Summary:
Background and Spiritual Journey
James Wood shares his background and spiritual journey, which began with an interest in Eastern philosophy and meditation in his early twenties. He describes experiencing a profound shift in consciousness during a silent retreat, which led him to explore non-dual teachings and eventually become a spiritual teacher himself.
Core Teachings
- Non-duality: Wood emphasizes the non-dual nature of reality, suggesting that all experiences are manifestations of a single, unified consciousness.
- Present moment awareness: He stresses the importance of being fully present and aware in the current moment, rather than being lost in thoughts about the past or future.
- Self-inquiry: Wood advocates for the practice of self-inquiry as a means to recognize one’s true nature beyond the ego-mind.
Practical Approaches
Throughout the interview, James Wood discusses various practical approaches to spiritual awakening:
- Meditation and mindfulness practices
- Investigating the nature of thoughts and emotions
- Recognizing the illusory nature of the separate self
He also addresses common challenges practitioners may face on their spiritual path and offers guidance on how to navigate them.
Perspectives on Awakening
Wood shares his views on the nature of spiritual awakening, describing it as a recognition of one’s true nature rather than an achievement or attainment. He discusses the potential for this realization to profoundly transform one’s experience of life and relationships.
The interview provides insights into James Wood’s teachings and approaches to non-dual spirituality, offering listeners a comprehensive overview of his perspective on consciousness and awakening.
Full transcript:
Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done over 410 of them now and if this is new to you and you’d like to watch previous ones, go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and look under the past interviews menu, where you’ll find all the previous ones organized in several different ways. This show is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers, so if you appreciate it and feel like supporting it, there’s a donate button on every page of the site and there’s also a page that explains other ways of donating if you don’t like PayPal. My guest today is James Wood. James was a student of Richard Moss, whom I interviewed a couple years ago. James works with groups and individuals to discover the fundamental reality of our essential nature. Having awakened in 2002 after years of study, he began to express a spontaneous teaching whose form continues to evolve. His message is that awakening is possible for anyone committed to finding truth. Originally James studied philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin and transformational studies, again, with Richard Moss. He has combined his education and experience to express a modern, integrated vehicle for others to use as a means of growth in consciousness, leading to awakening. He is dedicated to communicating the essence of the true teaching to those who are ready to receive it, and he has a book entitled The Ten Paths to Freedom, Awakening Made Simple, which we’ll be discussing. So welcome James.
James: Hello.
Rick: Good to see you.
James: Good to see you.
Rick: So, I want to backtrack, prior to your awakening in what may have led up to that. And I find that valuable and I think listeners like it, because it helps them relate to you as a person. Because sometimes, if you don’t do that, then the person is more inclined to think, “Well, lucky him, but I don’t think this could happen to me, because of such-and-such. I’m too much of a schmuck or something.” So, we’ll do that, but I want to start with your awakening in 2002 by simply asking what do you mean by it, the awakening? When you say “I awakened,” it’s one of those words that a lot of people define differently, I think. So, what do you mean by it?
James: Well, first of all, it’s really nice to be here. I appreciate the work that you’re doing with your website. I think it’s helping a lot of people and will help a lot of people.
Rick: That’s the intention.
James: Yeah. The way I define awakening is full conscious realization of reality.
Rick: Okay. Let’s dig into that.
James: Let’s do that.
Rick: Okay, so then prior to this awakening, you had partially conscious or partially unconscious realization of reality or perhaps a predominance of unreality, would that be fair to say?
James: Mostly unconscious, yes. Just ask Richard.
Rick: Were you a tough nut to crack?
James: Oh man, you have no idea. I don’t mean to be too self-deprecating but yeah, it’s pretty bad.
Rick: That’s okay. I mean, we all came, a lot of us came from pretty dark places. And I mean that’s good to know. You don’t have to be some kind of child prodigy to awaken. I’m going to interview a woman next week, who owned a biker bar and was a bartender for 25 years and was really strung out on cocaine and whatnot, and then had this profound shift and is doing very well now. And there are examples in ancient scriptures of people who were out and out scoundrels, who ended up undergoing a profound metamorphosis. So, these are all possibilities.
James: Yeah, well, we’re all scoundrels, I think. I mean that’s the thing about ego is, I’m just going to say, if you’re infected with it, which might sound kind of morbid, but ego is the problem, if you will. That’s what we’re dealing with and it makes us selfish and arrogant and a lot of other things. I was definitely those for sure. And I’m not going to say that I’m not that anymore. It’s just that, when you wake up, you see the self or one sees the self as a mirage or hallucination or something like that. And it’s still there, it just doesn’t tell you who you are anymore. So, some terms are useful and the word “being” is who I feel we are. It’s our essence. It’s nameless, formless, you could call it Atman or something like that if you wanted to. But the ego is like an imposter that occupies our space and it’s collective as well. We can see it everywhere. So, I was definitely occupied by that, as you will, before.
Rick: Yeah, you know the word Maya actually comes from a Sanskrit root which means that which is not.
James: Right.
Rick: And so, it reminds me of that by saying, that we take ourselves to be a certain thing but we’re actually not that.
James: Right, and paradoxically we are that.
Rick: Yeah.
James: In Zen they say, “first there’s a mountain, then there’s no mountain, then there’s a mountain again.” So first there’s a self in a world that’s opposed to it and then you wake up and realize that’s not true at all. It’s freedom. But then it’s a mountain again. And then you see, from that perspective of no self, or from the awakened perspective, you see self and see that it’s an illusion. It’s a mirage or something. So, you’re not seeing the lake, you’re seeing the mirage which is a distortion, but everyone else is convinced it’s a lake. Everyone is convinced that this separate and separative self, if you will, the ego is who they are. And it may sound like a judgment, like a bad thing. It’s not. It just is. It’s the condition of the world and all you have to do is read the newspaper to see evidence of that.
Rick: Yeah.
James: And I’m thinking about what happened in Charlottesville, frankly. I guess it was yesterday.
Rick: Yes.
James: I’m not sure what to say about that.
Rick: For those who don’t know, there was a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville and then there were protesters opposing the white separatists. They were having all these clashes and tear gas and all that stuff. Then some Nazi sympathizer drove a car into a crowd and killed a woman, injured a lot of people. So, that’s what you’re referring to, in case people don’t know.
James: Yeah, frankly, I find some of the news distasteful to read. I think it’s good to read some, but not too much. There is a term called hormesis that is interesting. Someone asked me about this. What do I do? Someone drives a car into a crowd like that and people get overwhelmed. That is horrible. What do I do? I think a little bit of that, awareness of what is going on, is important. But step away from the screen sometimes, go out in nature. It is like fasting. I do some intermittent fasting, which I think is wonderful.
Rick: I started doing that a few weeks ago myself, having done a lot in the 70s but I decided to start doing it at least one day a week now. I’ve been enjoying it.
James: Yeah, it’s great, you don’t want to be on all the time. You don’t want to be reading the news all the time and inundating yourself with negativity, which is basically what it is. You want some, so you can be aware of what is going on. Then take a retreat or something. So as with food, you eat, you feast and you fast and it is part of life. So, it’s form / no form. There is this balance.
Rick: Yeah, I think that what you have been saying for the past five minutes points to an underlying theme, which comes up on this show pretty often. That is, if I could explain it, that people tend to polarize. Most of the world, as you said, is polarized in the direction of “this is real” and “I am this” and “this is going to die” and all kinds of limited conceptions of reality. There are spiritual people who swing to the other pole, “this is not real, it’s not worth our attention, I don’t exist in any way shape or form, there is no semblance of self” and all that. And, somehow, I think that you’re alluding to a bigger package which puts everything in its proper context.
James: Yeah, I agree with that. After I woke up, you could say there’s a mountain and there’s no mountain, right? And there’s a mountain again. Well, another way to look at it is like climbing a mountain. So, let’s say you start in the valley and you decide that you want to climb to the peak. You set out and you have your path and you go up and you get to the peak and then you attain that, if you will. At least metaphysically or spiritually, when you attain that peak you do realize that ego isn’t real and the world isn’t real and it’s all an illusion. So those things are true for one who does that, who’s, in a sense, attained that. So is there someone who attains it? No. That is part of what that is. So, I wouldn’t say it’s intoxicating but it’s brilliant and it’s ultimately satisfying and there is a freedom there that is really attractive. Part of it is, you look around at the world, let me speak for myself. So, you wake up and realize that the one who wakes up is not you. Truth wakes up to itself through this vehicle, this person. And it is a wonderful place to hang out, and it’s kind of tempting to do that. The thing that I found is, it’s not the most social place. It is, in a way, detached from ordinary living, which is where we meet people and live. So, frankly, the last few years, the last few weeks, part of what I’ve been doing is pretty much a daily thing, of coming back down the mountain to see what the valley is like? And, with wars and with this violence that I was talking about in Charlottesville, things like that are unpleasant. It’s nothing but drama and yet, as you mentioned Maya, it’s actually one reality appearing as two. So, no one is going to say that, someone might be watching this and say that is dualistic or something to talk about. There is a car and then people, they get hit by a car. But there is a reality of suffering in the world that merits attention and so we embrace that. And it’s not dualistic if the one who holds that awareness of non-duality, it’s funny, I stop. If I’m really holding the awareness of non-duality, I can’t talk, really. There is a place where it doesn’t matter. I don’t matter. Actually, this is kind of strange perhaps, but when I woke up, it was such a place of freedom that I actually lost interest in food. Man, I didn’t care. I care, but in that place, you see through everything. It’s funny, I would say I saw through everything, but who am I? I mean, it is. And the body, the world, who cares? And it’s actually not even blissful, it’s better than that. Franklin Merrill Wolf talked about it and he called it the high indifference and it is truly impossible to talk about it. Later in his life, and he actually claimed that, as much as he tried to describe the merits of it to people, they were either perplexed or appalled, wondering how could you be indifferent to suffering and all of that? So, if I’m going to embrace words and language, I’m hanging out with Rick and we’re having a conversation like that, that’s what I want to do, that’s who I want to be. I’m James, you’re Rick, there is suffering and let’s do something about it. I feel what brings us to that place is compassion. So maybe you want to ask a question, I’m talking for a long time.
Rick: That’s okay, I tend to do that myself, but better that you should do most of it. I just want to refer people to an interview I did with a guy named Timothy Conway, I’ve done two with him and he’s a good friend. We’ve never met in person, but we resonate a lot with each other’s perspectives. But he wrote a really nice article, which I think I linked to from BatGap. You can find it on his site enlightened-spirituality.org. It is about the three simultaneously true levels of non-dual reality. And in this model, there are three. Perhaps it could be chopped up in other ways, but what he outlines is, there is the obvious level that everybody takes as real, in which there is starvation and disease and riots and all kinds of stuff that somehow need to be dealt with. We don’t just brush them off if somebody’s suffering, we try to do something about it. And then, we could say, there is the Divine level, which is the level of God’s intelligence in which everything is perfect and divinely orchestrated, all’s fine just as it is. And then you can say there is a more fundamental level, at which it’s just the transcendent, nothing ever arose, there is no universe, there are no car crashes or anything else, it is just all the unmanifest. And his point is that living a life in which you can encompass all three of these simultaneously would be optimum. And yes, there will be a dimension of your life which is indifferent or aloof or untouched by all this, but then simultaneously there could be a dimension of your life in which you’re actively engaged in trying to solve some problem or working with Doctors Without Borders, doing stuff. And at the same time there is this sort of trust in the Divine, that all is well and wisely put. So, it is a paradoxical, both/and, all-inclusive kind of perspective that is not just philosophical but could and should be experiential.
