Group Discussion at Sofia University, Part 2

Summary

The group shares varied descriptions of awakening, emphasizing unity, love, presence, and an ongoing unfolding rather than a fixed state. The discussion also examines how spiritual power can amplify immaturity and why teachers need therapy, peer feedback, humility, and accountability.

Questions This Interview Explores

• What is enlightenment or spiritual awakening?
• How is spiritual awakening different from psychological maturity?
• How can spiritual teachers avoid ego inflation and harmful behavior?
• How can spiritual seekers maintain their own authority on the spiritual path?

Key takeaways

• Awakening is often an unfolding clarity rather than a permanent state.
• Spiritual maturity shows itself through humility and gratitude.
• Nonduality does not remove unresolved trauma or ordinary human limitations.
• Therapy and honest peer feedback can help teachers recognize their blind spots.
• Spiritual teachers remain human and should acknowledge their vulnerabilities.
• Seekers should not surrender their discernment or authority to a teacher.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. This is part two of a two-part conversation with a group of people out at Sophia University in Palo Alto. If you haven’t watched part one yet, I would suggest you do so before watching this part. And if you have watched it, then you don’t need to hear the introduction of everyone in the group.

But collectively, we decided before starting this afternoon that we wanted to just spend ten minutes in silence. Being a little tired and having just eaten lunch, I thought, “That probably isn’t going to go so well for me.” But it was surprisingly deep, clear, and blissful.

So, Kristin just suggested that perhaps from that deep place, before we get all stirred up in our intellects again, we could each just say a sentence or so, perhaps about the topic we discussed in the morning, but more in terms of our own experience of what enlightenment is. Something along those lines. I’m being a little vague here. Maybe you can articulate it better. [Microphone feedback]

Kristin: It just appeared in the midst of our silence together that there was so much rich discussion this morning, particularly in terms of being of service. For the audience to hear a succinct sentence, maybe one or two from each person, speaking from that depth and concisely to the question we spent the morning on—what is enlightenment?—would offer the beauty of the varied responses.

Rick: Why don’t we start with you, since you have the microphone and it was your idea? One or two sentences. Give everyone an example.

Kristin: I don’t know what enlightenment is. I don’t know how the term is used. I haven’t studied it. My inner experience is of a singular “I am” that recognizes that it’s made up, and that there are dimensional layers of existence, all with their own expression of “I am.” The surrendering of that sense of self continues and is an infinite evolution, unfolding, and continual realization.

Rick: I won’t do this in order. We’ll just do it in the order that people actually want to speak. So, whoever would like to go next—Craig?

Craig: Being fully human and fully divine, and seeing that there’s no division between the two.

Francis: For me, as I said this morning, I don’t think that there’s some static state called enlightenment. But I think in every human being, there’s an unfolding clarity about life and about reality that unfolds.

Rick: And in terms of your own experience?

Francis: That’s what I find for me, too: there’s just an unfolding clarity.

Mariana: A deep love. The deep love is running all through everything. It’s waves—waves that appear as me and you. And in this deep love experience, me and you just becomes love.

In conversations about enlightenment, if it doesn’t translate to our lives and our relationships and bring us closer to each other, it has very little relevance for me. But I also believe that each of us has an inner intensity, whether we’re quiet and hidden away or large in the world, and an urge to unfold that. I think if we can go deep enough in almost anyone, in the right circumstance, we find that. And I experience that as well.

Dana: In these kinds of situations, I always imagine that the thousands of years of experience of people watching something like this—the tens of thousands of years of human experience—are all enlightened, and they’re just checking our math.

If I had to say how you can tell if you’re getting somewhere, I like the term “spiritual maturity.” How can you tell you’re becoming spiritually mature? You become more humble and feel a more profound sense of gratitude for this incredible mystery that’s happening. So it gets more mysterious.

A close friend, a swami in India, once told me that the word that best characterizes existence is “ajeeb”—sneaky. It’s sneaky. It’s very sneaky. On this side.

Clare: The experience here is that there is only this. There is only ever this that is here right now, that is ever-present. Everything that is appearing arises from this—from the silence, from the stillness.

There is only ever this that is here right now, that is ever-present.

The realization of this, the wholeness that everything arises from, to me is the awakening. I never use the “E” word because it has nothing to do with who we are, the people that we are. It’s to do with the evolution of wholeness.

We are just points where that polishing, that brightening, is happening. We have no control over how that is happening. All we can ever do is return right here to the now, to the ever-present now, to the place where everything comes from.

We can return to the divinity and allow the fullness of our humanity to be expressed from this.

David: There is a vast immensity, a totality, that has—a good word for it is—a musing, a brief thought that expresses as, or kind of collapses to, a little point, which appears as this apparent person having a life.

That life has an appearance, but it’s never anything to do with something that’s separate or distinct or apart. Rather, it’s an interplay that’s interconnected with all the other points where that collapse is taking place into this one completeness. If that made any sense whatsoever.

Chuck: The great discovery is that I am not the thinker of my thoughts. I am not the feeler of my feelings. I am not the speaker of these words. I am not the doer of these actions.

“I am” is the thinker. “I am” is the feeler. “I am” is the speaker. “I am” is the doer. “I am” is who you are. “I am” is I am.

David: The process of gaining a sense of expanded living, expanded existence, has translated for me into a very deep and profound sense of connection and love.

When I look in others’ eyes, I experience a profound sense of presence looking at me and seeing itself. It’s a very direct, real experience. So, for me, the translation of my experience has been to gain a sense of love and appreciation for everyone’s experience—those I don’t understand, those that aren’t familiar to me.

And yet somehow I sense the sameness within them as within that which is seeing them. It’s a profound way of living. I’d like to offer this as a gift to the many who are viewing and to everyone here.

My life is very much about non-words, about the body. So I’d like to do this for you, and I don’t know what it is, but it feels as safe to me as using words. So I’m just going to stand briefly. This is simply something that wants to be done. [David Ellzey makes dancerly moves]

Kiran: Enlightenment. Very big word that contains a lot of stuff. A lot of that stuff consists of projections and myths and stories that talk about something other than this.

My direct experience is that that which is looking out of my eyes right now is the same as that which is looking out of your eyes right now. That which is listening to these words is the same as that which is listening to your words.

That same oneness is coming into form as this body, as that body, as these bodies. It’s also coming into form as this floor and these walls, these chairs. But it is still just one movement.

The direct, living experience of knowing this is one and letting that one be the lead is a direct experience that is irrelevant to a word like enlightenment.

Susanne: This is fun. [Laughter][Sigh]

This is in love with itself. And it’s in love with itself even when it’s really, really hard and tough, and things are difficult within oneself or within anyone on the planet. What’s going on? It’s still in love with itself.

What the beauty of realization offers is understanding that, and being able to simultaneously hold the difficulty and even the suffering within the beauty, resolving the paradox of that, collapsing the paradox. We are large enough to contain it all. [Silence]

Jeffery: For me, it’s whole, unitary, singular. Words are tough, right? Complete. It seems, on some levels, to be containing, and on other levels, to be interpenetrating, and on other levels, to just be it—to just be sort of what it is. That’s it.

Rick: In terms of my experience, my sense, to varying degrees of clarity, is that I’m everywhere, I’m nowhere, and I’m right here.

There’s a Sanskrit saying, “Brahman is the charioteer.” And then there’s the prayer of Saint Francis, “Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace.” I feel very much like an instrument, again, to varying degrees of clarity. The more that I feel that, the more fulfilled and meaningful and purposeful my life seems to be.

✨ When spiritual awakening meets human immaturity

So, back to the papers. Several people have brought up topics for discussion. I think I’d like to bring up a couple that were on our papers here, that came from these emails that Craig, Kristin, and I were sharing a month or two ago. And then Laurie—there she is—had an interesting idea that we’d like to discuss also after that. That actually would sort of relate to some of this.

The first is this. The following paragraph arose out of a discussion that came up because several people were expressing concern to me. I get a lot of feedback from people about a particular well-liked teacher who seemed to be perhaps getting a little full of himself, getting a little off the rails in some sense.

We were generally concerned about him. I consider him a friend, and we were just discussing the topic. This paragraph came out of it as a summation of what we were thinking:

The energies unleashed during spiritual awakening can result in great charisma, eloquence, confidence, and the ability to enliven such energies in others. But I mean this as no insult to this person if he happens to watch this, because, again, love you. Immaturity and a lack of proper guidance can result in ego aggrandizement, making one feel infallible and beyond the need for constructive criticism. Many gifted teachers have fallen from integrity and caused great pain within themselves and the spiritual communities around them.

So that’s that point. I’m sure Mariana has something to say about this, and perhaps all of us, or some of us, will also like to. Let’s not spend all afternoon on this one point, because there are other things to talk about too. But let’s touch upon it, because it’s important.

Mariana: Well, one of the things I appreciate about this morning is that people really didn’t speak too long. This has been what I’ve dedicated most of my life’s work to, so I’ll just speak for a few minutes and maybe chime in later.

As you read that paragraph, it’s like, I dream that. I think about it when I’m heating up my whatever in the morning: nobody is beyond falling. The energies of enlightenment and the process of human development are two distinct things, I believe, as are the processes of psychological maturity and maturation.

I’ve come to this conviction—I think the last time, Rick, we spoke on your show, it’s loose, so I say it with conviction—but I quite believe that everyone who ends up in a spiritual teacher role should have a solid three years of psychotherapy, and maybe once a decade. That’s what I do for myself, about that. It doesn’t have to be with a psychologist or a particular psychoanalyst; maybe it’s in a group. But I wish for that. It’s become a deep wish that anyone who is a spiritual teacher undergo that process.

We recognize that Ken Wilber was a wonderful contributor in this way, talking about different developmental lines: the awakening line is very different from the sexual line, the social line, the ethical line, and so forth. I long for that. I think we would be so protected by it.

Simply recognizing that we wish—we’re drawn, right? So many of us are drawn to the path because it promises that enlightenment takes away all this oneness we’re talking about, takes away the human suffering. But human development is a different category, and nobody escapes it. So that’s one main point.

The other point is that I think we all need peer support. Many people don’t have living teachers, and many people who do have living teachers have teachers with their own blind spots. Blind spots can actually get passed on through lineages as well, so peer support is really important.

One of the things I’ve ended up doing is being a psychotherapist to spiritual teachers, but it ends up being more like being a spiritual friend—just hanging out with people in confidence to give feedback and have discussions. However that happens, I think I’d like all people in spiritual teaching functions to check themselves, or for us, as you’re doing in an anonymous way, to lovingly suggest and remind people to create a circle of peer support.

It’s not because there’s anything wrong with enlightenment itself. It’s what everybody’s been saying all day. The scandals don’t happen because there’s a problem with nonduality. The scandals happen because we got wounded as children, and we’re broken by simple, everyday trauma. So that’s my first point.

Rick: If a spiritual teacher were to take that advice, and presuming that a spiritual teacher, by definition—this might be presumptuous—has achieved some significant degree of awakening, does that teacher need to find a therapist who has also undergone a commensurate degree of awakening, or wouldn’t that be so important?

Mariana: No, no. I think there are two routes to go. At lunchtime, somebody asked me if there is such a place, and I’ve dreamed of creating this. I just need to wait until my son’s grown up.

What I’d like to see is something like a body of consistently interviewed psychotherapists who have a degree of spiritual experience, so that people know where to look and have a reliable source of support. But I definitely don’t think the therapist needs to have a commensurate degree of awakening. It’s quite irrelevant.

Our blind spots are blind to us, right? You can see my blind spot; I see your blind spot. There’s that. Sometimes—this is newer in my thinking—checking ourselves with someone in more of a mainstream context also has its own value.

Rick: At BATGAP, we have a categorical page that David put together, actually, and I think probably you, Craig, and some other people whom I’ve interviewed who are therapists are under a therapist category. So if someone’s looking for a therapist with a spiritual or awakened orientation, that is at least a very small start.

Mariana: Yeah, you know, and there are laws. When I work out a schedule with my Skype clients, I’m a spiritual counselor and not a psychotherapist, but I would be really interested in supporting the development of that.

