Summary
James Eaton describes a lifelong sense of dissatisfaction beneath outward achievement and his search for a more authentic way of living. The discussion explores how acting, teaching, mathematics, and early encounters with spiritual traditions challenged his defenses and encouraged greater vulnerability, presence, and questioning.
Questions This Interview Explores
- Why can achievement and success fail to resolve a deeper sense of dissatisfaction?
- How can vulnerability and improvisation help someone become more present and authentic?
- How can spiritual teachings be explored without accepting beliefs blindly?
- Can mathematics and the patterns of nature inspire a sense of wonder or transcendence?
Key takeaways
- Outward success can conceal deep insecurity and a feeling of living behind a role.
- Vulnerability means meeting fear directly instead of shutting down or controlling experience.
- Improvisation trains presence by requiring openness to whatever happens next.
- Learning becomes deeper when people discover truths through direct involvement.
- Spiritual teachings should be questioned and tested through experience rather than followed mechanically.
- Mathematical patterns in nature can open a door to awe and mystery.
Transcript
Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I believe that today’s guest is number 365, which means if I had done them every day of the year, we would have done this for a whole year straight. Today’s guest is James Eaton. James is in the UK, in a place called Totnes. Is that the way you pronounce it, James?
James: Everyone says “Totnas,” but apparently, it’s supposed to be “Totnes.”
Rick: Okay, Totnes. It almost sounds like it should be in Spain or something. In any case, I’ll just say a couple of quick, more general things before we get started. I just like to say every time when I do one of these interviews that if you’ve never seen one of these before, there are, as I just said, a whole bunch of them. If you go to www.batgap.com and look under the Past Interviews menu, you’ll find them all organized and categorized in various ways. You can check out previous ones.
This whole thing is made possible by the support of appreciative viewers and listeners, and if you appreciate it and feel like supporting it, there’s a PayPal button on the site.
So, let me properly introduce James. James Eaton lives in the UK. He’ll tell us his story about how he… Well, why don’t you just start telling it, James? Your little bio that you sent me is so personal and informal that you might as well just tell the story of growing up, your deep sense of dissatisfaction, and so on. Let’s just start with that.
A deep sense of dissatisfaction
James: Yeah, it’s the classic tale,
Rick: just having that deep sense of dissatisfaction. From an early age, I kind of knew I was playing a game. I mean, from a very early age, I remember always being very driven, but looking at the adults around me and wondering, “Why are you pretending? Why is everyone pretending?”
But when I got to about nine or ten, I was pretending too. I sort of got into the game, and somewhere I knew I was pretending, but you just can’t understand what’s going on there at such a young age.
Rick: Did you have a feeling like you were getting sucked into it, like blinders were being put over your eyes and you were trying to prevent that from happening?
James: Absolutely. I just found myself—rather than people saying, as you get older, everything expands and your options open—feeling like the opposite was happening.
Rick: Shutting down.
James: Yeah, and what I was doing was starting to play a role, like most of us seem to do. Deep down, I was feeling very insecure and wanting to open up and be fully seen and expressed and all those wonderful things. But every time that kind of impetus would rise up, I was kind of shutting down, with a fear of expressing myself. There was a kind of tension building up.
Rick: Were any adults telling you that you shouldn’t be so expressive, or that you should put yourself in a box? Where were you hearing that kind of advice from people?
James: Not in an explicit way, but I would say in my environment it was implicit.
Rick: Yeah.
James: So, what I started to do was to be very clever. That was my way of shielding this inner insecurity. Because I’m very driven—I always have been very driven—there was this willpower pushing, and so that got behind whatever I was doing. I did very well in academic subjects at school, for example.
I got into music, playing guitar. Well, that’s an interesting sort of sidetrack, because I had a friend at school, and I remember going back to his house. His brother was a musician. He came in with an acoustic guitar and just kind of sat on the sofa and started strumming it. Straight away, it was like—you get those moments where something starts jangling—it’s like, “Whoa.”
Rick: That was the coolest thing you’d ever seen.
James: Yeah, the coolest thing I’d ever heard and ever seen. That was like touching something far beyond this kind of inauthentic character I was presenting. So, I got really into guitar, and that was like my outlet to find some sanity, I guess.
But I put my willpower behind that, too. So, it was a band, and we used to play gigs and stuff. By the time I got to about 18, I had great results in exams and got into a top university. From the outside, it was like, “Yeah, this guy’s got it all going on.”
Rick: You went to Oxford and majored in mathematics, it looks like.
James: That’s right, yeah, that’s right. But if I’m honest, beneath that surface, I was a mess: very insecure, feeling shameful and guilty. I felt deficient—the classic selection of descriptions.
But I went to university. I had a good time; I enjoyed it. By then, I was cottoning on to my game. When I thought about leaving, it was like, “Well, what do I do now? Do I carry on playing my game and just carry on with a career and all the rest of it, continuing the same pretense that I was putting up? Or do I say, ‘Well, hold on a second, I’m going to look into this?’”
Rick: Are we skipping over the part where you got into being an actor and a schoolteacher?
James: Yeah, yeah, so that came a bit later. Basically, when I left Oxford, I went on the dole. In England, that means you sign on; you’re not working, and you’re receiving income support.
Rick: Yeah, you’re a no-good freeloader.
James: Yeah, exactly. There’s a Cockney rhyming slang term for it. It’s called “the rock and roll”—the dole, the rock and roll. I literally was on the rock and roll.
Basically, a group of friends and I had a band, and we were trying to get a record deal and do that whole thing. So that’s where I found myself, and I did that for a few years, really putting the willpower behind it. We had a certain amount of success, but it didn’t go big-style. Like a lot of these things, if they don’t progress, everything starts to implode. So, that kind of fell apart.
I was living in Oxford at the time, so then I moved to London. I was just a bit lost, really—working in bars, going out, partying, experimenting with life in all forms, joining other bands, and just kind of floating. Then that’s when I decided to go to drama school.
Basically, Rick, I was going through my list. I was going through my list like, “What is going to solve this? Whatever it is, how am I going to get through this?”
Rick: Meanwhile, there was no inkling that spirituality might be the answer?
James: No, not at this point, none at all. My only meeting with spirituality was through my mom, who’s a Christian, so I went to Sunday school. Like many people, the way it’s presented is just like another load of beliefs to take on, and the real beauty in it was completely lost on me. It was just another, “No, thank you.”
Although I would say that all throughout my life I’ve always had this sense of something much greater, like many of us do, but just no way of understanding it.
Rick: Yeah, you didn’t know what it was.
James: It was just nothing and no one and nothing around me to pick up on that glint in the eye and just go, “Oh, James, come read this or look at this,” or just none of that, really. I was left to my own devices. I did the rock and roll thing, and then that didn’t work.
Rick: Just out of curiosity—for kind of an irrelevant question—what sort of rock were you doing? Were you heavy metal, or were you more folksy, bluesy kind of music?
James: Yeah, melodic rock. Melodic rock, harmonies, Beatles-y sort of stuff, that kind of thing. Nice, crafted songs and harmonies.
Rick: Stuff I would have appreciated.
James: Yeah, it was around—I don’t know if you remember—this must have been in the ’90s, I guess. We had this whole thing in the UK called Britpop. It was bands like Blur, Oasis, Suede, and all these others.
Rick: You’ve got to move back about three decades before I can really talk to you about the Beatles, the Who—
James: Yeah, well, I can appreciate that stuff, too.
Rick: You know who happens to live in Fairfield, who’s a friend of mine? Richard Beymer, who played Tony in the movie.
James: Tony, okay.
Yeah, it’s a great movie. I love that—my favorite musical, definitely. I auditioned, and I was at a place called LAMDA, the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, and was offered a place on their course. So, I went and did that, and actually, that was the beginning, I think, of this journey.
To be a good actor, you have to be able to be vulnerable and in the moment, not planning everything and gripping onto the conclusions that you’ve already made. So, in a way, I was hopeless, which was great because it kind of smashed me to pieces. My attempt to present myself was being severely undermined.
By this time, I was about—there were other people there who were a lot younger and didn’t have such a hang-up, so they were really flying. Suddenly, from being used to being at the top of the class, I was at the bottom.
Rick: The old fogey.
James: Yeah, old fogey, but also really stuck in my ways. So, that was a really great introduction to looking inward, in a sense, and seeing, “Why am I being like this?” I started to open up, starting to be more vulnerable in the moment and not having to fix everything.
Also, I began feeling the kind of feelings of fear when they came up and not being overridden by them—not shutting down when those feelings were coming up, but actually meeting them and really expanding into them. These are invaluable things. I think everyone would really benefit from at least a year at drama school. It’s very challenging.
Rick: It must loosen you up a lot, because I know that you do all sorts of exercises to get out of your mold, to get out of your set way of functioning, and to try on different personalities. So, it must cultivate some kind of flexibility.
