James O’Dea Interview

Summary

The conversation explores how mystical life and social action can reinforce each other, especially when facing suffering, injustice, and ecological harm. It also examines spiritual development through failure, moral complexity, dialogue, compassion, and the willingness to embrace both the bitter and the sweet.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can spiritual awakening lead to meaningful action in the world?
• How should we respond to suffering without becoming overwhelmed by negativity?
• How can activists avoid self-righteousness and grow toward dialogue and reconciliation?
• What purpose might suffering and difficult human experience serve in spiritual development?

Key takeaways

• Compassion becomes complete when it moves into purposeful action.
• Spiritual growth includes mistakes, setbacks, humility, and steady development.
• Facing suffering honestly is different from indulging in negativity.
• Activism matures from opposing enemies to seeking healing, dialogue, and reconciliation.
• The bitter and the sweet can both belong to a truthful path toward wholeness.
• Human beings can serve as instruments through which justice, beauty, and compassion enter the world.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done quite a few hundred of them now, and if this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to batgap.com and look under the Past Interviews menu. This program is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers, so if you appreciate it and feel like supporting it to whatever degree, there’s a PayPal button on every page of the site. Thank you for that.

I’m really fortunate and honored to interview such wonderful people every week. I take the responsibility very seriously and spend many hours preparing. It’s been very conducive to my growth over the years, and I’m especially honored to be interviewing James O’Dea this week. I’ve really been inspired and enriched by what I’ve read and listened to.

Since boyhood, James has dedicated his remarkable life to alleviating the suffering of others, and he’s done so on a deep mystical foundation. James O’Dea is the award-winning author of The Conscious Activist, Cultivating Peace, Soul Awakening Practice, and other works. He is a former president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which was founded by the astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who spent about eight hours walking on the moon and had a profound mystical experience on his way back from the moon, which is why he founded IONS.

James is also the Washington office director of Amnesty International and CEO of the SEVA Foundation, which was founded by Ram Dass and dedicated itself to alleviating blindness through cataract surgery in poor areas of India and Nepal. He has taught peacebuilding to over a thousand students in 30 countries. He has also conducted frontline social healing dialogues around the

The purpose of suffering

James: Right, and behind some of this conversation is that troubling issue of, “Why do we come here in the first place?” What sort of deity or divine entity creates this place of such appalling cruelty, of such deep misery and deep suffering, and then says, “Oh yes, and I’ve given you some escape routes. You can get out this way or that way.” Well, why did you create that in the first place?

As a good Catholic boy, I learned about original sin, and Adam and Eve being thrown out of the garden because of their curiosity. And so one has to come to, I think, some understanding of what that story is. And for me, and for many mystics of different traditions, it becomes clear that there is a purpose.

The great Sufi mystic Muhyiddin Ibn al-Arabi—many people don’t know of him. They know of Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi, who in Sufism is called the Pole of Love, and Muhyiddin Ibn al-Arabi is called the Pole of Knowledge. He is very difficult to read, so most people don’t go there.

But he starts his great work, The Bezels of Wisdom, the wisdom of the prophets, with this thought: God wanted to know His own most beautiful and powerful qualities. God wanted to know. He wanted to know Himself as the whole story—the good, the bad, and the ugly.

And so then you look at creation and the eminent Pole of creation and say, “We can be the eyes and ears and hands of the divine. Maybe we can’t be the autonomous—what Ibn al-Arabi calls the principal autonomy—of the divinity, but we can be instances. We can be moments. We can be motivations of the divine.”

Beauty, Truth, and Justice in a Troubled World

We can express beauty and truth and justice, and these qualities can express themselves through us. And that, for me, changes the story. It says it’s not about escaping this hellhole of a world. It’s about discovering the beauty.

We can express beauty and truth and justice, and these qualities can express themselves through us. And that, for me, changes the story. It says it’s not about escaping this hellhole of a world. It’s about discovering the beauty.

You remember the vinegar story. Buddha is asked, when he tastes vinegar, what it tastes like, and he says, “It’s bitter.” This is a reflection of his understanding of the bitterness of human suffering and the terrible pain. It’s sort of a symbol of that.

Then Confucius is asked to taste the vinegar, and he says, “It’s sour.” The sourness is a reflection of the injustice of the world, the corruption. That’s what I’m looking for.

His Buddhist path, out of bitterness, is compassion. Confucius’ path, out of sourness, is to create structures that represent social order and high levels of governance.

Lao Tzu is asked about the taste of vinegar, and he says, “It’s sweet.” For him, that’s a reflection of the Tao and the sweetness of the Tao: if you look deeply enough into it all, there is sweetness. There is sweet truth in the way of nature.

For me, that journey has been decidedly bittersweet. I have a saying: “Let the bitter be bitter and the sweet be sweet until the bitter and the sweet are one.”

Let the bitter be bitter and the sweet be sweet until the bitter and the sweet are one.

What happens when we don’t let the bitter be bitter? We really get into falsehood. That’s the path to falsehood, when we create the false positive. “Don’t worry about the negative.” Our world needs positive and negative. You can see negative and positive, but it’s that false positive where the danger is.

What happens when we don’t let the bitter be bitter? We really get into falsehood. That’s the path to falsehood, when we create the false positive. “Don’t worry about the negative.” Our world needs positive and negative. You can see negative and positive, but it’s that false positive where the danger is.

Again, in Tzuism, Mahmud Aptal simply says, “Your heart must face its tests until some sweets turn bitter in the end. Your heart won’t answer yes.”

Why won’t your heart answer yes in this instance? Because the heart is an organ of wholeness. It cannot be a partisan of the sweet.

I know some people really believe that it’s all a journey through sweetness, and that if you’re acknowledging the bitter, you’re being negative. “Oh my goodness, be positive all the time.” I’m sorry, but I cannot do that. That would not be faithful to what I have learned on the path.

I need to say that torture is a horrific nightmare of human immorality and cruelty. And I don’t think that I am being negative by saying that. I’m pointing out the negative. I’m unveiling where the false truth lies.

I need to say that torture is a horrific nightmare of human immorality and cruelty. And I don’t think that I am being negative by saying that. I’m pointing out the negative. I’m unveiling where the false truth lies.

Rick: I think there’s a distinction between what you just said—where you’ve dedicated your life to trying to eliminate horrific things, and so in order to do that, you’ve had to put your attention on those things—and indulgence in negativity as a form of entertainment, like pornography or violent video games or something like that, which are only going to pollute our minds and hearts.

In that sort of thing, yes, don’t put your attention on the negative. But if people are suffering, starving, being abused, or mistreated in any way, then how is that going to be solved unless some well-meaning people put their attention on it and try to do something about it?

James: Right, I think you’ve got it there. There are very deep nuances in everything, in all of these stories. But if you take, for example, a story that I often share because it’s so powerful, about a social healing dialogue that was convened, that I helped convene, the participants were Gottfried Lief, a former Hitler Youth member, and Mary Rothschild, the daughter of Holocaust survivors.

She describes what happened to 23 members of her extended family, and she asked him about what he did. He said he was active in the Hitler Youth. He wasn’t like Pope Benedict, who apparently was somehow connected to Hitler. He was old enough to punch people and burn things and be nasty.

Now we’re in the zone you’ve been helping to clarify around false positives, negatives, what negative you pay attention to, and so on. She says to him—she’s hunting, she says to him—“What if you had been ten years older? Would you have taken my family and put them in the gas chambers?”

Wow, what a question. You can do that in a dialogical environment of social healing. You can get to the heart of the matter. He paused for a long time, and then he said, “I just don’t know.”

We were so caught up in it, and Mary said that was one of the most important moments in her life, because she heard truth being spoken by the representatives of Nazism, former representatives of Nazism or whatever. She heard the voice of truth speaking through him, saying, “I could have been a mass murderer. See how far we can take this conversation?”

Rick: Yes, and you and I could have been boys in Nazi Germany or soldiers in Nazi Germany and fallen into the same mindset that was predominant. We probably would not have had a choice to opt out of, so it’s good not to get too self-righteous.

