Group Discussion at Sofia University, Part 1

Summary

A diverse group explores what awakening and enlightenment mean across different traditions and personal experiences. They consider whether awakening is a final state or an ongoing process, and how spiritual insight relates to human personality, psychological integration, and ordinary life.

Questions This Interview Explores

• What is the difference between awakening and enlightenment?
• Is enlightenment a permanent final state or an ongoing process?
• Why do people experience spiritual awakening in such different ways?
• How can spiritual realization coexist with human emotions, struggles, and psychological shadows?

Key takeaways

• Awakening may unfold through many levels rather than arriving as one final breakthrough.
• Spiritual experiences share common features but are interpreted through each person’s unique mind and life.
• Deep realization does not automatically resolve every human or psychological difficulty.
• Personal integration is essential for bringing spiritual insight into ordinary life.
• Awakening can involve shifting identification from the separate self to a broader field of awareness.
• Stillness and presence can be recognized directly beneath thoughts, emotions, and perceptions.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer, and I’m with a bunch of friends out in California, most of us for the Science and Non-Duality Conference. But we had a whole day to fill with something useful, and so I’ve been having the impulse to have a group conversation with a relatively large number of people, as you’ll see in a minute when I introduce them.

It may seem a little crazy to try to have a conversation with this many people, but I’m a little crazy, so it seems perfectly normal to me. Does it seem normal to you guys? Okay, welcome to the monkey house.

So we’re just getting started. I’m going to introduce the people who are here, and this whole thing is a little bit informal. Some people will be coming in and joining us as we proceed. Some people might need to leave, and we’re just going to see how it rolls.

🎵 Meet the participants

Just showing up is Susanne Marie. She’s a spiritual teacher living in the Grass Valley area, isn’t it?

Susanne: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah, and she’s here for the conference.

Sitting next to her is one of my favorite authors, Mariana Caplan, who’s written some wonderful books: Halfway Up the Mountain, The Error of Premature Claims to Awakening, and a couple of books about whether you need a guru, and so on. I love Mariana’s books and read several of them before I even met her.

Dana Sawyer, who’s an old friend of mine—I instructed him in Transcendental Meditation in 1971 and haven’t seen him since nearly then. He’s gone on to become a professor of religious studies at the Maine College of Art. He’s been to India maybe 18 or 20 times or something, speaks fluent Hindi, has interviewed just about every swami of note in India, and done all sorts of interesting things in his life. He just came here from the World Parliament of Religions in Salt Lake City.

Next to him is my friend Francis Bennett. Francis was a Benedictine and Cistercian monk, a Trappist, for the better part of 30 years. He wrote me from the monastery, actually, when he had had a spiritual awakening and was feeling the impulse to leave, and I said, “Boy, as soon as you get out, let’s do an interview.” And we did, and people around the world immediately fell in love with him. And so did I. He’s become one of my best friends.

Next to him is Craig Holliday. Craig lives in Durango, Colorado. Incidentally, I’ve interviewed everybody on this panel, I think, with the exception of a couple that I’ll introduce in a minute. So you can look up any of these people as I’m introducing them, and as you hear them speak during this interview, if you want to hear more from them.

Craig lives in Durango and is a spiritual teacher and sort of a non-dual therapist, would you say?

Craig: Okay, good.

Rick: He has a beautiful daughter, whom he featured prominently in his interview with me.

Next to Craig, to my right, is Kristin Kirk. Kristin is a spiritual teacher and healer who has a very fascinating range of experience, in my opinion—kind of multidimensional. She has been living in western Massachusetts, but she’s in the process of moving to Kauai. I’m really glad that she could be here as part of this.

To my left is Clare Blanchflower, whom I interviewed just a couple of weeks ago up in Vancouver and just got to know. Clare lives there and just drove all the way down for the conference. And I don’t know what more to say about you, Clare.

Clare: Great person.

Rick: Great person.

To her left is David Buckland. David has been tremendously helpful to BatGap over the last several years. He has done all sorts of technical things and fixed all kinds of things that got screwed up, built some important sections of the site, and writes a fascinating blog called “Davidya,” which is a play on words because vidya means knowledge and his name is David, so “Davidya.” It’s one of the few things that I read on a regular basis. I always learn something.

To his left is Chuck Hillig, whom I interviewed very early on in BatGap, maybe almost six years ago or something. Chuck lives in Virginia and is—I suppose, would you call yourself a non-dual teacher? Do you actually do much teaching, or are you more kind of a writer?

Chuck: Yes to both.

Rick: Yes to both, okay. And he gives a very lively presentation and will be doing so at the SAND conference.

To his left is David Ellzey. David is—oh, God, what did you say you were? He’s a performer, a mime, and stuff like that, but he’s also kind of a non-dual teacher, right?

David: Yeah, you can use the words “transformational entertainment.”

Rick: Transformational entertainment, good. Yeah, you walk into one of his shows and you don’t know who you are when you come out.

David: Right.

Laurie: Well, it just—it’s always entertaining.

Rick: To his left is Kiran, who kind of goes by the moniker “Mystic Girl in the City.” I’ve interviewed Kiran a couple of times, now most recently up in Vancouver. She’s one of these people who wasn’t really interested in spiritual practice or doing anything of the sort, and I think was tying her shoes one morning and all of a sudden had this profound awakening. She took quite some time figuring out what the heck had happened to her. So, a very interesting story, and an interesting person to get to know.

To her left is someone whom I really need to thank so much for our being here today. It’s Jeffrey Martin. Jeffrey is a researcher at Sofia University, which is where we’re taping this. Sofia is actually the home of Transpersonal Psychology. Abraham Maslow was here back in the early ’70s, and he and Jim Fadiman and others pretty much started Transpersonal Psychology.

I’m grateful both to Sofia and also to Jeffrey for the tremendous help he’s provided in getting this whole thing set up. He’s bought all kinds of equipment, and we spent all day yesterday getting the equipment working, and so on. It really wouldn’t have happened without him.

Someone else who came in just as I was doing these introductions is Laurie Moore, to the right here. I’ve interviewed Laurie twice on BatGap. She is, among other things, an animal communicator, but I don’t think that fully defines everything she does. She also contributed a lot to some notes that we’ve been developing for what we might be discussing today and had some very good thoughts to share.

So, with that, I think we’ll get started. If I’ve left anything out from my introduction and you’d like to elaborate when any of you speak, then please add whatever you like.

Part of the reason for doing this is—for one thing, I’m sort of a… I don’t like downtime. I always like to be doing something constructive, and we’d planned another annual conversation with Francis Bennett and Adyashanti for today, but Adya had a retreat to go to in Tahoe. So I thought, “What can we do that would really be different and useful and interesting for people?” And we came up with this idea.

Craig and Kristin, and I think maybe David at some point, and I were batting some ideas back and forth about what we might discuss in a thing like this. I’m going to start with another point first and then get to one of these as our starting points. As we go along throughout the day, anything that anybody feels inclined to talk about that we’re not talking about, feel free to bring it up and we’ll get into it. I think it’ll just roll, and one thing will lead to the next.

✨ What do we mean by awakening?

One thing I wanted to start with that we hadn’t discussed in our emails, which I think is maybe a little bit relevant, is: What the heck is enlightenment or awakening, anyway? Everybody here, in one way or another, is either researching it—I forgot to mention that Jeffrey is doing EEG research on the neurophysiology of enlightenment—or they are teaching, trying to help others awaken in some way, however they define it.

Or perhaps—and in any case, everyone is continuing to pursue their own awakening and unfoldment, layer after layer. Do we actually all agree upon what that really means?

(Laughter.)

Or are we just kind of talking past each other a little bit, using the same words but with different definitions in the back of our minds or in the depth of our experience? So let’s bat that around for a little while before we get to some of these other points. Who would like to make a comment? Laurie?

Oh, you can’t talk unless you have a microphone. The microphones are the talking sticks.

Laurie: I think that we do ourselves a disservice by thinking of enlightenment as some one state that each person will experience in the same way when we get where we think we want to go.

We know from our sharing—many humans share about their experiences of awakening—that there are many states. We know from history that whatever spiritual path we refer to, there are some shared states. For example, the state of unconditional love, the state of oneness, the state of generating, the state of serving and yearning, which leads to all that.

But each person is experiencing these awarenesses in completely different ways. If you stepped into the body and the brain and the heart and soul of any individual, this would take on a different kind of translation as it’s worked through the universe into your eyes. And I’ll keep it short.

Rick: We were talking about that very point in the car on the way up here. Dana, since we were talking about—you need a mic.

