a thousand people or whatever. If they were really residing in the universal awareness, then the individual could be very comfortable getting up in front of a crowd and speaking because there would be a predominant feeling of mother’s at home, a feeling of contentment, security, comfort.
Gregory: You know, Rick, you’re the one that’s intellectual. It’s interesting.
Rick: But I’m speaking of experience.
Gregory: You’re talking about who is intellectual. You’re very intellectual, you’re a very bright guy. But you’re also, if there’s any drawback to what’s going to take you to the next level, it’s that you’re still intellectual.
Rick: Could be.
Gregory: You see, what could happen in the process of waking up, even if you just play act, just to see what it feels like, walk into a room of people and see them all as dreamers. And now watch how the dreamers are playing the part of people and stay tuned in and fascinated. Your eyes get big, your ears really like radar, you’re watching them and some of it’s embarrassing because they’re doing what you’re doing but they’re doing it better than you.
Rick: But in a way that’s an intellectual exercise. You’re walking into a room and you are saying, “Okay, I’m going to walk into this room and I’m going to play this little mind game of seeing everybody as dreamers while I’m in this room. I’m not going to be totally spontaneous, I’m going to have this idea in the back of my head as I walk into the room.” To get back to the Jesus Christ example …
Gregory: But I said to you, “Pretend.”
Rick: Oh, pretend. Yeah, but that’s still a mind game, it’s still an exercise. I’m pretending, I’m doing a thing when I go …
Gregory: The question is, how is any dreamer going to get past amnesia that shields you from the truth you’re not a person?
Rick: I agree, this sort of intellectual understanding and reading and dwelling on this as you have done reading that book 56 times, it does get into your blood, it gets into your bones, that perspective, and I imagine it becomes quite unshakable.
Gregory: What I’m saying is, this is consciousness. Here is the truth that mind is consciousness, and here I am in consciousness, featured, arguing for the relative to insist I’m a person. Now look, I’m studying and reading and at some point here I begin to go, “Oh my God, I’m not who I appear to be,” and that’s not intellectual awareness. I’m actually reconnecting with something at this end of the equation, which will reveal if I keep moving that I’ve never been anything but a dreamer in this dream, and you know what? There’s nothing intellectual about that because there’s no one to be intellectual.
Rick: I get that. So what you’re saying is that for you, the process of studying and reading and all that stuff was, we could say, served the purpose that for another person meditation might serve, where it sort of shifted you incrementally, bit by bit, to the point where that perspective of everything is a dream became unshakable. Is that fair to say?
Gregory: It’s not that it’s unshakable, it’s that truth is absolute. See, there’s nothing intellectual. If truth is absolute, right now is the dream mind is dreaming. That isn’t saying on alternate Wednesdays that’s true, it’s saying that’s what’s so.
Rick: Sure, all the time, that’s the way it is. Mind is dreaming right now, including us having this interesting discussion about dreamers in the dream.
Rick: Let’s say it’s true that Christ was so grounded in reality, so grounded in the divine or whatever you want to call it, that he was actually beyond suffering on the cross. Although the body was going through what it was going through, he resided at a level where he could truly have said, “I am not suffering, there’s no suffering here.” If you were put in that situation, would you be able to say that?
Gregory: I doubt it.
Rick: Me neither. I mean, I’d be screaming my head off.
Gregory: But I tell you, a lot of interesting things have happened. We could spend hours on it, in which I now no longer see things the same way, so that some aspects, the qualia of the experience of suffering has subsided, and now is changing enough so that I even look at some aspects of suffering from a place of humor rather than upset.
Rick: Sure. So by bringing up that Christ example, I brought it up to illustrate the point I’ve been trying to get at, which is that there’s a maturation of experience which can go so deep that it’s far beyond any kind of … it’s so deeply grounded that anything that happens to us can’t shake it.
Gregory: Yeah, you’re beyond the lie you’re a person.
Rick: Yeah, but you’re beyond it so profoundly and so stably, so unshakably, that it just can’t be lost no matter what. Like Ramana Maharshi and the Nisargadatta, they both died of cancer, and they’d be giving a talk and then they’d scream or something in pain, and then they’d keep giving the talk and their followers would say, “Oh my God, you must be feeling pain, we feel so bad for you.” And he’d say, “No, no, I’m beyond that, I’m not feeling pain. I mean, the body is in pain, but that’s not me.”
Gregory: One story about the Buddha is when he was dying, his disciples were around him and they were crying, and allegedly he looked at them and said, “I didn’t teach you a damn thing.”
Rick: Yeah, right.
