Igal Moria Interview

Summary

• Introduction: Igal Moria’s spiritual journey began in his teens.
• Joining Maharishi Mahesh Yogi: At 19, he joined the Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement and worked on developing courses.
• Leaving the Ashram: He sought independence and left the ashram.
• Traumatic Event: Experienced a significant traumatic event and its aftermath.
• Meeting Andrew Cohen: Introduced to Andrew Cohen and his teachings on enlightenment.
• Spiritual Leadership: Discussed the allure and challenges of spiritual leadership.
• Bigger Reality: Recognition of a larger reality beyond personal experiences.
• Overcoming Inertia: Emphasized the importance of embracing change and overcoming inertia.
• Liberation from Anxiety: Found liberation from anxiety and expressed gratitude for Maharishi’s teachings.
• Meeting Papaji and Ramana Maharshi: Discussed the impact of these spiritual figures.
• Shifting Consciousness: The power of trust and shifting consciousness.
• Classical Enlightenment: Explored the classical idea of enlightenment.
• Monotheism: Discussed the origins and development of monotheism.
• Engagement with Others: Enlightenment through engagement with others.
• Beyond Ego: The power of coming together beyond ego.
• Five Tenets of Enlightenment: Outlined the five tenets of enlightenment.
• Meditation: The value of meditation for freedom and contrasting meditation techniques.
• New Enlightenment: Embracing both inner and outer existence in the new enlightenment.

Full interview, edited for readability

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and this is a weekly show in which I speak with someone who has undergone a spiritual awakening and different guests tend to define that differently, but I think that’s over time providing a very interesting perspective on the varieties of, in which, the different ways in which spiritual awakening can show up. My guest this week is a dear old friend of mine named Igal Moria. And Igal and I have known each other for probably over three decades and had all sorts of adventures together. Here in Fairfield, Iowa when we were students at Maharishi International University, and then on courses and international staff of the TM movement in Switzerland and various other European countries. In India We were on a big project together in the Philippines where Igal was head of a comparative religions development group, which maybe he’ll talk about more, and I was working with him on that. So we’ve had all kinds of adventures and in recent years we both branched off in different directions, but we’ve stayed in touch. And I think I’ll start by having Igal just fill out his own biography a little bit, give us a sense of where he’s from and what his course of life has been, and then we’ll get more deeply into the interview. So take it away.

Igal: Okay. So I was born 56 years ago in Israel, in Tel Aviv, and I grew up there. And sometime during my military service at age 19, I came across Transcendental Meditation, and shortly afterwards, I, maybe three weeks afterwards, I heard an audio tape by Maharishi in which he described cosmic consciousness. And I remember that hearing him say those words, “cosmic consciousness,” and also it was in the context of a residence course where we did some more meditation. It was as if my whole life was sorted for me at that point.

Rick: Sorted?

Igal: Sorted, yes.

Rick: Right, right.

Igal: In the sense that I knew, okay, I’m going to learn with this man, I’m going to teach the meditation, and I’m going to spend as much time as I can working with him and learning with him. And it was just basically, it was like until that moment, I was a confused teenager who basically didn’t know left from right. And at that moment, it was as if everything got sorted. It got very simple. It was very clear that this is what I have to do and this is what I was going to do. And this is exactly what happened. And I spent 25 years from that year, which is 1973, to 1998. Maharishi was the hub of my life. I was a teacher. I was made a teacher very soon afterwards. I started working with him on religion. He recognized very early on my passion for religion and my insight into religious texts and asked me to look into the different religions. And that was until 1998. And to just condense everything very shortly, around that time, I already started kind of feeling that, not that it’s time for something else, but I was already in Israel and even though he at one point invited me back to, I kind of felt that it was that chapter with him was over and I thought I’ll continue teaching TM. I was a very successful TM teacher in the 90s. I was sometimes teaching 50 to 60 people a month. And I was living comfortably and I felt, OK, so that’s how, that’s the shape life is going to take. And I was also becoming very well known in Israel, interviewed on TV, radio. Everything was just a perfect bourgeois picture.

Rick: And you feel like you might have been feeling like that chapter was almost over, if everything was going so well.

Igal: No, the chapter with working with Maharshi closely was over.

Rick: And why was that? Was he less accessible or something?

Igal: No, I don’t know how much it makes sense to go into this in the context of our conversation, but I’ll say in a nutshell that two and a half years ago, before that, three years before that, he actually asked me to leave the ashram. That I was with him in Flodro in Holland and he asked me to leave, which was a shock for everybody involved. And the reason he said that, he said, “You have become too independent for me.” Because I have become independent. I have started realizing, look, I’m 40-something. The reason I joined Maharshi was in order to be enlightened. I didn’t join him just to teach TM and to work on religion. And I realized that I was not much closer to enlightenment up to 20-some years with him. And, than I was in the beginning. I knew a lot more about it. I had fantastic experiences with him. I loved him dearly. I had full confidence in his enlightenment and I loved TM, but I was not enlightened. And I was, And to be honest, I didn’t see around me people that I could be inspired by their level of enlightenment, to put it mildly. And on top of that, I also saw that another thing that started bothering me is, I realized that neither I nor many around me, after many, many years of practice, even though the practice has become in some ways more proficient, that we have become more moral people. And I saw this in myself. I said no I have actually, Maharshi’s emphasis was always on just do the practice and then you will change morally. And there was even research to show that you become more moral person just by practicing TM. And I, I didn’t feel I was in any way morally, spiritually different than I was when I came to him. And again, I must say that, at least from my perspective, limited as it was, I could not see that anybody in the circles that I was with, which was those that are closest to him, was in any way an exemplary of enlightenment or purity of motive or of anything of that sort. So I began to actually look for my own, to try and find my own way of making sense of the whole thing, of my own life.

Rick: I’m not, I don’t mean to interrupt, but I just want to say that I’m glad you went into all that, because it parallels my experience very much. I won’t elaborate on that now, because, this is, I’m interviewing you, but both went through very similar realizations.

Igal: Yeah. And he was very confusing, I must tell you, because as I said, I loved him dearly. I was very attached to him. Not attached, attached also in a personal way, because he was extremely fatherly to me all of the years. I mean, just as an example, when my father died, he invited my mother to come and live with us. I mean, he was like unbelievably generous, and he always encouraging, uplifting. So there was a very personal dimension to this, and I could not at that time conceive of my life away from the ashram, but I felt I have to find a way of making sense of the whole thing on my own. And at one point, definitely I pushed the edge.

Rick: Were you doing things that were overtly…?

Igal: Yeah, I was doing things which were overtly not ashram. I mean, I don’t want to go into all these details, but I definitely was not towing the line.

Rick: So it wasn’t just a subtle inner independence.

Igal: No, I was…

Rick: Your behavior was getting more independent.

Igal: Yeah. Yeah. It was definitely. It was bothering people around me, and it was bothering him, in a sense. And I understood him when he said, look, I understood what he said. He said, “You’ve become too independent for me.” But it was also, it meant a lot. It’s very revealing. So anyway, I left, and it was… It was, probably speaking of experiences, it was probably one of the most traumatic experiences I can think of. In fact, on the way to Israel, I stopped for a few weeks with friends in Tuscany, and I went to an osteopath in Firenze. And after treating me for about five, seven minutes, he stopped and asked me if anybody had died in my family recently. And I said no. And then he said, “It’s interesting, because your body has a trauma of somebody that I found when their father dies.”

Rick: Interesting. Yeah.

Igal: And it was definitely a devastating event. And then I went to Israel, and not really knowing anything to do. I’ve been with him since I was a kid. The only thing I knew how to do was TM, and the only thing I wanted to do was teach TM, really, because I loved that. That was one thing that I deeply loved, doing pujas, teaching, giving mantras, teaching things. It was fantastic. And everybody in Israel told me, “Forget it. You’ll never be able to make a living out of it. There’s no chance. Everybody’s tried and failed.” And I said, “Well, let me give it a try.” I said, “First course was one person, second course was two people, and third, three people.” Like that, it kept going. And sure enough, word of mouth got me more and more and more people. And I started actually having big courses. And it was at a time where not very many people were having big courses in the world. And it was fantastic. It was. And all I kept thinking of was, “I want to go back. I want to go back. I want to go back. I want to go back. I have to go back.”

Rick: Back to Maharishi.

Igal: Yes. In the meantime, life unfolded and things developed. But In my mind, there was this thing, “I want to go back.” And then one day, I asked him. And there was some contact also. He had, Maharishi, there was something so sweet about him. He had this subtle, indirect way of communication. We were so Indian. And in which ways that he would let you know that he’s thinking of you. He wasn’t over it. Well, like for example, the Israeli movement asked for a particular master tape so they can edit it for the National Law Party. So he would tell his video people, “Send it to Igal.” Now, there was no objective reason in the world why they would send it to me. I wasn’t the national leader. I wasn’t the head of the NLP, the National Law Party. But it was a way of kind of saying, “Hi, Igal, I’m thinking of you.” And all things like that. Sometimes he would suddenly have somebody call me and ask some question about religion. My research. He was very sweet. He said, “Hey, we’re still– everything’s cool. Just keep on going and keep on going.” And at one point, after two and a half years, I asked, “Can I come back?” And he said, “Yes, you can.” And come back to Perusha. And at that time, they were in North Carolina.

