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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 over 400 of them by now. So if this is new to you, and you’d like to check out previous ones, go to batgap.com Bat gap and look under the past interviews menu. This program is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So if you appreciate it and feel like supporting it in any amount, there’s a PayPal button on every page of the site. My guest today is Jeanie Zandi. And I’m really happy about that i i met Jeannie about five years ago at the science and non duality conference in California. And I’ve wanted to interview her ever since then. And she’s been like, yeah, when these days want to get my website together, whatever. And that’s kind of a good sign. Actually, the people who are desperate to be interviewed we tend to shy away from and I’ve had plenty of fish to fry. So I’ve been keeping busy. But finally now we’re getting around to interviewing genies and a genie is the director of living as love, a nonprofit organization dedicated to seeding a culture of the heart on the planet, inspiring teaching and supporting people to live from their essence as love. A year before the birth of her daughter, Jeannie was plunged into a dark night of the soul that culminated in a radical shift of consciousness. She is known for her fearless clarity, tender mercy toward humaneness, and a juicy, poetic and often humorous style that draws from Advaita Vedanta, Sufism, Christian mysticism, and the ongoing revelation of fully engaged living, residing in Colorado. She travels widely in the US bringing it down to earth and body teaching of living as love. Wow, yeah. So I had the opportunity to read quite a few articles that you wrote this week, Janie, and listened to a number of other interviews and you had done and talks and all. And I just want to say that I think your your writing is very beautiful and deep and your speaking is very eloquent. And I think people are really going to enjoy this interview. Oh, yay. Somebody I’ll start right away with a question that somebody sent in. This is Julie from Olympia, Washington. Hi, Julie. You know, Julie? Yeah, I think so. She asked. You know, many teachers seem to be focused on awakening, quiet mind realizing one’s true nature, etc. These subjects do not seem to be of direct interest to Jeannie, genies interests seems to be solely on serving the holy and this tends to manifest as serving love. She is deeply inclusive and loving of all aspects of being human. Do you agree with that assessment?
Jeannie Zandi: Can you ask it a different way? Because that would be a binary and I’m finding my answer isn’t a binary
Rick Archer: In other words, it’s too either or the way it was phrased.
Jeannie Zandi: Yeah, it’s to either or okay, I
Rick Archer: can ask away unless you want to go with it. Yeah,
Jeannie Zandi: here it comes. Okay. When my mind works is a little bit like a collecting funnel rather than, you know, so,
Rick Archer: right. You’re, you’re not digital,
Jeannie Zandi: I just open and you know, so, I would say that, that what happens here is of a different languaging and a different potentially orientation or at least the languaging is different. So, there seems to be here, a deep interest in the vibrating alive, clueless moment. So, oftentimes, when we think of awakening, we think of something somewhere different or some other different kind of perception or, you know, something a little bit different and when I, when I tend to draw people, through language and through presence, into a kind of direct experience outside of the mind, of the vibrating simple moment, encouraging them to drop out of the minds overlay, the wills attempt to master The moment or to use the moment to get to a better moment, my emphasis is actually, and I don’t use a lot of the language that people are used to hearing, awakening and things like this. For me, the realization of what we are and what we aren’t, is incredibly childlike. It’s incredibly simple. It’s incredibly no brainer, innocent, and yes and talking about it. I am more of the style of talking from it. And what I find. And this is something, this is something that’s a little hard to put into words, but when I’m sitting with people, there is a deep drawing of our uninviting attention, below the mind, to this kind of wedding of presence and sensation that we are, this is my pointer, it’s not a pointer down the road to some eventual awakening, if you do XY and Z, it’s actually a continual invitation, out of the mind down into the elementals, the elemental ground of being of presence and of the just this vibrating field, out of which all of what we think of as the world is, springs and and forms and so that orientation, then what happens as, as we’re invited there, is that our arguments with that rise? arguments of trust arguments of fear arguments of how am I going to find my car later? arguments of all manner of how do I say, the creatures the creature of the body’s arguments with the fact that we can be here wide open, it’s not very difficult for most beings to have a direct experience of being here outside the mind. It happens all the time, but Bay’s that are that that the survival based creature, a aspect of us is much more concerned with something down the road hauls us out of there again, and again. And so I would say that I have a deep interest. And it’s not like a mental interest is not an interest apart from my being, it’s difficult to speak without objects, there is a living flame of a passion for the alive moment and the ways that we can be here as as that in that together. And so a lot of what I do is I invoke that. And then the arguments come the arguments come in the form of questions in the form of and then I drill down to the essence of the argument hold someone there.
