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Rick Archer: 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 have done hundreds of them now. And if this is new to you and you’d like to see previous ones, please go to the past interviews menu on batgap.com, where you’ll see them all organized in various ways. In fact, for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working on a project where I’ve completely revamped the alphabetical chronological listing pages. So check that out. This program is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. Aside from those annoying little ads on on YouTube, there’s no advertising whatsoever. So we rely on that sort of support in order to do this. So if you appreciate it and feel like supporting it, there are PayPal buttons on every page of the site. My guest today is Jason Schulman. Jason, I’ll just read his canned bio here and then we’ll get into more personal conversation. Jason is an American spiritual teacher whose original work springs from his Judaic and Buddhist background. He is the author of a society of souls the school for non dual healing and awakening of the founder rather, of a society of souls the school for non dual healing and awakening, based in the US and in the Netherlands. Through the school he teaches the distinctive body of non dual work has developed to awaken the human spirit, non dual healing and personal movement and the work of return. Jason’s main concern has been to develop paths of healing the mind, body and spirit based on his own understanding of the difficulties inherent in the human condition. Through his studies and practice, Jason has developed a unique perspective on human consciousness and the nature of existence. His work seeks to translate this perspective into a replicable and clearly delineated path for other seekers of truth to follow. He has been especially interested in applying personal spiritual work into methods of transforming society at large. That end, he has created the Magi process, a non dual method of working with conflicts between people, institutions and governments. He is the author of numerous monographs and books and several albums of his work as a singer and songwriter. More about his work can be found at Society of souls.com. So let me just check one quick thing before we continue. Okay, it’s good. So I also want to thank very to Shaolin bear for recommending Jason, I very, you’re probably watching. I’ve interviewed Rivera. Yeah, I bet she she’s on there. I interviewed her about a year ago, and people might want to check out her interview as well. So Jason, your your wife, Arlene sent me a quote that she thought we might want to talk about, I thought I’d start with that, rather than starting with the usual biographical stuff, and we’ll kind of loop back and do biographical stuff as we go. So Arlene said, one of Jason’s greatest strengths, as a teacher and writer is his ability to put subtle and important concepts into clear language. I wanted to send this quote of his that I happened upon the other day, here’s the quote, within each human being is both a universe held in common with all other beings, and a unique universe, which is that individuals portion of heaven for them alone to reveal, are they instead I love this quotation, because it is it as it is a statement of true non duality, in which both the individual as a separate being and their unity, with all are seen as inseparable and CO arising. So, we could start with a bang by talking about that.
Jason Shulman: You sure? Yeah. What’s the what would you like to know about that?
Rick Archer: Well, why? Why does our lien think that’s such a significant quote, and perhaps, you know, that of all things she could have sent me she considered to be, you know, worthy of sending?
Jason Shulman: Well, maybe I can kind of combine some of the biographical material with the philosophical and practical material by seeing that that resolution because that’s actually a quote of resolution was one of my main preoccupations is as a spiritual student, starting when I became a Zen student around when I was 17 years old. So I, I had a tendency to oscillate. Let’s put it that way between a deistic point of view, where there is a separate God and a God who was a personal God, a God who could help me through my difficulties and suffering. And then the non dual, Zen oriented, Advaitic oriented material, in which case, there was no God that was outside or inside it was a different approach entirely
Rick Archer: representative of the Judaic and the Buddhists that I alluded to in your intro, yes,
Jason Shulman: yes, and the oscillation happened, because one would wear out, and then the other was needed. So I would have a very important and deep experiences from the non dual perspective. And then at some point that would peter out, and the suffering that I experienced, or the confusion that I experienced, would come back, and I would need help. So I pull upon the personal God and the how you could help that way. And then that would help. And then that would peter out, because I was very attracted to the open mind alone concept. So that that experience between my instinct was, which was correct, and I think many people would probably have this instinct, that truth has to be truth, that can’t just use a cliched metaphor, there are many paths up the mountain, but there’s a peak of the mountain, although with Kabbalah, we probably want to go down to the valley we don’t like we don’t like peak so much that too isolated. So, so I knew in my heart that whatever God was, whatever, whatever realization, Self Realization and liberation was that they’d have to be the same thing. And a lot of my early path, was trying to reconcile these experiences of oneness that I had in my Zen studies and Advaitic studies with the personal God, which also helped connect to my heart, and to support the personal being that I also was. So that that that journey took many, many years to really understand deeply enough. So the path that I created, really does not reject anything basically, doesn’t reject the ego, in fact, makes a differentiation between the separate self or the ego personality, as a, as the unhealed ego. Rather than saying that the ego is something we need to either ignore as illusion, or transcend as unimportant, or something like that. The path that we have in a society of souls doesn’t reject the ego. The ego, in fact, is a marvelous and fantastic invention. And as important as our hands and knows, it’s another sense it’s an executive function, but it has an unhealed, an unhealed incarnation, so to speak, and all of us, and the point is to heal the ego, at which point it takes its rightful place in the panoply of, of who we are in the in this spectrum of who we are. And so I think that Arlene probably liked that statement, because it doesn’t reject individuality. It doesn’t think that we have to become something that is undifferentiated from other people, some sort of smooth kind of attitude, or even and equanimity is to be an awakening person, that it likes the dynamics of personality, but it wants to heal the ego so that the ego can perceive the world in its totality, which is simultaneously two things and one thing non duality being that container that’s big enough that it can contain duality, as well as singularity. Let’s put it
Rick Archer: right. Now there was a great quote from your book, instruction manual for receiving God, which kind of jumped out at me and taught me something I didn’t know about snowflakes. You said each snowflake is actually a combination of several ice crystals, each formed around a tiny particle of soil. The human ego is like that particle of Earth, a condensation of the particular within the great expanse of the universe. Without it, the entire journey from separateness to oneness would not be possible.
Jason Shulman: Right? Great. Yeah, thank you.
Rick Archer: There’s some there’s a ton of thoughts and issues around this whole thing of healing the ego versus transcending killing or eliminating the ego and so on that we might want to talk about for a few minutes. You know, as you are aware, there’s in spiritual circles there are camps which champion one or the other perspective or recommendation. And, you know, some people or some people say that you really, like you’re putting new wine into old wineskins if you don’t somehow revamp or heal or improve upon your, the receptacle or the vehicle through which the Divine is to be lived. And, and others say it’s an illusion, you know, just get get over it get beyond it. And then we have examples of people who appear to have achieved a fairly high degree of realization, but seem really messed up in certain ways and behave inappropriately, and so on, which would tend to support the notion of healing the ego, and not just, you know, trying to bypass it. So I think you’d probably be in that camp. But um, maybe you could elaborate on the comments that just made.
Jason Shulman: You know, I, Rick, I would probably say, I’ve never met anybody without an ego, I can, there’s always a self that’s apprehending the world, that’s having an experience of oneness, that’s having an understanding that’s, that’s having a misunderstanding, and so on. Some egos seem more behaved, more have a better behavior than others. But there’s no such thing as a human being, or, frankly, anything in the manifest world that doesn’t have a self. And that self is not different from the ego. In fact, from an awakening point of view, even the self that’s asleep, is awake. It’s it’s, but for our personal experience, to have a personal experience of this awakening, we have to have, I’m getting kind of buzzed in there for a second as a motorcycle went by here, oh, we have to have an ego that is, has the ability to take in things other than its misconceptions. So this misconceptions need to be healed. And you know, healed and educated, because there’s a lot of MIS education. And some of it’s inevitable. It’s not only bad parent, bad parenting and bad culture, it’s inevitable because it’s extremely difficult for an individual to come out of the background into the foreground of individuality. It’s a very hard task for something to become manifest. So it’s an existential problem. It’s not only a bad education problem and a mis education problem, it’s a very difficult for a human being to be both an individual and part of the totality of being
Rick Archer: Would you say it’s always going to be difficult? Or would you say that just this transition process is fraught with difficulties and eventually, just just a way of transitioning to breaking the sound barrier results in a lot of turbulence until the sound barrier is broken. And then it’s kind of smooth after that.
Jason Shulman: You know, one of the mythologies that I’ve come across just personally, is that people think after awakening, and by the way, I don’t even like the word awakened, as if there’s a demarcation between some sort of state of ignorance and then some sort of state of awakened. I like the gerund form ing awakening, which I consider an eternal, constant process,
Rick Archer: which, just to interrupt for a second we used to, that’s the subtitle of this show used to be interviews with ordinary awakened people. And after a certain point, we thought we got to change that to awakening, because it’s never ending. And so we did, sorry to interrupt.
Jason Shulman: That’s okay. That’s, that’s the nature of what awakening is awakening. Awakening is not an experience, an experience, like Satori, or Kensho, to use Zen terms, or the presence of God to use deistic terms. That’s an experience. It’s wonderful to have these peak experiences, because they shake things up and let us reorient and so on. But awakening itself is an ongoing change in relationship with the world according to my experience, and requires effort all the time. Now, it’s a different kind of effort. But it’s an effort nonetheless. So we need to approach everything as we approach it, and look at it and be with it. And it’s not so much of an experience as an ongoing process of living. That becomes planar and planar actually.
Rick Archer: Well, you know, Ken Wilber, whom I interviewed a few weeks ago distinguishes between states and states. Just and I’m sure others talk this way to state to being temporary experiences, you may have a Satori here or somebody there, and stages being more like stable platforms that perhaps get stabilized after repeated states have been, you know, the nervous system and might have been exposed sufficiently to higher states, and eventually those become the neurophysiology adapts, and those become stabilized just the way. Well, yeah, that’s enough said, so would you agree with that model? Or no?