Dana: Well, two things came to my mind when you were saying that. One was that back in the ’60s, W. T. Stace down at Princeton came up with a typology of characteristics of some sort of megapoint in the growth of consciousness.

In other words, if you look across mystical literature of all traditions, then—I think it was seven characteristics that he came up with: ineffability, a sense of timelessness, a sense of profound interconnectedness. When you look across the mystical literature, there tend to be shared qualities or characteristics of mystical experience.

But at the same time, I found myself totally agreeing with you that even if we look at the traditions—whether they’re in Advaita Vedanta, Christian mysticism, or the paramitas of Buddhism—they set the bar at different places in terms of anything like an ultimate breakthrough.

I tend to think there is no ultimate breakthrough, that you just keep breaking through and breaking through and breaking through. Francis, do you want to say something?

Francis: I think it brings up an interesting point, even just about the word “enlightenment,” because I’m more and more uncomfortable with it as a word. I think that the connotation of it is that there’s some kind of final state, and once you get there, you’re enlightened and you’re done and there’s nothing more to see.

My own experience of this kind of unfolding of divinity—I think the discovery of divinity within and without and everywhere—is that it’s a kind of unending process, in that it really never has an endpoint for a human being, anyway, at least in our present state.

So I’ve really come to prefer the word “awakening,” because you can talk about different levels of it, different depths of it, and you can talk about abiding awakening and non-abiding awakening. I think as a word, it’s very functional just as itself, whereas the word “enlightenment” denotes a kind of final arrival that just isn’t my experience.

I’ve really come to prefer the word “awakening.”

Maybe it’s somebody else’s experience here, but it isn’t mine. So I don’t even like the word anymore.

Mariana: Yeah, just to connect with what you’re saying. I don’t think I—were you saying actualization is what you were—

Francis: No, enlightenment is what I’m kind of not comfortable with.

Mariana: Yeah, for me, the word that interests me most these days is integration and human integration. I work as a therapist. I work as a psychotherapist. I work as a spiritual—I’m not a spiritual teacher. I made that choice early on, and I’m very pleased with that. I work as a spiritual friend, and I work as a psychotherapist.

Most of my psychotherapy is with long-term spiritual practitioners and with spiritual teachers. I come in when there are scandals, and I mediate between the teacher and the wife and all the people they slept with and the disgruntled students. I’ve been doing that for years and years and years.

What I know about, and it’s why I get to do the work I do, is because I have a hermetically sealed container with these people, so I have their confidentiality. I sit and live and often suffer. This is part of my life’s work that I love.

My experience says that so many of the people that the world considers enlightened—I know about the shadow and the depression and the madness and the deep darkness. There are reasons they could share it with the world and arguments for them not to share it with the world. That’s another discussion, and maybe a point we’ll get to.

But this enlightenment, for me now, is more like a figment and a projection. It’s not a reason not to keep unfolding and yearning and going, but the amount of projection we have onto imagined enlightened teachers, in my experience, is enormous and almost useless.

Jeffery: In the early part of our research project, about ten years ago, I was traveling around talking to many, many people across all traditions, six continents, the whole bit. I would often spend six or ten hours with a person, literally talking all day. I used to say that I would talk to them until they kicked me out of the living room because I just wanted to get every last little piece of information out of them.

It was very much the same with you. It was a human story for me. I came into this as a researcher of well-being, not somebody looking into enlightenment. I was looking for who has the most well-being, and I eventually whittled it down to the population that’s sort of sitting around here.

One of the things that unfolded over time for me was that these were ultimately just normal people that I was sitting down with. It didn’t matter if they had 100,000 adherents or more around the world, or they spoke in front of stadiums full of people in some corner of the world, or they had twelve people sitting around a satsang in New Mexico or something. They were still just so richly human, and yet they were having this very different experience of how life can unfold and how life can show up than so many other people would consider normal, or what I was trained from a psychological standpoint to think of as the normal self.

I would totally resonate with that point. I also resonate with the other points, which is that, for us, it was very hard to figure out how to classify individuals over time, across cultures, and across different traditions and no traditions—people who were tying their shoes and had it hit them, and people who had tried for 70 years and finally got there in some religious or spiritual tradition or whatever.

I do think that there’s a common thread. I think Stace got it right. I definitely think there’s a common core, but I can also appreciate people like Ferrer’s argument about how there are sort of many shores around a lake or whatever.

It’s very interesting because although there does seem to be a tremendous amount of psychological similarity—I look at it from a cognitive neuroscience standpoint—there’s a tremendous amount of similarity. But how that actually expresses through the meaning of each individual mind is rich and incredibly varied between people.

Rick: I think Kiran had a comment.

Kiran: When I’m thinking about this question, all I can answer is from my direct experience. My direct experience is having the experience and learning vocabulary later.

For me, there was a direct experience where what I call my mind blew a fuse. What it very specifically meant was that the filter that could see form disappeared. Then everything that represents form was exposed as being pure emptiness, and that pure emptiness moving into form.

My filter that took all of that raw, empty information and turned it into chairs and bodies and humans left. From that place, there was such a recognition. I always have this little image that it was like—it was just so funny. I think lots of people know the experience where it’s just so funny because you think, “Oh my God, I spent my whole life thinking I was human.”

Suddenly, something happened and my mind blew, and I noticed the arm holding the puppet. It was a puppet. Then I noticed the arm is part of a whole room, and then I noticed the whole room. There was this recognition that it’s just one vast emptiness looking at emptiness.

It was so funny to me because it was like, “God, I’m not human. I’m not actually breathing. There’s not actually air. All this form isn’t actually here.”

Then I went and had a conversation very soon after that with a woman as we were walking to go talk to Eckhart Tolle. This was in Vancouver. She was telling me about enlightened people, with no idea that this was unfolding for me. She was telling me about people who walk on air and are always happy and never disgruntled and never experience emotions anymore, and this place of eternal bliss.

I remember thinking to myself—because I didn’t know what this word was; I’d never even heard of it—“Well, that’s not me.” I sure as heck don’t want to be that, and I don’t want to tell anybody that this is happening to me in case they project that story onto me.

At this point, where there’s just this vast spaciousness, that kind of story was so strongly full of identity that it hurt, coming from this incredible effortlessness.

But then, in my journey to go, “What the fuck is this?”—I called myself this—oops, I’m such a gutter mouth. Apologies. I’m not spiritual. I’m not spiritual. I used to call myself this strange angel-Buddha freak.

In my quest to discover what the heck this was, it was also so self-authenticating. While I went to find it, I went to meet all these “enlightened teachers.” I remember the shock of discovering a teacher who had put their sign out as an enlightened teacher and then spoke very clearly that there was no such thing as enlightenment and there was no true nature, that all of this was just a ridiculous joke. In my naivete, I was incredibly shocked.

What had happened directly for me is that when the separate self, or the me, dissolved, I had no ability ever to identify again. In fact, it took many, many months to even just find the body again.

From that place, a different sense organ opened. We might call it presence, or we might call it an access to stillness or clarity. That sense organ was so much stronger than any other sense organ—stronger than my nose, my eyes, or touch. It was so huge.

When I describe it to people, I say, “Well, I move sonarically.” That’s what I say. I’m a sonaric being. When I come across other sonaric beings—like sonar, like a dolphin’s sonar, which is this other sense that we might call presence—and it’s so strong, I can recognize them.

It literally drives the car for me. It turns left or turns right. It’s this huge sense organ, and I can come across other beings with the same sense organ. One being with this sense organ can recognize others with the same sense organ.

For me, there was a discernibly recognizable feature to other people who had no more identity and functioned, instead of through the separate self, with senses from this other sense organ. It was crazily obvious to me.

In my naivete, I was incredibly shocked to meet teacher after teacher who didn’t have this sense organ and had a whole conversation about, I don’t know, the fifth noble truth of waka, waka, waka. For me, none of this had any reality to it. It just had spiritual story and identity. That’s all fine, and I’ve learned over the years that there’s such a value to all that.

But in my direct experience at the time, if we’re just asking, “What is this experience?” that’s the experience.

Rick: I think both Davids have comments. Do you want to go first?

David: Actually, it might be useful.

Rick: Hold the mic up to your mouth. Yeah, the little point I wanted to make, too, is that enlightenment, awakening, or whatever kind of phrasing you want to give it, is a transpersonal shift. It’s a shift out of being a person.

It’s not a person that becomes enlightened. It’s a person that the person has left behind through the process. That’s also an important thing. It’s not something that’s going to be a solution to your problems or an escape or anything like that. You’re actually moving more into your life as it is. So, yeah. Thanks.

