Hale Dwoskin Interview

Summary:

• Background: Hale Dwoskin is a New York Times best-selling author of “The Sedona Method” and a featured teacher in the book and movie “The Secret.”
• Sedona Method: The Sedona Method is a self-help technique that bridges traditional self-help and non-duality, helping individuals release emotional burdens and recognize their true nature.
• Career: Hale has been teaching the Sedona Method for over three decades, conducting courses and retreats in the US and UK.
• Mentorship: He was mentored by Lester Levinson, co-authoring the book series “Happiness is Free and It’s Easier Than You Think.”
• Philosophy: The Sedona Method emphasizes that self-help and non-duality are not mutually exclusive, and it aims to integrate both for holistic personal development.

Full transcript:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week is Hale Dwoskin. Welcome, Hale.

Hale: Welcome. Thanks for doing this. It’s fun.

Rick: Oh yeah, totally fun. I’ll just read a short written bio of Hale and then you’ll get to know him a lot better during the interview. Hale is a New York Times best-selling author of The Sedona Method, who is featured in the Letting Go movie, which I was just watching this morning until this cat escaped and I had to run around on my bicycle and find the cat.

Hale: Did you find her?

Rick: I did. She was in the neighbor’s garage.

Hale: How did the neighbor like that?

Rick: The neighbor didn’t know.

Hale: Oh boy, that’s probably good.

Rick: Hale is the CEO and Director of Training of the Sedona Training Associates, an organization that teaches courses based on the emotional releasing techniques inspired by his mentor, Lester Levenson. Hale is an international speaker and featured faculty member at Esalen and the Omega Institute. He is also one of the 24 featured teachers of the book and movie phenomenon, The Secret, As well as a founding member of the Transformational Leadership Council. Over three decades, he has regularly been teaching the Sedona Method to individuals and corporations throughout the U.S. and the U.K. And leading coach trainings and advanced retreats since the early 1990s. I was going to say 1900s.

Hale: I feel like old, but not that old.

Rick: The Sedona Method is miraculous, man. You were born in 1860. You’re going strong.

Hale: That’s right.

Rick: He is also the co-author with Lester Levenson of Happiness is Free and It’s Easier Than You Think, a five-book series. That’s good enough for a bio and we’ll get to know Hale more as we go through the interview. I guess it would be most appropriate for you to give us a nutshell understanding of what the Sedona Method is and then we can trace its history and your experience with it and all that stuff.

Hale: Sure, sure. Basically, what the Sedona Method is, is a bridge. It’s a bridge between traditional self-help and even psychology and non-duality. Most techniques and most teachers think that you have to choose one or the other. One of the unique things about the Sedona Method is it shows you how to deal with the instrument, How to deal with the body-mind world and at the same time to recognize the truth of who you are. They’re not mutually exclusive. I’ve met many people who have had tastes of non-duality and they may even be leading satsang about it, but their lives are a mess. I’ve met a lot of other people in the self-help space, like even some of my friends in The Secret, Where they’re very sweet people, they’re very loving people, they’re in the top 1 percentile on the planet, But they’re ignoring non-duality. They’re trying to just simply make a better dream And then probably not even seeing it as a dream. What the Sedona Method is, it’s a tool that shows you wherever you are, Whether you’re trying to make more money or have a better relationship or have more radiant health, Or you really just want to find those last remaining tendencies or vasanas That are pulling you back from that non-dual experience. What I’ve noticed is that people who have a non-dual experience don’t realize that it can be a living part of every moment experience. They have a non-dual experience and they know it clearly enough so they can talk about it any time they need to, But it’s not their living experience every moment. The only reason for that is because they’re still unresolved in the East, They call them samskaras and vasanas, because they haven’t cooked all the seeds. Some of the seed cooking happens naturally, but a lot of the seed cooking can be nurtured along. That’s exactly what the Sedona Method does. It’s a way to rapidly dissolve the seeds that prevent you from knowing that you are all there is. There’s another thing that happens too. Whether your goal is a worldly goal or whether your goal is a spiritual goal, the process is the same because the samskaras and vasanas are the same. Another way of saying it, in the East they call it the gunas. The three gunas, there’s this sattva which everyone’s aspiring to, Rajas which you can’t live without and function in the world, And there’s tamas which are inertia. What happens with the Sedona Method is it helps you naturally and spontaneously dissolve tamas, Or have it merge into rajas and dissolve rajas and have it merge into sattva. That all happens naturally as you let go. You don’t have to try to make that happen. Unfortunately, often in the East they try to force that, And the mind rebels. But if you naturally let go of the tamas and the rajas, the inertia and the compulsive doingness, then what’s left over is sattva and then you can actually go beyond that too.

Rick: That’s a great explanation. There’s a quote at the beginning of your DVD from Lao Tzu. He says, “To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.”

Hale: Right.

Rick: And I was impressed.

Hale: I love that quote.

Rick: It’s great. And I’ve listened to hours of your talk and your whole process that you put people through. I also listened to your interview with Terry Patten on Beyond Awakening. I was, I must say, impressed with the way in which you integrated the practical and the non-dual, the manifest and the unmanifest. As you said, a lot of teachers emphasize one to the exclusion of the other. I’ve interviewed a lot of people and there are a number of them who will say Their whole emphasis is, “You are not a person. There’s nobody home. There’s nothing to do.” That’s the whole focus. But stick a pin in their leg and they’re going to somehow realize that there is a person there. [laughter]

Hale: I have to explain. The problem is most people who speak about non-duality are doing one of two things. They’re either speaking from the non-dual space completely, In which case, of course there is no person and there’s no debate about that. Or they’re speaking from the place of knowing there is no person from a direct experience, But they haven’t dealt with the person. Unfortunately, there’s many more of those. And so it doesn’t ring true. For instance, Nisargadatta could talk that way and get away with it. Ramana Maharshi could talk that way and get away with it. Because just their living presence is a continuous invitation to that non-dual experience. There are some teachers that’s true too, but with a lot of teachers, They experience non-duality when they’re in front of a room. When they’re being invited to take on that mantle, Part of the reason they like doing it is because it invites them back into that non-dual experience. But they’re avoiding their lives. They’re not dealing with life. And it also creates – I don’t remember the term for it – But it creates the non-dual speak which is total craziness.

Rick: Yeah, Advaita speak.

Hale: Advaita speak, that’s right. That Advaita speak is honestly just total bullshit.

Rick: Yeah, I know. Like, “Please pass the salt.” “Who wants the salt?” [Laughter]

Hale: It’s so silly. It’s just silliness. Because as long as there’s a body-mind mechanism, there is still human experience. It’s just that the more you’re surrendered or the more there is no sense of a separate you, One, the less there’s suffering. That’s why everyone wants that. But the more life just happens naturally and spontaneously. If you’re not experiencing that, then you’re experiencing conceptual non-duality, Which unfortunately is extremely prevalent right now.

Rick: Tell me about it.

Hale: For both teachers and also for the people who follow these teachers. Because what they are – Lester Levenson, my mentor, and remind me to talk about him.

Rick: Oh, we will.

Hale: Lester Levenson used to talk about how people try to skip rajas. They try to skip activity. And they’re in, tamas, they’re in apathy, grief and fear with a little bit of lust. They’re trying to skip lust, anger, pride, courageousness and jump into acceptance and peace. And they pretend, they go around pretending they’re in acceptance and peace. Whereas they’re only able to maintain that when the world is going exactly the way they want it to.

Rick: I can’t quote it – I was just going to say, I can’t quote them verbatim, but there’s a couple of verses in the Gita pertaining to that, Where one of them is, at a certain stage, activity is the means, And then later on, at another stage, silence is the means. But you don’t kind of jump to the final stage if you have some other things to transition through. And the thing about the conceptual thing, I actually moderated a forum out of the Science and Non-Duality Conference about this. There’s a Tibetan saying, which I’ve repeated a million times, Which is, “Don’t mistake understanding for realization. Don’t mistake realization for liberation.” And there’s such a prevalent tendency, in my experience, That people… you can get an intuitive sense of non-duality. We’re fish swimming in that ocean, and so if you read a book or two, And listen to a couple of YouTube videos, “Yeah, I get it, I feel that.” But it’s not the full embodied experience of it. And a lot of people make the mistake of assuming that it is, and begin terrorizing the chat groups with their knowledge.

Hale: One of the things I’ve always stayed away from is –

Rick: Chat groups.

Hale: What?

Rick: Chat groups.

Hale: Yes, I stay away from those. What I’ve stayed away from, this has been a conscious decision. No matter how profound the non-dual experience that’s happening here, I have never been willing to, and I probably will never be willing to, Take on the mantle of a teacher in that way, or do satsang. Because there’s just this unevenness that happens from that. I’d rather lead a seminar where we’re equals, And I’m just helping you with whatever it is that’s appropriate for you in this moment. Because it keeps us talking like human beings, and acting like human beings. In my experience, you need the direct experiential knowingness, But you also need to deal with the physical, And you need to deal with the emotional, And you also need to deal with the energetics. Unfortunately, most of the people that I know of in the non-dual space, Are dealing just with the knowledge. Even the ones who are fully genuine in that, The knowledge is their living experience, Their audience is not getting it. Because they need everything in order to really function.

Rick: You remind me of another verse in the Gita, where it says, “The wise do not delude the ignorant By speaking of the uninvolved nature of the self.” It’s a duly engaging inaction. They set an example. There’s an old saying, “The mango tree, when it’s ripe, the branches bend down so that it’s easy to pick the fruit.” It’s not like the branches are way up there. It’s not like you’re speaking from some plateau on high. You’re providing something that meets people where they’re at.

Hale: It’s just been part of what my mission is. Actually, it doesn’t feel like a personal mission. Part of what I’ve been given to do is to continually dissolve these imaginary dualities that we find in our everyday experience. And also, back to the thing I said very early on, be a bridge as opposed to just take a position and say, “If you don’t agree with this position, you just haven’t gotten it yet.” To me, that’s very prideful, and it causes people to just idolize you, and think that they haven’t gotten something – as though there’s actually something to get. In my experience, I love this quote, and I can’t remember who I’m quoting. The quote is, “The only difference between someone who’s realized and someone who’s not is the one who’s realized knows there’s no difference.”