Jason Shulman: Well, I’m more of an analog guy, okay, then then a digital guy. So even though I understand what Ken is saying, in terms of stages, and states, you know, those things don’t happen simultaneously. In other words, somebody could be very advanced in one state, and very primitive in another state, and another person in the reverse. So that’s why, for instance, you’ll get people who have had fantastic experiences of awakening, who also have very bad behavior. Yeah. Because they don’t have what should we call it, they have uneven development, right? In their spiritual work and the spiritual life. So they have this fantastic sense of freedom, which they then misunderstand and misuse, thinking in other realms of their life, that they can misuse it, and so on, yeah, the charisma, the power that comes along with it, and so on. So those stages and states are, to me a little bit, they’re part of the problem. Because identifying them in that way, you’re kind of standing outside of them, and describing them. And that leads to kind of an admiration of various states, rather than a surrender to the constant effort it takes to be a real human being.
Rick Archer: I think Ken might agree with much of what you just said, he talks of lines of development, you know, and there are various lines. And, you know, he says, We’re not going to make this all about Ken Wilber. But he says that these lines can get quite out of sync with one another, as you were just saying, Yeah, so it’s a matter of, from agreeing with what terminology we’re using. But I want to come back to the notion of taking a lot of effort to maintain a certain way of functioning. Because in my experience, it it’s kind of effortless. I mean, certainly life has its challenges, and you have to continue to exercise discrimination. And and, you know, good judgment and good, you know, keep an eye on your behavior and not act like a jerk and so on. But, but a certain development accrues over time, that doesn’t need thinking about in order to operate from that level, just as you don’t need to think about breathing or something.
Jason Shulman: Well, I understand that, I understand that. But don’t you, it hasn’t been your experience, that sometimes there’ll be a gap in yourself. And let’s say we’re both married men. So we’re, we’re spiritual men, and we are, have long practice, and discrimination and mature and so on. And sometimes idiots. Oh, yeah. Sometimes we just talk to our wife and we, and and they wonder to themselves, they say, Boy, what did I marry an idiot? And you have to catch yourself, say, What do you mean? I’m an idiot? Wait a minute. I was wasn’t I just then Yeah, and you have to regroup. And so that’s the effort that I’m talking about, which is an ongoing thing. And also, just to continue for a second. Certain things get harder, get harvest harder. Yes. Okay. Like, for instance, I find that I am more attuned to other people’s suffering, and the suffering of the world. Yeah, I feel that more acutely now than I did when I didn’t have a lot of this under my belt. Yeah. So, you know, it’s kind of like, there isn’t mythology, according to my way of thinking there is a mythology that when you get to a certain threshold, things become easy. You float in a certain way through life. Everything is in the so called now. And, and no one talks about a few people talk about the fact that certain things get more difficult. Yeah, that you feel the suffering of the world, that you that you are, that you want to make amends for your own ignorance over time, and so on.
Rick Archer: Yeah, I mean, I still feel guilty about things I did 45 years ago. You know, sometimes I just feel this sensitivity and like, Oh, my God, how could I have treated that person that way? And also, I mean, I can’t walk down the sidewalk and see a worm stranded on the sidewalk without picking it up and putting it on the grass and the neighbors have Robin’s nest on their front porch just on a table because it fell out of a tree. And I was up in the middle of the night the other night thinking about how to protect it from the local cat and stuff like that. But I don’t see that as a problem. I see that as a nice thing. I’d rather be that way than insensitive.
Jason Shulman: Oh, of course. In fact, in fact, here I agree with you 100%. I pretty much all the time. Welcome all of these moments. Yeah, I welcome all of these moments. So that’s a very big difference. If we want to call it a stage or, you know, I have on my email sign off, which is a sign off that I have yet to complete. I may not complete it in this lifetime. But I try my best to complete it every day. It says delight in all things. And I know that this whole facet of human life that I have not yet decided to delight in. But more and more I delight in all of it. So when I’m when I’m doing my meditations, if a problem comes up in my meditation, or a problem comes up that I’ve discovered in my personality, I welcome it. Yeah, I’m very happy to meet it. It doesn’t mean it’s not a little embarrassing. It doesn’t mean that it’s not a little painful, but I welcome it, which is why I think of awakening as more of an attitude adjustment then than a trophy, if you will, it’s an attitude adjustment where we have decided to be a total human being in, in every footstep in every moment that we walk, welcoming the constant challenges of being a human being and of improving even as we know we’re perfect in every moment.
Rick Archer: Yeah, there’s a quote from Padma Sun bhava ancient Buddhist, sage, who said though my awareness is as vast as the sky My attention to karma is as fine as a grain of barley flour.
Jason Shulman: My Was that was that the word clamor?
Rick Archer: My I’m not sure which word you thought it was quiet
Jason Shulman: my, my attention to to karma
Rick Archer: action? Oh, to calm my behavior. You know, my Yeah. In other words, you can’t go bumbling through life like a bull in a china closet. You know, your your unbounded awareness does not excuse you from as done once teacher would say impeccability.
Jason Shulman: Right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So So for instance, as a teacher I meant to say, right? So for instance, for example, I think it was the 17th Karmapa. That’s the Nigma sect of Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism, in answer to a question to someone once leaned forward and said, pretty crazy in here. So that I remember that a lot. Because it’s pretty crazy in here. Yeah, I didn’t grow up in a perfect household. I didn’t grow up with perfect parents. My genome, which gives me certain talents gave me certain deficits. So I don’t have to be the difference is I don’t have to be driven by the smallest parts of me. Now, I can know that it’s pretty crazy in there. And it doesn’t have to be my behavior.
Rick Archer: Yeah. Let’s keep playing around with this. Because even though it’s pretty crazy in there, so to speak, you’re not about to go out and shoot up a nightclub or something. There’s, there’s a difference between that kind of craziness and the kind of craziness that you’re talking about. We’re
Jason Shulman: talking about unreality of, of not understanding that you are entirely part of the web of creation. Yeah. For example. You know, there’s an old story by rom Das, who went to see his brother who was in a mental institution. And his brother thought he was Jesus Christ, which is what brought him into the mental institution. Great story. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we’ll see if my version is the same as yours. I hope it is. And, and Rhonda said, I don’t mind that my brother thought he was Jesus Christ. He just thought he was the only one. Right. So, you know, so that’s the, you know, that’s an extreme example. But, you know, we don’t have to go into personalities and stories. But we all know many stories of originally good hearted and devoted meditation and spiritual teachers who did things that were very split from the very thing that they were going after. Yeah. And they needed a little bit more to healing of the ego. Yeah, at point.
Rick Archer: Now I’m glad we’re talking about this. I gave my talk at the Science non duality conference. Just last year on the ethics of Enlightenment, and I know we can talk, we’ve talked, Weidman means but
Jason Shulman: there’s no I like the word ethics, I’d like to talk about winning. Yeah, let’s do that.
Rick Archer: But you know, I mean, and part of the point, one of the points I brought out, I guess was that people have this sort of pie in the sky notion of what Enlightenment is. And they chuck their discrimination out the window, and then go go way off the rails sometimes with somebody whom they think is enlightened, because they doubt their own common sense. And, you know, look at this guy is an example of an ideal human being. It’s gotten a lot of people into big trouble and even cause their death if we want to look at Jonestown or, you know, the Heaven’s Gate cult or things like that.
Jason Shulman: Or if we want to look at Ozel Tenzin from the Pashyanti community.
Rick Archer: I’m not familiar with that one. But there’s plenty of examples. Yeah,
Jason Shulman: yeah, I shouldn’t even I shouldn’t even do that. That doesn’t help the world’s for me to point out things like that. But go ahead. Well, no, no, that’s just
Rick Archer: the point. That we’re just kind of embellishing the point you made earlier, which is that the ego needs to be healed. And that attainments of higher states and so on, do not give you a pass in terms of perfect behavior or anything, and that there could be plenty of work yet to do. I guess one question that we could play with is, how tight the correlation is, I mean, can how how high can you get so to speak, in terms of development of consciousness without there being some commensurate development of ego and personality? Or does the one drag the other along eventually? Or can they just continue to get farther and farther out of sync?
Jason Shulman: Well, one of the interesting question, one of the things I like about the Qabalistic model, as I as I’ve interpreted it, is that it doesn’t talk it does. In my Kabbalah, let’s put it this way, as I mentioned before we go downward. So I would say that the Valley for me is a better metaphor, it’s a better metaphor, thank you, then the mountain top because in the valley, you have the river, you have the sheep, and you have the goats and the frogs, and you have other people, and you have the homes, and you have the schools and the hospitals and so on. So to me, it’s a matter of coming down to earth. Yeah. You know, I had a discussion with one of my mentors Reb Zalman Schachter Salome, years ago, I went out to spend some time with him in Colorado. And we were getting to know each other, and I was telling him about myself and my Advaitic. Understanding and my Advaitic passion, my passion for non duality. And he said to me, at that time, he said, I’m interested in the god of this earth and of this time. And I took that to heart and I thought about that a lot. And when you get down my experience is when you get down deep enough in the valley, that’s the highest as well, high and low and no longer opposite terms. And so I think, again, this all personal opinions, I think, for me talking about Hi, look, I’ll give you I’ll give you an actual example. In the four year intensive training in non dual Qabalistic healing, one of the things we talk about are the four universities. This is something you offer. Yes, yeah, yeah, I’m not teaching it anymore. All of my senior staffer are teaching that I only teach advanced students now. And I’m also teaching people the new work that I developed which went back to my original perspective, which is called non dual shamanism, or non dual voyaging, and there’s a book coming out in two months on that large book on that. But just a real quick example. There are four universes and they have different names, RCI you can see it a Bria and artsy lute. In the, in this course we talk about three of them. Invariably, before people have integrated, understood, metabolized and lived those three universes people wanted to but what about Aussie Luke because that’s the highest one. And they’re attracted to the highest one which turns out to not exist, because it’s really the, the manifestation of all of those three universes it’s the living of it from moment to moment. The imminence of it the imminence of God. So, I’m careful with those words. I try to because I know from my own ego that trying to Each Highness is really not only a misnomer, but a dangerously misguided effort.