James: I think so, yeah. Improvising is, I mean, for most people, that’s just terrifying. You’re standing in front of a group of people with no idea; you’re just saying yes, saying yes to whatever’s happening. Yeah, so that was a really mind-opening experience for me. When I left drama school, I was actually in the business for a few years, and it was great, actually, because I had musical skills as well, which meant I was sort of more employable.
I used to do sort of repertory work, where you’d have a few plays and a musical, so if someone can play drums, guitar, sing, you can kind of save yourself two people. We can get two for the price of one—the price of two, but two for the price of one, certainly not one for the price of two.
Yeah, so that was great, but I used to love the kind of heightened nature of it, going on stage, big audiences. But after a while, I just had this same kind of feeling: This isn’t it. This is great, but it’s not it. Whenever that used to come, I used to move on very quickly. I wouldn’t hang around, sort of like relationships. Some people get a sense that it’s over, and then it can take a year or two to fully admit that and move on. But I’ve always been very much, as soon as I know, I know. Then it’s like, well, there’s no point in staying in this anymore. We’re just wasting each other’s time.
So my kind of affair with the acting world came to an end, and then I just thought, well, what am I going to do now? The last thing on my list was, oh, I’ll just teach. I’ll be a teacher, a schoolteacher. So I retrained, and then I went and worked in an inner-city London school. It was a very challenging school, and I was teaching math.
So I went back to that, which is such a weird juxtaposition. We’ve got drama, which is all about not knowing, freedom in the moment, vulnerability, and then this sort of math, which is this kind of logical structure. It’s kind of solid like a rock.
Rick: It’s good you’re exercising different faculties.
James: Certainly was, yeah. So, yeah, that was really great. I enjoyed that. I loved the kids, the energy of the kids, that kind of vitality. I actually enjoyed presenting math in a way that I felt they could really connect with, because I think so many people have such bad experiences of math when they’re at school.
When I was young, when I used to say, “Oh, yeah, I’m doing a math degree,” people would just react as if I’d said a bad word, because most people’s experience is very bad. Think about math. What you could do is just take something really simple, like doing circles—circumferences, pi times diameter. The teacher comes in, writes that on the board, chucks out the textbooks, and says, “Right, do some problems.” It’s like, well, who’s learning anything there? It just feels like a complete waste of time.
So I used to try and do things like have all the kids come in with tins and stuff, circular objects. They would draw around them, and then you have a bit of string and go around the circle with the string and measure it. Then measure the diameter of that, and you have a table on the board or something. Everyone just fills in their values.
Then you get them—you might just whisper to one kid, not announcing it, just whisper, “Why don’t you divide them and see what you get?” So they divide it, and they get this number, three point something. They do it with another one: “What about that one?” They do it again. Then suddenly, as a teacher, you just stand back and watch this kind of wave going through the class as they start realizing they’re getting the same number over and over again.
No matter what size the circle is, it’s the same number, and it’s like, what the hell’s going on? Then you get one of the kids to go up and Google it: “Three point whatever—what is this number?” Then this pi symbol comes up on the screen, and they’re like, “Whoa!” It’s like touching into something mysterious. It’s even called a transcendental number, isn’t it?
Rick: Yeah. While we’re on that point, I know that some mathematicians and others have marveled at the fact that the universe is somehow mathematical, that we even understand mathematical laws, and that they correlate with things in the physical universe. Have you ever thought about that? Does it ever evoke a sense of awe and wonder in you, or some sense of divine intelligence that’s orchestrating things in it, that has given us this language that enables us to understand the universe from a certain angle?
James: Yeah, I mean, we can get onto this as we go through. That’s a way of looking at it. It certainly strikes you when you’re teaching this stuff. Think of ratios, like the golden ratio, and spirals, how spirals come out of that, and then you see it in sunflower patterns—
Rick: And galaxies.
James: Yeah, exactly. It’s really fascinating. Even in the helical structure of DNA, there’s a kind of golden ratio in that. Even if you measure your digits, your fingers, and your arms, you can get a ratio there.
There is a strange kind of beauty when—there was a Russian model whose face almost matched it perfectly. You look at the face, and it wasn’t like a sexy face; there was just something really beautifully pure about it. Yeah, it was really something.
So, yeah, it certainly can inspire that awe and wonder, and I certainly saw that in the kids. I had it myself a bit when I was particularly at A-level math. I think university got so conceptual that I realized, at university, I wasn’t really a mathematician, you know what I mean? Especially there, where I went, you start to meet people who really are geniuses, and you’re like, okay, all right, okay. I can get this stuff, but I’m not on that level.
Rick: Both in terms of the genius and perhaps in terms of the nerd value.
James: Yeah, right.
Rick: I met Brian Josephson one time, the physicist, and he was such a genius; he got the Nobel Prize. He was such an odd character, just so eccentric, just kind of caught up in this world in his mind.
James: Yeah, amazing, yeah. Certainly, there were a few like that when I went to Oxford, definitely.
So, yeah, in the end, the math teaching thing, the same thing happened. I just did it for three years, and it is very exhausting as well. I take my hat off to teachers out there, absolutely total respect, because of the energy that it sucks out of you, especially in those inner-city schools. Every second of the day you’re kind of on something. It’s just exhausting.
Rick: Yeah. I just want to throw in here that there are some nice programs where they’re teaching meditation to inner-city school kids and getting incredible results—huge reductions in violence, misbehavior, and dropouts, much better grades, and all kinds of stuff. It must be a lot easier on the teachers, too.
James: Yeah, right. I used to find that getting kids’ respect was the best way of controlling classes, rather than these screaming teachers at the front of the class. It just doesn’t work, especially in inner-city schools, because they’ll scream back at you, no problem.
So, yeah, actually, there’s a great Chinese proverb. It’s something like, “Tell me and I’ll forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I will always understand.”
Rick: That’s good.
James: Yeah, exactly. So that goes for the subject we’re talking about, in terms of the spiritual search, as well, for me. There’s too much telling, too much taking it on the word of the teacher, and not enough involving.
Rick: Yeah, a lot of times there’s a very rigid hierarchy, with the teacher up on a podium and everybody else sort of thinking, “I’ll never be like him.”
James: Yeah, there can be that.
Rick: A number of teachers are trying to get around that now and make it much more egalitarian.
James: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So that’s basically what I was trying to do in the math teaching. I’ll just tell you one very quick thing. I was doing Pythagoras’s theorem with a class once, and I did a similar lesson where they had squares that they fit together. When certain squares would fit together, you got a right-angled triangle.
So this kid in the class worked it out, and I said, “Oh, great.” I think his name was Juha. So we called it Juha’s theorem, and he was so excited. He said, “Yeah, I got a theorem.” Then again, we looked it up on Google, and it came up, “Oh, Pythagoras’s theorem.” He got really disappointed. He said, “Oh, he got there before me.” He was really disappointed.
And then this is the best thing. I heard this kid at the back of the class going, “Pythagoras? Bet he was bullied at school.”
Rick: That’s great.
James: Because, you know, they were imagining he was a kid like them in some other school in London, probably. It’s so funny.
✨ Finding spirituality and the first awakening
In the end, I realized that teaching wasn’t it either for me. It was like I had tried to fit myself into all these different boxes, and I just didn’t fit. This was when I started to get the spiritual direction coming in.
It was actually toward the end of when I was acting. I did a show, a Shakespeare comedy, The Comedy of Errors, and I was Antipholus of Ephesus. The other actor used to go off after rehearsals, and he used to go off very mysteriously. I said, “Where do you go?” and he wouldn’t tell me. I actually followed him once, and he ended up at this Gnostic group. It was a Gnostic group based on Spanish teachings. So that was my first kind of step into this.
I didn’t last very long in that group because I ask a lot of questions, and I’m not particularly reverent. I’ve always been like, “Okay, I need to know this.”
Rick: Good way to be, actually.
James: I think so, yeah. And then after that, I was in the Gurdjieff group. I think it overlapped a bit. So that was where my first things started to open up for me. I was reading some of his books and going to this group.
Rick: Were you trying to do that self-remembering thing that those people are reputed to do, like keep checking in, “Am I here?”
James: Yeah, that kind of stuff. Yeah, and I don’t know if you know much about it, but there’s some very strange stuff that goes on in those groups. People speak very slowly.
Rick: Well, yeah, I was a student of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and he said that when he first came to England, he met a bunch of Gurdjieff people back in the ’60s, and they were all speaking like that. And he said, “Well, why are you talking like that?” And they said, “Well, we’re trying to remember the self.” And he said, “Well, why should you not be able to speak properly?”
So he said, “Self-realization is like taking a shower. You take a shower in the morning, you’re clean, you totally forget about it, and it’s just there throughout the day. Thinking about it doesn’t help to retain it, forgetting about it doesn’t cause you to lose it. It’s just not on the basis of any kind of active attention like that.”