Rick: That’s nice.

Hale: Because wherever you’re seeing differences, that’s still the illusion. Any sense of differentiation is the illusion. You need that in order to function in life. You can’t pretend they’re not there. But at the same time, if you’re creating this stratification, even subtly in the way you’re presenting your message, then from my perspective you’ve missed the whole point.

Rick: I’m a practice sort of guy myself. I’ve been meditating for a long time. There’s another theme in non-dual circles of rejecting practice because it implies the presence of a practicer and it only reinforces the notion of a practicer. I have a bias in favor of it, actually, and I admire someone like yourself who has a practical method that can be offered to people rather than just words or concepts or sitting in the presence of the teacher, which isn’t always very practical.

Hale: We live in a world where you can on YouTube sit in their presence.

Rick: Sort of. You don’t get the vibe quite to the same extent.

Hale: It’s not as strong. It’s definitely not as strong. I struggled with that when I was still seeking in that certain teachers would say that, and yes, it’s true for them. They no longer did a practice, but they neglect to say that they were doing practice.

Rick: For 30 years or something. Yeah, I know.

Hale: Some of them were doing practice when they had their first experience of the truth of who they were. It was in the middle of a practice.

Rick: Yep.

Hale: What I say is, yes, of course, it is an act of grace. The completion is completely an act of grace. But in the Buddhist circles, they say you can – I don’t remember the exact quote, but basically all practice is designed to do – Oh, they call it an accident.

Rick: Oh yeah, I know what you’re saying.

Hale: But all practice is designed to do is make you accident-prone.

Rick: Exactly.

Hale: Well, in my experience, the Sedona Method makes people more accident-prone than almost anything else I know of, because it’s dealing with the exact thing that prevents you from living the experience. The vasanas and samskaras.

Rick: It’s a room with a banana peel rug, right?

Hale: Right. Right. The non-dual space is a room with a-

Rick: In other words, it’s an accident waiting to happen. It makes accidents very likely.

Hale: But it’s also a room like this, the non-dual space, as long as there’s any sense of separation, the room is slightly tilted, and you can’t maintain the experience, because it’s still just an experience. It may be a profound experience. So if you’ve had profound experiences of non-duality, you wonder, “Why do I keep getting caught back up into the world?” It doesn’t mean you did anything wrong. It doesn’t mean that what’s sore is invalid. It just means that the mind is not free of seeds yet, free of tendencies, free of samskaras. You need to cook the seeds. And if you don’t cook the seeds, no matter how many profound experiences you have of non-duality, you’re still going to find yourself getting sucked back into the illusion of the body-mind world as being real.

Rick: Perhaps we could say that correspondingly, that something hasn’t changed in the nervous system, in the brain, to support that non-dual experience. The two are correlated.

Hale: I think that’s also where practice comes in. It’s helping rewire your pranic system and your nervous system, so that it can actually maintain the non-dual state.

Rick: Neuroplasticity.

Hale: Neuroplasticity, yes. And also just energetics. The prana, or the energy, is required for the mind to maintain that state. Otherwise it gets lost back into the world. What happens is most people just go, “Hey, you just need to listen to what I’m saying, or just read my book, or whatever, and you’ll get it. And if you don’t get it, it’s just your problem.”

Rick: Don’t follow a teacher, but keep coming to my seminars.

Hale: Yes.

Rick: There are Eastern traditions that have worked this out in great detail, in terms of chakras and nadis and chi and prana and all that stuff. I’m not qualified to go there. I think certain Western neurophysiologists are trying to understand it in their terms and with their instruments. There’s a lot of research being done on brain activity during non-dual states and meditative states. That’s a whole other topic. But it does emphasize the point that there’s something going on in the physiology that correlates with this experience that we’re all interested in.

Hale: Yes, absolutely. If we’re really interested in non-duality, if we’re really interested in ending suffering, then we need to deal with the whole package. You can’t ignore the package or pretend the package isn’t there and keep tripping over it.

Rick: I’m laughing because I’ve heard you refer to your birds, and I hear one of those birds in the back.

Hale: Yes, I’m in our home office, and the birds are one landing up in my house.

Rick: I was interviewing this guy who used to be the bass player for the Mahavishnu Orchestra. There’s this noise that kept happening throughout the interview. I said, “Can you shut the door? There’s some baby screaming in the other room.” He said, “No, that’s a bird.” Rick Laird is his name, by the way, if anybody wants to listen to that interview. So how does the Sedona Method, might as well start getting into it… you presented it very nicely as not merely some feel-good thing or work-through-your-problems thing, but as a viable method of attaining non-dual realization. What are the mechanics through which it could do that?

Hale: Let me take a step back. I just want to make sure that everyone’s listening is clear about what the process is itself. It’s basically a form of inquiry that deals with not just the “I thought,” but all the samskaras and vasanas, seeing that you aren’t that, but in a very practical, experiential way. That’s one way of describing it. Another way of describing it is just simply that – I like to use props for this. Let me just make sure this is closed so I don’t write on myself, which I’m known to do. For the sake of this analogy, this pen represents our samskaras, our vasanas, our beliefs, our attitudes, our anger, fear, frustration, everything that’s in between us and experiencing non-duality and also anything in between us and having our goals in life. Our hand represents our gut or our awareness. Those of you watching at home, pick up an object so you can do this with me. Because actually doing this, sometimes it hangs. Be careful in the next part, when you drop it, catch it. Those of you at home, try to pick up something you’d be willing to drop without worrying about catching it. What we do in life is we are generally – this is our relationship to every problem. We’re going like this. You grip the object really tightly with your hand. I mean really tightly until it starts to feel really uncomfortable. This is what it feels like inside most of the time for all of us. As long as we’re identifying with that body-mind mechanism, as long as we’re identifying with our suffering, we’re gripping it at the same time. Now relax your hand and open it and roll the object around in your hand. Is this object attached to your hand? Obviously not. But think about our relationship to everything that we don’t like. We actually feel as though it is us. It’s even in our language. We don’t usually say, “I feel sad.” We say, “I’m sad.” We don’t usually say, “I feel angry.” We say, “I’m angry.” We don’t usually say – even the things in the non-dual space, we don’t usually say, “I’m feeling peaceful.” We say, “I’m at peace.” Or actually that’s still okay. There’s still some sense of clarity there. But we think, “I’m enlightened.” That’s a very common one. That’s an identification. But remember, all these identifications are attached to us. This hand is attached to your hand. So you have a choice. You can do this. Turn your hand upside down and then just let go. Open. Just drop the object. So that is the choice that you can make any moment with anything that appears to be holding you back on any level. And that’s one way we teach of letting go. Another way we teach of letting go is if you live life open. This camera’s too small. If you live life open, things don’t stick to you. So it’s kind of like going through life with your hand open as opposed to closed. If you go through life with your hand open, then things pass through your experience naturally. They don’t stick. So we call that welcoming or allowing. In Zen they call it vipassana or mindfulness. But you can actually live life that way. We’re not clinging to what’s being experienced in the moment. You’re just allowing life to flow naturally. That’s another way of letting go. Another way of letting go is if you look at this object and you look at it from the outside, it looks solid. But if you could magnify this enough, and this won’t be enough, but if you could magnify it enough, the object would start to seem less and less dense because it’s mostly empty space. So what happens is the reason that our limitations appear real to us is because we’re all living life on the surface. We don’t realize, especially internally, we’re living in a soap bubble. You know how thin that is? The non-dual space is both inside the bubble and outside the bubble. What we tend to do, though, is we try to stay on the surface of the bubble and try to hold our whole life together. But if you simply dive into the bubble, it pops because it has no substance. So we call that diving in. In life, as long as there’s mind, there’s pairs of opposites. You cannot have mind without it. If you have in, there’s also out. Up and down. There are certain useful ones for just functioning in life. But the mind has added layer upon layer upon layer upon layer of conflicting polarities or dualities, like right and wrong, good and bad, have to and can’t. There’s so many. The mind also tries to keep them separate. We have a pile over here of all the good stuff and a pile over here of all the stuff we think is bad. And we’re doing this all the time. I don’t want to. And it’s a juggling act. We’re kind of –

Rick: He’s pretty flexible. He must do yoga.

Hale: I do yoga, but I was born flexible. But anyway, What happens is, if you welcome both sides, instead of – Again, people are willing to welcome peace, but if you also welcome disturbance and peace, they dissolve each other, because they’re polarities. They’re a continuum. So what we discovered is that if you are willing to welcome that which you judge as good and that which you judge as bad, that which creates pleasure and that which creates pain, they simply start to merge. And what’s left over is non-duality. That’s what’s already here. So right in the life, when you’re experiencing some conflict, all you need to do is say, “Well, what would be here if the conflict was already resolved?” And so you welcome that, and you welcome the conflict. A lot of times we’ll go there and we’ll try to substitute. “Well, I’m just going to think about the positive and pretend the negative is going to go away.” Yeah, well, that works not at all. That’s the biggest problem with positive thinking, is you’re just layering. You’re putting a happy face on top of your problem, and the problem doesn’t go away because of that. But if you welcome the problem and the solution, both, they dissolve each other, and you do what Einstein says. You move to a new level to solve the problem from, which is not the same level you created that. And so we call that holistic release. Sorry, go ahead.

Rick: Well, I could interject some comments, or you could continue if you’d like.

Hale: Anytime you want to. Again, I really don’t have a train of thought. Because I don’t think about what I’m going to say before I think it. It just happens.

Rick: Kind of like Ronald Reagan. [Laughter]

Hale: Sometimes people would call me that.

Rick: I saw a cartoon that depicted the Reagan end run, and it had some thought kind of going around the back of his brain and skipping the frontal cortex and coming out of his mouth. Anyway, a few comments. One is, have you heard, this is very interesting, that you’re talking about the insubstantiality of the physical. If you took all seven billion people in the world and removed all the empty space that’s actually between all the subatomic particles in their bodies and whatnot, you’d end up with an object the size of a grain of rice.