James: Right, that is my experience. I don’t know if it’s the same thing as you’re talking about, but the Buddhists talk about the Dharmakaya, the Nirmanakaya, and the Sambhogakaya. So, there is Dharmakaya, you could call it the absolute, but I’m sure Buddhists would disagree with that because it’s not really anything. You could say it’s emptiness or something like that, or at least you approach it through that doorway and it’s completely transcendent. Then you’ve got the Nirmanakaya which is the form realm, which is, as you said, the suffering and car crashes and so on. But then there is a middle realm. The Sambhogakaya is the Bodhisattva realm. I think they call it a celestial body or something like that. I’m not a Buddhist in the strict sense. I just like a lot of the ideas. I’ll use any ideas if they are useful. So, my experience is, that the full embodiment of awakened consciousness includes all of that. And I will paraphrase what you just said, where one must embody the Dharmakaya in order to, in a sense, “meet” the Nirmanakaya which is really just suffering. The first noble truth. And that’s what it is. And so that, to me, is the third mountain position. And I don’t really believe that, because frankly, I’m not sure it ever ends. My experience of it deepens over time. And there is humility in that. I’m a guy. I’m a man. I’m a person. And it even sounds arrogant to say that. Of course that’s true. It’s just, I am also that which is. And thou art that. We are that. So, I think what humanity is doing, we’re waking up and we’re all part of it. So, what am I going to do? Go to the mountaintop and die there? Blissful or not, I want to help.
Rick: Sure. Even if you went to the mountaintop to die, literally as opposed to figuratively speaking, the dying process would remind you rather severely, that you do have a body and it does feel pain. So, you can’t ignore it, even if you want to.
James: Well ego death is not physical death. Or maybe it is. That’s what’s interesting about it. What does the word physical mean? I did a lot of the work of Byron Katie. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that.
Rick: I know you did, from reading your articles. There’s a lot of Katie-esque things in there.
James: Right. I drilled down into that. I’m not bragging about it. It’s literally the case. You can ask anyone who knew me back then. And a question, is it true? Can you absolutely know it is true? No you can’t.
Rick: Right.
James: “I exist.” No, you can’t know that. That’s interesting. So, it is one appearing as two and if I said to you, I’m drinking water, let’s say we’re hanging out, you and I, and I say, “Hey Rick could you pass me the glass of water, I’m thirsty.” And you say, “I’m sorry, that’s dualistic and water doesn’t exist.” It’s ridiculous, come on, dude, really?
Rick: Advaita police.
James: Yeah, maybe I’m being a bit harsh, but I see a lot of that. And anyone who is hearing this and who might be rubbed the wrong way, good. I mean that, good! That’s what is as well and who is it who gets rubbed the wrong way? We could just go on.
Rick: Yeah. I’m glad you’re saying this stuff. Here’s a quote from one of your writings. “It’s important to realize that there are false teachings out there that will negate the existence of forms in a way that’s dishonest.” It’s kind of what we’re saying and I’ve also beaten this drum quite a bit over the years on this show and I think it’s less than it used to be. I mean there were allegedly a lot of people who came out of the Papaji scene who were talking that way, “Would you please pass the salt?” “Who wants the salt?” “There is no salt.” And that kind of stuff, and I think everybody got kind of sick of that. Maybe there’s a whole new crop of people rising up through the ranks who are at that stage, I don’t know. But these days, it seems to me that the trend has been for a lot of people, who have been around for a while, to be emphasizing more integration and a kind of a more holistic, well- balanced, complete realization, rather than one in which you attempt to try to hide out in the transcendent. And I think part of the problem is, people aren’t even hiding out in the transcendent experientially. There have been a lot of cases where people have just read too much of this stuff and gotten into the intellectual game of thinking that everything’s not real, even though it’s not their actual experience.
James: Right, you’re talking about hiding out in the transcendent, I know what you mean. And what’s interesting is, this is the transcendent.
Rick: Yeah.
James: Like you handing me a glass of water is just as transcendent as anything. And that to me is a deeper realization, frankly. Now, to use that metaphor, if you haven’t reached the peak and that is a thing, we are talking about waking up, it is an actual event or non-event. It’s not really an experience, because there’s not someone who has an experience that happens to that person that it is gone. Truth just wakes up to itself. That’s probably as clearly as I can put it. So, I feel that this third mountain position of embracing the world compassionately is actually what we’re here for. Although, if you haven’t realized that “all is one” perspective, and this sounds like a judgment, if you haven’t realized it, then don’t say it. There is humility in that. I did a talk one time, where there was this guy, I almost want to call him a heckler, but I was talking about stuff and he said, oh something like, if you say that you are awake, you can’t be, because there is someone who is awake, and that is impossible. And I just kind of let it go, but the fact is, if it’s not true for you, then don’t say it. There are a lot of prescriptions in Buddhism about not saying it and the reason is, if it’s not true for you, that is really a big pitfall on the path. And yes, there is a path and no, there’s not a path. So, let’s not get into that. Is there a doer? Anyway, yes there is and no there isn’t. They are both true. There is no mountain and there is. Right, or neither is true.
Rick: Yeah. Donovan wrote a great song about that. Ever hear that Donovan song?
James: Sure, sure. First there is a mountain. Yeah, so basically, if it is true for you, ok, and if it is not true then don’t say it. If it is true then you really must say it. The Buddha himself said it. You know Jesus said “I am,” what did he say? “I am the way.”
Rick: Yeah, I think that’s important. And it is part of the reason I decided to do this show. I live here in Fairfield, Iowa where thousands of people have been meditating for decades. Many of them were starting to have awakenings, genuine things. And some of them would find that when they told their friends, the friends would put them down and say, “Oh who do you think you are? You don’t float three feet off the ground, you know? You’re just Joe Schmo. I know you have a problem with your business or whatever.” They didn’t associate real human stuff with actual awakening. And so, I thought, all right, let me start interviewing some of these people and just demonstrate to the local population that there are people among us who are having awakenings, so that it will perhaps enable more people to come out of the closet and instill some confidence or hope in the people who don’t think it’s ever going to happen to them. And then the whole thing kind of grew and reached an international audience. But that was one of the original motivations.
James: Yeah, I think the word awakening, this is just semantic, really, but awakening, isn’t it maybe with a capital A? I don’t know, but there is an event where you could call it end of suffering or ego death or something like that. Okay, but on the way there, there is what I would call growth in consciousness. That is just the term I use. And so, it’s important to acknowledge if you’re growing in consciousness. And yet, the ego is so insidious that it will try to co-opt your progress and make it, as if you are wearing a badge and whatever. It is insidious and frankly, I emphasize working with a teacher. I use the term true teacher, just to make sure that we’re clear about what that is. Working with Richard, for example, for me was, I say priceless. It’s more than that. He was able to see that things, well, they’re not hidden, really, but they were hidden to me, right? It was unconscious, but not to anyone else, you know? As if, “get a load of this guy.” But he saw that and he mirrored that to me. And I can’t say it was always pleasant, but I’m really grateful for that. I almost want to say it was like a WWE Smackdown for the ego. It’s just, you know nothing. I almost want to say Jon Snow. Sorry, I’m thinking of Game of Thrones. That’s an in-joke for Game of Thrones fans out there. Yeah, so he was just reflecting something for me and it’s hard to take that. You know the term humble pie? I’m not sure where that comes from, but you have to eat some humble pie until there’s actual humility there. And then there is a certain transparency. There is not as much ego and you can recognize that, but just don’t stop until you’re done.
Rick: Yeah
James: And the question may come up “how do you know you’re done?” That is a good question.
Rick: Stick a fork in your leg, see if you know.
James: Yeah, right. You ascend, is it three meters? Or let’s see, I think it’s 3.14, but there’s no end to pie. No, I’m kidding. Seriously though, how do you know if you’ve truly arrived? The question doesn’t arise and that is my experience. It sees itself and then the self-truth sees that and there is a sense of self, but it is just hanging around. It doesn’t control anything, it never did. It’s just as if, “it’s over buddy” and you’re done. Thoughts arise and you recognize, this is BS. Whatever the stream of thoughts are, they don’t tell you who you are anymore. And then there is this freedom.
Rick: Yeah
James: It’s pretty cool, but so that’s a good question. So, if the thought still arises, “well gee am I there yet?” You think, well maybe I’ll change my name to Swami something or other. I would advise against that because it, that is a pitfall. It is.
Rick: Yeah
James: And that’s not for me, I don’t care, I mean that is just for anyone who might be hearing this. So just keep going and when it happens, you will know. It is not a thought that arises, it’s not like a thought tells you, “you have arrived.” Then you are just another thought. It’s a realization, it’s something like that.
Rick: Yeah, I have several thoughts and questions based upon what you have just said. One is about the point of having a teacher who can see through your ego and help you diminish or dismantle it. Some teachers have, notoriously, taken on that role and done so in an extremely uncompassionate or even brutal manner. And the upshot of it was that they themselves were not free of ego, but they just thought they were. So, you get guys like Andrew Cohen, who eventually was kicked out of his organization and did a real “mea culpa” and has been really working to shift gears. Or Adi Da who did outrageous things. I don’t even want to get into it, it’s so disgusting. But I think one should exercise discrimination, as far as who one accepts as a teacher. And if a teacher is abusive and, in the name of ego busting, really being mean to people, look somewhere else. Be careful.
James: I agree.
Rick: So, there is that thought. Do you want to comment on that?
James: Richard is..
Rick: Richard is very sweet.
James: Well, he is obviously. We know him. That ego smackdown thing I was talking about, it’s unpleasant but it’s not cruel, it’s compassionate. And yet, I never felt that it was cruel, but some people might interpret it that way. I guess what brings me back is the question, is it true? Maybe that’s Katie again, but this is something Richard used to say, “James you’re kind of rigid, you know, and you need to loosen up a little bit.” That was sort of a reflection that I got from him and other students and it bothered me. First of all it bothered me, which is telltale. The other thing is, when I really looked at it, I had to care enough to look at it. I had to respect the teaching enough to look at self, look at ego as best I could and believe, there’s something to that. And that’s hard to do. But I think that is what one must do. You have to see yourself as you are, without flinching and without judgment. And, I like to say that the mind is really just a stream of judgments. None of them are true. So, any thought I have is not ultimately true. I use this mudra sometimes, observing, oh I’m this, I’m that. Right? And it’s not so much I’m as someone says, I’m rigid, like when I was a student. It’s as if, I’m not rigid, but the self is rigid, and you start to loosen a little bit. You see, oh man, what is this imposter, this parasite that is latched on to my being? This ‘name and form’ entity or set of ideas about who I am that isn’t true. And, the thing is, you have to see it first.
Rick: Yeah
James: And then, yes, self is rigid and at some level, it is not who I am. I don’t know if that makes any sense.
Rick: Are you distinguishing between true self and personality as if you had some rigid tendencies in your personality, but that is not who you are?