Being Conceived in Mourning

James: Yes. Well, if I could just share from my early life to try to bring in this developmental aspect: first of all, I was conceived days before my sister died. My mother, when she was in the mourning process, discovered that she was carrying me, and so I was conceived in mourning.

My experience—and we know from contemporary health science that a lot happens in utero—was that I was in the uterus of a woman whose mourning was taking place, and yet there was new life coming.

Rick: And she died suddenly and unexpectedly, so it was a real shock to her.

James: Right, an eleven-year-old girl. So that sets the whole story for me. There’s the bitter and the sweet right in the womb. I am coming into this world, in a sense, born out of the bittersweet.

And yet there is something in it that also tells me—because I’m born after this—that I’m born into my mother’s love. So I can go through these hell stories because I know it’s not the end of the story. There’s something else that carries me forward.

But where I want to take you is to when we were talking, when you said “you and I.” As a young boy, I had a fervent mystical path.

For people who really bang on the Catholic Church, I say, “Wait a minute. It has a mystical training for children that you really need to value.” I mean, having Christ enter your body and feeling the mystical union of being told that God Himself is in this process—whether you believe that or not—as a child, I went through my own story with it. You have communion with Communion. It’s a beautiful process.

So I told my parents I wanted to become a priest, and they said, “At age ten?” And I went to a remote Catholic seminary. Again, it was unbelievably rich for me.

The days of silence were days when, as I think we should really recognize, childhood spirituality could be much more potent than it’s often portrayed. But things unraveled.

I would just say that part of the unraveling was a kind of psychospiritual crisis that I had: early one morning, I vomited up the Communion host. Here, with all the seminarians standing around me in the entrance to the church, we were looking at the floor at these white particles of vomit that I had just vomited up.

What was that? What kind of mystical crisis was that? You were rejecting the body of Christ there.

Right, exactly. Then the priests ushered all the seminarians out and huddled, conferring with the rector about how to deal with this. I heard it whispered to me, and then said to me—whispered and then said to me—“This was an unpremeditated sacrilege.”

I was like, wow. I had to investigate the whole process. But where I want to take you is to my struggle with that and the crisis that developed.

I should have written to my parents and said, “I need to leave. Things are unraveling, and it’s not right for me anymore.” But probably it was the sin of pride—probably that, and other factors too.

But I went into this incredibly interesting criminal process whereby I studied how to steal the money from the bursar’s office, leave in the middle of the night, and take a plane to Ireland. My family had already moved to England.

When you said that each of us could have been in the Hitler Youth, I get it, because there was some perfection in this criminality and in the execution of it. Maybe I got rid of it at age thirteen, and I didn’t have to become a criminal in this life. But each of us, I think, has capacities, whether or not they get fulfilled in that way.

Rick: Yes, it’s something ironic about the fact that they were so shocked about your vomiting up the wafer. If you think about it, everything we eat usually comes out the other end, so I don’t see how that is any less shocking than occasionally having it come out the end it came in. But perhaps they don’t follow everything through to its logical conclusion in the Catholic Church.

James: But what happened to me was, again, being thrown out of the garden. I mean, after my family brought me back to London, there was this incredible grayness. London can—the suburbs of London can—be gray and foggy, but there was a spiritual grayness. I was thrown out. I no longer had those spiritual days of retreat where my soul really wanted to go, and I was responsible for casting myself out.

And so, again, in my development, there is this intensification process that’s beginning to work its way up through adolescence, which is very interesting: communion from early childhood, deep spiritual contact, loss, self-rebuke, and longing, then the beginning of a deeper longing. What have I done in my life to lose the impulse that was so rich for me?

And what happened, which I think was meant to happen—I don’t know how you feel about those kinds of things in life—but I started channeling that energy into activism, into work on behalf of the poor and senior citizens. It was both related because it was compassionate, but it was also the beginning, then, of my learning as an activist.

I got a Teenager of the Year Award for my activism and got a lot of prominence, as by this time, a 16-year-old in the media, for things I would say. The minister responsible for social welfare wrote to me and said, “You know, it seems as if you have a serious critique of our treatment of senior citizens. Would you kindly come and discuss it with us? I’d love to meet you.”

From Activist Viciousness to Reconciliation

And I wrote back with that viciousness that can be in the activist, in which I said, “You know what you have to do, and when you do it, we can meet.” That sort of refusal of dialogue is acceptable in an adolescent, but my goodness, there is a long way to travel as an activist until you get to the point that happens later in my life, where you’re about healing, where you’re about dialogue, where you’re about reconciliation, where you’re about forgiveness, where you’re about bringing the parts together and believing that the intergenerational transmission of wounds can be dealt with. That’s a marker, isn’t it, of a learning trajectory.

Rick: Yeah, I wonder how much—well, let’s see how you answer this question. To what extent do you think that learning trajectory resulted from ordinary maturation that we all go through, regardless of what we experience, or was it a result more of the various trials and tribulations you went through as an activist, which taught you humility and sort of imbued you with greater wisdom?

Or may it be both?

James: Right, I think both. You know what I said earlier about the mystical path, every step of the way? That’s what, when I look at my own life, every step of the way seems given, and I can celebrate that now. I can celebrate and say openly on a call like this, “I was a thief.” You know, “Look at me, look at where I came from. I could have been a really good thief.”

But I learned something in the process, and my heart learned something by being crushed. I would say by tasting the bitterness of loss. I thought I had lost my God. I thought I had—there was a really deep sense. I never completely felt I had lost God or lost the mystical, but enough to then vitalize the energy.

And then as you progress, you see how each phase helps, you know, both on the mystical path and the activist path, refine. And when I had my next sort of really significant mystical experience, I would like to share, if that’s okay.

Rick: Yeah, before I do that, I just want to comment on what you just said about each phase helping. We were talking a little while ago about God creating creation, as it were, to experience all of his powers or qualities or something like that. And as you were saying that, I was thinking, show me a place in which God doesn’t permeate and which actually is anything other than God, from the tiniest to the largest aspects of creation.

It’s all just sort of the divine playing or interacting within itself, and so you can’t sort of blame God for doing bad things to people because God is doing it to himself, so to speak. And I also was thinking that, if there’s going to be a creation at all, it seems to me there have to be relative qualities. If there’s going to be diversity, that by definition means there is going to be hot, cold, fast, slow, big, small, pain, happiness, and all the polarities that we can think of.

And so how does that relate to what you’re—so in terms of what you were just—

James: We’re in a zone here, so I’d like to respond to that. We have to be so careful in this discourse because we have a theological, cosmological discourse, and we have an existential discourse, and there is never a moment when we are not invited to try to end the cruelty or the suffering. We cannot in any way say, “Well, it’s God’s experience, so that’s okay.”

Rick: I wasn’t implying that.

James: No, no, I didn’t say you were. I just was flagging it because that’s where things can get hairy, and people make a choice or a decision to go spiritual and religious and mystical or whatever and say, “It’s all inevitable anyway, because this is God’s self-discovery process.”

And, you know, boy, do I like to invite people to really say, “Then let the God in you be powerful in manifesting the supremacy of compassion and the power to change and transform the world.” That energy, as you know, is an energy that feeds my life because I have seen people rescued from the torture slab. I have seen the power of mobilizing consciousness and conscience and dramatically changing the story.

And, you know, boy, do I like to invite people to really say, “Then let the God in you be powerful in manifesting the supremacy of compassion and the power to change and transform the world.” That energy, as you know, is an energy that feeds my life because I have seen people rescued from the torture slab. I have seen the power of mobilizing consciousness and conscience and dramatically changing the story.

So, we can say in this, my cosmological take on this is that it’s all related to evolutionary process. It’s all related to those impressions. I was a tiger. I was a vulture. I was, you know, I was a murderer. I was a thief.

In my lifetimes, as you know, Pythagoras had a mystical school, and he was—we don’t know what they were, but he taught his students. He could remember back even prior to human lifetime.