Hale: I didn’t hear that. That’s good.

Rick: And even that object, if you go deeper, is just sort of strings and probabilities. It’s virtual, ultimately. And I forget what else I was going to say, but it doesn’t matter. I’ve probably said it before. But one question I have with regard to letting go of the pen.

Hale: Yes.

Rick: I get the sense, and in listening to you do your thing, it’s obvious that you don’t let go of everything in one go. It takes a while. It took decades and lifetimes to build it all up layer by layer. It’s going to take a while to work back through the layers.

Hale: Absolutely. Let me finish the fifth way of letting go, and then I’ll tell you how they all interrelate. The fifth way of letting go is where we meet the nondual space. We call it the fifth way, and it’s just basically active inquiry. And that is noticing that nonduality that’s here and now, that’s already whole and complete. And also noticing that that sense of me is not there. You can’t find it. So every one of the other ways of letting go involve varying degrees of believing that there’s someone there to let go. And so what we do in our seminars, but what I also help people learn how to do, is you go back and forth. You deal with the layer you’re at. Now, if there’s an obvious polarity, you welcome the polarity, and then there’s nothing. If you’re just clinging to something, you let go. If you find you’re just repelling and you’re not really letting yourself feel, you dive in. So whatever’s appropriate in the moment. But you also, the lessee used to say you need to balance ego elimination with nonduality, with being that which you are, through study of scripture or hanging out with a truly realized teacher or just loving yourself or just being that nondual space. So you go back and forth. If you just do one, you can get into a completely artificial state of joyous escape. If you’re just focusing on that nondual space, you can actually live life, especially if you live in a beautiful place and you don’t have a job and everybody in your life is always nice to you and all this other kind of stuff, you can spend periods where you think you’re in this pure nondual space, but it’s just an escape. And on the other hand, you can get – and I’ve seen this too – people get so obsessed with getting rid of the vasanas and samskaras, the tendencies and desires, they get so lost in that that they forget the nondual space and they start doing this… You’re in a boat that’s sinking. Here’s the boat, it’s sinking, except I don’t know how I’m going to do this, but with one hand you’re bailing and the other hand you’re refilling the boat. So we’re going like this into our boat. We’re bailing with one hand and we’re refilling it with the other hand. So what you need to do is this. You have to be letting go with both hands. I always encourage people to balance any sense of working on the illusion of me With just resting as that which they already are.

Rick: Another thing which is more rare, which I sometimes get feedback from people, this one came in from a young woman over in Europe. She said that when I was 18 I fell into the nondual state for four hours and my kundalini awoke and at the age of 23, one year ago, I went into the state of samadhi, self-realization, which was such an enormous shift that I became dysfunctional and I still am. My identity disappeared into consciousness like becoming a baby. It was scary not knowing how to survive physically. She goes on and on. People can shift into a state so radically that they don’t know how to think, don’t know how to talk. Byron Katie was an example and Eckhart Tolle both. Their shift was so sudden and abrupt and unanticipated that it took them years to learn how to function again.

Hale: That’s not uncommon. When there’s that radical shift, without two things, without good process to support it, in other words, knowing how to deal with the world, both on a purely practical level but also on a physical, emotional, energetic level. It doesn’t invalidate that non-dual experience that they’re having but it does make it really difficult to function in life. The other thing is just simply lifestyle. You need to create a lifestyle that supports non-duality.

Rick: What kind of lifestyle would that be?

Hale: I guess more of a sattvic lifestyle and certainly not a tamasic lifestyle. Again, simple things like, people are going to hate this, but things like sex, drugs and rock and roll to excess is not exactly conducive.

Rick: Right, but a little Hendrix every now and then.

Hale: A little Hendrix now and then, that’s what I mean. Or just being absolutely obsessed with success, for instance, is great if you want success. But being absolutely obsessed with success and wondering why you can’t meditate deeply or you can’t experience non-duality, it’s really obvious because there’s much more of that anger, pride, courageousness than there is acceptance and peace.

Rick: Gita addresses that stuff too. It says, “This yoga is not for him who sleeps too much or too little, who eats too much or too little.” The Buddha, I guess, the middle way, advocating balance. You just don’t go overboard in any one direction because again, back to the physiology, we’ve got an instrument that we need to maintain if we want to live this non-dual thing and you can damage that instrument through any number of means.

Hale: Right, and it will just distract you. You can have these amazing non-dual experiences, but if you don’t have practice to support it on some level, some sort of practice that just helps you ground it and support it and you also aren’t creating a lifestyle that supports it, it’s really hard to maintain.

Rick: Yeah, I’ve been having a discussion with a friend of mine named Jerry about a lot of this stuff because we keep coming across people who again have some sort of awakening, maybe a very profound one, but they’re kind of in a stage of nothing ever happens, nothing to talk about, nothing to think about, nothing to do. Jerry’s emphasis is that that’s maybe a preliminary stage, but eventually what the Hindus call Brahman is considered to be the eater of everything. It’s all-inclusive, so it includes all the nitty-gritty of life, all the granularity, all the structure, the processes, the subjective character of one’s life, everything. So non-dual is not just this kind of plain vanilla nothingness, It’s the whole full catastrophe, to quote Zorba.

Hale: I like that.

Rick: That’s from Zorba the Greek. Completely engulfed though in wholeness rather than a million fragments as it once was.

Hale: Yes, again, this is a classic quote, “Before enlightenment you chop wood and carry water, after enlightenment you chop wood and carry water,” but so many people out there right now are in the middle state, where they’re in this new place that almost becomes a way to avoid life.

Rick: Yes, water is an illusion, wood is an illusion.

Hale: Yes, water is an illusion, wood is an illusion.

Rick: There’s no one to chop, there’s no one to carry.

Hale: Right, and that’s why most of those people eventually kind of fall back, Either they get very sick because they’re not attending the instrument, Or they kind of fall out of the state and don’t know what happened. Because that’s part of why in the East they have teachers, And they emphasize that in order to really approach non-duality You need to have at least some touchstone. Now if you have a good enough inner instrument that you can actually get knowledge directly from the source, That’s great, but that’s not common. Most people need some external support, not a dependent relationship, But external support so that they know that this is just a stage, for instance. So many people are out there, are in just a stage, and there are many stages. And they think, “Oh, now I’ve got it, oh now I’ve got it, now I’ve got it. Who is this I who got it? Obviously nobody.” But they still think that on a very subtle level, even though what they’re presenting in life, they may not even talk about it, but that’s actually what they’re experiencing, that something has been accomplished.

Rick: Do you know who Adyashanti is? Here’s one from him. “Even now with me the mystery is just beginning, always still beginning.” He’s a guy that I would respect as being quite ripe, quite far along. I’ve used these quotes many times, but here’s one from St. Teresa of Avila. She said, “The feeling remains that God is on the journey too.” Whereas God himself, this is just a stage, there’s more unfoldment.

Hale: Yes, and I 100% agree with that. Again, if it gets static, then you’re like this against the wall. Now it may be a beautiful wall, it may be this beautiful, apparently non-dual wall, But you’re still like this. And you’re missing everything else.

Rick: Why do you think it is that people have a tendency to feel that they have arrived And there’s nothing more to unfold?

Hale: It’s two things. It’s the mind’s wanting… well, it’s more than two. I’ll just start speaking. I said two and then I can see more than two. The first thing is the mind is always looking to create a structure around whatever is experienced, based on comparing it to the past, based on comparing it to what we’ve learned. And as long as there’s any sense of a me, not even – And also there’s levels of this too. In the East they call it asmita or ahankara. But a lot of times ahankara or the sense of I, The I sense may have mostly disappeared for someone, But the sense of am-ness is still there. That’s still an illusion. And so a lot of people get to this am-ness and they think that’s it. That’s just the beginning. So that’s one.

Rick: And beneath that would be is-ness.

Hale: Right, and beneath that is no more words. Even is-ness is still within a framework. And that’s kind of the difficulty here is non-duality. One of the things that Ramana did, one of his main ways of teaching Was to say nothing at all. And people said he wouldn’t talk. That’s not true. He would talk, but he always talked about silence Is the highest teaching. And one of the things that I always loved about Lester, my mentor, is that he always said the same thing. He said the highest teachings are the silent teachings. Because if you’re using words, it’s already a representation. And it doesn’t matter how good the words are, they’re still lies. They’re still conceptual. So people will confuse this sense of am-ness with the sense… when there’s a much less sense of I am, but there’s still a sense of am-ness, they’ll think they’re done. And the other thing that will happen is they’ll have some of the symptoms That they’ve heard from other people. And they think since they have those symptoms, maybe this is it. But if you’re looking for a this-it experience, that’s not it. So when people have awakening type experiences in my seminar, I say, “That’s nice.” And then we just continue… We absolutely make nothing out of it. Because it is nothing. If you make it significant, meaningful, important, or anything like that, You immediately are putting it back in a box. You’re immediately putting all this artificial sense of definition Around something that defies definition.

Rick: When Adyashanti had his first major awakening, He actually heard a voice that said, “Keep going.”

Hale: That’s great. And again, he’s one of those people that has nice access To the direct teaching that comes through, often without words, But sometimes with words. But it’s not from an embodied teacher. Maybe a disembodied teacher, but it’s not from an embodied teacher.

Rick: One impression that I got over and over again as I was listening to your talks Is that with the Sedona Method… if I had to sum up the Sedona Method, Let’s see if you agree with this, I would say that it’s a way of learning To cooperate with nature’s intelligence.

Rick: We kind of get in the way of what nature is able to accomplish Much more effectively than we possibly could. It’s a method of allowing yourself to get out of the way and let nature do its thing.

Hale: Yes, I would totally agree with that. There’s another wonderful analogy that you’ve probably heard before. Life is kind of like a river. But how most of us experience life is we’re actually swimming against the current, Gripping one rock from another, trying to pull ourselves out of the flow. The more you let go, the more you just become the river, Flowing around whatever appears to be an obstacle. You’re always flowing towards the ocean. River and ocean are the same. Another analogy, of course, is like the waves in the ocean. In life, we identify often with the wave. We forget that both the wave and the ocean are just water. What the method does is it helps you notice your ocean-ness, Even when the wave is like me. If you’ve really gotten lost in this, it helps you step back and do whatever process is appropriate in the moment to relax again as the ocean.

