James Braha interview

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump, a weekly show in which we have a discussion with someone who has undergone a spiritual awakening of some kind, preferably one of a permanent or abiding nature. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week is James Braha. I’ll let James introduce himself in terms of what he does and all that kind of thing, but I understand that James, you are a professional astrologer. Is that what you do exclusively for a living?

James: These days I do a lot of things. I do investing in gold and silver stocks, and I do a little bit of astrology, not as much as I used to. And I talk some non-duality, pretty much when people call up with questions or email. One of the odd things was that I always thought that if I had ever gotten to the end of my search that I would bang down the doors of everybody and tell them, “Hey, I got this great stuff,” but it turns out that there’s not really much need for that. People are okay as they are, and if they want it, then I’m available.

Rick: Yeah, I was more of a door banger in the early days myself, kind of a wild-eyed zealot. And you tend to mellow out both with age and I think with more spiritual maturity. I’ve listened to one interview that you gave on the Urban Guru Cafe series. In fact, I’ve listened to all about 75 of the interviews on that series, and maybe we’ll talk a little bit about some of my impressions of that as we go along and get into the discussion. And I also have a copy of your book right behind me here, someplace on the shelf. Here it is, right there. James was kind enough to send me this book a number of years ago after he wrote it. You can talk about the book during the course of an interview, but it’s a discussion of the summer you spent hosting Sailor Bob, which I’m sure you’ll also talk about during the interview. So, if you feel it’s relevant and you’d like to do it this way, why don’t you sketch for us the main highlights of your personal path, what you kind of went through that led you to where you are now.

James: Okay. I started at the age of around 20 with Transcendental Meditation, and I was immediately taken with it, and I was immediately struck by the spiritual path. And I thought, “I’ll get enlightened, I’ll spend seven or eight years or ten years.” And, by about eight or nine years, I realized that there had been so much intense growth, and I realized that if there was that much growth in ten years and I still wasn’t there, it would look like a long, many-lifetime path. But I did a lot of stuff. After I got to around 28, 29, I did all kinds of different spiritual techniques and paths and whatever I could do. At the same time, around the age of 30, I’d also realized that I didn’t want my life to be about me. So that’s when I went and started doing astrology, and I had a spiritual career, which is what I wanted, and I did that for a long time. And over the years, I did everything I could possibly do, and there was plenty of frustration because I could never get to the goal. I would get better, I’d get more alert, I’d get more relaxed, I’d get more of everything, and yet the same sense of separateness that was there from the beginning was still there. These other changes didn’t make a dent in the sense of bondage or suffering. And then I got to a point where I realized that I didn’t even care anymore about powers and bliss and all that. I just wanted to get to the truth, and I wanted to get to the end of suffering, the end of this life as an individual identity, etc. Around 1997 or something like that, I was at an astrology conference, and somebody came up after my lecture, and they started talking, and my wife said, “Oh, I know you from Fairfield.” And so we started talking, and I said, “Well, you know, 30 years have gone by, and nobody’s getting enlightened.” And he said, “Oh, that’s not true.” I said, “Really?” He said, “Yeah, I’ll get you a book.” And he got me a book called “Meeting Papaji”, and that was the start of non-duality for me. And the more I read of that stuff, the more I felt like, “Gee, I could really be close to something.” This non-duality gave you the feeling like there was something imminent, something imminent.

Rick: Who wrote that one, by the way?

James: That one I’m not sure. David Godman wrote one that was called “Nothing Ever Happened”, which is a three-volume set.

Rick: Three volumes on nothing ever happened, that’s pretty good!

James: It was an incredible book. But anyway, the other one was put together by one of the disciples after Papaji had died. This was really frustrating, because I read this great book of this guy who did all these miracles, and he was dead. So I started looking into his disciples and things like that. And then, that was for a few years, and I went through seeing different gurus and things. And then I picked up this … actually, I was speaking to a client named Meryl, and she said, “Well, you know, the best non-duality book is Sailor Bob Adamson’s, and it’s called, “What’s Wrong With Right Now Unless You Think About It?” I picked up that book, and in the first three pages, I knew I had to see this guy. I had to see him. However, about two or three years before that, I had gotten on a plane to go to England, and I had a full-blown panic attack. I didn’t know that’s what it was. I thought it was a heart attack and claustrophobia on the plane. It was horrible. And at that point, I knew I wasn’t flying any long distances. So I did some work to try to find out why this panic had happened. It turned out to be one of the most wonderful things for my life, because when I realized I had to see this Sailor Bob, I’d been on a plane since the panic attack, but I wasn’t going over an ocean. I wasn’t ready for that.

Rick: To Australia, yeah.

James: So I called him, and I basically invited him to come here, paid his way, he brought his wife, he stayed for five weeks in my house, and that was it. It was within those five weeks that I fully got non-duality.

Rick: You guys actually invited me to come down for that, but I couldn’t just uproot and come down for five weeks. But thanks for the invitation anyway. Okay, so you fully got non-duality, so you better explain what that means, because many listeners might not know.

James: Okay, well, the term non-duality is the translation for the term Advaita, which means “not two,” which essentially means that what really exists is oneness, and then there’s an appearance of duality, there is a dream going on. The essence of non-duality, the essence, and really the only way a person will ever get it, is to do the search of either “Who am I?” or “Who is this me? What is this me?” And if you do that search, if I look to find an individual James, there’s four things I can find. I can find a physical body, I can find thoughts going on, and I can find feelings. Those are going on all the time. And the other thing that is there is emptiness, or nothingness, or consciousness, whatever you want to call it. And it’s not a thing, it’s not hot, it’s not cold, it’s not black or white, it just is. And that’s been here since before I was born, or I should say before the body was born, and the mind and the thoughts. And that will be here when the body and thoughts and feelings are long gone.

Rick: As far as we know, I mean, there are materialists who argue that that is not the case, but I agree with you, and many people do.

James: Experientially, I don’t know, objectively who can say, but my own experience, and this is interesting, because when I was toward the end of the path, before Sailor Bob got here, I had been reading a lot of Nisargadatta Maharaj, and he was always saying, “Be with the I am.” He doesn’t mean the words “I am,” he means “Be with the sense of presence that’s always there.” And I would do that every night in bed. I would sit and contemplate or meditate or be with the beingness, not the mind, not the body, but just the awareness or beingness. And there was one thing that I sort of brought in, and that was that when I was seeking, I had always heard that these people that said that they had woken up, they would always say that when I gained enlightenment, I realized I had always been enlightened. So I said, “Well, this is crazy. If I’m enlightened now but I just don’t know it, well, let me see what the hell’s going on here that’s so great. Where’s this enlightenment?” Because that’s what they all said. So at night I would be with that “I am”, or that awareness. But the main thrust of non-duality is to look and see if you can find an individual self that is lasting. The body comes and goes, the thoughts come and go, and the feelings come and go. So that’s not my true nature. The only other thing that’s there with me 24/7 is nothingness or emptiness or awareness. Once you know that, then it’s over. Now, it doesn’t mean I don’t suffer like anybody else, it doesn’t mean I don’t get depressed like anybody else, it doesn’t mean if somebody punches me in the face I don’t go, “Ow, that hurt me,” and punch them back. It just means that I understand now, I know my true nature is the emptiness that’s always here, and the body, the mind, and the thoughts and feelings, they come and go. That’s not me.

