James Waite Interview

Summary:

• Background: James Waite is a writer, designer, and businessman based in Berkeley, California.
• Books: He is the author of Fading in the Light and Real, Whole, Here, and Happy!
• Spiritual Journey: His spiritual journey began with a profound awakening experience at an Adyashanti Satsang in October 2006.
• Non-Duality Insights: James discusses the importance of recognizing the fusion of human and divine aspects.
• Living and Dying: He explores themes of living and dying, emphasizing the natural well-being that comes from resting in aware living.
• Weekly Meetings: James meets weekly with friends in the San Francisco Bay area to explore aware living.

Full transcript:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump.  My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week is James Waite.  Welcome James.

James: Thank you Rick.

Rick: Not to be confused with Dennis Waite who is a Brit who also talks about non-duality.  James lives in Berkeley, California, no relation to Dennis other than on the non-dual level.  I met James at the Science and Non-Duality Conference in California and he sent me a  book, “Fading in the Light, Non-Duality Insights on Living and Dying.”  It was kind of timely, James, that I read this book this week because, there’s a subtitle  here, “Aging in Peace Happens When We Rest in the Light of Aware Living.”  Timely that I read the book this week because two good friends of mine died last weekend,  unrelated to one another, one from cancer, one from heart problems, and I went and meditated  with the body of one of the friends, which a number of people were doing, he was laid  in repose.  It was a very interesting experience.  I realized why yogis go and meditate in cremation grounds and all, and why you see that famous  Rembrandt of the monk looking at a skull.  There’s something about the experience that, maybe we can talk about it during the interview,  but it stirred up some insights and feelings that I found rather profound.  But let’s talk about you.

James: Well, living yet dying.  Death is one of those things that for me has been a very powerful movement.  I’ve been alarmed at how unwilling I’ve been to live.

Rick: Hmmm. All of your life, or what?

James: I would say somewhat afraid.  Not greatly, but just in an abiding way.  There was a fair bit of fear there, Rick, I think, that started out.  I think it kind of motivated me to explore things deeply.

Rick: Yeah, there’s that line from “Old Man River,” I think it was something like,  “I can’t stand living, but I’m afraid of dying.”  Yeah, so that’s obviously the goad for many people, the slings and arrows of outrageous  fortune force us or goad us into looking to some deeper meaning.

James: Yes, I think that’s exactly what happens.  I love this entree of yours.  Is it the dog or the cat?

Rick: That was a dog.

James: Yeah, I know you have both.

Rick: They come and go during the interviews.

James: Yes, that’s lovely.  At a certain period after my, I’ll call it, “waking up event,” it’s funny, each time  I refer to it now, because to set it in time, it was in October of 2006, and I was at an  Adyashanti satsang, and he said something, I still don’t know, and in a way everything  stopped and there was a timeless recognition, which can’t even be described, other than  to say that, in my case, there was a brilliant white flash.  Nothing else can I say about it, because there’s no way it can be described.  It’s truly ineffable.  But in any case, there was, with that recognition, gradually, a recognition that all fear of  death had disappeared.  And in about two years following that, I was kind of in a long phase where I was more or  less in the absolute, just kind of experience where I had to function.  I had also physical problems.  I’d moved and a whole number of things occurred to produce a reduction or somehow take away  whatever else I had left in my ego that had some investment in being spiritual.

Rick: So in other words, you had this awakening in the Adyashanti meeting, and then you went  through a period of adjustment for several years afterwards where a lot of house cleaning  took place.  Is that what you’re saying?

James: A wrecking bar.  Or a wrecking ball, in a way.  Not that many things hadn’t already happened, because I’d had a 22-year period in an esoteric  school based on the teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.  It was an international group, and I had been pretty active in it and committed to it, taught  in it and traveled worldwide.  I lived, in fact, for eight years in Europe, in Venice, London, Greece, etc.

Rick: You were really dedicated to it.

James: I really was, yes.  It was a beautiful, beautiful thing, something I would never have been able to do, to live  a life that was so focused on beauty and art.  It appealed to me greatly because I have an arts background, and so I was able to live  abroad.

Rick: In that group, was there an emphasis on Self-remembrance throughout the day, checking  in, checking in, checking in?

James: That’s right.

Rick: The reason I ask is that Maharishi Mahesh Yogi used to tell a story about when he first came to  the West and he was doing meetings in Europe, people would come and they would talk in a  halting kind of way, like that.  After a while he said, “What’s going on?  Why are you speaking that way?”  They said, “Well, we were taught to remember the Self, and so between each word we check  back and remember the Self.”  He said, “Well, why can’t you speak fluently?”  They said, “Well, because we’re doing this.”  He said, “No, no, no, that’s not the way the Self is lived, not through some kind of  mental gymnastics.  It gets established and then normal life goes on, but it’s not a continuous act of will.”  Did you go through something like that yourself?

James: Oh yes, yes.  I was searching for the truth.  I had not had any sense of life having something more until I was maybe 38 or so.  Then I had a number of experiences where I lost two businesses, a marriage, a number  of collapses.  So I’ve had a series of collapses throughout my life.  But this was the sort of beginning catalyst event of a “in the ashes,” wondering, “What’s  this all about?  What’s the truth here?”  So I started out in search of the truth, and I came across a book in a bookstore after  taking some gestalt work and stuff like that, by a man named Nicoll, called “Commentaries  on the Teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.”  It was a five volume book.  By the time I found that, I literally wept in the bookstore.  I kissed this book after I’d read a little bit.  I thought, “This is what I’m looking for.”  I was very earnest, and it’s never left me, that earnestness, since it was, whatever,  incubated in a way, because it didn’t come from me.  It was something that just started when it needed to, the way I see it now.

Rick: Your earnestness.

James: Earnestness.  I mean, in a spiritual way, because before then I was very success-driven, material-driven.  I was an advertising agency guy, copywriter, very much into the material.

Rick: Madmen.

James: Madmen, exactly.  In fact, I recognized that whole series, I’d watched with my wife, and I recognized that  was kind of my life, very much aspects of it.  So when I went on search of the truth and I found that book, that started me in a certain  direction.  I read for a couple of years, maybe, and got more and more earnest.  One day I found a bookmark in another book, but related to Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.  He has… Ouspensky wrote several books.  To me, that was just the tune I needed to hear.  So I found this bookmark, and it was for a group which I probably will not mention, because  I don’t see any particular value in it.  It has value for people, and it was certainly valuable for me for 22 years.  So I am very thankful that in some way I was taken in that direction.  On the other hand, now in hindsight, I could have saved, quote, “myself a long way home,”  but it’s never that way for us, is it?

Rick: No.

James: One of the key tenets of this school that I joined was Self-remembered, as it was called.

Rick: And it was based on Gurdjieff and Ouspensky?

James: It was, exactly.  And on an interpretation of them, that I wonder now how close we were, or whatever.

Rick: So there’s more than one group or collection of people that affiliate with Gurdjieff?

James: Oh yes, worldwide.  And they had their time and period, maybe not going strong the way it used to.  But the school that I belong to is still going fairly strong.  It still has maybe 2,000 people in it or so, whereas when I was in it, it had like 6,000.

Rick: So you did that for 22 years?

James: Yes.

Rick: Did you find that that Self-remembrance actually was an encumbrance in a way?  Did it make you less efficient in activity, to always be Self-remembering and yet trying  to run a business or whatever?

James: Yes.  If you practiced it, it was one of remembering your Self while in the middle of talking and  while doing things, and being intentional to reach for a glass with, “I’m here, reaching  for a glass.”  A lot of what I see now as a spiritual ego, a way to do something, to become something,  in time.  I was looking for that at the time.  I mean, show me, tell me.  I wanted structure, I wanted a method.

Rick: I think the motivation is sincere, but I think that sort of practice is really  inefficient, just to express my own opinion here.  It divides the mind and it kind of creates a strain, I would say, to constantly be trying  to do one thing and another at the same time.  It diminishes efficiency and activity and in a way could actually be a spiritual impediment.  But I think that the sincerity and earnestness that you brought to it certainly, and that  I’m sure many people do, carries them forward regardless of the ineffectiveness of the practice.

James: Yes.  I don’t know whether the word is “forward,” in a sense, because in a way now I see that  there was never any place to go and there was no forward, really.  There was in my mind an idea of getting somewhere, and it gave me a forum and colleagues, and  we had wonderful dinners and beautiful experiences.  I call it, how would I call it now?  I’m going for a word here.  Well, it was a very elegant period.  If The Gatsby is popular now,  I was living The Gatsby, only in a spiritual realm, and that suited me in some way.  So I’m very thankful, yet when it came time to leave, it was very obvious that this was  no longer producing anything worthwhile for me.

Rick: Right. You hatched out of that incubator.

