A Conversation with Rick Archer of “Buddha at the Gas Pump”

Summary:

Full transcript:

Rick: We had a gap in the schedule, so I put up a compilation of several interviews of me that had been done recently, and this is the audio podcast version of that. The first one is an interview by Yvonne Kason of Spiritual Awakenings International. The second is a series of three segments from an interview by Amertat Cohen of Sunseed. And the third is an interview by James Plath, who used to be the Amazing Randy’s protege. He had a huge philosophical turnabout at one point from being a skeptic to not being a skeptic. And he has a podcast or YouTube channel called the Institute for Advanced Astonishment. I did that one on my phone, partly while driving, partly while walking, and partly while sitting. It’s long if you splice it all together, but if you’re interested, enjoy.

Yvonne: I’m Dr. Yvonne Kason, the President of Spiritual Awakenings International. Welcome everybody from around the world, wherever you’re joining us from. We are absolutely delighted at how Spiritual Awakenings International has grown in the four years since we launched. We’re currently in 96 countries around the world. So please take a moment and enter into the chat where you’re joining us from today. I am joining you from Toronto, Canada and our speaker today, Rick Archer, is joining us from somewhere in the central time zone in the United States. So welcome everyone, wherever you’re joining us from. Today it is my great pleasure to introduce Rick Archer. Rick is the creator and host of the interview show, Buddha at the Gas Pump. Since 2009, he has interviewed over 700 spiritually awakening people from all kinds of backgrounds. Rick himself learned Transcendental Meditation when he was 18 and was trained by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi as a Transcendental Meditation teacher. He went on and earned a Bachelor and Master’s degree in Vedic Studies from the Maharishi International University. He served as a TM teacher for 25 years. Today, Rick is no longer associated with the TM organization, and he says he’s become too eclectic and independent to affiliate exclusively with just one organization. Rick Archer is also a founder of the Association for Spiritual Integrity, which I’m sure we’re going to hear about today. So today’s format, at Rick’s request, is going to be a bit more informal than usual. I will be interviewing Rick and please feel free if you have any questions for Rick to put them into the chat any time during today’s presentation and I will do my best to answer that question. So let’s start with me asking our dear guest Rick Archer if he could please tell us about your own spiritual awakening journey?

Rick: Okay, I’m going to include my entire lifetime in that answer and cover a bunch of autobiographical stuff and then we’ll get into some broader principles as we go along. So, I was born in October of 1949, which means I’ll be 75 in October of this year. My parents met at art school. They were both creative people. They had both been in the military in World War II, and my father, in particular, suffered from severe PTSD as a result of the war, although I don’t think they called it that in those days. And he was an alcoholic, and he also had some form of epilepsy and took drugs, phenobarbital and Dilantin, for his epilepsy, and I don’t think those mix too well with alcohol. In any case, he stayed out drinking several nights a week and came home drunk and verbally abused my mother for half the night, which kept us kids awake and made it tough to go to school the next day and all. On the other hand, he was very creative. As I said, he had an organic garden throughout the 1950s, which few people did in those days, I guess, and he was always sculpting or painting or cooking. He was a very good cook. Growing up, he took me skiing, took me on Boy Scout camping trips and fishing and things like that. So I think maybe that, what I’ve just told you so far, might’ve been the beginnings of my appreciation of paradox, which is one of my favorite words, and that people are not black and white. They’re not all good or bad. They’re mixed bags. And he had a very heavy load to carry. I might have been the same way if I had been manning a machine gun in the tail of a bomber in World War II. But in any case, childhood was a bit rough. I think I’ll share a screen, a picture here. This is a picture of me and my sisters when I guess I was about six or so, with my sisters, Kathy and Carol. Carol lives here in Fairfield. Kathy on the left is out in Colorado. So I had an interesting childhood. We lived in beautiful places, Westport and Fairfield, Connecticut, quarter of a mile from Long Island Sound, and so skiing in the winter, swimming in the summer. As I was telling the hosts here a little earlier, I had a natural inclination to be a drummer, and I wanted to start playing drums when I was four, but I didn’t manage to get a drum set until I was 14. But I was always pounding on things, pots and pans and stuff like that. And I joined several bands– well, I joined a band days after I got my drums. I’ll go for a new screen share on that here. Let me just see. There we go. We started this one calling it Little Louis and the tympanum blasters  and that was Little Louie on the left. And my father painted the bass drum, and he wasn’t going to put all that on it. And so we changed it to the Tim Panics. This was a picture of me playing in another band. I went to a prep school for a year. This was the band that I had going after I learned to meditate, which actually became quite successful, and the lead guitarist became a professional jazz musician. Anyway, so as I got a little older, into my adolescence, my father’s treatment of my mother took a toll on her and she swallowed all my father’s phenobarbital and almost died, and then tried that several times throughout my adolescence. And I kind of left home more or less when I was 14 and moved in with a very permissive family who had seven kids, and we could do whatever we wanted there. So, smoking, drinking, taking drugs, sex, whatever was available, and there was plenty of all that available in the late ’60s. I ended up dropping out of high school because I was just too confused and untogether. That family moved to New Jersey and convinced me to come down there and stay with them there and get into another high school, which I also dropped out of and hitchhiked to California with a friend. And then the band I was in at the time got to spend the night with Jimi Hendrix in his hotel room. And they called me up and said, “You gotta come back. We’re getting the band back together”. So they sent me a plane ticket, I came back, and we were all still doing so much drugs that we didn’t know what we were doing. But finally one night, July of ’68, I was sitting in the basement of my parents’ home. By this time I had started to get into hard drugs a little bit. And in fact, I have hep C antibodies in my system. And I picked up a Zen book, because I was actually into spirituality. A year before, when we were preparing to take LSD for the first time, some friends of mine were reading Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert’s translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. And they mentioned enlightenment. And I thought, enlightenment, yeah. It kind of hit me. It rang a bell. I thought– in some muddled way, I thought, that’s what you’re supposed to do in life. And when we did take LSD it certainly wasn’t a taste of enlightenment, but it did show me something I had never realized, which is that everybody sees the world differently. I’d always assumed that we all saw the same world. And so I thought, well, so the trick is you have to change your perspective on the world, not necessarily change the world, although you can try to do that too. But the big thing is to change the way you see the world, the way you perceive things. And so anyway, after a year of fooling around, that night on LSD reading a Zen book, it just hit me. I thought, “These guys are more serious, and I’m just screwing around. And if I keep on going this way, I’m not going to live a very long life, and I’m also probably going to damage my body, and I’m stuck in this body, and if I damage it, I’ll be stuck in a damaged body.” So I thought, “All right, that’s it. I’m going to stop taking drugs. I’m going to learn Transcendental Meditation and I’ll see what happens.” So two weeks later, I learned TM and I took to it like a duck to water. I immediately had a beautiful, profound experience, felt like a ton had been lifted off my shoulders and I just made this sort of subtle, deep vow, in a way, to just do it regularly and see what happened. As you can tell from what I’ve said so far, I was not the type of person to do things regularly. My life is very irregular, but you know, how many years later now, what is it? I’m no longer in the TM movement, I’ll talk about that later, but I just stuck to it regularly. So anyway, I kept doing that and things started coming together. I got back in school, got a job, got a girlfriend, got into this band, the last picture that I showed you, and I was all of a sudden quite productive and got a high school equivalency diploma and into a community college and later into another college. And I soon began to want to become a teacher of TM. So I went to a couple of courses, and then I went to a two and a half month course in Estes Park, Colorado, and became a teacher and began teaching. And in my first year and a half or so, I taught maybe 800 or 900 people, which made me one of the most successful teachers in the country, part of which is due to the fact that I had a very good area to teach in. It was Fairfield County, Connecticut. People were educated and wealthy and it wasn’t too big of a territory to cover. So I raced around like a maniac and taught courses here, courses there, zooming back and forth. It’s amazing I didn’t have a car wreck, I used to drive so fast. And because I was so successful teaching, and I sound like I’m bragging now but I’m trying to just be factual, they promoted me to be what was called a regional lecturer. So I started traveling around, I was like 22 years old or something, started traveling around New York State and some other parts of the Northeast giving larger lectures, and then the local teachers would teach the people. And I was teaching weekend retreats to people. I must have taught 75 of those or so. And meanwhile, while all this is happening, every 4 and 1/2 months, we’d go off to Mallorca or Switzerland or someplace and do a six-month-long meditation course. And so I went off to Switzerland to do one of those. And at the end of it, Maharishi asked me to stay and to go up to Belgium and help conduct a teacher training course, which I did, and I’m gonna share my screen. So, boom. So here’s a picture that was taken at the end of that teacher training course. You can see me in the lower right with my prominent nose looking sideways. And I stayed there in what was called international staff in Europe, mostly Switzerland, and a little bit France and some other countries. And spent a lot of time around Maharishi, whom I adored. There’s a picture of me with him. And after about two and a half years, I went back to the States and got involved in various projects. But while I was over there, I met my wife. I’m going to share my screen again. Here she is after we got married, which was about 37 years ago. Her name is Irene. Most of you have heard of her, who you watch BatGap. But Maharishi had instilled in us the notion that if you’re really adamant about enlightenment, you should be celibate. You should be a monk. And so when he first said that, I hadn’t met my wife, but I very rudely and unceremoniously dropped my girlfriend at the time — I still feel guilty about that, the way I treated her — and embarked on the attempt to be a monk and had visions of ultimately living in the Himalayas. And that went on for 15 years, And Irene and I had had this chemistry, but I kept saying, “Oh, I love you, but I gotta be a monk, ’cause it’s the best thing you can do.” And then finally, in 1987, I kind of like, although my intellect and my friends were all saying, “No, you gotta keep doing this,” my heart and my intuition said, “Hey, enough of this, it’s time to leave.” So I left that monastic program, which wasn’t exclusive, it wasn’t like living in a cave, we were traveling around the world to Iran and the Philippines and all kinds of places doing these projects, but a lot of long meditation courses, too. Anyway, we left and got married, which was kind of a cold turkey marriage. In other words, going straight from monastic programs because she was on the female equivalent right into marriage, without the usual courtship and all that stuff, although we had had our radar on each other for 12 years. But anyway, that was a bit of an adjustment. But we adjusted slowly but surely over the years. And then I did various other things with her, projects, traveling around, teaching, lecturing, working at Maharishi International University and all kinds of things like that. But eventually we kind of felt like this is not a life, living in some dorm room. And we decided to leave the university’s employment and move into town. And I did computer consulting. I did desktop publishing, which I had taught at the university. Some web design, search engine optimization. Then around end of the last century, or in the late ’90s, early 2000s, a load of information came to my attention, which I had always heard rumors about, but had always dismissed and had answers for, that in fact, despite his advocacy of celibacy and his claim that he was a life celibate, Maharishi in fact had had numerous relationships over the course of his public career. And instead of dismissing the rumors as I always had, I decided, okay, I’m gonna take a look at this and see what the truth of it is. And I apologize to any TM people around for whom this is an uncomfortable topic, but the information is really out there these days. So I talked to some of his personal secretaries. I talked to four of the women who had been involved, and there were many more, but I talked to four. And I just came to terms with the fact that, okay, that was true. But as I said with regard to my father, I didn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, because he had so many marvelous qualities. I mean, I’ve just described to you the effect that his teachings had had on my life. Basically saved it and enhanced it in so many ways and resulted in so many wonderful adventures around the world, so that unlike some people who did have a kind of negative black and white all or nothing reaction to that information, I tried to contain it within a larger understanding and it instilled in me an appreciation of, well, a greater appreciation of paradox and of nuance and of the recognition that we’re all works in progress and nobody is perfect and everybody’s growing. One of my favorite quotes is from St. Teresa of Avila. She said, “It appears that God himself is on the journey.” So that’s what I did, but it did instill in me… Oh, I should add, one of the reasons I am so appreciative of Maharishi, aside from the benefits he brought me through his teachings, was that he basically saved my mother’s life. I mentioned that she had had three suicide attempts. And when I was over there in Switzerland, I more or less had arm-twisted her into learning meditation when I was back in Connecticut, but she didn’t take to it. But I was over there and I didn’t know what was going on with her, but we were sending audio tapes back and forth. And she had been sliding into another breakdown and beginning to hallucinate and stuff. And she thought, “Well, maybe I should try to meditate and it’ll help me.” So she sat down and had a really nice meditation and felt a lot better. And so she started doing it regularly. But I didn’t know this. And I assumed she was in some hospital or whatever was going on. And she had sent me a tape in which she had told me all that, but since I was moving around I hadn’t received that tape. And then I got another one in which she said, “Well, I’m either going out to California to be with Carol (my sister, who was at MIU, the Maharishi University out there at the time), or I’m coming to Switzerland.” And I was like, “Oh my God.” I mean, through my whole adolescence, this whole thing had been weighing on me, my mother’s situation and what could I do? And I’d asked Maharishi about it several times. And I had been going to visit her in the mental hospital so many times when I was back in Connecticut. So it was this huge, wonderful, celebratory moment. So anyway, the next day I asked Maharishi if she could come and he said, “Sure, let her come.” And I said, “Well, what would she do?” And he said, “Doesn’t matter, just let her come.” And I said, “Maybe she can take care of children.” “No, no, no, she doesn’t have to do that. Just let her come.” So she came over a few weeks later, and the first night that she was there, we were standing in the hall and he came walking in. And you know, people lined up. You’ve probably been in situations like this. People lined up on either side. He’s walking up this little aisle, and people are giving him flowers, and he’s greeting people and stuff. So he got to us. But the first thing she said when she saw him come in the room is, “He’s so short.” She didn’t realize he was so short. But anyway, he got up to us, and she gave him a flower, he gave her a flower. He looked at me and he said, “Keep her happy,” and a little chit-chat, and then he went and sat on his couch. And she turned to me, her face was like awestruck, and she said, “He looks right into your soul.” And so anyway, she stayed there nine months, and she had some wonderful adventures there too, traveling around Europe and stuff, and it really strengthened her, and she was a different person ever since then. She came back to the States, ended up moving here to Iowa. That’s where I am, by the way, Fairfield, Iowa. And she’s had her ups and downs because she’d really been through a lot in her life, but it was a far cry from what it had been when she was in and out of hospitals. And anyway, so for that reason alone, I’m extremely grateful. But okay, so let’s move along here. So about 15 years ago, well, prior to that, for quite a few years, I had been participating in this little satsang or spiritual discussion group here in town. Every Wednesday night, we’d sit around for a few hours in a small living room packed with people, and we’d just talk about our experiences and so on. And there were a lot of people here in town, where people have been meditating for decades, who had had significant spiritual development and awakenings and they would talk about them. But they were reluctant to talk about them outside that room because they had experienced that when they did so, their friends would often dismiss them as being delusional. “How could you claim to have a spiritual awakening? You can’t float off the ground or you don’t look like, I can’t see any big bright aura around you, or whatever.” They’d think that this is just an ordinary person, and how can an ordinary person have a profound spiritual awakening? I know this guy. But I knew they were having them. And so the idea dawned on me to start interviewing some of these people, so that others could see that ordinary people like them were having spiritual awakenings. And if it could happen to these people, it could happen to them. And so initially I conceived of it as a radio show. There’s a little low power FM radio station here in town. And if you go back, you can look at the very first BatGap interview, and that’s where we did it in the radio studio. But the radio station didn’t want to make it a regular show. And so then friends encouraged me to start taping them at a local public access TV station. So I did a bunch of them and didn’t know what I was going to do with them. But then a friend, my old buddy from high school who had been a video professional, got in touch and said, “Hey, send them to me. I’ll turn them into things that you can post on the internet.” So I created a YouTube channel, figured out how to create a website, and posted a bunch and then just started doing them regularly and eventually figured out how to do them long distance. We didn’t have Zoom in those days and there were all kinds of technical challenges, but we just kind of met one challenge after another. And the thing started to take off and become more and more popular. And more and more people started getting in touch, saying they wanted to be interviewed. We sometimes reach out to people. And if you look at the testimonials page on Batgap.com, you’ll see all kinds of beautiful stories from people, which came to us unsolicited about the impact it’s had on their lives. So I feel very grateful to have been able to serve in this capacity, and it’s been tremendously beneficial for me, as well as for apparently many of the people who’ve watched them. Now as a result of this issue that I described with Maharishi, and also the experience I’ve had over the years of doing this, of being aware of so many instances of spiritual teachers who fall short in the ethics department, and in various ways, I’ve grown in my appreciation of the importance of ethics on the spiritual path, both for the sake of the teachers and for the sake of their students. I think it is extremely destructive for a teacher himself to behave unethically, the karmic implications and all that, and it can be extremely disillusioning to students. I know people who have literally committed suicide because they were so disillusioned by the betrayal of a spiritual teacher. And so the issue has interested me more and more over the years. And I think it was 2017 I gave a talk at the Science and Non-duality Conference on the Ethics of Enlightenment. And my friend Jac O’Keefe was in the audience and a bunch of other people, and afterwards Jac and a fellow named Craig Holliday and I had lunch together and we were just chatting because it turned out that they also had given talks at the conference, unbeknownst to each other and to me, on the same topic. So we got together for lunch and we conceived the idea of starting an organization which eventually became called the Association for Spiritual Integrity, the purpose of which would be to not to wield some kind of authority or to pass judgment on people or to revoke people’s teaching certificates, because there is no such thing, but just to raise awareness of the importance of ethics on the spiritual path. I feel that spiritual awakening is kind of epidemic in the world. There’s a kind of a rising tide of consciousness throughout the world, and that is kind of welling up from a very deep level, but at the same time facilitated by the internet and our modern means of communication, and that it may just be the hope of the world. I think that every problem or anything, positive or negative, that we see manifesting on the world stage in societies is just a reflection or a manifestation of the collective consciousness of all the people in the world. And that collective consciousness is made up of the individual consciousness of all those seven or eight billion people, just as a forest is made up of trees. And if all the trees in a forest are withering and dying, you fly over it, it’ll look like a brown, gray forest. But if all the trees are healthy, it’ll look green. And you can’t spray paint the forest green to make it healthy, which is, I think, what some of our attempts at correcting societal problems do. It has to come from within. So lots of individuals undergoing profound individual change and rising toward higher states of consciousness will inevitably result in a better world, in all kinds of ways that we can’t even possibly foresee. Things that are wrong will perhaps start to correct themselves, and new creative ideas could come up that could solve some of our critical problems, and all kinds of things. So anyway, that’s been my thinking since I became a meditation teacher in 1970. And I’ve always tried to devote myself to helping in whatever way I could to raise collective consciousness. And this whole Buddha at the Gas Pump thing has been a great way of my being able to contribute to that. So where was I going? I had a point. Oh, yes, the point was that I think that ethical– lack of appreciation and adherence to ethical standards among spiritual teachers —  kind of sabotages the effort of this raising of collective consciousness, shoots it in the foot, so to speak. And I think that helping to raise awareness of the importance of ethics on the spiritual path will help to facilitate this collective awakening. So as I said a minute ago, the ASI doesn’t have any kind of authority or anything like that. But we consider ourselves really an educational organization. We have webinars. We’ve spoken at conferences at Harvard twice now, and the Harvard Divinity School, and also at the Parliament of World Religions last summer. And we have well over 600 members and maybe about 35 member organizations now who have joined. And it continues to grow. I think I have– my next slide is– yeah, here it is. I’m going to share this. There we go. So this is just a slide of the ASI website and I put the URL up here so you can see it. And if you’d like to go to that later, you can sign up to become a member. As I said, we have webinars and so on that you might enjoy participating in. So that’s my second major activity. And then there are lots of things going on with BatGap aside from the interviews. I’ve been very much involved for the past year in building an AI chatbot. Oh, and David B put a link to Batgap.com in the chat, which I didn’t show, but it’s Batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P. Yeah, so I’ve been involved in building an AI chatbot for BatGap in the past year, collaborating with a fellow named Nippun Meta from an organization called Service Space, and I’ve uploaded tens of thousands of relevant documents to the data corpus of the of the chatbot, and we’re soon going to add 1700 spiritual literature, traditional spiritual books like the Bible, the Upanishads. And I’ll explain this very briefly and then move on, but things like chat GPT, they’re horizontal in the sense that they scarf up all the information on the internet and you can ask them questions about anything, which is great, but this is more of a vertical as opposed to a horizontal chatbot because it specializes in the kind of stuff we’re interested in here, spiritual development and spirituality and so on. And so you’re likely to get better answers if you ask it questions of a spiritual nature than if you ask the same questions of one of the more general chatbots. Anyway, I’m kind of a computer geek, aside from being a spiritual geek, so this kind of is a nice dovetail of interests that I’ve been enthusiastic about recently. All right, this would be a good time to pause for a question or more.