James: I was really hardcore. As a student, I’m sure there are people out there who could outdo me in that regard, but I was really focused and determined and …
Rick: Kind of fanatic?
James: Yeah, well I wasn’t fanatical in that, I wasn’t pushing for an ideology or for a view. I just tried really hard and some of that is ego, “I’m going to do this.” And we could talk about a deliberate path versus spontaneous awakening. You and Richard discussed that, I saw the interview. But, I was deliberate. I was focused, this is what I want. I want to wake up. I want to be free, and yet there is a lot of rigidity there, but that can be used. You loosen that up a little bit, as when I was in Richard’s program, called the mentor program. It’s a three-year process, a residential process. It doesn’t go on all year, you go twice a year. It’s wonderful. Anyway, when I showed up at the mentor program, the first meeting, I’m saying “I was,” okay. I was so gung-ho, that it actually irritated the other students, other participants, and that was interesting. But a part of what I realized was that, I had my regular life, where I go out with my friends and maybe party and just go out and have a few beers and just relax and not talk about quote-unquote spiritual matters. And then, I’d go to these meetings and just be so focused and almost monk-like, just a laser. By the end of it, I realized, oh it was actually our last meeting. I’d heard this enough and I relaxed enough, Richard helped me with that enough, that I went out with one of my friends from the group. And as I recall, I had four pints of Sierra Nevada pale ale. And no, I’m not a sponsor. But four pints, is that half a gallon? I can’t really think. But usually, I wouldn’t be doing that. It’s a spiritual retreat, right? We work all day, go out and have some beers. And we’re now pleasantly altered, if you will. Usually, the next day I’d be hung over. I’d be thinking, ‘oh man why did I do that,’ right? Guilt, shame, all that kind of stuff. I felt great and I feel as if there was a deeper realization there, of, frankly, humanness. Just, go out and have a beer dude, it’s fine. Be who you are, you don’t have a spiritual self and then a partying self. I mean, it is a party and everyone’s invited, so just be yourself, but integrate that. It’s more authentic.
Rick: Do you still like to drink sometimes?
James: Definitely! I didn’t drink, actually. Around the time that I woke up, I had a commitment to be sober. It’s quite a story, but I don’t want to bore anyone with it. I was sober for about six years, including the time that I woke up. At some point, I realized that alcohol would be helpful and frankly, just grounding. And I was sort of more in that mountaintop space for a while. So Yeah, I like to drink sometimes, and the craft brewing scene is amazing. I don’t pound Budweiser, as I might have in high school exactly, but I’ll sip a nice IPA or something and it’s wonderful. It’s got this aromatic nose and you can taste it, it’s wonderful.
Rick: Yeah, the reason I asked is that, when I learned to meditate, I soon found that the way I felt all the time couldn’t be improved upon by any chemical substance, alcohol or marijuana or anything. I felt worse if I tried something like that and so I just completely lost interest in it, never thought about it again. But anyway, I guess, to each his own. Things are different for different people.
James: Yeah, actually, I will tell you this. Currently it’s in the moment, it’s how am I if I drink this substance? What is it doing to me now? Next week it might be different. So again, that’s rigidity, right? It’s dogma, I’m not going to drink, it’s bad. Well maybe sometimes it’s not. Yeah, what I’ve noticed is, I mean it’s a CNS depressant, right? Alcohol is…
Rick: Central nervous system, yeah.
James: Sure, and I noticed that even now, I can enjoy it. But lately, it seems as if I’ve really noticed that it’s a bit of a damper. I’ll feel a higher energy or more present. And I’ve told you, I was doing some intermittent fasting. I find that with the fasting, it’s really wonderful. It’s sort of clarity and an energy, it feels really good. And I’ve noticed that if I drink, it puts a damper on that, and I think you can sort of play with that. That’s what I’m doing.
Rick: Yeah
James: But it may be useful. As I said, when I woke up, I was completely, I say, stone cold sober, whatever that is. But yeah, I was sober. So, I think if you listen within yourself, this serves me right now.
Rick: Okay, let’s come back to the whole waking up thing. I received an email from somebody a couple weeks ago who said you can clarify your confusion about this waking up thing if you think of it as water boiling. There’s a certain phase transition point at which water boils, 100 degrees centigrade, 212 Fahrenheit. And before that, it’s not boiling. After that, it’s boiling and turns to steam. He said it’s like that with awakening. There may be many, many degrees of growth of consciousness, as you put it earlier, but there is definitely a specific point at which awakening happens. It’s clear, it’s unmistakable, it’s a clear demarcation. Now, others say Christ said in the Bible that the kingdom of heaven sneaks up like a thief in the night. And I’ve heard Adyashanti and some others say that you can sort of slip into awakening and not really even know that it’s happened or know to mark it on a calendar or anything like that, because it grows so incrementally. So, would you disagree with that or say that for everyone there’s definitely going to be a point at which there’s a shift that is unmistakable?
James: Well, you said some really interesting things, like a thief in the night, was that what Jesus said?
Rick: I think that’s what he might have meant by that allegory that the kingdom of heaven sneaks up like a thief in the night.
James: Yeah, it does, the mind can’t grasp it. So yeah, it does. The night before I woke up, I remember I had a sort of a foreboding or sense of presence or I could say light or energy. I would say it is awareness or consciousness, something like that. It is like a light, it’s just not literally the being of a light or something. And when it happened, after it happened it was clear that something had happened. And my partner at the time asked me what had happened. She could feel it. It actually happened while I was sleeping. I went to sleep, also Eckhart Tolle fell asleep and then woke up, so, it’s not unprecedented, I guess. So, I really felt as if something was going on the night before. He was suffering tremendously before that experience, I wasn’t. I was on a deliberate path. So, I’ve been doing a lot of practices and felt again a sense of foreshadowing. And then when I woke up, literally out of sleep, everything was different. It was as if ‘it’ woke up. It looks around and the self is kind of hanging around, but ‘it’ gets up and goes in the bathroom, looks in the mirror, I’m looking at ‘who am I?’ Like Ramana Maharshi, there aren’t any words for that. And it’s looking at itself and so, did I know what that was? No. Did I know “oh, I just woke up.” No. So, I left the bathroom just kind of astounded, just really open and not knowing. I came back, went back into the room and she had gotten up too. I could tell, I could feel her there. She felt, something had just happened. I could feel that sort of sense and I think she said, “what happened? What happened, what just happened?” Something like that. And okay, so the thought came up that this is like the old man. I knew William Samuel, by the way. He used to say “man whose breath is in his nostrils.” So, it was like the old man, the mortal man or whatever, the thinking part. She said, “what happened?” And I could hear the thought, “well I woke up. I woke up and I went to the bathroom and I looked in there and it was really weird, and oh my gosh what is that?” But these were thoughts, right? So, I was going to say I woke up and did all the stuff and what I said was “I woke up.” I mean, who said that? Who is that? I still would say I don’t know, and yet it’s the not knowing that is grounded in beingness that is just apparent. And yet it isn’t an object of thought. So did I know what that was? Heck no, and yet it is evident. So, to answer your question, I would say they are both true. I saw Adya one time. I saw him in Tucson. It was within a year or two after I woke up, and I was curious about it, to see what he was like, because I hadn’t met him before. And I was listening to him and I heard him basically acknowledge that it is an event. It is a transition. But the idea that you are going to somehow know, in terms of a conceptual cognition, that you have arrived, no that’s not it at all.
Rick: And how would one distinguish, sometimes people can have some real explosive or profound or dramatic spiritual experiences or shifts. And how would one know that this is it or that it wasn’t just something? Even referencing Adya, he has spoken about how easy it is for a person to have a realization and figure that is the final thing, where it actually is not. And one can hang out in that place for quite a while, before realizing that perhaps that was not final.
James: Yeah, it’s a really good point. The thought doesn’t arise. That is the clearest way I could put it, as if it is just not true.
Rick: What thought doesn’t arise?
James: The thought, “Am I there? Am I there?” It is funny because that’s a thought, right?
Rick: So it’s a confidence, a natural confidence.
James: It’s like, is the earth flat? Rick, is the earth flat? Rick? No. Reality is funny. Reality is, and there are always thoughts and they are just not true, and yet they are, relatively. They can be relatively true. That’s what’s interesting. There is a relative truth like, “could you pass me the salt?” That’s a relative truth and to deny that is ridiculous. We talked about being in a restaurant having the water. Of course it exists, in some sense. I lose my train of thought sometimes.
Rick: So, I’ll jump in here, then. So, among your fellow students with Richard, or among your own students, have there been awakenings akin to what you experienced?
James: I don’t know.
Rick: Don’t people talk about them?
James: I’m not really in touch with them. Well, I’m in touch with a few. Really, there’s probably just one friend from the group, who I’m in touch with on Facebook. I have not sought them out and I would like to. I probably will at some point and I’ll ask them.
Rick: Yeah. I guess the reason I asked that question is to know whether there was a similarity in their orientation to what happened, because of the path they were on or the tradition they were in.
James: Yeah, you were talking about big experiences, a lot of energy and Kundalini explosions and things. Now, again, I listened to Richard’s interview and I know him well. I’ve read about it, read the Black Butterfly. I’m willing to be wrong about this, but my sense of what he went through is that his path was not what you might call a deliberate path. It was, but he admits that he wasn’t quite sure what it was he was doing at the time. He was experimenting with energy and healing and he met Franklin Merrill Wolfe, as I recall from the Black Butterfly. That is something to meet Franklin Merrill Wolfe.
Rick: Maybe you should say who he was. Most people won’t know who he was.
James: Sure, if I have a lineage, I would say Richard is my teacher and Franklin Merrill Wolfe was his teacher. And frankly, I would say that Franklin Merrill Wolfe’s teacher was Shankara. If you read his book Experience in Philosophy he really penetrated this text and entered a deep meditation. That’s why the second chapter of my book is called ‘Study,’ because sometimes I think people think that just reading is not very useful for spiritual progress. But it really is, if you bring a certain focus to it. And I feel that is largely what he was doing. So yeah, Shankara, Franklin Merrill Wolfe, Richard. We could talk all day about Franklin, but he was a brilliant mathematician. I think he was at Harvard, and he studied mathematics to the point where he realized that realm of study in the university. He was on a tenure track and could have just written his own ticket. But he intuitively recognized that it was limited and he wanted to know truth. He wanted to realize truth itself. So, he left and he moved to the base of Mount Whitney, because some sage had said that the place with the greatest spiritual power is the tallest peak in that country. So, at that time, before Alaska was added, it was Mount Whitney in California. So, he lived at the base of Mount Whitney and that’s where he woke up and did his work. And it’s still there, the center is still there. I haven’t been there yet.
Rick: Okay
James: He’s highly philosophical. He may not be everyone’s cup of tea in that form. It’s very rational, but it’s extremely precise. I found it highly useful.
Rick: So, speaking of your book, let’s go through the main chapter titles of your book and…
James: Oh, could I say one thing quickly?
Rick: Yeah.