James: Yes, exactly.  And then when I say that, everything is in hindsight and in the story.  It’s so unreal, a story about our life, just a fabrication from the beginning.  So I look at it with a little compassion.

Rick: Yeah. Everything can be dismissed as a story, but life is full of stories.  If we want to assign causality to things, then we can.  I don’t know which is the cart and which is the horse.  It seems that a lot of times people who are ardent spiritual seekers end up having realization.  On the other hand you could say, well, they were ardent spiritual seekers because this  realization was hatching, it was dawning, and their ardency, their earnestness, was just  symptomatic of this chick that was about to break out of the egg.  That’s why they felt that way.  So I don’t know what is cause and what is effect, but there does seem to be a correlation.

James: Yes, it’s curious, isn’t it, to talk about these things?  I recognize that there’s the life of James, and the whole … I was Jim before I joined  the school, then I became James.

Rick: Oh, very … more formal.

James: Oh yes, and many members in the school changed their last name to a more, like Lancaster,  or …

Rick: Oh brother.

James: … an English kind of name, because that was what the teacher asked some to do.  That was a little before my time.

Rick: Were you Sir James by any chance?

James: No, no, no, but hey, it’s happening right now I hear, one of the people that died  has been made Sir.

Rick: That’s funny.  Interesting.  Okay, so you’re just plain old James, and you stuck with the James.  So after you left this 22-year association, what year does that bring us up to?

James: 2006.

Rick: Right around the time when you went to see Adya.

James: Yeah, yeah, within months, some old friends from the same fellowship had mentioned  something about Adyashanti.  They thought they might go on Saturday, he was speaking here in Berkeley, in Oakland,  and I said, “Well, if you go, maybe I’ll go along.”  And we debated that morning whether to even go.  We thought, “Go hiking or there?”  “Oh, let’s go see Adya.”  And actually, it wasn’t necessarily, I’m not sure, that morning, but I saw him maybe two  or three times in the next three months.  And at one of those, this particular event occurred. I wasn’t asking for it, I wasn’t  looking for it.  It wasn’t in any way, as we know, deserved or earned.  I say that because, honestly, if anything I could say that I had exhausted for myself  all the possibilities and I’d given up the search.  And it was in that giving up that the finding occurred.  And we read about this.

Rick: That’s similar to what happened to Adya himself.

James: Exactly.  You don’t do these things.  Because I’d been doing, in a sense of making, I think, pretty big efforts to remember my Self,  etc.  And I’d had some wonderful states along the way, which is beautiful and that, but I would  define a state as something that comes and goes, and beautiful as it may be, you can’t  live there.

Rick: Contrast that with your experience now.

James: Yes, yes.  It’s like right now, as I said to somebody the other day, the light is on.  It’s like, it’s on 24/7.  It’s like a switch was thrown and there is a profound, I use that word with a lot of  respect, a profound sense of being.  It’s subtle, it’s gentle, its nature is love.

Rick: Beautiful.  When you say it’s on 24/7, how about at 3 in the morning when you’re snoring like a  sailor?  Is there some light on then, metaphorically speaking?

James: Yes.

Rick: Beautiful.  Cool.

James: Yes, it just doesn’t, I mean, it can’t go away because how could it?

Rick: Right.  Well, what would happen to the universe if it did?

James: Exactly.  If anything really died, I mean, our bodies and our minds die and life obviously in a  cellular form and in time and space has its time and space, but that which is forever  or infinite or whatever, that which we are, how could it go away?  So there’s that recognition that stays.

Rick: Yeah, that’s nice.  There are a number of writings about that and not all the spiritual teachers and speakers  address it, but there are a number of traditional and contemporary accounts of the fact that  when one is really awake, then that is 24/7 and it remains through the depth of deep sleep.  There was an Indian saint named Tat Wale Baba, I sort of paraphrased him a minute ago, someone  asked him if he slept.  They meant it in the sense of, do you close your eyes and go to sleep at night?  And he said, “What would happen to the universe if I slept?”  And of course his body slept, bodies have to do that, but he went on to elaborate how  that which I am is the foundation of everything and that couldn’t sleep, but if it were  to, then the foundation would be pulled out from under, there would be no universe.

James: Yeah, yeah.  I can’t really think about it, or I have no particular, I would say, grasp.  My writing is an exploration of it on my blog, my book or books, whatever.  All they are is a continuous discovering of this, of reality, and a probing and a curiosity.  I love what Alice said in Wonderland, “It gets curiouser and curiouser.”

Rick: Nice, great.

James: I like that, it suits me.

Rick: There are a lot of nice little bits in your book.  In fact, when I read people’s books I sort of wish I could do a week-long interview where  we actually read a paragraph, talk about it, read a paragraph, talk about it.

James: Interesting.

Rick: That would be fun, but not very practical.  But here’s one thing that jumped out at me, you said, “Not only do we open, but we continue  for the rest of our life, opening, opening, to new undreamed realms where we may come  to see that our thoughts, words, and actions are not the whole of reality, that they are  an expression of the infinite nature of source or spirit.”  So I like that, opening and opening to new undreamed realms.  And it also reminds me of something Adyashanti said, I’ve quoted in a couple of interviews,  he said, “Even now with me, the mystery is just beginning, always still beginning.”

James: Oh, that’s so true.

Rick: And I consider him a very advanced soul, but it’s sweet and beautiful to hear him say that,  that it’s like always a fresh horizon that you’re exploring.

James: Yes, yes.  And Krishnamurti would call it a young mind, always having a young mind.  The mind itself being staked in memory and the past.

Rick: It might also be what the Zen people mean by beginner’s mind.

James: Yes.

Rick: When they say that.  I always used to think of that as, “Well, you’re just a neophyte, you’re a beginner,  that’s beginner’s mind.”  But I think maybe they were referring to some very profound state where you’re always in  a state of beginner’s mind.

James: It’s an occupational hazard of a rare living to not know what’s going to happen  and to occasionally have the mind suggest or get a little bit concerned about what’s  going to happen, even though there’s a deep knowing that all we do is that we exist in  uncertainty, that it’s never been otherwise.  There’s a deep understanding of that, but still the mind can get a little agitated and  want to know.

Rick: I guess that’s what minds do, I guess.

James: Yeah.

Rick: One of the things they do.  M; Yeah, they plan and generally manipulate, and the ego’s whole function is to manipulate  for outcomes that are desirable and avoid those that are not.

Rick: Wouldn’t you say that having an ego of some sort is a functional faculty that  gets us through life?  It’s like your vision or your sense of smell or your hands, it’s just a faculty, but it  kind of usurps its authority and begins to think that it’s running the show much more  than it actually possibly could.

James: Yes, yes, the identity rests there, and that’s where the, I’ll say, error, if  you will, occurs, is that there’s an innocent misplacement of identity into this egoic being  or egoic structure.  As children, I remember taking that on.  I remember as a child just looking around me, maybe I’d be eight years of age or so,  maybe ten, and wondering about the world and wanting to be liked and respected.  So I would check out what people were doing around me that got that, and I would say,  “Oh, I’ll take some of this, and I’ll take some of that.”  I even wore certain clothes because, of course, at school and high school and later on, I  got comments and respect and all the things that I thought I needed.

Rick: Sure, we all do that, especially as we’re going into adolescence, there’s this  acute kind of identity awareness, “Am I cool?  How do I look?  Is my hair getting good in the back?”,  to quote the Mothers of Invention. There’s this sort of identification with the persona.  Would you say that that’s a necessary growth stage, that you have to build up an ego before  you can dismantle it?  In other words, you have to have a solid, healthy identity structure before you can  transcend that.

James: Yes, yes, it seems that way, and I think the key would be if you’re fortunate  enough to have a healthy ego structure there, by healthy I mean not too neurotic, not psychotic.  I was fortunate that my parents were quiet and simple sort of working people, not a  lot of dreams or ambitions, either in their own life or for me.  So they didn’t push me hard other than my mother was a born-again Christian for 50 years,  and that can be quite a burden for my twin brother and I.  We used to be marched off to church three times a week.

Rick: Oh, God.  I thought I had it bad having to go once a week, and my mother wasn’t born again, she  just thought it would be good for us, but it really ruined my Sundays.

James: Yeah, yeah, it ruined my Sundays.  We lived at one time right across from the school yard, and I would be nose-pressed to  the window, kind of that idea, watching my friends across the street playing in the school  yard all day Sunday, and I couldn’t go out.  So yeah, I grew up to hate that God.

Rick: God’s no fun.

James: I couldn’t even say the word “God” for years.  It angered me.

Rick: Now in non-dual circles, even now, very often the word “God” isn’t used much,  but what is your orientation to that word or that reality?