Gregory: Not in those words, but in effect, “You think there’s a need for a real person to die? You understand, death takes place in the dream and has nothing to do with people.” And you guys are still stuck in the idea, “There is me, a person, who’s dying right now, so I’ve failed.”
Rick: Right. So from his perspective, and obviously that was a living experience for him, he was not just philosophizing about nobody dying, he knew he was that which cannot die, and that was his living reality. That’s all I’ve been trying to get at, is that all of this can be taken as a mind trip, it can be adopted as a way of talking, a way of thinking, which isn’t necessarily being deeply lived by the person. I’m just cautioning against that. I’m just saying that what you’re saying is true, but it really needs to be a living reality and not just an intellectual concept. I’m not accusing you of having it be an intellectual concept, but I think it very often happens to people, especially after sometimes just a little bit of superficial dabbling in it, they think, “Okay, I get the concept, I know what he’s saying, I’m there, I’m done, I’ve given up the search, blah blah.”
Gregory: Yeah, well, you know, in the process of waking up I have days when there’s no connection to a person, and I’m just having a wonderful time here just being this, and then I get featured in the dream since there’s no one running anything, I get featured in the dream reverting back to Greg Tucker. And the difference is that I now can feel when I’ve shifted back into the relative, I can feel it, and instead of being at the effect of the shift, I now just notice that shifting’s happening. Because all of us in the dream, until you’re absolutely devoid of any attachment to anything physical or real here, you’re still going to oscillate between what’s true and what’s false.
Rick: Well, what I’m suggesting is that that oscillation can … one can outgrow that oscillation to the point where it’s … I think that even very highly enlightened people, to use that term again, can get overshadowed, but it gets to the point where it’s just very fleeting and it’s really hard to stay diluted for more than a moment. So there is this idea of growth, even though people don’t like the talk of levels of awareness and evolution and all that stuff, but this is something that one continues to mature into more and more profoundly over time.
Gregory: Yeah, but I mean, I start off by saying truth doesn’t sell, and you can see why. I mean, if 99.9% of the dreamers are featured in the dream arguing for the lie that they have a damaged self to prove they are a not-okay person, they sure as hell don’t want to know there’s no one to be a person because there’s no one to have a self. So you understand, truth in the dream is viewed as the enemy, and in the context of the dream, that’s comedy.
Rick: But I think most of the people that are listening to this are kind of beyond that point. They’re not wallowing in their suffering and taking any sort of pleasure in it. They’re for the most part interested in getting out of it if they’re still in it, or learning to articulate what they’re experiencing if they’ve quite significantly shifted to a realized state. That’s, I think, primarily our audience.
Gregory: Well, that’s what made them fun, and that’s why I listened to most of them, because I was interested in where were they with the truth, their dreamer in the dream, and to what extent are they still arguing for the lie that they’re some kind of a less-than-okay person or they’re suffering. So it’s a captive audience, which was really fun to hang out with, to hang out with Richard’s group and your group. Because, you know, it’s sort of like, I tell you, I love to watch prison shows on TV, because I love to see how dreamers, called prisoners, have to create bad behavior to document they have a bad self.
Rick: Ah, yeah. In other words, that’s their persona, is the bad guy with all the tattoos and the big muscles.
Gregory: Well, no, they have to commit crime. Crime is confirmation I’m a bad person. I’m with a rotten self. And they’re recidivists, and it buffaloes the psychologists. You say you hate prison, why don’t you go out and rob a bank within three weeks? What is your problem? Are you some kind of a whacked up … he doesn’t get it. Robbing banks substantiates the lie, “I must have a self, because the one I have is bad.” Look, I just robbed another bank.
Rick: Like the band sang, “I’m a thief and I dig it.” I don’t know if you remember that song. And this touches upon a point that I just want to bring up, and maybe we won’t go on too much longer. This whole thing of realizing that there is no person, and it’s all a dream, and so on and so forth, to my mind, does not absolve people of the value of becoming a better person. And very often this whole talk of realization, or even the experience of realization, some people use that as a cop-out for atrocious behavior and say, “Well, it’s all an illusion. I’m not really involved in this behavior. I can do this with money or with women or whatever, and I’m beyond all that. It’s just a crazy wisdom, it’s just a play.” And I personally take exception to that.
Gregory: I just don’t buy it. There’s still a dreamer
Rick: indulging in the dream
Gregory: who is stuck in the fiction that they are a person who is now pretending they’re light.
Rick: Could be.
Gregory: Therefore they have the right to go out and do atrocious things. You know, when you drop the lie that you’re a person, you stop doing atrocious things because you’re not trying to prove you’re a person by generating atrocious behavior.