So, rather than being a force of autonomous evil—which, believe you me, I’ve had to explore deeply in my life—is there autonomous evil? And that sense of evolutionary process that we gain all of these impulses, these instincts, and then there comes a moment, there comes a lifetime, like the lifetime you and I are having now, when we wake up sufficiently to begin to see that we are actually vast and our source, our basis, is love and truth and compassion. I know this is a big conversation.

Rick: We have time. And I don’t want you to forget the story that you were about to tell, but just to carry on with the point you just made for a minute. So if everything has a sort of evolutionary purpose to it, if that’s God’s agenda, so to speak, then how do you respond to somebody who says, “Well, tell me how the Holocaust had an evolutionary value for those who suffered from it?”

I’ve heard people give rationales like, “Well, the Jews took on the karma of the world in making this sacrifice,” or “It was somehow instrumental in their personal spiritual evolution in the big picture,” and that can seem very glib for somebody who doesn’t share that philosophical perspective. So how do you respond to such questions?

James: I go back to, I guess, my take on the evolutionary process, which is, as mirrored in my own life, it’s a developmental process. So what we are seeing in things like the Holocaust are developmental. They have nothing to do with God’s wanting it to be this way.

But I’m, for example, very influenced by Spiral Dynamics and looking at the evolutionary process of the social order through tribal affiliation and then empire and military and then true Scots. I’m sure in your conversations you’ve gone over Spiral Dynamics.

Rick: A little bit with Ken Wilber and some others, yeah.

James: And gone back, of course, to the master teacher of that. And what you see in that theory is that there is a positive and negative for each phase of our social development, of our evolutionary development as a species.

Can you take the red code, the warrior code, the phase where militarism dominates society? The positive of that is a great positive: there are beings who are willing to offer their life to protect the rest of the social order. And then the shadow of that is domination, is ethnocentrism, is power over, and moving through that is very, very challenging.

And so that’s how I see these genocidal periods, as moving through those social evolutionary phase changes. Then we can go down another road and talk more about those. But does that answer your question sufficiently?

Rick: Yeah, let’s leave it at that for now because there are so many things we want to get to. And five or ten minutes ago you were about to tell us a story, and I interrupted you.

Chögyam Trungpa and the Raw Spiritual Path

James: I wanted to tell you a story of moving up in the refinement process in the mystical area, and that was by 1977, so I’m now 26. I read Trungpa’s Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, and as you read in the book The Conscious Activist, I read those riveting lines of Trungpa when he says, “Better for some that they not even enter the spiritual path in this lifetime.” That it will be so challenging. It’s like having your nerves raw and exposed to the universe.

And there was something in that that said to me, “This is my guy. This is what I feel. I want to go through that burning-off, that peeling-away process to the truth.” Not that I’m a masochist, but of course it’s also very, very subtle. And our growth in the subtle—and I think we need to spend a little time talking about the subtle domain. I’ll tell you the story first because I think there’s a lot of confusion around the subtle domain.

Rick: Some people don’t even acknowledge its existence and yet consider themselves spiritual teachers. They say things like, “There’s only this,” and you try to discuss any kind of subtle domain with them, and they think you’re just off in fantasy land.

James: So here’s the story of the beginning of my deeper refinement. This book says I can’t get to Tibet, but I can get to the Tibetan community in exile in Dharamsala. So I headed off to Dharamsala. Dharamsala was two separate towns. Now it’s all one big sprawl, and it’s a Mecca for spiritual hunters.

But it was during the monsoon period, and I needed to buy an umbrella. So I went to the umbrella store, and there was one very beautiful umbrella with a rainbow panel of colors on it. But it was expensive, and I thought, “I’m only here for a short period studying at the Tibetan library.” So I bought a cheap black umbrella.

One day outside the Tibetan library—it has all changed now, but there was a huge open patio—it started raining, and thunderstorms started pouring. I put my umbrella up and then ran to a lean-to where there were some monks and others. In the middle of the patio was a sadhu sitting in the rain, with the rain pouring over him.

I thought, “Oh my goodness,” my little activist self. “I need to go rescue him. I need to go take my umbrella.” So I go over with my umbrella, and I feel his silence. I feel the center of his being. He is not worried at all about any drops of rain. He is in another place. It was my first contact with that density or that subtlety of being, and I backed away. I thought, “Okay, I rushed into this. Now I need to move.”

As I moved away, he lifted up his hand so gracefully. Again, he seemed to be in contact with the inner and the outer. It was just fluid. He lifted his hand like, “Take my hand and lift me up.” I helped pick him up. We went to my little cell, and he lay on the floor. Then we went up to McLeod Ganj for dinner.

I was somewhat radiated by his presence, as I mentioned. But we ordered lassi, and the Tibetan owner brought the lassi. The sadhu sniffed it and said, “Take it away. It’s watered down. It’s really watered down. Take it away.” I looked at the owner with embarrassment. I mean, we have to get into the subtlety here, with that superiority. I’m paying for dinner, and I’m so embarrassed by this guy’s behavior.

Even when he brought the lassi back, I tried to indicate to the owner, “Sorry.” But the lassis that were brought back were thick and creamy. When we walked down the hill back to my cell, he was going to go on down into Dharamsala. The Shaktipat moment came, and he turned.

It’s a wonderful moment for a beginner. I considered myself, even though I’ve had some development, a beginner. One’s always a beginner, right? And he said, “Because I choose to live without a house over my head does not mean I do not appreciate true quality when it is given, when it is presented. Like time with you, my beloved James.”

It was a combination of stabbing the heart and breaking it open. I saw there my shallowness, my arrogance, my superficiality. And it was given to me with love. It was pierced with love and a beautiful teaching.

I just want to finish the story by saying how the umbrella comes back in. The next day that I saw him, I gave him a bunch of money. I don’t know; I think I was feeling guilty or something. I said, “I’m just going to give you money. We’re going to eat. You’ll take the money and go get the food you need.”

On the day before my last day in Dharamsala, I was out in the town and I saw him. We never connected, but he had taken the money and bought the big, expensive rainbow umbrella. And that was a teaching, both the opening and again the teaching of quality. “Your quest, my friend, needs to be around quality. What is the deeper quality?”

It’s not about umbrellas. It’s not about anything like that, right? But it’s a way the universe can teach you and deepen your process. And so you see, at each phase, we get this growth and deepening. We may at some point get to Turkey, where it really breaks open, and then later where it really comes together.

Rick: Before we go to Turkey, I’ll tell you a story. This is Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s guru, who was Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, who became Shankaracharya of Jyotirmath and lived most of his life in the jungles as a sadhu. He eventually became Shankaracharya, and one time he was traveling on a train. He was in the first-class compartment, and someone came up to him and said, “You’re a Swami. You should be living a simple, humble life. What are you doing in first class?”

And he answered, “I’m a first-class Swami.”

James: That’s great. Kind of like the colorful umbrella.

Rick: Yeah. So there’s all kinds of things I want to talk to you about, and we’ll interweave those with the stories you tell. For instance, at some point I want to talk to you about the deeper meaning of forgiveness.

James: Let’s do it.

Rick: You want to do it right now?

James: Whenever you’re ready.

Rick: We’ll get to Turkey and all that other stuff, too. You don’t want to leave those things out.

James: By the way, this is wonderful because in Ireland we weave a conversation. Yeah, it’s not linear.

The deeper meaning of forgiveness

Rick: Right. Yeah. Well, about forgiveness, I mean, I was thinking about this as I was thinking about our interview, and I was remembering some examples. For instance, about a decade ago, some guy shot up an Amish schoolhouse and killed a bunch of children. Immediately, the Amish people—I think he was killed or perhaps killed himself—went and baked pies for his widow and forgave him, and all this stuff.