David: It’s funny, when I attempt to answer this question, two things happen. One is I’m in agreement on a certain level that enlightenment is an event-oriented implication. It happens, and then something begins, and it’s over. I don’t believe that’s our human experience. I believe it’s a progressive, dynamic process of living. So I explain it in a little different way.

But before I do that, I just want to state that, for me, whenever we have conversations like this, I always come back to what is—not what is enlightenment, but literally in this moment, what is. There’s silence, there’s vibration of vocal cords, there’s hearing, there’s clearing of throat. That’s the totality to me. And so within that, if I don’t add mentally or add storyline or add what I call the add-on of any other implication besides what is, there is a real stillness that is accessible instantaneously because it’s always this background behind all the activity, mental, physical, sensorial. So I always go to that.

In the silence, actually, there is a powerful recognition. There is mind activity, there’s noise, and that’s allowable too as we begin to understand the background. And that brings me to what I was about to explain.

Enlightenment is an implication of an event, and I actually don’t believe that any event can be the demarcation point between knowing and not knowing. There can be a moment of recognition, of expansive presence and awareness beyond boundary, beyond thought.

But the way I explain it—and Rick, you had said I’m a transformational entertainer, or I cued you to say that—and that is part of the way that I live, on stages, revealing in emptiness form. Because as a mime, that’s what we do. We create something that wasn’t here a second ago, but it’s also gone. So to me, the mime and the study of emptiness into form, even the body, is a deeply spiritual study.

And the way I explain awakening, which is my favorite term also, Francis, is that it’s a progressive process from a revealing that my veil—you used the word veil, which I really liked—the veil of my perception into the world, my perception of self, my beliefs of fear, my beliefs that the world is dangerous, whatever I have. We live with this as a foreground for a long time.

When we begin to glimpse that there’s something more than that, or there’s a container, an infinite container, in which that veil appears, what used to be a visitor—peace, self-recognition, knowing who we are—comes and visits and returns back, and the veil is the primary experience.

As awakening occurs, there’s this changing of location, so to speak, where the first veil, which is what we’re looking through normally—emotionality, reactivity to life, identifying with a separate self—is here. What begins to happen is peace visits. There’s a glimpse beyond it with no veil, and the veil comes back.

With time—and that’s the majority of our experience—with time, the peace, or the absence of the veil, begins to be more primary, and the emotionality begins to be a visitor and comes and gets in the way. So they actually begin to change places, so that a fundamental, or a foundation, of experience of life begins to be more grounded or rooted or stabilized in the truth of our expansive nature.

And yet, in our human experience of emotionality—I’m a life coach, basically. I work in consciousness coaching so that we can see the veil that we’ve been unconscious of prior, see through it. And I work with people going through divorce, financial issues that are extreme, every kind of human experience.

This idea of investigating the veil, the belief system that we’re unconscious of, seeing through it, and it’s revealed naturally that we are more than that—all my coaching sessions end up being about that. And we have myriad numbers of beliefs that we all have, but they all come down to the little me that has them. So then we look at that, and the matrix of beliefs begins to disentangle and fall down.

So enlightenment, I agree, I’m not in resonance with, but the awakening process can be a progressive deepening of knowing who we are. [unclear]

Rick: Oh, I’m sorry. Chuck, and then Craig.

Chuck: And this event doesn’t really happen in time at all. It seems to happen in time, but this one moment of now is not leaning forward into the next moment, simply because there is no next moment. It’s always now, and you’re always here.

And this moment does not have a past that it’s living out of, and it doesn’t have a future that it’s leaning into. This is whole and complete unto itself. This moment’s not going anywhere. No place for it to go.

And so the peace that is within your heart of hearts really depends on your willingness to align yourself with just this. And is this moment right now whole and complete? Is this enough for you? If it’s not enough, what’s missing? What needs to be added to it or subtracted from it to make it somehow more complete, better than, more brilliant than?

But if this is enough, and you have as your default position in life a sense of now, a sense of yes, and you live in that default position of yes, then whatever shows up, whatever arises, you are in alignment with. And you’re not saying no to, you’re not resisting, you’re not trying to push away and deny.

So if you feel happy, you feel happy, and if you feel unhappy, that’s okay too. And if you feel angry and confused and frustrated and run down the whole spectrum of human emotions, each and every one of them, and all of their craziness from one extreme to the other is totally okay with you because you’re always in this state of yes. Bring it on. It arises within me and disappears within me, and I’m the source of all of this, and nothing is to be denied. Nothing is to be denied ever.

Rick: Craig.

Craig: Yes, I very much agree that awakening is a fundamental shift, a shift out of our mind, out of our emotions, into something which is, in a sense, unborn, unmanifest.

But also, when I look out at life, when I look out just into the eyes of my baby or look into the eyes of a friend, and you just see this unimaginable beauty giving birth in every moment, it’s almost as if God is this vast emptiness, this vast wonder, this vast beauty, which is unborn. But God is also giving birth to this evolutionary nature, a nature which is ever unfolding.

And to me, one of the things that, when I did have this series of awakenings and I went to my teacher, he basically said, “That’s nothing.” And I said, “How could you say this is nothing? This is absolutely everything. This is what I’ve wanted my entire life.” And he said, “Yeah, but that’s nothing. That’s just the beginning.”

And it really shocked me. I was actually hurt. How could you say such a thing? But as the years have gone on, what I see is that God is giving birth in every moment to so much, and that this world is ever unfolding. And it’s so beautiful and so amazing.

I think we get into so much confusion because we think of awakening to God. It is. You awaken to that vast, empty presence. But that’s only half the truth. And the other half is that God is living through all of us, living through this world, this planet, this ecosystem.

When we were driving here, we were driving on the highway, and we almost got in a car accident. And Francis, an angel, showed up on his shoulder and tapped him and let out a holler. And I slammed on the brakes, and, see, that’s God too, showing up in this moment, in this world, in this life.

Rick: Who hollered? The angel or Francis?

Craig: Francis.

Francis: Stop, Craig!

Craig: But it’s such a beautiful thing. And so to me, a greater question than even, say, integration—it’s not that we wake up to the vast emptiness and we’re integrating our humanity into the vast emptiness, but that our humanity too is an expression of God. Our love is an expression of God. Our compassion is an expression of God. And that compassion is always continually growing, continually expressing ourself.

I think if the Buddha walked into this room or Jesus walked into this room, our worldview is so much more enlightened than their worldview. And I hope that’s not blasphemous to say. But it’s true that this world is growing. It is ever-evolving. And it’s continually evolving, and it will evolve forever. And that’s an amazing thing.

But to include that in what awakening is—that it isn’t just a static thing—it absolutely is a static thing from one perspective, but from another perspective, it is completely ever-evolving forever. And to include that in our definition of God and divinity and awakening, I think it’s a very important thing.

Rick: I think Dana has a comment, but is there anyone—Susanne or Clare or anybody who hasn’t spoken—who would like to? There’s the mic there for Susanne.

Susanne: Yeah, I love what you just said, Craig, about the evolution, the evolvement of consciousness. And I really feel like consciousness is evolving in and as and through us, within our humanness, within our bodies, and even, in my opinion, through the Earth itself, which I feel like is a conscious being.

So I rarely—I don’t think I ever—use the word enlightenment. For me, it’s awakening in the respect of—as if it’s a verb. It’s an ongoing process. And I’m a little cold. [laughter]

Rick: Oh, just in the moment. Yeah. Does anybody have a jacket or a shawl that Susanne could have?

Susanne: Oh, thank you. I actually also resonate with the very last thing that Kiran said. Thank you. Aw. This is the movement of awakening.

In regards to the sonar, I’ve actually used that term before, that it’s—to me, there’s an evolution in the development and the process of the descent of the realization of the light into the body. And I feel like it moves from mind—and this is my experience—mind, feeling, and then into sensing.

And in the end, we really become sensing beings without interpretation. The self-reflective mechanism of mind slows down and ends, actually. And so we just become that. We just become the movement of that without the need to interpret.

And I feel like we are intelligence itself and that the body opens up and is a sensing instrument of the divine. And that’s, to me, the ongoing delight of awakening and being curious to see what’s next. [laughter] What happens afterwards, you know, and the continuing evolution of it all.

Rick: I think Clare and Kristin, do either of you want to say anything on this? Or shall we go to—you want to say something?

Kristin: I want to say something. I love hearing everyone share. This is just such a beautiful opportunity for us to hear each other, to hear each other. And it’s kind of a demonstration of what people are saying: what’s the same thread that’s true, and what’s the unique expression of that? So I just want to say it’s a total delight. A total, total delight.