James: I don’t really think very linearly, so I’m coming back to something. The big energy experiences, as you said, I was prepared, and Richard went through that. He was prepared, but as he says in his interview, he wasn’t led through it. He wasn’t spoon-fed or handheld really with a teacher through a process. I was, and I’m grateful to him. I think it was because of the difficulties that he had after his opening, and he talks about how destabilizing it was, so it’s thanks to him that, frankly, when I woke up, it was actually quite easy. There is a lot of energy. There were some things that happened which were kind of mind-blowing, if you will, just a lot of energy and a destabilization. But, in a sense, I felt him there. I felt a presence that had led me all along and it ushered me across that threshold with great kindness. So, it doesn’t have to be difficult. I think, if it’s a more spontaneous thing, it can be a lot more dramatic and destabilizing, because the mind hasn’t quite been prepared for that yet.
Rick: Nor the physiology. It takes a certain physiological purity and strength to sustain or maintain, to embody awakening and the energies that come with that. And if people haven’t done any sort of work in that area, you’re pouring new wine into an old wineskin, to use another biblical metaphor.
James: You can do it.
Rick: It’s very problematic.
James: Yeah, it is problematic. It is like having an old car whose frame is bent and maybe you straighten it. So, you do some work, you get straight psychologically. And then maybe it’s not totally straight yet, and then take it out on the freeway. Yeah, take it up to 100, see what happens. It might rattle. Can you get there? So, the early stages of work I usually call a level two. It’s just a way of looking at it, but you get straightened out earlier on. So, when I did a mentor program with Richard, I’d been prepared a bit. It’s like acceleration. There’s a lot more energy, change happens really fast and it is destabilizing. But if you get that, if you get your vehicle and you really straighten it out and tune it up, it might be off slightly, but you can really go 100 on the freeway and it will be a relatively smooth journey.
Rick: Yeah, somebody once asked Maharishi Mahesh Yogi “can’t you just enlighten us just like that?” And he said, “maybe I could but it would take ten strong men to hold you down.”
James: Would that I could, right? Yeah. Maybe we’re here to enjoy the journey. I’ve written about how I started to enjoy it closer to the end of the path. The earlier parts are pretty difficult and kind of humiliating to the ego. But later on, it was enjoyable. As I said, I was doing the work of Byron Katie and I noticed, when I would do some of that work I would feel better. I would feel happier. But not just happy. There was a joy, and it was wonderful. I was enthused, I’m just gonna keep doing that. Just keep going and that’s what happened.
Rick: I think it should be enjoyable in the long run. There might be a dark night of the soul, where you no longer derive enjoyment from things as you used to, and yet you haven’t found an adequate inner enjoyment to really fulfill you, so there’s a dry period. You may feel free to differ, but ultimately, I think the whole spiritual path is largely about greater happiness.
James: Sure, can you really be happy if you’re not free? People want to be happy. I’ve been thinking about this. Everyone wants to be happy and I actually googled this the other day. It’s kind of silly, but I wondered, what do people want more than anything else? So, I wanted to see what would come up, and freedom is there, but then happiness is really what people want. Well, “I want to be rich. I want to be successful. I want to be loved,” and all this. And it’s basically, because people want to be happy, right?
Rick: Yeah.
James: But you know what? It’s not enough, because if you’re not free, you can’t really be happy, because in a sense, you’re a slave. That sounds harsh perhaps, but Kant talked about that, right? It’s the second noble truth. If there’s desire, it’s as if you are being driven by unconscious forces. It is like an addiction, and if you’re driven by an addiction, it is miserable. And at some point, ego is like an addiction. It’s an addictive or compulsive attachment to self, that self is who I am. And you can’t not do it, that’s what compulsive means. An addict cannot not do it. But with help, you become free of that and if you’re truly free of all that, free of ego, then yeah, why not be happy? So, I feel as if it is the way to happiness. When you choose to be happy, and can you choose to be happy if you’re not free? It’s just something to think about, something that came to me.
Rick: And what you’re asking, what you’re saying kind of begs the question, well, where does happiness come from? What is the essential ingredient of happiness? Does it come from what we experience through our senses? If so, it’s very tentative and variable and unstable, because what we experience through our senses is always going to change. And if it’s not what we experience through our senses, how come we do seem to get happier when we experience a nice thing and less happy when we experience a bad thing? But then, can there be found a source of happiness which is independent of what we experience through our senses, a deeper wellspring of happiness?
James: I think so.
Rick: Spiritual traditions have all talked about this.
James: Sure, I mean, happiness includes sadness. There are up and down, high and low. That is the human scene. One could say, what about the bliss of nirvana? Well, I’m not talking about that. It’s different. But just happiness.
Rick: I am kind of talking about that.
James: Okay, then let’s talk about that.
Rick: In terms of ultimately, what is really going to fulfill the human craving for happiness. I don’t know if anything else ultimately will.
James: I agree with that. What’s funny about it, though, is you have to let go of happiness in order to have it.
Rick: Yeah
James: You have to let go. I mean there is nirvanic bliss and then there is nirvana and samsara and they are the same.
Rick: Yeah
James: It sounds best, if you read the book by Franklin Merrill Wolfe, Experience and Philosophy, part of that book is called “Philosophy on Consciousness Without an Object.” It is really worth reading. And that is what he talks about. He says, in summation, something like aside from the great space, there is no other. But before that, he talks about how there is nirvana and there is samsara, and yet again, from the perspective of that transcendent consciousness, they are the same. That is why the third mountain position cannot be dualistic if you are awake, because you know you are eating a hamburger and yet, is there someone? It’s both true and not true at the same time. I’m not sure if I’m addressing your point. I just think, so, you’re talking about bliss. I think that’s tempting to think bliss is the point. Bliss is okay, but when I woke up it was peaceful. Do you want to be blissed out all the time? Or do you want to be at peace, just free?
Rick: Yeah
James: Bliss is great. I like bliss too.
Rick: I think what I’m saying is not that, I mean ‘blissed out’ implies a slightly overwhelming situation. I think there is a baseline of contentment. It’s called santosh in Sanskrit, which characterizes the awakened state and which is independent of changing experiences and circumstances. There is a saying, how is it? “Contact with Brahman is infinite joy.” And it’s this juxtaposition of the awakened consciousness with relative experience that stirs up waves of bliss the way sloshing around in a bathtub stirs up the warmth. If you’ve been lying too still, you don’t feel the warmth anymore. Slosh around a bit and you begin to stir it. So, I’m just saying this stuff because people talk about being enlightened and yet being depressed or neurotic or this and that. And I wonder whether such people have really worked it out and that perhaps the more traditional, the Zen monk with his hands in the air laughing with a big pot belly, is actually more characteristic of what true enlightenment, or full enlightenment really is.
James: Yeah, chop wood, carry water, totally. It’s just, there is that realization of freedom or nirvana if you want to call it that. And then, sure, chop wood, carry water. Part of it is, I don’t control it. I say ‘I’ and it really does come back to who am I? I would say, I don’t know, and there’s wisdom in that. It’s just what I am is unknowable. And yet, its relationship with form, it’s really pleasurable. It can be unpleasant. It could be blissful, but to me, it does stir up a certain enjoyable sensation, maybe.
Rick: In your darker moments even now, when, if something happens in your life or you’re sick, or something happens. Do you still discern a dimension in your life which is untouched by those things and which sustains you? Forty years ago, 30 years ago, if you had been under similar circumstances and bereft of that dimension, you would have felt the full impact of the negative thing with no buffer, with no foundation to modify or to put the relative experience into a larger context?
James: Right. I agree with what you just said, that is basically how it is. I get sick sometimes and it is really unpleasant. It can be overwhelmingly painful, depending on what it is.
Rick: Sure.
James: And in those moments, the pain or the unpleasantness certainly dominates the field of awareness. And yet there is that sense of detachment.
Rick: Yeah, it’s not the entirety of who and what of your experience.
James: Yeah, and it doesn’t judge. It’s funny because the self, the ego wants to judge. But when you’re awake, again, I don’t know, can you see my hand?
Rick: I can.
James: So, judgment is like this.
Rick: Gripping .
James: I want this or I don’t want that. It is desire and aversion and attachment. So, an unpleasant experience comes up. We usually pull away from it, right? ‘I don’t want that.’ So, it’s over there and we’re trying, and it’s based in a judgment. I find that doesn’t arise. So yes, it does add to the misery if you’re judging it. When the judgment doesn’t arise, it’s almost like a flower. The mind still runs. As the heart pumps blood, the mind pumps thoughts. So it’s arising and it’s as if awareness sees it. It’s not true. And yet when it’s really painful, the body is cringing. The nervous system is reacting, oh,oh! It could be. And yet there is no judgment of that. So yeah, it’s allowing a human experience and it’s wonderful. I’m not going to say that I don’t feel pain.
Rick: Sure
James: But who feels pain? That is what is interesting. I heard that you know a lot about Ramana Maharshi, I believe.
Rick: I’m not an expert.
James: I know a bit. Historically, my understanding is that he had cancer at the end of his life, right? Of course, ‘who had cancer?’ I don’t think he sought medical attention for that, did he?
Rick: Oh, he let people do all kinds of things to him. Whatever they wanted to do. He wasn’t seeking it, but all concerned people were tending to him and trying different things.
James: Sure.
Rick: He did not get morphine or anything to muffle his pain.
James: Yeah, it seems I read somewhere that his quote was “let it grow.”
Rick: Yeah
James: But from that really oceanic consciousness, it’s nothing.
Rick: Yeah, let me give you an example.
James: And yet, that he experienced pain, Sri Ramana, ‘to whom does that thought arise? To whom does the sensation arise?’ Yeah, I get that.
Rick: Yeah, here’s an example that will wrap up this point. And let’s say you had ten dollars to your name and you lost five or you gained five, somebody gave you five. That would be a big deal. That would be a significant change in your financial status. But let’s say you had just won the lottery. Somebody just won the lottery the other night and got three hundred and something million dollars and then somebody gives you five or you lose five. In that case, what does it matter? In the context of my financial status it doesn’t really. It’s not that significant. I think that we can use that as a metaphor for an awakened consciousness and its orientation to the gains and losses in life, relative to an unawakened consciousness, which doesn’t really have the capacity to sustain major gains and losses without being shaken.
James: I think that’s a good analogy.
Rick: Okay.
James: You were going to ask me about the book.
Rick: I was. You have a bunch of chapters and each one of these words that constitutes a chapter title is an interesting area for discussion.
James: And by the way, there was some discussion prior to this about whether I would send you a copy or something. The reason I did not is, it’s a hundred thousand words. It’s three hundred pages and I figured, to read that entire thing and assimilate it in a week would be too much.
Rick: Well, I wouldn’t have, you would have had to tell me to read pages 35 to 38 and 45 to whatever, like that. I wouldn’t have read all of it. But that’s okay. The chapter titles are nice. Now, I’ll read them quickly, all 10 of them, and then we can maybe poke around through them so, Honesty, Study, Instruction, Action, Commitment, Embodiment, Meditation, Community, Life, Devotion and this is called the 10 Paths to Freedom. So, are you presenting these as autonomous, independent paths or stages in an overall system, or what are you saying here with these words?
James: Each one could be used in itself and if you read the introduction, it explains that. Of course you didn’t have a copy, but for anyone who’s watching this, it’s definitely worth reading and I would read the introduction. And you know, there’s a way of reading that is more in depth and more focused. It’s not just the thoughts or the words, there is a depth.
Rick: So, yeah.