James: I find it doesn’t appear much in my relationship to the ineffable.  Maybe I got that in a way, sort of, I’ll say out of the way, the idea of God.  Now for me the key words are things like “awareness,” which is a less freighted, it’s clearer,  I recognize it as obviously not the thing itself, but one of those words that’s a little  more transparent that you can see through it to the underlying perception.  God, to me, just because of the way I was raised, is freighted with all sorts of conditioned  stuff.

Rick: But awareness, I mean, okay, let’s start from the word “awareness.”  How do we get daffodils and dolphins and galaxies and all the marvelous, even the functioning  of a single cell if you look at it closely enough and you see what an amazing thing is  going on there.  How does that all arise from awareness, if awareness has the sort of plain, vanilla connotation  that it sometimes has?

James: Yeah, when I’m using the word “awareness”, I mean all of that.  What I will say is the unmanifest and the manifest as one.  I would take as, for want of a word, awareness, love.  Love is a big operating principle for me, in terms of how my life finds expression.  It just has to go, it has to be initiated from love and it has to flow toward love.  In other words, when I’m relating to life and my friends and people that I bump into  on the street, there’s just pretty much this love-to-love connection.

Rick: Reminds me of a Stevie Wonder song, “Love is in need of love today.”

James: There you go, you know your songs.

Rick: I do, yeah, I’m an old rock and roller.  So for you then, awareness is not plain vanilla, it’s not this flat, featureless thing or non-thing.  It’s rich with qualities of love and perhaps we could say intelligence and creativity.  It’s sort of the repository of all potentiality that we find expressing itself as this incredible,  diverse universe.  Would you say that?

James: Oh yes, yes, and again, way, way beyond what we can ever say about it.  Somewhere along the line with the awareness, I came, I think in one of my readings or something,  I read for a couple of hours every day, or at least I have historically, seems to be  tapering off because other things are starting to happen.  But in any case, affectionate awareness.  Awareness by itself seems sterile and clinical and objective and no involvement here.

Rick: Yeah, like the flat white movie screen.

James: Exactly, yeah.  And no, it’s not my experience, if you will, of awareness.  Maybe it’s just my manifestation, the way it’s happened for me, but affectionate awareness  is one and the same, affection and awareness brought together.  And that’s another way of saying love.  And I write a lot about love, or at least it seems to happen that way.  I never know what I’m going to write, if I’m going to write at a given time, and then I’m  feeling, I’m sort of moved to write something and it happens.  It literally happens.

Rick: Do you find that that’s blossoming more and more?  Like when you first had that awakening in 2006, that was the start, in a way, and then  do you find that over the last seven or eight years, there’s been a blossoming of the heart  and a welling up of love in your experience?

James: Oh yes, definitely.  And in surprising ways, again, it’s just a continuous movement.  And how it’s going to take form is curious to me, in a given time, in a given experience.  I can be walking along and have the most, again, profound exchange with a homeless person  or an executive or the range of people, and there’s this communion.  There’s communion with people.  Not necessarily even an aware one from their perspective, but we both are touched and are  touched.

Rick: My wife and I saw a nice movie last night called “Liberal Arts,” which you might  enjoy.  There was one scene in the movie where this young girl turns this guy on to classical  music, which he’d never really listened to before.  So he’s walking around the streets of New York listening to Beethoven and stuff, and  it changes his whole perspective such that everybody he encounters, he feels like it’s  someone he could be in love with.  Everyone just has this beaming, friendly, beautiful look on their face, just from his  awakening to that deeper appreciation.

James: Yes, that’s my daily experience, I would say.  And it isn’t articulated like we’re talking about it.  We might talk about, oh, I don’t know…  Usually it’s something that’s actually going on.  In other words, I don’t get into discussions about the past very much.  I don’t find it interesting.  And I don’t get into discussions about the future very much, for the same reason.  It just doesn’t seem to hold my attention very long.  So we usually just go right where we’re at, as they say in the South.  And I still find it an awkward thing to say, “Stay where you’re at,” or something like  that.  You know, that expression?  “Stay where you’re at.”

Rick: Well, there’s an old hippie expression, “He knows where it’s at.”

James: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.  So it’s lovely there.

Rick: Do you find that your experience of love seems to, maybe a synonym might be, does  it sort of spring from an inner joy?  Like there’s this blissful inner joyfulness and that somehow manifests as love in your  relationships.  It’s like you’re at the checkout counter at the supermarket or something and there’s such  an inner joy that somehow it filters through as love for the checkout person.

James: Absolutely.  And it just happens.  And you are very aware that there’s a hollow… there’s no James in the terms of an egoic  love.  All the love that I ever thought was love was coming from my ego and it was manipulative.  It wanted something, it had a co-dependency, a condition, and there’s just none of that.  It’s just kind of like a radiant thing that just goes out and it doesn’t need to have  any feedback even.  It’s nice when it happens of course, but it just emits. Like a bird singing…

Rick: Like a bird singing or like a light shining, you said before, you used the word “light,”  it’s just on 24/7.

James: Yeah, it’s just there.  And you recognize, as everybody says, when they’ve had this experience, I use the word  experience very, it’s not a sensual or a mental experience, which is what we consider to be  our experience.  I call that experiences of the six senses.  I combine the mind with the five senses in my discussions with people, to kind of get  the recognition that the physical and the mental are expressions of reality, but they’re  not the whole picture.  They’re just limited, beautiful, beautiful, wonderful, absolutely essential function on  the planet and in time and space, but to be bound up solely in them, as this is who I am  and this is what you are, is for me to limit myself and to limit you in the same process.  So we free each other a little bit more.

Rick: As I’m looking at you on Skype, my background picture on my monitor is a galaxy.  I always look at galaxies and I like to imagine all the trillions of life forms that might  dwell in those galaxies.  And yet, permeating all that is the oneness, the wholeness.  We’re just one of those little life forms in terms of our physical structure that you  just alluded to, the mind and the body and so on, the senses.  But it’s like just the tiniest of peepholes through which that wholeness experiences the  material world.  But as you say, most people are kind of caught up in the notion that that’s all they are.

James: Yeah, and beautiful as it is and mysterious.  What do we know about any of this?  We have a lot of ideas about it.  I use the example of a frog being dissected and being understood botanically, etymologically,  all the kinds of ways and sciences that they can understand a frog.  But really, what do we know about a frog?

Rick: Yeah, try putting it back together again.

James: Exactly, exactly.  And so we take our identity and our meaning and our purpose and everything from a body-mind  based sense of reality, and all sort of well and good, because yes, we do have an instinct  to survive and indeed prosper.  But it’s just limited, and there’s so much more in the actual and in the real.  That’s another area that I talk about a lot, too, I think, is reality.

Rick: What do you say about it?

James: That’s a good question.  What do I say about reality?  Well, of course, you can only say about reality.  And so words, I’m often putting caveats in there, like words are just words.  Ideas are just conceptual framework for something that exists outside of the concept.  I point toward perceptions as perhaps something as a word, again as a limited word, but that  might help us penetrate a little more deeply into the stuff of our being.  I can use words like nature, like our natural  well-being is founded in reality, our joy, our vitality, all the beingness.  I go for words here because I’m trying to describe something that is totally indescribable,  And being is one of the words that gets a little closer.

Rick: Yeah.  Ordinarily I wouldn’t ask someone to describe reality…

James: We’ll come back to that too a little more.

Rick: Yeah.  Ordinarily I wouldn’t ask somebody, “Well, describe reality,” but you said you talked  about it a lot, so you kind of set yourself up for that one.

James: I did, didn’t I?  I do talk around it.  I discover it.  I discover what it is, moment to moment.  It’s not anything I can say, “Here’s reality, there’s reality.”  It’s just a discovering right now, moment to moment.  It’s not a description of it.  There’s no describing of it in terms of material content in reality.  Reality has its own power, its own existence.  Its gravitas.  I like that word, gravitas.

Rick: There’s a verse from the Gita that says, “The unreal has no being, the real never  ceases to be.  The final truth about them both has been known by the knowers of reality.”  But it’s kind of reminding of the old analogy of the ocean and the fish.  You ask fish, “Well, tell us about the ocean,” and most fish are going to say, “What ocean?  I don’t know about any ocean.”  And then some fish, a minority, are going to say, “I’m looking for it, man.  I’ll tell you about it when I find it.”

James: Isn’t that funny?

Rick: Yeah, and then even a smaller subset of fish are going to say, “Well, basically  I am the ocean.”  This little fish thing is just kind of moving around in it as a point of perspective, but  it’s only a point, and the reality of the ocean is vast and all-encompassing.

James: Yes, indeed.  We go silent, Rick.  It’s all sacred, and any time we approach the sacred we must somehow collapse into silence.  At least that’s my more and more abiding relationship to reality.  It’s an indwelling, I like that phrase, an indwelling that’s indescribable.