Or, a couple of years ago, when Dylann Roof shot those people in the church in Charleston, immediately the surviving church members were expressing forgiveness for Dylann Roof and so on. And I wonder when I hear that kind of story: Are they really forgiving, or is it just the way their spiritual tradition works, that you’re just supposed to say that? How could they so instantly feel forgiveness? And what effect is that having on Dylann Roof? Does it humble him? Does it shame him? Does it make him realize that perhaps he didn’t do such a good thing?

You’ve encountered so many experiences in your life where people who’ve been severely affronted by others, such as the people who were attacked with machetes in Rwanda, turned around and forgave their murderers, their attackers. How have you come to understand the deeper significance and mechanics of forgiveness?

James: Somebody wrote to me a little while ago and asked about a man in prison and how to do the forgiveness with him. I said, “Do it in a way that makes it real and valid for you. Don’t, because there are books out there that say the only way is total, unconditional forgiveness, fall into that trap. Because it’s about the two of you. It’s about the process between you and the other. So make it real.”

In dialogue, at one point with Father Michael Lapsley, who was the ANC pastor whose religious magazine blew up in his face, he lost his hands, and he lost sight in one eye, he was in one of the dialogues we were convening with a young man from Northern Ireland. The young man had had a rubber bullet pointed at his face when he was an 11-year-old boy, and he was blinded.

They were talking about forgiveness, and the boy said, “I believe in unconditional forgiveness.”

Michael Lapsley said, “Well, I believe in forgiveness. I created an Institute for the Healing of Memories. But I have a good idea who sent me that letter bomb, and they’ve never come to me. They’ve never asked for forgiveness. So how am I supposed to forgive them?”

He said, “It’s like somebody who steals your bicycle, comes riding on the bicycle, and says, ‘Forgive me,’ and then they go off on your bicycle. It doesn’t make sense. It’s got to be real.”

And the Irishman said, “Sure, I would have put a pretty little bell on the bicycle for them.”

He said, “Because I gained so much from my blindness. I became an international voice. My destiny was revealed to me through this process.”

Everett Worthington, for many years, taught forgiveness to couples. Then he came home, and his mother was found beaten to death with a baseball bat. He talks about releasing the toxic poison of unforgiveness. Are you going to live your whole life subject to this travesty? In the end, they win—not only the victim, but they win you.

And so you see that spectrum: from total unconditional forgiveness, to making it real and receiving an apology, to releasing the toxin that’s poisoning you, because if you don’t forgive, you’re going to be in a very wounded state.

Finally, there is the example of Albie Sachs in South Africa, who again had a bomb blow off an arm and an eye. During the Truth and Reconciliation process, he was also in prison and tortured. His torturer admitted before the commission—which was part of the reconciliation process—how he had tortured Albie Sachs. If you went up and spoke the truth in the Truth and Reconciliation process, the truth could literally help set you free.

After his testimony, Albie went up to him. Albie’s right hand had been blown off, but with his left hand he shook his hand. The torturer, it is said—Albie heard this—went away and cried convulsively for two weeks.

In forgiving him, I had my vengeance.

Albie Sachs said, “In forgiving him, I had my vengeance.” He called it soft vengeance. He said, “I got more out of that—that he cried when I offered him forgiveness—than I would have gotten from him being put in jail and punished.”

That opens up the arena of the larger emerging restorative justice movement, which again says it may not be as simple as some people say. You’ve probably seen their books. Some people say, “Unconditional forgiveness.” It may not be the only way. I don’t want to deprive anybody of unconditional forgiveness, but as you can see, I’m trying to paint the larger framework in which forgiveness becomes meaningful.

The restorative justice process says, “How are you going to atone? How are you going to show that your life has been changed?”

Truth-Telling Before Forgiveness in Rwanda

That restorative justice process was there in Rwanda. It was not simply a matter of forgiving those who had attacked you with machetes. In the gacaca process, the perpetrator is brought before the community and is asked to speak the truth. If they speak the truth, that’s heading in the right direction. If they really want to atone and they agree to atone, then the forgiveness process begins.

“Well, now I need some help with my house being built, and I need some farming help.” So there’s the rejoining of the community. It is not done in abstraction or without these other elements that come together.

Rick: So perhaps in conclusion we might say that whether or not the perpetrator knows he has been forgiven by the victim, if he does, it may have a transformative effect on him, as in the case in South Africa. But even if he doesn’t, forgiveness, if it can go deep enough, frees the victim from carrying a burden all his life. It liberates him and cultivates his heart, and so on. Would that be a fair synopsis?

James: Yes. And then there’s that other element of the restorative justice process of bringing the community together.

Rick: Yeah, there’s certainly some situations in the world that could use that.

James: It’s really on the rise—restorative justice in schools, and in some countries it’s much more prevalent.

Rick: Somebody sent me a documentary of this group of Israelis and Palestinians who are reaching across and connecting with one another and creating a fairly sizable and growing bubble of harmony in that intractable situation.

James: The bereaved families forum—that’s what you’re referring to.

Rick: I’m not sure if that was it.

James: People who, on either side, have experienced violence come together and deepen this reconciliation.

Rick: Yeah. Well, tell us another story. I think you were going to tell us about Turkey, but I’m not sure. Whatever you would like to say next.

🕊️ Human rights and spiritual resilience

James: Well, I want to say that just before Turkey, in terms of the activist developmental process, of really going in a place like Amnesty and seeing the power of mobilization, what led me to Amnesty was working in Beirut during the war with the Middle East Council of Churches and being there during the Sabra-Shatila massacre, where children were found murdered under their beds.

Rick: By who? Who murdered them?

James: Well, the Israelis invaded West Beirut, then they encircled the Palestinian camps, and then they allowed in the Phalangist, right-wing Lebanese militias who wanted to expunge all the Palestinians from Lebanon. They were ethnocentric, hatred-filled people. The whole Kahan Commission dealt with this crime and Israel’s role in it. They allowed in the Phalangists, who murdered whole families.

I won’t go into the whole story in depth, as there’s not much to cover, but some weeks after that I went to another Palestinian camp, and it had been bombed to the ground. When you think of camps, by the way, you think of bricks and mortar, established since 1948. The whole camp was blown away; it was just rubble. In the middle of the rubble were black flags mourning all the women and children who had been killed.

It was particularly deep betrayal because the Israelis had agreed to the PLO leaving Beirut, so all the men, the young fighters, had left Beirut, and then they massacred the women and children. In the middle of this rubble was a man who was calling to me and some of the medical doctors I was with, and we went over. I thought he was going to show us the body or something, and then he said, “I’d like to make you coffee.”

I couldn’t believe it. He had a little gas stove. At first we said no, and then it was clear that, for his dignity, he needed to do that. He apologized that the cups were broken and cracked, but he did it with incredible dignity. He had come from Jaffa, now called Haifa, and he made the Arabic coffee.

At that point, Rick, I was at the lowest point. I really felt humanity was evil, that things were lost, that the world was too dark for me. I said to God in my prayers, “I cannot live in a world this cruel, this dark, this difficult.”

Then slowly, as I watched this man, I had an epiphany, which resulted in my ending up in Amnesty International. I saw in this man the indestructible, inviolable nature of the human spirit. I saw that no bombs could blow apart this dignity. Here in the rubble, after the massacres, after the war, after all of this, I was allowed to see the human being rising.

I saw in this man the indestructible, inviolable nature of the human spirit.

He didn’t say a word of hatred about Israel. He talked about the beauty of Jaffa and the orange trees. That’s when I saw that it’s possible, because at our core we have an indestructible spirit. We’re spiritual beings having a human experience.

Out of that, I was able to crawl out of the darkness and desperate cruelty and start to work, mobilize action, and do that incredible work that organizations like Amnesty do: pulling people off the torture slabs, saving lives, alerting the world to how to help the world become a better world, and really mobilizing young people and people of conscience everywhere, linking that rather old-fashioned word conscience with consciousness.

But before I went to Amnesty, I had my final experience in Turkey, where I lived and taught. If you read the book, I was in night vigils and had all those experiences. There was a period, and I suspect for many of us there is a period in our spiritual development, where it gets very concentrated. I feel that this was really the place where my spiritual, mystical life was anchored and deepened to a very powerful extent.