Rick Archer: Yeah, well, let’s not worry too much about which metaphor we use high or deep, whichever suits our purposes. But I guess what we’re trying to convey with the metaphor is, you know, some sort of oneness or attunement to ultimate reality or divine intelligence or, or something of that nature. So when or whatever metaphor works for you, and you know, and we’re considering how a holistic approach which takes into account the development of all facets of the personality, how critical that might be, or how important or useful or conducive that might be, to the development of that living the divine as a as a 24/7 state that restates what we’ve been trying to say here.
Jason Shulman: Yeah, yeah. Well, in my lingo, I would never use the concept of just this is me, I don’t want to cause controversy on your show. But I would, I would never use ultimate reality, okay. That’s not a happy phrase for me, okay. Because ultimate implies a kind of ending place, or a kind of plateau. As ultimate reality, it’s very difficult to me to understand the difference between ultimate reality and this pencil, this mechanical pencil, because if reality is totally integrated, then the totality of reality has to be in this pencil as well. And, in fact, my experience is that when I see this pencil, or I see anything, I see what we call continuity density, but I see, I see the divine Yeah, all in all of these things. So ultimate reality would not be something it implies someplace different from, for me, it implies, perhaps not for you, someplace different than here.
Rick Archer: No, it doesn’t imply that for me, when I say when I look at your pencil, you know, a physicist might look at it and say, Well, ultimately, that’s just up quarks down quarks and electrons. Or he might go on to say, well, even more fundamentally, it’s just a unified field, or, you know, the vacuum state out of which this thing emerged. But he will, he also wouldn’t deny the atomic and molecular and the chemical and, you know, and the actual, you know, humanly visible expression of the pencil. So, and I think that’s a kind of a corollary to what we might think of, and, I mean, the universe is not dependent upon our perception or understanding of it, for what it is in and of itself. And so in that sense, I have the sense that there’s sort of an ultimate reality to things, but I don’t, but actually, living that as human being, is probably a never ending process. No, and to the extent to which is more clear and more profound, more embodied. That’s my perspective. Anyway, for what it’s,
Jason Shulman: yeah. So we’re I did this, we’re getting into very fine points of, of theology here. That’s okay. But, but from my perspective, the universe does need it. There is no objective universe that is separate from us that everything the Buddhists would call this CO dependent origination, or mutually colorizing. So for instance, our egos, which are practical machines, they’re wonderful practical machines, knows that this pencil is in the foreground of this picture right now. It ignores the fact that there’s a background unless someone asks what’s in the background and which face Jason’s face is in the background, but foreground and background are mutually co arising. This form the concept of foreground doesn’t exist, without background literally doesn’t exist. In the same way the concept of high is meaningless. Or, unless unless low is also noticed. If I and all those words are boundless, philosophical, as we would call boundless or vague terms that need each other to be nested together to mean something. So the same I experience a my my feeling about it is that this universe there is no universe without so hard to talk about this without the observer, who was also part of the universe anyway. So I went when I see. So for me what I call true non duality.
Rick Archer: You need to turn that off?
Jason Shulman: I did. Okay. I don’t know what that was. Yeah. For me, it’s always two things that are arising constantly. And not a single thing, a single thing would imply that there is a stage to get to that there is an ultimate reality, when for me when reality is cooperative effort. And if this makes if I’ve been clear enough, I hope that had been a little vague. So
Rick Archer: I think I agree with everything you say. But we can chew on it a little bit more. I mean, if the modern understanding of cosmology is correct, it probably took a few billion years before, you know, there had been enough birth and death of stars after the Big Bang, to, you know, result in enough heavy elements to generate any kind of life form that could be an observer in the in the sense that we are. And yet somehow those billions of years of cosmic and stellar evolution had to take place. And they took place without there being any any sentient being to observe them. And so they were not dependent upon sentient beings. But one might also say that, you know, the creator itself or himself or herself, was engaged in a process of, you know, observation and self interaction which gave rise to the universe.
Jason Shulman: Well, this is assuming that the type of sentient being that we are is the only type of sentience if stars themselves if there’s hydrogen sentience and oxygen sentience and star sentience and Galaxy sentience, then we have a different situation entirely.
Rick Archer: And whether Yeah, and also, you know, I mean, it’s just to take an example somewhat, one might say, well, there couldn’t possibly be life on the sun. That’s a it’s a, you know, thermal nuclear reaction, you know, fusion reaction. But how about subtle levels of reality? The sun, in many cultures is regarded as a conscious very intelligent being, which just has a very different, you know, gross body than than our gross body, but it’s nonetheless a real impulse or expression of consciousness.
Jason Shulman: Sure has an update sounds like this is you’re going to answer in the affirmative here. Hasn’t it been true for you in those moments where you have had plateau experiences, that everything seems alive? Absolutely. I mean, every every stone has sentience, every every I’m looking at pitch pines here. And what I’m losing the word for pine cones, every time cones and every every cut piece of wood on my deck over here, and every Cardinal that comes by everything has sentience. So from that point of view, and we are in touch with that level of, of life of aliveness. It seems to me that the somethingness of the universe is quite enough life, for there to have been two things going on all the time.
Rick Archer: Yeah. I always like to say God is hiding in plain sight. I agree with that. Yeah, if you just take a look at what you’re actually looking at, and consider what it is. And it’s like this dance of vast intelligence and every little pile of dog poop and, and stone and everything.
Jason Shulman: Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s life. It’s aliveness. And that, to me is what awakening is awakening. And you mentioned this before that we both talked about it. That that level of aliveness is where we welcome as best we can. Because we’re going to fail because we’re imperfect beings. We welcome the aliveness of the universe constantly coming toward us as we come toward it.
Rick Archer: Yeah. So two sentences ago, you said and that, to me is what awakening is. So what you’re saying is this sort of sensitive appreciation of the aliveness of everything is what what you regard as awakening or characteristic of awakening?
Jason Shulman: Yeah, characteristic, and also our liveness, which means the totality of the totality of me, for example, or some very deep understandings of the universe, and places where I’m still ignorant, and imperfect, and so on. But all of that from the awakening. Position is aliveness Yeah, the difference is I don’t have to be As a slave to the smallest parts, I can see them with compassion. And in fact, they are allies rather than being enemies. Yeah, because our suffering and our imperfections of the mother of our awakening, and are are awakening at the same time. So
Rick Archer: you were talking in the beginning about how you used to flip flop between the sort of a non dual perspective and then a more, you know, theistic or appreciation of the divine perspective. And it always puzzled me that I’m no expert on Buddhism by a longshot. But it always puzzled me that they somehow left God out of the equation. I mean, how could How could they have become as awakened, as many of them did and are currently and yet not sort of have the sort of appreciation that we’re talking about here of the the divine intelligence lively in every particle of creation?
Jason Shulman: You know, when I, and I wish I could quote some things here, but I’m not currently reading these particular texts. But when you read the original in English, but the original Pali texts of Buddhism, there’s a very godlike feeling to it. It got more, and there may be Buddhists listening to this, who will object to what I say. And it’s, it’s possible that I’m wrong. But this is my memory of it. That the Theravada and Buddhism with the Pali texts kept the sacred had that feeling this this kind of imminence feeling that is not so far away from everything else, as it gets toward the MaHA Jana. And as it gets toward the Chinese and Japanese aspect, it becomes much more austere. And when you get back to the version of Jana, where the bond influences are still there, and the spirits and demons are still there, and so on, the assurance and all the different things, you get back again, that that cosmology, yeah, that is kind of kind of missing in the, in the pure Zen, Chon tradition, you know.
Rick Archer: So it could be that things got diluted or watered down, or that certain branches just split off that were relevant to certain mindsets. Just as the way it’s happened in all the Western religions. Abran Yeah. Abrahamic religions.
Jason Shulman: Everybody has their own idea. Yeah, that’s, that’s why you have a show. It’s why I have people who come to my school and other people don’t, everybody has an idea because everybody has to confront. Everybody has to confront being the kind of unique human being they are in the common search for understanding and intelligent life, you know? So there’s always there’s always differences.
Rick Archer: Yeah. And, and God, God is not a one trick pony. You know, there’s, there’s so many different varieties of there’s a thing in the Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna says something like, however, somebody worships Me, even if he has no concept of who are who or what I am, that is appreciated and recognized. So, you know, somebody, it could be in the jungles of the Congo, you know, doing some kind of thing that might seem very exotic and strange to our culture, but it’s still the same sentiment, you know, expressing it in a way that’s appropriate to that person.
Jason Shulman: Absolutely. That’s what that’s the fertility of existence, isn’t it? Yeah. It’s just fantastic.
Rick Archer: You talk. Now, as I said, at the beginning, before we started this, if at any point, anything comes to your mind that I’m not asking you and you want to launch into it, just go right ahead. And also people watching or listening, watching this on YouTube Live? If you have a question, for Jason, just go to the upcoming interviews page on batgap.com. And there’s a form at the bottom through which you can submit that question. But um, you talk a lot, or not a lot, but quite a bit here and there in your books about suffering. And, hey, you’re Jewish, it’s goes to the territory, right? There’s all kinds of
Jason Shulman: the Christians that I that I meet insist that they suffer more Catholic Catholics that I meet, insist that they suffer more competition, I’m not sure.
Rick Archer: And I’ve heard some people say, Well, there’s a distinction between suffering and pain. Jesus feel felt pain, but he didn’t suffer because he was in such a state as to be beyond the impact of the senses. Even though his senses felt the pain his awareness was open to a dimension which was sort of, you know, beyond that. I don’t know if that if you would believe that statement. But let’s talk about the whole concept of suffering and how it fits into the evolutionary process and whether one might ever reach a state at which one is beyond it. Not to say that one won’t feel bodily pain, but they won’t, it won’t touch one’s innermost core, and things like that.