Spiritual emergency is also very important, when people undergo spiritual crises, so that people have support. We’ve had spiritual emergence networks, but both times they’ve lost their funding because this is a really real phenomenon. We need therapists who are just reasonably well versed and can hold that piece.

Rick: Yeah. Okay. Good. Thanks. Chuck.

Chuck: I’ve been a licensed psychotherapist in California since 1978. I am strangely okay with, and totally without any kind of justification, being comfortable with people just being as they are, without censuring them or saying they should not be that way.

I believe that they have their origin, just like all of the great teachers and all of their great spiritual teachings. They have come out of the source of who I am. Buddha, Christ, Lao Tzu, Nisargadatta, and Maharshi have all had the source of their being come from exactly the same place, as have all the notorious rascals in the world, too, including anybody that we’re mentioning or inferring about.

I have to source all of that. If I let anything out or let anything go, or shuffle it to the side, or label it in any way as wrong, bad, or not okay, or censure it—yes, I can do that—I still need to love it with total compassion, recognizing that it shows up within the great play of lila, within the great dance of life.

I can revel in their craziness, their chaos, and their shadowy energies, and know that those have their origin within me. That shadowy stuff I’m projecting out there is nothing more than a projection. It is me, and I have to own that. In my willingness to just own it, I can love it fully, without reservation.

Rick: Francis, give Francis a mic.

Francis: As you were describing that sort of scenario of somebody going off the rails, getting a lot of hubris, or experiencing the various kinds of things that can happen, what came to me was that the best medicine, in terms of medical intervention, is preventative medicine. It’s a lot easier to deal with something that’s just in its beginning form and nip it in the bud when it hasn’t bloomed yet. It’s a lot easier to deal with that kind of unfolding than it is with a disease process that’s already well established.

Rick: A stitch in time saves nine. Something that I found helpful: Susanne Marie, T. Jonathan Proctor, and I got together on Skype every month or two for quite a while. I don’t know how many months we did that—maybe almost a year. We would touch in and say, “This is going on in my life. This is going on with my students. This is what I’m doing.” We would give each other feedback.

Now, too, I have a couple of friends who are also spiritual teachers, and I check in with them really regularly.

Francis: Yeah, and I think that when I left monastic life, I did get back into therapy for a while, just because of the transition. I had been living in a very different culture, and then suddenly I was thrust into this big world with all these different things. I felt a need to get help. I’ve gone through different periods in my life when I did therapy.

I think we need to depathologize the idea of being in therapy. I suggest to a lot of people, “Why don’t you go into therapy? It would be helpful.” A lot of them get totally pissed off and never talk to me again, honestly, because they think it’s a big insult.

It’s like, dude, I’m telling you what I do. I’ve been in therapy probably five times in my life, and I think I’m a pretty psychologically healthy guy. But in times of transition, I felt it was really indispensable.

I think checking in with peers on a regular basis is also important—people with whom you’re in an open friendship, who can say anything to you and you can say anything to them, and you know it’s confidential.

Those two things are important. Every now and then, when we’re going through a transition or a difficult time, we could say, “Hey, maybe I ought to call a therapist and look at this.” Or maybe I ought to call my friend so-and-so and say, “What do you think of this? How does this hit you?” Just get some feedback.

The danger with a lot of spiritual teachers is that they get into their own little ivory tower. They think, “I’ve got this vast understanding now. I’ve got this great clarity. I don’t need that.” But I think we all need it.

Like you said, I don’t think any of us are above falling, getting full of ourselves, and falling off a pedestal that we put ourselves on or allowed other people to put us on.

One day I said on Facebook, “We have to have a national coming-out day for spiritual teachers,” where they come out as human beings and say, “That’s why I don’t like it when people say I’m not human. Yes, you are. You might have transcended that on some level, but there’s still a lot of human stuff there that we need to acknowledge.”

I honestly think it would be great if spiritual teachers would just come out of the closet and say, “I’m a human being. I sometimes get angry. I sometimes get sad. I have these issues. I go through crises. I get up on the wrong side of the bed occasionally,” and just say, “Yeah.”

Rick: Canela, Michelle Myers just joined us. You’re welcome to take one of these seats here. Canela?

Kiran: I would totally agree with what Francis was saying. I would like to add that I’ve had such a humbling experience for myself, because so much of my own journey has been learning this thing called spirituality. I didn’t know anything about it. Reality is what I came into.

Something that was so humbling and amazing was watching how much everything served. Things that I might think of as crazy, off the rails, or ridiculous, I could actually see served.

I had this beautiful experience of sitting in a horrible, very violent park in Vancouver, Canada, called Oppenheimer Park, if you know it. When you come to this part of the world, in this little park, your life expectancy is something like 18 months, because it’s literally a war zone and you’ll die.

Rick: In gangs or something?

Kiran: It’s like heroin addicts. It’s where the extremely broken come to die. And I had this beautiful experience of landing there. I sat on the grody, bloodstained, needle-thrown bench for nearly 18 hours and watched pain move. I had this amazing beauty of recognizing how it served.

After about five hours, I could see patterns. After eight hours, I could see this organization in the chaos and the way pain was taking care of itself. One of the main ways it was taking care of itself was that it was totally allowed. It was like, this is the one place where you are allowed to be fractured, broken, and in pain, and there’s no pressure to be otherwise. This is where they get taken care of.

As I grew as a spiritual teacher and in the world, coming face-to-face with our beautiful, egoic teacher friend, I noticed things like, when you’re in your 20s, all of us knew everything. We had the answer. And you know what? It’s a great energy. It’s a really beautiful energy.

Then, when it comes time to interface with families, have children, have loved ones die, pay mortgages, and deal with everyday traumas, as was so beautifully said, you lose knowing everything because you don’t know how to embody it. But, man, when you get to around 40 or older—which I haven’t visited yet—you start to go, “God, you know, I knew all this. I knew this when I was 20. I was crazy egoic, full of myself, thinking I knew everything. But now I can embody it.”

So there’s this recognition of how that serves. The place that I think is dangerous is when we give up our own authority for someone else’s authority. I think, really, on the spiritual path—but I also think it’s across the board everywhere—we want to give up our authority. We want someone else to tell us what to do: a doctor, a dentist, a parent, or a spiritual teacher.

So many of us come from other lifetimes where we were conditioned for years and years and years to let the priest, the high authority, the feudal lord, or the king be in charge. We have this inherited ancestry of letting someone else be in charge.

The place that I think is dangerous is when we give up our own authority for someone else’s authority.

I think the gorgeous thing about a panel like today, and what’s on offer for all of us today, is that we have each other. It’s not just like the Buddha, and then over there is Jesus, and there are three or four sadhus. We all have each other, and that’s a gorgeous buffet of it. Everything serves, and nothing serves like pain.

So if you have given up your authority to listen to our young, egoic, off-the-rails teachers, and it hurts, it’s going to bring you back into yourself. I’ve had to really eat a lot of humble pie in my world as a teacher to notice how much that stuff has served.

Rick: Laurie?

Laurie: Watching your mind over many years has been extremely humbling. My mind has come up with things that I didn’t agree with. As a licensed psychotherapist, I had many experiences of intense devotion and unconditional love, and was propelled into this oneness state while working with many people. Then the worship wave began, which I’ve watched—the worship wave.

Rick: What’s that?

Laurie: Anyone who puts himself or herself out as a spiritual teacher—and I’m sure you hear about it all the time. Worship. Worship. Worship. Not a war.

Rick: Like a battleship, I thought you meant.

Laurie: A devotional state toward a person instead of the universe, in which the person is assigned all kinds of capabilities that only the universe has. The person is just standing in a place.

It’s fascinating because truly, when you see a teacher surrounded by a group of people, and the teacher is being given all these wonderful gifts and talents, supposedly the whole group just created it. All that meditation, all that experience, came through every heart in that room.

So the worship wave came up. People were assigning me great capabilities, and I would give it back to them. People were coming in and bowing, and I would bow back to them. People would say funny things, and I would give it up to the universe.

At first it was comical and interesting. I did not take it personally or seriously. But then I heard my mind start up. My mind started informing me about things that I don’t even want to say.

One day I was walking down the road in Hawaii, and there were all these people around. My mind started reporting to me about who I was. This is where we get into psychic realms and astral realms that are false. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the psychic realm. I work in that realm.

Rick: What was the mind saying that you were?

Laurie: It was praising me. It was inflating me.

Rick: I see.

Laurie: It was so beautiful.

Rick: In other words, it started going to your head.

Laurie: Yes. But I’m so happy that happened, that it played out. It wasn’t my personal play-out. It happens all the time because it humbled me. My mind shocked me.

Rick: There’s an interesting thing I want to throw out. The blossoming of the heart is a natural stage of spiritual evolution. When the heart begins to blossom, one naturally begins to feel devotional. The heart doesn’t like to be devotional in an amorphous, unfocused way. It likes a point of focus.

If there’s a teacher sitting there, and we’re associating with that teacher, we’re naturally going to start feeling love and devotion toward that teacher. I don’t know if that should be entirely deflected or deflated, but I think the teacher needs to have the capacity to accept it humbly and let it pass through them, as it were.

My teacher was Maharishi Mahesh Yogi for a long time. He always used to have a picture of his teacher behind him. One time, some friends of mine organized a puja to him. He got so uncomfortable that he was turning around the whole time, looking at his teacher as they were doing this. He ended up kicking those guys off the course, and they were banished for a few years after doing that.

That’s not to say it didn’t go to his head, because it certainly did, especially later in life. One needs to have a super-fluid quality about oneself in order to allow this stuff to pass through and not get stuck.

Laurie: I want to share the other side of that because of what you said. I was very anti-guru, even though I’d ended up in an ashram since I was 19 and had been friends with the gurus. I couldn’t get into the dogma. I couldn’t align with a lot of the community.

Then I met my friend Gangaji, and my mind started doing those kinds of things toward her. It was an amazing experience for me because I would just watch: “How fascinating. All this that I have judged so fully is operating through my own mind.”

It didn’t become the reality. She’s a person, and I’m happy I’ve met her. But I let myself go through all these states just to experience them, just to embody them, and just to come out with more compassion for all the personal and human states we can find ourselves in at any time while in a universal state.

Exploring subtle realms without losing grounding

Rick: Canela?

I haven’t introduced Canela, but I interviewed her recently, and probably most people watching this will be aware of who she is. She just joined us a little late because her flight just got in. Canela lives on Bowen Island in the Vancouver area and is a spiritual teacher and author of a new book. I’ve interviewed her twice. For more details, visit www.batgap.com and search for Canela. Go ahead.

Canela: I’m going to pause to see whether or not I can keep where I was, what was being drawn alive here. The tricky part about some of this—about the humanness and whether or not to have that come forward—is that the humanness itself is also awareness at play.

It’s much more, instead of needing to make any kind of line at all, to just meet what is here, whatever that might be. As soon as we say that this is the humanness, and therefore you aren’t fully evolved if that shows up, or have any kind of idea of separating or transcending as if you’re going to get away from this, I mean, this is the vehicle that consciousness has chosen to be here.

So it’s here. There’s no escape. Getting friendly with that, and with what Rick was saying about how love wants to flourish and have some sort of direction—love loves the space. If Gangaji is open to being loved, of course people’s hearts will move forward, and so forth.

That’s where it comes in: the space is there because they’ve allowed it for themselves. So it’s a kind of natural falling open, if you will, to love.

Rick: I think Craig wants to speak. Is the mic on there? Well, Craig’s getting the mic. I just want to briefly say—go ahead. Namaste means something about the divine in me recognizing the divine in you, or something like that.

I think maybe where problems arise is if the teacher fails to remember that it’s the divine in them that the person is loving and attracted to, and instead mistakes it for their individuality that’s so great.

David: The student also, though.

Rick: The student also, right, right, right. The student has to keep that in mind.

Craig: One of the things that I’ve noticed, just meeting with a lot of spiritual teachers and being in the spiritual community, is that somewhere we’ve come up with this idea that therapy is a dirty word, or that it doesn’t belong or doesn’t have a space in this realm.

To me, one of the great gifts that my teachers gave me is that whenever they would meet with me, they would hold the space for two things. One, they would hold the space for my absolute divinity, and they would also hold the space for my absolute humanity.