Rick: Helps the wave to settle down.

Hale: Helps the wave to settle down. It’s so funny, in life, most of the time we try to out-do every other wave, But we forget that all the waves are going to end up at the shore. What happens to the waves when they end up at the shore? They’re gone. They’re gone. We’re in a hurry to get to our dissolution without even realizing it.

Rick: He who dies with the most toys wins.

Hale: I think that’s true. It happens to people.

Rick: Another thought that kept coming to mind as I was listening to you Was that, speaking again of nature’s intelligence, It seems that it’s natural. As individual human beings, we embody certain tendencies That are present universally in nature. One of those tendencies is that it is natural for the universe to individuate. After the Big Bang, I guess we had this big amorphous field of something And then it accreted into stars eventually. There was an individuation and then the stars exploded And then even more diversification and individuation took place. Now we have people and salamanders and all kinds of specific things. Yet at the very same time… and so that would account for the getting lost In the minutia of life, getting overshadowed, getting gripped aspect. But then at the very same time, it’s natural for the reverse flow to take place To get back to universality. It’s almost like the universe on a grand scale is playing this game Of specificity back to universality. We as individual units are experiencing the same thing in our own lives.

Hale: Definitely. Again, what we do though is we resist the process.

Rick: Perhaps that’s the individuation tendency still holding on and not realizing.

Hale: We want to take our individuality into non-duality. And you can’t do that.

Rick: It doesn’t want to surrender itself.

Hale: Right, the freedom or non-duality or awakening, whatever you want to call it, I have yet to hear a word that’s really accurate, is from you. It’s not for you.

Rick: Elaborate on that.

Hale: To the degree that there’s no sense of a separate me, to that degree, The non-duality, which is already here, is shining in plain view. But what we do on the path is we generally are trying to take me with us So that I can have an experience of oneness. I can have an awakening. And as soon as you say, “My awakening,”

Rick: Now let’s say you’re the most –

Hale: If you just avoid, if you censor your language and say, “There was an awakening,” That’s still the same thing. So you change your language. That’s another thing I tell people. You should use, in relating to people, if you’re using any kind of language That wouldn’t be understood by the checkout person at the supermarket, Then there’s a distortion. I tell people, “Please don’t try to take the language that we’re using here.” Sometimes we have to use this kind of distorted language in a seminar to help you experience what’s beyond what we usually experience. But don’t try to talk to your friends that way.

Rick: In our supermarket, every time you check out, they’re trained to say, “Did you find everything okay?” There’s all kinds of things I could do with that. I wasn’t actually looking for everything, and really there is no “I.” And you go on and on. Go ahead. I had a thought, but I lost it.

Hale: Actually, I had a thought that I want to share. It’s tangential, but the other thing is that the movie analogy is a great analogy To explain what we’re experiencing. Remember, it’s just an analogy. People hear these analogies and then they try to make literal sense out of the whole thing. Or they think, “That’s the truth! Oh, I’m in the ocean!” Not really, but it’s just a teaching story.

Rick: And every analogy has its limitations.

Hale: It totally has limitations. One of the analogies that I like in explaining that is that, First off, when you go to a movie, a regular movie, You don’t enjoy the movie unless you identify with at least one character. If you don’t identify with the character, there’s no drama. I saw a movie last night, Epic. It’s a kids’ flick. I usually like kids’ flicks. But this one, it didn’t quite make that – You didn’t really buy it 100%. Even though it was beautiful to watch, And there were great special effects, And it was a really good animation job, It wasn’t avatar where you really identified with the characters And you really identified with the story. And so, this movie that we’re experiencing now is the same way. This movie, in order for it to have high entertainment value, You identify with one of the characters. And you also think that all the other characters are separate. But it’s just a movie. And you’ve probably heard, taking that analogy a little further, You’ve probably heard the movie analogy where you’re just the screen.

Rick: Right.

Hale: Which is accurate. You’re just the screen. But what you also forget is you’re also the light. And the film in between is the sun, stars, and buses. What you’re experiencing in life is an out-picturing of all your past tendencies. You’re experiencing the past all the time. You’re not actually experiencing what’s here.

Rick: But if you went to a movie and all you had was the screen and the light, Aith no film, everybody would walk out, right? There’d be no entertainment.

Hale: Yes, absolutely. So that’s part of the reason that we have this whole dance, Is because it’s the way we stay engaged.

Rick: It has entertainment value.

Hale: It has high entertainment value.

Rick: Lila.

Hale: Yes, Lila, exactly. And that’s also, in the East they talk about the Maya, the Lila or Maya disappears for the one who’s seen the truth. But it stays there for everybody else. Well, again, because it’s just a theory or analogy, it breaks down. And it’s really not important. The important thing is that you are both the light and the screen. And the reason that sometimes there are all these things in your experience That you’re getting lost in, One is because you’re identifying with the projection on the screen. And you don’t notice that when there’s an explosion in the movie, you don’t burn. Or when there’s a flood, you don’t get wet. That’s one level. The other level is that’s all made up of, the pictures are all made up of your tendencies, Your samskaras, your desires. So you need to deal with that, If you just try to pretend you’re the screen or pretend you’re the light, Or maybe you even notice that you’re the light and the screen And you’re not dealing with all the stuff in between, It still stays cloudy and you still can forget. It’s easy to forget. But if you deal with the samskaras and vasanas, if you dissolve them, Then it’s harder and harder to forget.

Rick: Yeah. You said a little while ago, We’ll come back more to dealing with the samskaras and vasanas, But you said a little while ago that one is in the non-dual experience To the extent that a hamkara or ego has diminished or dissolved.

Hale: Right.

Rick: But even if you were the most nondual guy on the planet, And maybe you are, I don’t know, But wouldn’t there have to be some, In Sanskrit there’s this term, “leisha vidya,” faint remains of ignorance. It’s my understanding there would have to be some faint remains at least In order for you to be functional. Otherwise you’re just going to lie down and starve to death or something.

Hale: Or your devotees will feed you.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. In the case of Anandamayi Maharaj, Neem Karoli Baba, They seem to be in that condition practically.

Hale: Yes. So there are people in that condition. But yes, there are still… What dissolves is your identification, But you’re still the package of the core samskaras and vasanas That make up, in the East they call it the prarabdha – I can’t pronounce that.

Rick: Prarabdha karma.

Hale: Prarabdha karma. The karmas from before can be dissolved, And the future karmas can be dissolved, But the karma you’re actually living out, That doesn’t dissolve.

Rick: You’ll live it out, yeah.

Hale: You’ll live it out.

Rick: But you can do so realizing clearly that all the world’s a stage And all the men and women are merely players. You’re just a player in this, And that you’re not really getting stabbed or burned or whatever –

Hale: Whatever it is. And at the same time, you take care of the body. If someone’s about to stab you, you don’t just go, “Okay, stab me.”

Rick: Yeah, it’s only an illusion anyway.

Hale: You step out of the way. You take the appropriate action.

Rick: Now, one thing I kept thinking of, This shifts gears a little bit, As I was listening to the thing, Is, okay, what if Hale was sent to Connecticut To console and deal with the Sandy Hook parents, And sent to Newtown? You’re not just going to say, a few days after that tragedy, “Can you just let it go?”

Hale: I might.

Rick: You might, but obviously the grief is very sharp at that point.

Hale: But the first step is to allow it. What happens is people very often, The grieving process gets very extended Because people aren’t allowing themselves to feel what they’re feeling in the moment.

Rick: They try to numb out.

Hale: They numb out. They’ll either suppress, or they’ll escape, Or they’ll express the emotion. But they won’t just be with it. Again, a lot of therapy is based on expressing, which is better, often, and a necessary step. But there’s a balancing point in the middle of all those three, The suppression, the escape, or the expression. The balancing point, right at the center, is just an allowing. So when I work with people who are dealing with severe trauma, What you do is you start by just allowing for their experience, And let people know that their experience is okay. You’re not supposed to be experiencing anything different than what you are. It’s a natural experience.

Rick: So you wouldn’t dream of saying to them, “Oh, it’s just an illusion, and your children are not really dead.”

Hale: They weren’t really, yes –

Rick: They didn’t really exist to begin with.

Hale: That would be really insensitive.

Rick: Get yourself punched in the nose or something.

Hale: Or worse, shot. “I have a gun, too!” What you do is you deal with where people are at in the moment. The movie has that triple welcoming process. That’s a very good situation like that. So the first thing you do is you welcome what’s being experienced. The thoughts, the feelings, the beliefs, the sadness, the memories, all of it. And then what you do is you welcome all your wanting to fix it, to change it, to control it, and also wanting to pretend it didn’t happen. All the things we usually try to do with anything that we’ve labeled as unpleasant. So you welcome that, too. And just in welcoming those two things is already relief. First, in welcoming what you’re experiencing, there’s relief. Because you’re usually fighting with it or thinking you should be over it. Or there’s so many beliefs about what’s correct. So that’s one level. So if you welcome what you’re experiencing, there’s already some relief. Then if you welcome all what you’re trying to modify your experience, fix or change it, There’s a tremendous relief in that. And then what you do is you also welcome the sense that it’s your experience. You don’t deny that. So any sense that it’s me, it’s about me, or it’s who I am, you welcome that. Now, people often will say when I say, “Well, welcome.” “Well, yeah, it feels like…” I say, “Yeah, it does.” But you just welcome that it feels like you, that there’s this identification.

Rick: Now, do people have adequate capacity to welcome the most severe things? Or is it that you just, you know, nature guiding this process, you’re given as much as you can handle to welcome at any given time?

Hale: Yes, I don’t say… welcoming is not forcing yourself to bring it all up.

Rick: Right, because you might be like just a little cup of water, which can’t take a shovel full of dirt, whereas an ocean could.

Hale: Right, exactly. So when you’re welcoming, you’re welcoming only what you’re experiencing in the moment.