James: What I would say is, it’s linear. I started writing this a couple of years after I woke up. And as I said, I was really in that more mountaintop perspective. The main thing that book is about, is how did I get there, so to speak, right? There is no one and no one gets anywhere, we all agree on that. But basically, that is how I got there and I think it is important to read it in a linear fashion. If you just jump into the middle, it might not make sense because I define terms early on. But if you read the whole thing, you’re okay, and you take that in. And once you “grok” that whole thing, then you could use one chapter or another. Chapter seven is Meditation. Yes, you can use that by itself. And yet, frankly, every chapter could be looked at as a form of meditation. So it’s really non-linear and yet, I would recommend starting at the beginning and going all the way through.
Rick: Well, let’s discuss some of these, just for fun, and see what comes out of it. So Honesty for instance. Would you say that honesty is an important starting point for a person, if they’re going to embark on the spiritual path? Or if they have already embarked and maybe haven’t really taken care of that area of their life, they should?
James: Yeah, that was really important for me. I read a book called Radical Honesty by Brad Blanton. I don’t agree with everything he says in it, but one of my mentor friends, a student, told me he had gone to one of his seminars. And I was impressed. I had to check this guy out because if you look at him, you know how Blanton lives. I have not looked at it lately, but he is just brutally honest, and I don’t always agree with that. It is almost to the point of cruelty. But basically, I read the book and I realized I just could sense that it was important for me. This was when I was a student. So, I embraced it, decided, ‘I’m going to do that,’ right? I’m going to be honest. And I think even the same day or the next day something occurred, something happened, where I realized, before, I would have lied about it. It was subtle and I thought, ‘oh man, I can’t do that.’ But I had committed to it, so I told the truth about it. What had happened, a good friend of mine came by. My apartment was a mess, I mean it was like a train wreck. I felt bad about it. And he came by and knocked on the door. I realized, ‘oh man I can’t let him in, this place is terrible.’ And I love this guy. He’s a good friend. And so, he knocked and knocked and then went away. My car was in the driveway.
Rick: So, he knew you were there.
James: Or maybe I went for a walk or something. So, he called me later and I realized, ‘oh man, I gotta tell him.’ I knew, I’d read that book, I’d committed, and I knew, I have to tell him the truth. All right, I’ll do it. And it’s hard to do.
Rick: Yeah
James: It’s embarrassing. See, that’s part of it. The ego must be seen and it’s unpleasant. So, he said, “hey, I dropped by earlier and your car was there. I knocked on the door and you didn’t answer. What’s going on?” Immediately, I knew what I would have said before. It’s terrible I know, but I would have said, “oh yeah, I was in the shower,” or something. Don’t we all do that? We’ve all done it probably. And, his name is John, so, I said “John, I was there and heard you knocking and I was just embarrassed. My place is a mess and I didn’t let you in.” And he said, “Oh man, it’s okay, and I understand that.” And gosh, it was a relief. It was as if, “Wow, I don’t have to hide anymore,” and also, I really want my friend to come visit, so I had to clean the place up. And if I hadn’t embraced that, I don’t think I would have done it. There are other examples, but it was liberating quite a bit, quite a bit. And people won’t like it. I remember I was single quite a bit at that time and I would go out on dates sometimes and I’d meet someone and say that I’m into this thing called radical honesty. It’s amazing and I started to talk a little bit. I’d never see them again.
Rick: Yeah
James: They were looking at the watch as if, “I don’t know.” But eventually you meet someone who says, “Really? That’s awesome.” And that is the person you want to be with.
Rick: That’s great.
James: Yeah
Rick: There is a saying in Sanskrit, something like, ‘speak the truth which is sweet.’
James: Right.
Rick: Obviously. There was a story of Winston Churchill running into some woman at a party and he walked up to the woman. He said, “Madam you’re the ugliest person I’ve ever I’ve ever met.” And she said, “Mr. Churchill, you’re drunk.” And he said, “Yes, but in the morning I’ll be sober, yet you’ll still be the ugliest person I’ve ever met.”
James: Oh my gosh.
Rick: And so, obviously, that was his subjective opinion, so it’s not necessarily even truth, but I think people can get in your face in the name of honesty sometimes.
James: Yeah, my experience with Richard, and I’m speaking just about him. I would think that any authentic teacher would probably be like this, but basically ego gets reflected back. How does that work? I’m not sure, but it does. And that was every time I talked to him. It changed over time. I had to grow past that. Right? I couldn’t live like that, but I had to do it. When I first started working with him, everything I said sounded like idiocy, and it was. On some level, it was just blah, blah, me, me. But I didn’t really notice it unless I was speaking to him. And he would just look at me. That’s not cruel, that’s honest. It was a space where you hear yourself, like a canyon where it reflects back and you’ react, ‘oh my God! Is that what I sound like?’ And it’s wonderful, if you use it. Or, if ego wins that particular battle, you could blame the teacher, which I don’t recommend, because that doesn’t get you anywhere.
Rick: Well, let’s take another example. Let’s say you’re married or you’re in a committed relationship. I don’t know what the legal status is here. But let’s say you find yourself befriending someone else and you know there was a friendship growing. Would you just tell your partner, “Hey, this friendship is growing?” Or would you think, all right I’m just going to deal with this somehow and not necessarily put this in her face? Somehow, come to terms with this situation rather than really rock the boat.
James: You can rock it a little, right? It’s the middle way, right? You don’t want to rock it too much. You want to be honest. You haven’t met Allie, but my partner Allie and I, I would tell her something like that. In the book, I lay it out quite systematically. But what I call basic honesty is telling the truth. And it means not misrepresenting your experience. So, I see what looks like an orange globe on your bookcase there. I would say, there’s an orange globe on your bookcase. That matches my experience. We probably both agree on that, so that’s basically honest.
Rick: But human relationships are more complicated, more nuanced.
James: Yeah, there’s another level. The next level if you will, is not just telling the truth, but when do you tell it? To whom do you tell it? Why? Who’s around that might hear it? There are all these things and you have to listen a little more.
Rick: Yeah
James: You have to be aware if it is appropriate?.
Rick: What’s the greatest good?
James: Yeah, so I call it situational honesty, which doesn’t mean that you change the truth to fit the situation. It means that you just notice what your situation is.
Rick: Yeah, So, do you think that dishonesty is not a black and white situation, as you just said, but that some sort of habitual tendency to dishonesty erodes the person or erodes the sort of integrity of the personality in such a way that creates an impediment to spiritual progress?
James: Yes. I would say it is a way of hiding. Because, if you’re honest, you will start saying stuff. Like I said, I used to hide from my father that way. That was one of the scariest things. That was shortly after I read that book and I was in the mentor program at the time, so, there was a lot going on. There was a stage in my life where I felt moved intuitively, completely intuitively. I had no idea why I moved to Las Vegas. Why? I don’t know. I won’t get into that, but I could feel it. It was true and my mind was arguing, “yeah but, yeah but.” And finally, it was so painful to resist it. I said, I’m just gonna do it. I’m just gonna listen. I’m gonna do it. Why? I don’t know. Then I had lunch with my father. And this was the last time I actually lived in my hometown. I left, I never went back after this. I visited, but I didn’t live there after that. Anyway, so we were having lunch and I just said, “Dad,” it was hard to do, but I said “Dad, I’m moving to Las Vegas because God wants me to.” And he, what he did, he had this thing where he’d lean forward, saying, “oh no,” over his food.
Rick: He’d put his head in his hands, yeah.
James: Yeah, and part of me was scared, but I did it. It took courage. And then he said, “Oh well, we’ll deal with it, we’ll work it out.” And wow, that was easy, actually. We tend to hide. So that opened up all kinds of stuff for me. If you can be honest with your parents, it is hard to do.
Rick: Yeah
James: And I’ll add one more thing.
Rick: Ram Das said that if you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your parents.
James: Exactly, go home for the holidays. You think you’re awake? Go home for the holidays. And it can be fun, it could be unpleasant, it could be happy, it’s all kind of stuff. But basically, you love them, right? And that’s the basis. But there is one more level of honesty that I’ll get to quickly, which I call absolute honesty. That’s just a term, but basically, it’s what meditation is, it’s what consciousness is. Okay, so there’s telling the truth, and then there’s knowing when and where and to whom. Right? You get that straightened out. Then, you have thoughts arising. Absolute honesty is seeing that no thought is absolutely true. And so again, I’m making this gesture. It’s like thoughts arise and what do we usually do? Ego is some form of ‘I don’t want this’ or ‘I do want that’ and it’s this narcissist thing in our thoughts. But a conscious process, where you are in meditation, thought arises and you just see it as empty. You see it as, it may have relative truth, but it doesn’t have any absolute truth, and I think that’s important.
Rick: Yeah, that’s real important.,
James: If you are lying habitually, I don’t think you can really do that. I don’t think you can get to the place where you just clearly witness your thoughts arise, because you are too busy hiding. So yeah, you have to get it straightened out.
Rick: You create some kind of deep complexity in your structure that is not conducive to resting in the simplest form of awareness.
James: Right
Rick: Yeah, and it is worth adding that, again, in the Vedic literature at least, there is a lot of emphasis on that. There are people who are so much into their honesty that, if they say something, they have to do it, no matter what. Like Ramana, I don’t mean Ramana. Ram, in the Ramayana. He committed to going to the forest and so, he had to do it, because he couldn’t go back on his word. Or in the Mahabharata, the Pandavas, the five brothers, brought home this woman whom they had found on their journeys or whatever, and they said, “hey mom, look what we brought home.” And their mother is in the kitchen. She said, “well, whatever it is share it equally among you.” And it was this woman, so she became the wife of all five, because they couldn’t disobey their mother. She had said it, it had to be.
James: There you go.
Rick: They had other wives, too, in addition. Okay, so enough on honesty. Incidentally, those who are listening, and there’s about 140 at the moment, if you have a question that you’d like to ask, there’s a question form on the bottom of the upcoming interviews page on batgap.com. The second of your points is Study, and you touched upon this earlier.
James: It’s like letting the meaning penetrate the words. It is a deeper meaning. To the degree that a text was written from a place of consciousness, whatever that is. So, it could be someone is awake or someone who just is very conscious, either way. And again, is honest, so it builds on the first chapter, it’s basically honest and there is a degree of consciousness coming through.
Rick: And when you say study, do you mean like studying spiritual teachings and texts and things like that?
James: That is basically what it is, right. And I talk about that. There is a relative and an absolute value. In Tibetan Buddhism they call this the two truths, okay? So, there is really only one reality, one truth, we know that. But there is this relative appearance and so, we’re dealing with that. You know, Rick would you pass me the water? That is the relative truth. Absolute truth is Brahman, right? It is I am That. So, if you are reading for entertainment, like a novel, you are just reading. It’s basically, relative level. There are some feelings, emotions you might have. If you’re reading a spiritual text, say you’re reading The Crest Jewel of Discrimination, which is fantastic by the way, if no one’s read that, Shankara. It’s as if, as you penetrate it, it will penetrate you, in a sense. That sounds funny, maybe, but there is a depth of it that is as I said. Franklin Merrill Wolf was studying, forget what he was reading when he woke up. It was a commentary. He wrote a lot of commentaries on the Upanishads.
Rick: Franklin did or Shankara did?