It involved meeting with different spiritual masters. One was a Sufi master, Sheikh Musa Farah, whom I met in an antique bookstore. He was a great, great being. After that meeting, through Hassan Shushud, the author of a book called Masters of Wisdom in Central Asia, something happened.

With Sheikh Musa Farah, I spent this time and there was a deep transmission, but he did not initiate me into his Sufi mystical path. This is why I’m telling the story this way. Through his energy, I believe, and his grace and magical synchronicities, I was led to this other master, who was the most protean. He could change his body. He changed his body in front of me. I had never, ever seen anything like this in the cities before.

He was a little old man who told me on the phone, “I’m too old and I don’t take students anymore.” But then he said, “There’s something in your voice that tells me we’re going to meet.” He was quite balding, small, and petite.

At a certain point in the conversation, he moved toward me because he was going to give me the transmission of the zikr, or prayer practice, and the instructions. As he moved toward me, I couldn’t believe my eyes at first. It was extraordinary. He started to change. His face started to change.

As he sat close beside me, there was a young Mongolian, Central Asian, or Tibetan face. It was from that part of the world. He was young and luminous, and he started to give me the instruction, the breathing process.

When the whole instruction was complete, he sort of pulled back, and there was that little old man again.

I went into the most intense period. He had given me the breathing experience. He said, “Fast, do night vigils. Pray. Do your zikr. Fast. Night vigils.” That’s all I could do. I did day work, but for several months I lived at this intensity, doing as much night vigil as I could, fasting as much as I could, and doing this breathing and zikr.

At that time, I thought this was complete. I thought I had found my spiritual master. I was so grateful that, after all the journey of those years, I was now about thirty-two and had been given the grace of a master.

Then this young man, who was a spiritual colleague, said, “I want you to meet my teacher. He’s almost your age, a little older than you.” At first I put him off, saying no, and then I sort of agreed to go.

I could feel the intuition on the day of the meeting. You know, Meher Baba says, “Intuition, inspiration, illumination, realization, that’s the path.” The intuition clicked in: I was going to meet a great master.

I bought honey and herbs, a sort of traditional gift. The herbs were more inspired, but in Turkey you often give the master something like honey, as you do in other traditions.

He was in the back of a pots-and-pans store. This meeting totally transformed me again and became the new anchor, and probably the lasting anchor, of my spiritual journey.

As I approached him in the back of his pots-and-pans store, he said, “He brings herbs and honey to the Baptist in the desert.” I sat down, and he said without any interruption, “When Jesus Christ was on the cross, he spoke to his mother and the beloved disciple.” The beloved was John. He said to his mother, “Woman, this is your son,” and to the beloved disciple he said, “Son, this is your mother.”

He said to me, “Could you tell me why?” He said, “Woman,” to his mother, and “Son,” to his disciple. I said some words, but he said, “Well, try this hypothesis. At this moment, Jesus is entering the cosmos, becoming the cosmic Christ. He is leaving all of those filial relationships with his mother and so on. But this is the woman who has been his mother, and he wants her to be taken care of. So he says, ‘Woman, this is your son.’”

“And when he says, ‘Son,’ to John, he is at that moment where he pours the fire of his love, the unconditional fire of his love, into the only heart that could bear the unbearable intensity of this earthly fire of Jesus.”

You can imagine, even in telling this story, the Shakti that’s in the room at this point. I’m feeling the Shakti. He said, “So, James O’Dea, the reason you are here is that the game is up. There is no religion, there is no formula, there are no set of practices for you. There is no way but to hunt that fire. You, my friend, are a hunter of that fire, and you will keep hunting.”

At the next meeting he said, “Stop praying, stop fasting, don’t make yourself a saint.” He said, “For six months, completely abstain from any kind of spirituality. Don’t even think about God. Don’t ever get on your knees, and let the page be emptied out.”

It was very Zen in some way, so that you can be written on. He said, “At the moment your book is too full, and it’s got a lot of different chapters, so empty it out.” He said, “After six months it will be clear.”

Six months after I did that practice with him, I started with Amnesty International. So I don’t know if you have any commentary or reflection.

Rick: Well, I do have something. I don’t know if this is the man you were just alluding to, but there’s an excerpt from your book where you say, “The bishop lifted his head with measured deliberateness, as if about to speak. He threw a glance at me that ruptured forever the membrane of the separate self. Gold threads poured from his eyes into mine. The threads were finely braided. They entered through the portal of the eyes and gathered in a pool in the center of my chest. I had witnessed the divine in a human being.”

Was that the same man you were just referring to?

James: It was at the same time. The same time, yeah. He wasn’t a Sufi master; he was a Suriyani, Syrian Orthodox bishop.

I won’t go into the whole story, but what I learned from reading Meher Baba’s book, just about two months ago, is that that transmission through the eyes is a particular transmission given to someone who has reached what he refers to as the sixth level of initiation or consciousness.

The zero-to-first level is the gross level. Levels two, three, and four are the subtle levels. We said we’d get to the subtle, so maybe here it’s coming. The fourth level is the end of relationship to any form of energy or subtle energy. The fifth, sixth, and seventh levels are the causal level, or the mental level, and the different aspects of the mental levels.

He said that if you get to that level, you might discover that the seating has been arranged so you’re given this eye transmission. In the book, I didn’t know this at all, but I talk about the seating. I was at dinner between four people, and I was made to sit opposite the bishop.

This initiation, in Sufism, would be called a wali: someone who has reached the sixth level, pure mental consciousness, with no relationship to subtle energy at all, but causal of all that happens in the subtle planes.

At the sixth and seventh levels, Meher Baba says, you can see the divine. It’s not that you have merged with the divine; that comes later. It’s that you see the divine.

That experience, Rick, was a profound mystery to me for many years. It felt like I had seen the divine. These golden threads had come through his eyes, and I had experienced Shakti as never before. But beyond Shakti, I was beginning to see the edges of the edges, beginning to see the divine face. That is something that feeds me and will feed me all my life.

The subtle realm and the transformation of the body

Rick: I was a student of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi for many years, and he talked about stages of consciousness, as Meher Baba does and others do. He referred to a stage after self-realization as cosmic consciousness, and the stage after that as the blossoming of celestial perception.

He said it’s as if, prior to self-realization, we have foggy glasses on, which is like in the Bible, seeing through a glass darkly. Then, with cosmic consciousness, the windows of perception have been cleaned, so the glasses are clear. But through the growth of deeper appreciation and refinement comes a phase where it’s like having golden glasses on.

And everything—yeah, and as you know, I presume—I haven’t reached this stage, but I presume that as your day-to-day appreciation or perception of the celestial field grows, which is a very subtle field of the world that we all perceive, ordinarily we’re stuck on the gross level of perception. Beneath that gross level are strata of greater and greater subtlety, and the most refined level is one which we might call celestial. The perception of that would be one of a sort of golden glow characterizing or shining through all the objects of perception.

James: Beautiful. That’s wonderful, thank you. I agree, and since we both agree that there is something about the subtle level that I think is really important, if I may say, we mentioned earlier Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo says, in this conversation around mysticism and activism, that you don’t worry in the beginning about the path of service or activism. Serve others, be compassionate, but focus on going through those subtle planes and then bringing down the supramental into the world.

So it’s a very powerful story for anyone interested in spiritual activism to explore Sri Aurobindo. It’s not exactly the path I’m taking. I’m taking more of a simultaneous switching between the two, and eventually we get to the merging. But I think that bringing down is so important, whether it’s going up or bringing down, to acknowledge where you are, what you’re learning, what you’re receiving, and where you’re growing in relationship to the subtle path.

I love that expression by Mozart when he went to see the emperor and said to the emperor, “Your Imperial Majesty, I am a vulgar man, but my music isn’t.” And another time he says, “From whence this music comes, I do not know, but I thank the good Lord.” It is Mozart, and what Mozart obviously does not realize, or is trying to articulate, is the subtle—the beginning of the subtle plane.