I think that’s a really important thing when we’re choosing a therapist or working with someone: It can be really helpful if people can hold the space where they are honoring both simultaneously. It can be deeply healing.

Then it’s not like you were saying: There is no division between, “This is my divine nature and this is my human nature, and I just want to be enlightened and forget about the human.” Instead, we can see that they are one movement and can be one movement.

I think it would really serve us, instead of seeing therapy as this terrible thing where we’re talking about the yucky nonsense that arises, which we’re all trying to transcend, to see it as a form of active inquiry.

Everyone’s so happy to inquire into our true nature, and that’s a great thing. But can we also inquire into our human nature? What is it in our human nature that needs to grow, that wants to evolve? Where is it that we’re struggling, and can we be okay admitting that?

As a teacher, can we be okay asking our students for feedback? Can we be okay, as Francis was saying, asking other friends or other teachers for feedback? Can we really hold a sense of humility within ourselves and be completely comfortable with being both completely confident—absolutely in our supreme divinity—and simultaneously completely humble?

If we’re going to be awake, we have to be completely honest.

Can we really be able to admit, “Yes”? My teacher would tell me all the time, “Craig, you are your God, and you are an absolute idiot. Your life is just one drama after the next.”

He was saying it from a place of total love, and it was just really clear to me: Yes, there’s a part of me that is really growing all the time. If we can’t see that, oftentimes it just means that there’s a part of us working hard not to be honest.

If we’re going to be awake, we have to be completely honest. If any of us were honest, we could see that life is talking to us all the time and pointing out all the ways in which we can grow, the ways in which we can evolve. And there’s no separate…

Rick: No talking without a voice. That’s a good one. I heard a Zen story the other day where some Zen teacher said to his students, “You’re all perfect just the way you are, and you could all use improvement.”

Craig: Yeah, yeah, so true, so true.

Rick: Mariana?

Mariana: I have no idea who your friend is that you’re talking about, which is good because it leaves me uninvolved in a certain way. But there’s also an old Zen saying that it’s the student’s responsibility to make the teacher a better teacher. And my question to the group would be, as a group, have you lovingly confronted this person directly?

Rick: Yeah, we did.

Mariana: Yeah, which is good. And I wanted to underline—I can’t remember which of you all said it—but nobody’s beyond falling, and nobody’s beyond falling at any point. For me, this whole question, that would be the one sentence I would highlight. It’s just an is, and it’s not a… It’s just an is, and falling is not the worst thing.

When I’ve counseled teachers in spiritual scandals, after the scandal, we can be very, very forgiving, even as students, when we’ve been hurt by teachers’ mistakes. So if and when the teacher’s in the inflation, they might not be in the space to be able to get it. But responsibility’s done; you’ve done due diligence to tell them. They’ll end up getting slammed at some point, most likely—ideally before the scandal goes down, because then it gets more complicated.

But I love the very, very few cases when the teacher really, really does their therapeutic work, or however they do it, and then they come and go to the individuals and groups and ask for forgiveness. Not everyone will agree with me, but Yogi Amrit Desai, who’s a friend—he’s become a friend of mine—I think he’s an example of somebody who’s done a good job of that.

Rick: I think Andrew Cohen is also doing a good thing, you know, and a lot of people say, “Oh, Andrew Cohen, he’s fallen.” I mean, he’s taking a very positive step by—maybe he was forced into it—but he’s really doing a lot of soul-searching now. When that happened, I thought, “Oh, good for you, Andrew. This is the next stage for you. You need to do it.”

Mariana: It’s like when you don’t do it, it’s sort of the end of the game. And when teachers do do that, the heart’s open, the heart’s open, and, right? Then life continues.

Incidentally, this guy we were talking about, we eventually came into an email conversation, and I terminated the conversation after a big, long email in which he said at one point, “I’m perfectly pure,” and at another point, “You’re wasting my time.” But, okay, we’ve done our job. Dana?

Dana: I’m having a clear moment. I realize I’m present, so I’m trying to remember what I was going to say. Okay, I think that not only are you capable, but if you silo yourself, you will fall. That’s the lesson of history.

Rick: Just to be clear, what do you mean by silo?

Dana: Well, if you start only listening to yourself, and if you start believing everything you’re saying in a way that is never questioned, even in your own mind, that’s a dangerous place. You’re building a structure of failure. That’s my two cents.

If you look at traditional structures, whether they’re in shamanic communities, Tibetan Buddhist communities, or Hindu communities, the sangha kind of protects you against yourself. That insight comes by one of the Vinaya rules of the monks: if you’re ever asked if you’re a Buddha, you have to say no, even if you’re lying, because that prevents that structure from building.

And a lot of times, if we do silo ourselves, we start building. If you were a psychologist, you’d start to see those structures being set in place: sitting on a dais, sitting high on a dais, putting flowers around yourself. How can you say you’re sending an egalitarian message if you’re not sending an egalitarian message? It’s good to be a teacher, it’s good to share, but being careful of structures you yourself are building, I think, is important.

Clare: It’s such a small thing. It just occurs to me that it’s such an integral part of the awakening unfolding to have a really complete understanding of the human condition. In order for the opening to truly open into wholeness, we have to understand our humanity. We have to understand the intricacies of the human condition and the necessities of what it takes to be fully human—like surrender, love, compassion. All of those essential qualities of our humanness have to be fully explored in order for us to awaken to our wholeness.

And then, as a teacher, the continued exploration of the human condition seems to be such an essential piece. The other small thing that I was going to say is that, as a one-time student of a former teacher, the experience here is that the gift of having been a student of a fallen teacher is enormous. The acceptance, the surrender, the allowing, the love, the compassion for that being, for his wounded places that emerged through the projection that was put upon him as a teacher and how he fell into what he fell into, was an incredibly valuable experience for me in my unfolding and for the other students around me.

So it brings me to this place of that ultimate acceptance—not that we want to encourage that, but that everything is operating in its own perfection, that there’s nothing outside of consciousness, there’s nothing outside of conscious awareness, and everything that unfolds has its own perfection. Of course, that isn’t to say that if you see something coming, you’re not going to try to intervene, but in the happening, there’s nothing wrong. Nothing wrong happened, and everything that that teacher shared with me and with the other students was exactly what we needed to support our unfolding, to get us to where we needed to be, because all of that was consciousness supporting itself.

Psychic experiences, siddhis, and discernment

Rick: Shall we shift topics? Do you want to hit another point on this topic?

Francis: There was just a really beautiful little story that I wanted to share very briefly, because most of the time I was a Christian monk in my monastic life, but I ordained for a year and a half in a Theravadan tradition under Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, who was my preceptor.

At one point I was with him, and there were all these Thai ladies, little old Thai ladies, who were coming and offering food for the monastery that we were in. They were offering it to me because I was receiving it on a little cloth that we would put stuff on and pull to ourselves. It’s this big ritual kind of thing.

They’d come and bow to you just like they would to a Buddha. They’d put their hands up here and then down, and then they’d bow and make these offerings. I was growing increasingly uncomfortable with that and just feeling like, “This is just creepy to me, and I don’t like it.” I said something to him about it. I said, “I feel really uncomfortable with that. I don’t know quite how to deal with it.”

And he said, “Never forget, they’re not bowing to you; they’re bowing to the robes.” And he said, “So whenever that goes to your head and you start feeling uncomfortable or anything, just remember, they’re just bowing to these robes. It has nothing to do with me.” And that was really helpful.

Rick: What the robes represent.

Francis: What the robes represent. The robes represent the Buddha. The robes represent clarity and awakening and things that are within them, that are properly understood.

I said, “Yeah, but how did they experience that?” And he said, “On some level, they know that.” He said, “They know that. That’s part of their culture.”

David: I was going to ask if, Dana, can you be on a microphone just for a second? I want to ask you a question since you are a scholar in Hindi and Sanskrit. The term guru and sadguru, can you define those two for me? Because I wanted to say something.

Dana: A guru is just any teacher, right? Like your music teacher or your ballet teacher. And then a sadguru is truth.

David: So the truth teacher would be more…

Francis: Right. That’s how I understood it. And thank you. The reason I bring it up is that it’s similar to your teacher who kept wanting to bow to his teacher, who would probably bow to his teacher in the lineage back to prior to the human teacher.

David: As teachers, or as people who are counseling or representing teaching to others, what I have found is that when someone will come to me during a gathering and say something complimentary to me, I say, “Thank you.” Or, “You’re welcome.” And I’m real careful about saying, “Oh, it has nothing to do with me.” Because at some point, there’s a very fine line where the giving of love is also healthy to allow.

Rick: Yeah. Good point.

David: But within that, there is, within the container of the event, or what I’m sharing, a way of talking about what I’m sharing as something that is contained within all. So that somehow there’s a context for that. Thank you. It’s very humble, as much as possible.

So the consciousness of the teacher, in addition to the words, is really powerful.

Canela: So, yeah, the tricky part about that, because I saw different teachers when things had shifted and seeing was really clear, and I got a little bit upset when I saw that they were sort of taking on—when people would have experiences with them, they would sort of say, the person would say to the teacher, “Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you,” and that teacher didn’t say, “Actually, it’s you that opened to what happened. It’s you yourself.”

And so that brought that actual piece forward. At first, I was sort of like, “Oh, he should have given it back. He should have given it back to them.” And then I started looking at that and realized that there’s this other way of total surrender to whatever the appearance is, whether it’s a robe or that. That is also a way for some people to—and they need someone to actually give themselves over to, to eventually then embrace themselves. Because once it’s total and clear and full surrender, then it only can be to themselves.

Susanne: I think there’s a true humbleness that emerges through being really worn down by life. I was thinking like a mortar and pestle, just ground down to be, when you’re pulverized.

So I think that kind of pulverization really creates a true type of humbleness where one meets another person not only seeing the divinity in that person, but meeting them on the human level and knowing that you’re not separate from them on the human level.

And so I feel like students and people who are drawn to teachers who haven’t experienced life to that depth, or just haven’t, for whatever reason, been worn down to that depth, there’s something perhaps that the student is wanting to maybe bypass within themselves—that experience. And they’re projecting onto the teacher a model of perfection, a model of bypassing the humanity, thinking they’re going to get a pass, that maybe awakening and enlightenment means getting a pass.

And so it really feels to me, having heard you all, I feel like we’re sharing in a deeply common-held experience that that’s not what awakening is. And it really opens up the container in such a beautiful way, the model that it feels like evolutionarily consciousness is heading toward and going through right now with all of us here, which is saying, no, it includes everything. So, yeah, that’s my part.

Rick: New topic? Anything more on this topic? Okay. So, the next topic, I think, might not be as mainstream as the one we’ve just been discussing, but I think it’s one that is going to be emerging more and more, and it’s worthwhile getting a jump on it and addressing it.

Awakening can result in experiences of subtle realms and the beings who reside there, psychic abilities or powers, siddhis, etc. Most respected spiritual teachers have admonished their students to focus on discovering their true nature, cautioning that fascination with subtle realms and psychic phenomena can cause one to become lost in them, sacrificing the whole for the part, losing the ability to distinguish reality from the imaginary conjurings of our egoic nature, and even becoming mentally ill.

Yet these experiences and abilities often blossom without being sought, commonly after an awareness of one’s true nature has been stabilized. Many respected saints and sages have displayed them. Dismissing them altogether does not honor the depth, expanse, and potential of consciousness itself.

How do we maintain our integrity and humility while exploring these new realities? How do we relate to our experience in a sane, meaningful, and grounded way while continuing to extend the limits of what is possible for us as conscious beings? How do we keep a one-pointed focus on devotion so that these graces and gifts are well used for the good of all, rather than becoming diversions and worlds in themselves?

And as teachers, how do we both honor and share these worlds, yet not become inflated by our experience of them? As students, friends, or colleagues, are we willing to challenge the teacher or friend when they seem to be losing touch with our shared plane of reality? How can we effectively do so when the teacher or friend considers himself beyond reproach? What do you guys think about that? Kristin, give her the red mic.

Kristin: Thank you. So this actually links to our previous discussion, part of what I wanted to share. So for me, there have been all these different realities and functions that have come forward that were not sought, and they’ve been completely intrinsic to the whole awakening process.