James: Well, Shankara wrote a lot of commentaries on the Upanishads. But, Crest Jewel for example, it is really clear philosophically, and that’s Important. That relative level of clarity of thinking. And yet there is a depth, because of who was writing it and from which place it was being written. And they are both going on at the same time, so actually, it’s a form of meditation.
Rick: Yeah, I guess my thought on study is that spiritual progress, if you want to call it that, definitely has a knowledge component as well as an experience component. And without the knowledge, experience can be misinterpreted. One can have an awakening and it can be a source of confusion and fear, if one doesn’t know what it is. You yourself said, when you first awoke, you didn’t know what this was. And also, too much study, without the experiential component can get lopsided. You can just get all hung up in intellectual ideas and mistake those for actual realization or experience. So, there is a kind of a step-by-step process, where it is nice if knowledge and experience can go hand in hand, I think.
James: I agree with that. That’s basically what chapter two is about.
Rick: Right, good. Okay and instruction is a natural follow-up from study, I guess. It’s as if you are saying that you are getting some guidance from an actual person rather than just trying to figure it out on your own from a book.
James: Right. I would say, look, these are just conventions, so let’s not get hung up on it. But I call level one is when you’re studying. You haven’t literally met an awakened teacher in person. It’s very different. I met Richard and when I first met him, it was a different quality, they’re both important. So yeah, I’m gonna say one more thing about study before we abandon it. It’s not just text, it’s also videos.
Rick: Sure, in this day and age.
James: Well, YouTube is really useful and there is a way of listening within yourself, as you are hearing this conversation, for example. And you are right, there is an intellectual component and there’s an awareness component that has a depth to it. Yeah, so chapter three, Instruction. I know that there is some disagreement sometimes about whether a teacher is necessary. I would say really what happens, we have an inner Teacher. I usually capitalize the term. You have your school teacher from third grade, that’s lowercase “t”, fine, unless you happen to be awake. That’d be kind of cool, wouldn’t it? That your third grade teacher is awake.
Rick: Yeah, that’d be great.
James: No but anyway, I don’t think mine was. Sorry, Mrs. Stewart. Anyway, so yeah, so it’s an inner capacity we all have for awakening. And they say, when the student is ready the master appears or something. That’s what it’s like. It’s as if it appears outside you, but it’s not. If this is a dream and you’re trying to wake up from the dream, thinking, I really want to wake up, I’m really sincere. Get honest, do some study, a teacher appears. When I found Richard’s book The I That is We, his first book, it was random. I thought it was someone else. There’s a guy named Rick Moss who did some kind of work in Texas, in Austin.
Rick: Yeah, I knew him actually. He was an old TM teacher back in the day.
James: Oh, cool yeah. I’d seen him present and I thought, oh cool. He wrote a book and it said Richard Moss. Pulling it off the shelf, I opened to page one, and, ‘whoa, what is this?’ Really, frankly, a transmission. Just bodily, just, oh my gosh and I just devoured it, and so on. So, what made that appear, was it random? I don’t know, but I think that if you’re ready and you’re sincere, help will come.
Rick: Oh yeah, I’ve spoken to people who have walked into a bookstore and they’re walking down the aisle and a book falls on the floor. They pick it up and it’s Ramana.
James: right.
Rick: What’s going on?
James: Yeah, so is a teacher necessary? Well, no, not really. Look at Eckhart Tolle. Well, it was spontaneous right?
Rick: Somebody told me he had a lot more seeking phase before his awakening than he lets on in The Power of Now, but who knows?
James: Yeah, I think he was an intellectual. He talks about that. He was a student.
Rick: Yeah.
James: You know, a university student in England but, who knows. I’m just saying, the basic thing is that having a teacher makes it easier.
Rick: Yeah.
James: Why not avail yourself of that help. It does not mean, now find someone, I write about this. It is really important to discern true from false. It’s just how it is. I mean, look at Jim Jones. Do I need to say any more? Just don’t go there. But there may be more subtle forms of that and just basically, you have to listen within yourself. And if you’re honest and you studied, you know it is a process that, you get a certain degree of clarity and you learn it’s almost like a flavor. It’s not a taste, you can sense this is true, this is real. Yes, you get that and then, but then you don’t check your intellect at the door. You continue to participate, and it takes a lot of trust.
Rick: Yeah.
James: And if signs of abuse come up, which you mentioned, get out of there.
Rick: Yeah, we got an email from somebody recently who said basically, “You interview all these bozos, and none of them are enlightened. Why haven’t you interviewed my teacher? My teacher is really enlightened.” And I don’t know about that person’s teacher, but my whole attitude in doing this is that everybody’s a work in progress. I don’t know if anybody’s ultimately finished. And in this day and age, it does seem, as Thich Nhat Hanh said, that the Buddha is the Sangha. You know that there are hundreds and hundreds of spiritual teachers all doing their thing and most of them have something to offer to people who resonate with them. And somebody might totally resonate with you, others react, “I don’t get this guy, I’m not interested.” Fine, then you have your niche, you have your affinity group and I think that’s kind of true of all the people I interview. Some might stay with a teacher for a long time. Others might hopscotch a bit from one to the next. And as long as they’re not being a dilettante and just dabbling and not really going deep with somebody, but really “All right, this guy’s taught me everything I need to know. I’m going to move on,” I think somehow in this day and age, that’s the nature of it.
James: Well, you mentioned Adi Da. I don’t want to get into that too much. But when I read Method of the Siddhas, his first book, I just really affected me. It’s very powerful, I thought. We might disagree on whether it’s quality or not, but I will say that the community around him was a bit strange. I don’t mean any disrespect to him. It didn’t feel right. And so, I write about that in this chapter, that you can investigate and see what it’s about and then if it’s not for you, you can respectfully back away.
Rick: Yeah
James: You don’t have to go online and start a flame war about it, just, if it’s not for you, it’s fine, no disrespect and then you know. And that’s when I found I that is We. It was maybe a couple years later and Richard just worked for me, basically.
Rick: Sure, yeah, I mean, I’ve interviewed a number of people who were with him. Samuel Bonder, who was one of his top people, Sandra Glickman, Mercedes Kirkl, probably a few more. Terry Patton was with him for a long time and they all have laudable qualities. They all obviously grew and gained something. But he himself was, I don’t want to get into it.
James: Yeah, let’s not go there.
Rick: We could get into horror stories.
James: Chapter four.
Rick: Yeah, chapter four. Action, action.
James: Yeah, Action. I could just start anywhere. So, is there a doer? No. Rick, would you hand me the water? Yes, they’re both true.
Rick: Yeah.
James: So, a lot of this, I just would say that from a conscious perspective, say you’re a student and you’re working on this. You’re becoming more conscious, you start to see through ego, you start to see through. You start to relax a little bit. And then, you could say there’s just beingness. There’s just, we mentioned happiness, yeah, you’re happier. You’re feeling, wow, this is cool. And maybe you’re sad, you see that sadness is kind of interesting, too. You’re just a little more loose and “hand me the glass of water.” It’s not a problem. And if you’re embracing dualism, for example, if you want to, it’s going to be unpleasant. If you’re attached to a thought that disagrees with reality, you’re going to feel it. So, you don’t have to go around wondering if things are dualistic or not. They’re basically not, that’s the premise. All is one. The world is a mirage or something. But, it’s as if you are in a bad dream and you are trying to wake up from it. Well, if you’re in the dream, it’s scary and painful. As you start to wake up, it changes. So, no, there’s not a doer and yet, I don’t know, I know I’ve heard it said, there’s no doer. Great. Just don’t make that a dogma, right? It’s, yeah, pass the salt. It’s not that big a deal.
Rick: I think the thing about levels we were talking about earlier, where there is a level at which there is no doer, there is a level at which there is a doer. Both are true simultaneously. Taking the Gita is a case in point. Half the book is Krishna exhorting Arjuna to get up off his butt and fight. And, I want you to do this. And yet there are whole chapters about how the self-realized being realizes I do not act at all. The gunas of nature are performing action, it’s not essentially who I am that is the actor. And then they’ll throw in a verse such as: you have control over action alone, never over its fruits. So, that goes back and forth between those perspectives, and I think the only resolution is that in the bigger picture, both are true and you have to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. And if there is a sense of performing action and doer-ship, then honor that on its own level. But if there’s also, simultaneously a sense that I do not act at all, then that is also true. They are not mutually exclusive.
James: When I hear you speak, for example, and honestly, I’m not trying to flatter you, but it sounds as if there is a clarity. You have obviously thought about this. You have obviously studied and there is a certain wisdom that comes through, based upon your experience. And there is honesty and so on, an intellectual honesty. You admit when you don’t know things and we’re having this conversation. And I forget what I was going to say about that. Is there a doer? I don’t know, but you are transmitting a conscious position, where you can get yourself out of the way. Rick, there is a degree of consciousness that I’m hearing that really isn’t about you. That is what I’m trying to say. And yet, there is a humility where you have had this experience in that. It is both. But it becomes less intellectual and more about how we live. And the quality of your presence, there’s an intellectual precision to what you say and I try to do that, too. I’m not always good at it. There’s also a presence and you get yourself out of the way a little, you know what I mean? It’s more honest. And then there’s a connection. We all want that. Yeah, I would say, we want connection. There’s a lot of loneliness and so, we listen to each other differently. We’re listening into the being and then, is there a doer? I don’t know, man. Pass the salt, you know what I mean?
Rick: My own orientation is just that, ever since I was a teenager, I’ve really been lit up by this stuff and have had my attention on it. And I have this inclusive attitude of all the various components, the intellectual understanding, the experience, the morality, all these different things are important components and you can’t take any of them in isolation or to the exclusion of the others. And I very much consider myself a work in progress. You see a picture of Amma over my shoulder, she often says we should always have the attitude of a beginner. I’ve heard Adya say that too.
James: I feel that.
Rick: Yeah, I feel, and I think it’s literally true, that it is not just a little intellectual safeguard, but relative to beings who may exist in this universe and levels of spiritual development that might be possible, we are all relative beginners.
James: I don’t know how to play the bag pipes. I’m sure if I tried it would be terrible.
Rick: Yeah.
James: But you’ve got to start somewhere, right?
Rick: Sure, and even in the realm of spirituality, that’s why there are two things that bug me. One is people who say they’re done and they’re kind of adamant about that. And another is people who take opinions as absolute truths. They might have a certain attitude about teachers or about some particular thing and ‘this is the way it is.’ And it’s not as if ‘this is my perspective and maybe another perspective would be equally valid,’ but rather, ‘this is the truth.’ I think that is a boxed in way of living.
James: It could be, I guess the key is not to be one of those people, right?
Rick: Yeah, and in describing them, not to become one.
James: Yeah, I will say for your first point there, that in my book, and again, when I wrote that, it was at least 10 years ago, it was definitely more. I was more in the mountaintop perspective, which is fine. And the book is really about being in the valley, and wanting to get to the peak. After that, I don’t say a lot about it. Maybe a little. I feel as if, whatever I write from here on out, I’ll probably address that, but I want to live it first. Right? I do stress that when you’re done, you’re done. But really the question is ‘who’s done?’ And I don’t mean to play a little semantic game.
Rick: And what’s done? What is, what do we mean by done?