Rick: I was listening to a recording this week of a Buddhist teacher, and she was talking in  the story about these two Buddhist monks that met in their garden, and they just sat together  for about three or four hours or something, just sitting.  Finally, after three hours or so, one of them pointed to a tree and said, “They call that  a tree.”  Then they both just burst into laughter.

James: Beautiful.  I think those are the most profound times many of us recognize, when really not anything  special, or whatever was said, but that we just simply resided in our awareness.  There was this resting in awareness, as Adya calls it.  It becomes, I don’t say a refuge, but it’s the constant in an aware living.  There’s always a resting in awareness.

Rick: Yeah, the ocean is always the ocean, whether or not it rises in waves.  Sometimes there’s waves, sometimes there’s no waves, but the ocean is there.

James: Yes, yes.  I’m surprised sometimes.  Even this morning, I had a little confusion about the time.  We were Central Time, Pacific Time, etc.  So I had very little time to get ready for this interview, but there was nothing to get  ready.  Some egoic thing was saying, “You need to be able to sit and read quietly, and maybe  sit in the garden,” and all of the kinds of things that maybe in some kind of a speculative  way one might want to do.  So that isn’t the way it happened.  The recognition, though, is that that inner peace, that core of our being, is not disturbed  at all.

Rick: I think you’ve done your homework.

James: Well, you know, yes, that’s a good way to put it, but there is nothing to do  but be.

Rick: Yeah. But you’ve lived a life which has enlivened the ground of being, so that you’re  not just tossed about in the winds.  You’re established in being.  There’s another verse in the Gita, it’s basically “yogasthah kuru karmani,” which is “established  in yoga,” or “established in being, perform action.”  Most people are just not established, so they’re just performing action, performing action,  and it’s all this agitation without any kind of foundation to it.

James: Yes, yes.  I’m coming to see reaction coming from programming, from conditioning.  I see that going on, but what sees it is not involved in it in terms of attached to it,  or attached to an outcome.  So there’s this simultaneity, I sometimes say to people, it’s like my mind is like a  TV set that’s on in the corner, or a dog curled up in the corner.  But there’s a watching, there’s just a simple watching that is non-judgmental, among other  things loving.

Rick: But it’s not something you’re doing, right?  You’re not like you’re being on your toes, “I better keep watching here.”  It’s just kind of a “nothing could shake it” kind of thing.

James: That’s right.  It’s effortless.  It’s happening.  It’s not anything to do with a me or a James that would command it.

Rick: So that’s where practices get born sometimes, which can be actually a little  unnatural.  Let’s say you might describe your experience, well there’s just this watching, and people  hear that and think, “Oh, that’s what I should do.  Okay, I’m going to start watching.”  Then they make a practice out of it, and all day long they’re doing what you used to do  during those 22 years, “Oh, I’ve got to reach for the salt shaker, but I better watch.”  There’s this kind of unsettledness.

James: Oh yes, we had exercises.  In fact, one time in the school, Self-remembering, the teacher was encouraging people to have  these little clickers, people coming in the door.  If you remembered your Self, you’d buy this clicker, and you’d click your Self, and at  the end of the day you could see how many clicks you got, 200 or 300 or whatever.  You could see how anything we do takes us away from what we are, ultimately, although  it all seems to be what happens, so there’s no need to in any way beat oneself up about  those efforts.

Rick: For all I know, people who did what you did, who are doing what you did, maybe  that’s leading them to the point where it will become second nature and not anything  you need to do.  Obviously, that’s true of a great many relative skills.  You play enough tennis and after a while you don’t think, you just know how to do it.  So who knows?  But it does seem to be a little unnatural.  It falls into the category of turning a description into a prescription.  Someone describes their state and that’s mistaken as a prescription.  People try to mimic it by doing all sorts of practices which are reminiscent of what  they’ve described, but it’s far cry from the actual living of it as that person described  it.

James: Yes, it happens that the key word there is “happens.”  Anything else outside of it, I’ll say grace, occurring where one has this simple, usually  sudden, for me sudden, recognition of existing, of being.  I fall into the wordless so quickly because it’s impossible to describe, and yet because  it’s so simple and so obvious and so real, how do we get words and descriptors and measurements?  This is why science can, as long as science doesn’t get closer and start to connect with  the non-dual, it’s just going to stay in its own realm, just like the mind stays within  the labyrinth of the mind.  We did that.  This was a very intelligent school that I was in, very highly intellectual, lots of  very well-educated people, very well-traveled, just my kind of people, I thought.  It gave my spiritual ego a real boost.  I was something noble.  That’s where the appeal was.  If you join and are a member of this fellowship, you have status and you bring honor to your  family.

Rick: There are a lot of spiritual groups that feel that way.  Ours is the best and my guru is the best, and because I’m part of this group I’m somehow  the cream of humanity.  There are dozens and dozens and dozens of groups in which the people feel the very same thing,  and all these other people have kind of lost it to some extent, they don’t really know  what’s going on, but boy, am I fortunate to be in the in-crowd.

James: Yeah, yeah, yeah.  And we judged, and I say judged, everybody who was not, as being life, we called that  life, and sort of like in deferential terms, life doesn’t understand, life doesn’t have  the grace we do.  We got a little buzz going on, I don’t know whether…

Rick: My wife is running the blender, she forgot to close the door.

James: This is life at home.

Rick: This is life going on.

James: That’s beautiful.

Rick: Dogs, blender.

James: It’s all good.

Rick: Yeah.  There’s one thing I wanted to discuss with you, which just came up this week, and I thought,  “Well, I’ll just talk about this with James, because I think we’ll get some juice out of  it.”  And that is that I get a certain amount of flack, and I got some this week from people  on the BatGap chat group, for talking about levels and stages and progress and things  like that.  And I’ll just set this up for you and see what you say in response, but I can talk about  the homogenous, indivisible totality of reality with the best of them.  But, within that, obviously, there is diversity.  Somehow diversity is contained within the wholeness.  And if you want to, you can take any diverse thing and boil it down to wholeness, just  as a physicist could take an apple and bring it down to the level of a unified field, but  that doesn’t completely negate or deny the existence of the apple.  So where I’m going with this is that there’s a paradoxical situation in which, on the one  hand, yes, there are no levels, there are no stages, there is no progress.  Reality is what it is.  It’s completely all-encompassing, all-engulfing totality.  But, on the other hand, practically speaking, paradoxically speaking, there’s always this  paradox, we do go through stages of development.  There are levels.  I mean, obviously, physically speaking, there’s the gross obvious, there’s the molecular,  there’s the atomic, there’s the subatomic.  There are levels of nature’s functioning, or at least there apparently are levels of  nature’s functioning.  And so you can, in the same breath, say that there’s no such thing as levels or progress  or anything else, and yet say that there are.  And even in your experience, like that quote I read earlier about always going deeper and  deeper, and you had a nice one from Rumi here in which he said, “Fall down and down in always  widening rings of being.”  So address that, if you would.

James: It’s a curious thing because we do live in paradox.  We actually live in paradox.  We want resolution.  Something wants to come to some conclusion, especially the mind, always looking for conclusions,  although it being binary, it’s totally unable to conclude anything.  So, there is this diverse human experience, and then there’s this even more diverse, I’ll  say, divine experience.  And again, I’m using experience without… when I say divine experience, I mean the timeless,  and that isn’t experience through the body-mind, but it is, in some way, recognized and known.  Let’s say known.

Rick: And it’s known by the fact that  there is a body-mind.  It’s mysterious, as you say, but although we don’t experience it the way we experience  books and desks and lightbulbs, there is this sort of innate knowingness which seems  to be made possible by the existence of a body-mind.

James: Let’s just explore that a bit.  It does seem to be made possible in a sense that I can, in my six senses, engage in this  kind of life in time and space.  But I just wanted to explore the idea that when the body-mind is no more, when that kind  of death occurs, that what remains is this same awareness.  So there’s not a condition.  There’s no conditions related to awareness, in that sense.  So what is immortal, what the unborn and the born… our unborn nature continues, while  our born nature will pass in time.  So I just wanted to add a bit.

Rick: Actually I wrote down one of the sentences in your book, you said, “Death is the end  of the dream called me and mine, you and yours.”  We started out this interview talking a bit about death, so maybe we’ll come back to that.  I wanted to take exception to that a little bit, because, if the whole idea, like the Gita  says here, “As a man casting off worn-out garments takes other new ones, so the dweller  in the body casting off worn-off bodies takes others that are new,” if that’s the way it  works then I don’t think merely dying frees one from the dream.  It just perhaps relegates you to a more subtle level of the dream for a while and then you  re-engage with a more concrete level of the dream once again, until eventually there’s  enough depth of realization that the dream is seen through, once and for all.

James: You know, that’s kind of the idea of karma, it seems to me.