For me, there have been all these different stages that have opened, and one of them was the experience of this singular I Am being everything and feeling oneness and God. At some point, that I Am was absorbed, surrendered into whatever words you want to use for that dissolving.

And in the return of the I Am from nothing, I Am recognized that it was created. So any sense of identity arising anywhere is recognized as nothing. It’s recognized as a complete fabrication of creation.

And so to have an inflated sense of self doesn’t make sense. In that surrendering through, at least what’s happening here, there’s a profound humility, because any sense of self that arises to hold or be or think it has a skill or can do something, it falls apart. It’s not true.

As each of these layers of consciousness have revealed themselves, and the functionality that goes along with that level of consciousness comes into acuity, the identification can’t—there’s no traction for it. It can’t stick on anything, because everything recognizes itself as completely made up, at the same time as fully existing as God, living and loving and evolving and sensing and experiencing.

David: Yeah, for me it showed up before there was that. Well, there was some, to some extent, but in the understanding I had at the time, you found—first you go in and establish self-realization or whatever like that. You establish that inner core silence, consistent silence, and then the stuff will flower naturally. You didn’t go and seek it separately.

For me, what happened was, as soon as there was some silence established—not when it was fully flowered, but when there was some silence established—the whole layers and all that kind of stuff started to show up in various ways. I talk about that a little bit in my BATGAP interview.

And so for me there was actually a learning process in that, because I actually started to get caught up in it at first. I was aware of the teaching around that, but it was still enticing and interesting.

The initial kinds of beings I first started experiencing were what would generally be called astral, or fairly superficial kinds of levels, and they were happy to have any kind of attention you gave them. So if you wanted to ask questions or get advice on which flavor of yogurt to choose or whatever like that, they were happy to tell you whatever you wanted to know.

But at a certain point—pretty quickly, really—I realized that this was really stupid, and this was not productive or spiritual or anything remotely like that. I realized it wasn’t where I should have my attention.

So it was actually interesting when deeper stuff started showing up after that. As I mentioned in the interview, I was highly suspicious of it for a while because of the previous experience.

For me, it was a really useful lesson, but I’ve certainly seen people get quite caught up in it. Sometimes I get contact through my blog from people who are very caught up in it. It’s running their lives.

And right now, in the time we’re in, there is a lot of opening to that. It’s happening spontaneously, because as consciousness is rising, it’s rising in the whole. The more people wake up, the more the entire whole is woken up.

So people are becoming much more aware of energy and the subtler values. There are various ways that can show up for people. It doesn’t happen in terms of beings and such like that, but it’s certainly a very major part of reality. To say it’s delusional or whatever like that is completely missing the point.

Craig: Yeah, I think one of the things that we have to remember is that we really don’t understand God. No matter how awake we are, we don’t understand God’s intelligence.

Most of us here are talking about nondual awakening, and that’s a beautiful thing. It’s a pristine thing. It’s a very simple and clear thing. To me, I often think of it as just having a very basic sanity. It’s wonderful to have a basic sanity, but beyond that, there may be worlds that awaken within us.

I feel myself almost like I’m living in multiple worlds right now during this show. To me, it’s oftentimes, “I’m just listening. What is God teaching me? What is God showing me? What is God revealing to me in this moment? What can I learn, and how can I be of service? How can I allow this energy to transmit through me and as me?”

I think that’s something that is really important for us to remember: We don’t really know. Maybe it is important to listen to the astral beings telling us what type of yogurt to eat or whatever. I don’t know. I don’t know much about that.

I’m not necessarily wired to see beings, but for me, ever since I was a kid, different forces were kind of opening to me, and different worlds were opening to me. I always just thought of them as beautiful and humble, but it wasn’t like there was anything speaking to me.

I think that’s where it can get quite confusing and people can get lost. If there’s not a basic sanity, if there’s not a basic clarity within oneself—and as Dana was speaking about, that psychological maturity and spiritual maturity—I think that is so important, so that we don’t get lost in a place that’s not helpful.

And of course, if we do get lost, there’s so much to learn from that as well. It’s like, why did I get lost? What is my path about? What is my life truly about?

If you get lost in some crazy psychic world while you’re walking through Walmart and you get taken away in a stretcher, well then it’s like, okay, maybe I need to become more grounded. Maybe I need to become more solid. Maybe I need to go see a therapist and get some grounding.

Francis: Go to Target.

Craig: Maybe I need to go to Target or whatever it is.

Yeah. Well, one thing I can say is just that we want to be really humble and be able to listen to what is this that’s coming to me, and what is it trying to teach me and show me?

In a session a couple of months ago, an angel started coming to me. And I said, “This is kind of weird. This is new for me.” The angels began to communicate these very basic things to me about the person I was speaking to.

I thought, “Well, I’ll go out on a limb and I’ll speak it.” It had no meaning to me; it seemed irrelevant. But when I did give it permission to speak through me, the person was on a Skype call, and they just started crying. Tears came down their eyes because it brought up some sort of healing.

There was just this place within me that said, “Okay, I’m just going to begin to test the waters and see: Is there truth in this?” And you’ll see. It seems to be pretty clear whether there is truth in it or not by the people’s reactions and your own reaction. Does it take you down a road that is actually helpful?

Rick: I just want to make a comment before Dana speaks. In fact, even before you picked up the mic, I was going to ask you to comment on what I’m about to say, which is that in the Yoga Sutras there’s that verse where Patanjali cautions not to accept the invitations of the celestial beings. It can be a pitfall.

And yet he devotes an entire chapter of a four-chapter book to explaining how to perform siddhis. Many teachers dismiss that as, “You shouldn’t perform siddhis. It’s going to be a distraction.” Why did he devote a whole chapter to explaining, “If you want to understand the language of animals, do this. If you want to know about your past lives, do that”? It goes through the whole thing. It’s like an instruction manual.

And let me throw in one more thing, which is that we’re surrounded by subtle beings. There are people in this room who see them constantly. They seem to be attending to people and helping in certain ways.

So perhaps Craig’s experience as a therapist was that these beings have been around him, maybe all his life, but he’s gotten to a point where he can actually receive their instructions and serve as an instrument for the guidance that they are capable of giving, which he might not have thought of.

So there’s an example of actually being open to the guidance of celestial beings and having it serve a useful function. So, maybe.

Dana Sawyer: They tell me to eat gelato.

[Laughter]

Dana: It’s different for me. Entirely different. [Laughter] Especially prickly pear gelato. That’s their favorite. [Laughter]

But, you know, I think just answering your question, Rick, in the Vibhuti Pada, that third pada of the Yoga Sutras, is it a prescription or description? I’m not clear on that, because it might just be that he’s saying this exists and this is how it exists, but not necessarily saying that you should cultivate that or whatever.

But the part that I was thinking about when you first read the very long question was dealing with siddhis and powers and things like that. I think the lesson from India is actually to not develop a culture that puts a premium on that. Because as much as you hear in India that you shouldn’t put a premium on it, there’s a premium on it.

And so, you know, there are sects of sadhus, and one of the sects of sadhus the British were aware of was the fakirs. And from the fakirs we get the English words “fake” and “faker.” Because it becomes such a doorway for charlatanism. You can do a few card tricks and sleight of hand, and people think you’re a great enlightened being.

Rick: I remember you telling me when I interviewed you that with all your travels in India, you only met one guy who appeared to have any kind of a siddhi, and that was swallowing a live snake and being able to regurgitate it.

Dana: Yes, a cobra. [Laughter] You never know when you’re going to need that, Francis. Come on. [Laughter]

Well, you know, the one that came to my mind was one time I’m going into a Krishna temple. There’s an old baba sitting there, and I usually keep small coins in my pocket to put in begging bowls. So I bend down to put a coin in his begging bowl, and he goes, “Tangmak dharo.” You know, “Don’t do it.” “Kyon nahi?” “Why not?” “Oh, because I am a totally enlightened being. I can manifest anything with my mind. I don’t need it.”

So I said, “Dikhae, show me.” He goes, “Okay, I need food.” He picks up his begging bowl and he puts his hand on his forehead, and all this milk comes rushing down his face and he fills this begging bowl up.

So I said, “Now, see, I’ve seen that one. You take a sponge, you fill it up with milk, you hide it in your dreadlocks, and then you press it and milk runs down your face.” He goes, “Have you seen this one?” [Laughter]

So then he says, “You sit beside me, take my pulse. I will go into samadhi, stop my heart, and you will feel the pulse stop.” And I said, “No, see, I know that one too. You take a walnut, you put it under your armpit, you squeeze it, and you stop the pulse from coming down your arm.” He goes, “Seen this one?”

He kept riffing off that, and of course it became entertaining. I ended up giving him more money than I originally was going to. I mean, it’s the genius of those babas, right?

But the part that I think of mostly around that kind of psychic energy, telekinesis, telepathy, or any of those kinds of abilities—the part that gets juicy to me—was down at Esalen about three years ago. I was with a group of people from SRI who believed they had scientifically proven that all these things are real.

So the exciting part for me is not that I could have saved money getting out here by flying on my own power. That’s not that exciting to me. But what is exciting is that those abilities make no sense in a universe that’s structured in a Newtonian way.

But if they really exist, then what is the structure of the universe that allows those things to be natural rather than supernatural phenomena? That’s interesting. That’s a good question. What is the new blueprint of the universe that would come out of that?

Kiran: So I think on this panel, though I might be wrong, Laurie and I both work every day, all day long, with clairvoyance. That’s what we do as part of our work.

For me, it has a lot to do with being able to feel the field of the people I’m working with and see all those root-core belief systems. And of course, I think it’s without saying on this panel that we recognize there is also this universal energy.

I think a really important distinction that needs to be made is that people sometimes get confused and they open up to universal energy, thinking that that’s connecting to oneness.

When I’m feeling into people—oftentimes, actually, it’s other spiritual teachers that I’m working with—there’s this very… They can just kind of mantra themselves. You can do a lot of mantras for a bunch of hours and then kind of trance out. And that trancelike energy starts to feel like oneness because it’s spacey.

But when I feel that energy, I have a very clear sense that this is not our true nature, because our true nature is a stillness that’s right here, right now. It’s literally looking out your eyes. It’s what’s listening to my voice right now. You’re completely saturated in it. You cannot leave it. It’s extraordinarily grounded and it’s right here. You don’t have to trance out to it.

And there’s a lot of confusion between this sort of universal energy and true nature. For distinction, I always say it’s like true nature is zero-dimensional. I kind of point to inside, which is just a kind of terminology, versus out there, which is this big universal energy, which we might call the fourth, fifth, or sixth dimensions.

But for lack of all that distinction, we’ll just call it fourth-dimensional beings. And the reality of the fourth-dimensional universe is that it’s freaking huge. And you want a good guide, because as much as there are angelic realms and angels and our Akashic records and all kinds of beautiful movements there, there are hell realms and demons, in equal aspect. All form.

And the fourth dimension is still form, of course—just made of light, just nothingness coming into one form right now. But it can take any of these shapes. And if you don’t have a good guide, you can be face-planted into some hell realms that become really torturous.

So the point being is that I think people confuse universal energy with true nature, and true nature is so much more grounded. It’s very, very available, and it doesn’t create special spiritual powers.

And yet, naturally, as we open up, we become more and more sensitive to all form, and the fourth dimension onwards is there. There’s a beauty to it. And I don’t think it’s inside of our control to decide whether or not we can access it. We can’t decide, “We’re special,” or “We can’t.” It just blooms as we become more and more sensitive and more and more aware of all these beautiful, amazing forms.

And I think the point, from a teacher’s point of view, is that you just can’t really think about it. It’s a big, big world full of everything.

Chuck: These passing phenomena are not really the problem, as I see them. I think that the problem is really becoming attached to them and attributing some kind of special significance to their appearance in your life.

If you then use that as a way of beating other people up and saying, “I have spiritual one-upmanship over you because I can manifest these kinds of siddhis. That means that I must be spiritually further awake than you are, and I’m further down the road than you are,” and use them as a way of gaining some kind of false superiority, I think that’s the real danger.