Rick: Well, who suffers? Who has the emotions? Whose nose gets broken when you get punched in the face? Who feels that pain?

James: An appearance of James. However, it doesn’t feel like an appearance of James. It feels like a me. It still feels like, “Ow, that hurt me.” If you put my head in a vice, I’m going to say, “Ow, that’s hurting me.” But if you put a gun to my head and said, “Who is it really hurting? Is that really you that’s in that vice?” I’d say, “No, absolutely not. That’s an appearance of me.” But that has to be gotten. People oftentimes will go through that search and they’ll say, “Yes, I understand I’m not the body, I’m not the thoughts, I’m not the feelings. I realize I am the emptiness or nothingness.” And then you say, “Is your search over?” And they go, “Well, no.” Because the conviction is not there. So it’s like a person who sees the blue water in an ocean and you say, “Look, is the water blue or is it not?” And they say, “Well, no, of course it’s not blue.” They know it’s not really blue. And you say, “Well, do you really know that or is it an intellectual thing?” “No, I really know the water’s not blue.” Same thing. So once you realize that you are the emptiness, that conviction has to be there in order for the freedom that non-duality will give. Non-duality doesn’t bring bliss necessarily or anything like that, but it does relieve you of a tremendous amount of psychological suffering.

Rick: And how does that conviction get established?

James: “How” questions are impossible to answer. I can answer that from the point of view of reality, which is that there is no conviction, there is no me, there is no world, the whole thing’s a dream. It’s like a dream. It’s like you saying, “How does the baseball…” You know, you had a dream last night of the baseball stadium. How did that baseball stadium … how did the player do what he did? Well, it’s just happening. On the level of the appearance, however, you’re asking me how does that happen, there’s different things I can say within the appearance. I was just speaking with a seeker the other day, and basically he understood everything, but yet wasn’t willing to give up his search. And it was clear to me that he wasn’t earnest or serious. This is a real interesting thing. This seeker had been around for 35 years, seeking, and spent his whole life at it, gave up all sorts of stuff to be on the search, and here I am saying, “You’re just not being serious. You’re not taking it seriously.” And then I said, “Let me ask you, if someone put a gun to your head and said, ‘Answer this correctly, we’ll let you live,’ what are you, the thoughts, feelings, and the body, or are you the emptiness or nothingness?” He said, “I would say the nothingness.” I said, “Then why are you unable to, if you understand that and know that, why is the conviction not there?” And eventually he said, “Well, it scares me to think that I’m not really here. It scares me to think that the world isn’t real.” So that’s a process. Like Sailor Bob was here for five weeks, and even on the last day he was here, I was still asking him questions. And this is fascinating, because the day that Sailor Bob got here, well, he got here at night, on a Wednesday night or something, the next morning I looked out my window about seven in the morning, and he was outside the cottage sitting under a fruit tree. And I went out there. It was the first talk we had had on anything spiritual. And the first thing I said to him, I said, “Bob, is it really true that the world isn’t real?” And he said, “Of course it’s not real. Look at it. Analyze it. It comes and goes like a dream.” Now this is fascinating, because I knew that at the age of 20. You know, reading the spiritual books, they would always say that the world is an illusion, the world is maya. But at the age of 20, and 25, and 30, and 35, and 40, that statement had no meaning. Now, here was a man that I trusted, and it wasn’t just his book. I had read his book and all, but when he got here, I was going to look in his eyes and see, do I trust this guy? And I knew right away, this was not a fraud. This was a genuine, someone who knew something. So when he said, “Of course it’s not real. Analyze it. Look at it.” He wasn’t saying something I didn’t know. However, at that point, and I didn’t realize it, but at that point, my path was over. It was over. And still I was asking questions, and why this, and how that. And it wasn’t until about two weeks after he left, about two weeks after he left, that I remember getting up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, which was a normal occurrence for me. Sometimes it still is. And when I would get up in the middle of the night, up until this point, about a week or two after he left, I would wake up in the middle of the night, I would go to the toilet, and the thoughts would begin. What if I can’t pay the rent? What happens when I die? What’s going to be like for my son when I die? What if this, what if that, what’s going to happen when I… All this craziness. “What’s the next shoe that’s going to drop?” is what would occur every night when I go to the bathroom. And that’s the stuff that was going on all day long anyway. When am I going to get enlightened? So it was about a week or two after he had gone, I got up to go to the bathroom, and I just went to the bathroom. There was no craziness. No, why this, what if that, what about this, what about that? It just was gone. And at that point I said, “Oh, it’s taken hold.” Because even while he was here, one of the funniest things was, a couple of days before he left, I said, “Bob, Bob, I have a question, I have a question. What do I say to a seeker when they ask X, Y, Z?” And he said, “What are you talking about? Are you talking about something that’s in the future? There is no future.” I said, “Yeah, yeah, I know, but what am I going to answer to this question?” He said, “James, you’re asking me about something that doesn’t exist. When the time gets here, whatever you’ll answer is what you’ll answer.”

Rick: That’s the kind of thing Eckhart Tolle might say. He goes to give a lecture, he just basically gets in the car, he’s riding to the lecture, enjoying the car ride, he gets up on the stage, sits in his chair, and he starts to talk, and it just kind of comes out. People will ask him a question, he’ll answer it when they ask it.

James:Exactly. And later on, I had this student that used to come every so often, and she’d say, “James, I get it now when I’m here with you, but I know, because it’s happened several times before, I’m going to go and tomorrow I’ll lose it. What do I do then? What do I do then?” And I said, “You’re asking me about some future. There is no future. Whatever happens, happens in the now. Worry about it in the now.”

Rick: Right. It’s funny you should mention when you were 20, because I was thinking, as you were talking about, when I was 18, and I was basically a stoned-out hippie, but I used to read a lot of philosophical books and spiritual books and Zen books and so on. And I was quite familiar with this idea that the world is an illusion and so on and so forth, but at the same time, I was a mess. I was such a screwed-up kid. I had dropped out of high school, I was taking all these drugs, and I was just full of confusion. I was really torn up inside, difficult family life. And then I learned to meditate, and it was like someone had turned the light on. You said yourself in the beginning of the interview that you noticed quite profound results when you started meditating. I still meditate. I haven’t actually missed one since 1968. But at the same time, many of the developments that you’ve been outlining have occurred for me in a spontaneous way. I don’t feel any sense of seeking anymore, even though I still meditate, but I used to have this desperate yearning and craving, basically clawing at the walls to try to break out. Now I feel primarily free and established. If I were to stay this way for the rest of my life, that would be just fine, just the way I am. But nonetheless, it keeps actually getting better. My orientation is that there are degrees of clarity, and there’s perhaps no end to the depth of clarity that one can appreciate. So would you agree with that? Or would you say that in some sense your way of looking at things is there’s a sort of a static end, not only to seeking but to growth, once this realization has taken place?

James: That is such a fascinating question. Such a fascinating question. The thing about the human experience is that the human experience can always get better and greater. You can be having more awareness, you can be having more bliss, more this and more that.

Rick: Or it could get worse. You could have a stroke or something.