I was inspired to pick up the microphone, just kind of tagging on to what you were just saying about being the living divine, right? That we are that truth. We are the sensing organ of the singular existence.

I’ve been curious about what enlightenment was because I haven’t studied anything, so I don’t have any sort of history of the technical aspects. I’m sure in Tibetan Buddhism, there are all these details of the different stages. There’s a great curiosity on my part about what all those things are because I don’t have any of that kind of education.

In my experience, there’s been a kind of wild—wild—it’s like the sense of self that’s necessary for everything to maintain its individuality has been seen as transparent or permeable, so that the I am of the chair and the I am of the body and the I am of Craig’s glasses, right? It’s all the same I am. The fluidity of that, simultaneously with being absolutely nothing, and then the joy of the sensation—the whole thing all kind of being seamless—is part of what my experience is.

But everything that everyone has said is also, yeah, just another beautiful way of saying a similar thing.

Clare: The way that I was experiencing it is that there’s something here that we all recognize: the stillness and the silence, which is here, which is the ever-present now, is what we awaken to. However the uniqueness flows from that is the expression, the living of being.

The place that we all agree is that there is this presence, which is known as the ever-present now, and it’s that. That’s the place that we all agree, where we all come together. From that flows all of these individual expressions and this unique living expression, which is humanity being expressed from divinity. So that’s the beauty in that.

Rick: Dana.

Dana: One of the things that struck me as we were going around is—I agree with Clare—there is this shared moment of nondual experience and a shared moment of an aspect of us that a lot of people aren’t aware of, perhaps. There’s that scene in Alice in Wonderland when the White Rabbit says to her, “Don’t just do something, stand there.” Be there and be present in it.

But I also think of an interview with George Harrison one time when, after 20 years, after the big Beatles phase, somebody asked him, “Do you still believe it’s true, all you need is love?” And he said, “Yeah, I’m going to stick with it. All you need is love and a sandwich.” You need a sandwich too.

Francis: Made with love.

Dana: With love. But my point really is that sometimes I see almost a toxicity in the nondual experience. What I mean by that is that sometimes it’s such a powerful and compelling experience that we think it’s the whole story of growing up as people, and people will kind of warehouse themselves in the experience.

Even when the kleshas, as Buddhists call them—when emotions like anger, fear, jealousy, and envy arise—because those can be witnessed from one level, from a sort of God’s-eye perspective, there isn’t enough maturity to say, “Okay, but there’s also the sandwich level, in which things have to get done and the rubber meets the road. You’ve got to go to the bathroom, and you’ve got to feed the kids, and that goes on too.”

So where is not only the waking up, as Ken Wilber says, but the growing up—the unpacking of those problems and facing those dark aspects of the psyche that the nondual awareness is witnessing? That’s what Lama Surya Das—you called it “halfway up the mountain”—calls premature immaculation, right? The rest of the work isn’t done, and there’s not a responsibility for being embodied.

Altered states of consciousness are wonderful, but if they don’t lead to altered traits of behavior so that we realize the kingdom of heaven is within, but we’re also responsible to—

Francis: Manifest it.

Dana: Right.

Francis: Could I?

Dana: Yeah.

Rick: Francis, then Laurie.

Francis: Laurie then Francis.

Rick: Laurie then Francis.

Laurie: Thank you. As you were speaking, a lot of heat and joy was rising in my body. I have full agreement with what you’re saying, and I’d like to expand it some more.

Throughout history, as life evolves through the human form—and I’m speaking right now only of the human form, because each species is quite unique—there is a tendency, I’ve noticed, to try to obliterate, make wrong, or decide that what was before—we can even see it from the ’60s to the ’70s to the ’80s—was wrong. That wasn’t right. This is right.

However, if we’re really honest with ourselves, we’re living in a multitude of experiences. We all got here. Yes, maybe universal, enlightened, awakened—whatever words—maybe there was a complete release of identity, but there was some recognition of how to get the key into the car. I don’t believe one person here didn’t have some thoughts of their identity on the way over. If you did, awesome. Although I don’t think that’s actually where we need to go.

Words are—perhaps we could have an inquiry into what is the value of words, what is the beauty of words, and what is the gift of having words while in the incarnation. It’s allowing us to connect on this level, which is just as beautiful as levels of complete release of all words, no thought.

There is a way of existing where this oneness, deeper than identity, occurs, and yet at the same time, there’s a recognition of within that identity. Identity allows me to put her coat on when she was cold, for you to offer a coat, and for us to give each other food, and ask, “How is everyone on the planet going to eat?” And, “What are we going to do about war on the outside and the inside?”

So there’s a way to experience life where emotions are the weather. They’re just passing through, and they’re just heat and joy, as I was speaking of, rising in the moment.

Rick: Well, Francis is getting ready to speak. I just want to say something that Francis often says, which is in response to those who say you’re not a person and all that: of course you’re a person. You’re just not only a person, you know?

Francis: He’s just going to say that.

Rick: Yeah, good. So, who’s next?

Yeah, so, I mean, of course you’re the—of course you’re a wave. You’re just not only a wave. You’re the ocean. I have a mic. So, anyway, go ahead.

Francis: Yeah, and piggybacking on what you two said, it’s like a perfect segue into what I’m about to say.

It really struck me very early on when I was listening to other people, and several times I heard this phrase, “I’m not human,” or “I’m not a person,” which I really, really don’t feel comfortable with. I really don’t like those phrases. I understand where they’re coming from. I really, really do.

I get it that you wake up from the illusion that all I am is merely this separate human being with a body and a mind and a particular personality and a gender, and, you know, fill in the blank—the whole thing. I think that’s absolutely important: that transcendent movement up and out of the merely human.

But then, something that I’ve taken to calling the awakening from awakening—because we can’t stay in this vast emptiness. I mean, we can, but, like you say, it makes it hard to go to the grocery store. People can reframe that all they want, and you hear it a lot: “Well, I’m not going to the grocery store. Life is grocery-storing.” “I’m not Francis. Life is Francis-ing.”

It’s like, okay, that’s reframing, but you’re still there. You’re going to the grocery store. I think that there needs to be a kind of new approach to this. I can see it coming in teachers who are maturing spiritually and maturing just as human beings. They’re realizing, okay, it’s important to wake up to that transcendent reality and to realize I’m not merely this person. I’m not confined to this.

But then there’s a kind of awakening down and into the humanity again. Even my talk here at SAND is going to be integrating humanity with divinity. I think that awakening has two movements. One is up and out, and one is down and into.

The up and out, as you say, is only half the journey. It’s halfway up the mountain, which I love. I’ve used that phrase. I have to admit, maybe I should send you royalties, but I love that phrase, “halfway up the mountain,” because there are two movements of awakening, at least two. I would imagine there’s more, but the two that I’m aware of are this movement into transcendence, up and out of the imminent, and then a movement back into.

That’s where I think the Christian mystical tradition has a great image and model of the incarnational energy of Jesus, of divinity becoming a human being. I think in awakening, that’s the movement. It’s like, okay, you awaken up and out of your humanity and realize, “I’m not merely a human being. I’m not limited to that.” And then you awaken from that awakening and awaken back down and into fully your humanity.

There’s this kind of effect then in the world that can be quite lovely and beautiful, solving problems like world hunger and war and things like that. If we’re just going to hang out in emptiness all the time and let everything go to hell in a handbasket, well, that’s fine for me, but that’s not so great for the person living in a drain tile in India or somewhere. So, anyway, I could go on and on because this got me.

Awakening has two movements. One is up and out, and one is down and into.

Rick: We have two over here. Go ahead.

David: I just wanted to make a comment about that too. One thing I’ve observed is that people, as they mature into an awakening, actually become more distinct, more unique, more individual, and more—I don’t know if “eccentric” is the right word—but the shoulds and the musts and all the conditioning fall away, and you have this very unique person. It’s just perhaps the expression of that, but it’s still there. There is still a person in the dance.

I’m reminded of something which I’m sure some of you know better than I, but it’s a brief Zen story: prior to enlightenment, there are trees—

Rick: Oh, mountains.

David: Right, there are trees and mountains. During enlightenment, there are no trees and mountains. After enlightenment, there are trees and mountains. The purpose, to spell it out a little bit, as I see it—that’s touching my heart—is that suddenly I know that the trees and mountains are of the same substance, in essence, as I am.

So that’s profoundly what you’re saying in a way: there’s this tendency in a lot of spiritual traditions to be lost at the transcendent stage and say, “I’ve arrived.” But you’re speaking of the integration—or there are many words we can use—but returning to everyday living, knowing now that essentially we are in union, in our deepest core of being. That’s the transformational understanding that I feel in that third part of the story, which is important and touching.