Susanne: I think there’s a time for everything. I really love how you, Kiran, said that about true nature. I’m just going to use my own words here. It’s almost like the singularity, the point of becoming the light upon oneself.

As the Buddha said, there’s a time to go in and to leave behind outward movement of expression, outward momentum, grasping onto anything, and turning that light of consciousness back onto oneself and realizing for oneself true nature—what we really are, the still point, the unmoving center.

And then there’s the universe that is intelligent, that we are all made up of, that informs us, and that we can become available to. Some of us are more open to that as an antenna than others, but everyone is open. We are receiving all the time. We’re living on multidimensional levels all the time.

And I think that if we’re open, it’s a beauty. It can be a very beautiful thing if we’re not losing ourselves in it. So once that still center has been realized and something inside is fully stopped, it’s not looking for itself anymore outside of itself.

That’s the danger of these kinds of experiences: We can become more identified with them and look outside of ourselves to these other beings or dimensions as authorities, right?

So when we know ourselves as our own inner authority, then if these dimensions reveal themselves, it’s just bonus. You know, as people say, it’s like icing on the cake. And then it can come and serve in moments.

We are empaths. All of us are empathic. We are open. And the more we become open and available, the unified consciousness makes itself available as you, because there really is no center to consciousness. There’s no center of self. So we are the whole. The whole will inform us and give us the needed information that is necessary.

Rick: There’s an analogy that might be useful here to illustrate this. If we think of life as a territory, and in the territory there are all kinds of interesting things to explore—diamond mines, gold mines, and various things that would be fascinating to explore—but the territory is commanded by a fort.

If you start by exploring mines and exploring the territory without having captured the fort and owning the territory, then you can get in trouble. Maybe the owner of the territory will send his troops out after you or something.

But if you first capture the fort—which I think in this analogy would be that still center that you referred to—once that is established and you own the territory, then maybe it becomes safer, more legitimate, and more appropriate to begin exploring the territory.

Susanne: Right. I’ll just be really brief. Because of what you just brought up, Rick, and I mentioned it in our interview, at the time of the interview I had really left mystical experience behind, and it actually fell away. It’s because I was being captured by it.

It was incredibly helpful. I can’t say that just because the still center hadn’t been fully realized here, it wasn’t useful, because dreams and having visitations and all that can be really helpful. You know, it’s instruction.

But there was a time for me to drop it all and get really still and sobered up, and everything fell away. And now it’s returning again. So that’s all I wanted to say.

Rick: You’ve captured the fort now.

Susanne: Yeah, I guess it’s been captured.

Canela: It’s all of its coming and going. So these realms, they’re fairly tasty. The cosmos are the cosmos. I mean, look at even the word. It’s pretty catchy, to want to get lost in it.

But as this stuff comes and goes, it just comes and goes. Remembering that it will go if there’s an attachment to that, or any kind of making it into a something. “I have this. I have this ability. I have that.”

You don’t have anything. I mean, you’re being done, and it’s coming through this representation of awareness, but it’s not yours. And all that attachment might show is that attachment is happening. And then you get to let it go.

So it’s keeping coming back to the moment, and it just works really well.

Laurie: I’d like to echo everything that keeps being said and add on. My personal experience is that there is a neutral void. There is a place of oneness in which the neutral void includes all, with no line between it.

In that expression, the universe is expressing itself through every form. The non-form is consistently expressing itself through every form. So what we’ve heard over and over is that when we start to give authority to one form of expression, we might momentarily lose our listening or our guidance from within—not our guidance from within as though it’s separate from us, but that which is propelling us in a particular kind of way.

So my experience is, yes, angels communicate, animals communicate, people who got lost and passed over communicate, and people who passed over well and went to the light communicate in another way. Katydids communicate, the grass communicates—everything has an expression.

But what I keep hearing over and over again, and agree with, is that it doesn’t necessarily mean anything. And it might. It might be helpful. It might be of service. A ladybug might give you some good information. They might tell you the wrong yogurt to take home, and then your husband’s upset. But it’s just like people: they were part of it.

So the ladybugs and the angels might be saying, “Should we listen to them?” Because we have some capacities to assist with this whole plan that we don’t even understand, either. So we’re always using discernment. But we can listen, appreciate, and then ask ourselves what’s next. And a lot of the time, there’s nothing to ask. We’re just being utilized.

Francis: Rick knows that this is one of my favorite topics. I was on a panel about this, and I hardly said a word because I was—it’s not one of my favorite topics. But it is something that I think is real.

Something Kiran said was really good, and you just said it again. I want to reiterate it because I think a lot of people have this idea that if they encounter some being from some celestial dimension or whatever, they’re automatically able to guide you because they’re all enlightened. Well, they’re not all enlightened.

Rick: Just because you’re dead doesn’t mean you’re smart.

Francis: No. Well, it’s not even mostly dead people. I mean, there are all kinds of beings, and I don’t even want to go into that. But what I want to go into is what you said. It’s just like in real life. You go out, and do you think every single person you encounter on the street is going to give you good advice? No. You’d be ridiculous to do that.

Nobody would go out and say, “Oh, there’s somebody. I’ll just ask them if I should buy a 401(k).” You don’t do that. You go to an accountant or a person who deals with that. And it’s the same with this. I think there’s a lot of naiveté about it. It’s like, “Oh, well, if they’re celestial beings, they know everything and they’re enlightened.”

Rick: In my sense, some of them might be nefarious.

Francis: Some of them might actually. Well, I think they are. I think some of them are. Some of them get a kick out of jerking your chain and pulling you around and doing stuff. They think, “Oh, these gullible human beings—any of us can say anything, and they believe anything we say.”

But I think it’s important, while we acknowledge that they can be real—these different dimensions—that they’re not all benevolent and they’re not all good. I’m not trying to make it into a scary demon story, but I think it’s just like we do with people.

What you said, I thought, was perfectly, absolutely right on the mark. A ladybug might give you good information, but it might not. Ladybugs probably don’t know a lot about yogurt. I would just guess it’s a guess, but I don’t think they would.

The other thing that I think is really important is what Chuck said, which needs to be really brought home. Pulling in what Mariana said earlier, nobody is above falling. Nobody is above hubris. Nobody is above getting all full of themselves and creating a spiritual ego.

When we talk about it, it’s one thing to have a siddhi. Siddhis are great. They can be useful, so use it. Go for it. Knock yourself out. Use it every chance you get.

But when we talk about it, be careful. Talking about it is dangerous. I don’t think, for the most part, talking about it serves anybody. And I think we always have to ask ourselves, “To what end?” Why am I talking about this? Is it really to help people? Am I giving people any kind of information that they can do anything at all with? Or is it just aggrandizement? Is it just, “Look at me. I’m special. I can see angels. I can do this. I can do that”?

I think it’s something to really consider. It’s easy to dismiss that and say, “Oh, no, no. This is a gift. I can’t be proud about that.” It’s like, yes, you can. Anybody can.

Rick: So there’s that. But what if society evolves to the point—maybe it’s actually doing so rapidly—where seeing angels and that kind of thing becomes as commonplace as, I don’t know, being able to ride a bicycle?

As that begins to emerge in society, people are going to want to know what’s going on. Why am I seeing this stuff? Am I going crazy? What is this? So there’s a sort of balance between making a big fuss about it and drawing attention to oneself, and educating the public so that as this kind of thing dawns more and more—I believe it will—people are able to take it in stride and put it in context.

Francis: Well, I mean, I think it’s fine. If you have students who are going through this and you’ve gone through it, I think it’s useful to say, “I’ve gone through that. I’ve had these experiences, and they’re normal, in a certain sense, for a certain type of person. They’re normal, and you don’t need to think you’re losing your mind or whatever.”

But on the other hand, I just think it’s good to say, “To what end?” I remember my novice master in the monastery saying, “Everything you do, everything you say, everything, all day long, ask yourself, ‘To what end? To what end am I doing this?’”

Really be, as Craig was saying, really honest with yourself. Am I trying to aggrandize myself? Am I trying to present myself as this special being? And if you are, then that’s not so useful for anybody else or for you.

Jeffery: I’m just curious. Does anyone have—I was privy to this incredible conversation in Fairfield, Iowa, one time. You’ve been so instrumental in opening doors and helping me understand the landscape of Fairfield. When I visit for research, it’s such a cliquey place, and there are all these groups. You really do need somebody with a program to tell you what part of the place to pay attention to there. I’ve been very grateful, as you know, for that over time.

One time I was there, just before that panel, and I think it was the first time that we met. I was hanging out in the coffee shop where one group of people in Fairfield, Iowa, hangs out quite reliably at a certain time of day.

It was, I thought, one of the most interesting conversations I’ve had in years, and that’s saying something, because all my days are filled with people who are awake. I used to have one of those weird jobs where that’s who was around me all the time, literally all day. It’s weird for me to have somebody around who’s not awake.

That conversation really stood out. Francis came in, and he was talking about being on this panel and trying to decide what he was going to share, and it led to this rich discussion among all the people who were in the coffee shop about their own experiences. They were sharing their experiences for the first time.

One of the things I was thinking after that was: to what degree do you, as teachers, weigh that? I’m in a lucky position as a researcher. I’m not out there as a teacher, as a spiritual teacher or something.

To what degree do you, as teachers, weigh the fact that, as you said a minute ago, as these experiences become more commonplace, it’s good to have a guide out there? It’s good to have some information that people can find, which is a valid position.

A contrary position to that might be something like: most of the population thinks this is really strange, and yet awakening is something that seems to be, in my opinion as an academic, profoundly beneficial for people psychologically. So I’m spending a lot of time trying to figure out how you engineer the spread of it. I believe it’s something that should be spread.

But is there any disconnect between these two? Does anyone have a sense that, “Well, I kind of shy away from mentioning this, that, or the other thing so that I can spread my message more widely”? Or is it just, “No, foot to the floor, all in”?

If entities turn people off, if Christians want to say, “Well, that’s just demons,” and that person’s possessed and we shouldn’t talk to that person, it cuts off a certain part of the whole population from even hearing the rest of the message. Is that considered okay? I’m just curious to hear from some of the teachers here how you balance that. That’s one of those things that I think people are probably interested in.

David: I’m an interesting one to respond because I’m not aware of multiple realms as much as some others are. But what feels relevant is that, for all the realms of emotional, personal, and mental levels or experiences that people have, I constantly have to choose to be very conscious of what seems to be available to hear, and very conscious about wording to facilitate a sense of openness first.

Then, within that openness, I see where the doorways are for furthering the conversation, so that it’s a really safe conversation and alienation doesn’t happen. Those are the realms I’m working on prior to other realms of the unseen, even though emotions, other than physiologically, can be unseen, or thought can be unseen other than neurologically.

To me, it would be similar. I would apply that even to all realms on a certain level. Theoretically, from my standpoint, there’s a constant attempt to be present with someone exactly where they are in that moment and see where, safely, you can walk together, arm in arm, further down the line to a greater awakening.

So I would assume that it’s similar in other realms, if you’re working in other realms.

Kristin: In my experience, because so much of my reality is this kind of massive detail and plethora, the people who are drawn to me are already having lots of experiences within all those layers of consciousness and are desperate to have someone actually speak to it with clarity.

I also have the experience David was just speaking to: people who aren’t having that, who come to me, and I don’t mention any of this other stuff because it’s not of service.

But I’m finding that there are—I can’t tell you how many times, over and over again, I hear people saying, “Oh, thank God. Someone who’s actually seeing all this stuff.” It isn’t separate from spiritual truth. It isn’t about a psychic pathway to get lost on, but it’s actually completely integrated with the depth of understanding one’s true nature.

Rick: I think it’s going to emerge more and more, just the way awakening has emerged more and more. And it’s going to be the next phase at a certain point. And so that’s the reason I just bring it up. And I think, to your point, teachers will have specialties just as doctors have specialties. People will gravitate to whatever teacher is most appropriate for their needs, just as you’d go to a particular endocrinologist or a proctologist, or whatever your particular needs are medically. (Laughter)

Kiran: There’s a larger audience for that conversation. Truth be told, we have these teachers like Abraham Hicks, who is channeling a fourth-dimensional being. We have Jane Roberts with Seth back in the ’70s. This is already a larger audience.