James: Absolutely. I remember that before Sailor Bob got here, I used to sit in bed every night. When I would sleep, I would start to be with the I Am, and do this to try to get a sense of the beingness. And every so often I would have an experience in the middle of the night where everything would recede except for awareness. And it was a blissful experience. It was an experience of being as big as the universe. I do not walk around now with an experience of being as big as the universe. But in those experiences, they were incredible. And I thought, from everything I had read about enlightenment, I had thought that that’s what enlightenment was about, having some grand experience that would be there 24 hours a day. One of those experiences happened when Bob was here, and I went, “Bob, oh, I had this great experience!” “Yeah, yeah, it’s an experience. It’s no big deal.” And this was a real eye-opener to me. And it took a while, but eventually I just stopped caring about experiences because I had what I wanted. And I began to understand that I could have more bliss. Maybe powers are available, who knows what. But those are not what I was ever really looking for, even though I thought it was. What I was really looking for was to know my true nature. Now I know my true nature. I know who I am and who I’m not. And my personality and my temperament and my nature is such that I don’t particularly care about better this or more this. It’s not me. In fact, people will say, “Oh, there’s a great book on non-duality.” For my temperament, I’m done. I don’t care to read them anymore. Now there’s plenty of other people that have got the same knowledge I got, and they still enjoy that, and they still enjoy getting more this and more better experiences. My personality is such that, for me, I’m done. More than I’m done, what I mean is somebody else could be done, and they could still enjoy more spiritual stuff. For me, I just enjoy maybe playing music or being with my son. I don’t look for more experiences now, because they come under the category of just come-and-go experiences.

Rick: Yeah. No, that’s good. And it’s good that you put it that way, too, that this is, for me, the way it is. Because one size does not necessarily fit all. There are seven billion people in the world, each with their own path and each with their own orientation. If you ever get a chance to listen to some of these other interviews I’ve been doing, you’ll see some people that obviously have a very profoundly established sense of self-realization, if you don’t mind that term, knowing who they are, however you want to put it. But still they’ve got this exciting adventure going on, where there’s all these experiential breakthroughs and discoveries and unfoldments, and so on and so forth. And that works for them. Some of them meditate, some of them don’t meditate. All these different varieties. And I’m also glad to hear you say that, because in listening to the Urban Guru Café things, which gives you a hint about my personality, the fact that I’ve listened to all 75 of them, I got this sort of bias that kept coming across of – I may be wrong – but almost every spiritual group in the world has this attitude that our thing is the best and everybody else is somewhat inferior. And this bias kept coming across in many of the speakers, some of whom were extremely articulate, more so than I could ever hope to be, that anybody who talks about levels of development, or some guru who is in any way better able to realize the self than anybody else, and so on and so forth, is bullshitting you. They’re off the track. I happen to ascribe to the word paradox. I sort of feel like, yes, I totally agree, the world is an illusion, not real. And on the other hand, it is real. I mean, if your son died, that would be a very real experience for you. You wouldn’t just brush it off with some philosophical sleight of hand. It would hit you right in the gut.

James: There would be a lot of suffering and there would be a lot of grief.

Rick: Yeah, and the concept that the world isn’t real wouldn’t be a lot of solace at that point, but it might buffer it to some extent.

James: No, there would be – first of all, it’s all theoretical, talking about a theoretical – but even in those really intense kind of experiences, that knowledge of knowing who you are and knowing who you’re not, that knowledge of knowing that the material universe is not real, it’s going to be a different experience.

Rick: Yeah.

James: I mean, it’ll be exactly the same as anybody else, you’ll suffer your ass off, but it’ll also be different in the sense that you’ll be experiencing the grief without so much of the psychological stuff that goes on. One of the fascinating things that I realized after Sailor Bob left, and I felt so different, was that people would say, “Well, how is it different?” I’d say, “It’s no different than I ever was, and yet it’s completely different.” And it’s just because there’s a freedom of the psychological suffering because of the knowledge. It’s almost like when you’re having a dream at night and it’s real and it’s got you in its grip, and as soon as you realize – sometimes even while you’re dreaming you realize, “Oh, this is a dream,” and that frees you up.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. And when you use the word “knowledge,” I’m sure you use it in a slightly different sense than it’s often used by people. Like, someone might have a knowledge of chemistry, let’s say, and if you ask him about chemistry he could tell you a lot of things about it. And I suppose that knowledge is always there, whether or not he evokes it, but it’s not necessarily fundamental to everything in his life. It doesn’t necessarily have pertinence to his behavior as a father or his experience walking down the beach, although it may in that case make him think about the chemistry going on at the beach and so on. But I believe, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, the kind of knowledge you’re talking about is so essential that you’re not just referring to an intellectual concept that you sort of grasp as a man might study chemistry and learn how to deal with its concepts. You’re describing something more visceral that somehow has kind of seeped into every cell in your being, so to speak, and that is there regardless of what life may throw at you.

James: This is the most fascinating question because the seekers will say, “I understand it, but it’s an intellectual understanding.” And so, even though I understand I’m not the body and I understand I’m the nothingness, I still don’t get it because it’s an intellectual understanding. This is fascinating, because then you say to them, “Okay, the rainbow that looks like you could touch it, but you know you can’t touch it because it’s not physical, right?” And they go, “Yes, I know that.” And I say, “Well, do you know that intellectually, or is it a real knowingness? Is it an experiential?” And you use the word “visceral.” It is visceral. At the same time, I’ve thought about this a lot when people will ask, “Well, how do you know this nothingness? Do you know it intellectually, or do you feel it, or what?” And it’s fascinating because I talk about the liberation that comes. I really hate the word “enlightenment” because I don’t … not that, but …

Rick: I haven’t mentioned it once in this interview for the same reason.

James: But when they say, “Well, is it an …” I talk about non-duality as an understanding. You must understand who you are and who you’re not. You must understand that the world is not actually concrete and physical and permanent. And people say, “Well, is that an understanding, or is it an experience?” And it turns out that it’s both. It’s both. Now, it’s possible for it just to be an intellectual understanding, and that’s what it doesn’t help you very much. There’s no freedom if it’s just … And that’s when I say, “Well, that’s where the commitment or the conviction has to come in.” And if they say, “Well, I understand who I am and who I’m not, but there’s no conviction,” and that’s when I say, “Well, you’re not being serious.” And that’s an odd thing to say. Someone has given up their life and they’re seeking this, but something isn’t happening with that understanding. They’re not … and this is why …

Rick: So how does such a person get serious? And I’m sure people have asked you that. “I want to be serious,” they might say. “How do I get serious?”

James: Yes. Well, in reality there’s nothing that they can do, because they’re not even here to begin with. It’s a dream, and if they get serious it’s because that’s how the dream went. They don’t get serious because that’s how the dream went. However, in the world of appearance, I’ll talk to them about … I’ll use that again, that analogy. Someone put a gun to your head, which are you going to say is real, which is not? But there’s something else that I say to people with that question. I say, “Look, you say you want the truth. You say you want the truth. How badly do you really want it? The truth is given to you, and then you get it and you don’t take it seriously.” So I always use the explanation of … you’ve probably heard this story. A seeker goes to his guru and he says, “Oh, I want enlightenment so badly.” He says, “Come on, let’s go in the river.”

Rick: Yeah, hold his head under.