James: Yeah, I think there are ways, like with all these things, that when the teacher dies, you’ve got people interpreting the teaching, and I think there’s a lot of judgment, actually. I used to see you do the movements as well. The movements are fantastic; I love the movements. But you see people getting them wrong, and then they’d be chastising themselves for getting it wrong. And it’s like, this is just judging yourself, and then judging yourself for judging yourself, and all this kind of stuff.
So, again, I got into trouble and a bit of an altercation with a senior person. But I have to say, I think Gurdjieff the man was a bit of a genius. My first big kind of awakening, I guess you’d call it, was through Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson. It’s this massive tome, more than a thousand pages, and it’s so wildly crazy, just so out there. These huge words, and it’s just so fantastical, but delivered in a kind of “This is the way it is” sort of thing.
For someone like me, continually trying to get my head around it, it’s just so out there that you can’t get your head around it. In the end, it just breaks. The whole thing just breaks, and then it’s like, “Ahhh.”
There’s a knowing, and all those attributes are coming and going, shifting and changing, whereas this knowing is just shining always.
Yeah, so that was the first time when I really sort of realized that there’s a presence here, there’s a knowing here that’s knowing these thoughts, that’s knowing these thoughts equally as the sound of this voice, as the colors of Rick on a screen. There’s a knowing, and all those attributes are coming and going, shifting and changing, whereas this knowing is just shining always. There it is.
So that was just like a bombshell. And I remember my older brother actually came round. I was staying at my grandpa’s place. He wasn’t very well, and he’d just moved into a home. I was basically living in his old house, ripping it apart—taking out the carpets, stripping the walls. I was literally in an environment where I was ripping everything out, and, funnily enough, that’s exactly what I was doing in the evening. I was just sitting reading books, spiritual books, and this massive Gurdjieff book, and just kind of ripping everything out internally in the mind as well, somehow.
Yeah, my brother came round to see me, and I just bent his ear for a whole night, talking about this incredible discovery. “Something knows thoughts. You’re not thoughts. There’s something before thoughts. There’s knowing thoughts.” And he’s like, “What’s happened to my brother?”
Rick: Yeah, you’re on drugs, buddy?
James: Yeah, I said to him, “My life has changed. From now on, my life has changed.” I just knew it. This discovery was the beginning of something completely different. So, I still hadn’t found non-duality by this point.
Rick: But you were onto something.
James: Yeah, I was onto something, but it felt incomplete.
Rick: You realized that there was this presence. You hadn’t quite glommed onto non-duality yet, but there was a crack in the cosmic egg.
James: That’s it, that’s right. And so, yeah, of course what happens, because life as it is starts to kind of creep back in again, doesn’t it? And this discovery suddenly is less clear than it was, or you rediscover it again and you rediscover it again.
And then also, I think I just felt like there’s just something else here, because I could still feel that incompleteness, that sense of more. But I think it’s really important, this point, because I think a lot of people stop there. They get into this awareness thing, and then they think that’s it. They think, “Oh, I’ve just woken up. There’s this awareness here.” This is the first step on the ladder.
Rick: If you’ve watched many of my interviews, you realize that there’s a kind of a perennial theme with me, which is the old Zen saying, “Beginner’s mind.” And as Adyashanti says, “I consider myself to always be a beginner.” So, I don’t think there—personally, I haven’t yet seen or come to understand how there could be a final step. It seems like there’s always a dimension of life that doesn’t change, but then one lives, and in the living there can be every fresh clarity, realization, depth, or whatever.
James: I totally agree with that. When I say “first step,” I mean this is just the beginning of a journey; it’s not the end. And what I later began to see, and what became part of how I share this message, is that people actually get fixated on that, and it becomes a concept—another concept—without even realizing it. They’re now conceptualizing awareness and using it as a way of stepping out of life and kind of hiding from the challenge and the messiness of what life offers. So it can actually become a bit of a false refuge as well.
Rick: Yeah, I heard you comment in one of your other interviews about going to non-duality meetings and seeing these people sitting in the back row who are sort of checked out. They’ve gotten into a dissociative kind of state from dwelling on it this way without continuing to evolve.
✨ Awareness is not a refuge from life
James: Yeah, that’s a good point to make right now, because when I did discover non-duality, I was looking around. I’ve got a voracious mind; when I get my teeth into something, I’ll go all in. Sooner or later, I came across non-duality, and I was hearing these kinds of slogans, like “Nothing to do,” “Nowhere to go,” “There’s nothing to get,” and people were really selling me this stuff, really believing it. And yet I could see that they were far from being in a place where they had found that kind of fulfillment.
Rick: My take on it is that they’ve glommed onto a concept, and they’ve gotten good at speaking those kinds of words. But when you contrast what they’re actually living and experiencing with what’s possible, then it’s kind of sad.
James: Yeah, it’s very sad. The people sometimes at the back of the room are the people who sometimes tell you this stuff. And it’s like they’ve got stuck in a rut here. They’re telling themselves there’s nothing to do, but what they’re actually doing is suppressing a natural yearning to explore with the belief that there’s nothing to do. So they’re actually doing nothing. Without even realizing it, they’re completely contradicting themselves.
Rick: I think if we analyze why they say that, it’s sort of a misappropriation of a different level of experience, which they probably haven’t attained. But there is a level on which there’s nothing to do and nothing could be done, because there’s no doer, and so on and so forth.
But if that’s not the level on which you’re living, then there’s a saying in the Gita: “The dharma of another brings danger.” It’s not your dharma; it’s not your experience. And even if it were your experience on some level, there’s nothing to do, but on other levels there’s plenty to do, and you’re going to be doing it.
James: Yeah, exactly. All those phrases—it’s all true. Of course it’s true. But exactly like you say, if it’s not true for you, then maybe there is something to explore.
And I think that’s why what I try to bring with the way I speak about this is that you can come in at it anywhere; you can come in at it at any level. So, I could be speaking to someone who’s never heard of any of this stuff, and you’re just getting them to see that there’s something here that’s knowing thought. Just something little like that can be really profound for someone who’s never even looked into that. And then, for someone else, it might be a completely different way of speaking.
And there are no qualms, no worries about contradicting yourself, because it’s right for particular people at particular times. That’s just the way it is. So, yeah, there’s nothing to do. It’s true.
Rick: That’s an important point. I interviewed this wonderful gentleman named Sri M, and he was talking about the trickiness of being a teacher. You might be talking to a hundred people, and yet the people in the room are at all different levels of understanding and development. It’s sort of an art, learning to speak in a way that’s appropriate to all those people. But he said that to really get deeply into something, you actually need to have a one-on-one, because then you can tune right into where that person is and what they need.
James: That’s exactly what I do. I usually have an introduction on a group basis, so it’ll just be a kind of guided-meditation-type thing, bringing people into that place, just easing and softening into being. And then, from there, I invite anyone who wants to come up to come up, and then it’s like a one-on-one with an audience.
So it’s great, actually, because having the audience heightens the one-on-one.
Rick: It does. It creates a sort of ambience, or spiritual field, so to speak.
James: Yeah, and it kind of amplifies whatever the issue is.
From non-duality to direct experience
So, I realized there was more, and I wanted to explore more. I was living in North London, Kentish Town, which is quite close to Hampstead, and Hampstead is where anyone who comes to the UK really does non-duality meetings.
So, yeah, I was walking over to the Heath all the time, going to see different people—anyone who had set foot in the country, basically. I was there, lapping it up.
James: I started exploring different teachers, different books, and different teachings in the non-duality sort of sphere. Marnie and Rupert were great because they became friends, and that, to me, is so important, because all the bullshit just goes out the window. It’s nothing to do with any kind of pretensions or all that crap; it’s just gone. I think that’s such a gift that someone in that position can give—to just be a friend. We’re just friends. It’s really, really beautiful.
From exploring all those things, the other part of it started to open up. I think the way—how do we talk about this?—I seem to have got into this pattern. I’m writing a book at the moment, and there’s this way in that I’ve sort of used. First of all, common sense: What does common sense say?
Going back to the awareness thing, common sense says you’re a person, a physical person. You’ve got a name, a gender, and all the rest of it, and you’ve got your past and your future to come, past memories, and all that kind of stuff. That’s what you are, right? It’s simple. That’s common sense. Easy.
And yet, if you just probe that a little bit further, you say, well, what you most essentially are—where’s that? Most people wouldn’t say, well, it’s in your legs. If you lost your legs, you’d still feel like you were you somehow. So most people kind of end up here: what I most essentially am is up here, looking through two eyes.
Rick: It reminds me of the Cat Stevens song.
James: Which one?
Rick: “Moon Shadow.” If I ever lost my legs.
James: “Moon Shadow.” Yeah, that’s the kind of common-sense thing. But then you just start digging a little bit beneath that and you think, well, let’s take the body.
The body—the baby is born. I’ve got two kids, and seeing them growing in the womb—well, I didn’t see them growing in the womb, but seeing the womb growing, and then the scanning pictures, all these incredibly intricate structures being grown—nobody does that. It’s just happening. You don’t design the intricate structures of the lungs and stuff. Thank God. It all just happens.