Rick Archer: I think that what you just said is perfectly congruent with the idea of awakening, quiet mind realizing one’s true nature and so on. But perhaps what Julie was alluding to is that sometimes the emphasis on those things is made to the exclusion of humaneness, you know, and the world is dismissed as a losery, and emotions and relationships and all that stuff are, you know, dismissed as sort of trivial distractions or whatever. And yeah, and you know, and that, frankly, that got a little old for a lot of people in the whole Satsang scene and the whole spiritual scene over the last decade. I think there was more emphasis on that a decade ago than there is now and, and now a lot more people are talking about embodiment. And, you know, yeah, this
Jeannie Zandi: is, this is part of the reason, you know, when I was How old was I when I was in my 30s and I had just met my daughter’s dad, he was very into Ganga Ji and I went to see Ganga Ji and there was, you know, the, the big scene that used to happen around Ganga Ji I don’t know how it is anymore. And I resonated with the things that she spoke but I wasn’t attracted. And maybe part of it was that at that time, there was an interpretation, and I was very close to this person who was my daughter’s dad right. And there was this emphasis on it, you know, how do I say it felt like there was a splitting off from it was as though non duality was being purchased by a splitting off from an aspect of the hole. Yeah, at least that’s how it landed here. And I could never get on that. It never resonated with me in that way. And so I wasn’t attracted, I liked Ganga Ji, I resonate with the truth that was there. But I wasn’t called to go back until I was, you know, deeply on my knees in a dark night. And, you know, we can talk about that later. But
Rick Archer: if you think about what you just said, it’s rather ironic that there should be any splitting off from the hole in the name of non duality, because non duality is non duality. And if there’s splitting taking place, we’re creating a duality.
Jeannie Zandi: Yes, and I’m not saying that necessarily, Ganga Ji was doing that. But I think that that was the that was and continues to be the old school interpretation, that that we just go to this other place and this other perspective, and all this is just a and, and what happens I feel is that, in the name of we’re not the body, which is absolutely one wing of the bird, in the name of we’re not the body, we can actually be carrying on unconsciously, the primary split between the unmanifest and the manifest, and be speaking on duality out our mouths as we’re embodying a split.
Rick Archer: And I think that for some people, at least, maybe for everybody, that that can be a stage a legitimate stage, that sort of split condition, which can be misinterpreted as final, but which is really very sort of intermediary, and ultimately, the heart doesn’t like duality or division. And you know, and if we’re really if the evolutionary force that continues to guide us, as it say, then a larger wholeness is eventually got to be realized.
Jeannie Zandi: It seems, seem so yeah.
Rick Archer: So besides Ganga, Ji, what were some of your other early influences? Are you one of these people who, like had spiritual yearnings in childhood or something? Or did it kind of Dawn later in life?
Jeannie Zandi: So I wouldn’t call Gandhiji a big influence because I think I went once. Okay. But I would say so. I’ve been, I would say spiritually oriented my entire life at some level, varied levels at various times. And as a child, at a Catholic mom. And what I thought of was an atheist Dad, I’ve learned now he’s agnostic. So I would go to church, my mother is the kind of person who sees a sunset and feels like God’s speaking to her. That’s, you know, God’s present to her in that moment, right. Very devotional and, and innocent. And then my father is a scientist, agnostic, his parents were atheists, his, his father used to make nice religious women cry with his rational arguments against religion. And so I grew up coming home from church, running to the garden and saying, Daddy, Daddy, God made the corn grow. And my father saying, I made the goddamn corn grow. I’m out here holding. My father is a very deeply he’s very into the natural world and has a beautiful devotional quality to him toward life. So I grew up with this sort of interesting, these two aspects of the innocent devotional and the rational skeptic. In fact, my father even sent me a membership to the skeptic society as a present once. So in that milieu, I grew up half devotional half questioning and went through. You know, I’m a Catholic, I’m an atheist, I’m a I’m a this some of that, but always, what’s real? A, what’s real? Be? How, what is the essence of humaneness? What it What am I? what’s true, what’s real? How do I be here? In a virtuous, true, simple, unencumbered way? How do I be a representative of what’s true, rather than a representative of limitation or fear or, you know, whatever. So that was my bent. And I would say that I was never a seeker in the way that people are seekers in satsang. And such, I didn’t even think about something called enlightenment. I thought that was something obscure that Chinese old Chinese men were interested in I just, you know, wasn’t part of what captured my attention. what captured my attention was much more Christ like Sufi, like, full embodiment, of, of, of divinity of and, you know, I didn’t know anything about the Eastern stuff. And when I would come across it, I could see that it was beautiful, but it wasn’t something that was sort of crossing my plate. And so I have a deep orientation to how do I say, one of the things I learned early in just out of college was how pain seems to be at the bottom of
Jeannie Zandi: how do I call it sub optimal behavior, behaving as a ferret, instead of an angel, let’s say. And so I had a penchant for finding the aspects of myself that felt funky, reactive, limited, fearful, and drilling down into the emotional knot at the bottom of those and freeing those up. And one of the things that I discovered in there was that and this wasn’t through any billion being denied certain things, the relationship, we want someone to love us, and we don’t get exactly what we want in the relationship. And so there, there rises, this longing. So what I would do is I would assume that there wasn’t anything wrong with reality. But what was, I would fall back into the longing I would take the longing or the angst or whatever the pain and drill down into it. I treated life for example, when I was a waitress I treated it was, how do I wait on this human being, no matter what they’re like, to me, no matter what a jerk they are, or whatever they’re behaving like? How do I serve them from a kind of I just had this interest from Young who knows where it came from? Where my my, my idea for change was more based on the transformation of this than the changing of that. And so there was a lot of meeting very deep things before I had any idea that this was something particularly spiritual. I was just wanting to. I didn’t even think of it necessarily even as God or holy, it was more. How do I be this beauty that I know that I am, you know, when looking at these places, were not so beautiful that that’s intolerable here in a certain way.