Jason Shulman: So this is a really interesting question. Let me let me tell you, something I’ve thought a lot about there is a, according to me, another mythology, that a mark of Enlightenment or awakening is the fearlessness in the face of death. And, and also somehow not feeling pain, and not feeling certain types of pain, right. So for instance, one story that I hear bandied about a lot is Ramana, Maharshi, who was emblematic? And when he was exactly when he was dying of cancer, they said, you know, he was no different, although when he was sleeping, he moaned. Yeah, you know, I made a practice since I considered Ramana, one of my teachers, I made a practice of trying to get contemporary, a little pamphlets that were written by people who knew him. And then one of them by his attendant, little, I don’t know, 46 Page kind of little pamphlet, he leans over to this attendant, and you know, he used to, he used to, once he came down from the mountain from the cave, to the ashram, he was on a little bed day bed, and people who would lie there on this bed reading and talking, and people would come and ask him questions, and so on. And after a day of that, he leaned over to this attendant and said, I feel like I’m in jail. Now, for me, that’s just as important, maybe more important than some of the things he said about the self, and who am I, and so on. Because it gives us it’s been filtered out of the literature a lot. I don’t think, I think by preference, not by a censorship, but because it’s his humanity, the same time as he is a highly evolved being, he feels he’s trapped, being a specimen, having people look at him on this day bed as he talks all day. So for me, the mark, this is something I’ve battled with myself for many years, that I wanted to achieve some sort of mark of not being of having those marks of not being afraid of death, or so on and so on. One of my teachers was the dining category, Roshi, the Zen teacher, and who’s who’s passed on now. And he said, there’s no right way to die. That’s a terrific statement for me. Because some people die in their sleep, and, and with angels around them and not in pain. And some people die in horrible pain. And there’s no correlation between being an elevated spiritual person and having a good death. You can have any kind of death, you can have any kind of as a as one type of human being or another. So Kati Geary statement for me was very broad and very beautiful. Because it takes everybody off the hook, you die the way you die. And you face what you have to face, and so on. So I kind of I think I might have lost the the point of what I was saying, but you’ll have to remind me again by by saying something.
Rick Archer: Sure. Well, we’re talking about suffering and whether one could actually reach a state at which one was still feeling pain. If you put your hand on the stove, you feel it, but but not suffering because it doesn’t go to the core of who or what you are. There’s some sort of, I mean, I feel this in my own experience. I can give you examples. I mean, I remember one time, falling off my bicycle and scraping my arm on the gravel, and it was painful, but I was actually almost bemused while it was happening by the fact that there was some deep, silent, unshakable rock like, awareness that just sort of witnessed the whole thing and wasn’t impacted by it. And I could say more, but I’ll bounce it back to you.
Jason Shulman: Sure, sure. I’m sorry. You fell off the bike? Oh, it
Rick Archer: happened. I made a stupid turned into a gravel driveway going way too fast. And yeah.
Jason Shulman: The tires went out. Yeah, yeah. We have a work called the work of return, which you mentioned before the work of return has a basic understanding which maybe I’ll take a minute to explain. I often asked myself, Why when someone has a peak experience of Satori, or Kensho, it disappears. If you get a peek into the way the universe and yourself works, why doesn’t it remain at that point? Why does it disappear. And I realized that the ego in its unhealing state and its unhealed state, only likes homeostasis, it wants the next moment to be like the last moment. That’s what it wants. So that means that negative experiences, it clearly doesn’t like, let’s having a negative negative experience, let me get back to homeostasis. But it also doesn’t like positive experiences, because that changes the ego and the relationship to the ego as well. And it’s fearful of that type of change that it means annihilation. So even change in the positive sense, the ego resists, because the unhealed ego resists because it feels it means it’s annihilation. The aim of work of return beside personal exploration, this is a work that I created that people use as self healing. Sometimes the problem that you work with if you’re working with it with a disease or an injury, or thinking problem or an emotional problem, sometimes those things by the end of the work of return remain exactly what they were. But they don’t interfere with your life. They don’t interfere with your lifeforce. They don’t compound themselves into secondary suffering. Yeah, I think they’re just just the primary suffering. Oh, look at this. That was stupid. I went too fast. They hurt my arm. Okay. It didn’t go further. It didn’t say Oh, my God, why are the gods against me? Why am I so stupid? My mother said I was stupid. And this proves that, and so on. And
Rick Archer: so to close, it was
Jason Shulman: there was no secondary suffering. Yeah, well, much less secondary suffering. So that’s why I agree with you. But I don’t take it as far as seeing that as a mark of what’s what’s the word, mark of Enlightenment or mark of attainment, that’s the word I was looking for. It’s something that happens that we work toward. But if we hold out that as the goal, we’re going to be disappointed, because you may not have the genome that does what Ramana de made, what he how he lived, I may not have that. But we are both capable of being fully awakening beings. So I’m not going to hold out his particular brand, with his karma, his genome, his culture, and so on, as what it should be. For me, that would be a failure, a mark toward failure or a disaster spiritually.
Rick Archer: Yeah. A couple of things that come to mind. One is, there’s maybe the philosophical framework in which you understand life and death, and so on. We’ll talk about that in a second. And another is just the sort of moment to moment, visceral, experiential orientation, you have, like, when I fell off that bicycle, it wasn’t a time for philosophical speculation about whether I’m separate from my arm and all that stuff, it was just sort of a instantaneous experience of what happened. And like you say this, there’s a thing called secondary suffering, you know, that story of the princess in the pin where she was told she was gonna get pricked by a pin. And she went all through all sorts of hand wringing, and moaning and groaning. And you know, about the anticipation of this thing. And then finally, it happened. And she said, Well, that wasn’t so bad. So all that was unnecessary. So So with regard to sort of the philosophical suffering, I remember hearing about Raymond Burr, Who Played Perry Mason, and when he was dying, he was so terrified of death, probably because he thought that was going to be the end of any existence of him whatsoever, that he kept forcing himself to sit up right, so he wouldn’t pass away, slip away. And you can imagine that, you know, a large percentage of the population doesn’t believe that anything happened, that there’s anything after the body dies, and others do. I should think that believing that something continues even after the body dies, would have a very have a profound impact on how you view death as it approached.
Jason Shulman: Well, with a decision you don’t like little Questions. So, so, for instance, there are people who are Christians, for example, who have a deep connection to Jesus. And I love Christians who are really loving hearts. I think they’re fantastic people. And you
Rick Archer: sound like Donald Trump there for a second. This person.
Jason Shulman: They’re fantastic people because they go out, and they help people a lot. There’s a lot of people who just who are who are in, in the arms of Jesus who will go out and just help any soul. They’re, they’re the exact opposite of, of the Trumpian version of, of Christianity. So, so those people I’ve noticed, have a totally different relationship with death. Yeah, because they know, they feel and they know, they believe. But they, the belief is so deep that they know when they die, they’re gonna go be with Jesus. Not only that, they’re gonna go be with Uncle Henry and Aunt Martha, because who are also with Jesus, and they’re going to have a second life over there. Yeah. So there’s no question that people who have this kind of deep belief have less fear, it seems to be true, or at least they believe they’ll have less fear about dying, because the continuity of some sort of life after death is sustenance. It sustains them. Right. And on the other hand, people I’ve met who are complete atheists also have some of them have had no fear of death, because they get him may have fear of getting sick and having pain, but not of death. Because they’ll be gone. There’ll be nobody there to have death, right? It’s us guys in the middle, that have all that service. You know, yeah. It’s us guys in the middle who who have to, to think about what this happens to be the Hindu belief about life after death from the tribe, tribe. transmigration of souls is very different from the Buddhist. But I want to clarify that it’s very different from the Mahayana Buddhists because in the Pali scriptures, Buddha talks about reincarnation, and the Tibetans advisory Ana, talk about reincarnation as well. So it gets very, it gets very confusing. You know, I had a private practice for a while. And by private, I mean, it was not public. It was not something I charged for or did the, because I found that I had the ability to contact souls after death. I would contact people to help them with their psychology after dying. Because Because there’s after the death, psychosis, this after death, neuroses, people are frightened and so on.
Rick Archer: Are you saying that people who have actually already died have psychosis and neuroses? Or are the ones who are still alone? No, no, no, the ones who have died, okay, so they’re in a scary place, and they’re all mixed up and
Jason Shulman: all mixed up, some died in accidents, some died, suddenly, some whatever, they’re just in tremendous pain. I never thought that I was in charge of all of this, because there are plenty of guides and helpers and so on. But I would help as best I could, and I would always also ask for much too, the word check checking intercession? No, no, no. Intercession? No, I would always because I had doubts about myself and liability verification of some verification. Exactly. Thank you for those words, verification, that’s and so they’d say, yes. Please tell her to go look at in the back corner of the second draw, there’s a locket that I quit. And it will invariably be a true, yeah. That was just for my own edification, my own verification to calm me down. Because at the same time, as I had that ability, I grew up in a family that was very afraid of death. Yeah. And I found myself being very afraid of death, the pain and suffering and being again, it’s like the princess and the pin, the anticipatory anxiety, because I haven’t died yet. The participatory anxiety that would make me afraid of leaving my loved ones, and so on, and so on. So I’ve come down to especially since I’m deeply involved in non dual shamanism now, I’ve come down to a kind of agnosticism I guess I’d have to say about the whole thing. Even though I can still do this particular thing, and get very detailed and exact information and so on. Really, I don’t know. Yeah, I just, you know, I really I don’t know So I don’t count on that. to ameliorate to give me Sucre, I was gonna say, sucker super,
Rick Archer: super is like sugar, I think
Jason Shulman: it’s artificial super?
Rick Archer: Well, I’m reminded of a couple of Woody Allen quotes. He said, I don’t mind dying. I just don’t want to be there when it happens. It’s right. And that he also said, I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it but not dying.
Jason Shulman: This is an example of uneven development. Yeah.