Rick: And Perusha is a monastic program. Yeah, of which I was a part of. I was a part of that program from its very inception from 1981. And he says, “Go to that group and join them.” And I started packing, and then I actually asked myself, “Where am I going?” If I go back, it’s going to be to the same questions I had. I mean, I loved him and I missed him. But then I had–that was the point where I had to actually admit to myself, “It’s actually over. And I’m going to stay put.” And at one point, I realized there’s nowhere to go back to, and I just have to just continue. And I thought, “Okay, so let me just continue teaching TM.” And it was at that point that actually I realized that chapter is already closed. With all the nostalgia, with all the love that I felt for him, it was finished. Because then I knew if I went back, it was the same dilemmas. It was the same things that didn’t make sense. It was the same–and I just felt, “Okay.”

Rick: You weren’t going to see him in North Carolina anyway. You’d just be with a bunch of guys.

Igal: Well, no, the thing is I knew that if he sent me to North Carolina, after a while when he needed something on religion, he would call me back. I had the feeling that that wasn’t the issue.

Rick: Yeah That sooner or later–and maybe I was wrong. I didn’t know. I had the feeling that he was that way, that he would be. Because it’s also that he invested a lot in training me, to be honest. I mean, he really did.

Rick: Training you to be honest, or are you just saying, “To be honest, he invested a lot in training you?”

Igal: To be honest, he invested a lot.

Rick: Right, right. That kind of had me going there for a minute.

Igal: He invested a lot to train me. And I felt that he hadn’t yet–that for which he prepared me for, he had not yet started utilizing me, going out there on the whole religion thing. But anyway, it was just a feeling that, “Look, it’s over, and there’s no–and that’s it.” And I was thinking that this was it. I was going to finally, at the age of 45, settle down. And I was in a relationship at the time after so many years of being a monk. I had a beautiful house. I was teaching TM. I was successful. I said, “Okay, fine. We’ll just–.” But then nature has ways of playing tricks on you.

Rick: Yeah.

Igal: And I had heard about my present teacher, Andrew Cohen. I had heard about him already sometime in the early ’90s. I had come across something, some magazine, the magazine issue, and I had seen his picture. I had heard very good things about him, that he’s very serious and all that. But I was really not interested, and I never read anything of his. And funnily enough, the fact that he was a New York Jew just put me off. I said, “What do New York Jews know about enlightenment?” And funnily enough, I started hearing more and more about him in Israel, from all kinds of different directions. It was not from one person. Here one person, somebody mentioned him, and here, somebody mentioned him. And I said, “Wow, that’s interesting.” But I never–I was not looking for another teacher. I was really satisfied with being a Maharshi student, external student, I mean, a remote student. And then one night, I, Tel Aviv can get very sticky, humid, and hot in the summer and the fall. And one of those very, very humid nights, I couldn’t fall asleep, and there were some mosquitoes in the air, and all that. And I was really annoyed, and I just got up and just basically started surfing the web, aimlessly. Without any particular thing. And I came across somebody else’s site, and they had two articles of Andrew Cohen on that site. And I said, “Hmm, interesting. Again, I hear the name. Why don’t I read the articles?” And it was literally out of boredom, and having nothing else to do. And I was floored.

Rick: By what you read.

Igal: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah

Igal: I was floored because it was like as if somebody had put a mirror to my face. And it wasn’t a very pretty picture. He was describing in that article the whole predicament of the boomer generation, and their, how they started with a very big passion to get enlightenment, and they sold out, and they became bourgeois, and they settled down, and all they wanted was comfort. There were things that he was saying, like, “Everybody wants to get enlightenment, but nobody wants to change.” Powerful things he was saying about the call for integrity.

Rick: Well, you kind of wanted to change, but you felt like you hadn’t changed.

Igal: Yeah, and I felt that…I don’t He was saying the boomers have become cynical about the possibility of change. And I realized this was true about me.

Rick: Yeah

Igal: I was more interested in teaching a lot of people TM than I was interested about getting enlightenment at that point. Enlightenment wasn’t even something I was even thinking about. I kind of gave up.

Rick: Yeah, there’s a lot of people in my town here who feel that way. They think, “I’ve been doing this for 30, 40 years, and at the rate I’m going, it’s not going to happen, so I’m just going to meditate, do my job, raise my family,

Igal: Exactly

Rick: and live out the rest of my life. It just isn’t going to happen the way I thought it was.”

Igal: Exactly

Rick: And that’s part of the reason I got motivated to do this show, because I want to show examples of people who are, in fact, making breakthroughs, and experiencing, kind of fulfilling the original promise.

Igal: Right. Well, actually, that’s what happened that night. What happened was he, in some way, rekindled the spirit. He rekindled in me the spirit with which I came to the spiritual life to begin with. It’s like I felt I was 19 again.

Rick: Wow.

Igal: And I was totally floored. It was.. The two things.. At first I felt that somebody just gave me a real strong, how do you call it when somebody hits you with a punch? Yes, a big strong punch in the stomach.

Rick: Right. Knock wind out of you, so to speak.

Igal: Yeah. And the other thing was, at the same time, he woke me up, in a sense.

Rick: Right

Igal: He woke me up to what my situation really was. And not my personal situation, but the predicament of my entire generation. And he was challenging me to do something about it. And there was something about it that I could tell the authenticity of his voice. It was unquestionable for me that he was authentic, that he was not he was really authentic. This guy is serious, more serious. He was deadly serious. He was more real than real. And I at that time, I didn’t think I would join him, necessarily. But I, as I read it and reread those two articles, maybe 30 or 40 times, I couldn’t move from the screen.

Rick: It was that night, you sat there and read them?

Igal: That night, I just sat there and I read it and I read it and I couldn’t believe what I was reading. And I couldn’t believe what I was reading. And I was just, I couldn’t have enough of it. And that night, I knew that my, I didn’t know how, I didn’t know if I would be associated with him, necessarily. But I knew that my life as I knew it up until that moment was over. And I’m going to start anew. And I didn’t know what it meant. And I also felt that I have to take off the mantle of a teacher. I was becoming a little bit of a spiritual persona. And I felt that I had to take the mantle off, fold it nicely, put it in the cupboard, and become a student again. And I didn’t know it was being with him, but there was a certain sense of that this chapter, it was this chapter was over. In a sense, maybe it was a recognition of something that happened anyway. But it was basically a recognition, okay, this is where it’s at. And the next morning, my girlfriend, when she woke up, I said, “I’m stopping to teach TM.” And she almost fainted. She said, “What happened to you? You got sick, did you?” But I said, “I’m going to stop teaching TM.” Well, as it turned out, I didn’t have the guts to really do it for a few more months. I started back paddling. There are those moments where a bigger truth gets revealed to you, as if the screens of perception get lifted off your eyes. The screens that block your perception get lift off your eyes, and you suddenly see a much bigger truth. And those moments are rare. And this was one of those incredible, miraculous moments. And then you have to respond to it. But of course, sure enough, those screens will close again, and now how true will you be to what you’ve seen?

Rick: It takes a while to acclimate. It’s like you come out into bright sunshine, and you have to sort of go fade your eyes for a while until you get used to it.

Igal: Maybe that’s what it was, but anyway, I started kind of back paddling. I said, “Look, you’re 50, 45.” Things just started sorting themselves out for the first time. You start to settle down, everything’s cool. What are you looking for? You just finished so many years with a guru. What are you going to do now? Start being a hobo again? What are you going to do? You don’t know how to do anything else. And I was also invested in being the spiritual persona that I became, actually, to be honest. And…

Rick: In other words, there’s a lot of gratification in having people look to you as a spiritual leader.

Igal: Yeah, and I had a lot of friends, and in that relationship with those friends, there was kind of deference that they were feeling towards me because I knew so much, and I’ve been this kind of like spiritual seeker and whatnot. That whole thing that’s very alluring.

Rick: Right

Igal: It’s very… And it was also very sweet relationships. I had a good relationship with my girlfriend. I had very good friends. Things seemed kind of normal.

Rick: Yeah. So, for a few weeks, I kind of like, it’s almost like I knew he was coming to Europe, and I had the whole timetable. And I knew when he was going to be in London, and he was going to be in Copenhagen, like that. I knew the whole thing, and I felt I should go and see him. Then the London journey came, and I said, “Well, I’ll go to Copenhagen.” Then the Copenhagen, “Oh, I’ll go to Brussels,” or whatever. I don’t remember where he went. And then suddenly it was the time of the last trip. It was the last stop on that trip, he was in Amsterdam. And I said to myself, “Okay, this is the moment of test. If I’m not going to go and see him now, it’s going to be one of those spiritual experiences that happen to you, and you get blown away by it, and then you don’t do anything about it.” And it would have been something to tell, “Oh, I had that thing with Andrew Cohen once.” Oh, yeah, I think that was interesting. I should have gone and seen him.

Rick: Yeah.

Igal: And the whole thing will dissolve in no time, and life will go back to exactly the way it was. Or I better really kick ass here and do whatever I can and just go. And it was like a drowning man holding on to a lifesaver. I said, “I have to do this, because this is going to slip away from me.” And within three days, I got the whole thing sorted. I canceled a course, and I just went to Amsterdam and saw him. And two weeks later, I went to spend time with him in India on a retreat that he was offering. And all this, it’s against…

Rick: Obviously, the Amsterdam thing was gratifying.