Rick: The most popular Batgap interview was Bashar.

Kiran: Right, Bashar, exactly. We have Bashar, we have Teal Swan, where these people have literally a million hits on their YouTube videos. The largest audience of any of us talking about truth or reality, we have maybe 50,000 or 60,000. So, in a way, it’s an irrelevant question because there was already a bigger audience for that than for an audience about true nature or truth.

Rick: Yeah, you know, I think that the reason that’s true is that it’s not that there’s already this massive body of people who are having celestial experiences and that’s why they want to pursue them. It’s more like they haven’t established the self-realization phase yet, and they’re getting caught up in the eye candy of all the flashy stuff and finding that more interesting than something which is actually much more subtle and intimate and relevant to their immediate development.

Clare: It’s really quick. What’s coming really strongly in me right now is the importance of establishing oneself in the ground of being and not indulging in the phenomena. That’s not to say that all of that isn’t part of everything, but the experience that I have is that all of that is taking place in the infinity, the unbounded infinity that we are. There’s nothing greater than what we are: the unbounded awareness, the one awareness, the Supreme. Everything that’s celestial, all of that, is taking place in it.

So, as a teacher or as teachers, it feels to me that it’s absolutely essential to establish the ground of being, the silence, the stillness, the unbounded awareness. Only from there can any other perceptions that start to open and refine within consciousness be developed, because the shift to recognize the self as presence, as awareness, as stillness, is absolutely essential to shift out of the identification with the person, the divided, the separate. It’s from there that everything is only taking place in consciousness.

The openings and the refinement are then opening in consciousness. So whatever opens there can be explored from a place where the mind isn’t getting involved, where the filter of the mind isn’t getting involved and identifying with it. I can feel in my body that it really strongly needs to say that. There was one more thing. I don’t know if it’s still here. No, that feels complete for now.

Rick: Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven, and all else shall be added unto thee.

Clare: Exactly what you’re saying about catching the foot—it’s that place that is essential. And also, just reiterating and remembering that nothing is bigger, nothing is vast, nothing is more infinite than infinity.

Rick: In my Father’s house there are many mansions. Who’s next? Mariana hasn’t spoken in a long time.

Mariana: I really appreciate that point, Clare, and what has struck in me is that I don’t have too much to say about the astral realms. My teacher and his teacher, Yogi Arun Sri Kumar, were so strict about not going there. We had this guy in Tiruvannamalai, in India, where I lived when I was 26. He was called Bench Swami. Some of you guys maybe saw him. He was enlightened and lived on a bench. My teacher said, “If you want to end up on a bench, go worship Bench Swami.” And I actually…

Rick: You’re hung up in the astral realms, is that what you’re saying?

Mariana: Yeah, and I don’t actually resonate with so much of what’s being said. It’s just that I’ve had times exploring it. And lastly, with Clare’s comment, when she says not to indulge it—and it’s a thread throughout the day—it’s like now we’re talking about astral phenomena, all kinds of phenomena. Like when your sexuality really awakens, right? If you get into spiritual sexuality.

I had an experience this year where I tend toward creative openings, and my creativity got so unleashed that it actually took me astray, highly astray. And I think that there’s, as we’re opening and exploring, one thing that hasn’t been mentioned today is the use of medicines. It’s so common these days: medicine, [inaudible], ayahuasca—but I mean multiple, multiple medicines. And here in California, where I live, it’s a huge, huge field of study.

And again, very similar to what we’re talking about, it’s something that’s bringing many people tremendous benefit, and it’s bringing many people—it’s diverting some people, and it’s causing some people great harm and spiritual emergency. So when you spoke, Clare, I just thought, right, it’s like everything. Everything can be used or misused, and there’s no way that we’re not going to fall.

I used to think of the path as a tightrope made of fire, and we were up on this tightrope made of fire, just walking up there with no net underneath. And gosh, it’s a half sentence, really. But it can all be used and misused. And if we don’t let ourselves expand, we’ll never know how big we are. So it’s not that it’s—I like to keep things close to the ground, but if we don’t dare to expand, then we won’t know how full we can be and how great we can be.

So it just ends up being this mortar and pestle, like—I think life is grinding me down, and I think it doesn’t feel good, but I think it’s a healthy process.

Canela: Yeah, that’s the tricky part. Like a while ago, your question about—Jeffery’s question. Yeah, Jeffery. All of it becomes available, and then more and more, that’s what I see. We were talking about this on our flight here, actually, about how whatever’s revealed itself, whether first it seems to reveal itself to me, and then I don’t really know what’s going to happen when I’m meeting with somebody. It’s a completely mysterious happening.

And then they call whatever. So those experiences, whether it’s the angelic realm or cosmos or people who have deceased, it’s not so much—it’s tricky because we don’t want a rule around “don’t go there,” because it shows up itself. So it’s like, okay, if that does show up, then how can we be with this? And it’s like, just see where it wants to tilt, sort of. The moment you can kind of lean this way or that way, you can taste it a bit one way or another. Sort of somebody said something. (Laughter)

Canela: So, yeah, it becomes available and it gets used through me. Often, as that occurs, I’m seeing it freshly. It comes in the way they can hear it—whoever that is, however they, as consciousness, want it to be heard—because all of it, no matter what it looks like, cosmos or dirt or air, seems to show up in support of consciousness knowing itself, if it’s listened to in that way of the moment.

Craig: So one of the reasons that I wrote to Rick about this and wanted to speak about it is because I meet with a lot of people who awaken to these worlds, these astral worlds, the world of these different kinds of phenomena, or angels, or a Kundalini awakening. I notice that they make a very similar mistake that many spiritual teachers make. It’s this shadow that we all often fall into: if it feels good while it’s arising within me, it must be true.

I think a lot of teachers fall prey to this. They feel so good because of the process of awakening; they feel so good because of the energies which are arising within them; and then they start to believe their own thoughts. They start to believe whatever it is that’s arising within them. The same can be true with a healer or with someone experiencing some form of awakening.

I think it’s a real shadow and it’s something that we need to be conscious of, and just to continue to have a deep level of discernment and humility with it, just to make sure that we don’t—as Francis was saying—just because something is communicating to us, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true.

But we often make the mistake that, because it feels good, it must be true. This arising force oftentimes comes with, at the same time, perhaps a message from an angel or an astral plane or this or that, or a psychic being. And it’s not always the case. It’s a very dangerous thing, I think, that a lot of people get confused by and fall into.

Even whether it’s a Kundalini awakening, you can have—I’ve met a lot of people who have a spontaneous Kundalini awakening. They come to me and say, “Well, I’m the next Messiah, the next Jesus.” And it seems hilarious to us. But to them, someone who perhaps hasn’t had any spiritual training, if all of a sudden you feel euphoric and incredible and voices are speaking to you, you may believe them. And it can be a very dangerous thing, a dangerous thing.

Just because something is communicating to us, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true.

Rick: There was a saying in the ’60s: “If it feels good, do it.” And we know how that turned out.

David: I thought it was worth clarifying a little point there, because there’s one way you can differentiate what has showed up: how it feels. Whether there’s a sense of it having a fancy appearance, but there’s something darker there. Or that—well, anyways, it’s just the idea of discriminating with this stuff. It’s a feeling-based thing.

But what you’re talking about is something different. What you’re talking about is how it feels as a person, what it does for me: “Oh, I feel good because I’m having these nice experiences,” or something like that. So I just wanted to differentiate those two things, because it is through the feeling value that you can discriminate. It’s not by appearances, because this stuff is subtle and it shows up.

Rick: But you’re talking about subtle, intuitive feeling value, not necessarily a more manifest feeling value.

David: Yeah, yeah. And because this stuff—subtle beings—they’re basically made-of-mind stuff, essentially. So they can appear as we expect them to appear, as they choose to appear. But the appearance is quite illusory. It’s what’s behind that that you have to pay attention to in order to discriminate what’s showing up. But yes, there’s also that value that you were talking about.

Craig: Yeah, but there is one other thing, too. Say you have a spiritual awakening, but you don’t have psychological maturity. You can feel really good, and because you don’t have psychological maturity, you may believe your own thoughts. You may get lost in your own arrogance. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Francis: I have a friend whose wife is pregnant for the second time, and I had dinner with them the other night. She was talking about how, during her first pregnancy, she got morning sickness really badly, almost the whole time, I guess. She said that this time she had a little bit at the beginning, and then none.

Her husband was talking about how, when she’s pregnant and has morning sickness, he’ll feel nauseated because she’s throwing up. He said all the mechanics of getting sick make him sick, so he got sick, too.

I think it’s important to realize that all this stuff is a side effect of awakening that happens in some people and doesn’t happen in other people. Sometimes it even happens in people who aren’t awake, just like the sickness. He wasn’t pregnant, but he was getting sick. During the first pregnancy, she got sick the whole time; during the second pregnancy, she barely got sick at all.

I think it’s important to dispel a very common myth. A lot of people have read Autobiography of a Yogi or something like that, and they think, “Oh, enlightenment is all filled with saints who don’t eat for 40 years, and people who walk on water,” and all this.

My sense is that it’s not at all intrinsic to awakening. In some cases it is; in other cases it isn’t. It’s important to understand that it’s not a blanket experience, that everybody who awakens deeply and in an abiding way is going to have those particular experiences. They may have other siddhis that aren’t particularly dramatic but are very useful.

Dana: Well, I think whether the energy is coming at you in the world that we take for the everyday world, or in any other kind of world that could ever be, your skill set for dealing with that energy is this: Is it causing you to feel a strong sense of attachment? Is it causing you to feel a strong sense of aversion, which is just more attachment? Is it causing you to self-aggrandize? Does it inflate your ego?

It doesn’t matter what plane that’s happening on. You’re going in the wrong direction, right? You can use the same metrics for adjudicating the decision. I really like Clare’s, and yours too: the still point. That’s a great place. Is it moving me off that still point? Is it trying to move me off that still point? Then you know that’s not where you want to go. You want to come out of that center.

✨ Awakening and healing

Laurie: I just want to add to all these wonderful points that are being made that each person, in my experience, does have some kind of calling, some kind of essential, simple purpose. Within that, we make choices and decisions as to how our service goes. What’s right for one person will be very wrong for another person.

Rick: So how much time do we have left on the cameras? Oh, okay.

(Laughter.)

The night is yet young.

(Laughter.)

Actually, if we left now, we’d get stuck in traffic anyway. So, if you guys have a bit more steam, let’s continue on for—

Susanne Marier: We’re already going to be stuck.

Rick: We might as well go on.

Kiran: Might as well keep going for a while. (Laughter) We want to stretch.

Rick: So, you want to take a stretch?

All right, let’s find a pee break or whatever. Let’s do that, and then we’ll resume.

Laurie: There are certain action groups that look at health, wellness, what would be called “wholeness,” as part of awakening. There is another frame of thought that awakening is awakening, and life goes on with its preferred and non-preferred experiences. I find it all extremely fascinating, so I’m opening up the conversation to hear what people want to say about it.

David: One of the things I found really useful in some of my research is from Ayurveda. They talk about the six bhavas, or houses. Three of them, when we’re born, come through our family bloodline, and three of them come through our past-life history.

Of particular note, two of them from our history are atman and sattva—basically, consciousness and clarity. That’s where the healing side comes in. Our past development is cumulative and comes forward into this life, which is why you get this variety of experience with people: some having a lot of clarity and subtle experiences without the awakening process going on, some apparently awakening spontaneously without any apparent history, and all kinds of variations in between.

The point that I wanted to make was that there can be a real emphasis, when the mind is strong, as in Western culture, on the consciousness process, the awakening process, and consciousness unfolding to itself, without paying attention to the clarity side, or the sattva. That’s where the refinement of perception and the awakening heart come in.

In some traditions, they talk about that as the masculine and the feminine, Shiva and Shakti. Really, from my perspective, and from many others’, a full unfolding is both—not one or the other, but both together.

There needs to be an unfolding of consciousness, but you also want to bring in healing of the person, of the emotions, of the energy, of the baggage, or whatever, so there’s greater clarity. The form that will take will vary. People aren’t all visually inclined; they’re more feeling-oriented or bodily-oriented, or more hearing-oriented, or something like that. There may be various combinations of how that shows up.