In Sufism, and in many paths, as you were saying, there’s a movement from the gross to the subtle, and the spiritual path is the entrance to the subtle. You had as your guest a dear friend of mine a while back, Kabir Helminski, and his society is called the Threshold Society: the threshold between sharia and tariqa, between the world of logic, order, reason, and even intellectual prowess—they’re all in the gross level.

Then the subtle level is where the music really takes off, where the siddhis begin, and where, as we go through the illusion, they’re still part of the illusion, but they’re the entrance to the illusion that draws us deeper into the story of ascending. But I also believe, and feel passionate about, bringing those powers into the world.

After all, this story about illusion can get very “illusion or not illusion” kind of. You have the illusion of horrific behavior in the world, massacres and things like this, and you have, as the illusion, Mozart’s music. Which do you want? To bring a contact with the subtle powers into the world so that we can transform? This is where it gets very exciting, where I think the story does come together.

We’ve meandered through parts of it in my life, but when health and healing start to say it’s all about the subtle, you go to the doctor and the doctor says, “Do you meditate? Do you meditate?” Twenty years ago, a doctor wouldn’t have asked you that. Are you empathic? Do you serve other people? Are you bringing down those subtler states into your body?

Sri Aurobindo said the supramental has to be taken into the cellular level. So we have a story in science, health, and education that really can bring these worlds together. Look at science. Science is exploring the subtle realm like nobody’s business, and it begins to tell us that what we thought was the vacuum is now the plenum. The subtler it gets, the more powerful it gets. It’s the same metaphor, the same analogy, with spirituality. The subtler and more refined it gets, the more powerful it gets. So, yeah.

Rick: There are several things I’d like to say in response to that, but before I do, I just want to remind those who are watching the live interview that if you have a question you’d like to have me ask James, go to the Upcoming Interviews page on batgap.com. There’s a form at the bottom of that page through which you can submit your question.

Physiological Transformation and the Supramental

A couple of things you just said that I want to comment on and have you comment back on: one is about what Aurobindo said about the supramental being brought into the cellular level. That brings to mind the thought that what we’re talking about here, in addition to its other aspects, is a physiological transformation.

The whole physiology has to be restructured in subtle ways in order for it to be a fit vehicle for what we’re talking about here. That goes right down to the cellular level and to things which are understood in Eastern traditions as energy paths, nadis, sushumna, kundalini, and all that business. It has its relevance.

Another thing is that I think something clearly associated with this growth of subtlety is growth of the heart. You can’t really imagine a hard-hearted person having refined subtle perception. There’s a kind of melting of the heart and a blossoming of deeper values of the heart that correlates with being able to function, perceive, and act on a subtler level. I have more to add, but would you like to react to that?

James: Absolutely. We understand more fields and fields around the body, and so when the heart shifts deeper into empathy and love, the field of the body, the electromagnetic field of the body, changes—the vibrational tone, the limbic resonance in a group.

So you have the subtle and the physical affecting the psychological and emotional and the cellular level of the body. In these social healing dialogues and in deep dialogue, dialogue does not mean “with two.” It comes from the word “dhya,” which means “through,” and “logos,” “higher mind.” So “dhya logos” means “through higher mind.”

How do you get to a space of such communion with people that they can really leave the platform of the rational, sequential, linear mind and go into that higher state where they are experiencing, through listening, fields, and so on, this communion with each other? It’s physiological.

We know that the electromagnetic field around the body is holographic—fascinating—and that it extends outward. Certain fields can be measured to a certain degree, but they extend quite far. So now you and I, nonlocally, have created a field together, and the hologram of the electromagnetic field becomes the hologram of the two.

So we change the fields of rooms, we change the body’s field, we change all of that electrical activity. The heart has 5,000 times the electrical strength of the brain. There are more neural ganglia going from the heart to the brain and the other way around.

The heart is an organ of wholeness.

So the heart plays a central role in helping create these resonant fields where massive, deep psychospiritual work can be done in healing ourselves and the planet and ending the transmission of our woundedness. So, thank you.

🩺 Fields, nonlocality, and collective healing

Rick: Now there are two things I want to talk to you about. One is complexity and simplicity, which I think relates to the topic of subtlety that we’ve just been discussing. But now you brought up the topic of fields, and that’s another thing. So I’m not sure which one we want to do first, but maybe we should take a crack at fields since you were just mentioning it, and then we’ll come back to the topic of complexity and simplicity.

With regard to fields, I think we’ve all heard the phrase that consciousness is a field—the field of consciousness. We’ve heard that term used in physics. There are fields such as the electromagnetic field, the gravitational field, and so on. Some physicists like to speak of a unified field which may underlie all fields and give rise to them, and some physicists go so far as to equate the unified field with consciousness.

There’s a fellow named John Hagelin whom I’ve interviewed who wrote a whole paper about that. But I also think humans are rooted in and influence various degrees and levels and circumferences of fields.

For instance, in a family there’s a sort of group consciousness in that family which you could think of as a field that is contributed to by all of its members and which influences all of its members. The same is true of the community, the state and nation, and the whole world.

Just as, in the atmosphere of a cloud, enough static electricity accumulates in that field to result in an imbalance between positive and negative forces and lightning strikes in order to neutralize it, I think there can be a building up of tensions, negativity, and so on in all these other types of fields I just mentioned—family, national, global, and so on.

Often when we see an outbreak of strife in a family or war among nations, it’s kind of like the lightning effect of neutralizing the accumulated tension, stress, or negativity in that field.

But in the same vein, we can do something which Patanjali recommends in the Yoga Sutras: avert the danger which has not yet come by neutralizing the tension that is built up in the field through meditation and various spiritual practices, thereby perhaps circumventing the inevitability of a gross physical outbreak.

In other words, we can tone it down; we can neutralize or diminish the tension that has grown in the field. I’ve actually participated in groups in Iran and places like that that were attempting to do this. But anyway, that’s enough of me talking. Go ahead and respond to what I just said.

James: Yes, yes, yes. I love and believe in the Maharishi effect, which has been tested in various places. There’s evidence that the violence level can be brought down and the field can be softened.

Lynne McTaggart’s work on the field and the intention experiments that she does—her work in Sri Lanka on a large scale—are examples of this. She’s done one for which she will soon have the results, in terms of softening the field in Cleveland and bringing down the violence in Cleveland, U.S.

How the fields are interpenetrated, I do not know. We know that one important thing is the nonlocality dimension of fields: they are not dependent on spatial-temporal relations in the same way that material reality is.

Rick: Sure, we see that when we turn on the radio. We’re seeing that the electromagnetic field is carrying a signal from perhaps 100 miles away and playing it on our radio. We can’t see that field, but the radio can see it, so to speak, and transmit the influence that’s being propagated through that field and turn it into music.

James: Yes, so we have this non-locality and we have memory. We know that electrons that meet and spin together seem to potentiate back when that spin is recalled. So just think of all of your journey through spinning electrons that have spun through you and your family and others, and the interfoliation, interconnectivity, and interpenetration that creates the resonance where we get synchronicities and extraordinary things that happen. I encourage people to read the book if they’re interested in a major event that happened to me in Bolinas.

Rick: Oh, I want you to tell that story, actually. You can tell it now if you want, or we can come back to it, whichever you prefer.

James: I’ll tell it quickly. I was on my way to a Spiritual Heart of Service meeting in Kalamazoo when I got to Chicago. They canceled it because of snow. I came back, took the day off work, and went out to Bolinas.

Here, from the get-go, you begin to see massive levels of field connectivity. I’ve also written about this in an essay that is coming out in a book by Ervin Laszlo early next year on spiritual insight and scientific insight. I was going to meditate at the Commonweal Institute, above the plateau above Salinas, but I went into the town, got out of my car, and this house seemed to dance at me, just seemed to call. I went over, and this inner voice said, “Go inside and introduce yourself.”