Rick Archer: It’s neat that you function that way, naturally. And because most people externalize things and blame the external environment for where they feel or you know, this and that, and you seems like you had a natural tendency to look within to find the source of it. The Dalai Lama, somebody said, it’s a lot easier to wear shoes than to pave the earth with leather.
Jeannie Zandi: That’s beautiful. Exactly, exactly. I can’t say that I was a perfect saint and this or that I never blamed anyone, because that wouldn’t be true, right. But there was some. And and I had the support of various things that I studied, I studied a lot of psychology. I was involved in counseling, I was, you know, I, I read young, these kind of things. And I looked in my small New Hampshire town, and for things that spoke to my spirit that resonated and so, you know, I, I did Sufi dancing, and I, you know, did a variety of things. I was also very athletic and did a lot of dance, and a lot of expressive things, reclaimed my capacity to sing these kinds of things. And I would say, I would say that the big influences at that time were just various things that I would read that would, that would sort of wake something up in me, that kind of thing.
Rick Archer: Do you have a degree in psychology or counseling or something like that,
Jeannie Zandi: you know, I did end up going back to school to Naropa and getting a master’s in Transpersonal Counseling. And all of that was a pretty kind of groovy, eclectic sort of code, you know, interest and resonance and come here and go there and taste this. And at some point, I said a very passionate prayer. That was with a friend in a sweat lodge and in you know, in sweat lodges. There’s this sort of bearing in the dark and the steam and there’s this just burying of the heart of the soul. I had seen this way that if I didn’t get something that I want, wanted, and I burned through below that drop back into the longing, let it burn, that suddenly in that spot where there was a clutching there was just a freedom. And so I prayed, give me nothing that I want, slightly arrogantly very passionately, you know, that way that we pray, you know, just decimate me, you know, that kind of thing, right? And, and then this dark night of the soul showed up shortly thereafter. And boy, it was the direct answer to a prayer. But I didn’t know that’s what it was. And I didn’t know what was going on. And I would say that was my biggest influence on my biggest teacher. Along with the simultaneity of being pregnant with my child, I was cast into a level of darkness that had no apparent cause. And the world, the manifest world turned into cinders to me, like all of the meaning I had invested in it faded. I felt like a ghost, I felt like I was being taken to another world. None of my, none of my former ways of orienting to here worked. And it lasted about four or five years. During that time, I was pregnant, and then a new mom, my daughter’s birth, was probably the darkest hour of this dark night. And yet, such a sweetness to be joined by this amazing, wide open, you know, as I was being absolutely deconstructed, she came in freshly open. And so we were, we were such great pals to each other because she had this very natural way as children do of questioning conditioning. And so she was like a little spiritual teacher, just questioning assumptions. And quite, you know, that was very beautiful. And during that time, I was quite desperate. I had no idea what was happening. And I, you know, just Yeah, and that’s when I met a few other influences. I like to call them my cleanup crew.