Igal: It was gratifying, and I still was a bit kind of like… I was like something in me already given up, but something yet didn’t admit I’ve already given up. There was something that was not yet admitting, “Look, it’s over. Just face the music. It’s over.” But something did say, “Wait a minute. Go check it out.” So I wasn’t even going to go to the retreat. And then the retreat came by, and there was this urge, this feeling of, “If I’m not going to be there, the world will collapse.” That kind of urgency. Maharishi used to sometimes ignite that urgency in us, as you very well remember. And this was completely self-generated here. It wasn’t that he was calling me or anything. I suddenly knew, “Look, if I’m not going to be there, the world will collapse.” I have to be there as if my life depended on it. And again, in a very short notice, I arranged to go there. And I went to that retreat. And it was a two-week retreat, and three days after that retreat, everything just basically, all my resistances collapsed. And I knew that my life as it was was really over. I was ready to accept the reality of what I already recognized that first night. And I came back, and within two weeks, I sold everything in the center that I had. I sold my stereo, my air conditioning, my chairs. I transferred the contract to another TM teacher. Everything was just basically, within weeks, everything was closed. My life was packed. I took my suitcases, and off I was with him.

Rick: Did you feel at this stage of the game that you had undergone some kind of shift in consciousness, or was it more like a shift in motivation, where you felt like the course of action you had to follow was different, but essentially you hadn’t yet become any sort of different person inside?

Igal: Look, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t know what to tell you. There was a recognition, a deep recognition of a much bigger reality, and there was the guts and the trust to respond to that recognition.

Rick: That’s a good answer.

Igal: And the, I found that the guts and the trust that I found within me, and the passion to respond to that recognition, was in itself liberating.

Rick: Yeah.

Igal: But it was still the same Igal.

Rick: Right. ; It’s just that I was sensing that my life, that one part of my life was really over, and I was totally at peace with it. And another exciting, totally unknown, and in some ways very scary part was starting.

Rick: It’s interesting because a lot of times when people go through big shifts in life, like they lose their job or they get a divorce or some big thing happens to them, it’s or they get sick or something, it’s very often something that’s forced upon them by circumstances that are beyond their control. And if those circumstances hadn’t forced them to make a big change, they wouldn’t make it, they wouldn’t have made it. But in your case, the circumstances were good, but you were almost forced from within by an inner compulsion to upset the apple cart and change your whole life, on a couple of major occasions now that you’ve mentioned, three of them, 19, and then when you left Maharishi, and then when you made this shift, it was all coming from within. And you probably also had to…

Igal: A combination of things.

Rick: You probably also had to overcome a certain amount of social inertia among all your friends

Igal: Oh, for sure.

Rick: who thought you were going crazy.

Igal: Every step of the way, I mean, It started with my parents when I was in medical school when I was 18.

Rick: Oh, brother.

Igal: Can you imagine how a Jewish mother feels when her son was about to be a doctor? He leaves medical school not because he’s a bad student, but he says, “Look, this is not for me.” It’s like you have a…

Rick: What’s that joke about when a Jewish baby comes?

Igal: Well, when a Jewish mother, you ask her, “How old are your kids?” And she says, “The doctor is five and the lawyer is three.” And in my case, it was definitely the case. I mean, I was groomed to be a doctor, definitely, so, But anyway, so definitely, you had to… These things you had to overcome inertia, and definitely. But the thing is, there’s a beautiful verse in the Hadith. The Hadith is one of the Muslim scriptures. It’s a scripture that, unlike the Koran, it’s considered a revelation. The Hadith is actually the words of the Prophet Muhammad. So, so there’s, in one of the Hadith, Hadith Qudsi, they call it, the holy Hadith, the mystical Hadith, there’s God says something like, I don’t remember the exact words, something like, “When my devotee takes one step towards me, I take five towards him.

Rick: Yeah.

Igal: When he takes, when he walks towards me, I run towards him. When he runs towards me, I embrace him and make him my own.” So I think the spiritual path, I’ve seen it again and again and again, that it’s a matter of really… It’s good that you point this thing about inertia. It’s about overcoming inertia. And once you take the steps of overcoming inertia, whatever the cost, all kinds of things come to actually support you.

Rick: Absolutely. I mean, I’ve experienced that many times myself. It’s as if nature says, “Hey, wait a minute, we’ve got a live one here. Let’s give him some juice.” You know?

Igal: Something like that, yeah. And I remember actually, when I, the day I left, the day I sold everything in my center, it was after the retreat, I was already set to go, I sold everything. And I suddenly was overcome by an incredible anxiety, like completely overcome by the irrationality of what I was doing, the impracticality of it. I was literally shaking with anxiety, “What have I done?” And I went for a walk around the block, and I suddenly was not sure, even, for some reason I got this anxiety that maybe Andrew would suddenly not call me or not really want me as his student or something, I don’t know. It was totally irrational, because I didn’t know him very well. And suddenly he said, “No, I’ve done all that, and I don’t even know if you will want me.” It was completely irrational. And I walked around the block, and I suddenly realized, even if it just happened thus far, even really if, let’s say, it came to this point that I just closed everything, and something will happen that I will not, for some reason, be able to connect with him, as I thought it would be, for whatever reason, even then it was worth it. I had to recognize that just to have the kind of inertia to make the break, to really crash through the wall, which I thought it was not possible, and really completely be free from that which has become a boundary in a sense, because I was so attached to that identity of the teacher, all that. But that in itself, and suddenly there was incredible liberation came from that recognition. And then I was totally at peace, and of course all the anxieties proved to be completely ridiculous and unfounded, as most of our anxieties often are, completely self-generated. So anyway, that was about 11 some years ago, and I’ve been associated with Andrew ever since. I feel an incredible amount of gratitude, and to, I don’t know, of course to Maharishi, but to life for having had the incredible opportunity to be with Maharishi for so many years, and to have such a personal relationship with him, and to really be groomed and educated, and having interacted with one of the most significant spiritual figures of the 20th century. But, so there’s no, I mean I know that some people, in order to leave Maharishi, they had to develop an incredible sense of, some people left Maharishi with kind of slamming the door behind them.

Rick: Right. And I usually look at these kind of people as if they were, I look at all these things as victimized baby battle.

Rick: What is it?

Igal: Victimized baby battle, they just basically, you know, “Ah, he did this to me!” It’s just kind of completely, kind of basically immature and pathetic. So I have only good thoughts and grateful thoughts towards this incredible man, and, but it was over, it was really over. And I’m involved very deeply in the spiritual work with Andrew, which is completely different. And yeah, that’s in a nutshell. So I think that was a long answer.

Rick: That was a nice story. So how do you feel that you have changed now in the last 10-11 years? How different are you as a person, both in terms of your inner subjective experience and in terms of how others might perceive you and the way you behave and so on?

Igal: Wow, that’s a tough one because it’s almost a dangerous one to go down because, to start, first of all, let me say this. First of all, talking about experience, my internal experience, if that’s what you want to hear. That which normally people describe as spiritual experiences, and for example, in the TM movement it was the most important currency.

Rick: Right.

Igal: And in many other spiritual organizations, spiritual experience and the various nuances of spiritual experiences is equated with higher level of consciousness. You have spiritual experiences, you have higher level of consciousness, you have greater purity in your life, etc., etc. Well, I mean, there’s big question marks around that area. And in fact, one of the things that I love so much about Andrew Cohen is that he actually pokes that balloon very strongly and that immediately spoke to me.

Rick: Right. Because I think you and I have been on the spiritual path for long enough to know that some people who have the deepest, clearest, most fantastic spiritual experiences can be outrageous narcissists, bastards, immoral bastards, and sometimes right out jerks.

Rick: Well, that’s why I asked you both about your subjective experience and your behavior, how others might perceive you. Not that I did perceive you with adjectives as strong as that. But I’m wondering how you felt… Well, you continue, you know what I’m saying.

Igal: Yeah, no, so I just wanted to say that definitely am not going to speak too much about my quote-unquote experiences because, at least in the path that I’m on, experiences are definitely… I mean, they’re, look, experience are important, spiritual experiences are important. They’re important as signposts because, they’re important because they signal you, “Hey, Rick, hey, Igal, that three-dimensional world that you live in, it’s not all that there is. There’s a much bigger, more significant… There’s a bigger reality, there’s a bigger picture. And spiritual experiences are signposts that tell you, that remind you, that’s like a poke, something poking you and says, “Come on.” And it also

Rick: Incidentally, I just want to interject and say that I’m not so much interested in spiritual experiences, plural, because, experiences which can come are going to go.

Igal: Right. Right.

Rick: It’s like, there’s a beautiful story about Papaji, I believe it was, who was Andrew Cohen’s teacher, and Ramana Maharshi. When they first met, you may have heard the story and could tell it better than I, Papaji apparently had really rich experiences of Krishna. And he would, Krishna would appear to him and he would play with Krishna and so on and so forth. And he got an appointment to see Ramana Maharshi, which was a rather difficult thing to do at that point because he had become very famous and it was hard to see him and so on. And so on the day of the appointment, he wasn’t there yet and it was time for his appointment. And everyone around was buzzing and saying, “Where is this guy? How disrespectful. What does he think he’s doing?” And ended up, he came late and he said, “I’m sorry I’m late, I was playing with Krishna.” And Ramana Maharshi said, “Is he here now?” And that floored him, that statement, because he realized in the presence of that great saint, with that statement, that transitory experiences, however flashy, aren’t, they don’t cut it. That’s not what it’s all about.

Igal: Right. The whole thing, one of the things, one of the lines, one of the things that Andrew keeps repeating, and he speaks about that from his experience, was that spiritual experience, profound as they may be, do not usually, in and of themselves, lastingly enlighten somebody.