The key is that you want to cultivate both: the development of clarity of consciousness and the clarity of the physiology that you’re using for that to express through. Then you’ll have the richest and smoothest unfolding.

Jeffery: I think this is a very interesting topic. It’s poignant here in California, where a lot of people are trying to wrestle with the exact same question. I’m also very personally curious about it, and we’ve tried to do some research around it.

One of the things that we’ve developed is this protocol. For a long time, we only had B data, which means we were only researching people who already reported awakening. We really wanted to collect data on who they were before and who they were after. But how do you do that? You can’t just look out at the population and say, “That guy’s 30 seconds away. Quick, collect some data on him,” right?

Over a couple of years, we basically mined all the data that we’d collected, and we came up with a protocol that would transition people over a period of months. It didn’t work for 100 percent of people, but it worked for more than half of them.

Through that, what’s really emerged on this healing question, I think, from our standpoint, is kind of interesting. We don’t feel like we can say with certainty, but it seems that as part of the awakening process—and I bet you all have cool stuff to say about this, which is why I’m bringing it up—depending on how deep into awakening someone lands, or whatever term we want to use for that, different psychological stuff burns off.

Different conditioning burns off, or different conditioning perhaps becomes deactivated and is just no longer relevant. It doesn’t really seem to be repressed in a way that’s still subconsciously affecting people’s behavior or whatever. It just seems to be irrelevant.

Then other stuff isn’t irrelevant. Other stuff is super relevant. To your point, you better get some therapy for that, because now it’s like the voice of God telling you that this is right, and it’s going to cause you problems in your life, or whatever.

I think this is a great question, this healing question, because it seems like there are some schools that basically think you should just heal, heal, heal, heal, heal, heal before awakening. Clear out as much of your stuff as you can before awakening, and then wake up.

There are other schools that say, “No, just wake up and deal with whatever comes after it,” and then there are schools that are in the middle of those two bookends.

I personally find myself leaning toward waking up and seeing what’s there afterward, after collecting this data, because I’m not sure how someone could predict what is and isn’t going to be relevant, having looked at these before-and-after cases in our research.

I’d like to add those observations to the conversation and just see what you have to say as well.

(Static crackling.)

Craig: One of the things that I really noticed within myself was discovering this great peace, this great emptiness, this great freedom. Having the experience of nondual awakening happened in an instant. It just came out of nowhere, and that was a beautiful thing. It was a gift; it was something that I didn’t do, I didn’t create. So we want to be careful about thinking that we are going to awaken and that we are going to make it happen.

There are all kinds of things. I was an intense meditator, I put myself in the right place at the right time, and did all that kind of jazz. But ultimately, it was something that happened within me, not from my own volition. And I think that’s something that we really need to remember.

But there’s this very human aspect of ourselves that can get in the way of this abiding awakening continuing. If we don’t do our personal work, if we don’t listen to life, if we don’t listen to our children, our wife, or our husband, who are constantly pointing out our shadows and all these aspects of our humanity, we may have a moment of awakening, but we will quickly find ourselves unawake again.

And so I think in this way, healing, spiritual maturity, and psychological maturity go hand in hand if we want to stay awake after awakening has happened. And I think it’s very necessary for us, whether we’re a teacher, a student, or whatever, whoever we are, if we have awakened, or even if we haven’t, to continue to heal, continue to do our personal work, so that we can be a clear vessel for whatever it is that’s coming through us.

Ultimately, if awakening is about living in sanity and living in clarity, we must be healed. And like Mariana was speaking about, we can see clearly what happens in an individual who has awakened but has a huge shadow. That person can be quite a dangerous individual. They can create quite a lot of suffering in a community, in themselves, and in their family if they haven’t done their work.

So I don’t see any separation between the two. And I’d go back to saying that, yes, there’s inquiry into our true nature, but also seeing that therapy and the healing process are inquiry into our active, dynamic, grounded, personal nature of humanity and how it expresses itself in the world. I think it’s so important to do both.

Chuck: After awakening, you’ll still have your mortgage, you’ll still have your issues with your kids, you’ll still have the problems with what to do about Nana’s Alzheimer’s, your aches and pains, and your everyday concerns in the world. You’ll still have all of that present.

I think that the shift will be that you will experience all of that, and you’ll be holding all of that in a different context—a context of wholeness and completeness and okayness—which will help to ameliorate that. You will look at it differently, and with the willingness and ability to look at it differently, as you change how you’re looking at it, it will begin to change. In some way, it will shift, and I think that’s part of the healing. But that contextual shift, I think, is where the real healing becomes, and certainly begins.

Mariana: I’m thinking about a couple of teachers that I knew over the years. Like many of my new friends, I spent a lot of years interviewing teachers, and one of them was Arnaud Desjardins. He was a great Advaita Vedanta teacher in France.

He used to say that oftentimes, when people come to the spiritual path, they say that they want to be enlightened, but what they really want is to be happy. He was such a wise elder, and he gave people a certain permission for that. It wasn’t that when people would admit that, they would run away from the spiritual path, because we also have, I think, an inherent longing to know ourselves more deeply.

But I like that, because I know it’s true for me, and it gets confused. Instead of saying, “I want to be happy. I want to be happy in my life, and I want to have connection, friends, and partnership. And, yes, I want spirituality too, but I don’t know in what order,” things happen developmentally differently.

So I was just thinking about that, and it puts a certain pressure, or a potential pretentiousness, on needing to want to awaken and be awakened, because the spiritual path promises some relief from suffering, and that’s what brings a lot of people there.

Just like yoga: you go to an asana class, and it feels so good, and then you say, “Oh, wow,” and then you discover there’s a sutra. It comes that way organically anyway. So I want to bring in that piece.

Somehow, I can’t let the day slip by without bringing in the presence of one of the other teachers I knew, my guru’s guru, Yogi Ramsuratkumar. He was a great teacher in South India, in Tiruvannamalai. He died in about 2000, and I spent a year in close company with him when I was about 25.

Of all the—I don’t know, maybe 100 or so awakened teachers I’ve interviewed in my life—he was far, far in a whole different category than the others. He was like the awakened masters of old, like Neem Karoli Baba and Anandamayi Ma, the people that there are only a few of, and there aren’t very many of them alive. I always felt grateful that I met him.

I didn’t really know what was going on. I just hung out with him, and he didn’t really talk. He chain-smoked and didn’t give linear teachings. But I met him 30 years into his awakening process. I met him when he was about 70, and he had had his awakening when he was 30, and he never stopped.

He never claimed enlightenment. He never claimed guruhood. He said he was an old, dirty beggar on the street, and people followed him. He never had an ashram until about a couple of years before he died.

I felt so grateful to have been around somebody where the bar was so high that it just turns the question of awakening upside down, which you could probably speak better about than I could, because I know that in the sutras it describes all these different levels of awakening. I was so excited when I found that sutra. I talked about one of them that described his level, because it seems like a lot of us, when we talk about awakening, are referring to that.

Kristin: I’d love to use an analogy in response to your topic of a game board and a player piece. I think of healing as the game piece: healing relationships and experiences and traumas it’s experienced on that game board. And I think of awakening as the piece waking up to the truth that it is the game board, and that which the game board itself arises out of.

So when I’m working with people, I’m working with these two different levels. There’s often a mix of people coming at different stages of awakening and at different stages of healing or emotional maturity.

I haven’t heard of different camps in the way you’re naming it, but that’s my own experience of seeing what I’m working with. Being present in the moment and being of service to whoever it is who’s coming, there’s not a formula.

In some people, it may be that the wounding is the doorway for awakening, and so the response to that is surrender through that. That’s God too. Surrender through that pain, and one falls through the game board.

For other people, that may not be what is appropriate, and the response is actually, “No, go talk with your mother and heal that issue.” Not that I would tell someone what to do; it’s not like that. But in terms of being in the moment and supporting whichever process is happening, there’s no formula. I find that each person needs a different kind of support.

Susanne: I really like what you were saying. What is your name again?

Mariana: Mariana.

Susanne: About what that teacher said to you about people just wanting to be happy. I think that, correspondingly, the opposite is equally true. People want to have permission to be unhappy, to really feel their deep pain, their loneliness, and their unhappiness, and to know that that’s really held in an unconditional space of love and acceptance.

That’s kind of a transmission of whatever kind of practitioner one is. If one is arriving at that within oneself, it’s something that can be supported and held with another person: to give permission for both happiness, true happiness, and all the places where someone hasn’t felt held within their own pain and unhappiness.

That’s quite a lot of the work that I do with people, and then the joy can come out, the true joy. So to me, in this context, that’s what healing is really about in terms of awakening, because awakening includes everything.

That would include, and does include, all aspects of ourselves that are in denial and want to see the light of day. And then, of course, once something is really seen, held, and accepted, the gift of it opens up, and the transcendence of it also opens up.

And not only transcendence, as if it’s gone and it’s over and we transcend. Actually, it creates more depth within ourselves. We become richer and deeper within our humanity, owning that piece.

David: I find it challenging for me to make a statement about awakening and healing, except to share my personal experience, which feels the most truthful.

Over the years of self-awareness, assessment, and discovery, what I have discovered is that there’s been a quieting happening as I’ve been looking at some patterns, some emotional patterns, and some programming from childhood conditioning.

As it has been disappearing, I like to call it the great disappearance. Awakening is really not an event, not a becoming. It’s the great disappearance of what had appeared to be real before.

Awakening is really not an event, not a becoming. It’s the great disappearance of what had appeared to be real before.

For me, that has been healing, because the disappearance has been of the veils I’ve been looking through about myself and about life. So healing has been a part of awakening, and awakening a part of healing. That’s been my direct experience.

What I find interesting about your question is, which would be better: to awaken and then heal, or what was the second part?

Jeffery: Oh, like spend a lot of time healing?

David: And then awaken, right. So what’s interesting about the question is that it’s as if we have a choice. Who is it that’s choosing to awaken first and then heal?

The egoic sense of self can’t be the one that does that, because it’s part of the illusory perception. So my sense is, if you’re pulled, if you’re inspired, follow the pull to a teacher, to teaching, to reading. Follow the pull.

But the moment of grace, the moment of God’s choice, the moment of life’s choice or consciousness choosing to see itself more deeply, isn’t up to the egoic sense. So it’s going to happen when it’s going to happen.

Francis Lucille said this once beautifully in a retreat. Somebody said, “Francis, if we are absolutely the truth, who we are is infinite, all-knowing, and omnipotent, then why do we forget? Why do we need a spiritual practice if we’re already awake as our true nature?”

And he said, “Just to keep you out of trouble.”

So there’s a sense of, do that if you’re called. But the moment of its happening isn’t up to you. Follow your heart; follow the call.

David: Yeah, there’s one thing, too, I remember from my own process: it is useful to do some of that healing work beforehand, partly because it helps with the clarity and the smoothness. But it’s also interesting because when the dominant sense of me falls away, and the sort of doership falls away, there can be a period of time where there isn’t a person who can do that stuff anymore. There’s no longer any motivation to try to fix anything or improve anything. That can happen.

So you end up in a place where that process—I mean, certainly healing is taking place just from being in that place—but, yeah, in some ways, it can be easier to do beforehand. Then, later on, as it matures, you have that platform where there’s clarity, and that can accelerate the process as well. So it’s kind of interesting: the dynamics change as you relate to yourself as being changes.

Rick: Karen brought up a point that this could actually segue into, which is that, for some people, in some people’s minds, enlightenment or awakening has a bit of a stigma because we have famous examples such as Eckhart Tolle and Byron Katie, who became rather dysfunctional after an unexpected, sudden awakening, which they hadn’t even been seeking. Eckhart Tolle famously ended up on his park bench, and Byron Katie practically needed to learn how to brush her teeth again and reassemble some kind of a life.

And so people who have a life and responsibilities and all this think, “I don’t want that. What’s going to happen to my kids if I awaken?” I think this healing issue comes into it. If those two individuals had undergone some years of preparation, had been on a spiritual path, then there might not have been much of a speed bump when they had their awakening. They could have just carried on because they already would have done a lot of purification and integration and so on.