Rick Archer: Well, I think not knowing is a good attitude. I don’t think it means that one can’t know. But But I don’t know if it’s like the scientific methods. They never achieve absolute certainty about anything, because they’re all if they’re really doing it, right, because they’re always open to the possibility that something could come along some anomaly that refuted what they believe to be true. And this happens over and over again in science. So I think it’s a good approach to take with spirituality to where you take everything as a hypothesis, perhaps worthy of investigation. You don’t invest a lot of energy believing or disbelieving or whatever. But you know, if it seems worth your while you investigate and see if your experience, you know, supports or refutes
Jason Shulman: the hypothesis. My business card says. Not knowing but paying attention. Great one. Yeah. So that’s what that says, and in non dual voyaging, or non dual shamanism, we have a statement that we try to use a lot that came from my ninth grade biology teacher, which is interesting if true. Yeah. Yeah. And, in fact, everything that the great Mr. Leo Steinberg taught me turned out to be pretty much untrue, right. 40 years later, whatever how many years it was, but interesting, if true, and not knowing but paying attention means that you’re going to have a hopefully vastly open panoramic view of what’s going on, not knowing exactly what’s important until it’s important.
Rick Archer: Yeah. And I think interesting, even if not true, is viable. Like, I find it really interesting to think that extraterrestrial life has been visiting the earth for a long time. Maybe it hasn’t. But the fact that it might have been is intriguing, you know, so
Jason Shulman: it is is, and I think it’s probably true,
Rick Archer: I think it’s probably true, too, but I’m not gonna stake my life. Because why should I you know,
Jason Shulman: I just asked my wife the other day, I said, if there was a civilization, a million years old, do you think we’ll ever find an artifact or is so many Earth changes that nothing can be found even some, some sort of whatever? That’s another,
Rick Archer: a whole nother topic of discussion. I think I might like to get Steven Greer on the show sometime. He’s, you know, he is he’s sort of a he’s the one who set up the non disclosure product product project and got all these pilots and military people to testify as to what they’d seen. He’s also a meditation teacher, so he has the spiritual angle. So I managed to read pretty sizable chunks of several of your books, and one of them was the book entitled Kabbalistic healing. And I’ve always I don’t know much about Kabbalah, Kabbalah, there’s a couple are Kabbalah, Kabbalah and Kabbalah.
Jason Shulman: So America in America, people say Kabbalah
Rick Archer: Oh, yeah, right. I don’t know much about it. I always think of it as non as Jewish mysticism. And I remember once reading a fascinating book about the Baal Shem Tov, he was remarkable. But um, let’s talk about that book a little bit. First, here’s a quote from from it, the Torah, a description of the interaction between oneness and duality, a vehicle for finding and cleaving to this unity, often called God, and a profound explanation of the reasons and direction of creation. That gives us a springboard
Jason Shulman: did I say that?
Rick Archer: I believe so. I got an audio book, I think. Was he plagiarized that?
Jason Shulman: No, I’m impressed. That’s so Kabbalah. I’ll tell you a very brief story about about about this. When I was 17 and had just gone to college, I grew up Jewish. I went to Tama Torah. So I went to I had a Jewish education and so on. But a Jewish education did not include any mystical stuff because you know, we want to watch out for that and get that out of there because it’s it’s unreliable. Anything might happen. Yeah, someone might blurt out the truth. So I was I was I started It’s sitting Zen when I was 17. And I was also
Rick Archer: to center down in midtown Manhattan by the way.
Jason Shulman: Do I know about it? Yes. Is that where you went? No, no, no, I didn’t. I was actually went to a it’s interesting. You asked that question, because
Rick Archer: I went to it once in 1968. And just curious whether you might have been there something.
Jason Shulman: Right. That was what was that a tie song was that Adel Roshi? At that time? I
Rick Archer: forget. I only went once. And it was in somewhere in around Midtown Manhattan, and we got our car towed and had this, go and sleep in the car lot until we could get money to aid with the whole adventure, trying to trying to cash a check in Times Square and asking prostitutes if they cashed a check. There’s a no my man doesn’t take checks. It was it was one of those teenage adventures.
Jason Shulman: Yeah, I could tell you, we can share a few of those. Anyway, where was I?
Rick Archer: Yeah, no, it’s alright. So you started sitting down when you were 17? Yeah,
Jason Shulman: so 17. But I always kept going back to Judaic stuff. Because I was reading Ramakrishna, I was meditating, I was having a profound spiritual experiences. And I guess I felt somewhat a little guilty or something, I would go back to Kabbalah. And I would read that to Ka’bah a lot. And it always seemed very intellectual, very dry. And while the Buddhist stuff and the Advaitic stuff was very expansive, and very beautiful to me. And this continued for many years, with this battle between the theistic and non theistic perspectives that I talked about before, until one day, and by that time, I had become a healer. And I was teaching for a healer, a particular healer, and so on. And I was up in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and brought along some Kabbalistic books, and I was reading them. And suddenly, it was a sudden experience, the entire thing open to me. And I understood, it opened in a specific way about healing. And I realized that there was a healing modality implied in Kabbalistic work that had never been unfolded. And I began unfolding it. I started writing about it. And I started experimental groups. I wrote curriculum, I actually only wrote curriculum, because I started developing healings from that. And people started having very powerful experiences and said, teach me this stuff.
Rick Archer: On your 17 are a little Oh, no,
Jason Shulman: no, no, no, no, no, it’s this is now when I was in my 30s. Okay. So I’ve never wanted to be a teacher, I had no interest in it. I was too egocentric, and I was suffering. I suffered too much.
Rick Archer: But you had like a seven year health crisis, didn’t you? I did,
Jason Shulman: I did very serious health crisis during that period, but I started teaching so on and so on. So the point the point is this, that traditional Kabbalah is a path of, in a sense, trying to divine the, what Heaven wants from us, in a certain sense, and following that, so that we can cleave to God, much more. But the the Kabbalistic thought that I started developing was from a non dual perspective. So I had to deal with a lot of paradoxes. Paradox number one, and we’ve alluded to this in our conversation was, God is very far away. God is hiding. The other half of that is in plain sight, right? As you said before, so that’s a paradox. What does that mean? And what does that mean for our daily life? If God is completely missing, and completely present, simultaneously? How does that happen? What is it about?
Rick Archer: It? Let me interject a question here. You know, Jesus was always saying, those who have ears to hear, let him let them hear. And I think the same could be said of eyes. You know, God is hiding in plain sight, but it’s it but it’s playing to see if you have the eyes to see. And a question came in from Dan in London, who asked, Can you talk a little about the visual sense in the exploration of reality? I find such beauty in the true subtlety, in the visual perception, the oneness is palpable. What are your thoughts? And I hope I didn’t throw you off the train. I think you can weave his question into what you were saying.
Jason Shulman: I’ll try to do that. Try to do that. So just to go back to your quote about Jesus. And I’ll try to talk about Dan’s question as well. To go back to your quote about Jesus. I was very intrigued. Stan in how can you help people gain the eyes to heat see, and the ears to hear? Because it’s all well and good. And I love Jesus. He’s a friend of mine. But it’s all it’s all well and good to see. Let him who has the ears to hear, hear this wonderful stuff?
Rick Archer: How can you help them and develop those ears? Exactly.
Jason Shulman: So my work was, specifically how can we make the the let’s let’s just call it this. I’ve never called it this spoken about it this way. But let’s call it the opening of the ear. Shema, the opening of the ear and the opening of the eyes. How can we make that a replicable and reliable experience for people? Yeah, how can we give them the meditations, the conceptual insights, the practice, and so on, so that people can become awakening beings? Doing whatever they do in the world? Yeah,
Rick Archer: I mean, Jesus also said the pearls before swine quote, and we don’t want to just brush people off as swine and say, I’m not going to give you these pearls. We don’t want to, right, yeah,
Jason Shulman: no, and we have to remember, these are Jesus’s words through various
Rick Archer: disciples hundreds of years before they wrote anything down. Whatever. Yeah,
Jason Shulman: yeah, yeah. So you know, by that time, a little swine harshness can come in, and the which I suspect Jesus didn’t think of anybody as a swine now, since he hung since he hung out with the poor, and the prostitutes and so on. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, like, what, what’s that about? So, so that was my, that was my desire. My desire was, how can we create the cradle for this, so that people if they follow the path can have replicable and reliable experiences of awakening and understanding, and so on. Now, different people will do that in different ways. And here, the thing that I’m talking about is, the total bodily sense of what awakening is and what connection to the truth and totality of our being is along the way, all the senses have to be healed. Strangely enough, because just to use eyes as an example, if we take Wilhelm Reich’s work, this great psychologist, psychiatrist, actually Wilhelm Reich, he said that the Oculus segment is the first segment that gets distorted and armored and blocked in a human being. So we think we’re seeing stuff. And we’re not we’re seeing memories, we’re seeing prior conditions, we’re seeing anticipatory things, we’re not seeing actually what’s in front of us. Because we’re armored, we’re protected. In fact, just as a little aside, if you’ve ever been to a drawing course, where they teach you to draw things, the hardest thing to do is actually to draw what you actually see, if you actually do that. It suddenly comes out looking like this thing that you never thought you could draw. Instead of saying, well, there’s a face and I’m going to draw a circle, do you see a circle? No, not actually, I see a thing here and a draw that, so we, so we don’t see, we don’t really hear. We don’t really Smell, smell, and so and so on. So, and then different people have different predilections. If you happen to have a predilection for actual visual sight, and that begins to open up, then you get a situation like dance, where that happens. But I’m very careful to know that there are different learning styles among all of my students, and some of them need to. So we call it perceive, we don’t call it C, in the way Don Juan calls, seeing where we make sure to call it perceiving. Because there’s going to someone, someone’s going to smell the truth, someone is going to hear the truth, someone’s going to see it, someone’s going to touch it. Someone’s going to feel it as rhythm, someone is going to feel it as heat, someone’s going to feel it as cold. So it’s not that we’re aiming toward those specific things that I mentioned, but it happens along the way. As the body mind spirit is trained to be an open sensorium for living the truth. The but you know, you alluded to this before, hope I’m not going too fast here. But you alluded to this before. People also have the mistaken notion that awakening is new information that can be put into you as you are. So now I got this new information or new experience, and now I’m awakening or awakened, whatever they want to call it. When the neurological endocrine structural things of the body must Change in order to have and hold that experience, you’re not the same person that you were with new information laid over it. That’s why it’s another reason it takes a long time. Sometimes you have to, you have to make new neurological, neuronal connections in the brain and the intestines and the body and so on. You have to give to grow.