James: Hold his head under until the guy can’t breathe. Then he lifts his head out and he goes … he’s gasping for air. He says, “When you want the truth that badly, that’s when you’re ready.” Now this is fascinating, because when I finally understood what I understood, it was not at all what I had expected for 35 years. It wasn’t bliss, it wasn’t powers, it wasn’t any of the stuff that I thought it was. It wasn’t some special walking around … it wasn’t that. I had gotten to a point in my life at that point where I wanted the truth more than I wanted an experience, and I wanted the end to the sense of separation. Wanting it so badly has something to do only within the world of appearance, not reality. In the world of appearance, wanting it that badly, when you finally see what it is, you want it that badly, then you take it seriously. You would literally have to want it that badly, because when you actually get what you get, it’s not at all this flashy, at least for me. It’s not this really flashy stuff. So if I didn’t want it that badly, I just discard it and say, “Well, let me go seeking somewhere else.” This is like that story of the guy who goes to the guru, and upon enlightenment, he says, “Okay, are you ready? I am that, you are that, all of this is that.” The guy says, “Thanks a lot.” And he goes to the next village. He goes to the guru and says, “I want enlightenment so badly.” He says, “Okay, I can give you enlightenment, that’s not hard. What’s your background? Where have you been?” “Well, I went to the guru over there.” “Oh, you saw that guru?” He says, “Yeah, I did.” He says, “Okay, well I can help you, but you’ve got to clean toilets for 12 years. That’s when you’ll be ready.” Twelve years goes by, a million clean toilets later, “Master, the 12 years are up, I’m ready.” He says, “You’re ready? I am that.”

Rick: And he gets it, right?

James: He gets it.

Rick: Yeah, that’s an interesting point. There’s a Zen saying that enlightenment may just be an accident, but spiritual practice makes you accident-prone.

James: Yes, and there’s a fascinating thing about people, gemologists that are making, growing their own gems. And they say that, while it’s true that it takes a million years for coal to turn into a diamond, I thought it was a gradual process. I’m told that it’s a million years of pressure on the coal to get it to the point where it’s ready, and then the diamond occurs within 24 hours.

Rick: Wow. Phase transition, as Maharishi always used to put it. Water rises to 212 degrees Fahrenheit, nothing much happening, all of a sudden it’s boiling. And there’s so many examples from science of that kind of thing.

James: That’s exactly it. Now, the first thing I said to Sailor Bob was, “Is it really true? The world’s not real?” I knew that 20 years ago. When I was 20 I knew that, 35 years ago. It meant nothing.

Rick: You hadn’t cleaned toilets, you had to clean some toilets.

James: So when I say to these people, “You’re not being serious,” at the very least it lets them contemplate, “My God, I thought I was serious. What’s missing?”

Rick: I’m also glad to hear you saying this stuff, because another impression I got from a lot of the Urban Guru Café folks was that there was a dismissal of spiritual practice as having any value. And it was just kind of dismissed. I disagree. I just feel like, “Fine, well, like the story of Shankara. The king releases the elephant, the elephant’s charging at him, Shankara climbs up a tree. The king says, “Hey, if you’re so enlightened, why’d you bother climbing the tree?” And Shankara says, “Well, the illusory elephant chased the illusory me up the illusory tree.” But nonetheless, he didn’t sit there and get squashed, he climbed the tree. So fine, you can take the perspective that the whole creation is an illusion and not real, and therefore spiritual practice is silly, because what are you doing if the thing isn’t real? But to use another analogy and finish up my point, Maharishi used the analogy of someone standing in the middle of a big mud puddle, and someone says, “Well, come out of the mud puddle.” And he says, “Well, how?” “Well, take a step.” “Wait a minute, you’re asking me to put my foot in the mud again?” “Yeah, but you have to do that, and you have to take a number of steps before you get to the edge of the mud puddle, then you’ll be out.”

James: Yeah, yeah. The thing about them saying spiritual paths aren’t necessary, it’s not that one is right and one is wrong, they’re just different. And a lot of times when they say that spiritual practice is not necessary, they’re speaking more from an absolutist point of view, sometimes. And the other thing is that there’s a few things that I’ve noticed. One, people that get the understanding of non-duality usually have done some practice. The statistics from what I’ve seen are that most of them have been at it for a long time, and they’ve been doing it, not everyone, but most. And secondly, there’s different paths. Advaita or non-duality is a particular path, it’s a non-path path, you don’t do anything. However, the people that get non-duality are far more likely to be the ones that are looking for the truth of what’s real, and they’re looking for “Who am I, really?” The people that are looking for an experience very rarely get Advaita. They may get enlightened or something at some point, or they may get liberation or some great experience, but as far as getting non-duality, because non-duality is this thing where we’re not talking about experiences, we’re talking about just understanding who you are and who you’re not. A person who’s looking for bliss or powers, you give them this understanding, you point them in the direction of who they are and who they’re not, it’s not satisfying experience at all. It does, to some extent, after the understanding is there, they may have some experience, but if they’re after experience and you’re pointing them to the truth of who they are, they often don’t get it.

Rick: Yeah, but people’s orientation matures, I think, very often, hopefully. A little kid, he wants a tricycle, then maybe when he’s a little older he wants a bicycle, then later on he wants a little go-kart, and at a certain stage he wants a car. His desires mature as he matures. People start out with meditation, let’s say, and they think, “Whoa, I had such a great meditation. Enlightenment must be where I have that kind of experience all the time. I’m just practically unable to walk, I’m so blissful.” And they look for that to happen more and more often. I’ve been there in terms of my understanding and experience, but then later on, as they mature spiritually, they become ripe for the realization that, “No, it’s not just some flash-in-the-pan thing like that, it’s something much more non-flashy and natural and perhaps subtle and certainly continuous.” It’s like stepping stones, you step up to that, in many cases. So I don’t necessarily feel that somebody who’s… But to play devil’s advocate to myself, there are a lot of people in Fairfield who have been meditating 30, 40 years, and I don’t think that they’ve undergone that shift in understanding. It’s still like, “Oh, I had this cool experience during my meditation and I’d like to have that experience become permanent.” In fact, in this town there’s a certain attitude among some people towards those who claim to have an abiding realization, that they must be self-deluded or on some kind of ego trip or something because they can’t fly or they don’t seem to have the kind of spiritual pizzazz that Maharishi had ,or something like that. And there’s this sort of attitude that, “Well, that’s what real enlightenment is, the ability to perform these miraculous things or to wow people with your darshan.” A regular schmo like you, so-and-so, must not be genuinely self-realized because he seems so ordinary.

James: Yeah. The thing is that, what you mainly want is the freedom from the bondage or the freedom from a sense of separation or something like that. But I was going to say something else, but I…

Rick: Let me tell you something. Oh, go ahead.