Clare: Actually, yeah, that ties in with what I was going to say. I can speak just from my experience, which is that my life was committed to healing. I wasn’t—I was never looking for awakening. I wasn’t aware of the nondual teachings. I had a yoga practice and a very committed spiritual practice for many years, but I was led to that as part of a commitment to healing.

So I was healing myself on every level, and as part of that process, I was taking the role of being a healer in the world. I was working with people in their healing process and learning more about that human condition and why people behave as they do, why everything operates as it operates. Somewhere along that path, there was this shift in awareness, which I wouldn’t even have called “awakening” because I wasn’t looking for it, but that is what it gets called. Suddenly, the awareness came that I wasn’t this individual person.

As Kristin said, the game fell away. All the foundations, all the concepts, everything just completely fell away. There was the realization that I’m this unbounded awareness, I’m stillness, I am silence, and everything that then blossomed from that.

What occurs to me is that we can’t make a decision to awaken. We can’t really make a commitment to awakening. Once the impulse for freedom is there, we can step into a sincerity to know the truth of being. What we can commit to is our healing. It’s something that we can cultivate in various ways, not as a doing toward awakening, but the more that we cultivate awareness and an environment within this body mechanism for the possibility for grace to enter, the more chance there is that, when it does enter, it can be abiding—that it has a really clear house to live in, shall we say.

Canela: Yeah, my experience also—or the experiencing that happened with me—came through wanting to heal and embrace myself. But I did commit, once I found out about this waking-up possibility, to that. So I think it is a commitment to both, if that’s what feels true, and then let it come to your doorstep, whether it can be an ad for something that draws you. I think somebody mentioned that feeling: you feel that pull in the moment toward what feels true for you, as this depiction of awareness at play that you are.

The other part about being able to function or not in the awakened present way of living, the stateless state, is connected with the healing being part of what happened with me, and then also the awakeness. What felt true to my heart was to return and include my children in my life.

So then I was a single mom in North Vancouver with two children, and their father lived in another country. It really brought it home in terms of functioning and being responsible for the three of us. It all looks the same to the outside observer. It wasn’t easy, and I was impressed that this body would get up in the morning and continue to function beyond what I could possibly have thought. It looks like that’s what I could do, and I did. I got up and got everybody out to school and whatever it was that was going on, and managed all that by myself.

I don’t know why this comes in, but then I got a boyfriend, and suddenly I just was somebody’s boyfriend. It’s unbelievable. It gained so much, and then it was just gone.

But, yeah, the functioning is totally different. Because you’re all working together, there isn’t any authority anymore of a parent with children. There’s a mom with children, and those parts are still there, but nobody’s in charge unless the moment needs someone to be in charge. So you begin to trust yourself in being able to respond to the moment and whatever the moment calls for. That is the meaning of day-to-day living as a human being in this world.

David: I just wanted to mention something, too, on that. I did find with the shift that there were certain parts of life that fell away. Actually, it started somewhat before the shift. I didn’t know it was coming, but certain aspects of life fell away. There was real support for the process. It wasn’t being done by a me; it was being done by the Self, by Source, however you want to frame it.

There was a whole thing happening where it created the right circumstances for it to show up, for the process to be processed, for the experiences to take place, and so on. There was just a real sense of support, that it wasn’t a disaster. My life didn’t collapse, that kind of thing. But there was a lot of change that took place overtly in my life at the same time as the inner changes were taking place. There was just really powerful support in that process.

So I mean, this expectation that it’s going to be a big disaster—I don’t think that’s useful.

Kiran: What is it that you can get afraid of from some of the stories? Certainly, my story is one of the scariest. But from reality, or what actually exists, it takes care of itself.

I remember, like, day three of just vast spaciousness here that couldn’t even find a body or a form. A friend came in, and the friend also had a radical, massive, spontaneous awakening—somebody I’d never met. It was taken care of, and he was like a guide. I remember on day three looking at him and going, “But I have a life. I have a job and I have a home.” And he said to me, “It’s taken care of.”

In that moment was this hilarious recognition: I was never taking care of all that stuff to begin with. Whether I was awake or not, from the moment each of us—which is consciousness in this moment—has a belief system in a birth, we open our eyes as a form, and the beginning of form begins. It’s never been done by us to begin with.

So when we finally get the me out of the way, it begins to actually function with so much more efficiency, intelligence, and right action. What I find all the time, because this is a huge part of what I work with in my private practice as well as in my classes, is how to let life—which has been doing it from day one—move us. Again and again, everybody’s life just gets so much better, because the me was the big problem that was messing up the function to begin with.

Our scary stories that we sometimes think—I certainly had about five years that basically looked like something from The Exorcist, with my head spinning around and puking and epileptic seizures and craziness. That’s a scary thing for a separate me to hear. But I have to tell you, while that was happening, the bills were getting paid. At that point, I lived in the most beautiful apartment I had ever lived in up to that date. I mean, it got a whole lot better the more I let life guide me to my beautiful home now.

But then it was like I lived in this beautiful apartment. There were groceries provided. Whenever you needed something, there it was. That’s literally been happening for all of us from day one, because that’s your birthright.

And I think the concept, the story of “I have kids, I’m a father, I’m a mother, so I can’t go there,” as I was mentioning earlier, makes steam come out of my ears because it’s such a ridiculous notion. That’s just our good friend fear coming in to eclipse your experience of freedom that’s right here, right now. It’s been living your whole life from day one, right now.

There’s that movement of fear coming in and attaching to a separate self and creating a separation. It’s doing that all day long. That’s the little fucker that makes functioning really tough—not your true nature.

Francis: Behold the lilies of the field, they toil not, neither do they spin. And yet I tell you truly, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these.

Behold the lilies of the field, they toil not, neither do they spin. And yet I tell you truly, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these.

The leading edge of growth

Susanne: I thought that we could each take a turn, or whoever feels called, to speak briefly about—whatever your idea is—how, what one’s own leading edge is, where we find ourselves right now, and the growth that is happening, this place of where growth is. Just include ourselves in the conversation a little deeper.

Rick: And here’s how I’d like to do it, but you can all vote this down if you don’t think it’s possible: answer that question in one word. [

Everyone: “Ooh.” Laughter]

Rick: Okay, one sentence, and not with a lot of commas and semicolons. [Laughter]

Kiran: Inspiration would be my first word. I lived for so many years with just this gorgeous unfolding of stillness into form, into form, into form. And last January, inspiration showed up. When it showed up, it was like, wow. Subtle forms had showed up before, but this was a huge movement of huge inspiration, taking me so deeply into building a very big business and moving into very big realms of form.

It was all being driven by inspiration, and it’s been so fun. It’s such a raw edge, and it’s been gorgeous.

David Ellzey: For about 25 years, I’ve been in the field of self-awareness and consciousness teaching, coaching, and my own [work]. Within the last year, I’ve been placed by life in the experience of my mother aging and a friend dying. And I have been called in really deeply to care for this friend who’s also aging and dying.

The level of human experience has deepened in magnitude, like a boot camp. And so my discovery because of that has caused my experience of life to become much more grounded and rooted in the earthly experience of being human. And so now my teaching, which was a lot about transcendence, is now inclusive and much more powerful for my own living, much less for those that I work with. The integration of both of those now. Mm-hm.

Chuck: Only four words: abandon certitude, embrace ambiguity.

David Buckland: Well, for me personally, the cutting edge, the leading edge, is a new unfolding of divinity from a whole different level that’s still revealing itself.

Clare: Being here, doing this, allowing this to speak. Stepping in. This is God’s life.

Rick: Kind of what she said: just to be as effective—why do we have a mic? [Laughs] Just to be as effective a servant of the divine as possible.

Kristin: If I were to pick one word, I would say love. And if I speak to the larger thing, there’s a continual dissolving through these layers, where the sense of I is larger and larger.

The experience is often of all these worlds being a swirl and these movements. And so the cutting edge is living as both the universe creating all the beauty and all the suffering, and being present through all of it: both in the small, crushed, suffering truth, at the same time as all these layers of consciousness that create themselves, dimension after dimension after dimension.

So it’s like being all that and this, and being with them is the same thing.

Craig: My evolving edge is allowing love and compassion to deeply penetrate my everyday family relationships with my wife, my baby, my teenage daughter, and myself, in all the places I wish didn’t exist.

Francis: I would say the cutting edge of my own awakening is realizing more and more the seamlessness of this vast, huge consciousness that I awakened to, and all the stuff appearing in it—that it’s absolutely one. It’s not two.

When you first awaken to that vast consciousness, you think that’s the One, and all this other stuff is just not real. And anymore, I’m realizing that it’s totally seamless. There’s no separation whatsoever between these different levels.

And the specific thing for me that’s appearing in that, an edge for me, is: What is the role of human relationship in my life? And what forms, what are the many forms it can take? I’m just finding it fascinating.

Laurie: It’s the love and allowing it, discovering it toward this little imperfect self that doesn’t fit into any spiritual ideals. The love that was just like fire going out to everyone and everything, tempering itself, turning itself back toward the imperfect human.

Mariana: I was thrown a big curveball by life this year, unexpectedly. So it’s about not accepting the luxury of defeat. I can feel and hurt, but to really surrender to the new forms, to surrender very much to the unknown when it isn’t, to accept something being taken away and still choose to love my life and move forward.

Dana: Well, being a college professor, especially at this time with so many millennials, I see them really floundering, struggling to try to find some identity. There’s a lot of cynicism, a lot of “everything’s been tried and nothing worked,” and a kind of drowning in an absolute relativism of truth. There is no truth; everybody just makes up their own. And that bothers me. I see them going through it, and it’s painful to watch.

In the same way that, since I teach at an art college, they’re always saying, “I wish people could define art bigger,” I find myself saying, “I wish you could define spirituality bigger,” because so many of them are not attracted to spirituality. They see it as light and love and rainbows and butterflies, and they’re really turned off by that—really turned off by that.

Some of them will be talking to me and they’ll say, “Man, I was at the Slayer concert the other night, and it was timeless, and I felt connected to everything.” Then I keep trying to say to them—and what I would want to pass on is—if you say, “Well, there are spiritual people and there are non-spiritual people, and this is a spiritual place, and this isn’t a spiritual place,” then all of those divisions are just in your mind.

Every place is a spiritual place. Every moment is a spiritual moment. Every opportunity is a learning opportunity. If you need your spirituality to have tattoos and piercings, then that’s cool. That’s fine with me.

Canela: I guess it’s continuing with this honest embrace of myself, bowing to love however it comes, in both its discomfort and comfortable expressions, and then supporting others in finding their own way to that, because it’s certainly going to be their own way, not the same way as for myself. So, yeah, bowing to love in its many forms as it shows up.

Jeffery: A few words, I guess. My leading edge right now is really around possibility and discernment, and trying to listen and sense and feel into what’s showing up. Trust.

Susanne: Mine is diving more deeply, fully, uninhibitedly—how do you say that word?

Rick: Uninhibitedly?

Susanne: Yeah. Into life. Just embracing in ever-deeper ways, just having that be revealed to me where I’m still holding back from embracing life.

Rick: Good. Okay, well, I really thank you all for coming to do this. I think it worked out pretty well. I’m glad we did it.

And I really, again, want to express my appreciation to Jeffery Martin and to Sofia University for making this possible, and to Laurie Moore. We were originally going to do it at her house, and at a certain point I realized it wasn’t going to happen with all these people and all these cameras and all this stuff. And so Jeffery had offered Sofia, and I said, “Let’s do that.” And he’s really been invaluable in making this whole thing happen.

Again, I really appreciate the university allowing us to use the space. So I hope you’ve all enjoyed listening to or watching this.

I’m about to release a whole batch of things from the SAND Conference. Well, I haven’t done the SAND Conference yet, but we’re about to do it. And I’ve got a whole bunch of interviews and panel discussions and my own talk and different things. So there’s going to be a little surge of stuff on BatGap. Stay tuned for that.

And if somehow or other this whole BatGap thing is new to you and you’ve never heard of it and you stumbled across this talk on the internet, then go to BatGap.com, and you’ll find, at this count, 310 previous interviews categorized in various ways if you look under the Past Interviews menu.

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