Rick: Right.

Igal: So, and it’s interesting because he himself, his own awakening, occurred as a result of a very profound spiritual experience.

Rick: Right.

Igal: But, and he thought, well that means that anybody else, that that would be the way to enlighten others. In the beginning days.

Rick: Yeah.

Igal: But suddenly he realized, wait a minute, no, people can have spiritual experiences and they can maintain the same level of doubt, of self infatuation, of materialism that they had before. I think you can, I can, without necessarily getting into a lot of details, I think you can, it’s, I should say that this was really the case with me, that having had such a deep recognition of Andrew, having had such a, like the first retreat I took with him was a total inebriating experience. I couldn’t stop meditating. People would go to lunch, I would meditate. People would go to bed, I would meditate. They had, every night in that retreat, it’s around midnight, they had to lock that room, the meditation room, so they had to kind of come and whisper in my ear, would you please leave? Because I, they had all the video equipment was there and it’s India, you can’t leave it just unguarded.

Rick: Right.

Igal: So it was, it was this, I found a level of trust in the absolute, so to speak, that I had not known, even with all these years of with Maharishi.

Rick: Is that why you were so drawn to meditate? It was kind of like you were just experiencing, or dwelling in the absolute more profoundly than you had been accustomed to and so you were more…

Igal: Yes, there was something, it was like, suddenly I realized, wow, this is like, this is what liberation is about, this is why people went to caves. This is why people left the whole world and just went to caves, they didn’t want to know anything about anything for the rest of their lives.

Rick: What do you think it was about the situation that had that effect on you? Was it Andrew, was it India, was it what?

Igal: I think there’s certain things that you have to just basically, this line from the puja at whose door,

Rick: God’s pray for perfection day and night?

Igal: Right, no, there’s something else. Anyway, there’s this, at one point, intellect, there’s a door beyond which the intellect can not enter. And I think this is one of those things, I had no idea, I mean, I can, what it was, I had no idea and I didn’t ask, it was totally unexpected, I didn’t expect it to be so powerful and I think it had a lot to do with the incredible trust that I had in him. I mean, I think it did.

Rick: It sounds like you were also ripe for something, I mean, you just uprooted yourself from a comfortable life, made a radical shift, so you were ready to

Igal: Yeah, I came and everything was… I hadn’t yet uprooted myself. I was still, I was still, I was still not, in some level I have, but in some level I was still holding on. But I think there was already a trust in him. I really trusted his integrity and I really knew that this guy is a very serious teacher. He’s probably the most serious teacher I’ve ever met. He is, and I, I, I, and everything he said, he’s gifted with a particular way of making his words, in retreats he creates a kind of very charged environment that his words get alive in your experience. He creates a very, very super-charged environment. It’s like the ego is in abeyance, the way he describes it. Your ego is in abeyance. And then if you give yourself to that, then you basically your own consciousness responds.

Rick: Yeah

Igal: That’s what happened. And it was, it was very powerful and How did we get here? I don’t remember.

Rick: Actually, a question arose in my mind, which is that, if you were to ask Andrew about the nature of his experience, even in this article that you recommended to me, which I read today, and which I’ll post a link to on the Batgap blog, he does allude to his own experience.

Igal: Yeah.

Rick: Like, here’s a sentence, “I was convinced beyond doubt by my own experience that there was nowhere to go, nothing to do, and no one to be or become.”

Igal: That was his experience of awakening, right?

Rick: Yeah. And so, I think, correct me if I’m wrong, but he would acknowledge that awakening, although it’s not a matter of specific experiences, is an experiential thing. It’s obviously not just sort of a conceptual or philosophical thing. It’s the ground of our experience shifts in a profound way. And ideally, if it’s a true awakening, in a permanent way.

Igal: No, I think You see, it’s a very tricky thing. It’s a question of what do you mean by awakening, and what do you mean by enlightenment.

Rick: Right.

Igal: Because

Rick: Keep talking, I’m going to let the cat out here. I can hear you.

Igal: Yeah. Well, because, you see, this so-called classical idea of enlightenment Oh, just a minute. Yeah. The so-called classical idea of enlightenment, the idea, enlightenment used to be, and for many people still is, a situation in which you have a life-transforming experience of the shift of your identity.

Rick: Right.

Igal: From the separate self, from the separate sense of self, to the absolute, to the absolute, non-changing, eternal dimension of life, so to speak, which is completely impersonal, which is completely transcendental, where nothing happens, nothing needs to happen, nothing ever happened. And everything else is, oh, it’s just a joke or an illusion. That’s the kind of awakening that classically was considered an awakening. We talk about this, this is the classical and the old enlightenment. Look, you have to see also, if you talk about the existence of humanity of 50,000 years of speaking humans, and out of which 50,000 years of the speaking version of the Homo sapiens. It’s not that this particular… It’s not that when we got off the trees, the first thing we did was sit in lotus and ask ourselves, “Where am I?” Right? There were other concerns, 50,000 years ago, when there were about between 1,000 or 5,000 Homo sapiens around, there in what now is called Ethiopia, their concerns were very much concerns of animals, plus some beginnings of something which we now would call civilization. So the whole thing about enlightenment is actually rather new. The whole thing of the concept of enlightenment, even the whole ability to conceive of something transcendental, abstract, unmaterial, is really new, and maybe, at least as far as we know from the records, may have started with Abraham or Moses as the first monotheistic thing. Maybe.

Rick: And also we’re speaking in terms of the culture of which we have a record. Who knows what might go even farther back,

Igal: Maybe

Rick: that record destroyed, or other places, or whatever. But maybe, as far as civilization is concerned, true.

Igal: Let’s work with what we have in front of us. A lot of stuff is fairy tales, and fairy tales cannot because everybody’s got their own fairy tales that they’re willing to die for, and go figure which of those fairy tales, which everybody is totally convinced and invested in, is the true one. If you ask the Daoists, they were the first ones 10,000 years ago. If you ask Maharishi, it’s eternal Ram Raj. And from what we have, from the records we have, monotheism started in Egypt. And it wasn’t an abstract monotheism. Suddenly they said, “No, there’s no different forces of nature, there’s one force, and that force is the sun.” That was the first monotheism. And at least, from what we can tell now, the first abstract monotheism, transcendental monotheism, may have been that of the Abrahamic religion, and that Moses actually brought into a larger populace, population. And so that’s very recent. And then the first time that you find at least records for a self-referral kind of monotheism, that classic equation of the mystics is, the equation is “I equals God.” The first time you hear this expressed is about 3,000, 2,800 years ago in the Upanishads. Where it says, “Aham Brahmasmi,” “I am Brahman,” “I equals Brahman.” Then you have Jesus saying this, “I and the Father are one,” 2,000 years ago. And Al-Hallaj saying it about 1,000 years ago. Berger was saying, “An-al-Haq,” “I am the truth,” where “Al-Haqq,” the truth, is one of the ninety-nine names of Allah. So it is new, relatively. But it’s old in the sense of it’s already been around for a few thousand years. And what happened in the history of the development of Andrew’s teaching, is at one point he started, that’s how he learned also, it was this kind of enlightenment that he learned. Realize, he says in that article that I sent you, “Realize and Surrender.” That’s what he taught at first. He said, “You realize the Absolute and you surrender to it.” He said, “That’s all there is to do. There’s nothing to do. You don’t need to change anything. You just need to realize that Absolute and surrender to it.” And it’s still very powerful, I don’t know what what you feel. I feel that when I talk about it now, it’s alive. It’s as if it’s a meditation, just to conceptually think of it. It’s a sort of meditation. It brings you in touch with the Absolute Dimension of Life. But then he noticed that when people gathered around him, and I was not there in the early days, obviously. It was 86, 87, 88 in those early days. People who were around him in those days say that he was just ecstatic. Like you’d go into the room and people would have these incredible experiences and they would just want to leave everything. Like going to a cave, they want to leave everything and just join him because he was so powerful. And based on his own experience of awakening as a result of experiences, though people are having such strong experiences, we can have a revolution of enlightened people in no time. And sure enough, he found out that this was not the case. It wasn’t happening. People who have peak experiences and surrender to their ego in no time, fall back into their ego. And he started working with people and then he suddenly realized, he found, he saw that when people gathered around him, something happened between them even not dependent on him. He realized that when.. He saw, the way he described it, he says they broke for lunch and then he came back from the break and he saw people are engaging with each other and from the corner of his eye, he saw two people talking to each other. And he knew that that which they were sharing between them with eyes open was more significant than what they were sharing in their meditations or with their spiritual experiences on their own. He recognized that there was something, that they were sharing enlightenment between them. There was a new kind of possibility emerged between people. And the moment he realized that, it was a profound realization in him that this is really what he should be focusing on. It’s this new form of enlightenment where you go beyond ego not only with your eyes closed, which seems to be the easier part, but you go beyond ego while engaging with others.

Rick: Let me interject here.

Igal: Sure

Rick: There’s that old Vedic saying, “Samiti Samani” or something, where in the collection of enlightened… Maharshi used to talk about this whole being more than the sum of its parts and the importance of groups because something much greater gets generated than people in isolation. So it almost seems like these are in fact rather ancient ideas.