James: I know what it is. This is something that I mentioned on the Urban Guru Cafe. People will tell you about, you know, Guru so-and-so who is so enlightened and this other guru who is even more enlightened and this other guru who is even more enlightened. But here’s the thing. When people are looking for one particular thing that, criteria that, proves enlightenment or something like that, this is where it gets hairy. There really is no enlightenment because there never was any real bondage. However, the idea of enlightenment is losing the false reference point. That’s the major idea. The false reference point would be that I am James. That’s just false. My body is going to come and go, James is going to come and go. So the idea of gaining enlightenment is losing that… Like Nisargadatta said, “As long as you believe you’re a person, you will suffer.” Because things will happen to you that you don’t like. You’ll be suffering. If something happens and you say, “But who is it really happening to?” You realize it’s not happening to anybody. It may not feel good, but at least you understand. So here’s the thing. For the people that believe that there’s somebody who has something that they don’t, you can always find that, no matter what guru or God or Shiva or Krishna, no matter who it is, that false reference point never goes away until the body goes away. And the mind and the appearance of the body, the appearance, until that goes away, that false reference point is there. You just have to know how to get to it. So you may be with a guru and they take his money and he says, “I don’t care.” He’s sick, “Oh, I don’t care.” But if you press the right button, you’ll see his false reference point. The analogy I always use is, you go to your Krishna or Shiva or Nisargadatta or whoever it is, and you say, “Look, I’m a killer. That’s my nature. I like to kill people. I have to kill someone today. I just have to do it. I can kill someone in the next village, or I can kill your loved one. You choose.” Now, if the guru says, “Yeah, go ahead, kill my loved one,” he’s crazy. He’s a lunatic. When I was 20, when I was younger, I didn’t really analyze this enlightenment stuff well enough, and most people don’t. You think that it’s going to get you to a state of no suffering and perfection and no reference. But if you were that, you would be a zombie. Somebody said, “If you go to a guru and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got a dirty bomb. I’m going to explode it in New York City, or I can throw it in the ocean,’ they’re going to choose the ocean.” They’re doing that from a reference point. And therefore, that’s the reason why I don’t have any more envy or, “Oh, this person can do that, and this person’s got this.” We’re all ultimately the same, and those little tricks or those little abilities or whatever, they’re meaningless. Because ultimately, there’s nobody that doesn’t have that false reference point, the same as I do, the same as everybody.

Rick: That’s a very good point. You can think of many other examples. You could give the most enlightened person in the world a plate of dog poop and a delicious meal. They’re going to take the delicious meal, obviously. They make choices, they distinguish, they have opinions, they have attitudes, they have preferences, and blah, blah, blah. They’re human beings.

James: And that’s the reason, you know, it used to drive me nuts. So many of the gurus that I saw, they would get embroiled in money, they would get embroiled in sex scandals and power scandals, all these crazy … And I said, “Why is this?” It’s because they also have a false reference point that’s going to give them desires.

Rick: And that may give them prostate cancer or whatever. There’s a personality that has these things and that suffers from them. One analogy I like to use in thinking of all this is that if we think of the reality itself, the essential nature of everything, as being like electricity, and then you have different bulbs. And they’re all drawing off the same electrical field. And that electrical field isn’t different for any of them. But some bulbs shine more brightly than others. And some might have different colors, and some may burn out and die. But the electrical field remains what it is. So I say that a big famous guru, some of them at least, they happen to be pretty bright bulbs. They can channel or reflect or express a great deal of that electricity, so to speak. And others, not so much. But it doesn’t mean that, in the ultimate sense, one is more enlightened than the others. Unless we define enlightenment as meaning the ability to channel or express, as opposed to the ability to just realize one’s essential nature.

James: Yeah, well I would even go to the thief in the prison. He’s just as enlightened as well.

Rick: Yeah, but whether he knows it or not is an important matter.

James: He has no idea. He actually feels like he’s suffering, and he feels like he’s in bondage, and all that. But ultimately, the reality is, the guru, no matter how great the guru is, he’s got a false reference point just like the thief.

Rick: Yeah.

James: Certainly, the person who’s shining brightly is having a much more graceful life.

Rick: And the thief in the prison may not realize he has a false reference point. He thinks his reference point is real, and he’s really upset about being in that prison. Whereas you might take an enlightened – pardon me for using the word – a realized person, or whatever, and put them in the same prison, and they might be cool with it. They might rather be somewhere else, but as long as they’re there, it doesn’t grip them to the same extent. In fact, Ed Beckley, whom you may know, wrote a book about his experience of awakening in prison. He said some people there, it was hell for them, because they had no sense of self-awareness or inner freedom, and every day was a nightmare. Others, the experience had actually brought them into a state of living in the moment, as you were speaking of earlier, where they just absolutely took each moment as it came. They didn’t think, “I have to be here 20 more years.” It was like, “Now, and now, and now.” And he said those people were quite happy.

James: Yeah, that’s great stuff. I know Ed, we talked about this stuff.

Rick: He’s down in your area, isn’t he? I want to interview him one of these days. So, what haven’t we covered? Well, pertinent to our discussion, I think you can ultimately trace, if you have a lineage, you can trace it back to Ramana Maharshi, in a sense, because there’s Sailor Bob, and then he was with Nisargadatta, and he was with Ramana Maharshi, was he not? Or maybe he was with Ramesh Balsekar, and he was with Ramana Maharshi.

James: No, they had a different guru. It wasn’t Ramana, but you know, it’s…

Rick: Anyway, it doesn’t matter, they’d all respect him. But one interesting thing that someone told me about that Ramana apparently would say when people came to him, and it sort of harkens back to something you were saying earlier, was at first he would give them a Mahavākya. He’d say something like, “Thou art that,” and maybe they would get it, but mostly people wouldn’t. And so he’d say, “Okay, well then, do self-inquiry,” like the kind of thing you were saying that you sat in bed and did every night, where you’d… the “I am,” “Who am I?” “What am I?” And if that didn’t work for him, he’d say, “Okay, well, practice meditation, do that.” He’d take them a step back, but if they couldn’t even sit to meditate, he’d say, “Well, do service, just get out there and help people.” And Shankara says something like this, too, in his writings, that these stages are sort of… Well, there’s a verse from the Gita, “Because one can perform at one’s own dharma, the lesser in merit is better than the dharma of another. Better is death in one’s own dharma, the dharma of another brings danger.” And so I think the idea is you do what you’re suited to do, and that may change over time. The service guy may get to the point where he can sit and meditate, and the meditating guy may get to the point where he can do self-inquiry, just as you went through those two stages. And then that guy may eventually get a Mahavākya, and ta-da, he gets it. So there is this sort of progressive nature, I think, to development. And I think the reason I’m dwelling on it so much is I didn’t get the sense, again, in listening to all these Urban Guru people, that they really appreciated that. They kept…

James: The growth?

Rick: Yeah, the growth thing. In fact, I was listening to a verse from the Īśopaniṣad, which says something like, “Those who are devoted to avidya go into blinding darkness, but into even greater darkness go those who are devoted to vidya.” And “avidya” means ignorance, “vidya” means knowledge. And I don’t really know what the writer of that verse intended, but to me it sort of means, if you just are totally stuck in the relative, that’s suffering. But if you’re oriented to the absolute, to the point that you dismiss the relative entirely, and like we were saying earlier, you kind of deny that you have preferences, or that people should have preferences, or that there can be stages of growth, and so on and so forth, that’s also a lopsided view. It’s kind of like paradoxical, as it may be, both perspectives are true, and they kind of fit into a larger whole. Do you agree with that? It’s kind of a long rambling.

James: No, I do. But the thing is that there’s no… From my side, I can’t speak for the other people, from my side, it’s purely… Once you understand who you are and who you’re not, once you understand that the whole experience that you’re having is something that’s transitory, it will largely depend on your nature as to whether you consider the growth to be of any value. I have always been a goal-oriented person. That’s just the way I am. I would do something until I get to the end of it, and then I’d say, “You know what? I’m done with this.” That’s just my nature. And so once I understood that no matter how brighter the bulb would get, the essential freedom is here, how bright the bulb gets is irrelevant to me. That’s my nature. Now, there are people who understand it, who get it, they are free, and they prefer to have more growth. Now, when you say more growth, I mean relative growth.