Rick Archer: Yeah. neuroplasticity.
Jason Shulman: Thank God for neuroplasticity? Yeah,
Rick Archer: several things came to mind, as you were saying all that, you know, we’re not going to develop the, well, there’s two things, there’s how acutely or clearly we perceive. And there’s also how we interpret those are two things. And I would say there’s another thing, which is subtlety of perception. So for example, you know, we’re not going to develop the nose of a bloodhound, or the eyes of an eagle or the ears of whatever animal here’s really well. A bat, a bat. Yeah, we’re not going to hear ultrasonic levels of pitch. And it said that some birds, there’s some theories that birds actually navigate by being able to see the, the Earth’s gravitational field, and they navigate by that. So we’re human beings, and we have human perception. But I think that there’s a vast range of potential development of human perception that most people don’t tap. And we were talking earlier about subtle beings, and you know, devas and angels and stuff like that. I know people who see that stuff routinely. So there’s a there’s a dimension, but the potential dimension for development of perception that we could say, has a vertical thing, rather, in terms of increasing subtlety. And I think perhaps Dan is moving in that direction from what he described there.
Jason Shulman: In the training that I’m doing now, with advanced people called non dual shamanism or non dual voyaging, one of the things that we do is to develop all of that. But the attitude that we have toward that is something that we call a single world. And what a single world means is that this is it. This is it, I don’t eat every subtle dimension that we can apprehend or think about, we’re able to do that because there is a physical analog in our brain, it all comes down to that, whether it’s regular neurological acetylcholine, electrical stimulation, or whether it’s quantum processes in the brain that we have yet to discover. Every subtle state or understanding eventually migrates down toward a physical apparatus that can apprehend this. So the attitude of our approach to shamanism, is that all of this all the dimensionality, all the angels, all the Divas, everything are here, though this plane of existence is infinite in every direction. So it’s not it’s not constrained, but it’s here. And that’s a good thing for a shaman because you don’t have to go anyplace else, you have to learn how to be here. Yeah, with all this sensorium opened up.
Rick Archer: That makes sense to me. And, you know, and obviously, it’s all here, but we’re not necessarily equipped to experience it all. I mean, just using the bloodhounds a simple example, but Hunter walk into the room and smell all kinds of things we’re never going to smell, but that isn’t necessarily even relevant to human evolution in the spiritual sense. You know, it’s not like we have to somehow develop the capacity for experiencing everything and the relative creation that could possibly be experienced. In order to, well, you know, I’m going to this.
Jason Shulman: Yeah, I mean, I gotta tell you something else. The first Zen teacher who I met was a guy named Bishop Nakajima, and he’s, he’s never left me. Because if there’s such a thing as a as a as a spectrum of charisma, and presence, Bishop Nakajima was minus 10. He had he had zero charisma. And he has zero presence. And he gave me my first soft food, my first cushion, or I bought a fame. I remember. I loved him, because there was no display of anything. Yeah. His plainness was of a transcendent level if we can mix it together. And I mean, it was it was kind of like the plane this was a beautiful thing. So I I lost the track of wire brought that up, you said something?
Rick Archer: Well, I was talking about how you were saying in this room, for instance, it’s all here, all the dimensions, planes, whatever may exist is here, we don’t have to go someplace. And I was saying, yeah, it’s all here. And people shouldn’t assume that getting to experience it is some kind of essential criterion of, you know, spiritual advancement, because I agree. We’re human beings, we don’t need to experience the ultraviolet range of I said, you know, all that. Yeah, yeah. And even in terms of angelic or subtle perception, I remember I was talking to Adyashanti, once about this. And he said, Well, you know, I, we’re having an interview with Francis Bennett, and Francis does experience this stuff. And obviously, you know, I kind of remember choosing as I came into this life that it didn’t really want to didn’t need or want to open up to all that kind of thing.
Jason Shulman: Right, right. So I agree. 100% That’s, that’s exactly why I brought up thank you for putting me back on track. What Vic Bishop Nakajima the anti anti charisma teacher, because that’s not what awakening is about, you know, chugging Trump, I would have called that he would have put that under the rubric of spiritual materialism, where we want to gain powers, so to speak, and feel that we must have these powers to be you know, we must be like, What was the name of that? He? He was popular in the 60s? Now, no one talks about him. Sai Baba. No, no, no, it’s not a real person. It’s, it’s this Yogi who’s lived for 600 years biology or something. Something is something like, and, well, that’s good that he could live for 600 years in the Himalayas, someplace, and so on. But it’s not gonna happen to me and I have to eat and maybe eat a little less that might be helped me to live
Rick Archer: a few years. Yeah, yeah.
Jason Shulman: So yes, so we don’t want spiritual materialism. It’s not about gain. Or it’s actually if anything, it’s more about loss. It’s about the loss of our illusions. It’s the loss of our pride, the loss of our self judgment, and so on, those are good things to lose.
Rick Archer: Yeah. So for those with a Jewish background, you know, does do you feel like the Torah has, as much sort of richness of, of its tradition really good with regard to oneness and non duality, and so on? As, as, you know, Vedanta or any other tradition? And it’s just hidden and buried? Or? And are there living examples of that? Or is it just that it sort of lost all that long ago, if it ever possessed it? And if you’re really looking for that, that sort of appreciation, you might be better off looking elsewhere?
Jason Shulman: You know, first of all, I don’t I’m not sure that it’s a choice. I think that people are like, I kept going back to my Judaic roots. Because somehow I was programmed that way. I had to, I had to do that. So any of the holy books, so called work, they work, in fact, with you, if they resonate with you, but also things do have a way of being accentuated in one age and depressed in another age? Yeah. So you mentioned the Baal Shem Tov, before I happen to be reading a book on the Baal Shem Tov right now to cool and, and I see that what he was doing with the Torah was a very non dual approach. And his, what became Hasidism. At that time, although I don’t think he was an actual founder of it, I think he was the inspiration for it from people who came contemporaneously with him. But in any case, what happened was, and this often happens with an issue and initiator or founder, while that founder or initiator is still alive, people start getting it, there’s a glow that comes and this non dual perspective, he still use the word God and still understood the God has been Hashem and the name and so on. But there was this, this unity that was he was after citizen went that way for a while. And then it became more and more, according to my way of thinking more rigid, and further away from that particular impulse of the Baal Shem Tov hat. So can another person rediscover it that way? Absolutely. I have a students who are rabbis who are wonderful rabbis who have that attitude. I Zalman was a true Mundus mentor for me and was filled with that. That unity between the dualistic and non dualistic, non dual and theistic, rather, is the way I should say it kind of thing. So if someone’s attracted to it, they can find it. And there are guides who have walked that particular path. You know, there are people who read the Bhagavad Gita, who are Orthodox Hindus, who have many limited and, and strict views about things that are not very open. So some people can read the Bhagavad Gita and find an excuse for the caste system. Yeah. And some people can read the Bhagavad Gita and concentrate on the parts that are about unity, openness, non duality and human life.
Rick Archer: Yeah. That’s true. I mean, and you can take any book like the Gita, or any book that has genuine depth to it, and read it over the course of your life as you grow spiritually, and continue to discover a new book each time you read it.
Jason Shulman: Absolutely. Absolutely. That’s. That’s beautiful, isn’t it?
Rick Archer: Yeah. A question came in from Jason in France. Hey, to Jason’s. He, Jason asked earlier, you were talking about God as if he she were an individual entity? Why personalized God? If all is God, if we can see God and all, why narrow it down?
Jason Shulman: Great question. I’d love to answer that question directly. Good. One of the understandings and this is Jason right.
Rick Archer: This is Jason in France. Yes. And
Jason Shulman: this is Jason here. Yeah. So okay, God. So one of the understandings that I had was that we have different, who is different, who is is, on one end of the spectrum, is a who is with subject and object are very separate. I’m here on Cape Cod, you are in Iowa, I think you’re in Iowa. And, you know, we share many things, a deep interest in spirituality. But I’m really aware that you’re over there, and I’m over here. And when you talk to your wife, you’re not talking to my wife. And vice versa, we’re separate. On the other end of the spectrum, what’s accentuated is our unity. That’s a different who is, and all along the way are different, who is each who is, is a valid way to be. But each who is sees God and spirituality, from the lens of the who is. So a person at this part of the spectrum, who has subject and object very separate, sees a personal God sees a God that relates to me. So there’s some sort of divine force or presence. And who cares about me, who, since I am viewing life and spirituality through the who is of the personal self, someplace in the middle, we might have somebody who says, Yes, God is personal, but God is also inside, because my who is is more psychological. And I see that God has also a fate of flavor, a fragrance of feeling inside of me, and maybe outside too. And that’s a different, who is, at a certain point, there’s no talk about God, this talk about universal presence and things like that. The thing that’s really interesting about this is that if we give up our prejudices, we realize that the totality of the Divine, is in every single position. It’s not like the person who has the completely subject object point of view, is less enlightened, or has less God, or access to God, than the person all the way. My hands all the way out of the frame, all the way all the way out of there, or any place in between. That’s just our pride and our prejudice. So when I was talking about Christians before, who are very subject and object, they don’t say Christ is in them. They say, Jesus is over there, and I want to follow Jesus. They can have if they are good people and have really penetrated the mysteries. They are fantastic. Same thing with Jewish people who have done that Muslim people who have done that, so on so on, and then you get people all along the spectrum is an r&b a different, who is and who is so on and so on. And so that that’s my answer, because I’m going to come from different who is is and I’m comfortable coming from the whole spectrum of who is is because that was my path. Yeah.
Rick Archer: incidentally, a guest Jason’s name was Dirk from France, the fella who forwards me the question got mixed up and put your name in there, so it’s dirt. So, anyway, regarding what you just said, I mean, traditional Vedic teaching, there’s sort of the impersonal and personal aspects of God, you know, Brahman and then Ishwara. And it’s thought that sort of the ocean quality, omnipresent, uniform quality of divine intelligence which pervades and permeates all creation can also arise in specific expressions or impulses of intelligence Master
Jason Shulman: has to MST Yeah, they call it they call arise, they call arise
Rick Archer: and all those impulses are actually instrumental in the orchestration of the universe, and they have their functions that they perform and that one can establish a personal relationship with them and so on. So and the two don’t concept don’t conflict with one another.