Rick: Really, so then would you stipulate as a criterion then for genuinely having dropped the notion that you’re a person, that there will be a profound shift in the quality of your behavior?
Gregory: Oh, there’s no question.
Rick: Okay.
Gregory: There’s no question.
Rick: So one will become more compassionate or whatever.
Gregory: I’ll give you an example. I work with a lot of dreamers in which the way in which they anchor the lie they have A self is they’re stuck in a parody in which they play the part of a loser. It is so common, it’s like when it walks through the door I go, “Ah, here’s another one.” And their attachment to the fiction they’re a loser is profound because that anchors the lie I must be a person because the self I have is somehow defective, damaged or flawed. Now in order to play the part of a loser you have to go out and lose. You can’t document you’re a loser and not generate behavior which supports the fiction I am a loser. When they start to wake up and they engage in this thing which I call the recovery process. They start in the process of waking up, they identify what they do to sustain the fiction they’re a loser and start to realize it won’t work to prove they have a damaged self. And that’s the beginning of going, things start falling away. What they had to do to anchor the lie, a loser is a real person, no longer is relevant. In fact there’s a tipping point at which playing the part of a loser is even laughable because there’s no one to be that.
Rick: So you feel that in your experience as a psychologist and also as a so-called “spiritual teacher” or whatever you want to call this that you do.
Gregory: I call it dream work.
Rick: Dream work, okay. You feel that conditioning is not etched in stone, that deeply seated habit patterns or personality traits and so on that may have taken a lifetime to build up can actually be shifted quite quickly if this realization dawns in a person.
Gregory: Well theoretically there’s documentation that it’s happened in a split second with no intervention. Just someone walking in the woods and they hear a twig snap and suddenly what dawns on them is, “Oh this is a moment in the dream,” and it sticks.
Rick: Yeah, did you listen to my interview with Takuan Minamoto?
Gregory: Yeah, yeah.
Rick: Yeah, I mean he almost got hit by a car and the shock of that somehow shifted him and that was it.
Gregory: Well that’s a whole other story because if you work with post-traumatic stress disorder, was combat what ruined the dreamer’s life or did the shock of combat open up the portal to truth so that what it saw as an aspect of truth is, “I have no control and there isn’t any.” And instead of making that okay, you use the combat event as the excuse to now play the part of a wrecked person, including, “I’m going to destroy my family, commit suicide and do all kinds of weird things when I get home from war.”
Rick: So the PTSD guys that you’ve been dealing with, you’ve seen profound alleviation of their PTSD as a result of this work?
Gregory: Absolutely. If I can get them to realize that they’re a dreamer who used the war to play the part of a wrecked person and they’re willing to at least play with that as an idea, it’s interesting that their investment in documenting they were ruined by the war subsides.
Rick: And how successful are you in that? What’s your track record if you saw a hundred people?
Gregory: It’s not as if I had fifty cases. We’re talking maybe seven cases in the last ten years. What I would love to do is get some funding and go somewhere, drum it up and go get fifty guys before they kill themselves and come at them with this approach. And you present it in a way of, “Gentlemen, you’re having a terrible time, you really feel like crap, war is hell, and how many of you, if you could, would like to feel better?” Hands go up.
Rick: Sure.
Gregory: All right, we’re going to play an entirely different game, an entirely different perspective in which we’re going to look at the war in a brand new way and if you can play that game, let’s see what happens to your point of view about life.
Rick: Have you ever considered going into a prison? Sometimes you can get permission to do that, especially you as a licensed psychologist. You could go in there and … Byron Katie has gone into prisons and some other people like that. Could you go in and set something up and actually work with some people?
Gregory: It’s just one problem.
Rick: What’s that?
Gregory: You try to explain what you’re doing to those in charge, they immediately go into terror and turmoil, like I did when I read Wayward Way, and the hair will raise on their arms because they already know that they aren’t what they purport to be and they’re busy defending the lie they have control, they’re in charge of the prisoners, they’re bad, I’m good. The whole morality play is going on right there, and your view then, not just as a problem that possibly might stir up the prisoners, but you might stir up the wardens.
Rick: Yeah, I don’t know, it’s just a thought. Teachers of various kinds do manage to get into prisons and set up programs and talk to the … Gangaji, same thing, she went into some prisons and gave some programs, so theoretically you could do that.
Gregory: Yeah, that’s what I’d like to see, give you a chance to really be an acid test of this whole thing.
Gregory: I’m seeing 15 people a week, that’s all I want to see, and everything’s by word of mouth. These are all either people that have been on the path, dreamers on the path, who are already kind of halfway there, and have run across my blog or my website, or have talked to someone that’s worked with me, and they say, “You know, that sounds different, somehow resonates,” I’d like to play with that.