Rick: On the relative level. Because that’s the only thing that can grow.

James: Well, the thing is, once they understand that they’re not the body and thoughts and the feelings, there’s no more growth to take place in terms of the understanding of their… Well, I don’t know, that’s hard to say. Because the bulb will burn brighter, but people would always ask Sailor Bob, “Is there a deepening? You’ve been with this 30 years, is there a deepening?” And he would have to answer, he prefers to answer from the ultimate level, and say, “No, there is no deepening, ultimately.” Because once you’re realized, you’re realized. And yet, of course, and then he’ll say, “But of course, my experience isn’t the same now that I’ve been with non-duality for 20 years.” It grows, but for some people there’s a preference to have more of that growth, and for others, that’s it, done. It depends on the nature only. So it may be that the people on the Urban Guru, I don’t know, it’s hard to say why so many of them… I think so many of them will talk against growth, possibly because they are feeling that it will keep a person seeking. And the more you seek, the further away you are from where you want to be. Now that’s seeking. There’s a difference between seeking and seeking and seeking, as if when I get this better experience, then I’ll be something. That’s not so good in what they’re trying to teach. So I think when they hear that stuff, they immediately want to deny it, and say, “Don’t do that, that’s no good, blah, blah, blah.” But as long as you understand the true nature, go and have a field day.

Rick: I think you may be right, that might be why they have that emphasis.

James: Most of them definitely do. Because if a seeker… See, when you talk to them, you’re not a seeker-seeker. When a seeker comes, I’m talking about a person who says, “I’m in bondage and suffering, I want freedom.” The last thing on earth they want to do as teachers is say, “When you get this, there’ll be deepening and deepening.” They don’t want to say that, it doesn’t do them any good. This is really an important point. One of the reasons that I really, really am thankful that I found Sailor Bob, as opposed to many of the other non-duality teachers, is that many of them will say that there is a final understanding, at which point this drops off and that drops off and this drops off, and it’s a final understanding. This to me is a bunch of crap. Total crap. (Irene sneezes) God bless you! This to me is really nonsense, that there’s some final understanding. First of all, most of the time that’s coming from teachers that basically want to have people still coming to them and getting more money. At least that’s my perception of it. Because, if you take one of these people who says that they have the final understanding, they’re no longer John or they’re no longer Maharaj or whatever, I’ll find their reference point real quick. Want me to take a nice can of sewage and throw it in your house? As soon as they say no, I say, “Oh, there’s his reference point.”

Rick: I think that’s one of the reasons the Zen masters would have a stick in hand. You think you’re not anybody? Whack! How does that feel?

James: Yeah, that’s a good point.

Rick: I was thinking about the growth thing that we were talking about a minute ago, and whether it’s a preference or not. I sort of think, in my opinion… I’m sorry, go ahead.

James: When you say whether it’s a preference…

Rick: Whether the desire to continue growing or whether just to rest on one’s laurels and enjoy that state and not be so preoccupied with further development and growth and so on. It’s a personal preference, as you were saying. But, on the other hand, and there’s always another hand, there’s a certain… maybe even four… There’s an evolutionary force that I think has been functioning since probably eternity, but in this universe for 13.7 billion years, giving rise to stars and planets and eventually forms of life. And there seems to be a sort of an impetus or a direction to achieve greater and greater expressions of complexity and capacity for self-awareness. And I’m not sure that we can ever divorce ourselves from that force, that we can ever be immune to it or not still guided by it. We may not feel it acutely as a sort of a driving personal imperative, but at the same time I think it’s nonetheless carrying us along. Maybe it’s like a river. The river is flowing. We can choose to just sort of float and go with the flow of the river, or we can swim along and maybe move down the river a little bit faster than the guy who’s floating. But nonetheless we’re still moving along, carried by this current of evolutionary… whatever you want to call it.

James: Right. And to that I would say, what you’re describing is something that you’ve noticed happens within the dream. So if tomorrow that doesn’t happen, that wouldn’t shock me.

Rick: Right.

James: Because that would be how the dream is going. I wouldn’t take anything within the relative to be too absolute, or having any great reality to it. If tomorrow gravity changes and there’s no more gravity, that would be how the dream goes.

Rick: Yeah, true.

James: That’s how the dream goes. And for some people, when I say it’s a preference, it’s the same as saying for some people the dream will go in that direction, where they want more and more and more. And for other people the dream will go in a different direction. Or they can have… I think there was a TM woman who had these really flashy enlightenment experiences, but she also had a brain tumor.

Rick: Oh yeah, that’s Suzanne Segal.

James: Right. And then suddenly life wasn’t… toward the end of her life I think, life wasn’t going… the light bulb wasn’t getting brighter, it was getting dimmer.

Rick: Sure.

James: So that’s just how the dream went.

Rick: And that’ll happen to all of us in one way or another.

James: Yeah, we’re all headed for a crash landing.

Rick: But there are certain features which seem to be characteristic of everyone’s dream. None of us are exempt from gravity, none of us are exempt from dying, none of us are… photosynthesis seems to happen to all plants, regardless of their dream. And we all need to eat. There’s certain laws of nature. We all have hearts that need to beat if we’re going to stay alive. There are certain laws of nature which seem to be irrevocable. And ultimately we can analyze it all as an illusion, but the illusion is quite marvelous and set up with apparently unfathomable creativity and intelligence. Anywhere you look, from the cosmological perspective, looking out through telescopes to the microscopic level, there’s something marvelous happening. And you can analyze it down to its very essence and say, “Okay, the essence is really all it is. There is no manifestation, there is no universe.” But that wouldn’t be the whole story, because… you agree?

James: It’s really kind of a loaded subject, I think, because… the way the dream goes over here is that you’ve described something. I’m not going to argue it, but how the dream is going over here is that to me, I wouldn’t place much… it’s a dream! It’s like what you just described. It’s like me talking about… I had this dream last night in the baseball stadium, and the Braves won and it was 5-2. And if I was describing that dream to somebody of the baseball game that I had in the middle of the night, I wouldn’t get too caught up in it, because it’s a dream. So, the stuff that you’re talking about, I would guess that if you talk much about that with non-dualists or Urban Guru Cafe, they’re going to want to go, “Oh, get out of here!” And part of that, I think you’re right, that it is part of the story, the dream appeared to occur, but most people that have finally gotten to the point where they’ve figured out that it’s a dream, they want to go, “Enough of the dream!” So Rick wants to talk about the dream and the gravity of the dream. “Enough of that! I had enough of that. Now I want to talk about how I know it’s a dream.”

Rick: Yeah, I agree with you. But there is still… even the people who do the Urban Guru Cafe, they put a whole lot of effort and time and money perhaps into telling that story, getting it out there to the world. And the gurus, let’s say the whole subset of totally genuine gurus who have ever lived, they know it’s a dream, but they dedicate their lives to getting out there and helping other people wake up from it, or to eliminate their suffering. So it’s not like they just sort of… maybe some of them do, I mean there are some who are content, “It’s a dream, I’m staying in the cave.” But others feel this motivation.