James: Suffering. Ego, let’s just call it ego. Ego dies. Now I could almost hear Richard saying, ‘oh you know, play my dad, oh no.’ No, I don’t know. What do you think of that? But no self. Okay, here’s the thing. This is really important. I’ve heard misunderstandings. Self, there is still a self. It’s just seen as a phantom or a mirage. It is as if I made a shadow puppet. I’m not a light and I’m not good at shadow puppets, but if I made, say, a bunny on the wall or a duck or something, I could say hey Rick, see? You see the bunny? You would react, ‘yeah, yeah I see it!’ But there is no bunny, so there both is and is not a bunny. It’s a concept, it’s like when you’re watching a movie. Like ‘whoa! Did you see that? You know, that guy got shot,’ or something. And I think, ‘but is that real?’ No. So you entertain disbelief, I mean what do you suspend, disbelief? Yeah, but so, ego is like an addiction. An addict is not free, right? An addiction is defined as a compulsive behavior, such as a use of a substance or gambling or something like that. It’s compulsive despite negative consequences. That’s the textbook definition. And you can’t stop. It’s compulsive and you need help. Ego is like that, basically similar. It’s a compulsive attachment to self, self-importance, it could be big self, small self. “Look at me I’m important” or “oh I’m insignificant,” they’re both false and what happens is, they wake in perspective. Again, the mudra is just freedom. It is. Is it true? No. Is it relatively true? Sure, why not? Why? Because I’m talking to Rick. It is compassion, it’s connection, it’s freedom as it is lived in the world. It is as if, ‘let’s do this together.’ Come on, let’s do this. At the same time, none of that is real. And that is what gives you the freedom, too. It doesn’t matter what you do. I mean that sounds terrible, there is a morality about it, it is as if it doesn’t matter. And yet I find that the kindness, generosity, and that sort of virtues that we tend to talk about are natural.
Rick: You’re leading into something here that I was going to say, based on this done point, which is that, as you mentioned, “Well, I can’t play the bagpipes.” But obviously that is a very tangential sort of skill and not something that everyone in the world needs to learn. Thank God! It would be cacophony if they all did! But there are certain qualities.
James: We’re all doing that metaphorically, aren’t we?
Rick: There are certain qualities that we associate with spiritual development and have been historically associated with it. You just mentioned a couple: kindness and compassion. I would like to think that, although there are certain qualities like that, aside from awareness or realization of truth or self, there are important components of spiritual development. And there always may be exceptions and variations and so on and so forth, but once that ground of being has been established, it is going to begin to percolate into various aspects of the personality. And one might find that the heart becomes more and more full and blossomed. And compassion and love and devotion and qualities like that begin to grow. Or that the senses begin to become more refined and subtle in their appreciation of everything, or that behavior begins to become more helpful and compassionate and so on. I don’t know, those are qualities that, I’ve heard people argue the opposite. I’ve heard them say that there is no correlation between spiritual awakening and behavior, and that behavior could be very crude and cruel and rough and yet, one could be awakened. But I really just question whether that is fully true, whether there might not be higher values to awakening that are being missed there.
James: That is a really good point. I would say it’s about connection. I mean if I’m a jerk, you’re probably going to tune me out. I don’t know, maybe I am a jerk and you are still listening. I don’t know, but that is the nature of self. It is like the fool in the tarot deck, just stepping off a cliff. It just doesn’t know anything. Yeah, if I am a jerk, who cares if I’m awake or not? You’re probably gonna tune me out. So, would I be a good or moral person or a kind person for a purpose? Yeah, because freedom. It is the foundation for me anyway. It is the foundation of all of that. So, I mean, that is part of why the relative is called relative because it relates. So, as in passing me the salt, that is a relationship, right? That has certain object relations. What is it for? What is the world for? I tend to say it doesn’t have an absolute value, it has a relative value. If you use it, say you use what you have in the world to wake up. That changes everything. Because, say you have a pencil. It’s just this absurd object, right? You can write with it. Well, I journaled for a long time. I mentioned William Samuel, he got me into that. I kept a journal for 12 years. That was really important work and so, I used pens back then. Computers were not as prevalent, so I used writing tools. So, I’m using a meaningless object. I don’t know if you’re into Camus, but the absurd. What do we do about the absurdity of life? Well, use it. I know Sandy Jones, too, by the way.
Rick: Yeah, I was going to mention her name, in case people want to find out more about William Samuel, I did an interview with Sandy Jones, which you can look up on Batgap.
James: She endorsed my book.
Rick: Oh good.
James: By the way.
Rick: Nice
James: Just a little tidbit there.
Rick: Yeah, okay, we may have covered the point, but I guess the point I wanted to make is about you saying, if I’m a jerk, you’re going to tune me out. My question would be, if you’re a jerk, if you’re behaving like a jerk, not that there’s any absolute universal criteria of jerkiness.
James: We all kind of know what it is.
Rick: Yeah, but…
James: If you don’t know, then you’re the jerk.
Rick: Then is that really representative of the full value of awakening? Or would that indicate a sort of a half-baked or partial stage of development and there’s more potential there for development?
James: That’s a great question.
Rick: And you asked about what the purpose of the world is, or what is the purpose of existence or something like that. Some people like to think of it in terms of, that evolution of consciousness, development of awareness is the purpose and that the universe is one big giant evolution machine, so to speak. And if that is the case, speaking just hypothetically, to discuss it more, then it would seem to me that someone who is really awakened has merged with or discovered their essential identity with that intelligence, which is intrinsic to and is governing the creation. And it has really become a servant of that. Many people have spoken that way, that they have become a servant of the divine. As in, “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace,” Saint Francis. So, if you are really serving the divine, of course the divine likes to blow up planets by crashing asteroids into them and stuff like that, too. But there is, who was it, Stephen Colbert said that the truth has a liberal bias. I think that the universe has an evolutionary bias, in terms of promoting and facilitating greater and greater expression of its essential nature, the divine nature. And that an awakened person becomes a servant of that, ideally. And if they’re not a servant of that, if they seem to be serving something in opposition to that, then maybe further awakening is desired.
James: Yeah, I’d say that the event that I’m calling awakening definitely is a thing, and then self is seen as empty. And at the same time, I’m constantly improving and growing.
Rick: Yeah.
James: But when I am talking about the person, the dude, the one who would hand you the salt, whatever that is. Let’s hang out. If I’m just transparent being with no … What am I going to do? We do things, I like to hike, I like to ski, I like to go and have a beer, I like to be with people, I like to do this work. And there is a sense of self that is there, it’s just empty, right? So every object in the universe is like that. It isn’t ultimately real or true, but it has a relative truth. And again, it’s about connecting, it’s about relationship, it’s about connecting. So, the better that, better I can be in that respect, I think, the more I’m able to connect with others. And I think everyone, we’re all jerks to some degree. Everything is awkward. The self just doesn’t know what to do. It’s like the fool. It’s in the tarot deck, just there is such a humility about it and I’m constantly surrendering myself to not knowing, what I call not knowing. Just, I don’t know, and yet there’s a beingness that doesn’t know, conceptually, because that has nothing to do with it. Because thoughts aren’t true. It’s what Franklin Merrill Wolf called knowledge through identity. It is “I am.” Does a river know how to flow or does it just flow. It doesn’t think, it just is and is perfect. It’s just Daoism. I think morality is part of that. I feel, at least for me personally, which is probably the most honest thing to say, that I really do try to be a decent human being.
Rick: Sure.
James: Do I always succeed? No. Just ask Allie. I can be abrasive, I can be rude, I can interrupt, I have interrupted you a couple of times, but I try not to.
Rick: No, you’re doing okay. You know what you said about not really knowing? I keep quoting the Gita a lot for people. Some people don’t like that, but I happen to know at least the first six chapters. But there is a verse which says, “unfathomable is the course of action.” And the implication there is that the intricacies and the ramifications of any action are so complex that they are beyond the grasp of human intellect. And what is advised is to get in tune with or merge with that intelligence which does permeate and orchestrate the whole thing. And then spontaneously, action will be performed with the sort of skill which you might have, if you did actually know all the ramifications, even though you’re incapable of it.
James: I agree, I agree. What comes to me is: darkness is just as light as light. And light is just as dark as darkness. You know, Yin and Yang, as soon as you think you know what it is, it isn’t. It is purely movement or stillness. What does Jesus say? What is the sign of the kingdom of movement within stillness, or something, I don’t know. I read this, I think, in the Gospel of Thomas. But it’s interesting. It’s an absolute consciousness that, frankly, it’s hard to say this, for me, but it includes genocide. How do you reconcile that? I don’t know, we’re working on it. You know, I try not to be a genocidal maniac. That’s my job. And, through doing Katie’s work, it is radical if you really get into it. The turnaround that she has, for example, people shouldn’t judge, that’s your thought. Well, first of all, people do judge, so it’s not true. It is all we do. It’s just everywhere, judgments. But then it turns around like, I shouldn’t judge. Oh wait, I’m doing that. It’s as if the problem is littering and yet, everyone is throwing garbage everywhere. And you know that is terrible and yet you’re doing it, too.
Rick: Yeah.
James: You gotta stop. Just clean up your part of it.
Rick: And decide what the other turnaround is.
James: So, it’s “I shouldn’t judge.” And then there’s, I don’t want to get into that, you go ahead.
Rick: I was just going to say, you kind of choose what team you want to be on, do you want to be on the genocide team? Do you want to be the guy who drove the car into the crowd in Charlottesville? Or do you want to serve a higher purpose? You know, all is well and wisely put and it takes all types to make a universe, but where do you want to affiliate? And, what is the experience of your life going to be like, based upon with whom you associate, with whom you affiliate, the kinds of actions you do. You choose, you know.
James: Yeah. It’s an ongoing process, that part doesn’t end, it just keeps on, as Richard talks in your interview. I watched it and I feel that he’s a wonderful teacher. Again, I don’t mean to flatter anyone, but you know, he is. And I’m just glad that he taught me that stuff. You know, I don’t know what I’d be like personally, if I hadn’t. I don’t know if I would even be here, talking to you. But I think he mirrors a certain social responsibility and sort of a grace and dignity that we can all understand, and that’s part of it. It’s, and yet so is the jerkiness. You got to have a little of that, right? It’s just part of the spice of what we’re doing. If it’s held consciously, it’s not a problem, that’s the thing. In my book, I noticed to say a lot about anger and Buddhism. Well, anger and certainly rage, fear, these are like afflictions, I think. They’re problems and they exist. But if they are held consciously it doesn’t matter. I mean you can actually be passionate and it’s not a problem.
Rick: Yeah, I think it depends upon whether, how much you indulge and also, whether you use spirituality as an alibi for misbehavior, which I have seen people do.
James: That doesn’t happen, does it?
Rick: Yeah!
James: Yeah. I try to be a decent person. That’s what I try to do.
Rick: Yeah. Actually, somebody was telling me the other day about somebody in our town, maybe there’s more than one, who have done all kinds of scurrilous business things. And you know, when they are called on it, it’s more like, “Oh, it’s not, I’m not the doer! I’m not the actor! It’s just all the gunas of nature carrying this out.” And so, they are using all that.
James: Tell that to the judge.
Rick: Yeah right, exactly! They are using spirituality as an alibi for misbehavior.
James: Yeah, I don’t I hear that, I don’t know if I do that, I try not to.
Rick: Yeah.
James: I might have, it is convenient, but it’s just not right. Talk about being a jerk. Yeah, I try to take responsibility for all that and not do that.