Rick: Karma, reincarnation, the whole deal.

James: Yeah, and all I can understand about that is that that’s an idea, like everything  that we’re wording.  From an abiding aware perspective, it’s an idea.  I really can’t say anything more about karma and reincarnation.  I do find that it could well be a source of comfort that we have, like when I was being  raised as a Christian, I became a born-again Christian at one time, when I was like 14,  and you would go to heaven if you accepted Jesus as your personal savior, close quote.  And so there was solace there, even for a 14-year-old.  And as we get older, we do tend to reach for some kind of sense that what we are is going  to go to heaven or continue.  There’s a lot about it.  Let me say that it goes into the realm of belief, and what I understand about beliefs  for myself is that they’re just ideas.  In other words, I don’t have any beliefs.  I don’t function.  I don’t need a belief, in fact.  I’m wanting to deal with facts, with the actual and the factual, and belief gets in the way.  It could be a wishful thing.  Even my beliefs are going to be conditioned.

Rick: Well yeah, but listen, the word “belief” usually denotes reference to something we  haven’t experienced.  And if someone said to you, “Do you believe in apples?”,  that would be an absurd question because yeah, I’ve experienced apples, I eat apples, I know  all about apples.  So if someone says, “Do you believe in reincarnation?”  We say, “Well, I don’t know.  It sounds like just a belief to me.”  But actually, Adyashanti, when he had his awakening, he remembered a whole lot of past  lives.  And one of the standard siddhis in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras is the yogi remembers all his  past lives, or a whole bunch of them or something.  So it can be a solace, I’m sure, and billions of Hindus take it as a solace, but it could  also actually, possibly, be the reality of the way the universe works.

James: It could be.

Rick: Yeah, it could be.  I’m not insisting that it is, because I certainly can’t prove it, but actually researchers have  done a lot of work on it and interviewed little kids who remember the village they lived  in and all the artifacts and all this stuff.

James: It hasn’t been part of my spiritual path.  I never was attracted to India, a lot of the things.  It seems useful from a non-dual perspective to recognize the mind and its limitations.  If I see where something is coming from and recognize that it’s limited and that I cannot  know so many things, in fact I don’t need to know, and in fact I’m quite happy to live  in the unknown, which is where we all live actually.  I think karma is something that can be worked through.  In terms of waking up, I think certain ones like Teresa of Avila, I can’t quote these  people so well right now.  I used to know a lot more than I do now, frankly.  I’ve lost a lot of what I’ve learned and I’m jettisoning, it seems.  I wake up in the morning and something else is gone.  If we’re raised as a monk, for instance, and we “wake up”, we tend to see the figures of  our Christian heritage.  I don’t know about Adya, but I do know that he was a practicing Zen Buddhist for many  years and the nature of that does have a history, it seems, of seeing lifetimes.  It’s all just interesting reporting of these things.  It’s pretty surprising and interesting, isn’t it?

Rick: Yeah. The reason I find it interesting is that I don’t think that a deeper experience of the  universe necessarily precludes a detailed understanding of it.  This quote I read earlier about deeper and deeper opening and discovery of unknown realms  and so on and so forth, there’s a whole world of possibilities out there, or in there as  the case may be.  All these things which philosophers and spiritual people have been debating and speculating  over for millennia could be seen as valid directions for exploration or theories which  could be scientifically, in a spiritual sense, experientially explored and their truth or  falsehood ascertained one way or the other.  Whether angels exist, whether reincarnation exists, all this stuff, I think it can be  experientially known.  It may be icing on the cake.  The real cake is this living awareness that you’ve been referring to, but nothing wrong  with a little icing.

James: I hear you.  What I can know is the false.  I feel like I can know that when it reveals itself to me as being false.  But the truth, I’m not able in any way to express it, although I know it.  R

Rick: Right

James: And I don’t feel like it’s a coming to know.  In other words, the truth is always of this moment and it’s always just here and simply  revealing itself in obvious, very obvious.  What it is, that’s the mystery.

Rick: You’re referring to absolute truth here, which is unmanifest and ineffable and  just inexpressible in words.  The kind of things I’m alluding to in the last few minutes are relative truths.  If there’s reincarnation, if there are angelic beings, if all this stuff exists, those are  relative truths, which are ultimately unreal.  I acknowledge that.  They’re ultimately made of the same stuff that everything is, which is pure being.  In a sense, nothing ever happened, nothing ever manifested, if we want to take it to  that level.  But we’re living life and life involves all kinds of adventures and whatnot, which we can again  and again, as often as we want, we can boil it down to pure nothingness, but we have to  live life.  So if a good friend dies or something, I can say, “Fine, it’s all nothing, nothing ever  happened, he was never born, he never died.”  But it’s also interesting to ponder, in a relative sense, as unreal as it ultimately  may be, but it’s relatively real, what happened to his soul?  Is he going to be reborn?  Where is he now?  What does he know now that he didn’t know when he was alive?  What is his experience?  That kind of stuff is kind of interesting.  Maybe some people would consider it a distraction, but I find it interesting.

James: Yeah, and I think I have, and I can, find it interesting in a given situation.  There’s always some underlying knowing or recognition about the relativity of these  things and just that, and that doesn’t go away.  So one is always seeing the world, if you will, and functioning in the world from that  place and everything is relative to that place.  In a functional way, all of these things exist in a certain kind of relative way.

Rick: Yeah, so that’s my basic perspective too.  It’s just that this absolute knowing doesn’t negate all the relative knowings or all the  relative explorations.  You don’t say to your wife, “Well, we’re not going to watch movies anymore or even talk  to each other because it’s all absolute.”  You engage in those experiences.

James: You know, it’s so important to recognize that there is the human and the divine, and  that they’re fused.  They’re not separate, and we isolate ourselves from the divine, from our divinity, through  the processes of the way we’re raised and culturally and psychologically conditioned,  etc.  That isolation is a produced, fabricated non-entity.  We never actually are separate, but we think we are.  There’s that lovely comedian Eddie Izzard, who makes references to, “He’s going to be  Napoleon in my head,” and everything is “in my head.”  That’s a good way to see how the mind, which is totally incapable of ever comprehending  oneness because in its nature, in its structure, it’s binary, it can only sort down to two,  and it can never come to one, and one is everything.  So the mind, putting it this way, the mind has no, sharp as it is, it has no actual direct  way of knowing anything real.  It can only know itself, its realm, the realm of the mind.  And beautiful as that is, and thank God for it, we miss our divine nature if we reside

Rick: Yeah.  There’s a beautiful quote from Rumi, I’m just trying to find it here.  Something about, maybe it will come up, something about that we’re not a drop containing the  ocean, we’re the ocean containing a drop, something like that.  Here it comes, never mind, keep talking.

James: Oh, well.

Rick: Oh, here it is.  “You are not a drop in the ocean, you are the entire ocean in one drop.”  So you are the ocean, but living as a drop.  And there’s this beautiful phrase that’s repeated over and over again in the Rig Veda, they  keep saying the absolute and the relative are interwoven, warp and woof.  If you know the way weaving works, the threads go one way and the threads go the other way,  so that’s the warp and the woof, but there’s this complete interpenetration.

James: Yes, I’m in the tapestry business, not to get into that, but warp and woof, or  warp and weft.

Rick: Maybe that’s the word, weft.

James: Weft.  Well, woof I think comes from an older phrase.

Rick: I see.

James: Yes, it’s a good way to look at life, and if you think of the vertical threads,  which are the warp threads, which are the structural threads of a tapestry, as them  being the divine, and then the horizontal or weft threads are the ones that go through  the vertical, and they make up the picture.  They could be considered to be the human, the manifestation of the divine.  So the warp and weft are co-mingled, and together they produce the tapestry, life, however we  want to put it.

Rick: That’s nice.  And you know how you say you were a religious fundamentalist in your teens.  People seem to have a tendency to want to lock into a particular perspective and make  it absolute.  There’s some security in that.  It happens even in so-called non-dual spiritual circles, where people take this absolute perspective,  largely based on understanding, in my estimation, not so much grounded in experience, and then  kind of use that as a fundamentalist cudgel to beat people over the head with.

James: Yeah. It’s fear-based.  Ultimately, we have these deep fears, existential fears.  Once we start to become somebody, that’s the initiation of the fear.  Before then we have no fear, because we know what we are.  And that knowing, while it’s not articulated, it has no qualities to it, especially no fear.  But we take on this fear and then it goes from there.  We want certainty to assuage our fear, our doubts.  Somebody has said that the most fundamental believers are the most fearful.

Rick: I think you’ve got something, yeah.   They’re kind of desperately trying to defend their doubt, because they’re on very shaky  ground.

James: And they know it.