Rick: Kiran?

Kiran: The place that I work at all day long—we all work with people—so I’m not a teacher of enlightenment or awakening, because personally, with my own direct experience, I could give a flying f*** about it. I don’t think we need to awaken out of and then come back into, because for me it’s so clear and so obvious that formlessness is doing one thing here: it’s coming into form. And for me, the direct experience is that that’s the point of formlessness. It’s its love, its devotion.

So there isn’t actually an experience where there’s pure samadhi that stays forever. All of us have probably experienced samadhi for long periods of time, and it ends. It’s not a sustained thing. It eventually moves into form, because form is formlessness. It’s one and the same.

So when I’m working with people, I talk about reality and true nature, and there’s not a movement for us to dissolve out of something to come back into it. In my experience, it’s very much about where suffering is happening for you, and what’s the story that’s happening there that you’re believing about lack and limitation at its most fundamental—which doesn’t exist in reality.

And I don’t have to teach you about reality for you to know lack and limitation doesn’t exist in reality, because in your own direct experience, you know that. There are so many places we can go back to in our lives, in our own direct experiences, and know this incredible movement of constantly moving, constantly thriving, constantly living. It’s like this constant movement.

And so for me, when I work with people, I find it’s very small to just pull out the lack-and-limitation stories, and then they come face-to-face with freedom. And the piece for me that I actually really feel is a factor, and maybe really worth talking about here, is the word identity, because for me it’s very clear that identity isn’t here.

But I really respect what Laurie’s saying about, well, we have identity to put the car in. Now, I don’t have an identity to put keys in the car, and I don’t think there was an identity to put a coat on someone who’s cold. We don’t need identity to do that. It’s the movement of love that does that, and awareness.

So it would be really great to just look at the semantics of what we mean by identity, because I think that’s a sticking point when I’m working with people directly to find their own freedom and to live their own freedom.

Quite specifically, when I talk to people, basically I pick up the phone and ask them, “What’s your mirror look like? What’s your day-to-day? What was the day last week? What’s your week like?” When they report to me, I’m looking at the external mirror of their world, and I can see from there where their own lack and limitations are making them stuck.

And I really could give a f*** about how much they understand—sorry, I keep saying this word. I could really give a fart about how much they know God, because they are God. And as soon as lack and limitation is out of the system, they come face-to-face with God. And it’s irrelevant whether they’re climbing up a mountain or down a mountain, because there’s only one thing happening.

But these are semantics, because I think all of us have a deep agreement on the same plane about what we’re speaking about. It would be fun to talk about what identity is.

Rick: Kristin, and then Susanne. Okay, you have the mic here.

Kristin: I have a little hesitation in saying this, right? When we start talking about identity, where there’s identification, there can be a reaction. So I think—well, I love your sharing and how you’re speaking and how you’re offering it.

Part of what happens for me in doing the healing work that I do is that I’m conscious through all these different layers of “I am,” and that at each of these different dimensions, there’s a level of functionality, and that it’s different in each of the dimensions.

When people are functioning from a typical humanness that hasn’t recognized itself as the divine, there’s a level of identification with the function of the hand and the key and the car. So there is a sense of identity that’s needed to do that when consciousness is identified at that level.

And for me, in that surrendering through these different layers of “I am,” there’s a layer of “I am” that does not need any identity, that knows itself as a hand and as a key and as a car—as a direct reflection of how you’re articulating. So I completely understand that.

And when I’m working with people, I’m doing a similar thing, seeing where identification is contracted, and in that releasing, in terms of evolution, I will witness that release of identification through these layers of the divine. So everyone’s experience makes sense to me, however people are articulating it.

I guess I just wanted to reflect that place where I’m seeing the truth of what everybody’s saying. I’m not seeing a contradiction, and that…

David: It’s semantics, like she said. I think it’s semantics.

Rick: Susanne—and just a reminder, no one should ever speak without a microphone in their hand, or else we won’t hear them.

Kristin: I don’t think I’m quite done. Can I have another second? I just want to be quiet for a second.

In surrendering into nothing, it’s not the personality, the mind, or the thinking—that place of identification—that’s speaking. It’s a deeper… It’s God that’s speaking, right?

But the whole game is identification, right? In terms of my experience of evolution, everything is God’s fingers. We’re all God’s fingertips. It’s God experiencing, and in that awakening or surrendering through these layers of identity, we wake up over and over and over again through these layers of God’s sensing organ.

Rick: Let’s give Susanne the one… Oh, the one with the orange cord, yeah.

Susanne: Excuse me. We have a cell phone going off. Okay. Great topic.

I think that this is part of the evolution of consciousness within a human being: the journey of the dissolution of self. That is the journey of the “I am,” the “I.”

In the beginning, it seems like the natural formation of the “I,” the sense of “I,” is to be fused with mind and body and to imagine itself as being a separate aspect of self, with an awareness of being separate in the world: “I am here and that’s that.”

So that’s the journey of what I saw my own children go through, being a mother. And it feels like the maturation is to have that sense of “I” dissolve over time.

There’s a hole that appears in the center, and that’s the experience of emptiness. And as that appearance expands, one of the awakenings is the descent—the experience of unity consciousness.

In unity consciousness, the “I” is included in the vaster sense of self. There’s the “I,” but it’s part of the whole. It’s not seen as separate, it’s not seen as a problem, and it’s something that is easily experienced and maneuvered within life.

But I think there’s a continual, further evolution. Touching on what Kiran was talking about, that’s something that I myself have experienced as well: the falling away of the self-center, where the sense of unity consciousness actually falls away and dissolves.

Let’s see how to explain that.

Voice: Wordless.

Susanne: Pardon?

Voice: Wordless.

Susanne: Well, there’s no longer a sense of having an identity. The sense of “I” is not necessarily—it isn’t included anymore in the totality. It’s known that it exists there, but it’s not sensed here anymore.

🕊️ Brokenness, shadow, and spiritual maturity

Rick: Mariana.

Mariana: Right there. Do we have some water anywhere? I didn’t bring any.

Rick: I’ll get someone to get some water.

Mariana: So I’m shifting the topic a little bit, but I want to speak on behalf of our brokenness—the part of us that’s broken, and the part of most of us that, if it hasn’t been broken, probably will be.

I wrote about this in one of my books, Eyes Wide Open. I thought I was at the most broken that I’d ever been, but I didn’t know. I didn’t know it was going to happen again, and I think I’m due for it every ten years, where my life gets shattered.

And I know it’s not only my life. I work more in the yoga world than in the non-dual world, and there were a couple of points that I wanted to make as I was listening here. I usually end up speaking on behalf of the underworld, but I think I’m more at home in these kinds of conversations.

One of the points I wanted to make is just how much we separate ourselves in the name of spirituality—how much, in the yoga world and the non-dual world, in my experience, where I work across traditions, some of the separation happens most frequently. It’s such a subtle thing.

In the name of union, we separate ourselves from the people who don’t feel union, and it just happens all the time. It happens with our families. It happens in our relating, with going out into the world—with us who are spiritual and those who aren’t spiritual.

That isn’t the main point I wanted to make here. I wanted to speak about the part of us that’s broken, because I think it happens, and it happens unexpectedly. We find out how broken we are and how psychotic we are in different parts.

I remember—I happened to be driving across the Golden Gate Bridge when I had one of the deepest experiences. I was being driven across the Golden Gate Bridge because I couldn’t even drive, when I was in a really, really deeply fragmented state. It was the most powerful—one of the most powerful—experiences of oneness I’ve ever had.

I felt at one with everybody broken in the world, and everyone on the streets, and everyone in the psychiatric hospitals, and…

Rick: The Leonard Cohen line.

Mariana: There’s so many.

There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.

Yeah. And that was oneness. It was as equal a oneness experience as all the highs, and for me, a more important one, because I think, again, in my work as a psychotherapist particularly—but I think just as a person—that’s what makes me more compassionate.

Living through these experiences, if I was given the choice to be less compassionate and not have to live through them, I probably would choose to be less compassionate, because they’re so hard to live through.

But again, tracking these communities over time—my teacher had me starting to write these books in my twenties, and I didn’t know what I was doing—I’m now tracking communities over twenty years. Teachers have severe breakdowns. We have psychological breakdowns. We have psychotic breakdowns. We have borderline-schizophrenic breakdowns. We have these breakdowns.

And for me, strangely, it doesn’t contradict the awakening. It’s just part of tolerating the complexity.