Yvonne: All right, thank you, Rick. That was really fascinating. And I do have a few questions. First off, let’s go back to when you went to the Maharishi University. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Like, where is it? What is it like? Were there lots of students there? Who taught your courses? What exactly did you learn there? Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Rick: Yeah, it’s here in Fairfield, Iowa, and it’s been here since the early ’70s. It started out in Santa Barbara, California in a rented facility, but then they found an abandoned campus here and moved the whole thing here. And I taught desktop publishing there, as I mentioned, but then I also became a student and took courses in what was called the Science of Creative Intelligence, the basic premise of which is that there is an all-pervading fundamental intelligence governing the universe, which I suppose in religious terms you could call God, but that it can be explored and understood more scientifically, that you could empirically investigate it through direct experience, and also some of the other criteria of the scientific method could be used to understand it better. And so I got a bachelor’s and master’s degrees in that. I’ve used the term Vedic Studies because it was very much that also, and that’s probably better understood than Science of Creative Intelligence, which is a big mouthful to explain. And the faculty members were people who, like myself, were long-term meditators, but had more academic credentials than I did. And there were quite a few students in those days. These days, the whole thing has dwindled a bit. And I think the university itself is being shaken by some of the allegations that I mentioned earlier, and they’re going to have to come to terms with that somehow. The lifeblood of the university in recent years has been students from Africa and places like that coming to study computer science and then getting jobs in the US and then having their wages garnered to pay their tuition retroactively. But there’s also a very popular Ayurveda program that my brother-in-law heads up and has several hundred students and it’s probably the most popular program of its kind that I know of in the country. I think that’s the most popular program at the university at the moment. That’s a bit more about it.

Yvonne:  Awesome. Well, thank you. Now we’ve had a couple of people asking the same question, which is, how did you come up with the name Buddha at the Gas Pump?

Rick: Well, actually I didn’t. When I was in that Wednesday night group that I told you about, before I conceived of this, there was a young fellow there who was one of the participants. And when I told the group I wanted to start doing this thing, I said, “Help me brainstorm on a name.” And he just spat out about a dozen possible ideas. And everybody said, “Oh, Buddha at the Gas Pump, that’s got to be it. We like that.” So we called it that. And it may have been an allusion to the Celestine prophecy, I think it was called, where there was some character– or was it “The Way of the Peaceful Warrior”? Maybe that was it. There was some character who was sort of an enlightened dude. And he was at a gas station. And he levitated up onto the roof of the gas station or something like that. I don’t know if that’s where he got the idea, but the reason we like the idea, the name, is that it implies what I was trying to say earlier, that spiritual awakening is not for extraordinary people, at least not exclusively, that it’s really everyone’s birthright and that you could be pumping gas at a gas station or maybe charging up your Tesla at a charging station and the person next to you might be in an exalted state of consciousness and you’d never know it. It doesn’t necessarily broadcast in a gross way. It’s a subtle thing. So anyway that’s why we chose the name.

Yvonne: Awesome. Ingeborg has a question for you. She says, “Have you ever heard of the lecture by George Hammond, a member of TM, titled ‘The Pervasive Influence of Personalities and Ideas on Human History’, given November 30, 2014, at the request of the deceased Maharishi. George Hammond reported on the movement and shared their messages. If you’ve heard of this, what is your opinion on this incident and the worldview behind it?”

Rick: Yes, and if this is the Ingerborg I know, she’s the mother of a good friend of mine, Susanna Marie, who’s a spiritual teacher who’s been on BatGap a few times. Yeah, I watched that whole thing or listened to it as the case may be, I didn’t go in person. And I heard his whole story and he claims to have been like all these people throughout history in his previous incarnations, Plato, Socrates, I don’t know, just a whole bunch of them. Mark Twain, you name it, he’s been it. And so I’m very skeptical of it. He claimed that Maharishi came to him in the shower, channeled, and started giving him all these instructions that he was supposed to impart to everybody. So I’m skeptical. That’s all I can say.

Yvonne: Thank you Rick. Tim has a question for you. He says, “Thank you so much for your very great talk and personal sharing. I too did TM and then joined SRF as well as did some Zen meditation around the same time as you did. I still do them and find them very valuable, but I also agree with your assessment of the importance of ethics on the spiritual path. Why do you think there is so much of an issue experienced by many of the spiritual leaders around ethics?”

Rick:  Good question, Tim. Well, most of the spiritual teachers who are out there today didn’t have any traditional training. They might have just been, well, almost all of them were self-appointed. I’m told that in certain Zen traditions it was the tradition that if you have a spiritual awakening, the master says, “Great, now wait 10 years before you start to teach.” And maybe some of them have had a fair amount of traditional training, but even some of those people have behaved horrendously. Some of these Tibetan masters and others that have that have come to the West have just really been bad boys. And sometimes it’s written off as “crazy wisdom,” but I think that’s a lame excuse. I have a friend named Timothy Conway who’s been on BatGap a couple of times. He’s a scholar and he says that crazy wisdom is just a literary trope that someone cooked up, and that there really was no such history of these people beating and drinking and behaving like that. So anyway, I think, again, we’re all works in progress. And even some of the well-known —  well, let’s take Adyashanti, for instance. I think he’s very clean ethically, a great guy. But he himself recently retired from teaching and announced that his body had suffered so much trauma from all the pain he had been through over the years due to whatever it was that was causing him that pain that he was on some anti-anxiety medication. Most people wouldn’t be so candid. But, you know, if I think about my life, I can think back, let’s say, a decade at a time, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, and if I tune into where I was at each of those junctures, it’s like a huge contrast from one decade to the next. Maybe it’s not so obvious on the surface, but in terms of my mentality at the time, I can think of how I functioned, how I behaved, how I saw the world at those different stages, and I feel like there’s just been steady progress, and I’ll probably be able to say the same thing 10 years from now. So I’ve had debates with people about the progressive versus the direct path, and there’s actually a BatGap panel discussion about that. And I think that there’s always going to be the progressive path, because I don’t think that you can just snap your fingers and arrive at some state of complete dissolution and resolution of all of your ingrained habit patterns and tendencies, or samskaras as they call them in Sanskrit. That takes a lifetime, maybe lifetimes, to work all that out. That’s always going to be happening if you apply yourself to making it happen. But there can be the direct path in the sense that even from day one, if you do a certain practice you could have a clear glimpse of pure consciousness. You directly flop into it. Great, but then you have to stabilize it and the stabilization entails purification of the whole mind-body system which is the vehicle through which anything is experienced, especially the state of enlightenment. The state of enlightenment, being an extraordinary subjective development, would correlate with an extraordinary degree of physiological refinement in order to sustain it. And that takes time. It doesn’t happen overnight. So I think that people neglect that to their peril. There’s another favorite quote of mine from the Buddhist sage Padmasambhava, who is considered an avatar, He was very highly enlightened and he said, “Although my awareness is as vast as the sky, my attention to karma is as fine as a grain of barley flour.” And what I think he meant by that is that he’s saying basically, “Hey, I’m a pretty cosmic dude, but I have to be really careful about the way I behave. It doesn’t grant me a pass to have attained this state of consciousness that I’m in. I could screw up like anybody else could.” Somebody else, Constance Casey, whom I interviewed a month ago or so, had a quote that she heard someplace which was that, “We’re all at different stages on the path, but we’re all the same distance from the ditch.” So I think that people can fall at any time, and there are numerous instances of it in the Vedic literature and probably in the literature of other spiritual traditions. So you have to attend to right behavior, right action, consciously and carefully, and never take it for granted that you are above such considerations. I’ve heard people actually get caught having been sleeping with all of their female students and they say, “Oh, it wasn’t me, because I’m one with God. It was God doing it.” Or “I’m not the actor, it was just physical bodies having sensations and I’m not responsible, there’s nothing wrong, I’m beyond right and wrong” and so on. And that to me is BS. It’s just a lame alibi. Anyway, I’m probably going on a little bit too long. So I probably answered his question. If not, I can come back at you.

Yvonne: Thank you Rick, that was a very elegant and I think multi-layered deep understanding of why anybody can fall. I completely 100% agree with you. And so, that being said, next question is along a slightly different angle. “We are many, many people that you’ve interviewed over the years at Buddha at the Gas Pump. Some major insights or spiritual lessons or surprises that you’ve learned in interviewing all these people. Share some of that with us.”