Rick: Yeah, at some level they know it.  I think there’s a sort of an unconsciousness about it.  And the fear is externalized too.  It’s definitely an inner fear, but it’s externalized that we’re afraid of this threat over here  to our integrity and that thing over there, and everything is seen as a challenge because  there’s no foundation.  There’s a saying in the Upanishads, “Certainly all fear is born of duality.”

James: There you go.  Either way, as soon as we enter the dual aspect of our nature, solely, exclusively, because  that’s the way it happens, we end up in uncertainty or wanting certainty.  We end up estranged from ourself in some way, and we don’t even know what that is, as we’re  saying.  It’s something very in our subconscious, but nonetheless it functions and it produces a  life that’s full of conflict.

Rick: You know how when the space shell comes in from outer space, as it’s slowing  down there’s a big boom as it breaks the sound barrier in the slowing direction, and then  when something’s getting faster there’s a big boom as it breaks the sound barrier in  the speeding up direction.  It’s like a lot of people on the spiritual path when they get to the threshold of the  Absolute, so to speak,  the gatekeeper is fear.  The fear is born of duality, but on the return journey sometimes that same fear is encountered  and then in successful cases crossed over and then one becomes fearless.

James: The idea of successful, I would just kind of park that a little bit, because I don’t  feel in any way waking up is a success.

Rick: Did I use the word success?

James: Yeah, you said successful.  It doesn’t matter.

Rick: I’m just riffing along.  That’s the word that came out.

James: Exactly, exactly.  We’re just having this lovely discussion.  It’s sort of coming into our inheritance, but we don’t succeed at achieving it.  That’s the key word, achieving.  All my ambitions, my spiritual ambitions, even the idea of paths, well, they all have  their place.  I had mine, you have yours, we all have the apparent paths.  It turns out that we’re really going nowhere and have never left.  It’s functionally true.  It’s like, did we ever leave?  In my head, no.

Rick: Well, you know that T.S.  Eliot quote, didn’t you quote it in your book at some point?

James: I did, yes.

Rick: Yeah, can you repeat it?

James: No, it’s there.

Rick: Something about coming back to the place from which we started and knowing the  place for the first time.

James: Exactly.

Rick: It’s from Burnt Norton.  Yeah, it’s a great quote.

James: I keep coming back to that because it doesn’t go away.  It’s like that awareness of never having left and never having done anything.  The inane ideas of past and future.  I mean, inane, they just make no real, I won’t say sense at all, because in time and space,  sensually as we experience it, we do create and experience time and space.

Rick: Yeah, try booking a plane ticket without it.

James: Exactly.  You have to function in time and space.  I must say it’s taken me, and it’s an ongoing thing, to learn, not learn to function, but  in the moment, to see what the moment is asking for.

Rick: That’s nice.

James: And the responsibility, the response-ability to the moment comes from a recognition of  what is asked for, so to speak.  So you never learn anything, you never acquire any, it’s not like riding a bike where you  learn your balance.  In the world of time and space, we have to learn our functions.  But in aware living, the functions continue, of course, and they must, but you never know.  You never know what you’re going to do, and then you find it’s happening.  It happens, we go for walks, I take my friends hiking and whatever, or in the city, urban  hiking sometimes.  And the things that happen, and it happens with all of us if we’re just kind of there,  but you never know, in these most beautiful opportunities, you’re walking by and you’re  admiring a garden and somebody says, “Come on in and I’ll show you my garden.”  And you’re like, “Gosh, here we go!”  And so, kind of like wandering in this garden, I don’t plan my day, I don’t have a plan for  anything.  It’s not necessary, except when it is, to catch a plane.

Rick: Yeah, but even if you lived a life in which a lot of planning was necessary,  you were running a business and had all sorts of responsibilities and employees and taxes  and all this other stuff, that wouldn’t preclude living in the moment or dwelling in being,  or however we want to phrase it.  Your particular relative expression is a little bit more footloose and fancy free than some  other ones might be, but whatever the lifestyle, I think this can be lived in the midst of  it.

James: Oh yes, oh yes.  I could be a brain surgeon, working under all kinds of laws.

Rick: 747 pilot or something like that.

James: Yeah, definitely.  I’ve been fortunate and blessed to have my own business, in terms of just this one aspect,  for 20 years.  And it’s allowed me to attend to it minimally and to, in my case, pursue my spiritual much  more earnestly and fully.  I’m sort of a semi-monk for years.  I was able to live that way and I needed that space and time to collapse into my essence.  Who knows how these things work, but while I wasn’t drawn to meditation per se, I could  look at much of my life, in the quiet shuffling around that occurred, as rather monastic.

Rick: There can be a place for that too.  Some people say, “Oh, nobody needs to go off to a monastery,” but literally speaking, I  think that can be of great value to people for whom it is appropriate.  There can be a time and a place for that kind of thing.  And then there’s a time and a place for coming out of it perhaps.  There’s this fellow, Francis Bennett, whom I interviewed, and you may know him from the  interview at least.

James: He prompted me to write you.

Rick: Oh, great.  And I met you anyway.  I know you from the SAND Conference.  He was in a monastery for 30 years, various monasteries, and then he had this awakening.  And then, at a certain point, he just felt this inner prompting, “Okay, it’s time for me to  leave.”  And now he’s much more in the thick of things in the world, but with that foundation that  you’ve been talking about.

James: Yes, that’s what seems to be happening now, is that while there was a contraction  period, even after the waking up part, there was some contraction and I would say residence  in the absolute that was absolutely beautiful.  Not anything can be said about that other than we all know it.  And, at a certain point, and it was thanks to Adya’s help, we do need each other at points  to point out things and say, “Try this.  This looks like that.”  And Adya was very helpful.  But there’s a moving out into life, into complexity, but never the loss, as you say, of that ground  of the absolute and the simple and the one.  And it’s curious how that’s happening.  I’ve got some particular interesting things that are going on just in the last week that  haven’t occurred heretofore that seem to be saying, as Adya says, that if you rest in  awareness, life will produce for itself whatever it needs.  It looks after itself.  We call it trust, some call it courage, but never knowing what’s going to happen is a  very real, beautiful, exquisite edge of one’s being to be inhabiting.

Rick: Makes it interesting, doesn’t it?

James: Oh, it’s fresh, it’s alive, it’s vital.

Rick: I think life gives you what you need even if you don’t rest in awareness, but it  can be a school of harder knocks, because there’s no sort of anchor.

James: Oh, we need our suffering, don’t we?  I needed my suffering.  I needed all of it.  Now I would say maybe I might be able to use it, use the suffering a little more, because  from some perspective, I’m not engaged in it.  In other words, I can have pain in my knee and not suffer it, because I can just accept  the pain instead of getting into a lot of imagination of, “Oh, poor me,” and get freighted  with all that.  So there’s a more clarity in terms of, I’ll say there’s a moment-to-moment transformation  of suffering that is only to say that there’s an acknowledgment of what it is, precisely,  that seems to be wanting to suggest that I should be worried or angry or create a problem  out of it in some way.

Rick: One thing that comes to mind when you talk about the spontaneous unfolding of  life and even pre-awakening that whatever happens is meant to happen in some way, to  me again points to the intelligence of life and the evolutionary direction that life takes.  It’s like this river that we’re all being carried along in towards, the adjectives are kind  of clunky, but greater and greater, or higher and higher, evolution, deeper and deeper,  whatever you like.  Some are swimming against the current, “Oh, God, where is this taking me?  Let me hold on to this stick,” and others are flowing with it.  But whichever way you do it, you’re up against an invincible force, which you might as well  flow with it.

James: Thankfully, reality is at least 51%, and illusion could be the other 49%, because  illusion is extremely powerful, but reality is more powerful and it’s already won.  It’s already over, there.  So it is all good.  We can have all our illusions and suffer illusory suffering and all of that.  Fortunately, none of it gets real.

Rick: Yeah, and that can seem rather glib if you’re talking to a Holocaust survivor  or a Sandy Hook parent or something like that.  But it does seem that the universe is a school of hard knocks.  It’s not always going to be pretty.  Asteroids crash into inhabited planets every day in this universe probably and everybody  gets incinerated, but somehow in the big, big, big picture of things, it’s all good.  Everything God does is for the best.

James: It is all good.  You can see that in a moment-to-moment way just by tuning in, say, to nature.  Nature is immediately accessible because it is our nature.  It’s not that nature outside.  It’s nature, nature, nature.  Again, everything is one and everything is intertwined.  Nature is a wonderful teacher and illustrator of harmony, of a kind of innate peacefulness.  Now and then there’s a little cat fight, so to speak, in nature and there’s suffering  comes from it, but it spikes and then it goes back to a lovely kind of thing and then it  spikes.  That seems to be the nature of things, to have some disharmony, or imperfection, amid  greater perfection.