Rick: Is no one immune to that? Are there teachers that you can think of who have moved beyond that—I wouldn’t say possibility, but probability?

Mariana: I think there are teachers who had more balanced upbringings. I really do. I’ve talked with some of them, and there’s no point in naming any, but I remember talking about this in circles like this, and I’m like, “You really don’t experience that?”

They drank from cows’ udders, you know? That’s where they drank milk, and their parents were always happily married, and there was no arguing in the household. There are a few people who don’t get broken in the way that most of us do.

Of all the many teachers I’ve interviewed, it sounds like you’ve—we’ve done similar tracks. I mean, there’s been a lot, lot, lot over the years. There’s one I can think of, but nobody knows the real story of what happened.

And just one more thing on that. I interviewed Joan Halifax for this book, and I was doing the research for Halfway Up the Mountain when I was in my 20s, asking Joan Halifax, a famous Zen teacher, about this. She said, “Premature claims to enlightenment, that’s such a terrible thing that people do.”

She’s like, “Honey, I work with prisoners on death row, and they’ve got real problems.” And she said, “When people are doing this, like, dress up as enlightenment, and I’m non-dual, and I do this,” she said, “It’s like going in your mom’s closet and playing dress-up.”

Again, none of it negates these profound conversations. I just want to let that voice be here.

Rick: I sometimes wonder if—I know this sounds a little morbid, but if torture could be considered a litmus test for enlightenment, like Jesus on the cross. I mean, it’s easy when everything is smooth and nice and you’re well-fed and everything.

Francis: You can talk if you’re not on a mic.

Mariana: He’s got a mic.

Rick: I’ve got a mic, buddy. I’m eternally mic’d. [laughter] You know, but it’s sort of like, under what conditions is enlightenment sustained, or whatever, if we’re using the E-word?

Perhaps those of us who are fortunate enough to be able to coddle ourselves and live relatively smooth lives are saying something which we feel might be permanent. But if really put to the test, or if we were injected with some weird chemical or whatever, I mean, maybe, as Susanne and others are saying, we’re sense organs of the infinite. Is enlightenment or awakening lost if that sense—if that particular sense organ of the infinite becomes sufficiently damaged or compromised?

Mariana: Simple things like heartbreak or the death of a child or a loved one—I mean, something is going to take us down, or is likely to take us down, and it doesn’t seem to be—

Rick: In the darkest, deepest sort of phase of that, though, I mean, you said you felt this oneness driving across the bridge, but did you feel like—

Mariana: It wasn’t a happy oneness. It was a broken one.

Rick: But did you feel like there was some dimension of your experience which was imperturbable, or was everything shattered?

Mariana: No, I was shattered, and I’ve been shattered again. I think there’s probably people for whom maybe that doesn’t happen. Maybe that’s a maturation. I don’t need to be there yet.

I just know that so many of the people, even the famous people that we project onto and imagine that’s not happening for, it actually is happening regularly. They’re on meds, and they’re—sometimes. I did a lot of intervention in the big, recent Geshe Michael scandal, and stuff happens. Real bad stuff happens.

Rick: Craig.

Craig: Yeah, I think one of the things that we really forget about when we’re speaking about enlightenment is that we live in an evolutionary world, and everyone is growing. I think we all have this desire to get to a place where we will be ultimately free from growth.

But if we really look at that, that’s the ego’s biggest desire—to get to a place where we’re untouchable, to get to a place where we don’t have to grow, where we don’t have to—we can just rest forever.

If we look at our life, and, like you’re saying, it’s just teacher after teacher, I went and saw Swami Sai Baba in India, and he’s an incredible master. He could manifest things out of his hands right before my eyes. And then you hear about these scandals.

When the man would walk into a space of 20,000 people, the air was filled with tremendous grace. Part of us could say, “Well, how could something like that happen?” To me, it’s tremendous arrogance on our part to think that anyone on the planet is outside of the realm of growth.

It’s a ridiculous thought that we’ll get to a place where we’re no longer growing. It’s denying that God is continually growing forever.

Rick: Saint Teresa of Avila said it appears that God Himself is on the journey.

Craig: Yeah, God absolutely is the very force and nature of evolution. So I think in our definition of enlightenment, there has to be this sense that, yes, it’s always growing. It’s always expanding.

Yes, there is the vast emptiness, but even that, too, is awakening forever in every direction, that our humanity is awakening and growing in every direction.

But I think what you were saying, Rick, can absolutely be possible as well. This last May, my father died unexpectedly, and I got this phone call: “Craig, your father died.” I hit the floor, cried, and grieved, and yet the grieving was happening in this vast space.

But am I sad? Hell yeah, am I sad. Absolutely. It’s painful, and it’s difficult. So I think it’s very important just to acknowledge these parts of ourselves that, like you said, are broken and can break. Yet even the breaking itself is included in the unity of God, in the expression of God.

The breaking is that evolving edge of God—growing in compassion, growing in love, growing in this non-dual understanding. I mean, look how crazy the world is. It is absolutely crazy. There are wars going on right now. People are being bombed, and yet those wars are arising in incredible beauty and space and peace. There’s this ongoing paradox of both continually arising together, in every moment.

Rick: Chuck.

Chuck: I’ve been a devotee of Ramana Maharshi since 1970, and since that time, my life has shattered maybe four or five times. Seriously, just collapsed, exploded, and imploded at the same time.

I’ve noticed that in the heart of all that, there’s something that remains constant. In the middle of my mess, in the center of my chaos, swirling around me with everything just being taken away from me and ripped away from me, I felt something that was unmoved, something that was unchanged, something that was constant.

I think that’s maybe the best word for it. It always was there, always present, and there was nothing that I needed to do—or could do—to change that in any way. There was always an okayness about it.

The peace that I would feel by just relaxing down into that, just collapsing down into that, somehow made it part of the dance, part of the craziness and the chaos. Everything was leaving, and that was somehow part of the dance. I felt okay with that.

I would wear it like a mantle. I would go, “Yes, okay, I’m in the drama. I’m in the melodrama of it. I’m in the tragedy of it.” When weeping and wailing and gnashing my teeth seemed appropriate, I would just do that. I would throw myself into it.

I would not hold anything back. I would be 100% into it. I would be authentic, and it would be valid, and it would be a place of authenticity and integrity, and it would be powerful.

Eventually, it would abate, it would begin to modify, and something else would show up and replace it with something else that would show up. I got clear that it wasn’t like, “I am feeling this pain,” or, “I am having this agony.” It’s really, “I am is having this pain. I am is experiencing this.”

If I inject the word “is” between “I am” and whatever followed that, it seemed to put it in a much greater context, in which everything that showed up would be exactly as it needed to be. I did not need to sit back and try to figure it out, make sense out of it, or come to terms with it.

All I had to do, in a sense, was to love it. I mean, love it—just love it being exactly the way that it was showing up and exactly the way that it wasn’t showing up.

To love it fully, with every fiber of my being, to throw myself into that, somehow was transformative and freeing at the deepest possible level. It would blow me away again and again and again, and it went back and forth, and boom! It’s never-ending.

If I align myself with that and have that “yes,” make that “yes” my default position, then there’s no difference between myself and the flame at all. If there’s any kind of separation between the flame and myself, then the shadow appears, and that’s okay too, because it shows up. It shows up, and I love it the way it is, and it loves me the way that I am.

Nothing is to be denied ever.

Rick: Sounds like heaven.

Craig: And I settle down into that, and it’s all beautiful, and it finally does collapse totally into love. Just love.

Rick: Nice. Susanne.

Susanne: I resonate with what you’re saying. I think it was at Osho—maybe someone here knows—someone says, “Have your ‘yes’ be so big that all the ‘no’s are contained within it.” It’s just beautiful.

To me, the whole alchemical process of this evolutionary force, of the dismantling process of what I think of as the self-center, is a movement of love, a movement of allowance. That is what allows for the resistance to fall away, so that everything is known as that. Everything becomes known as that.

✨ Different ways awakening unfolds

Rick: Kiran, Jeffrey, I haven’t heard from Jeffrey for a while.

Jeffery: Let me add to some of Mariana’s points and maybe provide a different voice. In recent years, I can speak to this from personal experience as well, but I think I’ll speak from the thousands of people who have participated in our research and try to bring their voice into it a little.

One of the things that I noticed in the early days was that we dealt with a lot of spiritual teachers, major religious leaders, minor religious leaders, and whatever else. At a certain point, we were able to actually reach into the general population. We were able to find people in the general population—programmers, janitors, and you name it—just ordinary people experiencing this.