Rick: You don’t do it, but some incredible intelligence is involved there.
James: You see the same thing: the skin growing, the nails growing, the hair growing, everything. It’s all happening. The heart is beating, the breath is happening. And yet, when we come down to it, out of all these millions of processes—trillions of processes, God knows how many processes—there’s one that we say, “Oh no, I’m doing that.” At least one, anyway, which is thinking. “I’m doing thinking. I am thinking.”
It’s interesting: Are you doing that? Can you find the function that does thinking?
Rick: There’s this whole free-will issue. Obviously, there are certain things that we don’t do. We don’t beat our heart. We don’t do a lot of things. We don’t run our liver or anything like that, but we do seem to be able to raise our hand or not raise our hand, speak or not speak.
Physiologists talk about the autonomic, sympathetic, and parasympathetic nervous systems. A lot of people try to argue that the things we seem to have control over are actually just as automatic and beyond our control as the heartbeat and liver function. What’s your take on that whole deal?
James: My take ultimately is to go right beyond all of that. It certainly feels like you choose thoughts. But then, if you look for whatever it is that’s choosing the thought, all you ever find is another thought.
So what’s choosing that thought? You just keep finding another thought. The thought is just arising. Literally, try and find now—find a function, some function that’s doing thinking. If you have a good look, you just find another thought. Where does that come from?
Rick: Let’s say somebody’s listening to this interview and they feel like, “All right, well, I made the choice to listen to this interview. Right now, I’m going to make the choice to leave this interview and go out for a walk, or maybe I’ll decide to stay here, but either way, it’s my choice.” There is a somebody who, although I can’t quite put my finger on what it is, enables me to choose to do this or that.
James: Yeah, so the thought that arises—“I’m going to press stop on this interview and I’m going to go and walk my dog”—there’s a thought arising.
Rick: Where does it come from?
James: Where does it come from? It’s the same question. It doesn’t matter what the thought is: “I’m going to raise my hand.” So where did the thought come from? These are just ways of loosening up the certitudes that we have.
If you try and grab hold of science to back your case, it does the opposite. Science is basically saying that we’re an organic machine. It’s like a software program that’s just updating. It’s got its hardwired DNA structure, which comes from your parents. You didn’t choose your parents, either, and it’s sculpted by the environment, which you don’t choose. The whole thing is just an upgrading system. This is what science would say.
That’s actually quite useful for people on this path because it starts to loosen things up a bit. But when I really got that, it still felt like, well, no, whatever’s here, there’s a freedom here. There is a freedom here that that doesn’t speak to.
That’s when we go into this first-hand experiencing. This is the key, the beautiful way into exploring this whole area of non-duality spirituality: first-hand, direct, actual experience.
This is the key: first-hand, direct, actual experience.
Sounds and sensations and thoughts and feelings are all moving and changing and shifting, but this knowing of that is always present. Here it is, always shining. That’s the kind of key I then took into this next step of exploring.
So you could say we’ve looked at the subject—the “me”—and we’ve seen that what we thought was a subject is actually thoughts, feelings, and sensations that are arising. The real, ultimate subject is this knowing, this presence, if you like.
✨ Is the world separate from awareness?
What I then like to do is turn it around. Now let’s look at the object, because this is the contradiction that I found myself in. Okay, I’m this presence. I can’t find where it begins or ends, and yet this world still feels like it’s outside.
This computer and Rick over there in America—we’re having this conversation. All of that stuff is still there. So we get this weird contradiction, and that’s why, for me, it felt incomplete.
Then we look at the object. We turn and say, well, let’s really look at this object. What is this? I think this is where most people find it most challenging, actually, because what we’re doing is seeing that all we ever experience is like a virtual reality.
If I say that, sometimes people go, “Whoa!” So we walk in gently. Common sense says what you most essentially are is behind here, looking through eyes at the world. But just look at that for a second. What we’re believing there is that these eyes are windows and that there’s a sort of entity behind them, looking through windows at what’s out there.
But then you could really play devil’s advocate with that. You say, well, how is this little entity in the head seeing? If it’s just looking through windows, you get into this infinite regress. You need a little entity inside the head of the little entity that looks through its eyes, which looks through these eyes, and you just keep going back. It just doesn’t make sense.
Rick: What if you say, “All right, what you are is consciousness, and there’s a physical apparatus—a mechanics of perception involving senses and so on—and then there are objects of experience, objects of the senses.”
You have a threefold structure: perceiver consciousness, mechanics of perception, and objects of perception. The perceiver obviously can’t perceive himself because, to do so, he’d have to be an object and step apart from himself, and there you get the infinite regress.
But he—I’m saying “he,” but it’s not a he—can perceive other things. They can fall, like images falling on a movie screen. The screen can’t perceive itself, but images can fall on the screen and give rise to experience. Does that sort of fit with what you’re saying, or would you like to refute that?
James: That’s a nice model, and if that works for you, go for it. But I found that that kind of model didn’t work for me. There’s still a feeling of separateness that it evokes.
Actually, in a way, the screen does know itself. It does know itself. You can get down to that screen knowing itself.
Rick: You can, but isn’t it different from the way you know a cup or something? The screen is itself; it can’t sort of become two things in order to know itself.
James: Yeah, but where this is leading is that there is no cup. There’s only itself. That’s where we’re going.
Rick: So that which appears to be a cup, a pen, a tree, and so on is all just consciousness.
James: Yeah, that’s where it’s leading. So, just going back to that, because we leave that common-sense thing behind, this is really mind-blowing. What you start to realize is that all this sensory data from the outside is being picked up and coming into the physical system, but it’s all being fed into the brain, and the brain is dark. There’s no sound or light in a brain.
Rick: The brain is interpreting it.
James: Yeah, it’s just electrical, electrochemical signals feeding into the brain, where this utter fucking miracle happens, where this explosion of this theater, this cinematic, rich experience happens.
I mean, this is mind-boggling, because what it means is that what you’re seeing now—everyone who’s watching this, wherever they are in the world—what they’re seeing now is not a real physical reality. It’s a kind of collection of perceptions, and if we’re sticking with the scientific view, it’s a projection being created by the brain in the mind.
Rick: Let’s say you’re looking at a tree, and there’s also a bird looking at the tree, and there’s a dog looking at the tree, and maybe a squirrel or something. Each of them, obviously, if you think about it, is seeing a very different tree because they have very different perceptual apparatuses and ways of interpreting what they perceive. So, who sees the real tree?
James: Who sees the real tree? Yeah, right.
Rick: And you could have a thousand people looking at the tree, and they’re all seeing it slightly differently. What is the tree exactly if no one actually sees it as it is? Does it have a reality that stands alone in and of itself?
James: That’s a philosophical question because nobody can actually answer that. This is the wonderful thing: nobody can step outside of their first-person experience to objectively experience a material world out there and say what that tree actually is.
And I mean, that’s an extraordinary thing to realize, because what it’s basically saying is that the concept of reality that we share conventionally is a concept. It’s a philosophy; it’s not a kind of actual experience. And this is really mind-blowing.
Rick: And yet, we don’t want to say that we’re all each creating our own reality, because there’s an agreement to a certain extent between all the different realities. The squirrel obviously sees some sort of tree, the same as we do. It climbs it, we watch it, the bird can fly up and land in it, so they’re all identifying an object that’s apparently there, and we could die and they could still be engaging with the tree. So, there’s some sort of existence to the tree that seems to be independent of anyone’s perception of it.
James: These are big questions. I just want to pause here, because I think it’s really something that was profound in my journey.
For example, if you’re sitting watching this now, as you move your head around, it seems completely obvious that you’re moving your head around. But what we’re saying is that because your experience is virtual, it’s being recreated. What you’re experiencing is the movement of colors that gives an as-if impression—even the little sort of clicks in your neck.
If you’re walking down the street and you’re feeling the tingling sensations in your feet, and you feel your feet touching the ground, and you look around and you see people walking, your smells and the cars going by—it’s all being recreated out of perceptions.
So, in terms of distance, you look at a star, trillions of kilometers away in the sky at night, and it seems that far away, but your brain isn’t bigger than the universe. You couldn’t possibly house that distance inside your brain. So, it’s an appearance, the appearance of distance.
So, this is fundamental, right? Because if you don’t start to kind of feel into this, then you’ll always have this sense of separateness between the knowing presence and what’s appearing.
Rick: I think I was about to ask you: what’s the practical value of this philosophical discussion we’re having? And you just sort of said it—that if you can really feel into this, then you can begin to sense the unity of things.
James: Exactly, because now I’m looking at my hand. This is colors with sensation that create this experience.
And so, you’re inside your actual body and your thoughts—everything. It’s all appearing. It’s all like a perceptual cocktail, if you like. Our conventional view is that that’s a representation of what’s out there, but that can never be experienced.