Rick Archer: Do you ever is Suzanne Siegel’s book collision with the infinite
Jeannie Zandi: I did a long time ago, and I barely remember anything from it. Unfortunately, some similarity
Rick Archer: she she was pregnant. And she underwent this sudden shift, which for her was primarily resulted in abject terror that went on for about 10 years. And the terror was largely because she couldn’t find any sense of a personal self anymore. And she didn’t know what had happened to her, even though she had actually been a meditation teacher before that. And she finally met John Klein, and he kind of cleared things up for him. But, um, reminds me of your story in a way. But it’s
Jeannie Zandi: interesting that I think I don’t know when I read that. But it almost makes me want to go back and look, there was plenty of terror. Yeah, plenty of terror. It was there was a there was a sort of a constant terror in the body. But then there were also these little spiky tears when I have certain certain thoughts, anything about the future spiky terror. And then there was also the mind secondary level of fear making, which I recognized pretty early on was a detriment. And I spent a lot of time dropping out of the mind when it would come dropping out of mind dropping into the ground breath, rippling Creek, just really, until until it until there was a little fate a final face off with the mind, which was very interesting. It was it’s comical now, at the time, it was something that just was happening inside of me where, you know, most of us as you know, our mind, her everyday mind, our sense of me, totally laminated onto our presence so that we actually think that’s us, right? It’s like laminated and there was this moment where whatever I was, looked at whatever the everyday mind was, it was almost like a cartoon like you could picture like the Tasmanian devil over here, just freaking out like this. And whatever I was, looks at that thing. And there rose this sort of, wow, like goodbye, like, like you Oh, you are not my friend. You know, up until then, this was the go to right we go to our minds to solve things to figure things out. This is us. This is what we love. And I saw it for what it was. And I saw it as the source of suffering and it wasn’t like, I let it go, it was this sort of organic thing that just sort of happened. And, and this thing screened and what it screened was so interesting. And I think a lot of people who are confronted by the unknown, who cannot help but be confronted by the unknown with something larger than they know how to handle like illness or losing your mind, in my case. Silence just ate my head just a second. It’s scary, screamed, it screams something like, you will be alone, you will be mentally ill, you will be sick, you will be dead. It screamed all of these things at me as like, the final sort of, but it had no power. At that point. All of the power all of my life’s blood, my attention that I had invested in this coping mechanism in building this me in in, you know, trying to create the best me the most whatever me. All of that lifeblood that that life energy had slowly leaked away from an allegiance to it. And that final moment, when it screamed, it screamed, like I say, like a tiny little ant on a raft in the middle of an ocean, rather than as my overlord. It was like, oh, right, like you, you’ve been deposed. You’ve been deposed by this, whatever, whatever this is, I didn’t think about what is this? You know, I wasn’t thinking it was just a being a being it. And something that was no longer necessary, sort of fading.
Rick Archer: I’ve been thinking about the Dark Knight business all week, because you write about it a lot and talk about it. Yeah, I have a lot of questions and points I want to discuss with you. But before we get into those, you mentioned you had a cleanup crew of various people you interacted with, I guess, after this thing came on, who were some of your primary cleanup?
Jeannie Zandi: Well, this, this was the the fortunate thing was that. So I was with my daughter’s dad, and he was very into satsang. And we were in Taos, New Mexico, his primary teacher was Congo Ji. And he was just a very interested in and I think he Oh, he started to work on actually he was working on an anthology of Ramadan quotes and quotes from people who sort of attributed themselves to Ramadan, some way they’re teaching. And so he was both organizing Satsang inviting all these teachers to Taos where we lived, as well as collecting things first book and sort of seeing who did he feel was authentic, and that kind of thing. And so I was not interested, because A, I had already been down that route. And in our relationship, there was a lot of this sort of, well, it’s not in your body, can you just focus to this other place, and you know, this whole, we had this whole kind of, you know, meeting of two different orientations. So I just thought satsang was this thing. So then here comes Pamela Wilson, to tallis and I think Cass couldn’t find a meeting spot. So he had the meeting in our house. And I, I think my child was maybe a year and a half old at the time or something. And Pamela was very welcoming of Sofia being in the room. So I she was in my living room. So I went downstairs. And a couple things happened. One was that the energy of song soothed the terror that I was walking around with all the time, he’s soothed it. And as well, there was something that I was actually making a study of, which was, how do I not reference off this mind, which is obviously the source of suffering. And so I discovered in sitting in the salt song, the support for dropping out of the mind. And then the other beautiful thing was that Pamela looked at me. And I don’t even think I had said anything, or maybe I had. And she just started talking about the dark night and an experience that she had had. And it was the first time besides a shred here or a shred there in the literature. I hadn’t found St. John of the Cross yet, because I didn’t know I had no, you know, I thought it was mentally ill. I mean, I had no idea what this was. It was the first time that I felt my experience reflected and if you could imagine, having looked for two and a half years in desperate terror, what the hell is going on having consulted is this postpartum depression is this like, what is this Suddenly, I felt my experience reflected and some of the things that she said, I started to feel at home. And so she, she came to tell us quite a lot back then. And so she was a, a deep, a deep body of the heart, you know, just really, really got what I was going through. And, you know, I would sit with her privately and I would sit in her songs, and it was the most