One of the things that I noticed was a very different narrative among those people than among the spiritual teachers and religious teachers. The spiritual teachers and religious teachers were often talking about the stuff that we’ve just heard a moment ago, right?

But I’m thinking of very specific people, like a business owner, a janitor, and a programmer, spread across the United States. They had a very different perspective on this. They were trying to balance their lives and balance how far they could really go in the direction of whatever we want to call it today—awakening, nonduality, enlightenment.

I use an academic term for it called persistent nonsymbolic experience, or persistent nonsymbolic consciousness. PNSE is how I abbreviate it, so I might use that term today accidentally. If I do, that’s what I mean. I’ll try to remember to say awakening.

One of the things that I’ve noticed is that we have a taxonomy that comes out of all this research, and we call them locations instead of levels because we don’t think one is necessarily better than another. We think that they are all basically great, and they all deserve equal respect.

Ordinary individuals will often look at our taxonomy—they’ll find it online or read some paper that we’ve written—and they’ll say, “Oh, yeah, I’ve been there and there. When I was there, I just wasn’t really able to make my family situation work, so I went back to this. Or when I was here, I really couldn’t run my company, so I found that I had to be in this other location.”

They often have a very practical viewpoint around this. There’s a very practical integration that they bring into their lives.

There’s a Silicon Valley engineer out here who’s a brilliant problem solver. He’s known to be one of the great problem solvers out here. I’m going to use some of our terminology, which is “location.” You don’t have to know what any of these mean. Just think of them as different categories, different ways of experiencing this, some of which we’ve already heard around the circle today.

He would say, “In location four, I just can’t be as effective a problem solver. I need to go in, and I’ve got one year to solve this major problem. There’s nobody else who can solve this problem. I’ve got to be in location three in order to do that.”

But now he’s in this problem because he’s being tasked to lead this startup, and he’s got to be a manager. He can’t be a manager in location three because he tends to just—it’s sort of like the end of the Christian path. You have so much compassion, giving, and love, and you’re giving away the store, which doesn’t make you a very effective manager of a startup in Silicon Valley, right?

It allows you to go in every day and take an extraordinarily difficult engineering problem or something and spend 16 hours straight trying to tackle it, then go home, get a bite to eat, sleep, wake up, and do it the next day. But it doesn’t allow you to say no to people or have an effective organization that you’re building.

So one of the things I think is that there’s this one dimension of deepening that we’re talking about here. But I think there’s also a question of life integration involving deepening, as well as all these different circumstances that are out there in life, with people finding all sorts of different ways to manage them.

People say, “Okay, well, if I go this deep on this dimension, I just can’t really function the way I want to function in my family. Or if I go so deep in this dimension, I can’t really function the way I need to function at work.”

Some people just choose to leave their family. Divorce is not an uncommon thing among people who have an awakening experience or whatever. Or if someone wakes up in a place where they don’t have emotion, sometimes their partner is very bothered by the fact that they can’t love them anymore, and so their partner will leave them. There are all sorts of these dynamics that go on.

People are making decisions out there that aren’t necessarily about putting the pedal to the metal and seeing how much this can unfold. This is just another aspect of psychology that’s being integrated into their lives in different ways, in the same way that other things—other personal-growth, self-help, and psychological-growth-type things—are being integrated.

So I just thought I’d slide that voice into this conversation.

Rick: Do you feel that people have the choice of changing locations, to use your word? Or do people sometimes find themselves so immersed in a particular location that they just have to face the consequences in their relative life because they can’t shift locations?

Jeffery: We think that that’s changing over the years. There seems to be an acceleration of people waking up starting around 1996. The best guess came from somebody who was looking at our data one time. They said, “Well, it seems to sort of track Internet growth.”

It’s possible that there’s something connected with the increased connectivity. I hadn’t thought about that, so I went back and looked at it, and it turns out it did actually track Internet growth.

I think there’s something to this enhanced connectivity. We could never have done this study otherwise. We’ve done this amazing study, right? But it just happened that I was the one who came along at a certain point in history, when communication was at a certain level and travel was at a certain level, or whatever. It could have been done 100 years ago if that had happened 100 years earlier.

What we found is that prior to that time, people often landed in a location, and there isn’t a starting point, as everybody here, I think, knows. There are all sorts of different places that you can land. They would land in a location, and often they would just stay there. There would be such a deep sense of truth, and they would deepen in that location.

There are two different ways, I think, to talk about deepening. You can talk about it as going further along to later locations, or you can talk about it as going deeper into your existing location.

Most people from a certain era, if you will, of awakening went deeper. Every now and then, somebody would move further along the continuum, like Bernadette Roberts, who’s speaking from the Christian, Catholic tradition. She fell kind of off the end of the Christian mystical tradition into what we would call location four, and she spent a lot of time trying to grapple with that and trying to make sense of it from her tradition’s perspective or whatever. That’s what happened, but it was rarer.

Now we find that it’s much more common. I think it’s much more common because people have cognitive frameworks for it. You can go out to the Internet, and you can see that people are having all this diversity of experience.

You can find papers by us. You can find work being done by other people, or just lots of sharing that’s going on in all of these different communities, and it provides a perspective for people. They realize, “Oh, well, I can recognize where I’m at. I’m sort of here. But then there are these other people talking about it over here, and there are these other people talking about it over here.”

It’s almost like it opens their minds to the possibility of movement. Past a certain point, I think there’s a lot more movement that you see.

Prior to a certain point, there was a lot more personal dogmatism in terms of what’s right. I think that’s also loosening conflict.

One of the things that’s been great to see in this group today is how flexible you all are with everybody’s different experiences. There are other groups that you can sit in where, if you were to put that group together, they would just be fighting like cats and dogs, right? They would be saying, “I have this experience, and I know that it feels completely true. I hear your experience, and it sounds so close. I feel like you’re so close to knowing the truth. If only we could—” Right? And then these conflicts develop.

There’s almost a new generation of dialogue, in some ways started by the SAND conference and other gatherings, that has sort of dampened that. To me, this conversation is amazing because 10 years ago, when I started doing this work, there was a lot more conflict between a lot more individuals.

Rick: Dana.

Dana: One thing that I was thinking about is that I’ve spent most of my time in a very different setting because I’m an academic. I’m always at conferences where people say things to me like—because there’s still such a strict materialism in academia—“Quantum physicists can talk about metaphysics, but philosophers can’t.” It’s a strange world, actually.

People say, “Aren’t you tired of pretending you have a soul?” And my comment is, “Aren’t you tired of pretending you don’t?”

So to be here in this kind of context is very strange for me. But one thing from that context that I keep listening to and thinking about is this: If all of us, the 14 of us, were stranded on a deserted island together after a shipwreck, we would find identity very quickly.

Whether its identity is expression, with nobody in the way of that expression, or whether we’re identifying with that identity is semantics. But who would be useful? Who has a shoulder to cry on? Who knows how to get fish? Those things would become very clear to us and very important to us very, very quickly.

So, like you say, sometimes the location of nondual consciousness is a very useful place to be, and sometimes you need fish.

Laurie: Shadow would come out really quickly.

Dana: Very quickly, inevitably.

Francis: The guy who could get fish would think he was all that.

Laurie: I’m deeply appreciating each of the sharings and the opportunity for us to sit among one another and feel and hear something that’s part of each of us as one another speaks. I appreciate, Karen, your comment about semantics, because I do think there is a semantic difference. And with your response, I did identify that there was a semantic difference in how we were using identity.

I would like to say I just appreciate each person’s unique flavor and essence. To me, that is your identity, and that’s why there’s something precious about being incarnation. There is a oneness, there is an awareness that comes for me. It comes and goes. I don’t profess to live in it all the time, and I understand most people here don’t make that profession either. But even in states of that, there’s a recognition of the mysterious, awesome, amazing wonder that has each of these flavors here. And from each of these flavors, unique creations, inquiries, explorations, and activities are occurring. How incredible, how wonderful.

Francis: Something that Jeffrey said, and it would be interesting to see what his response to this would be, is that—I mean, I get that idea that, okay, there’s these different states of consciousness, and people can kind of move in and out of this state or that state. This state’s good for getting fish, and this state’s good for getting a date, and this state’s good for driving the car, and this state’s good for doing zazen or whatever. I can understand that in a way, but what I’ve experienced in my own direct experience was reaching a point where there was no more of this sort of either/or kind of thing. It was like there was this spacious quality.

When you were talking, I was remembering when I was in the hospital a couple of years ago and had a very bad infection in my foot. I’m a type 2 diabetic, and I happened to get an infection in my foot. It got really bad. They thought it went to the bone. There was talk of amputating part of the foot and stuff.