So, we’ve got to be careful here, because for me this whole journey is not about replacing beliefs with new ones. It’s just about unpicking things. From there, we don’t now come to the conclusion that there is no “out there,” but neither do we come to the conclusion that there is. We just don’t know, so we’re coming into this innocence, this childlike innocence. All we know is direct experience, this right now.
Rick: A little while ago you said, “Well, it looks like I’m looking at a cup or I’m looking at a tree,” but really, it’s all consciousness interacting with itself.
James: Yes, that’s where we’re going. That needs some clarification.
We’ve broken down the subject into pure knowing, consciousness, whatever word we use, and now we’ve broken down the object into this kind of softening, into just a play of sensation, a play of thoughts, feelings, like mind stuff, if you like.
Rick: Well, the object is mind stuff and thoughts and feelings as far as our perception of it is concerned, but does the object really depend upon our perception for its existence? The moon has been doing just fine even before there were human beings that could really perceive it.
James: It’s a great question, but I don’t want to jump in and answer that because, in the question itself, there’s stuff in there. By answering it, I’m agreeing to the premise of the question.
So, if we just now bring these seeming two together, there’s this knowing presence, and then there’s this cocktail of perception. What we can then do is maybe, with eyes closed—it might be easier—but just take a sound. Sound is sometimes the easiest thing to play with. Maybe the sound of my voice, if there’s some traffic nearby, or a clock ticking, or whatever.
We’re going to go with direct experience, so that means letting all of our assumptions—all of them, every single one—just drop away, so you don’t even know what this is. You have no idea what this sound is right now, or where it is, or when it’s going to begin or end.
So, without any of those assumptions or predictions, there’s just sound spontaneously appearing now, and it has this quality. Here it is, spontaneously appearing, and it’s being known by this presence.
So, the first question to look at here is: is there a gap between these seeming two? If we go into our concepts, then suddenly I’m a person sitting here on a chair, and the sound is a meter or half a meter away from me, and there’s the gap.
But if we come back into this first-person experience again, this consciousness—I can’t say where it is. It’s certainly not here between my eyes. That’s a sensation; that’s a sensation that is being experienced by this knowing presence.
So, this knowing that I can’t point to and I can’t say where it begins or ends—is there a gap between that and this spontaneously arising sound that I know nothing about? Where do I start my measurement? Do I start it here, from between my eyes? That’s a sensation; that’s not where I, as presence, am.
So, you try this: is there some kind of boundary between the two? Where does knowing end and sound begin?
[Music]
The knowing is being the sound.
For me, I was playing with this stuff, and then, for some reason, it just broke open, and it became utterly clear that this knowing and this sound are indivisible. The knowing is being the sound.
And we can play with that with all the different kinds of sense doorways, if you like. You can play with sensation, smell, taste, movement, the sense of movement, and even image—open eyes, colors. Even colors: you can see that the presence of knowing those colors is being those colors.
So, in a sense, there’s nothing looking. There’s nothing looking; there’s what is sort of shimmering, shining as it is. This is the step from being that awareness to actually being what’s happening, the experience itself.
And we could call this experience, we could call this love, because it’s that coming together of seeming separate things, seeing that it’s only—well, it’s just what it is: wholeness being what it is.
✨ Awakening and the work of integration
Rick: Is this sort of way of seeing things spontaneous, living reality for you throughout the day and night? Or is it something more—you kind of psych yourself into when you’re thinking this way?
James: The way I see it, being consciousness, it kind of shape-shifts in generally three different ways. It can come into being a focus, as if it’s a person; it can soften out as a sort of witnessing presence, like this stuff is happening and it’s being observed; or it can go into being the whole experience.
So, that movement can always shift and change. The idea of trying to hold on to some particular state, it seems to just disappear.
Rick: I like that, though—kind of the zoom-lens analogy. You can zoom in or zoom out according to the circumstances and the need.
James: It’s infinite. You can do what it wants. It’s like all the doors are open. Why limit yourself?
Rick: Someone might say, “Well, you’re sort of going through this analysis and gaining a sense of oneness, but that’s really just a subjective experience. Does that really correlate, or are you actually getting a kind of a peek into the oneness of reality as it is?”
James: Yeah, that’s what it seems like.
I don’t want to get stuck here because this is like another step. You can realize what we’re talking about here, and then, again, your life doesn’t change. Or maybe it does initially, and there’s a kind of honeymoon: “Whoa, wow, wow!” Then you start to see that the old patterns are still coming back. So, what was it?
This can be a really hard place to be, because it’s like, what was all that about? These realizations have dropped in, but I’m still left as the same idiot I was, or whatever it might be. I’m still frustrated in the same ways and falling into the same patterns.
Rick: Does this open up a kind of a dimension of fulfillment?
James: Exactly, that’s what I’m talking about. So, there is that fulfillment, but the patterns still come back, basically, and people can get stuck there. Just like they can get stuck with the awareness, they can get stuck here, and then they start appealing to the “nothing to do” thing again. They say, “Okay, I’ve seen it, I’ve seen it, there’s nothing to do,” and they just carry on suffering, basically.
So, my invitation is, “No, come on, let’s keep going, let’s keep going, let’s not give up, let’s keep going.” And this is where, for me, the most interesting part begins, because it’s the psychological side. It’s almost like, for me, non-duality is the reverse of most other paths.
A lot of other paths get you stuck in the psychology. You start looking at your patterns and start doing all that stuff. Then the hope is, one day, when I’m totally pure, I might realize wholeness or something.
What I love about non-duality is that it just turns the whole thing around and says, “No, you can realize what you are right now. It’s abundantly available, always and forever. It always has been.” Then the invitation is, when you start to realize that, you have the most extraordinarily powerful tool to now really go deeply into all of that messy stuff, because you know what you are.
You can realize what you are right now. It’s abundantly available, always and forever.
So, I’ll share a bit of my experience, but I’ll tell you: if I’d have met what I’ve met without knowing what I am, God knows what would have happened, really.
Rick: Here’s an analogy I like to use for that. Let’s say you have a handful of mud and you want to dissolve it, but you only have a cup of water. You throw the mud in the cup of water, and it’s just all mud. But if you have an ocean to throw it in, you throw it in the ocean, and it just dissolves. So, what you’re saying is, this gives you the capacity for processing stuff much more elegantly and efficiently.
James: Much more elegantly and efficiently, yeah, absolutely. No question about it.
Rick: And it inevitably does process, doesn’t it? Once this opening takes place, the evolutionary process continues. It’s like, “All right, now it’s time for some housecleaning.”
James: Yeah, absolutely.
Rick: And incidentally, we talked about you singing a song or two here or there. If we get to a point in this discussion where you feel like taking a break and singing a song, particularly if it relates to what we’re talking about, just let’s do it.
James: Okay, great. Maybe now?
Rick: Oh, yeah, okay. You’re all tuned up and ready to go?
James: It’d be a nice kind of sidetrack, yeah?
Rick: Yeah, just get out of our heads for a minute, if that’s where we are.
James: I always love that, “Get out of our heads,” because it’s got such bad connotations, or it’s seen as madness, but actually, it’s sanity in a sense.
All hopes, all dreams, falling apart at the seams. Belief, control, it’s the end of pretending to know. Maybe is what is, all become meaningless. And this lifelong quest, dissolving into emptiness. Losing it all, losing it all, losing it all, again. Those eyes meet these, and the mind it just falls to its knees. And this heart breaks in love with all it creates. No gripe, no grip, it’s all free to just be as it is. And this heart sings, there’s nothing and everything. Losing it all, losing it all, losing it all, again. Open another door, it’s not what you’re looking for. There is nowhere to go, to not know. Losing it all, losing it all, losing it all, again. And again, and again, losing it all, again.
(Guitar music.)
Rick: Nice. I was playing drums quietly as you were doing that. I used to play the drums. It’s funny, there was one little line in there where you said, “No grip,” and it reminded me of the experience I had when I was a teenager. We were on LSD, walking along in the middle of the night, and the sun was rising. We were walking down the street, and this friend of mine said, “You know, there’s no grip. There’s no grip.” He just kept saying that, because everything was sort of flowing and changing and all.
I always thought, if I ever talked to him again, I’d say, “Well, yeah, on that level, there’s no grip, but there is a level which doesn’t change, which is stable, and which gives coherence and a foundation to the ever-changing world.”
James: Yeah, so there’s the paradox, isn’t it?
Rick: Yeah.
James: There’s the paradox. I like to use the songs in the retreats. We do a lot of guided meditation, and you take things, go deeper into the mind, so everything starts to loosen and open up. Then sometimes I like to cheekily slip in a song, so that kind of blows the heart open as well.
Rick: Yeah, it does. It sort of creates a balance.