Rick: Do you have little sessions with Skype with people?
Gregory: That’s how I work entirely.
Rick: Do you charge them or do you do it just for fun?
Gregory: They’re in Chicago, New York, wherever, the distance doesn’t matter.
Rick: Do you charge a consulting fee?
Gregory: I charge 75 for the hour. I wish I could charge nothing, but I’ve got to pay the bills. I really wish I could charge nothing. I would love that, but I’d go under quick, then I would be a dreamer that has no food.
Rick: Right, no dream food. All right, well people will have this on the website, and people will have links to your site and everything, so that if people want to get in touch with you and have some sessions, they can do that.
Gregory: Yeah, and you might get some interesting feedback, because as I said, if you ask a critical question, “What is it we are at war with?” It’s only “We’re at war with truth.” We transfer the war to truth, to people, to avoid identifying we’re at war with truth. I’d rather pretend you’re my problem than I’m at war with truth, and that’s where reality gets fairly scary and strange. Because everyone’s at war with truth, and yet we don’t want to know what’s going on, so we make everything people-based. My mother, my father, it’s my uncle,
Rick: it’s Osama bin Laden, it’s all the Russians,
Gregory: it’s the Jews, whatever. And you understand that as long as we transport the real problem to dismiss it because we don’t want to relate to it, reality is filled with chaos.
Rick: My father used to chain-smoke and he’d say, “Oh, this weather, I can’t stand the humidity,” as if it really bothers my sinuses.
Gregory: Yeah, right. And it’s really interesting when you assist a client to shift from thinking people are the problem to really realize they’re at war with truth. Because it first of all evens out the playing field and pulls people out of the equation because that is a waste of time.
Rick: And by the way, you always lose. As Byron Katie says, “Whenever you fight the truth, you always lose.”
Gregory: Yeah, well, if you’re going to go on for 35 sessions, your mother ruined you and you didn’t have a mother because she’s a dreamer and you weren’t ruined by it because you’re not a victim, I would say that’s a waste of your dollars and our time.
Rick: Yeah, yeah. Well, this has been good. I feel like I have a lot to learn with regard to, despite my whole decades of spiritual practice and so on and so forth, I have some things to come to terms with in terms of this whole terminology and the way you speak.
Gregory: I have a different language. I haven’t laid all the language on you. I’m being pretty selective. But there’s a different language that’s upstream of the lie we’re people and then the downstream language is dualistic and services the lie we are people. So there’s not much we’re saying in the downstream realm, okay, on this side of amnesia. There is really valid … I mean, I could say, “Please pass the butter,” but if this is a dream, what butter? What the hell are you asking me to do?
Rick: Well, and that gets ridiculous. I mean, you say, “Please pass the butter,” who wants the butter? There is no person, there is no butter.
Gregory: Yeah, but that’s the functional element, the functional aspect of the relative. And even that’s funny. You could joke about the butter, like, “What do you want, the red butter or the green butter?” I mean, really, there’s humor inherent in all of duality.
Rick: Sure.
Gregory: There’s no such thing, wouldn’t you agree, that defending the lie of duality is what humor is?
Rick: Yeah, yeah. You say that.
Gregory: That’s funny.
Rick: The first time I took LSD when I was a teenager, we sat around all night and we played this game where you couldn’t just say something to the person. You had to sort of say, you had to preface it with, “Ego to ego, I think this,” to make sure that you both realized you were just speaking from your egos, and not from truth. But obviously we were, at the same time, mixed up, confused kids, and there was a lot to sort out in terms of genuine …
Gregory: You know, there’s been a year of regenerated interest in LSD and they’re bringing it back to want to study it because they’re beginning to realize that something really profound does happen and maybe if it’s modified or chemically modified, it might become a valuable tool yet again. It’s come and gone several times, but it’s coming back.
Rick: I was listening to some interesting interviews with Stanislav Grof recently and he’s one of the pioneers in that. If used wisely, it definitely blows the doors open. If nothing else, it convinces you, it shows you very profoundly that your perspective is not what you thought it was, and that everything depends upon how you see the world, not in changing the world but changing your perspective is the key thing.
Gregory: Exactly, and somehow it punches a hole through amnesia and allows you to reconnect the fact that nothing is what it appears to be. It is something, but it’s not just what the mind insists it is, because the function of the mind is to create stories and then defend them as facts.
Rick: Yeah, someone put it, and I don’t know whether you’d agree with this or not, it’s not that the world is an illusion, it’s that our perception of it is an illusion.