Jeannie Zandi: it was, you know, similar to I went to a Zen session at Natalie Goldberg’s house. During this time, I was very pregnant. This was before Sophia was born. But I had a friend who was very into Buddhism. And so I went, I was just had nothing better to do at the time, you know, and I sat down with my pregnant belly, and I just sunk into this awesome silence. And I attributed it to the fact that I had given myself permission for those few days, to not have my attention in my life. And so Satsang became this beautiful excuse with a beginning and an end, to not have to solve this problem of what the hell was happening. Because my whole life had fallen apart. I, I had no idea which end was up, the only thing that made any sense to me was that the sort of spiritual practice of being a mother of a baby, you know, and, and so, this, this way of this invitation, to simply be, it was easy for me to simply be when I gave myself permission to simply be and took my attention off of solving my life, you know. And so, Pamela was a wonderful support in there. And then there was still, for me, something unmet, and I didn’t know that that was true until I met, ADIA and Adria was a big influence. For me, I think I met him in around 2002. And I remember, at Nirmala was a friend. And Nirmala was someone who was sort of helping me bridge the sort of argument between the two sides, you know, the, the body, the psyche, and then this non dual thing, you know, like Nirmala was very good at, you know, I said, Can I just email you, you know, we went back and forth, sort of, I’d asked him questions, and so he gave us a recording of audio. And then we went to visit, my daughter’s grandmother and audio was in Tucson, and I got to see him for a day. And when, as the minute I saw him, I felt like if, if each spiritual teacher may meet this, or this, or maybe this, this and this, when I met Adi I felt boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, you know, just like, grounded rooted in reverent on the ground awakening, but mercy and just such a, he, he was, he made so much sense for me, and was a was a guide for me, in some very impactful ways, that had a lot to do with actually embodying what was happening, you know, bringing the body along. So those were my I had a lot of other influences personal support some. And, but I guess those were the the two big sort of spiritual teacher, people that, you know, I went to a lot of their meetings.
Rick Archer: Yeah, it’s funny. I mean, I’m in sort of unique position, because I talk to all these people and have become friends with them. But so maybe my perspective is a little different than the average listener, but I sort of feel nonetheless, that we’re kind of like this big family, you know, all interconnected and intertwined in various ways and, you know, helping one another in, there’s a word for that, if you get that as a great, great word for that. Maybe symbiotic, but I don’t know, interdependent, interdependent, and inter supportive, I would say because dependent has sort of a negative connotation, but but there’s a sort of cross fertilization maybe it was a good word. Yeah, you know, that takes place these days. And you know, tick not Han said the next Buddha may be the Sangha. And this it seems to me that this is an an explanation of how that is. So it doesn’t just mean one particular song that you go and sit in but there’s this sort of network around the world of people that are cross fertilizing and inter and enriching one another. It’s really cool.
Jeannie Zandi: Very, I think it was it rom das who said we’re just all walking each other home.
Rick Archer: Yeah, that’s nice. Love that.
Jeannie Zandi: Yeah. Yeah.
Rick Archer: So let’s talk more about dark notice. So I as I read your stuff and listened to I kind of had a theory and I don’t know if this really gets to the heart of it, but I’m sure you can help me.
Jeannie Zandi: Well, what’s what’s very cool is that I just got done reading a survey of practically everything that’s been written about the dark night of the soul that I could find probably about 15 books or so in the last six months. So I’m freshly. I’m freshly primed only because I’m about to write my own. So right
Rick Archer: Oh, you are the go to girl when it comes to?
Jeannie Zandi: Yeah, I have search strings in my website, things like I’m in hell help. What the frick is going on? These are my search strings.
Rick Archer: So my first question about that is, do you feel like a dark night of some degree and we can talk about degrees is a kind of an obligatory rite of passage for everyone on a spiritual path?
Jeannie Zandi: Well, if I were to answer that question with anything, if I were to answer that question with either yes or no, it would be rather arrogant, I think so. I’m just gonna say. However it is, however, it is. That the deeply ingrained with its tentacles in the very embodiment of the creature, however, the energy management structure of coping and conditioning that has it sort of out picturing in this concept of me, however, that thing is brought to its knees, or deeply seen through, and I don’t mean in a moment seen through, but I mean, has the backbone of its will broken, however, that happens, so that we are the sort of how do I say, that is utterly humbled? And the sense of what we are, is, however, that happens, yay. And I can’t even begin to pretend to be an expert on pretty much anything, but my own direct experience. And
Rick Archer: if you’re 14 books about it, you’ve been exposed to other perspectives about the whole thing, and maybe some universal trends and, you know, have become apparent.