Rick: Okay.

Hale: And just in doing that, it gets less overwhelming, not more.

Rick: Because the thing itself dissolves or because your capacity grows or both?

Hale: Both.

Rick: Okay.

Hale: So in a situation like that, that would be one of the tools I would use. There was a man on my last retreat. He was the first person to work on the retreat. And what he worked on is that he was severely abused. He was abused by his priest when he was a kid. And then what happened is he told his dad about it. He told his family. And his dad beat him for 15 years because he didn’t believe him.

Rick: Yikes.

Hale: So he had two layers. He had the sexual abuse and then he had the abuse of his dad because his dad just couldn’t accept that the priest would do something like that. So it must have been a story he made up. And he got punished for it for 15 years. So that might bring up just a little bit of trauma.

Rick: Yeah, really.

Hale: So we did just this triple welcoming process. And he was the very first person to work. And in just 10 minutes, the core of it dissolved.

Rick: And didn’t resurface or reemerge?

Hale: There were layers that came after that, but there were less and less. And by the end of the retreat, his relationship with his wife had healed. And a whole other–that’s part of the reason he knew he had a genuine letting go– is that there were all these compensations and results from holding on to this trauma that all started to dissolve at his wife. He was sleeping better. He went through a whole litany of things that had changed. And so even with severe things like that, if you’re willing to start with where you’re at right now and you’re willing to engage in the process, I’ve seen people do really miraculous things. I mean, really miraculous things.

Rick: Nice. One thing I admired or appreciated in listening to your interview with Terry Patten was that you were very ecumenical or eclectic. You just sort of saw the Sedona Method as one of many, many tools in the world that people can use to evolve and grow. And there was no sort of, “Our way is the best way.” (Laughter)

Hale: I don’t even think that. I think our way is a way. And it may be the best way for you this moment, and then a year from now it may no longer be the best way for you.

Rick: Yeah, that’s great.

Hale: And I think that people need to really follow their hearts when it comes to any kind of tool or any kind of teacher. If you put the tool or the teacher first, then you’re missing the point.

Rick: Right.

Hale: What you always need to put first is, “Is this really supporting me?” And with a teacher, is this teacher really – am I feeling that peace and that love and that beingness that I am when I’m around them? If I’m not feeling that, or if I only feel it around them, and then every time I’m not around them, they’re just good at producing that state in their presence, but that state should not just be when you’re with them. It should be more and more of the time.

Rick: Right.

Hale: If that’s not happening, or if there’s a… how do you describe this? If there’s –

Rick: This is the wayward cat that had to go catch it.

Hale: The one that was in the neighbor’s garage.

Rick: Sorry for the interruption, but I thought you might like to meet it.

Hale: No, no, that’s great.

Rick: So you were saying about being around teachers all the time. If you lose the state when you’re not with the teacher, then –

Hale: Again, there are many teachers who have a very good – they have a city, basically.

Rick: They can evoke a state in you.

Hale: Yeah. And so the other thing is how they treat you. If they treat you as a complete equal, then you know you’re in the right place. If they’re either putting you up, “Oh, you’re only the chosen few can be here,” Or they’re putting you down, “Someday you’ll be as high as I am” then you have to be cautious. True teachers see you as the same as them. That’s part of what makes them such a powerful teacher.

Rick: Which is not to say that some people aren’t more spiritually evolved than others.

Hale: No, no, no, of course. Obviously, yeah. It’s obviously a continuum. And especially teachers from the East are going to have at least some trapping. They just can’t help it. It’s part of what they –

Rick: The culture.

Hale: Part of the culture. It’s more a thing to be more concerned about in the West, because it’s not part of our culture. So if it’s not part of our culture, there’s something artificial there. Even if it’s as simple as they’re always sitting up here and you’re always sitting down here. Then it’s not required.

Rick: Sometimes that’s necessary if you’re speaking to 300 people.

Hale: I’m not talking about that. In a small room. In a big room you have to have a stage. Especially I do, obviously. I’m only 5’6″. So when I stand in front of a room, then they start complaining, because they can’t see me. So I have to step up a step or two, so that they can actually at least see my face. Because I’m short. But I’m not talking about that. There’s a difference. If there’s a separating happening, a hierarchy, then you know there’s something going on. Also with any kind of tool, you should have a whole tool chest. You should use the tool that’s appropriate for the moment. Now, some tools are more universal and some tools are less universal, But you still don’t want to use a hammer to change a light bulb. That would just create a mess. But a lot of people do. They think, “Well, this is the best tool, so I have to use it for every job.” It’s only the best tool when it’s the right tool.

Rick: I have a friend whom I’m sure you know, who became a TM teacher in Rishikesh in the 1960s. She’s also a Sedona teacher. I was talking to her about it and she said, “Meditation is wonderful. I’ve been doing it all these years. I love it. It’s very powerful and effective.” But there are certain things which I found that Sedona really gets to, which meditation doesn’t seem to have been getting to. So it’s part of her toolbox.

Hale: Yes, absolutely. Again, in my experience, meditation combined with releasing is amazing. So again, follow what is actually helping you. If it’s not helping you, don’t keep doing it just because you think you’re earning merit Or someday it’s going to work.

Rick: Somebody asked Maharishi one time how many followers he had. I don’t have any followers. Everyone follows their own benefits. So tell us a bit about your teacher, since we’re speaking of teachers. I know you had a very warm relationship with him for many years. He was an amazing man. It might be interesting to hear Lester’s story.

Hale: Sure. I met Lester Levenson, the man who inspired this work, back in 1976 at a seminar That I helped organize for another thing. One of the things this lifetime, when I’ve liked something, I just did it a thousand percent. I didn’t just taste it. I did EST years ago before I did the Sedona Method, and within weeks I was assisting at trainings, then I was a training supervisor, leading guest seminars. I was just gaga over it. Then all of a sudden I started to see that it was just brainwashing and programming, and I got the hell out of there. My way of doing it was to immerse myself. I was immersed in this other thing, and Lester came as a guest of the seminar leader. It was a seminar that went over a year, and people came and went, So I didn’t even really notice him that much in the seminar. The seminar leader, myself, and the other organizer went out to lunch with Lester. I was blown away. He was the first teacher I had met. I’ve been very fortunate to meet many others since then, But he was the first one I had met who was no longer seeking.

Rick: Why was he at a seminar if he was no longer seeking?

Hale: He was invited there because the man, he didn’t come to take the seminar. He came to the seminar because the man was trying to decide whether or not to introduce Lester to his following, and Lester was trying to decide whether or not this guy was even worth having anything to do with.

Rick: I see.

Hale: It was one of those types of things. It was like, “All right, I’ll come see what you’re doing.” Not because I need something, but because he was a guest, Just so that the seminar leader could experience what the seminar leader was doing.

Rick: What was it about Lester that made you realize that he wasn’t seeking, While you were just having lunch with him?

Hale: One is, I could feel his equanimity, the changelessness. Two is, there was a profound peace, and on some level there was also a sense of blissfulness. Then there was, he wasn’t doing that “I’m up here” thing. He was just an ordinary guy. Then there was just this inner knowingness that happened in meeting him. It was like, “Oh, this guy really knows what he’s talking about. I need to find out what this is about.” I signed up for the seminar that, the Sedona Method back then was taught over a two-weekend seminar. I immediately called the next day and signed up for it, And then invited a friend of mine to come with me because I was a little nervous. I invited a female friend of mine who was involved in the same group, one of the organizer types. I said, “Will you come with me to this? I think you’ll like it. I’ll even pay for it” because she didn’t have the money. What happened during the seminars, I realized that, I inwardly realized that this is what I came here to be involved in. I’ve been involved in it ever since. When I met Lester, there was first who he was, but then there was his story. His story was really very interesting. His story was that back in 1952, he was sent home to die from a second coronary. She wants to come back in.

Rick: Yeah, you can just keep talking. You’ll see me doing that, letting the dogs in and out.

Hale: Oh you have dogs too?

Rick: Dogs and cats.

Hale: You’re the doormat.

Rick: Menagerie, yeah. So he was sent back to die after a second coronary…

Hale: The doctors basically gave him a death sentence, and he was very successful. He was living in a penthouse apartment in Central Park South in Manhattan. Even back then, that was an accomplishment. He was financially successful, and he had at least two women who had proposed to him. It didn’t happen that often back then. He had external love directed towards him. He had all the trappings of someone who should have been happy from a worldly perspective, Except he was a physical and emotional basket case. He had post-perforated ulcers and diverticulitis, And jaundice several times a year, migraine headaches, and depression. He was just a mess. He also had gone to therapy. He went to an associate of Freud, who after four years said to him, “Lester, I’m sorry, but some people just can’t be helped.” Which if they said that today, it would be a lawsuit. He basically was a physical and emotional basket case, but he was a physicist engineer. When he got this death sentence, first he went back to his library. He had studied psychology, medicine, engineering, chemistry. He studied all the fields of man except metaphysics and spirituality Because he thought if he couldn’t prove it physically, it wasn’t real, it wasn’t true. He went back to his library, and he thought maybe he could find the answer to get himself out of this mess. After about two days or three days, he felt worse. He dropped whatever book he was reading and said, “Lester, for a smart man, you are stupid, stupid, stupid.” Then he decided to go back to the web within himself. That was a very fortunate decision. He realized that if the knowledge was in books, for him, he would have already found it. It wasn’t in any of his pre-learned knowledge. He asked himself, “What have I been looking for?” He realized, “I’ve been looking for happiness.” He said, “What is happiness?” He started exploring what is happiness. The first thing he saw, the first insight he had, was that happiness was – He first thought, “Happiness is when I’m loved.” Then he went, “No, that’s not it. I can remember times where I was loved and I still wasn’t happy.” He said, “Maybe it’s when I’m loving.” Then when he saw that it was one of the keys to happiness, when he was loving, He started going back to his life. Wherever he was wanting love or not feeling love, he started changing it to love. He started feeling better and better and better. Then he also saw that he wanted to change everything in his life, Even the ends of movies and how things had turned out. He started dissolving the wanting to change it. Then he went deeper and he saw that there was this fear of death. Instead of running from it, he just turned around and faced it. After that process of facing these things about himself, he entered this state of… What he said was unbearable bliss.

