Gregory Tucker Interview

Dr. Gregory Tucker Transcript: The Lie of Being a Person and the Dreamer in the Dream

 

Summary

Rick Archer and Gregory Tucker explore the nature of enlightenment, suffering, and the search for truth. They discuss psychological and spiritual perspectives on why suffering persists and what it means to awaken.

Questions This Interview Explores

• What is enlightenment and how can it be understood beyond traditional definitions?
• Why do people continue to suffer even when their external circumstances improve?
• How does reconnecting with truth relate to the end of suffering?
• What causes sudden shifts or transformations in people's lives?

Key takeaways

• Enlightenment is seen as a milestone in ongoing human evolution, not a final endpoint.
• Suffering often persists due to unconscious resistance to truth.
• Awakening involves recognizing one's true nature beyond personal identity.
• Mental suffering is frequently rooted in misalignment with deeper truth.
• Profound shifts can occur unexpectedly, sometimes triggered by exposure to new insights.

Transcript

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.

Exploring Emptiness and Suffering

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.

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’s Encounter with Wei Wu Wei

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.

The reason why is that I was totally clear that he was telling the truth about something that I didn’t want to know.

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.

👁️ The Dreamer and the Lie of Personhood

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.

Defending the lie you are who you’re impersonating is a perfect full-time job. It is incredibly exhausting. And it’s a hoax because you can’t be who you pretend to be.

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?

👁️ All Life is a Dream: The Absolute and the Relative

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.

All life is a dream. There are no people, not one. They’re all dreamers in the dream, impersonating people.

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.”

🩺 Working with Clients: The Recovery Process

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.” 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? 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.

Instead of a person becoming enlightened, the dreamer drops the lie, the person it’s impersonating, and the dreamer wakes up.

👁️ Living the Dream: Practical Implications

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: 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: 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.

Final Thoughts and Closing

Rick: 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.

Sometimes when I slide out of personhood, I get this incredible feeling of joy and bliss, and I start to laugh. What I thought was serious, it just isn’t.

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.