Rick: I’ll tell you a little story that will be kind of entertaining here.  There was a king and he had a chief minister who was his trusted advisor.  The minister was a very wise and philosophical man and just about anything that anybody brought  to his attention, the minister would say, “Everything that God does is for the best.”  This really annoyed some people.  There was one woman whose child died and the minister said, “Everything that God does is  for the best.”  Some kind of tricky people decided to trap the minister in this game.  They waited for their opportunity and one day the king was having his manicure and the  barber cut the king’s finger.  It was bandaged and so they went and ran off to the minister and said, “Hey, what do you  think about this?  The king’s finger got cut.”  The minister said, “Everything God does is for the best.”  So they ran back to the king and said, “Hey, your minister said that this was for the best,  that you cut your finger.”  The king got really mad and said, “Throw the rascal in jail.”  So they threw the minister in jail.  Then the king went off on a hunting party and while he was off on this hunting party  in the jungle, he and his companions got captured by some aboriginals and they decided they  were going to sacrifice this king.  They wanted to do a human sacrifice.  So they were preparing him for the sacrifice and they discovered, “Oh, he has this cut  on his finger.  We can’t sacrifice him.  He’s not perfect.  He’s not the right specimen.”  So they let him go and the king was greatly relieved.  He immediately thought of his minister and he went rushing back and went to the jail  and apologized profusely to the minister for having jailed him.  The minister said, “No, no.  He said, ‘Everything God does is for the best.  If I hadn’t been in jail, I would have gone with you on this party and they would have  sacrificed me.'”

James: Yes, yes.  That’s a lovely story.  It illustrates something very true to our experience.  We can actually see all of this.  There’s a similar kind of story about a man who has a horse and a son.  Well, actually, the son breaks his leg and they say, “Oh, woe is me.  The poor guy, he’s broken his leg.”  But then along comes the army and they’re recruiting and the guy’s got a broken leg  so he can’t ride and so he gets passed over.  It’s a longer story.

Rick: Yeah, there’s like four or five different segments.  It’s always the same.  And the old man keeps saying, “We’ll see.”

James: Yeah, right.  And what he keeps saying too is, “You never know what’s good or bad,” as I recall in my  memory.  But that’s so true, isn’t it?

Rick: And so, if we take that phrase, “Everything God does is for the best,” and if we understand  that to mean that the universe is one big evolution machine, then all these dramas,  all this stuff that keeps unfolding, that sometimes seems tragic and sometimes seems  wonderful and so on and so forth, it’s all part of this vast cosmic unfolding.  So, it’s just marvelous to contemplate, in my opinion.

James: Yes, yes, and if we can, I’ll say, contemplate it from an absolute place, and we can, and  we do, and we are, it’s given context and meaning within the relative.  There’s things that we’re here to enjoy or to endure or to experience in whatever way  that that happens.  And where would we be without our suffering?  We wouldn’t be alive, frankly.  We couldn’t have any experience in the body-mind without being born under gravity.  And just breathing can be hard.  Do you ever get sick with pneumonia and you realize just the effort to breathe can be  hard.  And in fact, ultimately, gravity wins.

Rick: Well, you know, Shakespeare said, “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women  merely players.”  And if we’re in, let’s say, the play, Julius Caesar, and if we forgot that it was a play  and we thought that we were really Julius Caesar, and then it’s like, “Oh, God, all  these people are coming to stab me.”  And if you were Brutus, you’d think, “Oh, I’m going to stab my best friend here.”  The whole thing becomes very serious.  But if you can regain your memory that, “Oh, it’s just a play,” then the whole thing actually  becomes a lot lighter, more enjoyable.

James: And there’s nobody invested in the play.  You are literally the actor.  And so the acting that’s going on is not me-centered.  There’s a selfless manifestation.  It comes from a selfless kind of place.

Rick: And if my character dies in this play, that’s just the role it’s playing.  It’s not the end.

James: Oh, gosh, no.  Death becomes at our elbow.  I studied Michel de Montaigne quite a bit at one time.  One of the earliest essayists.  He was a contemporary of Shakespeare in the 1550s, in around there.  And he was the first person to, we’ll say, invent the essay.  And meaning to essay something is to,  like with gold, they’ll assay gold to this date, to contour the makeup of it.  So he chose as his subject human nature, his human nature, his experience.  And he followed it in long lines of friendship and all sorts of wonderful things.  Michel de Montaigne’s essays are a terrific introduction to our human nature and our divine  from the 1550s.

Rick: And why do you bring them up?

James: Well, I’ve lost the track of why I brought him up.

Rick: We’re talking about the play and getting lost in it and forgetting that one is merely an  actor versus keeping that memory and just enjoying the play.  Then somehow that stimulated you to bring his name up.

James: Yeah.  And you know, it still doesn’t particularly come back to me what the relevance was of  Michel de Montaigne.

Rick: Maybe it’ll come back.  Just that maybe something to do with the exploring of our life.  It’s a lovely opportunity that we have, to explore all of these things, and to live them.  To live, just to live.  Oh, I know what it was.  It was connection to death.  And Michel de Montaigne, he talked about death being at his elbow.  And he talked about, he never left home, and he lived in a fortified place that I’ve been  to.  I’ve been to the tower where he wrote in France, in southern France.  But he would leave home, he would say goodbye to everybody as if he wasn’t going to be coming  back.  And there were wars, civil wars going on.

Rick: So there was a good chance he wouldn’t come back.

James: There was a good chance.  Mortality then, the average lifespan, his best friend had died with the plague, etc.,  etc.  So death was more of a constant.  And he introduced me to kind of, because I’ve always sort of had a little curiosity about  death.  Not in a morbid way.  But what is it?  What’s true here?  What’s the truth of it?  And there’s no fear whatsoever of death coming from, and when you recognize your infinite  nature.  And it isn’t like a feel-good thing.  It isn’t.  Because if it stays just as, yeah, that’s nice to remember, that’s good.  It is a consolation.  But it’s a truth.  It’s a natural fact.  And the fact of it, is where the juice is.

Rick: Experientially, you’re identifying with that which doesn’t die.

James: That’s right.

Rick: Instead of that which does.

James: That’s right.  And with that, as Montaigne would say, keep death at your elbow.  It’s useful.  Everything is going to end as your body-mind experience.  It is finite.

Rick: Yeah.  You know, Amma, the hugging saint, she always says, “You never know, your next breath may  be your last.”  She said, “We should live like a bird perched on a branch that might break at any time.”  And she, too, is not being morbid.

James: It’s not a morbid subject.  It’s a life-giving subject to take anything, really, and go into it deeply.  Any profound subject, say, and go into it deeply, will lead you to life’s essence.  But death is a particularly powerful trail.

Rick: Yeah.  Well, you know, I started this interview referring to my friends that died last weekend.  One of them, he didn’t know he was dying.  He had hepatitis and liver cancer, and he put up a few YouTube videos, which were quite  interesting, talking about his life.  He gave some talks here in town.  I went and visited with him, and a lot of people gave him a lot of love.  And then, after he died, his body was laid in his apartment for a day or two, and people  were going there and just sitting or meditating or something.  I went and did that.  It was just this deep impression of the fact that that which he was hadn’t died, couldn’t  die, and the sense of the freedom.  Again, I tend to be a little esoteric in this realm, but the sense of the freedom that he  was now experiencing in contrast to the constraint he might have been experiencing before he  died and the pain that he might have identified with and so on.  I don’t know, somehow afterwards, just walking around, looking at people, I was seeing them  as dead people who happened to still be animated.

James: Yeah, That’s the fact.

Rick: It’s like there was a sort of an inner spirit animating their bodies, but those bodies were  as good as dead.

James: Yeah.  No, I mean, it’s simultaneously so.  We’re passing in time and space and in experience.  All of that is passing.  It comes and it goes until a point where it doesn’t come or go.  What is left is that which does not come and go, which is actually the very spark of our  nature, this thing that’s right now visiting on Skype, not to be limited there, the whole  thing.

Rick: Right.  It’s a universal fire.

James: Yeah.  And we have our song, “we strut and fret our hour upon the stage, and then are heard no  more,” as Shakespeare said.  This is great beauty.  And all of a sudden, the stock goes up.  Our stock goes up in terms of, we look at each other and our friends.  After somebody has passed, a good friend, we were with a man years ago, my wife and  I, we were with him very closely.  I nursed him until he died.  There’s a great gift that he left us, that was the beginning of another recognition.  And I know, both Ella and I, my wife, were profoundly affected by not as much his life,  because we didn’t know him much before that, as his death.  So not to be afraid of these things, and not to feel that we need to build some kind of  life-continuing story.  Because our life, it isn’t a story.  This is not a story.  This does not need any consolations and good feelings about it.  It’s fine when they occur, but all I’m saying is that it is all good.  It truly is all good.  And life is just doing what it’s doing, and I have nothing to do with it in any personal  way.  It’s impersonal.  Very, very intimate, the experience of it, very, very intimate.  But it’s quite impersonal.