Rick: Okay, now there are about five more points in your book and if we spend ten or fifteen minutes on each one, we are going to go way over time, so we can’t.
James: Lightning round.
Rick: Yeah, so it’s like, you know: Commitment, Embodiment, Meditation, Community Life, Devotion. All right, thank you! So, Commitment. And let’s just spend a lightning round, as you say.
James: Sure. Commitment. I talk about the bodhisattva vow. Again, I’m not a Buddhist, but it’s important, and it’s in the middle of the book because, at that point in the process, it’s going from a level two to a three where you’re committed.
Rick: Committed to the practice, to the path.
James: We’re talking about commitment, right, it’s chapter five. Yeah. You’re committed to, I call it the path of awakening, which might sound kind of lame, but it is what it is. So, there’s actually a vow that one takes, Franklin Merrill Wolf took it, Richard took it, and Richard, fortunately, allowed me to take it in Yosemite Valley. It is beautiful, I’m telling you. And there’s a certain ripeness or maturity for that to occur. I talk about it in the book. But it’s necessary to get past that point, so to speak.
Rick: What was the vow?
James: I don’t have it memorized. It’s in the book.
Rick: What were you committing to?
James: It’s something like, may all beings, what is it? It’s funny, I can’t remember it.
Rick: Is it like the bodhisattva vow?
James: Yeah, yeah. I think Richard calls it the Kuan Yin vow, right, it’s in the book. It’s like, may all beings be free, and basically, I’m going to stay behind until all beings are free. And we could get into what that means, but it’s more of the spirit of it. Jesus says “He who is lastly first and first last,” all that, so, you know, there’s some of that.
Rick: Someone told Ramana about the Bodhisattva vow and he laughed and he said, “that’s like saying I’m not going to wake up from this dream until everybody else wakes up from this dream.”
James: Yeah, I can see that perspective, and yet, if Richard had said, we want you to stack this pile of rocks and then take it down and stack it over there, and do that for 10 years, I would have done it. And then we could get into what that means, but there is a certain degree of transmission that’s going on.
Rick: Yeah.
James: Chapter six.
Rick: Embodiment. We’ve already talked about that a little bit.
James: Embodiment. At the beginning of that chapter, it’s funny, I have two quotes. I contrast Shankara with Walt Whitman. So which one of these is true? Shankara says “the body is like a bag of bones and filth and it’s worthy of our contempt.” Whoa, and “yes” to that. And then.
Rick: Whitman.
James: Walt Whitman, yeah.
Rick: I Praise the Body Electric.
James: I sing, I Sing the Body Electric
Rick: Sing the body Electric.
James: Right, yeah, “the armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them” and, “I shall not go off until I discorrupt them and charge them full with the charge of the soul.” That’s a paraphrase, I may have botched it, but basically, they’re both true and if you read the book, it’ll make sense.
Rick: Okay, great. Meditation.
James: I will say that I do a lot of embodiment, moving meditation in my retreats. And it’s wonderful. And it’s awesome and it works. We do sitting, too, but if your body isn’t awake then you’re not awake. That’s just, I’m asserting that without defending it. But that’s how it is.
Rick: Sure, people can learn more.
James: Chapter 7, Meditation. I just cover, I really cover the different forms of meditation: mindfulness, inquiry, prayer. They’re all different takes on the same process that I call a conscious relationship.
Rick: And you teach some forms of meditation on your retreats?
James: Totally. And it’s pretty simple. I try to keep it simple, because if it’s complex, you’ll forget it. You won’t do it. But, one of the main points I make at the beginning of that chapter is that meditation practice and meditation itself are not the same thing. And again, I can’t get into it. I kind of want to, but meditation is the relationship of the formless with form. And so, practice is just waking up to that.
Rick: Okay, good. Community.
James: Uh basically, so working with a group magnifies if you do it. Again, it’s important to have a good teacher uh and to have, there’s a section in there literally called Avoiding Cults so check that out. I have no interest in anything remotely related to what looks like an authoritarian deal. But I wrote about it there. That being said, getting a group together and invoking that presence through these practices, it greatly magnifies the presence. You were saying something about the sangha is the, what did you say?
Rick: Thich Nhat Hanh the famous Buddhist zen master, said the next buddha may be the sangha. In other words, we’re not going to be waiting for some great big superstar, savior type guy, but just the sangha, the collective, the groups that we form can be our teacher.
James: Yeah, that’s basically what that is.
Rick: Yeah.
James: Chapter nine is called Life, and that is, really, about just living this in the world. Living, you’re a student you’ve made all this progress and you’re getting closer, maybe, and yes, it sounds linear and that’s how it is. So, it’s living it.
Rick: You don’t need to be apologetic for linear. I don’t think. Spiritual development is linear. I’ve yet to find anyone who hasn’t progressed through various stages.
James: Okay, so remember, so, you have your party self and your strict spiritual self and just live. Live it, live it. Be a decent human being and deal with your parents. Go home for the holidays, that kind of stuff. How, that’s really what that’s about. And then chapter 10, Devotion is written, I really like that chapter of it. It’s written as close as I could get to that sense of formlessness, and what that’s like. And to put it in words, frankly, I’m also going to say, it sounds a bit apocalyptic, which, viewers may ask, “what?” But basically, you’re talking about ego death, you’re talking about, if you read, it’s in the literature. Like the world ends, the universe ceases to exist. Self, ego, if you don’t understand it, that’s where it’s going. At least conceptually, okay that’s what it’s like. Then, to me, it felt dishonest not to put that in there. That being said, I don’t know. Just read it and see what you think. But part of it is as if you’re done, it’s over, it’s ended. As you were saying, you, if I were to write something now it would probably include more about what is it like after that? It just ends. It’s as if you’re formlessness. So, I would say, that was honest when I wrote it and it still is, as long as you understand, okay that’s what it’s like. And then you wash the dishes.
Rick: Yeah, let me dwell on this for a bit because I don’t yet understand why you would associate a word like apocalyptic with devotion, but all the great non-dual teachers that we talk about, like Shankara, Ramana, Nisargadatta, Papaji, many others, they were all extremely devotional characters. Shankara wrote all this beautiful devotional poetry and was devoted to Durga, I believe. And Ramakrishna to Kali, and Ramana to Shiva, in the form of Arunachala. And Papaji to his teacher, and Nisargadatta to his teacher. And they were always doing pujas and singing bhajans and prostrating to the floor and all this stuff. So, at least in the examples of these people, there’s no incompatibility between non-dual realization and devotion. And in fact, it would almost seem that non-dual realization provides a context or a platform in which devotion can really soar. So how does that relate to what you’re saying here?
James: Why did I say apocalyptic?
Rick: You did say that, I wasn’t sure why.
James: Yeah, good question. Because it ends your nightmare.
Rick: In a good sense then, it’s like the end of the nightmare.
James: Yeah, I’m really not a Bible scholar, but isn’t the last book in the Bible…
Rick: Revelations. Yeah, but that all sounds like fire and brimstone.
James: I know, I know.
Rick: All the sinners being cast into the fire, and all that jazz.
James: How many cults have there been or continue to be, where they’re just praying for the end of the world? It’s like, it’s wicked and sinful. I wouldn’t say all those things but I would say there is some kind of understanding that the spiritual path has to do with ending that. And if you read, say Shankara, he’s really clear about it. He says, it’s done, the world ends. And of course, I’ve said that, embracing the relative continues, it’s just empty. That’s why I said apocalyptic because devotion to me is the purest, it’s basically love of truth, with the capital T. Remember when I said I was doing the work of Byron Katie and I thought, ‘wow, I love this.’ I just felt good. I felt happy, but more than happy, like more freedom. More just, consciousness. And to fall in love with that is, I would say that’s the most potent weapon you had in the war against falsehood. Now, it’s funny, because of these militaristic images. But, Whitman says “the armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them.” The armies, there’s something about a fierce determination. It’s as if devotion means giving everything. Give it all you’ve got and you know what, you’re next. It feels as if you’re being undermined. But it’s ego, but man, it feels like you. So, it’s not you, Rick, but just in general, it feels like devotion to me. I felt that and that’s what helped me across that threshold I was talking about. So, ego death, what do you let go into? I talk about faith. Faith isn’t a belief. It’s a relationship with the formless. It’s just complete unknowing, but yet devotion draws you forward and man there’s no control. No, it’s just love of that which is. That’s it and so it’s at the end of the book because if you start out with that, the ego is probably going to cop it and you’ll end up, I don’t know doing what, but watch out.
Rick: Yeah.
James: It could become an obsession with devotion. It’s poorly understood but, in our culture anyway, maybe not in India. But it’s important to develop a certain discernment before you get to that point, and that’s why it’s at the end. But I mean, if you could skip to devotion, yeah, do that.
Rick: I think devotion needs to have a foundation, in terms of self-realization, because, if you don’t know who you are, then who is going to be devoted to what? Maharishi used to say that a small pond can’t rise up in big tidal waves without stirring up the mud at the bottom. And by the same token, unless there is that foundation of being, then the heart can’t rise in great waves of devotion, because it just doesn’t have the foundation or the depth or the capacity to do so.
James: Yeah, so I wrote it that way because, I mean just read it. Hearing you say that, it kind of bothers you. And people say, well I’m done, it’s over. I do kind of say that.
Rick: It doesn’t bother me that much. It’s just, really man.
James: Right, I mean we could still pass the salt and hang out, and so, it’s both. And I want people hearing this to hear that. The heart of it is really compassion. If you love people, love beings and you want to do this, let’s do it.
Rick: Okay, good. Well, we’ve covered a lot. This has been a good conversation.
James: Thank you.
Rick: Yeah, I knew it would be, just listening to your talks, that you’re an articulate guy and you’ve put a lot of thought into this stuff and taken it very seriously. I had a feeling we would have an interesting conversation, which we have.
James: Thank you.
Rick: Good. Okay, so let me wrap it up. I’ve been speaking with James Wood and, as always, I’ll be linking to James. I always create a page for each person and say a little bit about them, link to their website and stuff. So, James’s website is jameswoodteachings.com and I’ll be linking to that, so you can go there and find out what James has to offer and get in touch with him. As you know, probably, this is an ongoing series and if you would like to check out previous ones or be notified of future ones or subscribe to the audio podcast or donate or see who is scheduled in the coming months or whatever, go to badgap.com and just check out the appropriate menus to do those things. So, thanks for listening or watching. Next week, as I mentioned, well, I didn’t mention her name, it’ll be Gloriji, who is this woman who owned a biker bar and was a bartender and had some horrific experiences. She ended up literally on her knees and then the light broke through. So, I think she’s going to be really interesting. So, thanks James.
James: I’ll say one thing of a practical nature that we got a new website recently and we’re really adding more content to it. If people are wondering what can they do, one thing you can do is get on our mailing list. And we won’t spam you, but we’ll let you know about upcoming retreats and things like that. Jameswoodteachings.com. You get a free download of chapter one of 10 Paths.
Rick: I don’t spam you either and if you sign up to be notified of each new interview, you get basically one email a week. We don’t use the list for anything else. So great, thanks for listening or watching, everybody, and we’ll see you next week. And thanks again James. Have a good life.
James: Thank you, too. Hope to see you again.