James: Yeah. So, we were getting into this. In the play of our life, we go through the experience we go through. Right from very young, we have this full—I like to call it a second birth. It’s like when you’re around 18 months old. I’ve seen it with my own children. There’s this magical world, a bit like what we’re describing in a sense, but you actually don’t have any concepts at all.
What I’m talking about is that you still retain your concepts, but you see through them. They’re downgraded from beliefs to just useful playthings. Whereas, as a kid, you don’t even have that; it’s just experience. It’s just kind of wondrousness, and everyone’s providing everything for you. So, it’s like a kind of magic world, in a sense.
Then there’s this big fall, which is when we become a psychological self. We start to take on the concepts of our culture and our environment, and we seem to lose this openness, this sense of wholeness.
I actually think—I’ve seen it with my two boys—that this is the kind of rage that we go through.
Rick: The terrible twos.
James: Yeah. I think it’s like, “What the fuck’s happened?” It’s like really going crazy. It’s absolutely mad. What’s been lost in this fall? Of course, we don’t understand that. When we see our little kid rolling around on the floor, going crazy, we project forward to seeing a 16-year-old burning houses, and we try and shut it down.
But actually, this is rage that wants to express. I think, in a sense, this is where it all begins, because in losing wholeness, there can be a sense of inadequacy, like, “Why has this happened to me?” Then, when we try and suppress the rage that comes from it, it’s like a confirmation.
Rick: That’s a good analysis. I’ve never heard that before, but it makes a lot of sense to me. I’ll bet you that’s what’s really happening with kids at that age. They’re reacting to the extreme shutting down that they have experienced. Especially if you have a more esoteric view that we come into this life from some in-between state that’s very unbounded and free and vast, and then we come down into the earth plane, and it’s very dense and constricted. There must definitely be a reaction to that frustration.
James: Yeah, absolutely. There is a way of maybe soothing that process, but I think it’s inevitable. It doesn’t matter how enlightened your parents are, you’re still going to have to go through that.
When my youngest was two, sometimes he’d go into one of these rages for an hour and a half. I would just sit close to him, make sure he didn’t head-butt anything or hurt himself, and it was just amazing. After about an hour and a half, he would burn out. Then, at one time, he just stopped, looked at me, and said, “Oh, Dad, can I have a glass of water?” It was just like, done. It was gone.
Rick: Interesting.
James: He just needed to get it out. And if it’s suppressed and pushed down, then all that energy is stuck in there.
Rick: So, what you did there sounds like the right thing to have done. Maybe you could elaborate on that as a father, as a parent.
James: I wasn’t doing anything. I was just making sure that he didn’t hurt himself because he was rattling around on the floor, and just holding the space, basically. Classic holding the space.
Rick: Whereas if kids get yelled at or abandoned or shut in a room by themselves or something at that stage, it could be quite the opposite of what they need.
James: Yeah, and I don’t mean this as a judgment on anyone, because everyone just does the best that they can do. But maybe if we knew that was what was going on, maybe we’d look at it in a different way. It doesn’t mean our child is going to become some kind of crazy monster when they’re older. They’re just working out this utter rage at what’s happened.
But as I say, even if you have this managed in a nice way, there are certain natural ways that it’s done anyway, like peekaboo and things like that. These games are kind of universal all over the world. It’s like, is the world still there when I open my eyes again? And you’re just kind of testing it. Kids love being chased. You pretend to be the ogre, the baby thief, and then they run off. It’s a way of playing with, “No one’s going to abduct me and run off with me. It’s okay. Being this separate little thing, it’s okay.”
So, it’s fascinating, all this stuff, when you look into it. But in my experience, the conditioning comes in. It’s the environmental, the national, all that conditioning; it comes in. And so here we are, deep down, because of this primary trauma, in a sense, feeling somehow not enough. And then the conditioning comes in and we hide it. We just want to build a defense structure around it.
So that’s all the beliefs we have, and our looks—how beautiful or ugly we are, how clever or stupid we are—all that stuff, and the roles we play. Mine was to try and be superior, to try and hide this inner discontent. But you see, it’s never enough, is it? You can’t do that, because underlying all of it is insecurity, because you know you’re playing a game. So, we’re always trying to escape that discomfort.
And so how do we do that? We do it by craving things, whether it’s money, people, lovers, houses, or spiritual enlightenment. It’s the same thing: craving or clinging onto what makes us feel safe, or just plain resisting, judging, and pushing people away—whatever or whoever we don’t like or that threatens our sense of self—or just plain escaping. Shopping, compulsively shopping.
🛤️ Craving, fulfillment, and the search for happiness
Rick: I guess one way of explaining it is that we crave fulfillment; the mind wants happiness. And the Upanishads and scriptures like that say that there’s really one source of happiness, and that’s within. The Self is a repository of all fulfillments, and that fulfillment we derive from external objects is a reflection of that, but it’s not that.
It’s like the moon reflects the light of the sun. We go chasing after all these reflections, but they can never be adequate because they’re not the primary source. And if you can find the primary source, then firstly you find that happiness, but secondly, your whole relationship to objects changes and they no longer have the compelling quality that they once had, because they’ve been eclipsed by something much brighter.
James: Absolutely. But of course, if you’ve not been exposed to those teachings, or you don’t know anything about those teachings, what you do is what happened to me—you get stuck in a cycle. So maybe this is going to do it, and then maybe there’s a temporary reprieve, but then you’re back in discomfort again, as a separate me. And you just go round and round and round.
I have a friend who killed himself in his early 20s, and he just found no way out of that loop. Every time you go round, you get a bit more depressed or a bit more disillusioned. And then, if you’ve got no other avenue out of that, where do you go?
Maybe you convince yourself that life’s just a bit shit, life’s just boring. A friend of mine told me that a child was complaining that they were bored, and his dad’s response was, “Life’s boring! Get used to it!”
Rick: There’s a saying, “Life sucks, then you die.”
James: Exactly. Maybe you convince yourself of that and you just carry on going round and round the wheel. You go and see the football game, have a bit of a buzz on the weekend, go back to your daily grind, and you think that’s just what it is, and you just wait until you die, basically.
Rick: The more people can hear that that’s not all there is, the better off we’ll all be. All the great teachers throughout history have tried to tell people that: “Hey, I’ve discovered something great here and you’ve got to check this out,” putting it in contemporary terms, because life is so much more than you realize. It’s a shame to squander it on trifles when there’s this vast ocean of fulfillment that’s right there, as close as your nose.
James: This is where religion is supposed to step in. But of course, all we know is it just becomes another part of the wheel, the cycle. Now you have a religious belief; that’s part of your identity.
Rick: I think they all started out with someone who actually was having that experience and talking about it, and then over the centuries they get objectified and lose the inner core, and then they’re like a body that’s lost its spirit.
James: It’s all there in the New Testament. When you know what you’re looking for, you can find it.
Rick: It jumps right out at you.
There’s a question that came in from Mark Peters in Santa Clara, California. Mark often sends in good questions. Why do you think that sight is the primary driver of the imagined sense of self, the sense that I peer out from behind my eyes? Can you speculate as to why people don’t experience that self as existing primarily in the mouth, the nose, the ears, or fingers?
James: It’s definitely the stickiest sense.
Rick: It’s the most predominant.
James: Yeah, it’s the predominant sense, the one we rely on most of all. For a blind person, maybe it would be hearing. It would be an interesting thing to explore, but certainly with the people I work with, seeing is always the catch.
They can really experience the sense of movement, smell, and taste as all happening. It’s like literally this presence is being that, and as soon as they open their eyes, it’s like, “Zzzz, here I am again, here looking out.”
But what also adds to that conviction is where we’re going, because there’s a sort of density that these patterns create physically, which seems to bring a kind of center into the experience. That, married to the perceptual field that seems focused here, creates that conviction that we’re in this little fragment of the experience exclusively.
If you were sitting in an IMAX cinema right now, as the camera moves, it would be as if you were turning your head. But you, the screen, haven’t moved; you haven’t turned anywhere. You’re just what you are, like what you always were. All the colors dance to give the “as if” experience of moving your head.
So actually, the visual is exactly the same as all the other sense doorways. I think the stickiness is because we’re so used to interpreting in that way, and this density of the body brings in a kind of extra conviction.
Rick: Sight is the most predominant sense, and that’s why people close their eyes when they meditate. Also, all the senses have subtler levels to them. We’re more familiar with the subtler aspects of the sense of hearing than we are with the subtler aspects of other senses.
And that’s what thoughts are. Thoughts are actually a sound, but a subtler aspect of the very same sense with which we hear external sounds. We hear thoughts, so to speak, in the mind. We’re picking up on a subtler aspect of the sense of hearing, and that’s why the use of a mantra is often used in different traditions for transcending the senses altogether.
James: Nice.
Rick: Here’s a question for you from a student of yours. Jitendra Bell from Devon asks, “Could you say something about the fine line between a healthy earnestness and longing to come home to one’s true nature?” That’s the first part of the question, contrasting that with a willful, “I’m going to get this, damn it,” kind of attitude.