James: See, one of the things I said earlier on was that when I was searching, I thought if I ever got to the end of it, I would be beating down doors to tell people about it. But how the dream works over here is that it is glaring to me, it stares me in the face every day that the whole thing is a dream. And so the only way that there’s an impetus for me to help somebody with non-duality is if they come looking for it. Because other than that, it’s really too absurd. These people that think they’re suffering aren’t even really here, number one. Number two, the whole idea, now this is not reality, but this is going to be a theoretical explanation, the whole idea of the existence is that the oneness, consciousness or oneness or emptiness, it’s just one, boring. So it appears to manifest this great whole creation. So why would I want to go and take somebody’s dream away?

Rick: Unless they wanted it to be.

James: Unless they wanted it, and then I’m thrilled to do it because I know in the world of appearance, I know that they’re going to be freer and happier. But I would never go out and seek to change somebody, to make them hear this, unless they were searching for it, partly because the emptiness manifested in order to have duality. Why should I take that duality away from people unless they’re looking for it? But that’s my nature, or that’s how the dream goes over here. There are plenty of people that they want to spread it like crazy.

Rick: And even them, even they, don’t have much success except with those who are looking for it. Cast ye not your pearls before swine. Unless there’s some kind of motivation, you can’t foist it on people.

James: It’s hard enough when there is motivation. It’s simple but it’s not easy. It’s a simple message but not easy for people.

Rick: That’s a good point.

James: Ed Beckley was here one day. He had a group with 10 or 15 people and he’d known them for a couple of years. And so he says, “My group wants to come and see you.” I said, “Okay, great.” But I’m thinking, “Why do they want to come see me? He’s telling them the same thing.” So I give this talk and it happened to be a really good one. Sometimes you have a good one, sometimes you have a bad one.

Rick: Yeah, sometimes you’re really on.

James: I was really on. And when I was done, the hands went up. “How do I live a better life?” “How do I make this happen?” I just told you there is no you! And I was really perplexed. This was early on when I first started teaching. And Ed came up to me later on and he said, “Listen, some people are going to keep having the same questions over and over. And then one day they suddenly get it.”

Rick: Well, those might be valid questions, but you’re not the guy to ask them of. You trade gold stocks or something, you said, and I’m sure you’d like to trade them successfully. You prefer to make money doing that rather than lose. And maybe there are people you can learn from who teach you how to do that better and so on and so forth. So if that’s what you want, you go to one of those people. So how do I live a better life? There are all kinds of life coaches and people who teach that kind of stuff. You’re not the guy to see about that.

James: No, I just told them that there is no you. My job is to… You want to find out that stuff, first get this message that there is no you, and then worry about that stuff.

Rick: Yeah, “Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven, and all else shall be added.” And Shankara might have been able to take lessons in tree climbing. It might have helped him. So it’s not to say that no matter what one’s conviction that the world is an illusion, there might not still be the motivation to acquire more relative skills in it that benefit one’s… How did you put it? You had an interesting way of referring to the individuality.

James: False reference point?

Rick: False reference point, right. We like our false reference points to be enhanced as much as possible, within reason.

James: Oh, for sure.

Rick: And the other false reference points that our false reference point is devoted to and associated with.

James: The preferences. Everybody’s got their preferences, and that never goes away.

Rick: No, I don’t think it does.

James: It’s really fascinating to me. I had always heard that when you die, you would see your life before you, not with emotion, but just kind of objectively, and then a desire would pop up. A desire would pop up, and that’s what would bring you into the next life. Supposedly, if you gain liberation, that doesn’t happen. There’s no desire at the end. And it’s very interesting, because I had desires before, I have desires now. But the difference is, none of them can make a difference. In other words, I now understand that it doesn’t make a difference in reality whether a person does some great thing or becomes famous or powerful or wealthy or enlightened. None of that stuff makes a difference. I have no doubt that I have desires going on all the time, but none of them are strong like they used to be. They used to be, “I have to do this,” or, you know, that kind of desire, the attachment isn’t there.

Rick: Right. And that’s an important point, too, because there are so many spiritual teachings that are misinterpreted as killing desire or getting rid of desire, or not having any desires, and I don’t think that’s possible if you’re going to be alive.

James: It makes no sense.

Rick: But I think what all those teachings were actually pointing to is what you just described.

James: Yeah, there’s constant desire and there’s no desire. I remember that when Sailor Bob had been here for five weeks, it was really 12 hours a day of non-duality, and then I started writing my book, and I was just steeped in it for months. And I remember that I would have desires, but instead of even acting on them, I’d say, “Well, what’s the point of acting on that?” But they would be there, but I’d say, “It’s not necessary that I act on this.” And it was fascinating what started to occur was that so many desires got fulfilled anyway, without trying, and then other desires, I noticed that there were desires that I had that I didn’t get, and then I realized later if I’d gotten them, it would have gotten in the way of things. One night I went to this party, and there was one of the other people that had been around a lot with the non-duality groups. He was at that party as well. I sat down, and I was next to this woman who had a lot to drink, I think. And we were talking, and she said, “How many children do you have?” And I said, “I have one, and he’s a handful.” Whatever I said set this woman off. She kept complaining or throwing barbs at me. And finally I’m thinking, “Am I going to have to say something to this woman?” And I said, “No.” And it was in the same realm of, “It’s just another desire.” And it’s so funny because as it got stronger, I thought, “Maybe I need to say something to this woman.” And then Dale, who had been in the non-duality groups, he comes over and he hears this woman say something. And he immediately said, “Lady, what’s the matter with you?” He did what I would have done.

Rick: Did it for you.

James: Yeah, but I didn’t want to act on the desire.

Rick: Well, that’s interesting, because I’ll reiterate what you just said. You said that you began to find, once this inner freedom had dawned, that desires were getting fulfilled more readily, and desires which ought not to be fulfilled weren’t getting fulfilled, and something was sorting all that out. So what do you think was the agency, or is the agency now, for the fulfillment of those legitimate desires and the thwarting of the inappropriate ones? Who’s doing that for you? (Laughter)

James: I want to answer that from the point of view of the whole thing’s a dream, and it’s just the way it’s happening.

Rick: Yeah, but interestingly, the dream has been upgraded to a better dream, and there’s some kind of instrumentality that’s conducting it.

James: All I can say is that … I don’t know how to say it. You could use TM language, you know, you start to get in tune with nature. There starts to be less grabbing and clawing and desperation. I mean, the thing really, ultimately, I think that it is, is that when you understand that there is no you, when there is no individual here, it’s understood that there’s no individual that is actually here. I don’t know, the next sentence to say, “You’re more in tune with the oneness, you are more of the oneness,” I don’t know. But all the resistance, the resistance within the dream, it just disappears. You know, Adi Shankara, who lived a couple thousand years ago, he was a grandpappy of Advaita. He’s the guy who’s generally acknowledged as the founder of that branch of Vedic knowledge. And he was a great exponent of it, and he wrote commentaries on the Upanishads and the Brahma Sutras when he was just in his early teens and so on. But on the other hand, he was a great devotee of God. He wrote “Bhaja Govindam,” he wrote these beautiful devotional poetry and so on and so forth. And there’s a saying of his, which is that “The intellect imagines duality for the sake of devotion.”

James: Say it again?