Gregory: Oh, exactly. Look, if it’s true you’re a dreamer in a dream, and that’s a fixed fact, I’m saying that’s a constant, then that’s what’s real, but you’re going to insist, because you’re featured insisting as if to defend the relative in the dream, that you’re a person, you’re delusional. And you’re going to insist that you are the person you insist you are, which makes you totally delusional.
Rick: Yeah, okay, well …
Gregory: It’s fun, you know, I had some trepidation about trying to use the language I like to use and then I finally decided I don’t care, I really don’t care what anyone thinks about it, they can like it, dislike it …
Rick: Oh yeah, I wouldn’t want you to have pulled punches or to have used …
Gregory: It’s not just that, I’m 78 years old, I don’t much got them, come on, 78, you know, the old tick-tock on the dream is running out, your time is getting close to the end, so why are you going to sort of hedge your bets?
Rick: Well, I hope I’m as sharp as you are when I’m 78, in fact I wish I were as sharp as you are now, but …
Gregory: You are! No, no, that’s part of your game to imagine that you’re not. You understand, if we all mind, don’t we all share in the same sharpness at some level and to some degree?
Rick: At some level and to some degree, but there again, we can open up a whole other can of worms here and I’m going to go eat dinner, but what’s critical is the extent to which it’s lived, the extent to which it’s manifest. Not critical, I mean fine, everyone plays their role, but there’s I think no end to which we can give fuller and fuller expression to this reality. There’s no end to which our perception can be refined, no end to which our compassion can be expanded and so on. If it’s a dream, fine, but the dream can be enriched and there’s value in enriching it. Clear mind, good heart, all that stuff is worth developing, even though ultimately you might consider it to be illusory.
Gregory: I mean one of the things that my clients have to deal with, they all get to deal with, is in the name of personhood, they specify that by Friday I’m going to wake up. So they’re still arguing for the fiction that there’s someone to run waking up. Waking up is an event that happens in the dream when it does, not because …
Rick: When it’s good and ready.
Gregory: Well not because the dream we’re posing as a person, it’s going to happen by Friday. Good luck!
Rick: Right.
Gregory: It’s funny, it’s going to happen by Friday.
Rick: Can’t storm the gates of heaven, so to speak.
Gregory: Yeah, it will happen when it does, not because you say so, because it’s happening. And sometimes when I slide out of personhood, I’m telling you, I get this incredible feeling of joy and bliss, all the things they talk about, and I start to laugh. What I thought was serious, it just isn’t. It just isn’t. And I realized ten minutes ago, it was damn serious.
Rick: We have a serious responsibility not to be serious.
Gregory: It’s been fun Rick, and I thank you for the opportunity to talk to you.
Rick: Yeah, thank you. I didn’t know what we were going to be talking about. I’m so busy that I often don’t have a chance to really research my guests beforehand, and so I just said, I kind of say, “Okay, well that’s the way it’s going to be, and I’m just going to wing it and see what this person has to say.” And I really enjoyed what you had to say, and it’s really stretched me, I think, stretched my ability to understand and to deal with …
Gregory: Notice that when we’re wrapping, the investment in the self as wrapping disappears, and the self disappears, and what replaces it is sort of spontaneity and fun, so that no one’s pre-planning what they’re saying. They’re resonating back and forth at a very fast oscillation. So we’re getting closer to one thing talking rather than two things talking.
Rick: Good point.
Gregory: And it’s experiential, you can feel it.
Rick: Yeah. Well, I’ll tell you what, move back to Sun Valley and I’ll come and visit you.
Gregory: I’m not going back. I’m all done with the snow, I’ve changed too many tires, and had too many pipes thawed, and too many cars that froze. I’m here. Come visit me in California.
Rick: I’ll visit you there.
Gregory: All right, take care.
Rick: All right, thanks.
Gregory: Thank you.
Rick: So let me just wrap it up here. So you have been listening to or watching Buddha at the Gas Pump, and depending upon how you’ve been listening or watching this, you might be on YouTube or listening to a podcast or whatever, but there’s one place where you can go where you’ll find all of this and then find links to various ways of dealing with it, and that is www.batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, that’s an acronym for Buddha at the Gas Pump. So go there, you’ll find an archive of all the interviews that have been done so far, and a new one is added every week. My next guest is going to be a Tibetan Lama, who is, I can’t pronounce his name, I’ll get that straight before I interview him, but he’s visiting from India, I believe, because he’s in exile from Tibet, and he promises to be a very different and interesting interview. So that’ll be coming up next, and we’ll see you then. Thank you for watching.
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
YouTube