Jeannie Zandi: I don’t none of them claim that this is the only way. Right, and neither would I. But what happens, you know, there’s, there’s something about a dark night of the soul. And I don’t mean just a hard time because some of the books out there on the dark night of the soul, use that phrase. And many of us use that phrase, to describe a particularly gnarly human crisis that we went through, and we deepened. That’s not the dark night of the soul. Although it has some similarities, the dark night of the soul, you don’t go through something. And then you’re just like kind of more deepened. You go through the thing, and you don’t come out the other side. And St. John of the Cross is the I mean, I bow to that guy for having written as much as he did to leave that beautiful legacy, because he’s so clear. And it’s so useful. And when I found it just so happened, nearby star was in a sacred poetry class with me in Taos. So we were classmates, and she was working on her new translation of St. John of the Cross. So I got an early copy of it, I begged her, I said, I’ll copy edit it, whatever. She had her staff already. But you know, I maybe contributed a typo, or two or something, you know, but I got to read that. And as St. John says, when you’re going through the dark night of the soul, you never think you are because you feel way too wretched, to be deserving of something so holy. And that was true for me too. Even though my experience was utterly mirrored there. I didn’t, I just kept assuming, you know, my life is over. I don’t know I’d screwed up somewhere. I don’t know what but so. What what the darkness soul does is it’s like a rotor router. And it actually go you are forced into it’s almost like being forced into a small dark room with the worst things that live in your psyche. And as far as I can tell, the root of separation is a an energy of deep, deep banishment. Something here should not be something here should be cast to hell, something that’s here should be gone. And facing off with that and facing off with all of the confusions in a very direct and felt way. allows the instructor Meant to be open in a way that it can actually perceive those holdings in other beings. So it’s sort of like when you get raft, you can walk around the world, and you see all the people that need to be resolved. Or that kind of thing. It’s like, and so this body can detect, in a way. I’m going like this. And, you know, I don’t know what that is, you know, could it be the chakras cut? I don’t know, I’m not big on kind of cataloguing things, let’s say. But there’s a sense as I move through giving Satsang in different places. People who were masquerading as awake, people who were maybe had an experience, seeing teachers and feeling the openness is, and then the the places that we’re still we’re separation still lived. So I think the darker the soul is a great sort of roto rooter for embodiment, because it forces your nose deeply into the places where conflict lives. But I also, you know that what St. John says is that the dark night of the soul is an influx of light, God’s light that sends the impurities up into our faces. And while we’re assuming that this all this is, you know, God’s a jerk, because we’re experiencing this, it’s actually this we’re experiencing our own dross, rather than God is all this stuff comes to the surface. Where was I going with that? So so I can, you know, I have I have a sense that the Holy has many methods, so to speak, and there are many ways that that this confusion drops away.
Jeannie Zandi: But I think that there’s also some, some disservice being done, where people are somehow or some confusion happening, where people have had an experience. And we have all been sold this sort of candy machine enlightenment, where you put your quarter in, and you have the right insight, and then you become Ramanna. You know, what I’m saying? And so, you know, as I walk around, there’s a lot of people either feel really bad, like they failed, because all they can see is this darkness beckoning. And they’ve tried all the up and out sorts of methods. So either a lot of people feeling really, like they failed, or a lot of people posing. And, yeah, so there’s something, there’s something you know, I do this, always being always becoming, you know, the, the eternal spaciousness that we are the emptiness that we are, and then oh, I just bumped my head on the door, you know, the Zen stick, and the beauty, the beauty of the capacity of the human being, in getting on its knees in, in front of this emptiness as this emptiness, becoming a servant to its perfection in a way that like, and this is like, it’s so beautiful when a being doesn’t just stop. But But I feel like the force of awakening does this of its own accord, it moves into the dark corners and says, how about this, Bob? You know, you’re sitting on the cushion over there. But what’s this? And of course, we are aided in that process by all the beings around us, because what’s unconscious is unconscious? And how can we see it, but when eight people point to something funny in you, you know, that’s the I think the integrity that idea talks about?
Rick Archer: Great. Well said, I have a few thoughts based on what you’ve said. And then I’ll bounce it back to you. The thing you just said about people, either feeling they failed or posing. Before I started doing this show, I wasn’t really hobnobbing with the larger spiritual community out there, you know, but when I started doing it, I what hit me almost off the off the bat was that there are a lot of people who are mistaking an intellectual understanding for actual realization, you read enough Ramita books and not an advisor books and stuff and you can really get sort of intoxicated with the understanding and fail to distinguish between that and what someone like Rama was actually experiencing. And I would say to such Oh, go ahead.
Jeannie Zandi: I was gonna say and then you become basically a tool of sacrilege because these beautiful, alive truths become dead spiritual concepts that in You then perpetrate on other people,
Rick Archer: right? Quite obnoxiously, in many cases on chat groups, I would add that I mean, I had an actual guy, no disrespect to him if he’s watching, I had one guy actually said to me, there isn’t an inch of daylight between me and Rama. And what he was saying was, I get what Rama was saying, therefore I’m in the same state Rama was. And, you know, I would say, I think I said to that person, well, yeah, if you could actually step into his sandals and see the world through his eyes, I think you’d be in for a surprise.