James: This is where we’re heading. The way out of this cycle for me—the way we talk about it in our meetings—is just stop. Just stop. Stop the endless wheel, and just explore, as we’ve been doing throughout this interview: first the subject, then the object.
We just explore. And then that leads us into starting to recognize the patterns that we play in life, where these patterns are happening, and what’s going on. If you’re in a relationship or have kids, it’s great seeing your patterns. All your buttons get pushed; everything comes up.
Then what you can start to do is trace it back: What’s at the root of this? We go to the beach a lot around here, which is quite close to the sea, and there are sea anemones stuck to the rock. It’s like this solid kind of splodge of stuff, and then all these tentacles reaching out from there.
I see these patterns as being like those tentacles. If you go back—and this is what the guided meditations can help with—you’re going into deeper layers of the mind. You can get back to these energetic knots in the mind.
This is where you discover that guilty, shameful, totally deficient kind of child, if you like. It’s like an energetic holding somewhere in the mind, but also mirrored physically in the body, so you’ll find it physically in the body.
This is where the beauty of what you’ve realized—this presence—is just there, just shining, welcoming that belief system, that energetic contraction, that holding, to come home, back into wholeness. It’s just welcomed in.
That sounds easy to say, but often there’s so much resistance to even seeing that contraction, because it’s like being found out; it’s like being revealed. So, what happened for me was that, even after all the things we’ve talked about, even after seeing that very clearly, doing this—seeing patterns, just dropping back, just for the love of it, dropping back deeply, coming to that, really facing that energetic contraction—this is where that question comes in.
I found myself at one point—I used to actually visually see a shivering child, almost like a fetus, this kind of terrified thing. And I knew it was like a portal into the real depths. I found myself one day, in the meditations, with a voice saying, “Show me! Show me! Show me!”
Rick: Sounds like that two-year-old there.
James: Yeah, but it was this really strong kind of drive. It was that drive that I’d had my whole life. Bizarrely, it did show me, and what it showed me was that drive. It was that drive that was, in a way, like Newton’s third law: action-reaction. What you push pushes back.
It was that drive—“Show me! Show me!”—and it showed me, “Ah, that’s it. That’s what I’m still clinging on to. That’s what’s energizing that knot.” In seeing that, it was just like a softening, just an allowing for it to be however it wanted to be. And then things opened up.
Rick: I find there’s an interesting balance that one learns to strike between earnestness and surrender. Patanjali, in his Yoga Sutras, talks about yogis with vehement intensity being those who realize most quickly, and yet that could lead a person to struggle and strain, to be very unnatural and beat oneself over the head.
And yet, the people who say, “Ah, there’s nothing to do,” could sit around forever waiting for something to happen. So, there’s a kind of balancing act that one develops into.
I’m enthusiastic about this stuff. My wife will tell you, it’s all I think about. I read books about it all the time. I interview people. I just love it. And yet, I have no sense whatsoever—although I used to—of “I’ve got to have this or I’ll die.” There’s not a trying to break down the gates of heaven. It’s more like really enjoying the ride here. I love it, and I’m enjoying the scenery and totally eager and interested, and yet at the same time, I’m not in the driver’s seat, so I’m just relaxing and enjoying the ride.
James: You’re in your zone.
Rick: People who are struggling and straining maybe need to lighten up a bit. Go see a movie, listen to some music. People who are doing nothing better do something. Read a book, get focused, go to a satsang. There’s some kind of mixture you can find.
James: I would say you have to keep struggling and straining until you fundamentally realize it’s not getting you anywhere. You can’t advise. Maybe you could suggest something, but we have to see it for ourselves. We have to realize it for ourselves.
I think people have probably been telling me for years, “James, you’re so driven.”
Rick: “Just lighten up, dude.”
James: “Yeah, come on, just loosen up.” But I couldn’t hear it because I had to be driven in my mind, because drive was how I did things.
Rick: Are you driven now in some way, shape, or form?
James: Yes. I’m a bit like you, Rick, in that I love this stuff, and I love meeting people and holding meetings and retreats. I love music, playing songs.
Actually, in a way, this is where it leads, because when you can drop—I call this cycle we’re talking about the cycle of reactivity. When you’re not functioning in that way anymore, when you’re not living a reactive life—and most of us are living reactive lives, so everything we’re doing is often motivated by escaping that discomfort—when that’s not an issue anymore, then you have the opportunity to actually act authentically.
You’re not driven by reactivity, and so the stuff you’re doing can really blossom because it’s not being restrained by this kind of knot in the psyche.
Rick: It’s not being done out of a sense of emptiness or lack.
James: Exactly. It’s just celebration.
Rick: It’s being done out of a sense of fullness.
James: Yeah, celebrating the joy, the wonder, the joy and wonder of being.
❤️ Meeting the depths of conditioning
I don’t really talk about experiences very much. I think it can be so misleading, and I certainly saw that when I was really voraciously seeking. People would go on talking forever about this awakening experience.
But I think it’s worth just mentioning something here. When I saw through that pattern, what opened up was quite extraordinary. It was just like demonic destruction, like devastation.
Rick: What was?
James: I get a lot of images when I’m sitting, and there were just crazy demons ripping people apart, planets, and total, utter devastation.
Rick: Sounds like the eleventh chapter of the Bhagavad Gita.
James: It was like hell realms or something. It was almost like all the repressed stuff in the mind just going, “Pffft!”
This is what I mean about knowing what you are. It’s like the smiling Buddha: you just sit there, and it all does whatever it wants to do. But, I mean, it’s full-on.
Rick: That’s what confronted the Buddha before his enlightenment, actually. All these sorts of demons and wild stuff were coming at him, and he was just sitting there like a rock: “I’m not going to let this sway me.”
James: If you had done it the other way around, that would just be so terrible. There’s no way you could stay with that. You would just run off, thinking you’d gone mad, and check yourself into the nearest sanatorium.
Rick: People do.
James: Yeah, absolutely.
Rick: So, how do you support yourself? Are you a full-time spiritual teacher?
James: I am now, yeah. Just about, just about scraping it at the moment.
But it’s never finished. This is an endless deepening, like we were saying earlier. Even after that experience, there was actually a kind of collective suffering thing, tapping into some greater suffering.
Rick: People go through that. They feel like, “I’ve worked through my stuff, and now I seem to be processing the world.”
James: Something like that. I don’t know what was going on there. And then lots of biblical images, like Jesus on the cross. Then the last layer for me was just fucking rage—really vicious rage. I like this image of a metal fist, a huge metal fist just pounding.
Rick: Were you expressing it overtly, or were you just processing it inwardly?
James: No, I was just sitting there. It was all going on in the mind. And that was the message: “Why hast thou forsaken me?” It’s like, “Why the fuck?”
And then, of course, that’s when everything just—for me, it was just light. It was nothing but light, and the sense of being embraced by the Father.
Whether that’s because, in my own life, there’s a sense of needing to be embraced and loved by my own father, and then Presence, being the miracle it is, kind of mirrors what’s needed somehow. But that was where it finished.
Rick: It sounds like you really went through an inner meditative cooking process, in which you actually sat there and didn’t get dissuaded by all the stuff that was coming up, but plowed through it, burned through it, and eventually broke through into the clear.
James: Yeah, and all of that happened after the non-duality stuff. That’s why it’s really important to make that point. You can see the reality of experience, the nature of reality, and you keep going. Then you go down into those depths.
What was really beautiful, actually, after that had happened, was that I could see that drive pattern occasionally sort of fade in, like it was trying to reassert itself. It’s almost like a stick: if you pick any of the pattern up, you get the whole enchilada. You get the knot and everything.
The love of being what you are is so strong that you lose the taste for picking up the pattern.
This is really interesting, because what happens is that the love—the love of being what you are—is so strong that you lose the taste for picking up the pattern. You just lose the taste.
It’s like sugar in your tea. You have two lumps, and you go down to one, and then you go down to none. You get used to it, and it’s like, “Yes, this is what I like.” Then someone you haven’t seen for a while gives you a cup with two sugars in it, and you’re like, “Ahh, thank you.” You just lose the taste for it.
I think that’s where it comes from: love, not from this.
Rick: So, in that metaphor, you’re saying you lose the taste for old patterns of reacting and behaving.
James: Yeah, and the important thing is to say, I’m not saying it’s done. It’s a done deal. It’s like, “That’s it, end of story.” I think that’s a really big misnomer. It’s an infinite mind, you know? Anything can happen. It could pop up as anything. So, it’s just another idea: “Oh, it’s done.” Another idea, it’s another idea.
Rick: My friend Francis Bennett likes to say, “How do you know you’re done? Did someone stick a fork in you?” But I think this point you’re making is an interesting one. An awakening happens and then it’s as if the vehicle within which that awakening happens is no longer quite adequate to support it. So, the vehicle has to be cleaned, transformed, and purged of all kinds of stuff that no longer belongs there in this more awakened state. All that stuff has to get blown out, and it can be pretty intense.