Jason Shulman: No, the ocean must have waves. Yeah, the ocean like there’s no ocean called no wave ocean, right? If so, even if the waves are microscopic, the oceans nature is to have waves. Golds nature is to be yellow, and heavy, and so on. The the nature of the universal God is to have a personal expression, and the nature of because they colorize they’re responsible from, from the non dual point of view of codependent origination of colorizing. One, just like foreground and background, one is responsible for the existence of the other, it’s easy for people to see that the universal so called or the absolute, so called, is responsible for the particular it’s a little harder for people to see that the particular is also responsible for the universal absolute, but they co arise, there’s no separation between the two, and can never be any separation.
Rick Archer: Yeah, well, maybe a good metaphor is if you if you put a.on, a blackboard or something, it sort of creates a contrast between the specific and the universal of that particular meeting, right? Gives you? Yeah,
Jason Shulman: before the data is there, there’s nothing called space, right? Soon as you put the dot that you say, Oh, look at all the space around it. Yeah, space comes out of the plenum, as if it was created, and it was created by the particular and vice versa. There was space there. So we could put a dot was all evolved, it was all black and filled. We couldn’t put the.so this mutual colorizing is an extremely dynamic and alive thing.
Rick Archer: Yeah. Good, let’s move on. Keep going on that point. But maybe we’ll even come back to it. When I read your intro, I read a part about the Magi process, it said, you know, you you have been especially interested in applying personal spiritual work into methods of transforming society at large. And Mark Peters from Santa Clara, California sent in a question asking, in what practical ways has your awakening process affected if at all, your concern for the welfare of the planet as a whole? Do you think we can reverse the effects of global warming, deforestation, nuclear proliferation, et cetera? And I think perhaps the Magi process has something to say about that.
Jason Shulman: Yeah, you know, what’s the name of this fellow who asked this question Mark Peters. Mark, you know, Mark, I don’t know. My wife and I have we’ve divided up pessimism and optimism in different ways. She’s pessimistic about certain things. And I’m optimistic and I’m pessimistic about a lot of things that she’s optimistic about. You’re like a tag team. So I think we should get married. So here’s here’s the thing so for absolutely no reason that I can think of I’m optimistic about our survival and about the planet survival. But contrary to everything that seems to be happening, i Dad, I am I am, because I find it so dynamic. I find life so dynamic and filled with possibility that, that I hold the irrational stance that it’s going to be okay, somehow. Yet we know from the past that things have not always been okay that millions of people have died. And now we’re at a critical mass with pollution, global warming, for instance, that Mark talks about where the planet could die or large portions of the planet can die. So you know, I’m going to hold on to my irrationality there, but because I am committed to it, the Magi process. It’s very it’s a little difficult to describe, but it is a 38 step, image GISTIC formula I actually for working with conflicts, questions and problems. So there’s, I won’t go into detail with the process, there is a book called The Magi process, a non dual method for an A forget the subtitle a non dual method for conflict. I got
Rick Archer: it here. It’s a non dual method for personal awakening and the resolution of conflict.
Jason Shulman: Right? By the way, these things can be this foundation that has started to support the publication and dissemination of my work. And it’s called the foundation for non duality. And it’s that non duality.us.com, non duality that us.com, you can get the book there. And on Amazon as well, I’ll
Rick Archer: be linking to it. I’ve already set up a page where I’m linking to all these books.
Jason Shulman: Thank you. Thank you so much. I appreciate that. So this is a dynamic 38 step process, where we first take our question, and do a process called bracketing with it. So let’s say I say that I want all the countries in the world to sign on to the Paris protocol, for example, sounds like a good thing. But then I kind of challenge that is, is that is that good? Do I know for a fact that’s going to be good? I think it’s going to be good. It’s a start. And it would be better for us was there we’d be moving toward it. And even though I’m the furthest thing you can imagine from a Trump height? Do I know for sure that his opposition to it might not force something else later, even if it’s a crisis, that something much better will come out of it? I don’t know. So I start going through a process of rewriting my question, until the right one feels true. And sometimes I go back to the original question. And sometimes it comes out to be a different question. Maybe it wasn’t about the Paris protocol at all. It was just about glow, global warming and some other formulation. Once you have the right question, you go through and do little mini meditations on each of these steps. And it’s extremely powerful people, there are people, not large numbers, but maybe hundreds of people around the world, doing this process for both self working with self conflict, and working with conflict with others. A couple of whom are in government, here in the United States, I’m not sure how they are using it. Because this is a process that when we do run a course for it, we give it away for free. So you could always check back to the society of souls site, the school site. But that’s what I can say about this. It’s a very dynamic process that someone can read this book, learn the process. And I think that the more people who learn this process, the more dynamic and more hope we will have. So even though this is a tiny, you know, grain of sand in an entire Lake Superior in a huge lake. It needs to start someplace, and this was my contribution to it that
Rick Archer: is it complicated or difficult to learn or time consuming to practice?
Jason Shulman: No, there’s a session takes about 20 minutes. Okay, to do this, the book is you saw it was rather slim. So you could read that book in a couple of days. Yeah. And, and then if someone wanted to practice, they could contact the school through the info button of for society of souls.com. And, you know, I don’t know if there’s somebody there who will hook people up with other people practicing. But I’m sure something can be arranged. It’s not it’s not a difficult process. It’s actually an exciting process. It’s a little mysterious, because it has to do with action at a different at a distance. Something that you would like from Bell’s theorem and all of that spooky stuff.
Rick Archer: Yeah. That’s the word Einstein news. Yeah. action at a distance.
Jason Shulman: He didn’t like that. I know. I know. I’m beginning to think that he was right about that. But anyway, that’s another story over some will call a tea, right? A cup of tea. Have another discussion. So that’s, that’s my contribution. And you said it was Mark. Right. And Mark, Mark, if you take a look at that bookmark, I think I know I heard it, but I tried to avoid noticing. I think that you’ll find it useful.
Rick Archer: Yeah. I think it’s an interesting question. I often talk on this show and think from my own life about the fact that spirituality has an important role to play, perhaps a critical, perhaps the most critical role to play in the resolution of these dire problems that afflict the planet. And it’s talking last week in my conversation with Kevin Morgan, about the analogy of our metaphor of forests in which, you know, if you want the forest to be green, each individual tree in the forest has to derive nourishment from the ground in which it’s rooted. And, you know, if it’s not doing that, then that tree is going to be brown, and all the most of them are brown, that’s gonna look like a brown forest. And so you have to sort of establish that nourishment with each individual tree and enough of them. And then you’ll have a green forest. So I really think that spirituality is the establishment of that connection with our deepest source of nourishment, and that if enough of us do it, then these problems are seem so intractable, when we look at them macroscopically, will somehow find solutions and begin to diminish.
Jason Shulman: And here’s where I think the individual is very important. Yeah, because you’ll get some individual who has the charisma, who has the presence, who you want to also have the deep spiritual education, who can go out and form because I don’t know if it’s going to be a spiritual movement that is going to do this, or a spiritually astute man or woman who’s going to start being able to talk about this in a way that will attract a lot of people and governmental change as well. So both are important what you said, and, you know, the macro, and the micro both important.
Rick Archer: Well, you guys, you have guys like Elon Musk, you know, who happens to practice meditation. But, you know, that’s neither here. Nor there. Perhaps I think that, you know, you could have Jesus Christ as president, but he wouldn’t be able to accomplish much if the general collective consciousness were rather low.
Jason Shulman: I agree. I agree with that. I absolutely agree with that. Of course, we both know the progress on that level is very slow. We are actually in better shape now than we were 2000 years ago.
Rick Archer: Sure, and better shape than we were in the 60s or 50s. That’s right. We are
Jason Shulman: even though people are still killed. And even though all these things are happening, there is incremental change. And but it’s very slow for you know, you’ve I’m sure you’ve asked yourself this question. We had Jesus, we had Buddha, we had Moses, we had zero through stra, we had all the unnamed people who were geniuses of spirituality during our history. And look how slowly it’s gone. Yeah. And how easily things can be distorted.
Rick Archer: Yeah. But you know, I mean, the pace of change is accelerating. And, you know, 1000 years ago, during the Middle Ages, people were being burned at the stake routinely and tortured for believing that the sun was the center of the solar system and things like that. And so we’ve come a long way baby to quote the old cigarette commercial.
Jason Shulman: It’s true. It’s true. Yeah, it’s true. It’s just not fast enough for me sometimes.
Rick Archer: Yeah. But also, it’s subtle, though. It it, it percolates up. And we may not realize the extent to which it has progressed. It’s like I sometimes use the example of water boiling, the water can be at 99 degrees centigrade, and it just looks like water. But as soon as it does one more degree, you have a phase transition, and all of a sudden that turns into steam, so we can be closer to that boiling point, you know, or phase transition point or tipping point than we think and not know it.
Jason Shulman: This is why I’ve always is this half a joke. I’ve always wanted an alien to come to earth. Because if the aliens show up, even if they’re benign, benign aliens, let’s make it that way. The earth is going to unify, they’re gonna say Holy moly. This is aliens. Now with the earth we’re not countries anymore with the earth in this universe that has other intelligences. Yeah. So so I you know, I’m waiting for this. I’m not really waiting for but if they’re coming, and they’re nice people. I’ll have them over for dinner.
Rick Archer: Yeah. Or they’ll have you for dinner if they’re not nice people.
Jason Shulman: No no, they’re nice. To serve to serve, man.