Jeannie Zandi: Well, and he and why are we even having these conversations? Except that? Why do we even need to have a spiritual resume? What what is the need? What is the need? What is the need to put ourselves on a spiritual map?
Rick Archer: Yeah. And and then to your second point about the people who feel they failed, I think that what’s really helpful for them is an understanding that we’re kind of alluding to here, which is that there’s a vast spectrum of possibility, possible range of development, and deepening and clarification and purification and all that stuff. And if you think of it in simplistic black and white terms, like you’re not awake, or you’re awake, you know, people don’t know, we can’t place themselves on that map. Because that map is unreal, it’s really a vast spectrum. And go ahead and respond to that.
Jeannie Zandi: Well, I was just noticing how anytime we have an either or going on, it’s, it’s separation. Yeah. Anytime things turn into black and white, and this or that, or you know, and you can see it, you can see it in relationship, you can see it and how people are whole psyches are programmed to do this black and white thing that basically, then self abuses, anything that doesn’t fit into the good half. And, and, and it it completely factors out. The organic nature of being a human being, and the fact see in our culture, which is very, there’s an imbalanced toward I would say sort of unhealthy young. We worship, the we worship, worship Athena, who sprang from Zeus, his head fully armed, armored and ready to fight, right? We, we worship Superman, we worship, if there’s a seed in the ground, a sprout, a plant a flower of fruit, and a rotting, we worship the fruit. And if something looks promising a flowers pretty good, but the rotting and the seed, forget about it. And so when someone is in a beautiful, deconstruction experience, and everyone’s yelling at them, could you just manifest a bit? You know, this is clearly your fault. You’re not manifesting a good life? Or, or can you just come up and out? Well, there’s actually a valid spiritual passage that’s actually down in in. But we’re terrified of that. Because this is the land that we don’t know, a land that’s been absolutely painted with a red X. You’re supposed to be functioning, you’re supposed to be bright and look good, and anything less, you’re probably screwing up. And that’s if you said that to a seed or a shoot if you shouted at a seed that was attempting to lie in the dark and just ate and you shouted at it that it was doing the wrong way. Could it just get get it up to look like a fruit? Well, that it’s almost like shouting at a caterpillar to not build its cocoon to liquefy and sprout wings. It’s a complete ignorance of what seems to be a way.
Rick Archer: Yeah. What I take from what you just said is, among other things, is just that there’s a value in understanding the actual mechanics of awakening. And it’s, and in doing so, one can save oneself a lot of grief by being, you know, well, firstly by sort of going off on tangents that aren’t going to be fruitful, because they’re really not getting down in, as you say, but also in terms of misunderstanding, where one actually is on the path and it’s like, I’m not phrasing this coming out. Go ahead. Can I say some? Yeah, please.
Jeannie Zandi: So you hear hear in each moment, like we can just we, you know, we can talk and have a lot of fun fine with a lot of ideas and a lot of movements and a lot of theories and a lot of sort of understandings, you know, sort of like up in the fighter jet looking down at the territory, right. But here, always, those have to be bathed in a humble returning to this vibrating present outside of any ideas we have. And there’s a way that how do I say, there’s a top down way of looking at development, I got an idea. And I’m going to go there I’m getting, you know, in, there’s great insights that can really help us identify when we’re swimming around an eddy, at the same time, in every moment, for every human being. Right now, below all of our thoughts about all of it. There is something beautiful going on. Sometimes that beauty hurts. Sometimes we fight that hurt. But below all of our ideas. There’s an organic, alive dance, of presence and sensation that we leave, attempting to master it with the mind and the will. And no amount of overview is going to substitute for a dropping in in a humble open, no idea kind of way to actually sit in and as the simplicity that we are, and watch what it’s doing, where it wants to go. And in my work, this is what I do is I bring people into this vibrating power I mean Eckhart called The Power of Now, which was just a great phrase that where where’s God? Nowhere, but here, where’s life? Nowhere. But here, where is anything? Nowhere. But here. And here. Below the mind, it’s incredibly simple. There’s presence there sensation, and then there’s how do i in this moment, in a way, do my best to be true? Do my best to sort of like not act from delusion. And there’s there’s a lot to learn about how delusion moves in a moment. But to me, it’s like there’s, it’s really fun to talk at the fighter jet level. And then we have to, I have to, I have to be almost like, baptized in nowhere, and just drop into like high, like high, which is my main pointer by the way, my main pointer is high. And it will stop someone cold in there attempting to master their awakening, drawing them here. And for a moment, there’s a moment of, you know, huh?