My feet took me running in the other direction, and my rational mind said, “Are you joking? You’ll get arrested for that. I mean, what are you going to say?” And then there it was again: Meher Baba’s formula, intuition first. I stopped. A strong intuition, for whatever reasons beyond the rational mind, told me it was the right thing to do.

I went in the gate, up the path. The door of the house was a glass door. I knocked on the door. There were three women sitting on a couch and sofa, and as one woman came toward the door, she screamed out, “It’s Jim O’Dea!” When she opened the door, she said, “What are you doing here?”

My jaw would not work. I could not speak. I was in distress, thinking, “What is going on?” And she said, “You’ve missed the meeting. Everybody’s left.” I was totally confused.

What evolved, or what unfolded, was that I had known everybody who had been at a meeting in that house. They were the leaders of the human rights movement in the United States. They had come together because another friend, Larry Cox, at Ford had said, “We’ll give you a million dollars to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights if you work together.” They had discussed that, and they had all left.

I was very angry inside. I was disoriented. This is the time when the higher powers really got me, because I said to them in my inner voice, while sitting with these women, “No, you are not pulling me back to Amnesty International and the human rights movement. You know, I gave you my best. I really did, and I have another path to follow.”

I got up and said to the woman, “It’s been fascinating. I don’t know how all this happened, but I’m going up to meditate.” And this young woman, Christy Rodelius Palmer—I mean, how could you forget a name like that?—from the Minnesota Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, said, “Just before you go, I have a question for you. What is the relationship between spirituality and human rights?”

It was as if I was pulled back into the room. It was as if this was the question that I really wanted. And I spoke about healing and bringing spirit and action together, all of these things that I’ve now been doing since that day. That was a pivotal day in my life. Then I left and went away.

So what was happening in terms of the field? There was clearly, since I had been together with many of those people in the house, a field connection. We had had field experiences before. Remember what I said? Field is non-local and has memory. So there was not enough to take shape in my consciousness, where I got out of my car and could say, “Oh, yes, there are some people,” but there was enough to jolt the subconscious mind with something I remembered. What was it? There was a connection here, and a very passionate and deep connection with people I had worked with and gone through intense experiences. In other words, that intensified the field potential.

What we have to know about fields is their potentiation, which gets actualized when there is an observer, when there is an actualizing, potentiating circumstance. And here it was: me with a quest, them with their vibration, and the field that they created.

But it gets fascinating to look at the layers of consciousness. Out of this meeting—we won’t go into too many details—the Fetzer Institute funded a meeting, and I was allowed to invite anybody I wanted on spirituality and human rights. Very shortly thereafter, I started these social healing dialogues, looking at the perpetrator as wounded and asking how they heal. This was a much different place than Amnesty, which has to stay in a more binary, “Who’s right, who’s wrong?” relationship.

So you could look at linking me into the fields of health and healing, by then becoming president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. It’s fields within fields that got activated by my missing a meeting on the Spiritual Heart of Service, but in some ways bringing me to the Spiritual Heart of Service.

Rick: Another thing about fields is that they’re not just homogeneous, amorphous things. They are full of dynamism and impulses of intelligence. You were referring earlier to David Bohm talking about how, I think it’s said that in a cubic centimeter of empty space, there’s more energy inherent than there is in the entire manifest universe, at the subtlest level, at the level of the vacuum state.

But there is also, obviously—or not so obviously—inherent in this sort of most fundamental field all the impulses of intelligence that give rise to the whole universe. Otherwise, where does all this creativity come from?

Part of what we were discussing about subtlety and subtle perception is that when that really dawns in a person’s experience, they discover that a world of beings inhabits this subtle realm. They are every bit as real as you and I; they just don’t have gross bodies. They only have subtle bodies.

And those beings, from the accounts of people I’ve spoken with who perceive them routinely, are constantly engaged in interacting with us in various ways. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, whatever these beings may be, many of the intuitions we have are actually promptings from them.

So the desire to go up to Bolinas, the desire—that voice in your head that said, “Go back to this house”—could be this little angel on your shoulder saying, “James, this is what you’re supposed to do,” because they have a broader vision of the whole course of events and the interconnectedness of everything than we do, and can guide us if we’re open to that guidance.

James: Yes, I fully agree with that. In that sense, in the earlier parts of the subtle realms, these beings are very much identifiable as beings themselves, just as you so clearly said, without bodies.

Rick: Without gross bodies. They still have subtle bodies.

James: Right.

Rick: Right.

James: But they are interconnected in a more conscious, facile way than we are. We are interconnected. We know we’re interconnected. We’re finding ways, in systems thinking and in our communal development, to acknowledge that interdependence. But if we could lift the veil, we would see how vast that interconnection and interpenetration of realities is.

And it goes back to bringing these realms together, that thought that they need to be there in potential form, that need to be actualized. So a willing heart, an open heart, a meditative state, is not about somatic relaxation and taking it easy and having a nice time. It is to be receptive, not passive: to be receptive vehicles of these subtle powers radiating through that really can be an enormous resource in the evolution of humanity.

And that leads us to the tantalizing question: Are we a new species in development? When Meher Baba and Teilhard de Chardin and Sri Aurobindo and many others say a new humanity will emerge, a new humanity that experiences love, that knows love—not as any form of forcing or coercion, but as the force, as the state that can spontaneously connect being to being—that we will illuminate as a species, you know, it’s certainly very tantalizing.

I think the universe is deeply structured to hint that there’s so much more to come, and the story gets so much better. This is, again, when we started with my story of the bittersweet in my childhood, that sense in me of, “This is not the end of the story.” Whether we have a sociopathic president, whether we have terrible crises in different parts of the world, or cruel leaders in politics, this is not the end of the story, I think.

Rick: Yeah, and that’s no trivial comment coming from someone who has seen far more than most of us ever will see of horror and terrible things. I mean, did you find that some of your associates in Amnesty just became bitter and disillusioned and discouraged, and even suicidal, seeing all they saw? Are you kind of rare in terms of coming through that whole process with an optimistic outlook?

James: I would say burnout rather than bitterness. Every day you deal with torture, murder, and mayhem, and you’re trying to alleviate it. At some point, it takes a toll. And I think living in the polarity takes a toll.

It was a deep healing moment for me when I began to see that you can talk about impunity, and that topic is very big in the human rights movement: more human rights laws, get those responsible, stop impunity. But it doesn’t feed me as much as asking, “The perpetrator is wounded. Where did that wound come from? How did the perpetrator get so wounded that they would do these things?”

So the paradigm moves from right and wrong, which we need morally. In nonduality, we still have right and wrong, right? We still have torture is bad. We don’t want to do that. But moving from right and wrong to who’s hurt and how can they heal is a big element in my own transformation.

And that brought together for me the worlds of spirituality and action. Once you talk about healing, the root of the word “heal” is to make whole, to make whole again. We can be whole. As I said earlier, the heart is not healthy if it’s made to be a partisan of the part. The heart is an organ of wholeness.

“Universes cannot contain me, but I am contained in the heart of my beloved servant.”

In other words, the heart of my beloved servant is wider and bigger than the universe.

Complexity, simplicity, and conscious action

Rick: It’s beautiful. As perhaps a final topic, I want to talk to you a little bit about complexity, and it’ll be clear in a moment why I want to do that. Here’s a quote from your book. You said, “If you really tried to obtain a comprehensive analysis of every problem before you decided to act, you would end up being paralyzed. There is actually no end to the analysis of how things got to be the way they are.”

I’m reminded of a verse in the Gita which says that the complexity of karma is beyond the capability of human intellect; it can’t be grasped. Then you go on: “How can we change the world when it is so entangled in complexity?” Again, a quote from the Gita: there’s this verse that says, “For many-branched and endlessly diverse are the intellects of the irresolute, but the resolute intellect is one-pointed.”

So take a field of knowledge, for instance. If you study chemistry or statistics or any field that is studied in a college, you discover as you learn that the more you learn, the more you realize how little you know. It’s as if the ignorance increases faster than the knowledge does as you study. You realize that you could not possibly incorporate all knowledge within your awareness because it’s just too vast and complex, and you have to specialize more and more specifically, more precisely, as you advance in your learning.