Igal: Okay, here’s the thing though, and I agree with you. And I probably as a freak of religion, of course, already came with this thing of, “What’s new about that?” There’s this and here and there. I can supply a lot of quotes to that. Part of my job with Maharshi was to find quotes for this exact thing and this religion. The thing is, you see, my theory about scriptures is this. I think they are revelations. I think, I mean, they are revelations that came to people. They’re not this kind of… I don’t buy about any scriptures, at least this has this kind of transcendental, primordial, that the Jews said about the Torah, and Maharshi used to say about the Veda. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. I don’t know. I mean, I think there are revelations that come to people. There are. And revelations are always the revelations of a much bigger truth than the person had access to himself. And it’s genuine. I believe it’s genuine. It’s true. Mystical truths are self-revealing truths, and they have a status of immutability that transcends the human intellect. And, but it’s always in the context of the consciousness of a person. It’s a human… But anyway, those revelations that include within them in seed form also things for future. But whether or not that was actually alive in the culture where that revelation arose is a completely different thing, because you judge, it’s like you judge a tree by its fruit, right? And yes, Maharishi had a very big thing about groups, and I think it was in the air. And he was, Maharishi was really a seer, and he was really was a seer, and he really was riding a wave of, I believe, riding a wave of collective consciousness, and ahead of its time in many ways, and recognizing the whole idea of collecting, of coming together. What I think Maharishi missed was… Or maybe he didn’t miss, maybe he just didn’t want to go there. The thing is, I don’t believe just… Because his groups would just come together and meditate, and that would be the power of the group. But that’s not what we’re talking about. It’s still meditation. It’s still transcending ego with eyes closed. Those groups would come together and meditate. Here we’re talking about something else. We’re talking about transcending ego with eyes open while interacting, and that during their interaction, a field is created, which is the enlightened mind, that does not belong to any of the participants, but every one of them is responsible for. It demands everything from the individual. It demands the individual to be willing to really renounce their ego in a very profound way, on the spot, all their egoic tendencies. And it’s easy to renounce the ego with eyes closed. You don’t do anything, of course. Then the ego can be in abeyance. But it’s when you interact. That’s when the real test is, are you willing, able, and able to put… Are you even aware enough about how you act out of ego to the point where you can actually even renounce it?

Rick: So when you say renounce ego, are you saying that you lose a sense of personal identity, or are you saying more that you rise above the sort of self-indulgent, self-absorbed tendency that most people kind of live in on a day-to-day basis?

Igal: Well, look. Take a group of men getting together, or a group of women getting together, or a mixed group, there’s all kinds of motivation happening in the group. One wants to lead, one wants to appear cute. There’s all kinds of masks that we put. And we don’t know how to live without those masks. Sometimes we are so attached to those masks, we’re not even aware of these masks. You can very easily see the masks in other people. But coming together beyond ego means you come together, and you’re willing to give everything to put those masks behind you. Because why? Why are you willing to do that? Not for any religious purpose. I mean, it is in a sense religious. Not for any, because, not because of any shoulds. Not because you are going to gain anything out of it. But because that which is created between you is the most important thing for you. And you realize it really is a new being. It’s a new being. And that it’s the edge of consciousness, of where it is now. And it is ecstatic. It is rewarding. But that’s not the point. The point is, it is the next stage of human evolution, where the coming together is so profound that it’s a source of greater enlightenment than you could ever get with your eyes closed.

Rick: We have a satsang group that’s been meeting here for years now, seven or eight years, every Wednesday night. In fact, I’ll be going there after this interview. And when it’s really in its prime, some nights are not, but when it really takes off, there’s a profound atmosphere in the room. And I come away from that really surcharged. It lasts for days, much more impact on me than any meditation would have. And all we’re doing is sitting there talking to each other in a free-for-all kind of way. Basically talking as much as possible in a genuine, direct way. We’re not philosophizing, we’re not speculating, we’re more just stating what’s happening and corresponding with each other on that level.

Igal: I think that’s definitely in that direction. However, I would say this practice that I’m talking about, of coming together beyond ego, and it’s a, I think it’s even a stage beyond that, in a sense that, the players, it’s a high-stakes game. That, it’s high-stakes because you have to give everything to it and then some. You really have to… You see, because when I say come together beyond ego, you have to, first of all, be interested enough, bold enough, crazy enough, and you have to have enough heart and guts to face what you’re really made of, for real.

Rick: Well, is there a specific practice that you guys do to bring this about? Or, I mean, you don’t just get in a room and chat. I mean, there must be some kind of guided direction that shifts you into this way of, this mode of operating.

Igal: Well, it’s our way of living more than anything else. It’s our daily practice. All the daily practice that we do are, we have meditation, we have contemplation, we do physical practice, we do various things, but they’re all in the service of that. And part of the…

Rick: I should mention, actually, that you’re sitting in a room at Andrew Cohen’s ashram as we’re having this conversation, correct?

Igal: Yes. We don’t call it an ashram necessarily, but you could call it that.

Rick: Facility or building.

Igal: Yeah, but I am there, yes. No, but I… You see, one of the aspects of the teaching of Andrew Cohen is the five tenets. He has five tenets, which are the five tenets of enlightenment, or the five tenets of evolutionary enlightenment, his teaching. And those five tenets, they are kind of the fundamental tool of contemplation and guidance for life that we have. And they’re very profound. The first one is clarity of intention. In other words, what is it that’s most important to you in life? A lot of people don’t ask themselves that question. And those spiritual people who claim that enlightenment is the most important thing to them, if you look at their agenda and how they spend their day, and how they spend their money, then you would realize that that’s not really what’s going on. So clarity of intention is the first thing. You want to be… In order for you to be free, you have to want it more than anything else. The second one is the law of volitionality. In other words, recognizing that everything that… In some way, in some place, we all know what we’re doing. We’re not victims. It doesn’t matter what happened to us. It doesn’t matter… And some of us have been traumatized and mutilized in various ways. Who hasn’t been? But we are still responsible to take… We are responsible to take responsibility for all of that. And, I mean, look, we could talk for a few hours just on each tenet, but I’m just giving the…

Rick: The key points.

Igal: The thing. The third tenet is what I was just talking about. Face everything and avoid nothing. Face everything and avoid nothing is that… is on one hand to have the guts and the heart to really know that a lot of our motivations are very dark. It doesn’t matter how many years you’ve been on a spiritual path. It doesn’t matter how deep the spiritual experiences you have. It doesn’t matter… Any of that doesn’t matter. What matters is what is really your motivation. What are you acting out of? And part of this spiritual practice is to really face that because if you don’t face that, you can’t take responsibility for it. It’s only if you really face what you’re made of. And when I say face what you’re made of, it’s not only negative things. It’s also facing your potential. Facing your… Because facing the fact that you are important, not because your ego is important, but you have the power to make a difference in the world in a very profound way by virtue of the fact that you have a consciousness that’s aware of itself. So really facing it, not just your radical abstract idea, but really facing that whole thing. The fourth tenet is the law of impersonality where you may recognize that nothing that… no aspect of your life… no aspect of your life is unique, private or personal in any way. And that’s a big one. It’s a big one, but it’s a challenging and a very enlightening one.

Rick: You better elaborate on that one just a little bit.

Igal: Okay. I’ve mentioned something that we live in an evolutionary context, right? We are part of a process that has been going on for 14 billion years. It started as a big bang. Something came out of nothing 14 billion years ago. And through an incomprehensibly complex process of greater and greater structures of integration and order, from energy to matter, from matter to life, life to consciousness, and from consciousness to consciousness that’s aware of itself. And consciousness being aware of itself, that only happened 200,000 years ago. The first nervous system has been evolved that is… that is being able to be aware of itself. So you can… if you look at it from… if you look at your own life as part of a process, not as this individual bubble, skin encapsulated bubble, that occurred when you were born and will finish when you die. But look at yourself as part of this process, of this whole process, that every atom in your body was there in the big bang. Every particle in the body is 14 billion years old, and it kept… and there’s a whole process of flux of this river, all those particles forming, and at one point the capacity for the individuation arose, not as the most important thing, but as a tool for the universe to know itself. So you are part of that process, so nothing about your life is personal and about you. It’s not about you, it’s about the process of us, about the process evolving. And the process evolving, you are the leading edge of that process. You, Rick Archer, and I, Igal Moria, we are the leading edge of that process. It’s not about us at all. And to narcissists in the 21st century, post-modern narcissists such as we are, this is… that’s not what we are as a culture. Much of our spiritual development has been about my experiences, and my development, and my consciousness, and my this and my that, it’s all about me. And I want to have it just right, and I want to have this just right, and I’ll keep on manipulating everything. So it’s just basically, just like how do you call these foams that adjust themselves to your body?

Rick: Right, memory foams.

Igal: These pillows that adjust to them, and the mattresses. So we want life to be like that. It’s just perfect, it adjusts itself. It’s not about us. It’s not about us. didn’t occur so that just you and I can have more gratifying sex life, money life, food, and position, and satisfaction. It’s a much bigger thing. So that’s, the law of impersonality gets you in touch with it, you start contemplating that. It has a very profound effect.

Rick: Oh yeah. No, I totally understand it. When you first stated the point, I wasn’t sure what it referred to, but in elaborating it, this is a point I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, especially since I’ve been listening to hours and hours and hours of interviews, of Craig Hamilton interviewing people like Terry Patten and Andrew Cohen, and all kinds of people, talking all about evolutionary enlightenment.

Igal: It’s a very important contemplation to do.