Rick: All right, well I’ll just say what comes to mind. You know there’s a song by Paul Simon, “One-Trick Pony.” God is not a one-trick pony, and as Jesus said, “In my father’s house there are many mansions.” And you know it says in the Bhagavad Gita that wherever in the world people show sincere aspiration for spiritual development, the Lord recognizes that and acknowledges it and supports it. And there’s a natural human tendency to want to think that “my way is the best way, obviously, because I’m doing it. It must be the best way. If it weren’t the best way, I’d be doing something else”. So people do have that tendency and it becomes quite militant at times, and millions of people have been killed as a result of that attitude because “they weren’t practicing the thing that we’re practicing.” So I really don’t think that there is any one way that is the best way. I think that now there are different ways that are perhaps more effective than others, but only if you can practice them. There’s a verse in the Gita which says, “Because one can perform it, one’s own dharma, though lesser in merit, is better than the dharma of another. The dharma of another brings danger.” So, we have to find something that works for us, and perhaps the criteria of it working for us is that it’s easy to do and enjoyable. Because if it isn’t those two things, you’re probably not going to do it. And I think regular practice is very important of some kind of something that works for you. You know, you’ve all heard about neuroplasticity probably about how the brain changes over time by virtue of things we do. There was a famous anecdote about some musical maestro walking down the streets of New York and somebody came up to him and said, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” and he said, “Practice, practice, practice.” Ironically, there are actually some spiritual teachers, especially the neo-advaita types, that just say, “Oh, you don’t need to practice because practicing, you know, implies the existence of a practicer and you don’t really exist and the world is an illusion and you’re only going to reinforce your individuality if you do any kind of practice” and all that stuff. I don’t agree with any of that and I could go into more elaborate responses to it, but I really do think that also a regular routine in life in general is conducive to spiritual progress. Early to bed, early to rise, you know? And there are verses, again, in the Gita and other scriptures about not eating too much or too little, not sleeping too much or too little, not working too hard or too little, just being balanced. Buddha said the middle way, and getting enough exercise. Because again, the body is the temple of the soul. This is the vehicle through which we live our life or evolve spiritually or whatever. And you have to have a properly functioning vehicle to accomplish anything in life. Which again is not to say, I said this kind of thing once at a weekend retreat someplace and this lady who had MS or something burst into tears and said, “I’m doomed, I have MS, I can’t possibly make any spiritual progress.” I don’t think that that’s true. I think that you could embark on a spiritual path on your deathbed, and it will create a momentum which will stay with you in the hereafter and beyond. So I think there’s no bad time to start on the spiritual path. And one thing I have observed, and I’m probably rambling away from the original question, is that there are so many instances in my own experience and in the lives of people I’ve interviewed where the desire alone is the most pivotal thing in bringing about some kind of opportunities for spiritual growth. As some teachers say, some gurus say, take one step toward me and I’ll take 1,000 steps toward you. I think that if you have the sincere, ardent desire for the kind of thing that we’re talking about here, opportunities will present themselves. Synchronicities will happen. You’ll meet this person. You’ll hear– you’ll pick up– I’ve interviewed people who were in a bookstore, and a book just plopped off the shelf and fell on the floor, and they picked it up, and “oh, it’s Ramana Maharshi, I’ve never heard of him” and that leads to other things. So I think that I could get esoteric about this. I think we’re not alone in this physical realm. I think there are higher realms and intelligent entities in those realms who intervene or oversee human affairs and who orchestrate to create more opportune situations for us to advance if we have the desire and the intention. There’s again the verse in the Gita which says if you support the gods they’ll support you.

Yvonne: Awesome, I call that the invisible fingers behind the scenes.

Rick: You had some of that too.

Yvonne: I’ve had quite a bit of that in my life. Oh yeah, very very definite reality in my life.

Rick: I noticed somebody posted in the chat, when will this end? I think we’re going on until half past the hour, right?

Yvonne: Quarter past the hour. Yeah, okay. So we have a question here for you from Doug. He says, “In terms of your own awakening, has it coincided with the TM’s model of states of consciousness?” and he says “CC, GC, UC, etc.”

Rick:  Yeah, those stand for cosmic consciousness, god consciousness, unity consciousness, and they I think they have corresponding Sanskrit names from the ancient tradition. And incidentally, I just want to interject that TM has been around a long time, if you google Bhavati Dhyan in Google Translate, it’ll come up as Transcendental Meditation. And it’s been around for centuries, if not millennia, particularly in the Shankaracharya tradition, and particularly within that tradition among a group of monks called Dandi Swamis. I have a friend named Dana Sawyer who’s been on BatGap a couple of times, and he speaks fluent Hindi, and has been to India many times, and interviewed hundreds of these Swamis, and had them all initiate him into meditation, and they all taught him TM. He was a TM teacher. He knew what they were teaching him. And so it’s not something Maharishi invented. I think he probably learned it in his ashram when he was a student, and he was really good at marketing and had the energy and the motivation to just spread it around the world. Anyway, my own development, my own experience, I don’t claim to have achieved all those states of consciousness, although I know people who have. There’s one person on this call today who says he has. I’ve interviewed him too. David Buckland, he says it in his interviews so he’s not keeping it a secret. And Harry Alto, another one, and many others. I don’t know if any of you have ever read the book “Collision with the Infinite” by Suzanne Siegel. It was an interesting thing. She was a TM teacher. She was having good experiences. She sort of drifted away from the TM movement and she got married and she was living in Paris and she was pregnant and she was just coming from a swimming session at a pool and getting on a bus when all of a sudden, boom, she just popped. She just had this shift in which she could no longer locate an individual self, and it terrified her. She’s like, “Whoa.” And she was like struggling and straining and trying to find this individual self and she couldn’t do it. And she lived in a state of fear for like 10 years. And finally she was in a meeting with Jean Klein, the French advaita teacher, and he just basically said a few things which put her at ease and she realized that she had actually undergone the kind of shift that she had heard about when she was a TM teacher, but her understanding of it at the time was so different from the actual experience of it that she didn’t put two and two together. And that raises an important point, and I’ll still get around to answering your question. That raises an important point, which is that knowledge on the path is also very important. It’s not just a matter of experience. Without proper knowledge, even the experience of cosmic consciousness or some higher state could actually could cause confusion and fear. So ethics, knowledge, practice, all these different components, which are there quite fully in some of the more august spiritual traditions, but are very often lacking in some of the more contemporary forms of spirituality, are all important. So anyway, I’m a happy camper. If I had to describe my experience, I would say it is generally that I’m everywhere, I’m nowhere, and I’m right here, if you get the implications. And we are multi-dimensional beings. We’re not just absolute pure consciousness, and we’re not just physical beings. Development of consciousness or spiritual evolution, in my understanding is the expansion of the range or spectrum of dimensions of reality that we can incorporate within our waking life, within our conscious experience. And there is a level which is utterly silent, unmanifest, nothing ever happened, nothing is happening. There is a level which is kind of divine and all pervading intelligence and everything is perfect on that level. And then there’s a level of – there are Sanskrit names for all these by the way – there’s a level which in Sanskrit is called Vyavaharika which is transactional reality, ordinary stuff, people and buses and dogs and whatnot, and you have to deal with all levels accordingly and appropriately. You can’t say, “Well, this bus is an illusion. It won’t matter if I step in front of it” because you’ll go splat. So you know I guess my experience has just been an ongoing clarification and refinement of that sort of multi-dimensional incorporation over the years.

Yvonne: Awesome, thank you Rick. We have another question about a controversial topic which is the use of psychedelic drugs. So someone would like to know “what are your thoughts and have you had any negative experiences with psychedelics?”

Rick:  Well yeah I got arrested a couple times for possession back in the 60s, that was kind of negative. I remember one time, oh man, I took acid with some people and then somebody gave me some meth and I took that and I was just in a horrible state. Then I was in a very depressed, confused state for days and I went to see The Doors in concert and despite the fact that I might have thought that fun, it was one of the most miserable nights of my life just because I was still so traumatized by what I did. Now of course I’m just referring to very reckless recreational use of drugs and I fully appreciate the research that is being done at Johns Hopkins and NYU and many other places, and how much psychedelics are helping people with addictions, with PTSD, with end-of-life fears, and things like that, stage four cancer treatments, who are terrified of death and then they have a psilocybin trip and it’s the most beautiful experience of their lives and they’re no longer afraid of dying. So I feel that psychedelics have their place and their promise, but there’s a lot of recklessness in that field too. A lot of people just sort of doing too much without proper supervision. There are ayahuasca retreats where women have been raped. There are basket cases, kind of casualty cases of people. I know a girl here in town who I interviewed in the early days of BatGap who was on an ayahuasca trip and she had such an adverse reaction that she was hospitalized in mental hospitals and she’s never been the same since. So it’s a powerful thing. I don’t think it should be done casually or recklessly or even recreationally. And I don’t think everyone should do it. I wouldn’t want to do it again. I’ve been there, done that, but I recognize its value in the right hands for the right people.

Yvonne: Thank you for that, Rick.

Rick: And I’ve interviewed Michael Polin who wrote How to Change Your Mind, along with Christopher Bay. He’s a fascinating guy who did 75 heroic LSD trips. They call it heroic if you take 500 micrograms. And he has some fascinating insights if you’d like to watch that interview it’s on BatGap.

Yvonne: All right, thanks Rick. We have another question, from Paula, and Paula’s question is, “Do you have to have a big experience to be enlightened or can you get there gradually without any of these big experiences?”

Rick: That’s a good question. There’s a teacher named Samuel Bonder who’s been on BatGap and he coined the phrase “oozers.” He said some people have these “aha” big flashy shifts, other people are “oozers.” And I think Jesus said something like, “The kingdom of heaven sneaks up like a thief in the night.” I think that it can grow very, and I’ve heard Adyashanti talk about this too, and many others, but it can grow very incrementally so that you don’t even notice what’s developing and you get used to it day by day by day and yet if you were to somehow contrast what you experience now with what you experienced 20 years ago, coming or going in either direction, you know, if you flash back to 20 years ago, even though you felt well enough then, you all of a sudden you’d feel, “Oh my god, what happened to me? This is horrible compared to…” or if you could just flash forward from then to now, you’d think, “Oh my god, this is so blissful,” and yet it seems kind of, “Ah, it’s good. I’m feeling fine. It’s ordinary.” So we acclimate, mercifully, we grow accustomed to whatever we’re experiencing. And probably for most people, you’ll have some flashy things along the way, but for most people, I think that’s the way it goes for them. And if you’re anticipating some great big fireworks, you might always be looking for that and missing the fact that you’ve already got something that’s really valuable.

Yvonne: Very well put, thank you Rick. We now have a question from Ken who says, “Since you started BatGap, the consciousness marketplace has grown tremendously in terms of similar programs and with many of the same people being interviewed.” So he has two questions from this. Number one, “Has this affected your sense of the BatGap program’s role or service?” And two, “Do you see the AI chatbot you’re developing as a way of helping navigate, select, discern the vast amount of consciousness, spiritual information now available?”

Rick: Yeah, so I don’t know if it’s affected the BatGap program. I feel like we’re all in the same, we’re all just different players on the same big team and I actually have, or had until recently, we’re redesigning the website, but I had a whole big long list on BatGap of other spiritual interview shows. I’m happy to refer people to them. And I’ve listened to some of them myself and I’m friends with some of the people who do them and so on. So yeah, I don’t feel like they’re infringing upon BatGap’s territory or any such thing. You know, we’re all just helping and we’re all doing what we can, as the Beatles sang. And regarding the chatbot, different people have different affinities. Some people hate the way I interview. They think I talk too much, and others like it. And so, if you don’t like it, then maybe you’ll like Jeffrey Mishlove or Alex Takeris or one of the other spiritual interviewers or Yvonne Kaysen. So, yeah. So, regarding the chatbot, yeah, you’ve all heard stories about this, I’m sure, that AI is growing by leaps and bounds but it’s still probably in its infancy. And there’s no telling what it might be able to do five years from now. And for those who are afraid of AI because they’ve heard scary stories about it, I would say that it’s kind of like the internet in the sense that good people will do good things with it, bad people will do bad things with it. But if, in the terms of AI, if the good people are afraid of it and don’t do anything with it, then the bad people will just do things. So if you can apply it to a useful purpose, I think it can be a tremendous boon and it offers great promise in many, many different areas. And we’ll see how it goes with the BatGap bot. We keep brainstorming and there are a bunch of brilliant people behind it who are developing it more and more on the backend. And I keep loading more and more information into it, and we keep tweaking something called the Credo, which is this marching instructions for the bot that you can modify to change its behavior. For instance, one time, just for experimentation’s sake, I put in the Credo, I said, quote Beatles songs if there’s any appropriate lyric that fits in with the answer, and immediately it started quoting Beatles songs. But then I took that out ’cause I didn’t wanna have that in there all the time. But anyway, we keep fiddling and tweaking and trying to improve it. And there’s a page on Batgap.com where you can sign up to use it. So go ahead and do that if you like. And check it out. See if you like it.

Yvonne: Awesome. Thank you, Rick. I look forward to seeing what you come up with that BatGap bot. Personally, I’m very interested. We have a comment and a question from Brian. He says, “I so appreciate the level of vulnerability with which you reveal your history, thoughts, and emotions. It makes it so easy to relate to you as a human being on a spiritual journey. And the humility which acknowledges we are all works in progress. I believe these really help your message be heard and accepted. Have you deepened gradually in these qualities or have you always been this way?”

Rick: No, Brian, I mean, if you heard the whole interview today, I was a pretty messed up little kid, a young man. And, I mean, I wasn’t a bad person. I wasn’t, I don’t think, intentionally cruel or violent or anything like that, but I was very confused and mixed up and unhappy and lost in many ways and, non-functional in many ways. And so, when I was 18, I just had this aha moment where I thought, okay, I’m gonna turn this around, because I don’t like the way it’s going. And so I just started one step at a time, doing what I could to live a more constructive life and meditate regularly and eat better and exercise better and not consume damaging substances and all that stuff. And it’s just, it’s grown over the years.

Yvonne: Yes, I like the term that you said earlier on, we’re all a work in progress. That’s what I’ve been saying for years. I’m still a work in progress and we’re all a work in progress.

Rick: And St. Teresa, that quote from her is that God is a work in progress. So we’re in good company.

Yvonne: Yeah, we’re in good company. So we have a question here from Joe, who says, “Sufi Master Kheer Vilayat Inayat Khan has stated, ‘Awakening beyond life can never be the final goal of spiritual practice. It has to be followed by awakening in life.’ Oh, I see that I read this incorrectly. ‘Awakening beyond life should not be the goal but followed by awakening in life.’ Would you and others that you’ve interviewed tend to agree with this perspective?”

Rick:  I do. There’s a comedian named Stephen Wright, if you like comedians, check out Stephen Wright. Anyway, he had one joke where he said, he has this deadpan way of speaking, but he said, “I broke up with my girlfriend. I wasn’t really into meditation and she really wasn’t into being alive.” So I think that I see spiritual development not as a way of escaping from anything, but actually as a way of living life more fully. One of Maharishi’s favorite slogans was “200% of life, 100% inner spiritual, 100% outer material,” and you know most of us are not monks by our inclinations. We’re not going to go retreat to a cave or anything, and if we actually practice a meditation or some kind of spiritual practice that makes us start doing that and it’s not really in tune with our tendencies, it could actually retard our spiritual practice, our spiritual growth. So I think that spiritual, here’s a way of explaining it, and this won’t be unfamiliar to all of you, this inner reservoir of pure consciousness or whatever you want to call it, is generally regarded as being a vast repository of intelligence, creativity, bliss. And so the spiritual path can just be seen as a matter of tapping into that and then infusing it more and more into the more manifest aspects of our life. The mind, the senses, the intellect, all these things. And so that will naturally result in greater success in life if that’s what we’re really doing. We should be better students, better pickleball players, better violin players or whatever if we have access to a deeper reservoir of intelligence and creativity and energy. And that’s been my experience, at least with the pickleball. I’m not a tennis player. I’m not a musician anymore.

Yvonne: Awesome. Okay. So I think we’re going to wrap up. We’ve had a number of comments about how much people absolutely loved your presentation today, Rick, and that they wish you’d be teaching, you’d make a great spiritual guide.