But the saints and sages talk about what they might call the simplest form of awareness, that which is the home of all knowledge, that from which all the branches of knowledge spring and into which they ultimately merge. It’s kind of like the way the spokes of a wheel seem real complex if you’re out on one of the spokes, but if you get back to the hub, you see that all the spokes emerge from that hub.

So the reason I’m saying all this—well, here’s a bit more. I’ll read a bit more from you before letting you respond. You said, “Take away this noisy and opinionated mind and you create a vacuum into which the energy of the universe will flow in an orderly and coherent way. Rather than setting out to fix things, we need to cooperate with a masterfully creative universe by getting out of its way. When we switch from ego to witness, we become so much more receptive to the creative agency of a universe ready to help us transform, and it is in that state of receptivity that epiphanies occur and synchronicities abound.”

So the reason I wanted to set the stage with that is that as an activist, as the head of Amnesty in Washington and so on, you must have often felt frustrated by the political complexities and cultural complexities and clashes that seemed so intractable, so hard to sort out. It seems to me that if we could function from a simpler form of awareness, that ground state of awareness from which the universe itself emerges, and if enough of us could do that, then the sort of simplicity of our consciousness and the cooperation with the universe, which you mentioned in the quote I just read, would result from that simplicity and would spread through the collective consciousness.

All these problems which seem too impossible to solve on their own level, hopelessly impossible, hopelessly complex, would somehow begin to diminish. Perhaps we’d actually find specific solutions, or perhaps we’d find that a problem which seemed intractable was no longer there when we woke up one morning, or seemed a lot simpler than it had seemed the night before.

So, kind of in my own course of life, when I was back in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and everyone was protesting and all, and I had learned to meditate, I was thinking, “Well, that’s fine for them, but I think I’m going to try to take as my approach consciousness and explore that, and hopefully my exploration of that will enable me to contribute to the world in a way which will bring about peace from a more fundamental level.”

Which is not for a moment to diminish what you’ve done, because I completely honor it, and I think it’s essential. I feel a little ashamed that sometimes I didn’t take a more active course. But I think what you’ve gotten to in your life and your understanding is that a marrying of the two is in order, and that one without the other—development of consciousness without compassionate action in the world, or vice versa—is just not going to make it. It’s like you can’t really walk without two legs, and those are the two legs.

So please comment on all that, and it kind of relates to what you said a minute ago about your optimism, that a better time is coming. I think a better time is coming because of that sort of more full-bodied approach of spirituality and then the translation of that spiritual development into compassionate action.

James: Well, I first have to acknowledge you as a teacher here, because that was a beautiful riff that you just gave.

Rick: I get inspired every now and then.

James: Thank you. Now, I think you said a lot. There isn’t a lot to add. There is that contemplation that Thomas Merton has, that trying to solve every problem—the kind of frenetic part of the activist—is a form of violence. It’s a form of violence to the self, trying to run at every problem in the world and think that you can just throw more energy at it and be the savior. It’s really violent at its core.

Rick: Oh, and there’s also that quote attributed to Einstein about trying to solve problems from the level of consciousness at which they were created; it’s not going to work.

James: Right. That complexity is hugely terrifying to me, because I’ve experienced it. I experienced it in the Iraq War, testifying in Congress about how brutal Saddam Hussein was, and then having the administration get up and say, “We don’t acknowledge a pattern of gross human rights violations in Iraq.” Then, three months later, they said he was the Butcher of Baghdad and that we needed to stop a force like that.

There are existential crises that are created by the level of complexity, and it’s only gotten deeper. But as you so eloquently said, and I think it’s true, there is a way to bring it down. I think that in the second tier of consciousness of Spiral Dynamics, there is this feeling now that in the final level of the first tier, the green level, millennials and others are exhausted with the complexity.

There is so much complexity. There is goodwill. We want to save the planet. We want to do good things. We want human rights. But it’s all gotten so complex. How do we get out of it? And so the path forward is a leap. It’s that new-humanity theme, a leap to the next tier of consciousness that says there are solutions. We have to organize from a global framework.

Up pops this word “glocal.” I don’t know if you’ve ever heard it.

Rick: “Global” and “local” combined.

James: Right. You live locally. You build community. You build sustainability at its roots. Part of the reason I came to a place like Crestone, which is spiritually conscious, building community, and ecologically focused, is that you try to enact in simple, verifiable ways with your neighbors, in your community, what you want for the world.

So that second tier of consciousness says you have to be world-conscious. You have to have global systemic things, but they have to be based on inner values, on being the change that you seek in the world. Maybe that’s a good kind of synthesis. If you become the change, if you are the change you seek in the world, it does bring that complexity down to, “I know what I can do to be a part of it all.”

And somehow those resonances make it real. I know we’re finishing up, but as I said, I did want to end with…

Rick: Before you do that, I just want to tag one comment onto what you just said, which is that I think if we can become one with that intelligence which governs the universe, to which we’ve been alluding, and function from that field as an agent of that field, as an instrument of the Divine, then our actions will kind of incorporate or embody the intelligence of that field.

Even if we don’t completely comprehend—I don’t think we can begin to comprehend the vastness of that intelligence—without our even knowing it, our influences will sort of reflect the evolutionary value of Divine intelligence. “Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace.” We’ll be an instrument of that peace, quite spontaneously, even unwittingly.

James: Amen. Yeah.

The eternal instant

Rick: Okay, let’s hear your invocation.

James: One of the things that’s really fun for me is that I’ve been collaborating. I think collaboration is not a thing we dealt with in a major way, but it’s one we would definitely agree is part of the new paradigm. Dialogue and collaboration are going to lead us forward.

I’ve been collaborating with an artist who’s deeply inspired by Sri Aurobindo, who’s majorly immersed in Sri Aurobindo. Her name is Marika Popovic, and she paints paintings about consciousness and states of consciousness in the Akashic field and all of these elements. Brilliant, brilliant paintings. I sit with the paintings and then write invocations from them. I don’t write descriptions of the paintings. I go to, if you like, the same source that she painted from and paint my words.

So I wanted to close out with an honoring and celebration of that work. And that work, by the way, has now been picked up by dancers. The famous choreographer of Martha Graham has done a dance performance interpreting the paintings and the poetic invocation. So it’s again collaboration within collaboration.

The title of the painting and the invocation is “The Eternal Instant,” which is a quote from Sri Aurobindo. “The eternal instant is the birth of years,” I believe is the full quote.

The eternal instant. The universe has a center, and you are standing in it. They burned Giordano Bruno to death for this idea. The center is everywhere. Everywhere you go in the universe, you are in the center. The same could be true for time. There is no moment which is on the periphery. No moment which is not harvested by eternity. Not a single heartbeat has a solitary domain, but is pulsed by all life and belongs to all families of being. Come here, then. Stand here. Even here, where Giordano stood as his body was torched by ignorant hatred. He stood wide open to immortal truth, knowing that time’s masks of past and future melt in the fire of the eternal instant. Stand here in the burning center of your own imagination and see the infinite rhythms, brilliant flourishes, and subtle dimensions of time’s masterful illusion, all orchestrated for you to come alive, for you to offer your own gift to eternity, to sharpen the convergence of every instant of your existence where inner and outer conjoin to vivify body and soul and dissolve every grasping achievement of minutes, days, and years until all that is left is the luminous essence of your true self, glowing, forever glowing, with the freshness of a new dawn and a new day to rise up and greet your immortal destiny.

Thank you so much for the time with you.

Rick: Oh, thank you.

James: You are such a brilliant listener. You create such a deep field of resonance. It’s really been wonderful to spend time.

Rick: Well, it’s been an honor spending time with you and preparing for this interview. I just feel blessed, and it has been a very profound experience for me, just having this conversation with you, so I’m really grateful.

James: Thank you.

Rick: Thank you.