Rick: It’s cool that he had the volition to be able to do all that. A lot of people are more… It seems like he was able to just turn on a dime everywhere he tried.

Hale: I’m sure there was a process involved. Remember, by the time I met him, it was – Let’s see, 1976. This happened in ’52, 27 years later. By the end, the story had gotten distilled. I have no idea how much of it is 100% accurate. Any story like this gets distilled.

Rick: He made enough progress in a short enough period of time that he didn’t die in two weeks, obviously.

Hale: Right, obviously. What happened is when he was in this bliss state, he said, “There’s got to be something beyond this.” He then noticed he stepped out of duality into non-duality. That’s how he described it. Then there was just peace. That’s what was left with him for 42 years, just this sense of peace. No matter what was going on around him. I saw him in intense situations. That doesn’t mean he didn’t still have emotion. I saw him angry, but it would just dissolve as soon as it was no longer needed for communication.

Rick: That reminds me of an analogy I wanted to throw in earlier, and I forgot what it was. I think you might find it interesting. You may have heard it. We’ll get back to Lester. It’s from the Eastern Wisdom again. It’s said that someone who is carrying a lot of baggage is like stone. You make a line in stone. The line can’t go very deep, but it stays there for a long time once you make it. Then take it to the next stage. It’s like sand. It’s easier to make a deeper line, and it doesn’t stay as long. The next stage is like water. You can easily make a deep line in water, and it just immediately disappears. Finally, like air. You can pass your whole arm through air, but there’s no impression left. This whole thing about accumulating vasanas and impressions and then releasing vasanas. We become eventually like Lester, as you’ve just described, or like air. We have the experiences, and perhaps even more vividly and profoundly, richly, Than we had when we were more like a stone. Yet, there’s no lasting impression. It’s just like passing through.

Hale: I love that. I haven’t heard that analogy before, but it’s very accurate.

Rick: You have my permission to use it.

Hale: Thanks. Is it yours?

Rick: No, it’s one of those old stories. It’s an old teaching analogy.

Hale: Recently, one of the things is I like to keep exploring, because both inwardly, It’s a constant inward exploration, but I’m also open to other tools and techniques. Not because I feel like I need them so much, but because I just want to really get the full picture. I’ve been looking at more stuff from the East, and a lot of the stuff from the East has no author. It’s been around so long, or they make up this author who lived for thousands of years, And they just attribute it all to him. Unfortunately, it’s usually him. It’s rare to hear her. That’s really inconsequential. It’s nice if you know the person to quote them, but often the quote is way beyond a person.

Rick: Stuff’s just been getting passed on for thousands of years.

Hale: Yes.

Rick: One thing to say of the East, and sometimes people brush it off and say, “Oh, yeah, we need just a fresh knowledge for the West.” These guys have been at it for a long time. Like the Eskimos, who have 32 words for snow. I’m told the Eskimo is a politically incorrect term, But you know what I mean. They’ve nuanced the understanding of some of this stuff to such a fine degree that it’s fascinating to explore.

Hale: It is. It’s fascinating to explore. If nothing else, just to understand your own process. I think the Eastern stuff is just as brilliant as the stuff that’s been discovered in the West. A lot of it has thousands of years of science, of experimentation, of report, Which all the stuff that’s going on in the West doesn’t have. You need both. I think you need the creativity and the openness that comes from this exploration that’s happening in the West. You also need to honor the roots, honor the traditions, where they have these traditions that go back thousands of years to say, “Ah, that’s all based on the fact that I am.” That’s craziness.

Rick: That’s why it’s nice that with today’s communication and transportation, there’s a kind of a hybridization going on between the two, in which the best of both worlds can emerge. We can have something that’s systematic and scientific and so on, And yet has the depth of wisdom that the East can provide.

Hale: It’s wonderful to have both. I think we’re very fortunate to live at this time.

Rick: Lester, it sounds like, was conversant with Eastern stuff. You were quoting him earlier as referring to vasanas and whatnot.

Hale: This particular lifetime… again, there’s two schools of thought in the non-dual space about reincarnation. One is who’s going to reincarnate, which is obviously true, But at the same time, there are bundles of tendencies that not every baby is identical.

Rick: Sure.

Hale: Even before you get to genetics and environment, it’s just not the same. We come in, it may just be a scoop of universal gunk that needs to be worked out, Or it may be that particular streams stay together for long periods of time, which I think is what happens.

Rick: I think so too. I think there’s an easy way of explaining it, which is that, fine, If you want to say the world is an illusion, then the illusory individuality reincarnates into new illusory bodies, Until it doesn’t. But to say that reincarnation is impossible because there’s nobody to reincarnate, It’s like saying eating is impossible because there’s nobody to eat.

Hale: Right. But most of those teachers are still eating.

Rick: They are.

Hale: And again, we’re in the East, though, there are plenty of teachers. I actually met a teacher. He wasn’t even really a teacher. He was called an Avidu. I’ve only been to India once.

Rick: One of those naked sadhu kind of guys.

Hale: Yeah. He had dreadlocks that were longer than his body. He was living on a pile of prasad that was rotting. He smoked a bidi or two a day and had a cup of tea a day. He’d been like that for 25 years. But being around him, it was like there wasn’t even any love. It was like standing at the edge of infinity. He’s since passed. He was also in this interesting place in India. It was a fishing community and there were a lot of Muslims and Hindus working in harmony together. It hadn’t always been that way, but when he moved into that spot, they had been working in harmony. Both communities completely respected him. In fact, the fishermen would occasionally be out fishing and they’d see him walking on the water.

Rick: Wow.

Hale: When he occasionally went for a stroll. His family built a temple to him across the street, which he never entered. He just lived on his pile of prasad and had very little awareness of the world. It is possible for the body-mind to go into states where it doesn’t need to take care of it, but it’s very rare for that to happen. Very rare.

Rick: Right.

Hale: It shouldn’t even be something that’s to aspire to. The goal is the realization, the knowingness, the truth of who you are And to live in an integrated way in life with that truth.

Rick: Most of us don’t aspire to sit on a pile of rotting fruit.

Hale: By the way, there was no smell though.

Rick: Oh, okay.

Hale: He hadn’t bathed in 25 years, but his body actually sparkled.

Rick: I have this picture of Yogananda behind me. It’s actually the audio tapes of the autobiography of a yogi. Most of the people listening to this have probably read that book, But it’s full of stories of things like that. I wouldn’t necessarily dismiss them as fanciful stories. Anything is possible.

Hale: Anything is possible. That’s true.

Rick: But anyway, back to Lester.

Hale: Back to your analogy, which I really like.

Rick: Oh, sure.

Hale: What you’ll find is that when you first start using the Sedona Method, You’re dealing with a lot of rock. It’s just how it feels. Sometimes you feel like you are a rock.

Rick: Help, I’m a rock.

Hale: Right. It’s very, very dense. What happens is as you do this process, you turn the rock into sand. Then you start melting the sand. It would have been glass, but it’s not glass. It becomes water. You turn the sand into water, and then you evaporate the water. That’s basically what happens as you do this process. It naturally helps you dissolve these places inside of you So that you become more and more transparent, more and more like air. You also find that you naturally use this. You come in, most people either come to the method, They’re either in apathy, grief, or fear with a little lust, Or they’re in lust, anger, pride, courageousness. What happens is the people in apathy, grief, and fear with a little lust Start moving into lust, anger, pride, courageousness. The people in anger, pride, courageousness, as they release that, They start moving into acceptance and peace. Towards the end, even that dissolves. That’s the equivalent to the gunas from the East. Tamas is apathy, grief, fear with a little bit of lust. Rajas is lust, anger, pride, courageousness. Then courageousness, acceptance, and peace is sattva. When you’re in the middle of courageousness, you’re 50% selfless, And you’re 50% selfish. You’re 50% “I can” and 50% “I can’t.” You have to be all the way up into courage, Which is at that borderline between sattva and rajas, Or actually when you’re starting to get into pure rajas, Before you’re actually starting to tip the scales Into a more constructive state. What happens, though, is the sattva, though, You don’t have to… One, it’s a gradual thing that happens in progression, But every time you use the process, You can be in tamas or rajas, or be in apathy, grief, and fear, Lust, anger, pride, courageousness, And you do the process, and in just minutes, You find yourself feeling acceptance and peace. So you get this immediate shift in consciousness, Which is, again, that really helps for Westerners.

Rick: Yeah, they like the immediate.

Hale: “Oh, that’s very patient. Yeah, sure, 20 years from now, I’ll be more patient. Peaceful walking.” So? That doesn’t do me any good now. But when you use the Sedona Method, You find that your life also… You may still have lots of rocks, But you find that certain parts of your life Have already turned to air.

Rick: And in the presence of all that air, To stretch the metaphor, The rocks tend to dissolve more readily, As opposed to when it’s all rock.

Hale: Right. And you can discern them. You start to see the rocks. Now, people don’t always like that part, Because most of us live in so much denial That we don’t want to deal with the things that we’re denying. So part of the process, too, Is you start to see your limitations much more clearly. You see the remaining rock more clearly. And that’s not always comfortable or pleasant, Because most people want to pretend – They hear about spirituality, And they want to pretend, “Well, I’m air.”

Rick: That’s interesting. I remember one of the first times I sat In the close proximity of someone That I considered an enlightened person, A saint, All of a sudden my weakness, My inner weakness, Became so vividly obvious to me, In a way that it hadn’t been before. But somehow the contrast made it so clear.

Hale: Absolutely. And that’s a natural thing that happens. That’s part of the benefit of being around someone Who’s more airy than you are. Because when two rocks meet, They just bump up against each other.

Rick: Yeah.