Rick: Aren’t I teaching?

Yvonne: You are teaching right now, absolutely.

Rick: And also in the interviews, although I try to keep my mouth shut, but I get in some little nuggets.

Yvonne: You do. I noticed that during my interview. But I’d like to wrap up with, what are your future plans? Do you have any ideas in the back of your head in addition to the AI bot? Like, are you thinking of a book? Are you thinking of a movie?

Rick:  I may at some point use AI to help write a book because you know I have all these interviews and all the transcripts of them and then I have a lot of little things that I’ve written, and then I save them if it’s just some email to somebody or some little thing that that I think, well, this would be worth saving, so I save it and then I have hours of conversations that I’ve had with people that I recorded, just private conversations that were pontificating and philosophizing about things. I’ve saved all that stuff and AI is getting to the point where you can plop all that in to an AI and then say, “Write me a chapter on such and such in my writing style based upon all this material I’ve just given you,” and it’ll take a few seconds and give you that. And then I could go over it and actually refine it and make sure it’s the way I want it to be so, it is actually something I’ve literally written. So I might use some technique like that to write a book at some point, and it would probably be a book that consists of shorter essays on different aspects or different topics that wouldn’t necessarily have to be read cover to cover, but this, that, and the other thing, different reflections and observations that I’ve come up with over the years. So we’ll see, but I can barely even clean out my inbox on any given day. In fact, it hasn’t been cleaned out in months, so I don’t know, I’ll have to be a little bit better at time management before I get around to writing a book. Plus, there’s so many other things going on besides BatGap. I mean, we have dogs to walk, and grass to cut, and all the usual things that life throws at you.

Yvonne: Yeah, well, thank you, Rick, for an absolutely fabulous presentation. It’s been absolutely wonderful and I know everyone here is very very appreciative of your openness, of your spiritual wisdom that you’ve acquired over the years, and in your humility in expressing what your spiritual journey was like. There were ups and downs and the rough patches in the beginning and the conclusion that we’re all works in progress. So thank you so much for an absolutely fabulous presentation, Rick.

Rick: Yeah, thank you and thanks to those who’ve been watching and stay in touch everybody.

Yvonne: Yes, just as we close, could you tell everybody how they can get in touch with you, please?

Rick: Well, I don’t want to get inundated with emails, but my email address is rick@batgap.com, but I don’t have time for a lot of chit-chat, because as I said there’s a flood of emails and a lot of them represent projects that take a lot more time than answering an email. But occasionally I’ll have conversations with somebody while I’m walking in the woods or something, and if they really feel the need to talk, and I’ve made some good friends that way. So I’m theoretically open to that kind of thing, but I just can’t promise anything because of time constraints.

Yvonne: Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Rick. It’s been absolutely fabulous.

[MUSIC] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

I’ll tell you, the first time I took LSD, I realized, wow, people see the world so differently. You and the fundamental reality of the universe, of which you are a part, are one and the same, consciousness. So a simple answer to that question is, it’s the experiential realization, not just the intellectual one, that you are Brahman, you are unbounded awareness. And now the director of Sunseed The Journey and today’s host, Ameretat Cohn.

Ameretat: Hello everyone and welcome back or welcome to Wisdom Talks. Today we have a special program called Interviewing the Interviewer. Our guest today is Rick Archer, the creator and host of the webinar series Buddha at the Gas Pump. His guests are what he calls ordinary spiritually awakening people. Rick sees himself as a connector and a collector, a catalyst for more awakening. At least that’s what I read someone said about you. And if you find this or our other Wisdom Talks, movies, meditations helpful, please do contribute any amount you wish so we can continue to keep our Sunseed studio alive and well. And you can donate at our website which is the sunseedstudio.org/contribute. And now it’s my great pleasure to say “Hi Rick. Welcome to Root Room Talks.”

Rick: Hi Ameretat, good to meet you. I’ve already met you but good to see you again.

Ameretat: So Rick, you’ve had these almost 700 interviews with people. What is your selection process so that you actually are able to get the people for your talks?

Rick: So the theme of the show is, from the very outset, one of my motivations was to demonstrate that spiritual awakenings are happening, they’re happening more and more commonly, and they’re happening to ordinary people. You don’t have to glow in the dark, or to have been or to be some super-duper special person to have had a spiritual awakening. And my motivation for that was that, you know, here in town, some of these people I alluded to who had had spiritual awakenings were being ridiculed by friends for making it public because their friends had known them for years, and they thought they were just an ordinary guy. “You must be getting delusions of grandeur. How could this have happened to you?” So I just wanted to demonstrate that it was happening and it’s happening to normal, ordinary people and it’s everyone’s birthright. It’s not some super special thing, it’s something that we all have the potential to experience.

Ameretat: What do you call a spiritual awakening?

Rick: Well, good question. Generally speaking, it’s the realization that you are not merely a flesh-bound entity and your existence doesn’t cease when the body dies. You are consciousness. You and the fundamental reality of the universe of which you are a part are one and the same – consciousness. And so a simple answer to that question is, it’s the experiential realization, not just the intellectual one, that you are Brahman, you are unbounded awareness, existence, consciousness, bliss, that’s your true nature and also you are an individual person. So the wave, let’s say, recognizes that, hey, I’m not just a wave, I’m part of the ocean. But I’m still a wave – I now do it from the perspective of the ocean.

Ameretat: The idea of awakening as a process as opposed to something you said is permanent and non-fixed is actually, I guess, what a lot of us think about it means to be on a spiritual path.

Rick: Yeah, and there’s a great quote from Saint Teresa of Avila. She said, “It appears that God himself is on the journey.” So if God is, then certainly we are. The more complex the life form, the more fully embodied the divine can be. The more God has hands, feet, and the ability to experience in an embodied form, as a living reality. And I kind of like to think that that’s the very purpose of the universe. God sort of said, “Well, this is kind of boring, just me alone hanging out here in the unmanifest. I think I’ll play around a bit and just create this phantasmagoria of galaxies and planets and beings through which I can actually experience and perhaps even, it’s more fun.” They use the word Leela in the Vedic tradition, it’s a play, it’s more fun than just flat unmanifest being.

Ameretat: Let’s go talk a little bit about back to 1967 I think it was, when you were driving down the road in Connecticut, right? And you had these guys in the back seat reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead and somehow the word enlightenment came up. What did enlightenment mean to you then, when you first heard it?

Rick: It didn’t mean much, but a little light bulb went off in my head. It was like, “Whoa, that strikes a chord. There’s this thing that you can experience and perhaps I ought to experience it.” At that point, we were all preparing to take an LSD trip, which is why they were reading Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert’s translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. And over the course of the coming year, I took a lot of drugs and all and got pretty messed up. But I never forgot that purpose, even though I was really just goofing around. And so then finally, after a year, I got serious and learned to meditate.

Ameretat: What did that purpose look like to you then? What did you imagine that it was talking about?

Rick: Well, it was pretty fuzzy at that stage, but I’ll tell you the first time I took LSD, I realized, wow, people see the world so differently. I always assumed that the world was what it was and everyone saw it pretty much the same. And here I was all of a sudden, after a night of tripping, going into a donut shop and buying donuts and just marveling at the probable difference between the way I was experiencing the scene and the way the donut selling people behind the counter were experiencing the scene. So I thought that’s it, I mean the whole point is to change your perspective.

Ameretat: How would you say your view of enlightenment is now that’s different than it was when you were a kid tripping and hearing the words?

Rick: Well I remember driving down the road with a TM teacher whom I had invited to town to teach a course and at the time I was playing in a band and I said, “Wow, if I had an enlightened band, could we just get up on stage and like spontaneously compose songs and play them just like that, because we’re all so cosmic?”

Ameretat: Superheroes, right?

Rick: Yeah. So yeah, there was a sort of supernatural expectation of what it might be. But my understanding and experience have matured over the years, as everyone’s tends to do. And now I consider it to be a holistic, well-rounded development of the instrument through which pure consciousness is lived, or through which the Divine is expressed or lived. And that would mean that, like I keep coming back to this theme, it’s not something where you could have some kind of profound inner experience and yet your outer behavior reprehensible is in some way. All the cobwebs would have to be cleared out to really justify the use of the term enlightenment. And I think that’s pretty rare. Most people who are spiritual teachers have all kinds of issues and the honest ones admit it and they are growing and maturing as they go along. But you don’t have to have a PhD in physics to teach second grade math. So people can be somewhat along on their path and still be of value as teachers to others.

Ameretat: How was it that you were able to then not just become a meditator but actually get to know Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and have a relationship with him? Can you tell us what that experience was like for the first time you met him?

Rick: He always had a very profound impact on me when I was in his presence. I could feel my consciousness just shift and become deeper, more expansive, more profound, more blissful. He definitely had an air about him, an aura. I mean, maybe some of the listeners have met people like this, like Muktananda or Amma or various others who just, it’s called Darshan. They have enough inner Shakti or whatever that it radiates the environment. And if you’re in that environment, it’s transformative, you feel the influence of it. I remember when my mother first met him, he was walking in, we exchanged a few pleasantries and then he walked on and then she turned to me and said, “He looks right into your soul.” So anyway, he was a profound man. He was also a very complex and in some ways flawed human being, I believe. But I’m very grateful for the whole experience that I went through.

Ameretat: I know that you left the TM movement at a certain point and there were some, I guess you could say, allegations about Maharishi that he had crossed the line. Did that have an effect on the TM movement and on yourself?

Rick: I heard those allegations even before I learned to meditate. And I denied those allegations for decades as I worked in the TM movement. And then around 23 years ago or so, I got hit with enough evidence that I realized they were true and that he had in fact had sexual affairs throughout his career while claiming to be a life celibate and recommending that lifestyle for other people. And I’ve been processing it for 23 years. But when all is said and done, I’m still very grateful. My predominant sentiment is gratitude, but I can no longer obviously take everything he said as the gospel truth, and you have to sort of parse it out and consider what seems to be valid, what isn’t. But don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. And in fact, TM technique, if you search “Bhavatit Dhyan” in Google Translate, it turns up as Transcendental Meditation and it turns out this technique has been taught for hundreds of years if not more by a certain tradition of Swamis in the Himalayas. And a friend of mine named Dana Sawyer who’s been on BatGap a couple of times and who’s been to India many times and speaks fluent Hindi actually interviewed several hundred of these Swamis and had at least half of them initiate him into meditation. And he found that over and over again they were teaching him basically Transcendental Meditation. So it’s an ancient technique. Maharishi was just good at marketing it, packaging it, and systematizing it, and spreading it to the world.

Ameretat: So how does a person deal with that sort of dichotomy?

Rick: The way I deal with it is just I want to know the truth about things and then kind of somehow come to terms with them rather than adhering blindly to a particular perspective and rejecting anything that conflicts with it. And so my conclusion with regard to all this is that Maharishi, like everyone else, was a work in progress and he had progressed profoundly in certain respects and probably had some work to do in other respects. And I think we can say that of all of us.

Ameretat:  This experience you had with TM and with Maharishi, probably was one of the motivations for you to start the Association for Spiritual Integrity and maybe you can tell us a little bit about what that is and what your hope is that that can do and become.

Rick: It made me very concerned about the issue of ethics as part of the spiritual path. And it turns out that pretty much every time-honored spiritual tradition places emphasis on ethical behavior as one of its pillars. This is true of Hinduism, Buddhism, many other fields. And proponents of these traditions will tell you that you can’t just do spiritual practices and then behave irresponsibly or unethically, it will undermine you. It’s like trying to fill a bathtub while letting the water drain out at the same time. So I’d given this a lot of thought, it was very much on my mind and at one of the Science and Nonduality Conferences, I think it was 2017, I gave a talk on the ethics of enlightenment, which you can see on BatGap, and a few people in the audience, Jac O’Keefe among them, attended. And then afterwards we had lunch together and we decided to start this organization, the Association for Spiritual Integrity. Later on, Phil Goldberg joined as a board member and others, and it’s grown now to nearly 600 members and about 30 member organizations. It’s not, as some might think initially, a policing organization. We don’t have any authority. We’re not like the AMA or whatever body, police, lawyers, or other professionals. It’s just something that a peer-to-peer effort to popularize the notion of ethical behavior in the spiritual teaching profession. Many people feel that there is some kind of spiritual awakening happening in the world, some epidemic as it were of spiritual awakening, and I feel that the condition of the world in this age or any age is an expression or a manifestation of the kind of collective consciousness of humanity, and that’s made up by the quality of the consciousness of each individual, just as a forest is made up of individual trees. Now if a forest is looking all grey and withered, probably most of the trees are not doing so well. You can’t just spray paint the forest, which would be analogous to trying to impose top-down solutions by governments and so on. You have to actually make each individual tree healthy and therefore green, and then you’ll have a green forest. So as consciousness rises in the world and as spiritual teachers play a pivotal role as catalysts or as aids in the raising of collective consciousness, I think it’s very important that spiritual teachers hold themselves to high standards and not blow it by trying to use their position to take advantage sexually or financially or in other ways of their students because in so doing they sabotage the whole endeavor. They give spirituality a bad name, spiritual teachers a bad name, and I definitely think it hampers this awakening that is taking place.

Ameretat: A lot of people, you and me and many people, feel that we’re in a special time of history where where we have this global awakening and increasing consciousness happening. Of course, we felt the same way back in the ’60s, by the way.

Rick: Well, it was happening then too. We’re just in a different phase of it.

Ameretat: Yeah, exactly. It feels like we’ve come around. What’s happening in the world today with division, poverty, racial and religious wars, economic disparity, how we can get to those billions of people to help raise consciousness.

Rick: The upwelling of consciousness in the world is not so much being created by us or by spiritual practitioners as some kind of cosmic phenomenon. And we’re just riding the wave. Like surfers don’t create the waves. If they’re skillful, they get to ride the waves. If they’re not so skillful they wipe out. So I think this thing is happening regardless of what we do, but we can become willing participants in it, and much to our benefit. I mean, make hay while the sun shines, it’s a golden opportunity for rapid evolution if we ride the wave properly. I just interviewed a guy named Jem Bendel, it’ll be going up in a week or two, and he feels that we’re headed for catastrophic societal collapse. And I think he may be right, actually, because so many structures in society, political, economic, ecological, industrial, so many different things would be completely unsuitable in what we might envision as an enlightened age. Things like those things couldn’t function as they now do. They would be so out of place in what anyone would imagine as an enlightened age. So are they going to willingly say, “Okay, we had it wrong. We’re going to do it differently”? That doesn’t seem to be the case. Everyone in all these areas seems to be in the—

Ameretat: Not going to give up their power or their money easily.

Rick: Right. And there’s something more fundamental, more powerful than those institutions, even though they may seem very powerful, and that is consciousness itself. The deeper you go the more powerful it gets – molecular, atomic, subatomic is one analogy. So there’s greater leverage from a deeper, more fundamental, more causal level of creation And although the modern scientific paradigm is that consciousness is created by the brain, there’s the polar opposite perspective on that growing in popularity, which is that consciousness is fundamental and everything else is emergent from consciousness. So if that’s true…

Ameretat: It’s not so new, that’s what Vedanta has been saying.