Rick: It’s personal and it’s impersonal.

James: Exactly.  A paradox, Rick.

Rick: Yep, same time.

James: Yeah, yeah.  It’s beautiful.

Rick: Here’s another Gita verse for you.  “Know that to be indeed indestructible by which all this is pervaded.  None can work the destruction of this immutable being.”

James: There you go.  We know this and it’s been known and we pass it on.  One day somebody will have heard Rick Archer say something or James Waite say something  or all of it.  But we’re just in a way mimicking or ripples of this original, actual, factual reality.  And we are the instruments of it.

Rick: Exactly, I was going to say that.  We’re like little sense organs of the infinite or little instruments of the infinite.  Each of us doing our own little thing as an expression of that.  I get the sense that, if we want to anthropomorphize that for a minute, I get the sense that that  being, that intelligence, really treasures and values any of its expressions which have  come to know it.  Because it finds in them an instrument which is willing and able to carry out its, I say,  intentions.  Again, that anthropomorphizes it to a great extent, but it’s sort of, well, will of God.  There are so many sayings about the will of God, “Thy will be done,” “Make me an instrument  of Thy peace,” the prayer of St. Francis.  That’s what’s happening.

James: Yeah, yeah.  There is something there and I have no idea what it is.  No idea what it is.  But it’s in a, as it manifests, there’s a movement of love that wants to go out and  release, relieve suffering.  There’s something, there’s that movement toward wherever pain is, to relieve that suffering.  And that’s what I experience, moment to moment, day to day.

Rick: It’s like the water flows in the direction of the slope.  And you see that in the lives of great saints, who are just like these powerful engines of  relieving suffering, just sort of pouring their all into relieving suffering as best  they can, yet remaining in the bliss.

James: Yes, so there’s nothing, somebody said, “Let nothing be a means to an end.”  And there’s no big picture here or scale about wanting to do things on a certain way or along  a certain line.  I’m an ad guy, I’m a business corporate guy, I’ve had all this experience.  It’s all jettisoned.  It is of no use in the world in which this is operating now.  It’s the scheming, dreaming.

Rick: No, it’s spontaneous.  You’re just doing your dharma, so to speak.

James: Exactly.

Rick: Spontaneously.

James: Exactly.  And it seems to be moving now, just recently, in the direction of helping people relieve  their suffering, but maybe I’m not going to be a vehicle that’s necessarily involved in  helping people wake up.

Rick: Or maybe you are, or both.

James: Or both.  Do you know what I’m saying?  At some time I felt like, “Oh well, maybe I’ll need to be a teacher or something.”  You know, a teacher as in a non-dual teacher.  And that may in fact kind of has happened.  What is happening now is that I’m maybe going to be moving into dealing with people and  easing some of the suffering in their lives without any discussion of any kind.

Rick: You mean like in halfway houses or something like that?

James: Yeah, that kind of thing.  There’s a conceptual aspect here, and I’m calling it “be well.”  And it’s basically a natural way to help people come to their natural well-being.  Maybe not, without using a spiritual term, but through love.  But not in the spiritual way.  But just that my nature is to want to relieve suffering.

Rick: Yeah, that’s great.  Look at Mother Teresa.  She just spent her life tending to the poorest of the poor in the slums of Calcutta.  It’s not like she was saying, “Hey folks, I’m going to get you enlightened here.”  She was just washing their wounds and making, doing their thing.  But it was this beautiful spiritual example to the whole world.  That was her role.

James: In this case, the way the form is taking, and again this is just right now because I  never know, is with, say, boomers, couples.  American boomers, there’s like 77 million boomers.

Rick: I’m a boomer.

James: I’m a boomer.  And there’s so much concern, sickness, cancer, a lot of our friends have cancer.  As the boomers are coming to the last chapter in their long lives, a lot of them have arrived  without much ability to contextualize and really get to the nitty gritty of what their  life is about.  But they want to.  They want to explore it.  And so with this Be Well theme that seems to be emerging, it’s a well-being.  That’s what I’m getting to, is that I’m more concerned, if you will, with the well-being  of my fellow fellows.  And so I’m not necessarily going to be, as direct awareness speak, non-dual speak, more  a broadening ripple out more into a, I think it’s the nature of awareness.  I see it with Eckhart Tolle, Oprah interviewing him, and that whole thing.  I see awareness as broadening and love is finding new ways to move and penetrate.  Maybe the human species will survive through this vehicle.  It seems pretty clear if something like a major awareness raising doesn’t occur, I don’t  see any way that the current iteration of Homo sapiens is going to survive.

Rick: I think that’s the primary hope.  As Einstein said, you don’t solve problems at the same level of consciousness at which  they were created.  There needs to be the introduction of a second element, so to speak.  It seems to be happening, I’m optimistic.

James: The good news is that whatever is happening, it’s all good.  If we as a species turn out to be a failed experiment, well, life will go on.  And that’s what we are, is life.  So it’s all good.  We’ll see, won’t we?

Rick: Yeah, stay tuned.

James: If we pass, spread the love, share the love the way we’re doing it.  Again, I thank you and appreciate it very much what you’re doing.

Rick: Oh, thank you James, I love doing it.  Any of our friend, Francis, he’ll be coming out to the Science and Nonduality Conference  with me in the fall and hopefully you’ll make it down there and we can all get together.

James: Thank you.  I’d love to.  I haven’t met Francis and for various reasons I felt an affinity with him.  You too?

Rick: A lot of people do, yeah.  We’ve become really good friends.  In fact, he’s coming to my town this month for a visit, but he strikes a chord with people.  A lot of ex-Catholics really get off on him.

James: They do.  Because they’re looking for that, which he now represents and embodies.  When you come through any major field of religious endeavor and actually embody the root.

Rick: Yeah, although I think he would attribute it to a great extent to the Zen and Vipassana  he practiced while he was in there for all those years.

James: He did?  I didn’t know that.

Rick: Oh yeah, he did decades of practice of that sort of thing.

James: Within the monastery?

Rick: Within the monastery, yeah, it was a very liberal sort of monastery he was in.  It was the same one that Thomas Merton was from, yeah.  So they let him do that kind of thing.  Anyway, we’re kind of getting off on Francis.  People can watch that interview if they want his story.  So let’s wrap it up.  This has been great.  Really enjoyed talking to you.  I hope, as usual, that I haven’t talked too much.  Sometimes I get flak from people for doing that, but I consider it a conversation and  I try to give the lion’s share of the air time to the guests, but every now and then  I like to put in my two cents.

James: Well, I think that’s much appreciated by your viewers, too.

Rick: Most of them, I suppose.  Some people said, “Aren’t you going to shut up?”  But anyway, so I’ve been talking with James Waite and he has a website which is?

James: nondualityliving.com

Rick: nondualityliving.com, and I’ll be linking to that also from batgap.com and I  imagine they can participate and read what you’re writing and get in touch with you if  they want to through there and all that stuff.

James: Yes, I’m totally open to chatting with people.  If someone has some sense of wanting to do something or to connect in some way, please,  I invite you to do so.

Rick: Okay, you may find that you’re invited to have Skype conversations with people like  this, so you might want to be open to that if you want.

James: I’m open to all of it.  I have no idea particularly which way or in how one should be manifesting.  I just go from next to next.

Rick: See how it flows.  So a couple more concluding points.  This interview has been one in an ongoing series.  There are 170-something of them now, so if you’d like to watch or listen to others, go  to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, which is an acronym for Buddha at the Gas Pump.  Somebody asked me this week, “What’s the ‘A’ for, the G-A-P?”  Well, it’s part of gas, but you couldn’t pronounce it if you left that out, it would be “batgp.”  So I left the ‘A’ in there so you could pronounce it.

James: Okay, now we know.

Rick: And there you’ll also find a discussion group that crops up around each interview,  usually with several hundred comments and whatnot.  People get chatting about what has been discussed and other things.  There’s a general discussion group also for discussions not necessarily related to the  particular interview.  There’s a link to an audio podcast which you can subscribe to in iTunes if you’d like to  listen to this on an iPod while commuting or whatever.  And there is a donate button, which I really appreciate people clicking if they have the  wherewithal.  I just bought a camcorder with donations that had been sent in, which I intend to hook up  to my computer here for better video quality and also to use for more live, in-person interviews.  And there is a little link there that you can click on to sign up to be notified by  email each time a new interview is posted.  So I think that just about covers it.  So thank you, James, and thanks to all who have been listening or watching, and we’ll  see you next week.

James: Thank you.  Be well.

Rick: Be well.  [Outro Music]  [End]