Rick: Yeah, and in fact, I mean even just contemplating these notions does in fact shift one’s experience. It shifts one’s perspective. As you say, it tends to shift you out of regarding yourself merely as a flesh-bound individual, but you begin to sort of get a clear sense that you are that evolutionary energy that has given rise to this whole universe, but with eyes and with ears, living through this tool, this instrumentality of the human body. You are that very intelligence which sparked the Big Bang, now able to talk and reflect upon itself.

Igal: That’s fantastic.

Rick: and so on.

Igal: That’s awesome, because you see you said eyes, for example. Look, the way we’re built, the way we project, the way we interact with the world, a lot of it is through eyes, through sight. A lot of our brain is involved with sight. Now there’s one organ, the eye, through which we interact. A lot of our interaction with the world occurs. Now, in the same way, you can say that we human beings are the eye of the universe.

Rick: Yeah.

Igal: Because it is just like through the eye, we human beings are aware of where we are in space because the eye can be sensitive to light. So also it’s through self-reflective consciousness that we human beings have, the universe can be aware of itself, and in no other way. So, that’s, we are that, and that, so the law of impersonality says, “Look, face what your life is really all about.”

Rick: We’re sense organs of the internet, of the infinite instead of the internet. And I mean we’re a colony, really. If you think about it, if you start going into the microscopic, we’ve got all these little organs, which if you break it down further, there’s all these little cells, each of which has its own life. But as a conglomerate, we’re a kind of coherently functioning unit, but then take it to a larger scale, and we’re the cells of a larger colony, just perceiving or sensing and living through just one small expression of that totality of intelligence, that essentially we are.

Igal: And it has huge implications, if you really take it, it has huge implications because it means that for you, that is the reason for the spiritual life, because and really that’s the fifth tenet. The fifth tenet is, where in the first tenet I said, wanting to be free more than anything else, a clarity of intention, the fifth tenet is all about the motivation of why you want to be free. Because once you understand that you are really the I, the I, I both as E-Y-E, and I as capital I, of the universe, so to speak, that your interiority is the same as the interiority of the universe, and you’re the leading editor of this process, and in order to take this next step of the evolution of consciousness, you have to actually do it, the motivation for the spiritual life becomes that, and then everything that we talked about, dealing with your ego, dealing with all, doing the spiritual practice, I mean, your life becomes, if you take it on, seriously, and it’s a big deal, and most people, look, let’s face it, most people don’t, even people who are in the spiritual path. So, it takes a lot, and at one point, that becomes your life, and you say, OK, so it’s for the sake of the evolutionary process. The fifth tenet is called “For the sake of the whole” or “For the sake of the evolutionary process,” and that becomes, it’s all about the change of motivation. So you have those five tenets, and the people who come together, if you ask, what is it that brings us, how is it that this thing can happen when we come together, the people that come together in those groups, they’re all people that are committed to the five tenets, and it’s people, this is very serious work, it’s very serious work, this is not 20 minutes, twice a day type of thing, it’s a serious work, it’s all consuming, and it’s a work that basically, you trust, it has to be incredible amount of trust that, because everybody comes totally undefended, totally vulnerable, totally with their ego behind, and everybody means business, and there’s incredible trust between us that you will do everything that you need to do in order to develop, and I will do everything that I need to do in order to develop, so that this succeeds, and we can take the next step, and we can keep developing from time to time, from meeting to meeting, it’s not just that we come together in an ecstatic communion, in a higher way, which is in itself an incredible achievement, but also that we each individually keep developing, and as a whole, therefore, the whole gathering keeps developing, and we work in groups that are called Holons, it’s a term that we took from Ken Wilber, Holon, Holon is a unit that is composed of individuals, each of which is also a Holon in itself, and we have these Holons of people, so these are your peers, and usually it’s people you have the same kind of level of experience with, and you are like a military unit, like a commander unit, you entrust your life with each other, this is a very serious work.

Rick: How many people are in a Holon?

Igal: It can be anywhere between four to eight people, something like that.

Rick: I get the sense as you are saying this, you are mainly talking about people who live there in this facility where you live, or is it people who also might come in for a course once or twice a year, and get a taste of it?

Igal: Well, there’s all, there’s all levels.

Rick: There are degrees of involvement.

Igal: There are degrees of involvement, degrees of experience, there are Andrew has core students, which are not that many, and they are people who normally, even though I for example haven’t been for a while living in a center, but they normally they live in a center together, in some center together with other people, their peers, but sometimes they live in a center, like in my Holon, there is one in Germany, one in, two in England, I’m in Israel normally, and there’s four here.

Rick: So you get on Skype calls or something?

Igal: Yeah, a lot of the calls are actually on the phone, and it’s, consciousness is not local. And it works.

Rick: So when you say you work hard at this, what are you actually doing? Are you having a sort of encounter group-like, intensive conversation, or you’re publishing a magazine? What is the nature of the actual work to which you’re applying yourself?

Igal: This particular work that I’m talking about, working hard at this, what I mean by that is that, look, it’s very serious, is what I said. It’s very serious.

Rick: You’re not just entertaining yourselves, it’s a serious thing.

Igal: Yeah, you mean business. You come together and you mean business. And you say, okay, so it means that total vulnerability, it means that I want to know all the things that I need to do in order to develop myself from one meeting to the next. And if I don’t, I’m not fully aware of it, then my brothers will point to me what I should be aware of.

Rick: What should one of those things be, for example? I don’t know. Maybe everybody has their own thing in development. Maybe somebody is narcissistic, maybe somebody is stingy, maybe somebody is not putting everything that he could into their work.

Rick: So, for instance, if one of your buddies in the Holon said, “Igal, I think you’re kind of stingy,” would you go back to Israel and start handing out money to the beggars? What are you going to do to actually effect a change in some area?

Igal: That would be very easy. The thing is, first of all, you have to deal with those structures in yourself, that why are you like that? Not why in the psychological sense, but to first of all recognize that this is the case. First of all, face it and really see, oh, this is the case. And once this is the case, then you are free, because that’s why meditation is so important. Meditation allows you to have no relationship to the mind, right. Meditation is a situation in which you have no relationship to the mind, no relationship to anything. That’s meditation, it’s the ground of being. And then, so, you’re not a victim to those impulses. Maybe I’ve lived with that stinginess, let’s say, for 56 years, but once I realize, oh, this is how I operate, so then there is all this space as a result of all my meditation, all this space to leave room to not act out of it. And maybe

Rick: it kind of sounds like the old TM model, where you kind of transcend the problem, and then hopefully, from the transcendent, something good gets infused back in, and you water the root and enjoy the fruit.

Igal: No flipping way. No, it’s not even close. Here we’re talking, OK, the value of meditation here is not some mystical transformation at the root level that you don’t see, in this particular teaching. In this particular teaching, the value of meditation is basically that it allows you to have freedom in relationship to certain impulses in consciousness, in emotion, in mind, in consciousness, that otherwise you would not feel free from. So, for example, let me give you an example. I’ll take a very extreme example, OK? Let’s say you’re a bit, or not so extreme, let’s say you’re a virtual thief. And, look, I actually shared a house with somebody, with a woman who came from a very poor family, and at one point we realized that there was this kitty that we were using, and we observed that a lot of kitties were disappearing, and we actually thought, “Oh, wow, what’s going on?” And then we, it happened many years ago, and a few of us, we confronted that person, and she just said, “As a matter of fact, yeah, that’s the way I’ve been living all my life, and that’s it, it’s just natural.” Anyway, it’s a very primitive kind of state of affairs, obviously. And I remember I was totally shocked, because there was enough clarity that she saw, yes, there’s a tendency. The thing is, if you’re meditating with the right motivation, let’s say, I’ll take that as an example, if you’re meditating with the right motivation, it doesn’t matter how strong the habit is and how strong the impulse is, you will have enough freedom in your mind, that when the temptation comes to just say, “Ah, here the temptation comes,” you slow down the video. Here is when normally this is what I do. Here I can create a different momentum.

Rick: So, what kind of meditation is this? Are you saying that if you meditated with the right motivation, if you were this woman, for example, and that morning you had meditated with the right motivation, then later in the day you saw the kitty, because of the influence of the meditation you had done, you would have more detachment from the situation and be able to resist the ingrained tendency to steal?

Igal: Yeah, not because of the meditation you had done that morning, but because of the habit to have some freedom in relationship to the mind that you have cultivated over years of practice with the right motivation. Because meditation, motivation is very important. It’s very similar to, in the Sanskrit, when they say sankalpa, your intention. Why is it that you meditate? Sometimes meditation is just you want to sit there for a narcissistic pleasure, just having the bliss. But if you meditate, if you’re serious, then meditation, it will be bliss, but the meditation is more for freedom from mind, freedom from emotions, freedom from the insanity of the total infatuation and identification with your mental and emotional impulses. And a person who would do that with the motive to be free, and that’s the important thing, the motive to be free, that person would have some kind of more freedom in relationship to the impulses of their mind. And it would take interest, though. It would take interest, it would take desire to change, it would take guts, because you have to have guts to go against your habits, but more than anything else, it would take motivation. And if you’re in a committed relationship with other people, then for the sake of that relationship, for the sake of that which, not this personal relationship, but for the sake of that project that you’re in, if that project is important to you, for the sake of that project you’d be seeking to know all those dark impulses within yourself, so that you can take care of them, so you don’t have to act out of them. It’s not that you become a saint, it’s not that you become somebody in whom no thought of lust, greed, violence or anger arises. That’s not the idea, that’s not, that’s, that’s, I don’t know if there is anybody like that. Even Mother Teresa had a huge amount of doubts. It’s what you express and what you renounce, and for what it is that you renounce it. That’s the idea. And that’s among the most serious practitioners of this particular life, of evolutionary enlightenment, it’s basically, that’s the most important thing, that’s our profession. And then there is concentric circles of people who are involved with it to various degrees, and there’s people who just come to retreats once a year, and they love it, and then they’re not involved with it at all, beyond that. That’s fine.