Rick: Oh yeah, it’s been around for thousands of years, but the scientific paradigm is kind of the opposite of that these days. So I’m getting a little long-winded here, but what I’m trying to say to wrap it up is that it could be a David and Goliath kind of situation, or maybe a Jack and the Beanstalk situation where the deeper reality of life will prevail over seemingly impossible obstacles. Ameretat: Certainly. I mean you and I and many other people are dedicating our lives to trying to create what I call consciousness media to present many options, create a world differently than what this other disaster scenario is.

Rick: I’ll tell you a story. So once upon a time there was a seagull and she laid her eggs on the shore and she was tending the eggs and then a wave came in and washed the eggs out into the ocean. And the seagull said, “Give back my eggs!” And the ocean ignored her. And “Come on, give back my eggs!” The ocean ignored her. So she said, “Okay, I’m going to make you dry. I’m going to take…” So she started taking beakfuls of water out of the ocean and putting them on the shore. and she just persisted in this day and night. Impossible odds, but she just was determined, “I’m gonna get back my eggs.” So at some point, maybe the king of the birds took notice of her dedication and determination and he came and he had the power to say to the ocean, “you better give back the eggs or I will make you dry.” So the ocean said, “okay, okay, I’ll give back the eggs”. So there’s a higher power, I think, functioning in the world And we are rather piddly little pawns in the whole cosmic game. And that higher power has the ability to shift everything. And we’re just kind of doing our little parts, but if it were solely dependent upon our capabilities, I don’t think it would happen.

Ameretat: You can also look at the power of the universe, this higher power, and maybe, I mean, whatever happened they gave human beings free will. And maybe it’s totally oblivious to what we do, whether we survive. I mean, if there are infinite planets out there, and of course the earth will survive no matter what happens to the human race.

Rick: Yes and no. I mean, God helps those who help themselves. And I’m sure that everywhere, somewhere in the universe, every day, some planet gets blown to smithereens by an asteroid or gets melted as its star becomes a red giant or something, which will eventually be the fate of the Earth. That doesn’t mean all the souls dwelling on those planets cease to exist, but that’s another story. They find some other place to live. So it might seem that nature is red in tooth and claw, as someone said, that it’s kind of brutal and uncaring. But I do think, as I said earlier, that there’s an evolutionary agenda to the universe. And there’s so many ancient traditions around the world which prophesized what seems to be happening now, which prophesized many things which have already come to pass, but which then prophesized that after much trial and tribulation there and probably the death of many, many people, there will be a kind of a renaissance or a dawning of a more enlightened age. And maybe we’re just idealistic and naive, but I prefer to ascribe to that vision.

Ameretat: Last night I was at a Dances of Universal Peace introduction by a man from Columbia, who was actually in the movie “Sunflower” as we get it made. And he was talking about a tribe in South America where they actually have a whole mythology about this, that there were so many thousands of years of, I use the word darkness, they used a different word, and that that’s all preparing for the age that we’re entering into, which will turn things right.

Rick: I heard the same thing. There was some prophecy of the eagle and the condor.

Ameretat: That’s it, the eagle and the condor.

Rick:  And the eagle consciousness, which is the head, was gonna dominate for 500 years and almost destroy everything, but then the condor consciousness was going to reemerge and set things aright. So there’s a book called “Prophecies and Predictions: Everyone’s Guide to the Coming Changes,” by a woman named Moira Timms. You can find it on Amazon, but I read that back in the 80s and she went through all the different ancient cultures that she could find and looked at what they had prophesied and found that a lot of it had already happened and then extrapolated from the time she wrote the book to the coming decades and you know discussed what might be happening, soon. Just what we’re talking about here if anybody wants to go into that in more detail.

Ameretat:  So, let’s go back now into the practice, and specifically the practice of meditation, because one of the threads which seems to be coming out in our age is how meditation itself can help. Obviously we look at the scientific ways of more peace and more productivity and all that, but can also help actually in terms of raising of consciousness. And as you said there are many different types. Do you think that meditation itself is essential for this future that we’re hopefully creating in raising consciousness?

Rick: I have never skipped a meditation in those 55 years. Perhaps I’m obsessive compulsive. The mind has a natural tendency to seek a field of greater happiness.

Ameretat: Do you think that meditation itself is essential for this future that we’re hopefully creating and raising consciousness?

Rick: Some kind of meditation, I think for most people, can be very effective and we’ll talk about it more as we go along, but in my book it should be effortless, it should be almost immediately productive of some benefit and therefore enjoyable and therefore easy to practice regularly. If it’s unpleasant, if it’s a strain, if it’s a struggle, you’re not going to stick with it.

Ameretat: Can you tell us a little bit about what is your practice and what benefits you see.

Rick: Yeah, so as we’ve discussed, I learned TM and that was back in July of 1968 and I began practicing it regularly twice a day and I have never skipped a meditation in those 55 years. Perhaps I’m obsessive compulsive but maybe OCD can be your friend, and it was like from day one, first sitting, enjoyable and relieved a lot of stress and I just felt better right away. So I just vowed to keep doing it. And I still practice a meditation similar to that, although I got a mantra from Amma, Mata Amritanandamayi, about 23 years ago and I meditate in that style with that mantra. Couple, three times a day maybe, you know, morning before breakfast, evening before dinner, and then usually before I go to sleep and sometime in the middle of the night also, four in the morning or something, and then I’ll sleep a little bit more and get up. And it’s a mantra meditation. And I also do some yoga asanas in a sloppy kind of way, just to stay limber and flexible.

Ameretat: Does the mantra yoga practice include breath as well? Because most of the other practices also include breath in some form.

Rick: No, it doesn’t. I mean if you’re doing some yoga you can do some pranayama but that’s different than what I’m talking about.

Ameretat: So it starts with a concentration practice not necessarily…

Rick: No.

Ameretat: I don’t know how to describe it.

Rick: Yeah, okay, well if you want to get into it. So…

Ameretat: I do, I do. We’re here to become enlightened on the spot, right?

Rick: Right. You know, Jesus said the Kingdom of Heaven is within you, right? And Vedanta says that Brahman is sat-cid-ananda, existence, consciousness, bliss. And the Bhagavad Gita says contact with Brahman is infinite joy. And so all these traditions say that there’s a reservoir of happiness deep within us somewhere, the Kingdom of Heaven or, you know, ananda or whatever. And so if that’s true, and if that’s there, how come we don’t experience it? I think the reason we don’t experience it is, well, there could be detailed explanations, but that our senses by design are outer directed. You know, I’m looking at the computer right now, and then I’ll be eating lunch, and, you know, we’re always engaged in outer directed activities. And that becomes habitual from childhood and we just don’t have a means or a method of turning within to experience that inner bliss. But there are vehicles. So if the senses… so let’s take thinking for example. Thought is said by some to be a subtler aspect of the sense of hearing and also there’s a subtler aspect of vision. If you visualize the Grand Canyon, you’re experiencing a subtler aspect of the sense of vision. And the same is true for all the other senses. But we’re more familiar with the subtler aspect of the sense of hearing than with the subtler aspect of the other senses, at least most of us, because we think thoughts. So where do those thoughts come from? Well, it’s said that they bubble up from deep in the mind and we’re not aware of them until they reach a certain level of grossness or loudness, you could say, for us to become consciously aware of them. So the kind of meditation I’m talking about here uses thought as a vehicle to traverse in the other direction, to ride a thought down from gross to subtle, to subtler, to subtler, to transcendent. And as one does that, well firstly it doesn’t involve concentration because as one does that one encounters greater charm or greater fulfillment or greater happiness at each stage of settling and that is kind of a self-reinforcing process. The mind just goes naturally in that direction when it encounters greater charm And then, you know, not always, but could easily arrive at a state of complete de-excitation and enjoy pure awareness without any thought whatsoever, which would be Turya as it’s called in Sanskrit. Turya means fourth. It’s a fourth state, waking, dreaming, sleeping being the other three. Concentration would imply that you need to hold the mind on something. And if the mind is not encountering charm in the object that you’re trying to hold it on it’s going to object. It’s like you put a little kid down in front of Meet the Press and it’ll have a hard time getting him to sit there. But if you put him down in front of SpongeBob SquarePants or something he’ll just be absorbed in it because that’s enjoyable for him. So our attention naturally gravitates towards things which are more enjoyable and doesn’t want to stay on things which are not enjoyable. So to reiterate, the mind has a natural tendency to seek a field of greater happiness and that natural tendency is what’s used in the mechanics of this Bhavati Dhyan as it’s called or the Transcendental Meditation.

Ameretat: I would love if you would share with us a little meditation before we say good night to everyone or good morning to everyone. Thank you again for that and we’ll turn it over to you.

Rick: Yeah, so I’ve never done this before on a video. I used to teach TM back in the early 70s, and I’m not going to teach TM right now.  But I’m going to go through a few steps that are sort of based upon some of the principles of it.  And about an hour ago we were talking about how there’s a deep reservoir of inner happiness within us all and we can access that if we have the right means and that it doesn’t involve effort or concentration to do so. So, now many people listening might have a mantra that they got from somebody at some point. And maybe if you don’t have a mantra, then I’ll offer you an alternative. But for starters, let’s just all close our eyes for about half a minute, and I’ll tell you when to open them. [BLANK_AUDIO] Okay, let’s open our eyes. Now, did you notice that when you closed your eyes, you just settled down a little bit. You felt some quietness or some silence or some restfulness or something like that. Did you notice that Ameratat?

Ameretat: I did, yes.

Rick: Yeah, I think probably everyone noticed that. Okay, let’s just close our eyes again for a few moments. [no audio] Now let’s open our eyes. All right, did you feel some quietness again, some silence?

Ameretat: Yes, yes, I definitely did.

Rick: And did you happen to notice that some thoughts bubbled up while you were sitting there with your eyes closed?

Ameretat: Definitely, I was thinking about my brother and you meeting each other.

Rick: Okay, and did you notice how effortlessly you thought those thoughts? Didn’t take any concentration, didn’t take any effort. They bubbled on their own.

Ameretat: True.

Rick: And that’s the way we always think thoughts. All right, so we’re going to close our eyes again. And this time when we close our eyes, if you have a mantra, after a little bit begin to think the mantra as effortlessly as you think any other thoughts. And if you don’t have a mantra of some kind, then perhaps just put your attention gently without concentration. Let your attention dwell in the heart area. And we’ll just do that for a little while. Pick up the mantra, repeat it effortlessly. Don’t try to think it clearly or concentrate on it. It’s just a faint idea like any other thought. All right, let’s close our eyes. [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [no audio] Rick: Okay, let’s slowly open our eyes. Was that easy for you?

Ameretat: Yeah, it was. It was easy. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I didn’t care. I used actually the mantra my brother gave me from Maharishi.

Rick: Yeah. So, now if you do it more than three minutes, if you do it for 20 minutes or 30 minutes or something like that, in that effortless way that I described, you’ll notice something, especially if you start doing it regularly. I’d say that even though most of my meditations over the years have had thoughts in them, there have been few if any in which there has not been at least some settling down, sometimes quite profoundly. And a regular practice like that has cumulative effects. It changes not only the mind, but it actually changes the neurophysiology. And there have been a lot of studies on that showing changes in the brain and various other aspects of the physiology. And as Jesus said, the body is the temple of the soul. It’s the instrument through which we experience anything. What to say of enlightenment? It’s the instrument through which we experience lunch, but it’s certainly the instrument through which enlightenment is lived and the instrument needs to be refined for that realization to occur, purified and refined. We can’t just throw all kinds of garbage into it and expect it to be able to clearly reflect pure consciousness or function in an optimum way. So meditation is one way of refining it. And obviously there are many other things in life that we need to take care of, like, you know, regular exercise and healthy food and fresh air and, you know, fulfilling relationships and many other things that make a life.

Ameretat: We’re all so grateful for you to have spent this time with us. I know you’re a very busy man and doing all sorts of wonderful things in the world. So thank you, thank you Rick Archer so much. Thank you, your wife, for allowing this to happen. I know she helps program your schedule and everything else and does many more things, I’m sure.

Well, thank you, Ameretat. Thanks for staying up till 1.30 in the morning in Malaysia, which I guess is routine for you because you have to interface with all of us Western Hemisphere folks.

Ameretat: It’s true. And to all of our audience, this wisdom talk will be available on our website. We’ll let you know. It’s usually down the road because we do some editing on it. But you can go to sunseedstudio.org and then you can sign up for our mailing list. You’ll get all sorts of things. In fact, we’re just now coming out with a phone application. So we’re just now coming out with a phone application so you’ll be able to look at Sunseed, the journey and even now the original Sunseed movie. We’re going to put it all up on our phone app. So stay tuned. You’ll soon be able to get Sunseed Studio on your phone through the Apple Store or Google Store. But definitely come back and see this interview, invite your friends to take a look at it. And we’re so grateful for you all who have joined us. We’ll be back very soon with more Wisdom Talks. Wishing you all a good afternoon, a good night, good morning, wherever you are. May the long time Sunseed upon you.

 

James: Welcome to the Institute for Advanced Astonishment. Today we have a very special guest. Someone we’re flipping the tables on. Usually he’s doing the interview and now he can relax and just give us answers to the mysteries of creation. How are you, Rick Archer?

Rick: Good. For some reason I’m reminded of a Kurt Vonnegut quote. He said something like, “I belong to the church of universal astonishment.” Or something like that, perpetual astonishment.

James: That’s beautiful

Rick: Yeah.

James:  I got to meet him. I probably never mentioned that.

Rick: No, I didn’t know that.

James: I got to meet him and he was signing books on Long Island in New York and he wasn’t looking up, he was head down and you know, that face and that hair, head down, he was just signing and pushing, signing, pushing the book, going, going. And I said, “no way I’m going to, he’s a hero of mine”. So my girlfriend had no books get signed. So I had two books with me. I had Cat’s Cradle, a brand new beautiful copy, and I had this Darwin biography, this beautiful Darwin biography called The Tormented Evolutionist, with this big picture of Darwin with the beard. And because I knew Vonnegut liked Darwin. So I had those two books. So I gave my girlfriend Cat’s Cradle and he signed. And I took the Darwin book and I held it up high and dropped it from about four feet onto the table. He didn’t budge, he didn’t look, nothing, no flinch. And then I slid it to him and he caught it. So he was paying attention, he caught it. And then he held it and he looked at it and he held it in his hands like this and he said, “Darwin, I love him.” And I said, “Me too. Because he wrote that Galapagos book”. And he said, “You want me to sign this?” And I said, sure. And he signed it and he made, do you know what he does when he signs?

Rick: No.

James:  He made this little, I don’t have a pen, but it looked like an asteroid. And I said,” what is that?” And he said, “Oh, you want to know what that is?” And he said, “Come here, son”. And I went up to his ear and he said, and I have to say it, he said, “That’s an asshole. And that’s what I think of the whole earth, everyone here.” He goes “Present company excluded”

Rick: That’s funny. That’s pretty good.