On one level, there was this sort of upset about that. I wasn’t thrilled when the doctor came in and said, “Oh, you may lose your foot.” I didn’t get up and do a dance because my foot hurt, but also—

Rick: Might have been your last chance.

Francis: Yeah. There was a kind of pain, a psychological pain, a sense of loss, all that stuff. But I noticed, interestingly, that it arose in this huge, vast kind of space. Arising in this vastness, it kind of did its little dance a lot more quickly.

An analogy that came to me was, if you had a teaspoonful of black, thick, dark, noxious poison and you poured it in a little cup, it would overwhelm the cup. The cup would feel like, “I’m this big, black, noxious poison.” The whole cup would look like that. But if you poured it in the vastness of an ocean, the experience of the black, thick, noxious poison would be vastly different. It would be very, very different. It would hit the ocean a lot differently than it hits a cup.

My sense is that what’s happened with me is that there’s this huge vastness that’s appeared that does stay, I have to honestly say. It’s here all the time. But it’s no longer—it doesn’t negate the brokenness, the pain, the humanity, or identity for that matter, or any of that. All of that is appearing and disappearing in that vastness.

For me, it’s no longer like, “Oh, you’re in this state, which is good for that, and you’re in that state, which is good for that.” It’s like any number of states can arise in that vastness, and they do all the time.

The whole identity thing—for me, it’s not so much that identity is some problem that you need to get rid of or something. It’s fine as long as it’s seen for what it is: something fluid, coming and going. I often think of it in terms of putting on—if I play baseball, I put on a baseball uniform. If I wrestle, I put on a wrestling singlet or whatever. If I go to the office, I put on a suit. I put those on and take them off, and I’m not totally identified with the idea that I’m in a suit. But when I’m in a suit, I do move a little differently than when I’m in a baseball uniform.

For me, it’s not either/or anymore. It’s both/and. It’s always both/and. On one level, there’s no self. On another level, there is a self. On one level, I don’t know what—I can’t think of another analogy. That’s a good one, the self, because we were talking about—it’s not Kiran’s.

Rick: Kiran.

Francis: Kiran.

Kiran: My name is Kiran.

Francis: Kiran brought up the idea of talking about identity, and that’s what kind of spurred me. It’s funny, because we have so many people that somebody brings something up, and then you want to respond to it, but then there are four things in between. So then it’s hard to remember, okay, what was my response? Anyway, I’m just rambling now.

Jeffery: Yeah, because I was curious.

Rick: Kiran also wanted to say something?

Jeffery: No, he asked me to respond to something.

Rick: Bounce off that.

Jeffery: Just real quick. I agree with you, and there are many forms of this that are persistent like that. I was meaning that that’s one form of persistence. In our taxonomy, I would probably put that—call that Location 2, not having talked to you much more about it. I don’t know.

For instance, in Location 3, you might have a single emotion that’s really a combination of love, compassion, and joy that’s there all the time. It feels like it’s really turned up quite loudly. And then in Location 4, for instance, you might have no experience of emotion as we normally think about it.

But throughout all of this, there’s persistence, and there can be that spaciousness, that deep sense of peace, all of that. But there are other factors that change. That’s what I mean by them.

Francis: Yeah.

Jeffery: Yeah.

Kiran: I want to bring the conversation back to brokenness and back to what Susanne Marie was talking about, and take it out of the analytical and mental place and bring it back into what Rick had sort of asked. Is there fundamentally a place—an enlightened place, if you will—or a place where the sense that we were talking about, where we’re not harmed or broken, ends or something like this?

Rick: At least some core—

Chuck: Stability.

Kiran: Stability. Beautiful.

Rick: Even though all hell may be breaking loose, like Chuck was saying, could one characteristic of enlightenment, if we want to use that word, be a sort of deep imperturbability under any and all circumstances, which may not be apparent on the surface? I’ve heard it said—Maharishi Mahesh Yogi used to say, “Christ never suffered.” He appeared to be suffering greatly, but from his subjective experience, he was beyond that.

Kiran: I want to weigh in about that and add the good news: I actually totally agree with that. I want to bring optimism to the people who are listening and to those of us who have lived these experiences, and talk about what it can mean for you.

Essentially, I come from a very extreme and severe abusive background. I have ritual abuse in my background and extraordinary pain. The liberation in my life didn’t come because one day my mind blew a fuse. Without any identity, with pure, unfiltered form, there were still conditionings in the body-mind toward tremendous—I mean, I lived through torture for most of my life.

I have to say that my liberation came from recognizing there was this movement in clarity, found in the stillness, that always led toward healing, abundance, thriving, and safety. If I chose clarity, I would go there. If I chose fear, pain, or stories of limitation, I could go there.

In terms of this conversation, I really think it’s such a beautiful thing to say: yes, pain can be experienced and fear can be experienced, but there is a place that all of us can access. Awakened or not awakened, we can access clarity. Clarity brings us to wholeness, regardless of the extremity of the experience. It doesn’t bring us to brokenness.

What breaks is our identification, our habit of fear, our habits of pain, and our habits of limitation. Those aren’t actually true in reality. They’re conditions of limitation. Our healing journey rips that stuff away from us. What we might call these broken moments are where we’re literally being ripped free of our fear and our limitations.

As these leave us, as we have less and less experience of this and stand more and more in clarity, we clean our karmic house. We clean out all these areas where there’s lack and limitation. In our practical lives, we then have the ability to make choices from clarity. Again, mind or no mind, you can do that. That does not bring us to places of brokenness. It brings us to places of wholeness.

It brings us all the way to such a deep, profound wholeness of what Francis and Susanne Marie were saying: yes, I still have a body, and the body ages, and there’s still pain or injury. But it never again contracts in the same way when there was still fear in the system, or when it was still bouncing against this sort of separate self of me.

When that’s gone, it’s actually an expression of love, and it’s so seen and experienced. I mean that so directly—so directly. With the people that I work with all the time, we see this again and again, where something that looks devastating—for instance, I have students right now whose infant is in a life-and-death situation—and their experience of it is an immense dance of love and joy. It’s not broken. It’s not breaking. It’s an immense dance of love.

Everybody around them—it’s a little bit like a wedding, quite frankly. It’s like people going to the hospital. It’s this unbelievable love. That’s an experience of freedom, where life is moving and having life, but there aren’t movements of lack, limitation, and fear inside of it.

I’m not holding this up as an ideal. I’m saying that this is actually possible for every single one of us, and I know it directly for myself and with the thousands of people that I work with globally, all over the world. So I feel like I just want to say, yes, there is absolutely a place. Oneness is a whole place where life moves, but it moves, as Francis was saying, in this unbelievable movement of love—very, very practically, not theoretically.

No endpoint to divine unfolding

Rick: Thank you. Okay. I just wanted to make a comment that kind of wraps together some of the points that have been made, and I’ll be talking about this a lot in my SAND presentation tomorrow.

If we think about what’s actually going on, we take things for granted. But if we think about what we’re actually looking at here—and science can help us do this—it’s only the divine. It’s only consciousness. And so it may appear that I’m sitting here talking to you or looking at a camera, but it’s really just consciousness interacting with itself. Through that interaction, it’s giving rise to the appearance of forms and shrouding itself, to some extent, in the subjective experience of those forms.

To me, enlightenment is a matter of thinning that shroud more and more and more. Spiritual evolution is a matter of that. And that’s what the divine does. If we want to anthropomorphize and say that it has a purpose that we can understand as human beings, it would seem that its purpose is to enjoy itself as a living experience, as an embodied experience, rather than just being sort of flat, featureless, unmanifest consciousness.

We’ve talked about the continuous evolution of life and of our spiritual unfoldment as embodied forms. And I mentioned the phrase that it appears that God himself is on the journey. There will be no end to the refinement and evolution of the forms that the divine gives rise to in order to have this enjoyment of embodied experience.

So when we ask, “What is enlightenment? What is awakening?” and so on and so forth, we’re all just God having a human experience, or a dog experience, or a flea experience, or whatever form the divine has assumed.

There could probably be—and spiritual traditions have defined—milestones in the human experience of the unfoldment of divine consciousness. But from the perspective of the divine, there’s no terminus; there’s no endpoint. There will always be room for further refinement of its various expressions.

From the perspective of the divine, there’s no terminus; there’s no endpoint.

Does that kind of make sense in light of what people have been saying? That’s my perspective on what enlightenment is. Time to change subjects, or time to go to lunch?

Everyone: Lunch.

Rick: Let’s do lunch.