Hale: And it’s not a lot of fun. But even when the rock meets sand, There’s still more room. The rock maybe sometimes gets in the way, Maybe the sand sometimes gets in the way, But there’s more room. But the more flowing, The more open you are, That may make people around you feel insecure at first, But it also sometimes makes them feel a lot more relaxed, Because you’re not trying to change them. You’re not trying to convince them about your point of view. You’re not trying to make them into something they’re not. You’re loving them for their rocks, their sand, Their water, and their air. Loving them for all of it. And you’re also loving them because what they are is beyond that. You’re not seeing them as just the bundle of tendencies, The bundle of stuff.

Rick: Right. Seeing the full spectrum of what they are.

Hale: Exactly. So that is one of the benefits of knowing people Who are maybe a little ahead of the game than you are. As long as you don’t put them up on a pedestal, There’s a learning that happens just in that non-verbal interchange.

Rick: There’s an osmosis that takes place.

Hale: Definitely.

Rick: That’s what Ramana meant when he said, “The greatest teaching is silence.” You could just sit in his presence in that silence And it’s seeped into your pores, so to speak.

Hale: Right.

Rick: Let’s get back to Lester a little bit more. You spent decades commuting from New York to Sedona to take week-long…

Hale: It wasn’t decades. I met him in ’76. He was in New York at the time. I met him on 57th Street in Manhattan. He used to do introductory lectures. Actually, he would sit in on them. Someone else would usually do them. But they were done in an apartment on 57th Street. So I did the process and then I immediately wanted to – It was like everything else I’d ever done. I did the basic program in November of 1976. They only had two other programs. They had an advanced program, which I did in January of ’77. Then for a while they had an instructor program, Which I did in February of ’77. And I started leading workshops in my living room. But I was only 22 years old and I really was not ready. So that didn’t last. I started to help out at their apartment office and I started to do some workshops at home. Then we mutually recognized that I needed to go out and live this for a while Before I got so involved. Then they started doing what they called intensives in Arizona in ’81. From ’81 to ’87 I commuted from New York City to Sedona four times a year. During a ten-year period they did 40. I think I was at 38 of them. They were week-long or nine-day intensives Where you really did this work intensively. But I loved it so much it was my highest priority. Then in ’87…

Rick: During this whole ten-year period where you’re doing that, What sort of changes were you undergoing? You must have been going through a lot.

Hale: Every part of my life changed, every single part. My relationships got better, my health got better, My sense of happiness and joy and peace, No matter what was going on around me, Just became more and more profound. I remember the first time I ever – I actually started having experiences of non-duality and peace when I was very young. But then I kind of forgot about that And then got really lost in the whole pre-teen, teenager years And then into college. Then in college I read “Autobiography of a Yogi” and “There is a River” by Edgar Cayce. Then my whole life did a 180 And I’ve been a rabid lover of truth ever since. And then Lester actually, when I met him, Early ’77 Wester gave me teachings of Ramana Maharshi And said, “This is the closest to what I teach, is this Eastern teacher, so I would highly recommend you read this.” So I’ve been a fan of Ramana since ’77 when Lester introduced me to him. So in ’87 I moved to Arizona To try to help Lester with the organization he had established in Arizona. And then I moved to Sedona in ’89 for a couple of years And then I moved back to Phoenix. And then somewhere, I think it was in ’91 or ’92, I went from attending retreats to leading them. I can’t remember, it was ’91 or ’92. So Lester was still alive and then in ’94 he passed away. In the early ’90s he gave all his teachings to me and told me, And I actually wrote him on this, And said, “Lester, what? Me? What are you, crazy? I’m just a student. Why would you want me to take these teachings?” And he was absolutely insistent. And I said, “Why don’t we form a non-profit?” “No, I want you to personally hold the teachings.” So he gave the teachings to me in the early ’90s And he also said to me that they will evolve. When he gave me the teachings, it was just that first way of letting go, dropping it. The other four ways of letting go all evolved from just working with people. It’s what happens spontaneously.

Rick: Would you say it’s evolving still?

Hale: Of course. I’m going to be doing a retreat in about ten days. People are coming from all over the world. Actually, some people are going to be attending via remotely. For the first time ever, we’re streaming.

Rick: Teleprompting, televising.

Hale: And for the past few months, things have been coming to me like, “Oh, well do this with them.” By the way, when those things come, I just put them aside. I’m going, “We’ll see.” But when I show up in the room, if that’s needed –

Rick: It comes. And are there people who come to this thing now who’ve been doing it almost as long as you have?

Hale: Yes, there’s a few.

Rick: Quite a few years?

Hale: There’s some… Annrika James is one of the original Sedona Method instructors. She stopped for a while and I had her start instructing again two or three years ago. She took the basic program in October of 1976. She is actually going to be assisting at this retreat. There’s all varying degrees of people who get into it, stay for a while, go away, come back. Or they stay… It’s all over the place.

Rick: Sure, as the spirit moves them. I heard you say at one point that you’d like to get this videotape out to about 1% of the world’s population. Actually, you know, Maharishi used to say that about TM, 1%. Eventually he got back to square root of 1% would do it. He had physicists telling him that if in a laser, If only the square root of 1% of the light waves become coherent, Then all the others kind of fall into line. Maybe that can be your goal.

Hale: Actually, my goals for the Sedona Method have been falling away. The more non-duality takes me, the less I can hold on to even those goals. I think it’s an amazing tool and it’s helped hundreds of thousands of people. I feel like I’m just an instrument. If it’s supposed to get out to a lot more people, it will. If it’s not, it won’t. It took a lot of my rajas to get it out.

Rick: It has been dissolved.

Hale: So it’s going to get out or it won’t.

Rick: A few years from now you might be just sitting on a prasad heap smoking biddies.

Hale: No idea. The truth is my life now is so exquisite every moment that I trust that I’m being led to what is appropriate Both for this body-mind and for the Sedona Method. The other thing I did a couple of years ago, for many years, from Lester dying in ’94, then ’96 my wife and I started a company called Sedona Training Associates. It went through its rajasic phase. Again, when Lester was alive, even from 1976, or he actually started in ’73, I met him in ’76, but from ’76 to ’94 when he gave me all the techniques and said, “You continue” And actually even while he was still alive, he died in ’94. When he passed away, only 7,000 people had done the process. Since then, hundreds of thousands of people have done it. If it’s supposed to keep getting bigger, it will, but about two years ago I gave the entire business operations To another organization. I’m still the figurehead and I still do all the seminars and the products and promotions and all that kind of stuff. I still help with all that, but I don’t have anything to do with the business or its goals or any of that. It’s somebody else now.

Rick: Usually, spiritual organizations, when they get to a certain size, there’s all kinds of craziness that happens, Schisms within them and conflicts. You know the story. It happens in almost every spiritual movement. Have you guys gone through that kind of thing?

Hale: The story of when Lester was alive, there was a group of people who sued him because they didn’t get enlightenment.

Rick: That’s a good one.

Hale: It’s a good one. The organization was not really run that well, so there was a whole bankruptcy. The people who were suing for not getting enlightenment joined the people who were part of the bankruptcy. It was a mess. It was a complete mess. It was an amazing growth experience for me because I was in the middle of this whole thing. I was working as a volunteer for his organization, Sedona Institute. They didn’t just sue him and the organization. They sued everyone involved. Here I was, a volunteer, and it was a $22 million lawsuit. It ended up in a bankruptcy. Here I was. I didn’t have anything.

Rick: You can’t get blood from a stone, right?

Hale: But it was an amazing growth experience. It was hell for a couple of years, but by the time it started resolving itself, There was so much that had been ripped out of this body-mind mechanism. It was like a quantum leap, even though it was a very unpleasant one.

Rick: That reminds me of something that you mentioned in the recordings and that I also experience in life, Which is just about everything becomes grist for the mill. You can go through all kinds of intense stuff, but it’s actually, If we understand that we live in an intelligent universe, then this stuff isn’t just happening capriciously. It’s happening because there are lessons inherent in it.

Hale: Absolutely. My feeling is there is no accidents, and there are no mistakes. That’s my deep knowingness.

Rick: Everything is an opportunity for growth.

Hale: Everything is an opportunity for growth, as long as you don’t try to figure out what the opportunity is. It’s kind of funny. If you lead with your head, you try to figure out what message is this thing you just said.

Rick: They say karma is unfathomable.

Hale: Completely unfathomable. What we do in our seminars is I tell people, let go of wanting to figure it out. If you really let that go, and you let go of the emotion, the thoughts, the feelings, the trauma, If there’s a lesson, it will reveal itself to you. You don’t have to go looking for it. One of the things that happens so much in self-help is people will hold on to suffering for years Because they think they haven’t learned the lesson yet, or they haven’t gotten the message. That’s all unnecessary.

Rick: Yeah. There are so many more things we could talk about, but I always reach this point where we’re nearing two hours. I think, okay, we should stop.

Hale: Oh my God, we are?

Rick: Yeah.

Hale: I had no idea that much time went by.

Rick: Yeah. As Groucho said, “Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.” But we still have a bit more time. What I’m inclined to ask you is where do you see – I mean, you’ve already sort of described this in talking about how you deal with the organization and everything, But everybody has a next horizon. They have a sort of – I mean, sure, we’re living in the now, but there’s a sort of a sense as we go from day to day Of what’s unfolding for us, the quality of the deepening that seems to be taking place. Could you describe that in your own life? Do you still specifically use the Sedona Method, or has it become more subtle than that, Almost kind of an automatic way of functioning?

Hale: There’s several things. I’ll start with the last and work backwards. The Sedona Method has been so integrated into my experience that my tendency, When tendencies or issues or whatever arise in consciousness, which they still do, Is most of it just releases by itself.

Rick: Spontaneously.

Hale: It’s all spontaneous. Yeah. So that’s one thing that’s happening.

Rick: Like a lion on air.

Hale: Right. It actually is like that. There’s… I’m sure I still have a few stones I haven’t found, and I’m always actively looking. And occasionally the sand gets in the works a little bit.

Rick: Can you create new stones by looking, or is that not a problem?

Hale: I don’t think you can create stones from looking, but you can certainly create water or sand.

Rick: Like you can stir up something that doesn’t even need to be stirred up.

Hale: Probably. So most of my life is air. And sometimes it’s humid air. And occasionally I’ll find a little sand or a stone here or there.