Rick Archer: Yeah, Twilight Zone. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. Well, you know, that photo of the Moon from taking from Earth did a lot to enliven that perspective and human consciousness
Jason Shulman: did it did for a while. That’s the photo of the earth that Stuart Brand Put on the whole earth catalog. Yeah, because it was he was I think it was him by the way, who got NASA to release that picture. Oh, interesting. It was he who got I think, unless that’s an apocryphal story. But seeing the earth I remember distinctly, I think I’m older than you are. So I’m 68. Okay, so I’ll be 71 in August. So just a little bit older, but old enough to remember when we saw that picture. Yeah. And a lot of the astronauts were deeply moved by seeing that from space, this blue marble that of life. And from that perspective, it was like, What are we arguing about? Yeah, we have we have this, you know, and that’s, again, uneven display on uneven development, we can get to see something like that, because our technology is so advanced, but it doesn’t stick yet.
Rick Archer: He has a great quote from Carl Sagan where shot of the Earth taken from the Voyager as it was leaving the solar system and all you can see is this teeny, weeny, little pinprick of light. And, you know, he I forget the exact wording, but he commented about how, you know, Emperor’s and conquerors and all shed so much blood, in order to sort of, kind of get a little bit more territory for a little bit of time on this little tiny pinprick of light, you know how absurd that is? Right? So, ah, well, we’re a couple of geezers, carrying on about this stuff, but that’s good. That’s good. I think it’s fun to contemplate.
Jason Shulman: These days. You know what, what we’re really talking about here, from my perspective is our hearts. Yeah, we’re really talking about love. We’re really talking about the fact that we love being alive most of the time. We love our planet, we love other people. And we’re constantly trying to figure out how more of this love can be opened up, sustained, increased and shared, you know, so whether we’re talking about seeing the blue marble or a call savings, quote, these are all things that touch the heart when you say that, I can feel your heart. And and you feel mine. And that’s, you know, I’ve always said that the end result of spiritual work should be open heartedness. If it’s not that if it still stays at an intellectual level, or it still stays at a conceptual level, then the person hasn’t taken the steps that are necessary. Because when all when it comes down to it tenderheartedness open heartedness is really the the ultimate purpose of our spiritual search.
Rick Archer: Yeah, that’s nice. And you know, one thing that I find very inspiring and gratifying is that when one engages in the spiritual search, either quote for oneself, if the if it can even be conceived of as merely benefiting oneself, or, you know, more consciously and explicitly for the benefit of others, either way, it it kind of plugs you into a power source, so to speak. And you to mix metaphors, you begin to get the kind of the wind at your back or at in your sails, and you receive support and from whatever it is that is in favor of the evolution of the universe and evolution of the species and so on. And, you know, life just, I don’t know, it gives you greater, you know, I’m trying to say, Have you experienced this yourself? Sure, sure.
Jason Shulman: I mean, the attitude that I take with my students has always been an even the most distorted behavior. What they are actually reaching out for is wholeness. Yeah. So it’s part of part of my job is not to judge that particular behavior. I might want them to stop if it’s dangerous, or deliver materials to them and so on. But I do see I don’t even have to try. I see directly how they’re trying to reach for God, wholeness, liberation, freedom, even in the most distorted way, because they don’t know how to do it. That point. The, the, the Pure Land, Buddhists put this this moment in a slightly different way.
Rick Archer: Which is, can you hear me, okay, I can hear you will get a little dog action in the background, but it’s okay.
Jason Shulman: All right. So, which is That’s the call of Amida. Buddha said again, that’s the call of Amita. Buddha Amida. Buddha is always calling to us. And we’re trying to reach the Pure Land. We’re trying to reach this wholeness and, you know, so even even in the most difficult The that’s always present as well. And the more we, the more we can get help, for somebody seeing that and pointing that out to us. And taking a chance to walk toward that, the more progress we make.
Rick Archer: Yeah. And it may be a rather radical and controversial thing to say. But I would take the statement you just made to its extreme, which is to say that, you know, that kid that just shot up the high school in Texas was seeking How did you put it was seeking oneness and wholeness and so on, but just in an extremely distorted way, everybody’s seeking that, and yes, but it just the ways in which they seek it get really warped sometimes. And
Jason Shulman: I understand that. I understand that and dangerous and horrible, so on, but I do understand your, your, your motive and saying that that way. I actually agree with it. As horrible as it was, there’s no excuse for it. But that’s why spiritual education is so important at every level of our life.
Rick Archer: Yeah, I just want to mention that. I want to have you itemize a little bit more in a minute what you have to offer and for people who are interested, but that’s what I mentioned, again, an interview I did last week with Kavli Morgan who’s teaching a program of mindfulness in the Portland, Oregon Public Schools, and it’s growing and having tremendous results. And I’ll spend tastic Yeah, I think that any school which implements a program like that, automatically will greatly diminish the likelihood of some kid coming in with a gun and shooting,
Jason Shulman: I hope. I hope so. I can’t guarantee I have no guarantee that but but in general, whatever happens, that’s a great thing. Yeah. It’s wonderful. It’s a great thing. That’s a great thing.
Rick Archer: Yeah. So okay, so people have been listening to this, hopefully, for a couple of hours, almost. And, you know, they think, Okay, I like Jason, I like what he has to say, what can they how can they plug into what you’re doing? So
Jason Shulman: currently, the four year program in non dual healing is being taught in Boston, and New York, Copenhagen, and soon in Dubai.
Rick Archer: And that’s an in person kind of thing you have to do. That’s, that’s an in
Jason Shulman: person thing. Okay. It’s a four year program. And you can find out about, I think that people cannot join the one in New York or Boston, those are already going, Copenhagen just started. So that’s still a possibility. And Dubai doesn’t start until September, if I remember correctly. So that’s definitely open. All the information they need is on the school website, which is Society of souls.com. Okay. We also teach a movement work called impersonal movement, which is designed to give people a bodily experience of the unit of state that’s taught infrequently, it’s taught as part of the four year program. And occasionally we do a standalone, standalone version of that, and currently teaching two of my advanced students to teach that so that we can have more standalone, it’s a fantastic practice, I love it. That
Rick Archer: sounds like an in person thing.
Jason Shulman: That’s an in person thing as well. Again, the school website will have any information or people can just query and get on a mailing list to find out, then the work of return is taught every once in a while for free. And people should query that because some of it may be taught online and some of it in person I don’t know. One of our teachers, Eileen Mata merman is in charge of that. So you can just query about work of return.
Rick Archer: You have a mom, this people can get on and then notified of any of these things.
Jason Shulman: Yes, on on society of souls.com, they can do that. Then there’s the foundation, the foundation is a not for profit, called foundation for non duality. That’s where my publications go, at this point where and the new one will be the non dual Shaman. That’ll come out in the summer. And that’s non duality that us that come in terms of working with me personally, I’m only teaching advanced students right now. Although next year, I’m playing with the idea of we’ve had two years of non dual voyaging non dual shaman work, I’m thinking of opening it to the general public. I haven’t done that I’ve only work with advanced students in society of souls. But now that we have two years under our belt and have learned how to do this properly, I might open this so people should check with the Society of Seoul site, and they can check with the foundation site also, although it’s not for profit, they’re going to just direct you back to the other one. So I think I think that’s it, they should people should look at the books. I think that the instruction manual for receiving God is a very accessible book that gives an idea of my work. The Magi process is specifically with people who want to work with interior and exterior conflict. Ecstatic speech is kind of an advanced book, I don’t know if I sent you that of texts that we use in our advanced our advanced work Kabbalistic healing is available a path to an awakened soul. I guess if I had the power to change that I would call it an awakening soul
Rick Archer: to slay the next edition, the next edition.
Jason Shulman: And so all of those books you can find on the non duality that us.com site Foundation did
Rick Archer: you adequately explain what was in this upcoming book?
Jason Shulman: The non dual, the non dual shaman is an extension of the work that I started doing. That was my predilection my perspective. When I first started spiritual healing, I was very shamanistic. And then because I was very interested in having a replicable and what were the two words I used before replicable and reliable way for people to get in touch with the healing aspect of non duality. I’ve set that aside for many years and created the curriculum for all of the other things that I just mentioned. Now that that work is safely in the hands of my most advanced students, teachers who are teaching it now. I went back to take another look at shamanism and decided to completely revamp my thinking about it from a non dual point of view. From the point of view of someone who was not going to imitate American Native American stuff for Siberian stuff or so on. I had to ask myself, what is shamanism now, at this point in my life mean to me? What does it look like? And what is the training for it look like? So the non dual shaman, I think the subtitle is a contemporary shamanistic path and thoroughgoing approach to awakening the self. So it’s really a it’s kind of my magnum opus, in a sense, it takes in all of the material and all of the stuff that I’ve understood in my own life and teaching all of these years. And that’s what I’m beginning to teach. It’s been by invitation only, and if I open it to the public will require an application and an interview. Because it’s deep stuff, we want to make sure people are ready for it.
Rick Archer: Great. Thanks. I’ve really enjoyed having this conversation with you.
Jason Shulman: We too, are fun. Me too. Yep, me too. And I can tell people, they can go on your website and see it if they want to see this.
Rick Archer: Yes, it’ll be up in possibly by tomorrow, if not tomorrow, probably Monday. And if they come to the website, there’s a place they can sign up to be notified every time a new interview is posted if they want to. And it’s great. They can also sign up to subscribe to the audio podcast version of the show if they’d like to listen to things while commuting and so
Jason Shulman: on. Oh, that’s nice. Yeah, that’s really nice. Wow,
Rick Archer: there’s a few other things on there if there’s not too many things, but if you just take a few minutes to explore the menus on the site, you’ll see what’s there.
Jason Shulman: Yeah, wonderful. Well, I’ve really enjoyed meeting you.
Rick Archer: Yeah. Likewise, it’s been a lot of enjoyable a couple of hours. Right? Yeah. So take care. And thanks again to those who have been listening or watching. Next week, I’ll be interviewing a fella named Dean slider who teaches meditation and is an old friend of mine. I’ve known him since 1970. haven’t been in touch for years. And I think we’ll have a fascinating conversation. So see you next time and thanks again. Jason.
Jason Shulman: Bye for now.
Rick Archer: Bye bye.