Rick: Well, it’s interesting, because, I mean, contrasting what you just described with transcendental meditation, in which you think a mantra, and you’re expressly instructed not to go into it with any sort of goal in mind, or trying to achieve any particular psychological readjustment, or any such thing, you just proceed with complete innocence, and it’s all supposed to happen automatically. The kind of meditation you just described seems very intentional, very purposeful, that you’re actually kind of seeking out the dark corners and bringing light to them, and kind of…

Igal: No, not during meditation.

Rick: Oh, not during meditation.

Igal: not during meditation

Rick: Oh, what happens during meditation, the kind of meditation you just referred to.

Igal: Okay. Meditation itself… I only talked about the motive of meditation, it has to be very clear, and the intention has to be very clear. The practice itself is really three very simple instructions. We can do this now if you want.

Rick: It might not be so interesting for the listeners.

Igal: They can do it too, when they listen to it.

Rick: So go ahead, do it then.

Igal: It has three different instructions. In fact I sometimes I do it over the internet. I instruct groups, I did a meditation instruction during the internet, and some friends of mine are doing it all the time. But it really is composed of three very simple instructions. First, and that’s in contradistinction to TM, you don’t move, you’re still.

Rick: You sit still

Igal: You sit still, you don’t move.

Rick: Can you sit comfortably, or are you supposed to sit…

Igal: Yeah, no, you sit comfortably, but the idea is you sit reasonably straight, comfortably, and it means when it scratches, you don’t scratch. I mean, if in a scale of 1 to 10 you have a pain of a degree of 9, well, move a little. But the idea is you don’t move, because… Maybe I would say something before that, about Andrew Cohen’s teaching of meditation. The purpose of meditation in his teaching is to have no relationship to the content of consciousness. No relationship to the content of consciousness, which means thoughts, emotions, noises, sensations, fears, doubts, desires. You don’t do anything with them. You have no relationship to them. And in order to… And that is meditation, it’s a metaphor for enlightenment, because enlightenment, there’s movement, there’s… It’s a metaphor for enlightenment, because it’s a metaphor, it’s freedom. Freedom is… you’re free from all that. You… we’re talking about the old enlightenment, right? The classical enlightenment. You discover that who you are is beyond all that.

Rick: That may still be going on, some of it, but there’s nobody home so to speak.

Igal: That’s not who you are.

Rick: Yeah, you are not that.

Igal: Things may come and things may go, but I go on forever. And in order to actualize that state in meditation, there are three instructions. First is, you don’t move. You’re still. You don’t move. And there’s more to this stillness, I mean, we can talk about it a little more, but anyway, this is the first instruction. It’s more than just not physically moving. The second instruction is, you’re relaxed. And relaxation doesn’t mean necessarily, maybe there’s tension in the muscles here and there, which possibly, during the process of meditation, will relax some more. But relaxed means you don’t hold on to anything. It’s a fundamental position, a relaxed position, because you said it’s no relationship to thought. Even being still is an expression of no relationship to anything, because normally, the way we operate is we have an impulse to move and we just move. But here we say, no, no, we have no relationship. We shut off the mechanism that says, I have to move according to the motions of my mind. You can say, I got a scratch, or I want water, or whatnot. I want to move my head. I’m not moving. That’s the first thing. And the second thing is relaxed, and I’m not holding on to anything. And that’s the second thing. It means just being very relaxed. Now, as we very well know, when you don’t move and you’re relaxed, you want to fall asleep. But the third instruction here is you pay attention. You’re awake. You pay attention.

Rick: What if you get sleepy in spite of all that?

Igal: You don’t speak. You don’t sleep. You keep yourself from sleeping. That’s, again, in contradistinction to TM. You don’t sleep. You stay awake, because when you sleep, you cannot keep no relation to thought when you’re asleep.

Rick: And if you’re tired and you find yourself nodding, do you like, what do you do?

Igal: You don’t nod. It’s normally, look, sometimes, of course, there are situations like you haven’t slept for 36 hours.

Rick: You mentioned to me recently that you had meditated for 24 hours straight.

Igal: Right.

Rick: Were you consistently applying these three principles throughout that 24 hours?

Igal: Yes, I definitely was.

Rick: Didn’t move for 24 hours?

Rick: Well, okay, it wasn’t sitting still. It wasn’t sitting for 24 hours. It was one day meditation divided into, it was actually, that particular, it was an international meditation marathon. It was, like a lot of us did it around the world. And we, it was also a fundraising thing, but it was also kind of some, a challenge that we took upon ourselves. What we did was we meditated for 45 minutes, and then we prayed for 15 minutes. And then we meditated for 45 minutes, and then we prayed for 15 minutes. You want to go to the bathroom, you have to eat sometimes. And, and, and so, so it was, it was not in, in that kind of setting, sit for 24 hours. I mean, that, I know that there are yogis who are, who are, they, they say that there are yogis who are capable of doing that. I don’t know that I am. I haven’t tried.

Rick: I see.

Igal: But for 45 minutes, you don’t move. And if you focus the entire 24 hours, you really focus. And, and we also had some reading, we call it chanting. It’s not really chanting with music, but we just recite certain things. We have these chants So your whole state of mind is that of meditation. It’s one big meditation of 24 hours. Because meditation is not only, this is a formal meditation, but meditation can also be with eyes closed while you talk. Meditation is not limited to a particular, this is, see there is spontaneous meditation. And there is meditation that’s not spontaneous, that you have to do something for, some effort. And, and that sometimes state of grace, you call it, sometimes falls on you. And, it has nothing to do with, no mantra or a technique. It’s just basically you’re catapulted to a, a deeper, saner, freer, more expanded, less shackled, more true state of who you are. And then if you don’t do it, then one way of doing it is assuming that position. And so the meditation that I just spoke about is what you do to assume that position. And as I said, it’s a very serious practice, but you don’t do it for any experience. But you do it in order to cultivate, inculcate, is that the word?

Rick: Inculcate is good.

Igal: Okay. Anyway, cultivate the state of freedom. Not a state of freedom, a relationship, a stand, a position of freedom.

Rick: Right.

Igal: In relationship to your insanity. Yeah, the relationship to your insanity, let’s face it, our minds are insane.

Rick: Right.

Igal: This is part of it. This is part of it. So, so…

Rick: Which kind of sounds to me like, I mean, my, my understanding of witnessing has changed a lot over the years, from my original conception of it when I first heard Maharishi start talking about it, to, my experience and understanding now. But what you’re talking about fits very well with my current understanding of what witnessing is, which is that you have developed through whatever means, a kind of a natural independence from the mind, the senses, all the relative stuff, which is unshakable. no matter how tired you are, no matter, whether you’ve just burned your hand, or whether someone’s yelling at you, or you’re experiencing something very pleasurable, there’s this sort of pervading and ongoing state of freedom, state of independence, abiding.

Igal: OK, so I have some caveats about it here. I don’t know to what extent I would experience or have a kind of an equanimous state of freedom if my hand was burned. I mean, I’m saying, it’s not, it’s not, the idea is not that you become a robot.

Rick: No, no, you might be swearing like a sailor with your hand burned.

Igal: Okay.

Rick: But, there’s a dimension of independence, there’s a dimension of freedom, there’s a dimension of

Igal: Yeah, there’s a…

Rick: Which is just not perturbed by the burned hand.

Igal: Yeah, it’s a kind of a freedom from, a certain freedom, a certain dimension of freedom, because, yeah. I must tell you, kind of…

Rick: I’m not saying it’s an attitude that you try to maintain. I’m saying it’s, it becomes so stable that it’s there whether you think about it or not.

Igal: Yeah, I think, yeah, I don’t know, I mean, look, I mean, it’s in that direction anyway.

Rick: Yeah.

Igal: I here want to say a parenthetical, insert a parenthetical comment, that, I, when I joined Andrew, I actually made a conscious effort, actually. I didn’t make enough of the effort in the beginning. I had to have a lot of help from my friends to realize that it would be a good idea to make the effort to just get rid, to just drop the baggage.

Rick: Right, right.

Igal: To drop anything I knew, or I thought I knew about witnessing, about states of consciousness, about how you develop from CC to GC to UC and all those terminologies, which anyway didn’t really correspond to my experience exactly. And I had to just basically say, look, I’m just going to really, I’m going to jump here and really go for broke and leave it behind. So that’s why I was kind of smiling to myself when you were talking about witnessing. I had not even tried to bridge anything. It’s not that there was, it’s not for any disrespect to what Maharishi was doing or to, it’s just basically I had to, I had changed the context and I had to change everything. And the more I was able to drop that whole thing, the more I was able to be more free in relation to the whole thing.

Rick: That’s cool. And I mean, I haven’t plunged into a whole other way of life as you have. I’ve become kind of independent of the TM movement, but I’ve been rather eclectic in a sense in that I listen to a lot of stuff, read a lot of stuff, pick up a lot of stuff here and there. And I tend to find that there are many common threads among all these different presentations. I can hear Adyashanti say something that is very reminiscent of something Maharshi said, or hear Andrew Cohen say something, or Byron Katie, or Gangaji, or any of these different people. And they all have their own spin on it, and their own emphasis, and their own approach, and their own practices, and so on and so forth. And I don’t mean to imply that none of them have the complete picture, but it is reminiscent of the blind man and the elephant analogy, in which they’re all describing similar, well, maybe that’s not a good analogy, because the different parts of the elephant are so different. What I mean to say is that a lot of stuff corresponds, from my perspective.