Rick: Phoenix has those big sand storms.

Hale: Right, it does. They even have a name. I don’t remember what they’re called now. Fortunately, Sedona is far enough away from Phoenix that most of those storms never affect us. Although it’s hot at the moment. It’s about 100 degrees. It’s going to be 100 degrees today, which is unusual for here. Usually we’re 10 to 15 degrees cooler than Phoenix. Phoenix is probably going to be 115 today. But anyway, so… And I’ll occasionally pull out the process. If I find a little sand where the air has gotten very humid, Or I find a little pebble somewhere, I’ll take out the process and use it. And then the other thing that I’m doing at the moment is I’ve really been spending a lot of focus on integrating my energetic systems.

Rick: How so?

Hale: Just through yoga and just honoring Shakti and things like that. So a lot of that has been happening spontaneously. And some of it’s been focused where I’m doing practices that support that.

Rick: Did you get the sense that they were unintegrated in some way?

Hale: No.

Rick: And this move to want to integrate them?

Hale: No, it’s interesting. I didn’t even know there was an issue there. But I was attracted to some information from the East that really helped open up a whole other world Or a whole other window for me to start exploring. So I’ve been exploring that window.

Rick: Want to mention what it was or would you rather not?

Hale: Well, the only reason I don’t want to is it’s one of these things that they can only handle a very small number of people. And I wouldn’t want to mention it in a public forum like this, although I just did. Now I’m going to be inundated.

Rick: Yeah “What was it? What was it?”

Hale: But the bottom line is it’s something that only about 20 people do it a year. So it’s really not a wide open thing. And they take only very serious seekers.

Rick: I just want to say in passing that I think it’s cool that you admit that. There’s a lot of people who are heads of spiritual organizations that wouldn’t dream of admitting publicly That they’re actually doing some practice that they might find helpful other than the one they teach. Because it sort of implies that their teaching is deficient if they’re doing something else.

Hale: In fact, the one thing I will say about them is they’re incredibly supportive of this work And I think it’s one, it’s incredible preparation for the East End Game. But also there’s such a harmony between what we do and what they do That that’s part of the reason I’m able to really focus on it is because there’s a huge harmony there. And a lot of what they do happens spontaneously in my work. But for me specifically I needed something more focused. And I’m not embarrassed to say that because it’s really improved my ability to share my work Just from being open to this other modality.

Rick: Nice. Beautiful.

Hale: And so what my living experience is now is in the background there’s this sense of like the cosmic sound. I hear it all the time. I go between states of bliss and peace most of the time. The non-dual state is also here most of the time. And I’m exploring that now from a whole new perspective. Not just using my set of tools but a whole other set of tools. And it’s my goal, there is a goal there, still a goal there. It’s interesting. There’s very few goals left in life but there’s still one there. And my goal there is twofold. One is to, in the East they call it Nirvikalpa and Sahaj. So most of the people who are the people in the non-dual space here, especially in the United States, Have experienced neither. They’re not living Sahaj. They might think they are but they’re not.

Rick: And you’re referring to forms of Samadhi.

Hale: Yes.

Rick: These are like adjectives to refer to states of oneness.

Hale: Basically they’re varying degrees of Samadhi.

Rick: Which means evenness of intellect by the way. Sama means evenness and buddhi means intellect.

Hale: Yes, it’s interesting. And again, what I’ve been teaching all these years is an amazing preparation for Samadhi. So I’ve been going into Samadhi.

Rick: Just sort of eyes closed, pure Samadhi state.

Hale: Yes, and also eyes open.

Rick: Yes, while driving your car, right? Or walking your dog or whatever.

Hale: So my goal is, again, I’m honest, Sahaj has not been achieved. Ramana talks about the natural state where there’s no longer even the ability to do any kind of process. Because there’s genuinely no one to process. You’re not just saying that. So that has not been achieved, but it is my goal.

Rick: Nice.

Hale: And so my other goal is to keep working on this instrument until it is that way all the time. And then see if I can bring that completely as integrated as everything else I’ve been teaching. And I’ve been starting to do pieces of that, and it’s already coming out in the seminars, Which is what I’ll be doing soon.

Rick: So you’re saying if you achieve those goals personally, And some people cringe when they hear that kind of terminology, “achieving goals, oh my God.” But if you achieve those goals personally, Then your natural inclination would be to incorporate them into what you teach so that others may do so.

Hale: Not incorporate so much, because the teaching itself is integrous. It’s interesting, as I’ve been experiencing Samadhi more and more, It hasn’t really changed my teaching. It’s just where I’m teaching from. Which is another validation for me that I must have been on the right path These past 35 years to be doing what I’m doing. And I couldn’t possibly teach these Eastern teachings that I’ve been studying, Because that would require a whole other lifetime of study.

Rick: Yes, it’s not your toolkit.

Hale: It’s not my tool kit. So what I intend to do is not integrate any of it. I also think that would be out of integrity, because it’s not my lineage. But what’s happening is it’s seeping into everything I do. So I’m really looking forward to seeing what happens. And again, the other thing that may happen from that, I may reach a point where I stop teaching. That’s a very real possibility. But so far, it’s only deepening what I do with people.

Rick: Nice. Well, I really appreciate your candor. It’s refreshing. A lot of teachers hold their cards really close to their chest. They wouldn’t admit that they’ve gone off to explore some other thing, Or that their experience is evolving. There’s this kind of subtle tendency to maintain an image, And I find it really endearing that you don’t do that.

Hale: Again, why protect something that isn’t real?

Rick: Right.

Hale: One of the things I say in my seminars is, if you’re protecting something, it’s not real. So if you even think you have to protect this image as the teacher, you’re protecting an illusion. Why protect it? Let it dissolve. And again, if it requires maintenance – uh, Jerry Stocking, who I don’t know if you know who he is, But years ago he was very popular. He did NLP on himself intensively. And for a year and a half, he was in a very altered state, and then it all crashed. His whole world crashed around him. But he has some great quotes. And one of them is that reality requires no maintenance.

Rick: Nice.

Hale: And that’s been my experience. If it’s real, it doesn’t require maintenance. It also doesn’t require protection. If you’re re-protecting it, it’s not real.

Rick: That’s good. Shall we close on that, or do you want to make some kind of closing thoughts or remarks?

Hale: Oh, the only thing I would just say is, just to come back to something that’s very dear to my heart, Which is that basically the message you’ve probably heard on this channel more than once Is that you already are what you’re seeking.

Rick: Yes.

Hale: And honestly, that’s my living experience, that I’ve yet to meet someone that isn’t already whole, That isn’t already complete, that isn’t already enough as they are. And just know that you can honor and live that, but still also honor whatever your process is. So follow your heart when it comes to the teachers you interact with. Follow your heart when it also comes to teachings. And don’t think because it has a form to it, it’s wrong or bad. Know that if it has a form for you, that’s what’s appropriate for you in this moment. There is no one right way for everyone. And so just let yourself be open to what your heart tells you is the next thing. In my experience, your intuitive knowingness of your heart never lies. Your mind is lying continuously. It doesn’t know anything else. It’s all a bunch of lies. But your heart, your intuitive knowingness, that sense of clear reason, which in the Iseko Buddhi, when it’s clean, when it’s crystal, then it’s also a good representation. It’s not getting in the way, but the way most minds are, they’re getting in the way all the time. But rather than follow your mind, follow your heart. That’s a good thing to do. And just know that the goal is possible. If you’re suffering anywhere in your life, you don’t have to suffer. It’s not noble. You can be free of whatever your experience of suffering is. You can really be free of it, no matter what it is. And the goal of total freedom, of living life as love, as peace, as joy, is attainable to you. Not just this body, mind, or my interviewer, or all the other people you’ve watched here. Don’t put any of us up on a pedestal. If we can do it – we’re not special. If we can do it, you can do it. And again, it’s been my experience through everything I’ve done for the past 35 years, That this is contagious and it’s not special. So follow your heart and go for it.

Rick: Great stuff. Beautiful words. I think people are really going to enjoy hearing all this. So thanks. This has been wonderful. Let me make a few concluding remarks. I’ve been speaking with Hale Dwoskin, who is the primary teacher of the Sedona Method. I’ll be linking to Hale’s website, where you’ll find plenty of information about how to learn more about the Sedona Method. Get into it if you like. There’s a book you can get, and there’s a CD, a DVD you can watch, and all kinds of things. There’s always stuff. It seems like you’ve structured it in a way that people can dip their toe in, Or they can just dive in headlong, or anywhere in between. You can find a niche that works for you and take advantage of it. And this interview has been one in an ongoing series. You can find them all archived at www.batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, which is an acronym for Buddha at the Gas Pump. I left the A in at the end, G-A-P, rather than just G-P, because otherwise you wouldn’t be able to pronounce it.

Hale: Unless you spoke Sanskrit, then there would be some sound for that.

Rick: So go to BatGap, and you’ll find all the interviews I’ve done. There’s an alphabetical list on the right-hand side, And there’s a menu under “Other Stuff” where you can see them all listed chronologically. There are a few other things I’d like to run through. One is a chat group that springs up around each interview, And usually doesn’t stay on the topic of the interview, but I can’t bother to police it. Feel free to participate in that. There is a link to an audio podcast, if you’d like to get this on your iPod And listen to it while you’re commuting or something. There’s a “Donate” button, which I appreciate people clicking if they can. There’s a link to an email sign-up thing, so you’ll be notified by email each time there’s a new interview. Also, under the “Other Stuff” menu, there’s a “Volunteer Opportunities” link. If you look at that page, there’s something I’m racking my brains with right now, Which is trying to get a camcorder to work with Skype. If you have the technical wherewithal to get into that kind of stuff, I could maybe use some help from somebody. I’ll put other things up on that page as they develop. For instance, there’s a team of people who are doing transcriptions and translations, So that on YouTube you can see this in your native language. Somebody just did one in Polish. In any case, there’s all that there. I think that about does it. Thanks a lot, Hale.

Hale: Thank you.

Rick: It’s really been fun talking to you.

Hale: Likewise.

Rick: Thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching, and we’ll see you next week.