James:  That was Kurt. He was amazing. So Rick, can you just show us where you are? I had a glimpse of it. I don’t know if you could paint…

Rick: Let me just turn the camera around here. I’ll just turn the phone around.

James: Very beautiful.

Rick: It’s a pond in a park called Jefferson County Park in Fairfield, Iowa, where I hike most days.

James: You walk that every day?

Rick: Pretty much. Not walking today.

James: Jump into it after, what is it, 600, 800 interviews?

Rick: 700 and something.

James: So 700 interviews, so many hours. What would you say is your best advice to a seeker who is really trying to understand what we’re talking about in the mystical experience or awakening and they’re frustrated. What would your best tools be from all of those interviews if you had to condense them into a half hour here or an hour?

Rick: Well, I’ll just riff on that question a little bit to see what comes out. I would say that the key ingredient is incentive or motivation. And you have to want this in order to take the steps to pursue it. And wanting it means knowing that it exists or knowing what it is. And I’ll elaborate on what I mean by it in a second. So my first introduction to the idea of enlightenment or higher consciousness was when I was about 17 years old and some friends who had done LSD were about to turn me on to it and they were reading, we were driving down the post road in Westport, Connecticut. I was driving, three friends in the car and one of the guys in the back seat was reading from Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert’s book on the Tibetan Book of the Dead and they were using the word enlightenment and it’s like a little light bulb went off in my head. Enlightenment, whoa! And I had a very fuzzy idea of what it was but it sounded like something I wanted or that it would be interesting to investigate. And then we took LSD and I realized the world is very different from different people’s perspectives. It’s not all the same world, which I had previously assumed. And I just started reading Zen books and this and that, while still messing around with drugs, for about a year. But I kind of was hooked on the idea that higher consciousness, whatever we want to call it, is possible. And I couldn’t forget that. And finally I got fed up with drugs and decided to learn meditation. And that was a much more healthy and enjoyable path for me. And I just kept, I just had this, even though I had been a total flake in many respects, difficult childhood and dropped out of high school and so on, I guess I had a certain amount of innate intelligence. And I just applied it to this field and began studying and reading and going to meditation retreats and eventually becoming a Transcendental Meditation teacher and continuing to go on long retreats and six weeks, six months, just going at it and eventually getting master’s degrees in Vedic science and so on. So it’s always been rewarding for me. And I guess that’s the key point, which is that if what you’re doing is not rewarding, you’re not gonna have the incentive to keep doing it. So, if you start exploring spirituality and you learn this technique or go to that teacher and so on, and it doesn’t seem to float your boat or light your fire, maybe you should shop around a little bit more and find something that would be more suitable. Which is not to say you should be a dilettante just skipping superficially from one thing to the next, And incidentally, I’m in the car now for those who are wondering why the change of scene, because our cell reception wasn’t good, so I’m going to a better spot. But in any case, yes, I mean, all the fuss that people have made throughout history about spirituality and God and all this stuff, there’s a reason for it, which is that there’s actually something to it. You can actually radically transform the effort. Okay, it’s a little choppy. What’s the last thing you heard me say?

James:  I think “Welcome to gurus in cars getting coffee”. The last thing you said, I think the same idea, but you said it better, that there’s a lot of hoopla out there about something spiritual, and you’re saying that’s because there is something spiritual. There is a greater reality, whether you like it or not, it’s there.

Rick: Yeah, and I mean, it’s incredibly enjoyable and practical to live it, to experience it. It’s not just some kind of weird, mystical, ooga booga thing that monks in a cave might enjoy. It’s something that, regardless of your specifics in life, of your role, of whether you’re raising a family or you’re an athlete or whatever you’re doing, if you add this dimension to your life, you’ll be glad you did. And yeah, and so maybe we can explore why you’d be glad you did, or maybe that’s kind of like elementary for your listeners, I don’t know.

James: No, I would love for you to go into, so you’re saying there’s a ground out there, like there is a ground that you can connect to, and yeah, I would love for you to go into it.

Rick: Yeah, okay. So, okay, I’m just navigating a roundabout here. I don’t want to hit anybody. So, we’ve all heard these sayings like “The kingdom of heaven is within you”, for instance, from Jesus or, Brahman in Hinduism is described as Sat Chit Ananda, existence, consciousness, bliss. And, you know, and then they say, “Tat Twam Asi”, “thou art that”, you are Brahman. And so what it’s saying is that who you really are, your essential nature, is pure consciousness, which is blissful in its nature, inherently blissful. So everybody wants happiness, from a little puppy dog to a mosquito to human beings. All life forms are seeking, they have a natural tendency to seek something more and to seek greater happiness, we could say, in however they may perceive it. And what I just said suggests is that there’s an ultimate source or reservoir of happiness from which all the happiness we experience is, rather, let me reframe that sentence, of which all the happiness we may experience in life, all the pleasures and so on, are a faint reflection.

James: Yeah.

Rick: So what I’m saying there is that the amount of happiness you can derived from a good meal or a relationship or listening to a beautiful symphony, as laudable and as legitimate as those types of happiness may be, they’re just a little shard of a much larger ocean of happiness, little drop of a much larger ocean of happiness that exists deep within you, but actually everywhere, it’s eventually perceived as existing. Because again, all this is that. And we all have the tools, we all have the apparatus to experience that. This is not just a philosophy.

James: Right.

Rick: Although it is a philosophy, but it’s a philosophy that can be substantiated with personal experience. And I think the ultimate purpose of life, or the greatest sort of aspiration of life, is, or should be to have that experience, to realize that. Not realizing it, it’s kind of a tragedy. As one saint in India said, “it takes a long time before you have the opportunity to have a human life. And if you fail to reach enlightenment, you’ve sold a diamond for the price of spinach”.

James: Ah.

Rick: All right, now I’m at my destination, so I’m gonna switch over to my earbuds and walk to a place where I’m gonna sit. So we can keep talking while we do that. Let me just unplug this, plug in this.

James: There you are.

Rick: Yeah, I’m getting to it and going to a spot where I can actually see the cell tower. All right, let’s carry on.

James: So, you’re saying there. One thing I like that you always say is there’s a background and a foreground to consciousness and we’re used to that foreground of, these are my words, but a monkey mind or a regular consciousness where it’s distracted and distorted. and there’s an ego and you would say, I’ve heard you say, when you switch, that background all of a sudden becomes the foreground.

Rick: Good point, yeah.

James: Yeah, that’s a beautiful way to put it.

Rick: Yeah, it’s like, for most people, they don’t even know that this thing exists that we’re talking about here. This deep, deep reservoir of happiness and intelligence and whatnot, consciousness, they just kind of assume that life as we see it is what’s real. And you know the Zen, you know the 10 Zen ox herding pictures?

James: Not sure.

Rick: Huh, it’s a cool thing. It’s a famous depiction of the various stages of development in Zen, where, I guess at first, the guy doesn’t even know there is an ox, and then he sees some footprints of the ox and then he catches a glimpse of the ox’s tail and goes through these different stages and eventually he comes back into the town, riding the ox and laughing.

James: That’s beautiful. Yeah, so what do you think of this a little speculation, but what do you think of the people that don’t know, which is a big percentage that I wasn’t aware of it for so many years as an atheist and a skeptic, a James Randi skeptic, so a real skeptic.

Rick:  Professional skeptic.

James: What’s that?

Rick: Professional skeptic.

James: Professional card-carrying skeptic. What do you think? Do you think it’s almost like a school and eventually it just goes around and around until it’s presented to them in little breadcrumbs and things and they reject and reject and over many lifetimes they finally, like Buddha with the that beautiful analogy of a bird flying with the silk over that mountain that’s like eight miles high and the silk just brushes the mountain once every hundred years and by the time it finally takes the mountain down that’s how long it’s taken for us to become enlightened?

Rixk: I don’t know. That’s a little bit of a depressing assessment.

James: I know.

Rick: It might be faster than that but who knows. I mean if it’s true that we that like for instance you read Meher Baba and he has this whole thing about the scale of evolution from rocks to vegetables to insects to lower animals to higher animals and he kind of lays it out as this long span of evolutionary stages that the soul has to progress through. And so maybe it’s that way. Who am I to say?

James: I love what he says about the beloved, that there’s– I totally agree with this, and I think you do too — there’s only love or pure awareness or consciousness or pure imagination. And then it wants, love has to love, so it has to have another. So it splits and gets lost, and that’s sort of like the garden, and it gets lost and everything, and it searches and searches and suffers, and then it finally finds, and when the suffering reaches its peak, he says, Baba, that’s when the separation is at its strongest. And then, boom, it finds the beloved, the lover finds the beloved, and it realizes that everything, every obstacle is put by itself in its own way in order to make it a challenge until it finally finds what it’s always been.

Rick: Yeah, I like that. I mean, I don’t think that the problems and obstacles in life are ultimately obstacles. I think everything is divinely orchestrated and ultimately there’s nothing but God, you could say. We can elaborate on what we mean by God, but so the whole universe is one giant evolution machine and nothing happens capriciously or arbitrarily. And if you could zoom out big enough, wide enough, everything that happens is ultimately in the service of evolution. And that might seem like a very glib and cruel thing to say in light of the tremendous suffering that people go through. And if you’re going to accept that notion, you have to accept that life is much more extensive than a single lifetime. That we go through various experiences in order to evolve as a soul and not all those experiences are pretty. But, this again, this is philosophical.

James: I love that, though. I like you call it an evolution machine. I’ve always I called it like a spiritual machine and it’s so fine tuned. And you’ve been talking about this in an email. I mean, it’s so fine tuned. There’s no way you can get away with one thing, anything. It’s no cheating and getting away with anything. It’s so perfectly tuned and you must go home. You must. It’s like a homeward bound machine, that you must make the process home.

Rick: What you’re alluding to here is that you and I and some others are in this little chat group and there’s one guy in the chat group who’s still a card carrying atheist. He hasn’t relinquished his card. Or maybe he got your card because he used to not be an atheist.

James: He’s getting stronger and stronger too. He’s getting… he’s unbelievable.

Rick: But I posted this thing the other day of ten points of various laws of nature in the universe, like the gravitational constant and the strength of the gravitational force and the rate of expansion of the universe after the big bang, and in every case, each one of these variables, if it were off, just a tiny fraction of a percent of what it actually was, we wouldn’t have the universe, or we would have a universe that was completely unfriendly to the emergence of life. So if you calculate the statistics of all ten of these things being exactly as they were, the chances of it happening randomly are just astronomically small, just infinitesimally small. So, many scientists such as Robert Lanza and others who – he’s at Harvard  – postulate that there is some kind of a biocentrism at work in the universe, some kind of an intelligent design, though that phrase is loaded, which has fabricated the universe in a way that is conducive to the emergence of life, and intelligent life, and we can tie it in with spirituality here, which is conducive to the emergence of physical entities, or vehicles, which can serve as vehicles for the evolution of the soul. And that some people take objection to that whole notion and postulate that there’s a multiverse and that there are virtually infinite number of universes. And we just happen to have lucked out to be in the one in which all these 10 variables line up perfectly because they otherwise they become too uncomfortable with the notion that there’s some kind of intelligence that has brought this about.

James: I was one of those guys for so many years.

Rick: What kind of woke you up to the different way of thinking?

James: Well, I was with Randy for all those years and Carl Sagan and Asimov and it was such a group…

Rick: You’re with Sagan and Asimov, or you’re reading their stuff?

James: Well, they would come in and out of the house, Randi’s house was like an open… I was his apprentice. When I was 19, I moved in to the house. So it was an amazing time. And I was a magician. We were setting it up where I would be his opening act. And he took me on for free and just because he could sense my heart, and people had helped him when he was younger, so he helped me. He was a really kind atheist, a wonderful atheist, most atheists are great. You know, the scientific atheists are so kind, as especially in our group. Our guys are great. You know, the few that we talk to and battle every day.

Rick: Yeah, no, a lot of them are wonderful. You know Michael Shermer, he’s a famous atheist.

James: Yeah he sat with Randi

Rick: Yeah, I’ve listened to a bunch of his stuff. And it’s just, you know, you love the guy. He’s just, he’s kind of open minded. I mean, first, he had this interesting conversation with a guy I interviewed about intelligent design. And he was just so respectful and thoughtful during the whole interview. He just hasn’t been convinced, and that’s cool. There’s no reason anybody should take anything on faith. I don’t believe much in faith. To me, items that you might take on faith are better understood as hypotheses, which you could choose to explore experientially, empirically, if you wish to do so. So, is there God? Are there angels? Is there life after death? All these things. You don’t have to believe in these things. Just kind of proceed on your path of spiritual evolution and see whether you arrive at some kind of experiential substantiation of such ideas.

James: Right. So, in my case, I was knocking on tape. I knew the physics that everything was empty, or I would cling to that point. 0001%. You know something, but I knew that it was mostly empty. And then I met another hero of mine, another magician who’s the greatest card magician, close up magician in the world. And I met with him in a lecture. And the way I met him, Rick, like I walked into the magic shop after a year of philosophy and psychology at the university, at Stony Brook University. And I walked in totally on a whim, totally a whim. I didn’t look up anything. I just walked in. It’s been a year and they all say, “Hey, we knew you were coming.” And you know, that bothered me. And it’s like, no, I didn’t know I was coming. And they stayed with it. The whole group there said, “We knew you were coming. No, we really knew”. And I said, but I didn’t know this morning. This was total chance. And they said, “Nope.” And I was getting, I could feel it coming up, the anger. And they turned the flyer around on the counter. And it was this guy, Paul Harris, greatest magician, sleight of hand guy in the world. He was going to going to be lecturing there the next day tomorrow, the next day. So he was my hero, like Randi and him were my heroes. And I’d walked in to the magic shop on a whim the day before the lecture. So I just bought a ticket, walked right out. And the next day came back ready for Paul Harris. And he gave his gave an amazing sleight of hand extravaganza. And during a break in the middle, where he sat and sold some of his books, my friends all pushed me up as I was too shy and they pushed me up to him and I had my cards and I was doing like 160 cuts a minute and throwing them and catching them and it was all inspired by him. But he looked and he said, “who let this guy in here”, you know, as a joke,  and we started to talk and I said, “you seem from your books…” even though they were magic books and high level sleight of hand, for magicians only really, in the books there were little hints like little mushrooms with gnomes peeking around on each chapter and little breadcrumbs. So I said “you seem to be into philosophy or something” and he said “very much so, very much so”. And he said “come to dinner tonight”. So the head of the shop, my friend Ron, went to dinner with Paul and he invited me and it was just us and all we did was talk and he said “everything that Randi says is wrong. It’s all wrong. Not the work against the psychics or the faitheers, but the material view is wrong. Materialism is wrong. Atheism is wrong.”  And he just shattered everything. But again, it was just words. And I was talking about more books and reading more. And he said, “no, the beautiful thing is less”. He had a vision of two bookends shutting, shutting like this, pushing his whole library into one book. And I reached for the book and he just clapped my hand and said, “No, this is about non conceptual space.” And so that started me and then I meditated. And on maybe three or four tries there was a breakthrough.

Rick: Nice.