James: Yeah, although the vehicle thing is a bit tricky, isn’t it? Because then we’re back into, “Consciousness is in here.”
Rick: Whatever this is, it’s being lived through a nervous system, through a psyche, through a human mechanism. It’s somehow supporting this experience. Consciousness exists irrespective of the mechanism. It’s always existed; it’s the eternal foundation of the universe. But if it’s going to be a living reality, then it’s a living reality through a person. And when we talk about progress, we’re not talking about consciousness progressing; we’re talking about the capacity to live it progressing, and that may necessitate a lot of transformation.
Beyond solipsism and conceptual models
James: I had that classic question. If you’re saying this is all an appearance and there’s no experience of a material external reality that this is representing, then you can get yourself into this kind of area where you’re verging on solipsism. It’s like, “There’s only this.” Rick is just colors and sounds. And so, this is like, “Whoa, where’s this going?”
So, I found myself looking into that really deeply, and what it seems to come down to for me is that the guiding light is always direct experience. We think direct experience is saying, “Oh, Rick’s just colors and sounds. He hasn’t got thoughts because I’m not directly experiencing them.” But what we’re doing there is not direct experience. We’re still conceptualizing. We’re still talking about Ricks and Jameses, even though we might think now they’re not material things; they’re kind of consciousness things. But we’re still piecing up life into bits.
Rick: It seems like we’re also placing our perceptual angle at the center of the universe, as if the existence of everything else depends upon whether or not we perceive it.
James: So, then people talk about this. What I’m doing is taking thought right to the end here. If we’re actually true to direct experience, then we’re not cutting out things anymore. What creates the seeming perceptual field? If we’re not cutting those things out, there’s not a this and a that placed here in relation to this; we’re kind of dissolving that overlay.
What we’re left with, we could say, is appearing colors, appearing sounds, sensations, thoughts, and feelings. I’m not putting any labels on them as things. But then you could say even those things I’ve just said, like colors and sounds, are labels. So, if we let go of those labels too, we could say there’s one appearance appearing.
Rick: And even appearance is a label.
James: Exactly, because then you have to go to the concept of somewhere else where the appearance appears from and disappears to. So, in the end, that falls apart. All you’re left with is pure consciousness, like being, is-ness, whatever you want.
And when you’re at that point, none of these questions can arise, because the question of others can only arise out of the conviction of a myself. Without stepping into any of those conceptualizations, here you are. What’s left is you, capital-Y You, that is: presence, being. And there’s a real beauty in that, because even to call it presence, of course, is now to label it, so then that’s already putting a circle around it. You’re just left speechless in wonder at what is.
Now then we can dance. If you want to put a model on it, go for it. Enjoy it. Put a model on it, like all the models we were just speaking about earlier. This is where it led for me. Come up with a really great model; just go for it.
And it happens that the conventional model that we live by has big flaws. The big flaws are that we immediately see ourselves as separate little units rather than as this global consciousness. So, you could play with that. You could try to introduce a completely new world model into a new paradigm. Just like we talk about how the Earth is flat, the Earth is spherical; the sun moves around the Earth, no, the Earth moves around the sun. These huge paradigm shifts have happened throughout history.
Rick: But they didn’t happen overnight.
James: Didn’t happen overnight, absolutely.
Rick: People were burned at the stake for trying to introduce them, so these things take a while.
James: Absolutely. But the point that I want to make is that they’re models, and that’s beautiful and wonderful, and we can play with that. But as soon as we start to invest in that model and it gets upgraded to a belief, then we’re going to find ourselves back in the same position again.
Rick: The safeguard is to be true to your own experience and don’t settle for beliefs. If something is presented that you aren’t experiencing, take it as a hypothesis, which means something interesting to explore, and you’ll see whether it works out or not. But if you start hanging on to and believing things that you don’t actually experience, then that has created a whole lot of trouble over the years for humanity.
James: That’s going back to that Chinese proverb. “You’ve got to involve me. I have to see it. I have to see it.”
Rick: All the great religious leaders throughout history, and spiritual leaders, didn’t care what you believed. They wanted you to experience what they were experiencing, not believe what they were saying. They wanted you to have the experience they were having.
James: If you follow your actual experience right to the end, that’s where you end up. And then to say anything about it is, “As soon as I speak, I’m going into a model,” and that’s okay, that’s beautiful. Look at the rich conversation we can have, playing with these ideas and concepts and exchanging them.
And the baby, the pre-second-birth psychological self-baby, can’t do that. So, it’s part of the game, part of the play, part of the celebration.
✨ Awareness of awareness
Rick: David Pinney from Wales asks, “The phrase ‘awareness of awareness’ always baffles me. I see it as potentially leading to an infinite regress. Do you see this phrase as having any useful content?”
James: Yeah, I think it’s useful for people to rest. When you start to realize that there’s a knowing or awareness here, it’s knowing sounds, sensations, thoughts. And what often happens is, when we say, “Be aware of the awareness,” people start looking for something, because that’s what they’re used to doing: looking for something.
But of course, you’ll never find it as something, because it is always aware of the something. So, it’s actually, funny enough, the cessation of that movement of looking, and the kind of resting, the softening, the easing, and just dropping into what’s already here, what you already are, that you don’t need to look out to see because you already are it.
So, I actually prefer the word “knowing,” because it’s like knowing is what you are. You are knowing. Knowing is the substance of what you are, so it doesn’t need something to step outside itself to look in on itself. There is no need for infinite regress, because the substance of knowing is knowing. It’s knowing; it’s doing knowing.
It’s not a focusing into awareness; it’s a relaxation.
But this is the real tricky thing, because we’re so conditioned into focusing. “Be aware of awareness. Let’s focus into awareness.” It’s the opposite; it’s a relaxation.
Rick: It’s a relaxing in, yes. I think this also has pertinence to Ramana Maharshi’s self-inquiry thing. A lot of people hear that, and they start, “All right, who am I? Where am I?” and you get this whole inner searching thing, looking for a something, whereas I think, really, what he might have advocated was just what you described: a sort of relaxing in, where the subject-object split can just dissolve in presence or in wholeness.
👨👩👧 A song of coming home
Do you want to take us out with another song? Whether it be ukulele or guitar?
James: Let’s mix it up. Let’s have a bit of ukulele. This one is kind of related to what we were just talking about in terms of going in.
When your heart is breaking, And your world is shaking. When you want to run a million miles away. When your ground is crumbling, With every step you’re stumbling. When you’ve got nothing left to hold on to. Just feel, just feel it all coming on. When you feel it so deeply and open completely, You’re home again, as the love that you’ve been longing for. When all you see is madness. When all you feel is sadness. When you don’t believe in anything anymore. When the pain is aching, And your body is shaking. When you don’t see a reason for living anymore. Just feel, just feel it all coming on. When you feel it so deeply and open completely, You’re home again, as the love that you’ve been longing for. Just feel it coming on. When you feel it so deeply, And open completely, You’re home again. When all you feel is sadness. When all you feel is sadness. When you feel it so deeply and open completely, You’re home again. You’re home again, as the love you’ve been longing for.
Rick: That was nice.
James: Thanks, Rick.
Rick: I really enjoyed it. And I really enjoyed this whole interview. It’s kind of like I feel like we’re old buddies or something. We’re having this casual conversation.
James: Yeah, I feel the same way.
Rick: It’s great.
James: That’s the funny thing with this stuff, isn’t it? I go all over the place, and it’s always familiar.
Rick: It’s a nice thing. Okay, so let me wrap it up then.
I’ve been speaking with James Eaton. I noticed some messages came in: “Hey, was this only 14 minutes long?” Somebody didn’t pick up the streaming again after it got interrupted, but the whole thing will be on the web soon, within a week or so, with all the glitches edited out.
If you want to get in touch with James, I’ll be putting a page up for him on Batgap.com, as I always do, with links to his website and whatever else he wants me to link to. In addition to doing stuff locally there in the UK, do you do Skype sessions with people all over the world and stuff?
James: I do, actually, yeah. You can go to the website and find out about that and connect up.
Rick: Okay, good. People can do that.
James: I do meetings and retreats in parts of Europe as well, if you’re in Europe. I haven’t been to the States yet, but maybe someday, I don’t know.
Rick: Following Rupert’s footsteps, you’ll be over here. Next week I will be interviewing one of the founders of Findhorn.
James: Ah, I’m there next week.
Rick: Are you? You’re going to talk up there or something?
James: Yeah, I’ve got a three-day retreat.
Rick: Oh, cool. After that, I’ll be going off to the Science and Non-Duality Conference and doing a bunch of things with Adyashanti and others, and those will all be going up on Batgap as well.
So, thanks for listening or watching, and we’ll see you next week. Thanks, James.
James: Thanks.
Rick: Talk to you later.
James: Cheers.
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