Rick: “The intellect imagines duality for the sake of devotion.” So, I mean, this guy was no slouch. He understood his Advaita, he had it down. But on the other hand, he was actually a devotee of God. He acknowledged, at least for the sake of devotion, he acknowledged the existence of God, of a divine intelligence, and he engaged in devotion to that… I don’t want to say entity, to that level of reality or whatever. And what I’m kind of getting at here is perhaps that that which fulfills your desires for you and thwarts your negative ones or your inappropriate ones, is that greater intelligence that people have referred to as God, but which could be understood in a deeper sense or in other terminology. Illusory as the universe may be, something seems to have created it and given rise to it. And perhaps that something has greater play in one’s life once the individuality gets out of the way and is realized for the ephemeral thing that it is. Something else can play a hand in our destiny much more effectively once we stop interfering.

James: Yeah, that’s beautiful. I think that’s exactly what it is. The oneness is somehow enjoying itself better when you get out of the way.

Rick: Yeah. Yeah.

James: The oneness is enjoying itself when the dream of oneness, when the illusion of duality sees through itself. It’s kind of like oneness seeing through itself. Because the oneness has made this illusion and then the oneness sees, “Oh, it’s an illusion,” and so it plays better. It’s like a better functioning automobile. It functions better.

Rick: It plays hide and seek with itself. It’s like you were saying earlier. It’s kind of bored being just flat oneness. So, “Hey, let’s create a universe.” And then, oops, it seems to get lost in the universe. All these little manifestations, from their perspective, don’t appreciate that which has given rise to it all. But then at a certain point the manifestations become sophisticated enough in their functioning that it can dawn on them, “Wait a minute, I am that who started this game.”

James: Yeah.

Rick: And voila, the hide and seek game kind of comes to its fruition, at least as far as that expression is concerned.

James: Yeah, I think that’s what happens.

Rick: And that’s the area, I think, in which there’s greater capacity for growth, greater capacity for unfoldment of appreciation of that intelligence that has brought about this whole marvelous turn of events. But I’m speaking somewhat intuitively and speculatively myself here. It just seems to strike a chord with me.

James: Yeah, yeah, I can see. I have one friend who understands everything, but he reads Ramana, knows who he is, knows who he’s not, but he reads Ramana. And he reads that Ramana had this great state of calmness, and so he wants that, and that’s important and significant. And to me it’s garbage. I don’t mean garbage in, “Oh, it’s a bad thing,” I don’t mean that. It’s just, “Who cares?”

Rick: You mean Ramana Maharshi, that Ramana?

James: Ramana Maharshi?

Rick: Yeah, the guy in Tiruvannamalai who just kind of sat around the mountain.

James: My friend reads his stuff and he reads how, “Oh, you reach this great state of equanimity,” and all that stuff. And for that person, my friend knows who he is and he knows who he’s not, but he thinks that some of the stuff that Ramana Maharshi is talking about is really important and significant. Fine, go knock yourself out, but for me it doesn’t mean anything.

Rick: There’s a friend of mine who, in her little email signature, she has this quote which says, “Be yourself, every other role is taken.”

James: Ah!

Rick: And I would suggest to your friend that he’s never going to become Ramana. I mean, that guy had his own personality and his own dharma, his own personal qualities, but your friend can certainly become more vividly who he is, perhaps, and enjoy the unfoldment of that.

James: That’s definitely perfect. It’s like I know my own personality well enough to know that that’s just the way I am. But there was a friend that I had, he was a TM person, and he read my book, and we’d known each other for years, and he said, “Yeah, I see that, but I want powers.” I said, “Well, go and keep searching.”

Rick: Yeah, get him.

James: About a year later he came back and he said, “You know what? I’m done.”

Rick: That’s pretty good. Well, maybe we’re done. Are we done? Is there anything we haven’t really brought up?

James: I’ve said most of the stuff that usually comes up with seekers. There’s one other thing that is worth knowing, I think, for some people, for seekers, specifically for seekers. I get a lot of people who are seeking for a long time, they read my book and it’s, “Oh my God, I really got it.” They call me and they’re all excited. Well, there’s going to come a point, most likely, if you’re like most of the people, a month or two down the road you’re going to say, “Oh, I’m suffering, I lost it!” And let me tell you that suffering will occur, some shit will happen. It doesn’t mean you’ve lost anything. This is what life is, as long as you remember who you are and who you’re not, and that there’s a conviction there. The point is that… I’ll just tell you a story. When Sailor Bob was here, somebody did something that he didn’t like and all of a sudden his temper just flared. And then he just immediately apologized. That was it. His reference point came out, but that was the end of it. He wasn’t suffering, “Oh my God, I lost it because I said this to this person.” It’s not like that.

Rick: It’s like the old Zen story, the story of the older monk and the younger monk. They’re walking along the road and they come to a stream and there’s this beautiful young girl standing and she can’t get across the stream. And the older monk picks up the girl and they walk across the stream and he puts her down and they keep on walking. And several hours later the younger monk can’t contain himself and he said, “What did you do? You’re a monk, you’re not supposed to touch women.” And the older monk says, “Oh, are you still carrying her? I put her down on the other side of the stream.”

James: Exactly. But people think, because they get real excited, “Oh, I know who I am.” They get real excited and then when they have some suffering they think they’ve lost it. Because nothing’s lost.

Rick: I could recommend a book to such people. It’s by a guy named Adyashanti, whom you may have heard of. The book is called “The End of Your World.” It’s specifically written for people, although others could enjoy it, but it’s specifically written for people who have had a spiritual awakening. It discusses in a very systematic way all the things one might encounter after that initial awakening. One of the chapters is the “I got it, I lost it” syndrome. He addresses that very eloquently. adyashanti.org is his website and you can get the book there.

James: I met him at one of the astrological conferences that I was there. Somebody had brought him to give a lecture. He’s great.

Rick: Yeah. Hmm. Okay. Well, that might be a good stopping point. What I’m going to do is I’ll have this up on a website, and people who are accustomed to coming there will be listening to it and downloading it. It will also be on YouTube. You can send me a photo of yourself and a little biographical, a couple hundred words that you’d like to have there. We’ll include links to anything you want, so a link to your website, a link to Sailor Bob’s website, or whatever else you’d like to have.

James: How many of these do you have?

Rick: I think you are number 21 or 22. I think you’re 22. I do them about once a week.

James: That’s neat.

Rick: The website is on the local public access TV station here in Fairfield. If you’re watching it on that or looking at it on YouTube, the website I’m referring to is called batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, which is an acronym for Buddha at the Gas Pump. You can go there and you see them all archived. There are links to the YouTube channel. There’s a chat group where people are chattering about this kind of stuff all day long, and different resources like that.

James: That’s great.

Rick: When we’re finished here, there will be some titles that will roll also, and in the credits it will have a reference to that, batgap.com, and a few other things. And as I said, on that site we’ll link to your website. If people want to contact you, either for spiritual discussion like this, or for astrological services, or whatever.

James: OK.

Rick: Say hi to Ed for me, and tell him I’ll do him as soon as he likes. I’m kind of waiting for him to come to Fairfield, because I’d rather do people in the studio. But if he’s not coming, we should do it this way.

James: Oh yeah.

Rick: Thanks James.

James: Thank you.

Rick: Say hi to Vashti. I’ll wrap up by saying that you’ve been watching Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer, and my guest has been James Braha.