James: And it felt like I was dying. And there was no medicine. It was a little puff of pot, but I wasn’t a pot guy. I was a drinker and that little puff just, and all I knew, I knew about Neti Neti because I had watched Stephen Walensky. Do you know him?

Rick: Stephen Walensky? Yeah.

James: And I knew, but as an atheist, I still could sense that he was right about something, but I couldn’t see it yet. And so I knew Neti Neti, not this, not this. And I kept doing that and broke through to this. I thought I died and it was just endless love and no body and no me. It was beautiful. And then I wrote Paul and wrote my friends and Paul wrote back, “Welcome home.” And that was the start. And I thought that was the end, But that was just the start of it. It didn’t stick. It didn’t stay.

Rick: Yeah. Before I respond to that, what do you think about that guy, Shin Lim, I think his name is, who won the America’s Got Talent?

James: Paul is responsible for him being out there.

Rick: Okay, cool. I mean, is he good? He seems pretty impressive.

James: He’s one of the best. Yeah, he’s the real deal. Real, real deal. And later, if you want, we have to mention Uri Geller. We have to go into that a little bit. –

Rick: Okay, yeah. So, okay, you had this breakthrough, but it didn’t stay. All right, so that’s a common phenomenon. And I think a lot of times people are almost given a glimpse so that they’ll realize there’s something worth pursuing. And then it’s taken away again, if we want to look at it that way. But you know there’s something there, darn it. And you can’t…

James: And I couldn’t shut up about it. I would go to my best friends and say, it is a dream. It really is. It’s just like a dream.

Rick: Yeah. And so you get this taste and then you have to pursue it. You have to kind of, it won’t let you sleep. It won’t, well, you can sleep, but it won’t let you just rest until you find what it is you’ve had the taste of. And I think there’s a lot of interesting stories like the Lord of the Rings and Star Wars and all where there have that kind of theme has been woven in,  the Seekers quest or whatever it’s called. James: The hero’s journey.

Rick: The hero’s journey, right, and typical obstacles that you meet along the way and so on. But I want to get back to one thing quickly, which is we’re talking about this sort of intrinsic fulfillment that can be derived from spiritual awakening. But I just want to re-emphasize the practicality of it because I know in my case it just had, and in the cases of many people I know, it just had such practical real-world benefits in terms of beginning to live a more successful life. You know, I got back in my case, I got back into school, I got in a band that was quite successful and, had relationships much more successfully than I had before, and one thing after the other. And I guess one way of looking at that is the old saying that we only use a small fraction of our full mental potential. And if that’s true, and if spiritual development unfolds more of our mental potential, then naturally you’re going to be more successful in whatever you’re doing, whether it’s studying or being a business person or an athlete or whatever. So this spiritual stuff isn’t just about some inner experience that you can marinate in. It’s, it also you can say that it brings about the unfoldment of 200% of life, 100% inner values, 100% outer values – well, at least moving in that direction.

James: Yeah, and you see that with even like Jerry Seinfeld, when he started to meditate, he said he would have never made it through, he had to skip his lunch break to do Transcendental Meditation and that’s what allowed Seinfeld to happen. So for guys like that, it’s almost like putting the phone on the charger and recharging and giving them that boost and David Lynch, there’s so many.

Rick: Seinfeld had an interesting story about Tom Hanks. So Tom Hanks came to him, maybe, I don’t know, it might’ve been five years ago, and said he was gonna take a sabbatical because he was burned out. He just couldn’t do any more movies. He was exhausted. And Jerry said, “Well, you know, why don’t you meditate? That’s what I’ve been doing for decades.” And so a friend of mine went and taught Tom Hanks and Hanks said that, he said that he expected some guy to show up in a man bun, you know, but this guy showed up pretty good, sort of straight and ordinary. But anyway, he didn’t have to take that sabbatical. He’s made many movies since then, because it just recharges your batteries, to meditate deeply, on a regular basis.

James: And it fits what you posted this morning. I think it was this morning, or yesterday – this is a little bit of a switch but I think it’s the same idea that with the salt and the ocean or the lake.

Rick:  Oh, right. Yeah.

James: The more expansive you are, the gentler maybe suffering would be.

Rick: Yeah. Let me just explain what you’re alluding to. Yeah, it was a Hindu fable where the student comes to the master and he’s complaining about everything and the master says, “All right, take this little, here’s a teaspoon of salt, put it in this glass of water.” So he puts it in and stirs it and he said, “Take a drink.” And “how does it taste? “It’s really salty, I don’t like it.” He said, “All right, let’s go to the lake.” So they go to the lake and he gives them a teaspoon of salt and says, “Throw that in the lake.” And then after a little bit, “All right, take a glass of water out of the lake and drink that. How is it?” “It’s fine, it tastes like good water.” He said, “All right, you need to be a lake, not just a glass.” And so the metaphor is that if your consciousness can be vast and expansive and deep, then the ordinary vicissitudes of life, you’re still going to experience them, but you have the capacity to experience them with much greater equanimity. Your world isn’t rocked by small losses and gains. Maybe another analogy would be if a person is, let’s say they have $10 to their name and they gain or lose $5, it’s a big deal, you know? But if they’re a multimillionaire, they could gain or lose, I mean, Elon Musk sometimes gains or loses billions in a day according to what the stock market is doing, but it’s no big deal, because he has the sort of the buffer of all that wealth. And of course, here we’re talking about spiritual wealth or consciousness wealth, which gives you a buffer that makes it much easier to deal with the ups and downs of life.

James: And you can see this, like you said this before, that these things aren’t just, I don’t know what you call it, mumbo jumbo, like it’s not just the sky in a bun or in a turban. You can experience it in your regular everyday, life and I’ll give a little example. I’m in Guatemala now in this beautiful little town, San Marcos, and I came from New York to here. I never left the States, anything, but flew to here. And there’s little tuk-tuks that fly around and they’re loud and they zip around. There are no cars and it’s very beautiful. And I never noticed them. But when my cat got sick, six months into the whole thing, my cat was sick and I was at the pharmacy, which I’ve stood at many times and in that area and the tuk tuks go by there. When my cat was sick, I can feel the tuk tuks. And I noticed that like they annoyed me and they I turned around I almost said something like easy like, slow down. But for months and for months after now, I love the tuk. I love all of it. I don’t even notice it. But yeah, when I was squeezed because it was life or death for the cat and the medicine and they didn’t have it. Now what do I do? In New York, I could have gotten that medicine like this. But here it who knows? A boat ride, maybe a guy will get it. I’m in the jungle. And I could feel it. So I mean, I had more spaciousness than maybe an average person, but not my usual I noticed the level drop.

Rick: Yeah. So there’s actually scientific studies on this sort of thing in terms of the ability to not overreact to stressful stimuli and recuperate more quickly from stressful stimuli, and things like that the whole, and, which is an interesting point that we haven’t really mentioned, which is that spiritual development is not just a consciousness thing, or a mind thing or subjective thing. It’s a neurophysiological thing. And they’ve done a lot of studies on TM meditators, on Buddhist meditators, and so on. And the neurophysiology changes in so many different ways that are measurable. And even the way the brain grows, which you’ve heard the term neuroplasticity, the brain does continue to change throughout life. And people who’ve been meditating a long time have a thicker prefrontal cortex, which is supposed to be a good thing, and various other things that I’m not qualified to speak on. But the body is indeed the temple of the soul,  so it’s like the instrument through which anything is experienced, and in particular, enlightenment is experienced. And so, having a radically different state of consciousness or subjective experience or perspective on life would imply that your neurophysiology has been radically transformed as well.

James: Right. And I remember as a skeptic, and I was a big psych, I have a degree in experimental psychology and studied like crazy, I could never knock meditation. Never. The results were always good. It was never anything negative. It was always positive and always, you can’t really knock it, you know?

Rick: Well, yeah, I mean, to play devil’s advocate on that, there’s a lady named Willoughby Britton up at Brown University in Rhode Island, who has a place called Cheetah House, cheetah like the big cat. And she has specialized in dealing with meditation casualties, people who have had bad experiences. Now, usually it has to do with someone who is really kind of mentally unstable to begin with perhaps, and meditation tips them over the edge. Maybe they would have gone over the edge anyway, but also there are instances where some people either shouldn’t meditate very much or certainly shouldn’t do long meditation retreats where they’re doing 10 hours a day right off the bat. And there have been many articles and studies on how that has proven to be unwise. You know, you really have to, safety first, you really have to sort of take it in doses that you can handle.

James: Yes.

Rick: ‘Cause you can actually destabilize yourself. And I’ve been through some phases myself where I was rather unstable.

James:  I know two, a maintenance guy that I work with who was very Jehovah Witness, And when I met him, I would always give him a little bow or have a Buddha or something. And he said, “No meditation.” I said, “Why?” And he said, “The demons come in.” (laughing) So that woke me up a little to that. And I think there was one more person that, like the same with psychedelics, that the circus starts when they’re quiet, you know, the circus comes to town. And I can understand that. Rick: Well, that’s true. That’s a good corollary there because there’s been some great research on psychedelics these days at Johns Hopkins and New York University and elsewhere. And, you know, there are certain people who shouldn’t take them under any circumstances, you know? And then there are other people who might even be really stressed out, like PTSD sufferers who have benefited greatly from taking. So, meditation like psychedelics can be a powerful thing. And like anything in life, I mean, you can kill yourself taking too many aspirin, or too many Tylenol or whatever. So like anything, you have to do it in sensible proportions and in a responsible way.

James: Randi on stage –  he was very against homeopathy. So he would take the sleeping pills on stage, the real homeopathic sleeping pills. And he would take them the whole lecture. I mean, really, at the end he had like 200 of them and he just

Rick: And nothing happened, right?

James: Nothing happened, yeah. And then he had that great line, I don’t know if it’s his, but he did that joke about the, did you hear about the homeopath who overdosed? He forgot to take his medicine. (laughing)

Rick: That’s pretty good. – It’s a great line. – Yeah, I like that.

James: The way I found Randi was this beautiful book called “The Magic of Uri Geller.” And I was maybe 12 years old when I read it. Nice book on this spoon bender from Israel who came to the States And he was able to look at spoons and rub them. And the spoon would bend, a knife would bend, a fork would bend. When he went to England, he stopped Big Ben, they said. He could stop watches. And with his mind, if you made a drawing, you hold the drawing, and he can just discern what it was without looking at it. And Randi was his biggest nemesis. And Randi would duplicate. The first thing he would duplicate, I’m sure you’ve seen him do it. Uri Geller would go on a talk show and bend the spoons with his mind and make a compass stop and turn. And then Randy would come on the next week and do everything just as good, sometimes even better, with a little more flair and funny and make the compass move faster without touching it. And he would never really say how it was done, but by duplicating it, he was trying to say, use Occam’s razor, what would be the best explanation, the simplest, it’s probably that Uri Geller is using magic, and he was a very skilled magician ’cause he was able to fool scientists at Stanford. So I just wanted to bring up with you, I know so many of these people that are talking about the mystical experience or awakening. They’ll also include spoon bending and Uri Geller and these weird pseudoscience things in their books. And to me, it was always like what Douglas Hofstadter said about Ray Kurzweil. He said, “Kurzweil has these great ideas, but it’s like sometimes there’s a little bit of bullshit in there and it takes away from the idea. It’s like making a beautiful gourmet meal and putting a little bit of dog shit into the dog excrement and that ruins the whole meal. Just that little sprinkle of it, it ruins the whole meal. So I think we should maybe talk about that and stop people from, ’cause as a skeptic, it would turn me off immediately to read a book about awakening, but then Uri Geller or spoon bending or moving objects with your mind is in the book that would bother me.

Rick: Yeah. So what do you think was, was Uri just a good magician?

James: A really skilled magician, really skilled. And he totally admitted it now. I think he’ll say 95% was tricks and, and once in a while it happened. Do you remember when he was on the tonight show? Johnny Carson, who’s a magician who had Randi on about 30 times. Johnny was a magician before he became a talk show host. He called Randi and Randi couldn’t be there. So he said, what can I do to make sure Uri doesn’t cheat if he cheats? And Randi said three things. Number one, don’t let him see any of the spoons or clocks or things. Don’t let him see anything until showtime. Don’t let him touch anything backstage. Lock it up. Number two, watch him like a hawk during commercials. ‘Cause when Doc Severson and the band, Uri Geller will bang his foot and shake things on the table and he’ll be able to discern certain, like if you have 10 film canisters and only one of them has gold in it and the rest are empty, he’ll bang his foot and look what shakes and what doesn’t, very tricky. And the third thing was don’t let his best friend, Shippy Strang, who would give him like signs from the audience, don’t let him in the audience at all. Don’t let him. So they locked Shippy out. They didn’t, and they didn’t let Uri see any of the stuff. It came out on a tray, the spoons and the forks and the nails, and they watched them during the commercials. Johnny was like this, like just staring at him from the desk. Uri even said, “Why are you so focused on me?” And nothing happened on The Tonight Show, not a zero.

Rick: Right, yeah.

James: And he just said, “I didn’t feel strong that night.”

Rick: Yeah, right. So in the world of spirituality, of course, we have Autobiography of a Yogi, and we have Sai Baba, and we have even Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras outlining all these siddhis that yogis are supposed to be able to perform. And the general sentiment among most spiritual teachers is that this is a sideshow, don’t get caught up in it, but some people have tried to use it as a PR stunt. I think that’s what Sai Baba was doing. Our friend in our chat group very clearly explained to me one time what a lousy sleight of hand artist he was in terms of producing vibuti powder and stuff. Personally I believe that this sort of thing might be possible, that people have levitated or walked on water, but I wouldn’t stake my life on it, I wouldn’t need to, I don’t think I’m not going to have them if I don’t believe it. I’ll believe it when I see it, I’ll be all the more certain of it. And I think it’s more interesting perhaps to consider if such things are possible, how would they work? If you can walk on water or levitate, what is it about human consciousness that could enable you to do that? And my explanation, which I’m sure is in need of great improvement, is that most fundamentally, human consciousness is the foundation of the universe itself. It’s the field of totality in which all the laws of nature reside. And perhaps if you’re firmly enough established in that, then you can have some mastery over laws of nature. I mean, what the disciples said when Jesus stilled the storm, oh, look, even the wind and seas obey him. So perhaps, if like right now I can move my arm ’cause I perceive my arm as being part of me. And perhaps if I were one with everything perceptually and actually operating from the level of intelligence from which everything arises and in which everything is contained, perhaps I could have mastery over the laws of nature that govern the universe and use them in such a way as to levitate my body. That’s my understanding of how that might work.

James: But for me, it just seems—

Rick: But I think there’s been a lot of chicanery in that whole field.

James: Yeah. And it just seemed like when DT Suzuki says, “What’s the difference between enlightenment and regular life?” And he said, “It’s like being an inch off the ground.” Like for me, when you’re in this spaciousness, it’s already enough. Like when Thich Nhat Hanh says, “The miracle is walking on the earth and actually stepping on the ground or leaning on a tree.” That’s a miracle. You pulling your ear is a miracle.

Rick: My ear itched. There’s a bug biting.

James: That’s a miracle.