Igal: There must be, at least, there must be certain stuff that does correspond, and that’s the teaching of, for example, Andrew’s teaching about the ground of being.

Rick: Yeah.

Igal: It’s not new teaching. The teaching about the, the teaching, as he says in that article, he explains in that article, that the whole teaching about the old enlightenment, which he still teaches as part of his teaching, about the freedom, well, we just talked about meditation, freedom from the content of consciousness, is not new. So, obviously, there will be parallels there, and maybe even points of similarity or identity with certain teachings in some way. I would dare to make the outrageous statement that nobody else is really teaching evolutionary enlightenment in the way that he does.

Rick: I don’t think that’s so outrageous, but I might say that.

Igal: I mean, I’m saying this to protect myself in this age of post-modernity, which nobody should in any way stand out, and everything is equal to anything else. I think he is a path-breaker in that.

Rick: Yeah, he has a unique way of teaching.

Igal: Not just a unique way of teaching, I think…

Rick: A unique teaching.

Igal: Yeah, he has a unique teaching, and he has a… and he forged a path of evolutionary enlightenment in which enlightenment… He really finds enlightenment for the 21st century, which I’m pretty sure he’s the only one who’s done that. That enlightenment is no longer just the realization of the absolute freedom, but enlightenment is also that which is… That being is God, yes, but also becoming is God. That it’s one thing, it’s one event. And all the teaching that… I think he is unique in that. And I told you that I sent you the link, it’s very interesting, I told you that I sent you the link to this talk that I had with Maharishi in 1976.

Rick: Yeah, in fact, if you like, we can put that link on the blog too, where we have this other link to this article.

Igal: You can do anything, I mean, it’s fine, it’s a very sweet kind of interaction. It’s probably one of the first interactions that… it is the first interaction I had with him about religion. It’s the first interaction I had with him outside of the TTC context, out of the TTC, in which I offered something creative from my side. And in a sense, that interaction sealed my fate with him. But it’s interesting, as I was listening to you there, I remember what I told him was that there was a very, there was an old rabbi, Rabbi Nachman from Breslov, one of the greatest Hasidic rabbis, lived in the 19th century. And he described the mechanics of creation thus. It’s a very non-Kabbalistic thing, it’s not unique to him. It’s from the Zohar, it says that the light of God was infinite, and therefore there was no space in it, and you couldn’t create anything in there. But he wanted to make his kingship manifest. And you cannot manifest your kingship, your kingness, without subjects.

Rick: Right So he had to create the worlds to make his kingship manifest. But he couldn’t create the world because the light, infinite light, filled everything. So in order to create the world, he had to push his light to the side. And in the empty space that was created, in there he created the worlds. But then Nachman from Breslov asks this question, “Is that really possible?” How is this possible that there would be a place where he is not? Because one of the fundamental tenets of the Zohar, of the Kabbalah, is “L’et ha-ta’fa l’umine,” which is Aramaic for “There is no space where he is not.”

Rick: Right, omnipresent.

Igal: Right, or what Maharishi used to say, “Unified still is present in every point of creation.” So, he said, and so this is a paradox, he said, because he had to push himself to the side, but it was as if he pushed himself to the side. And he says this, “We cannot understand it at this point, but he said in future generations they will.” And I think that what Andrew is doing, I mean, Andrew doesn’t know any of it. He wasn’t, even though he was Jewish, he wasn’t even Bar Mitzvahed. He grew up in a totally secular Manhattan family. Where once in a blue moon they would go to a Passover Seder and his grandfathers, I mean, they wouldn’t understand anything, it looked strange and primitive. So he knew nothing about nothing when it came to Judaism. But in fact, in a sense, what he’s doing is a certain commentary, modern day commentary on that, because he’s actually saying, “Okay, that empty space where he is not is also where he is.” And now that empty space, it’s not theoretical, but it’s the empty space, that’s where the world exists. That’s where interactions exist, that’s where the universe exists. So now, let’s make the new enlightenment about that as well. Not only about the light, let’s make that also about this, in a way that there is no inner and outer. It’s one continuous thing of consciousness on the move. And the fact that he found also ways of working with people who are very far from it. And I can tell you my experience, and many of us, we all had to, he had to work with us to really, very seriously guide us to be able to do this kind of work. Where he now is developing, systematizing ways in which he can help larger and larger groups of people to actually embrace that kind of enlightenment. That is very unique, and that is very serious work. It’s very integral, so to speak, to use the parlance, not this hip term of the day. It’s integral because it includes physical practice, it includes mental practice, contemplation, it includes human interaction, it includes meditation, it includes taking care of your health and diet and everything. It’s very integral.

Rick: It’s interesting because before I even had the thought to interview you this week, there had been a lot of discussion going on about Andrew Cohen on the Buddha at the Gas Pump chat group, which there is one of. I was noticing that it was going on, but I really don’t have a chance to read all the hundreds of posts that people post there. So today, this morning, I posted something there saying, “Hey, I’m going to interview an Andrew Cohen guy tonight. Is there anything in particular you’d like me to ask him?” One person said, “Well, ask him how he would respond to the paradox or seeming contradiction between Cohen’s statement that the world is just fine as it is and his statement that there is a lot of work to be done and things can get better.”

Igal: Awesome question. This is an awesome question. Actually, I remember one lecture that Andrew gave many years ago about these two aspects, that they’re both correct. Because it’s true that, you see, from the point of view of being, everything is perfect as it is. From the ground of being, everything is perfect as it is. It couldn’t have been any other way. It is what it is. It’s what Ram Dass used to say, “Be here now,” what Eckhart Tolle talks about, he says, “The power of now.” It’s the present moment where everything is perfect.

Rick: He says, “Loving what is.”

Igal: Just basically, that’s it. It’s just… it is. And even when we talk about this now, you feel that that is right, it’s full. But that’s part of the picture. There’s another part of the picture, and that part of the picture is the evolutionary impulse which brought something out of nothing. And that’s 14 billion years of gushing, rushing, incomprehensible, never resting, ongoing, always changing, pushy, violent, passionate stream. That’s also part of the whole picture. So, that is, we talk about being and becoming, and that becoming is actually, it’s like a constant rush, an urgency, an ecstasy to go and go and go. That’s also part of it. So, it’s both the things. So, the question you could say, how can you bridge the paradox between the statement that life is a particle and life is a wave? It’s both. And it’s also through here, it’s enlightenment, it’s both. It’s embracing both. And that’s the beauty of the thing, and I think that is exactly the uniqueness of this teaching. And that’s really his contribution, is that he has brought in, not just as a theoretical concept, but as getting his hands dirty and actually working with his students, who, and taking a lot of risks also, and trying things, and getting to the point where he has now a core group of students who are really committed to this kind of work, and who are really making headways with it, in a very tangible way. I think that is really his uniqueness. Just like if you think about, for example, what is the uniqueness of Maharishi? If I look at what is the uniqueness of Maharishi, he was a giant consciousness. Maharishi came to a world where consciousness was not even in the vocabulary, in the thought, in the zeitgeist, in the awareness of the Western world. And he managed by hook and by crook, trying with a crowbar and with his charm, with whatever way he just pried open those burning walls of our materialism resistance, and shoved it down our resisting throats, lulling us with all kinds of promises, just so we spoon full of sugar and the medicine goes down, and lo and behold, he managed to shove it in, into us. Andrew’s contribution is very radical in the sense that he is putting this whole element of the becoming, of enlightenment in becoming, and showing ways of working with people so that they can actually transcend the ego, not just with eyes closed, which was actually Maharishi’s achievement to actually initiate the world into transcendence with eyes closed, even materialist Wall Street people. But Andrew is saying, “Okay, now let’s have the same perfection in the way we interact with each other.” That’s a bigger deal in a sense.

Rick: My wife is bringing me my dinner here, which I don’t think I want to try to eat while I’m talking to you. But there’s a lot of things on my mind, and I think we could go on for another two hours easily.

Igal: Easily.

Rick: I think it would be a bit much to try to do that right now. But let’s have another session sometime.

Igal: Sure.

Rick: This is as good a note to end on as any. I think what you just said is very profound and moving. And I’d like to have another session. So in a few weeks, a couple of months, whatever works out for us both, let’s do that. Meanwhile, I’ll post this and people will watch it and maybe start commenting on it. And I’ll kind of note down some thoughts and points and questions. In fact, if they start asking questions, you might actually like to interact with some of them there on the blog or in the chat group. I’ll bring it to your notice if something comes up that I think you might like to respond to. This has been yet another episode of Buddha at the Gas Pump. The implication of that term being that the states of enlightenment or whatever you want to call it, that were once considered to be fairly rare and unusual, are being encountered, and as Igal has been saying, in even more evolved ways by ordinary people in ordinary circumstances. And we will continue unfolding this. I believe this was the 18th or 19th such interview. And God willing, there will be many more. Thanks for watching. If you go to batgap.com, you’ll see all sorts of possibilities of things to get into, like the podcast and the discussion group and all that stuff. Thank you very much. This has been Rick Archer interviewing Igal Moria. And we’ll see you next time. [music]