Rick: Yeah, and having compassion and not mistreating people. I mean, those things, I value those things a lot more. I mean, Sai Baba was sexually molesting young boys while manifesting vibuti. And so I would be much more impressed if he were just a really ethical person, which is a whole area we can get into, ethics and spirituality.

James: I’m ready.

Rick And if he didn’t perform any little magic tricks, I would have been much more inclined to go see him or something.

James:  A lot of people, not a lot of people, some people are upset with you when you take down a Muji or you take down, not a lot of people, some people, and I think it’s a beautiful move what you’re doing. You have a no tolerance policy,  when these things happen like, and he’s a friend of mine, David Hopmeister, and these things come out. And I think you said he was your second highest interview on the site.

Rick: Yeah. It turned out he was like ripping people off financially big time, taking people’s life savings and inheritances and things like that. And then, when they finally woke up from the delusion that caused them to give those things to him, not giving them back to them. And then I had a couple of friends who went down to his retreat center in Mexico and had a horrible time, barely got out of there with their lives because one person had a medical emergency and it was just disregarded and they were not given proper attention or care. And so I mean I just feel I have a responsibility or a moral obligation in who I promote. BatGap is a means of promotion and some of these people are a lot more famous than BatGap and so who’s promoting whom, but nonetheless I kind of feel like there should be a good housekeeping seal of approval sort of thing on spiritual teachers. And if it endangers people to go to them, but that’s not generally known, but it’s something I know because of reports I’ve received from people, then I’m willing to take some flak for taking down their interview. And even if I can’t really explain publicly what the feedback I’ve received is, which is very often the case. People say, “Oh, don’t breathe a word of this to anybody because they’ll know who told you and then I’ll have people coming after me,” and stuff like that. There’s a lot of that too. There’s a lot of retribution in spiritual groups if somebody dares to criticize the teacher.

James: Yeah, it’s like junior high school stuff.

Rick: Yeah. We have this organization that I helped to start called the Association for Spiritual Integrity, and we had a webinar a week or two ago on cancel culture. And I guess I’m guilty of it in a way, I cancel people. But not capriciously. If I’ve discovered that someone I’ve interviewed has raped women or is taking people’s money and not returning it, or anything like that, but sex is the biggest offense and money is usually second, then I have an obligation to take them down there. And they may still—

James: But you don’t crucify them, you just drop the interview and that’s it.

Rick: Yeah, quite. You don’t go in, there’s plenty of room for redemption for them or whatever, but you just take the interview down, that’s all.

James: Yeah.

Rick: And there was one guy, I won’t name him, I took his interview down because I received some rather disturbing complaints about his behavior. But then quite a few years went by and there were no further complaints and he seemed to be doing good work and so on and so forth. So I just quietly put it back up again. Because people can change, although very often they don’t. But it makes me feel a little weird talking like this because I don’t claim to be morally perfect myself, and I’m not some kind of judge of character or someone who can pass judgment on people. I don’t like to do that. But I just have, again, a responsibility and I exercise it to the best of my ability. And maybe I’m wrong sometimes. And if I am, I’m eager to hear why. I mean, there’s another guy who I took his interview down after getting some rather serious complaints. And then he engaged me in a big conversation about how I was hurting his career and stuff. And then I was hearing some good things about him. And then I checked with some of the people who originally complained about him. And it’s like, is he cool now? And they sent me a whole bunch of screenshots just really yucky stuff that was still going on.

James: So what’s going on there? It’s like the message sometimes is like the Course in Miracles is a beautiful book, you know, to use Hopper’s or whoever these people are, Bentino, Massaro, I don’t know how to say his name, or whoever, they’re saying like his interview could be fine. It’s just then the person, the person sort of doesn’t represent the interview in their regular life and that takes away from the message. So you’re not against the message, it’s just the person.

Rick: Well, you know the saying walking is your talk.  I mean, it’s easy to use these words, you read a bunch of books and you get the lingo in your head, and it’s easy to talk about stuff. But I think the rubber meets the road, to use another metaphor. You need to be able to live up to what you’re espousing.

James: Yes.

Rick: And if you’re saying all this lovely stuff but then you’re sexually abusing your students or whatever, you are a work in progress and you probably should progress a heck of a lot more before you serve as a teacher. You’re not really serving. I mean it’s a serious matter to… I mean here’s an example of someone who is deceased that we can talk about. Robert Adams, you know, Silence of the Heart, total fraud.

James: I have to say I loved his books. He wrote a beautiful book. Did I understand the person himself?

Rick: His name wasn’t Robert Adams actually and he never went to India. He never met Ramana Maharshi or Nisargadatta or any of these people, he was a bullshitter. And he had a tendency to hit on the young women who would come to him, which resulted in some severe disillusionment. I believe one woman eventually committed suicide. And this kind of thing can throw people off the spiritual path. They come to a spiritual teacher with all kinds of naivete and inspiration and earnestness, and then they get abused in some way and it can be quite shattering. So I think it’s a great responsibility to be a spiritual teacher because you really do have people’s, the most precious aspect of their lives, you are sort of engaging with, their spiritual aspiration. And if you know what you’re doing, you can be very uplifting and facilitate their growth. But if you are really not qualified, you can throw them off the track of their evolution for quite some time. And if you believe in karma, there may very well be some karmic blowback for having done that.

James: I agree. I think you’re doing great work, great work with that. So here’s a fun question for you. I know you’ll like this. My whole since 2009, but mainly maybe 2015 till now, I would talk with, we both know RJ, we could say RJ and, uh, my friend, who’s in, our email group, Schopenhauer, Bernardo, fan, RJ. So RJ and I would debate what is the better path, the Bodhisattva path or the Arhat path? And do you have any, I know you have an answer to that.

Rick: So the Bodhisattva path is, right, you keep coming back to serve humanity for as long as you can, or as long as it needs serving, and so on. And the Arhat path is your up and out, right?

James: Yes.

Rick: Right. –

James: And you know that all is well, and you’re on the mountaintop, or in the cave, all is well, you know it, you see the whole thing. It just seems like, I’ll give my answer, it seems like the bodhisattva path is the, I don’t wanna say better, the Bodhisattva path is the, I’ll just say better, is the better or the deeper path because if you really know it and you’re on the mountaintop and you know the whole thing, you got it, it’s all one, you have it, you can trudge down that, you wouldn’t trudge, you’d skip down the mountain and enter and face people because you know they’re suffering and you can face it and you would help them and try to guide them. It seems like the Arhat avoids that a little bit. But I don’t know.

Rick: Well, I have several things to say about that. Firstly, I’ve been through both. I mean, I went through many years where my feeling goes, oh, life sucks. I wanna just get enlightened and never get reincarnated again. And these days my attitude is, hey, I’ll do whatever God wants. However I can best be of service, I’m either here or there or whatever. I don’t care, I’m having fun, and I’m not in any big hurry to obliterate my existence. And I don’t necessarily think that enlightenment does obliterate your existence, but although maybe there’s that option. And I’m reminded of a couple of things that Sri Ramakrishna said. This is somewhat related, but he said, “Would you rather be sugar or taste sugar?”

James: Yes.

Rick: You know, “Would you rather merge with God and be God, “or would you rather sort of maintain some separation and taste, have the devotional I-Thou relationship with God. And, and then when Swami Vivekananda first had his awakening, he said to Ramakrishna, “Oh, this is so wonderful. Now, let me just go to the Himalayas and live out my existence in a cave or something.” And Ramakrishna said, “What is wrong with you? I’m so disappointed. I had such high hopes for you. You know, I expected you that you’re going to go out and serve the world.”

James: Yeah, and Yogananda too. Yogananda was gonna stay in a cave and he said, “I’ll go to the US.”

Rick: Right. So I think, ultimately, the thing about being sugar or tasting sugar is a matter of personal proclivities. And maybe the Arhat versus Bodhisattva thing is too, and who am I to say what a person should do? So I think one naturally should follow their own inclinations. And maybe some people are destined, dharmically to be an Arhat and just check out. Maybe they’ll serve on some other loka, in some other kind of body. But, and others are wired to keep serving here. A friend of mine once died, well, she died. And we were around Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and he said, “Hmm, she must have been needed elsewhere.”

James: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah. I said this on the last podcast, but I’ll say it again fast. I’m sure you know it. Two people walking through the desert and they’re ready to drop, they’re thirsty, they’re hungry, they’re going to die, they’re not gonna make it. And it’s so bad. And they hear running water and they look up and there’s a wall and mango trees are coming over the wall and it’s paradise. It’s food and water and everything is there. And one of them climbs right over and replenishes and eats of the fruit and sits there. But the other one turns around and goes right back into the desert to guide people who can’t find their way to there. And it seems like those two are the one you need sometimes to replant, you need to be the Arhat and then you be a Bodhisattva. You know, it’s both.

Rick: Now the guy who went back into the desert, maybe he should have eaten some mangoes and gotten a big drink before going back into the desert. So he would survive and reach the people.

James: Let him throw him a few apples.

Rick: Yes, right.

James: Right, it doesn’t have to be so dry. So what are your, if we have tools to go up this Mount Everest of consciousness, what are your favorite metaphors that you’d put in your toolbox? The ocean and the wave, or what would you use to help a seeker that’s ready to throw a noose over a rafter and they just can’t do it anymore. They’re trying to figure this out. They’re fighting—

Rick: There’s a woman I interviewed who actually was planning to throw a noose over a rafter, literally. Her name is Robin Shurasia, and she had been working in the Red Light District Mumbai, not as a prostitute, but as someone who was helping the daughters of prostitutes get out of the red light district and get an education and live a better life. And she just got totally burned out. So she went up to the mountains and she was in this stone hut at like 13,000 feet, summer and winter, for a couple of years and listening to BatGap. She would get down to the town and load up her phone with BatGap interviews and then come back up to the hut. But at some point in the whole thing, she kind of reached the end of her rope, figuratively speaking and she was planning, she was thinking of committing suicide. And nobody ever came to her little hut. It had no running water, no electricity. Nobody ever came there. And she had a length of rope and she thought, “Okay, in the morning, I’m going to hang myself.” That morning, at about four in the morning, there was a knock on the door and it was some hikers. And they said, “Listen, our backpack’s broken. Do you happen to have any rope that we could tie it up with?”

James: Come on, you can’t write it better than that.

Rick: I know. So that was a sign. In any case, to answer your original question. Metaphor. Yeah, I think that, you know, there’s many paths as there are people in this world and one size does not fit all. It’s not that everybody should practice this, that or the other thing and you’ll just follow you. But you know the key ingredient, the universal, the common denominator is the incentive. And that’s how we started out this conversation. If you have the incentive, you know there’s something higher and you would like to reach it, then just culture that incentive. Don’t allow it to fizzle out. Nourish it and do things that will nourish it. Practical things, some meditation practice, some YouTube videos, some teachers, some book, anything which kind of inspires you, and just kind of follow your impulses, follow your inclinations. And as Jesus said, “Seek and ye shall find”, “knock and the door shall be opened.” As some Indian gurus say, “Take one step toward me and I’ll take a thousand steps toward you.” And I’ve seen time and again how when a person just, and sometimes it’s actual prayer, Like they’ll say “help me out here, what is life all about?”  “Get me out of this mess”. And something will come. Pamela Wilson, who I’ve interviewed a couple times, she was a young teenager and she just had this teenage angst, like “what is life all about?” And she was sitting on her bed one night and she said, “I want truth to just come through that door and I need to understand what life is all about.” And she woke up in the middle of the night and this little Indian man was sitting on her bed and she threw a pillow at him and he disappeared. And then later on she was in a bookstore a book of Ramana Maharshi. And she said, “That was the guy. That was the man. That was the guy I saw.” And then one thing led to the next. But I think that you can weave, you can integrate a spiritual pursuit into any lifestyle. It doesn’t matter how busy you are. If you’re too busy to meditate, you’re too busy. If you can’t afford 20 minutes, here maybe once or twice a day, then, you know, really? I mean, do you ever watch television? All right, watch 20 minutes less television. You know, do you sit around playing video games or solitaire on your computer? 20 minutes less of that. You know, you can integrate it.

James: So you’re saying the desire for God will define God, how would you define God? You wanted to define it?

Rick: Oh, how would I define it? Oh, I just feel that, I mean, here I am sitting in a beautiful place, there’s another pond over there and beautiful trees and a wetlands meadow and so on and so forth. And if I were to analyze a leaf on this tree that’s next to me under a microscope I would see that in a single cell of that leaf there’s more complexity than the entire city of Tokyo. It’s just like this incredible mechanism that is in no way just a random mechanistic phenomenon. I just think everything is brimming with intelligence, is infused with intelligence, and if we look closely enough we see it. You could go way out to some place in intergalactic space, and analyze a cubic centimetre of intergalactic space, and you would see laws of nature functioning there, gamma rays or whatever whizzing through, that indicate orderliness and intelligence that govern the universe. So I think there’s nothing but God, and if there is something but God then God must have holes in him. If you analyze, intelligence is there, even in a dung heap or something like that. So that’s my definition of God, all-pervading intelligence, and you are that, essentially. Who was it, Meister Eckhart or somebody said…

James: Love him.

Rick: “That which you’re seeking is that which is seeking”, or some such thing.

James: Eckhart said, “The eye that I look at God is the same eye that God looks at me. My eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.”

Rick: There you go. That’s the quote I was trying to get.

James: I think yours is Francis of Assisi, maybe? That in the seeking is in the looking, it is the looking that, something like that. It is in the looking. I think that’s what you were saying.

Rick: Yeah. Could be. I think so. get my quotes mixed up. But so that was your question about God. But anyway, about the whole spiritual thing, I mean, you’ve heard the analogy of how can a fish be thirsty in water? Fish lives in water, how can it be thirsty? But we’re all kind of thirsty. We feel unfulfilled. And how can that be? It’s when it’s all just totality of fulfillment,  Infinite bliss, Sat Chit Ananda is rock solid totality of the universe. And so it’s a strange paradox, but the fact that that reality is all pervading means that it’s the closest thing to your heart. I heard a quote one time, “God may be omnipotent, but the one thing he can’t do is remove himself from your heart.”

James: Amazing.

Rick: Yeah, so we are just immersed in that reality and there’s some kind of blinders on that prevents us from realizing that immersion, but those blinders can be removed and it’s not gonna happen overnight, but if you just start and just take a step at a time and one thing leads to the next, all the opportunities that you’ll need to realize this present themselves when they’re meant to.

James: That’s beautifully said, Rick. Thank you for coming on. Thank you. I know you’re a busy guy.

Rick:  Yeah, I gotta go to Walmart to pick up some groceries.

James: You gotta eat.

Rick: You gotta eat.

James: Thank you. You gotta go over that wall and get some groceries and come back.

Rick: Plus my phone is saying low battery, so good timing.

James: You’re on the cradle.

Rick: Well, thanks, James. Great talking to you.

Rick: Thank you.

James: Thank you very much.

Rick: I’ll see you in our mail fight.

James: Crazy little chat group, yeah. Take care, Rick.

Rick: Thanks a lot. Bye-bye. Thank you.