Rick Archer: A question came in from Kristin in Chicago, apropos to what we were just saying. She asks, How do you know whether someone is posing as being spiritually awake or, or enlightened? Or whether they are actually awake?
Jeannie Zandi: How do I know? Or how does anyone know?
Rick Archer: Both? I mean, you were saying a bit. We were both commenting on that a few minutes ago. And so Kristin wanted to know, you know, how can we judge or determine that?
Jeannie Zandi: Yeah, I’m my answer is, I don’t know. Here, you know, Bernadette Roberts said a really cool thing. She said, so much became clear, after it dropped away. So when we’re embroiled in things, things aren’t clear. And then when things drop away, we look back and we can see what was happening. We couldn’t see it before. But by virtue of its absence, we see all these kinds of things. And so in here, this is an instrument of resonance. And so there are almost like energetic signatures of what I would call a lie deadness. It’s actually a dead quality. There’s a there’s a dead quality to concept. And there’s a dead quality to sort of like these kind of gnarled up conflicted globs of life energy that we’re attempting to repress. There’s actually an energetic broadcast. that that bodies put out. And sometimes somebody can have a lot of Shakti and it can just blow you away and your instrument just gets blown out and you’re not, you’re not intuiting, anything, you’re not picking up anything, but in the average human being. And many of us have this capacity, when we start to listen to our instinctual, intuitive knowing rather than our head knowing we can feel when there’s an energy of yuck. Like, there’s an energy of openness, that’s like a meal. It’s like a full meal. When you meet someone like that. You know, I remember the first time i i met David White at it, this was, you know, long ago in like, my Naropa days, and there was a conference and there was an author, I won’t name, whose books I’d read, who I’d really loved his books, and I went to see him. And his energy was, you know, he talked, he was in his head a lot, he talked a lot, and I couldn’t really listen. And then I went, I left there. And I went into a presentation by David White, who I didn’t know. And when he walked into the room, the way he opened the door, and the way he stepped into the room, and the way he looked around, had more of a transmission of all the things that other guy had lots of ideas about. And he hadn’t even spoken a word. And so there’s a quality of young Yum, in a being that’s open and flowing, and a quality of something else. And, and I would just say to Kristen, to follow your resonance, despite what your head or other people say, follow this sense of, there’s food here. I don’t know why. Because each of us, we’re we’re all so unique in what our particular system, what will be transformative to us.
Rick Archer: So a minute ago, you use the phrase instrument of resonance, with reference to your own nervous system. And I like that a lot. And it brings us back to the dark night of the soul thing, because I have a feeling that everybody has the potential everyone has an instrument of resonance. But you know, a lot of those instruments aren’t very well tuned, you know. And there’s, you’ve used various words like yuck and garcon. Yeah, so using those kinds of words, we, you know, we all kind of come in with a certain amount of guck clogging up our instrument. And it seems to me that a dark night of the soul and correct me if you see it differently, is a clearing away of that guck and the intensity of the whole dark night experience kind of depends on how much gunk there is. And how, what our destiny is in terms of how quickly it’s going to be cleared away.
Jeannie Zandi: Well, the these this seems, your your theory is mathematically appealing. Yeah, I’m saying like, like, you know, I’m just imagining I’m thinking about like my physics class in high school, you know, and the volume of the guck and the height and the width, so much time you know, that sort of thing, but I think we have to allow for a deep bow to mystery Oh, yeah. Because my sense is the Dark Knight is not only the rising of scum there is a way that there’s a way that the faculties of mind and we’ll and St. John talks about this he uses the word obscure in Spanish, whatever that is, are obscured are darkened, that the, the the mind can’t work the way it used to. The will can’t work the way it used to the end this is before the the flotsam and jetsam starts rising. There is something it’s almost like this little holy mechanic that runs in and takes your carburetor. You know, there’s something about the darkness that’s not only the rising stuff, but the actual gift of the darkening of the faculties that orient us to the to the earth to the world. And that’s what he that’s what he talks about. He talks about us being weaned of our reliance on the things of this world to be prepared to be here have not have but not have here. So I’m not sure it’s just a gut clean out with you know, if you did if you You’re in there for 10 years, you know, you really had a lot of shit. And if you’re in there for five minutes, you were pretty rosy already. I’m not sure that that covers the entire mystery of it, although it is appealing.
Rick Archer: I think it’s part of it. You know, Jesus said, You can’t pour new wine into old wineskins. Absolutely. So there needs to be a restructuring of the instrument in order for it to be a fit. Servant of the Divine,
Jeannie Zandi: if you will. Yeah, I like like your language. Yeah, there with you.
Rick Archer: And I suppose and there’s all these variables, you know, I mean, one is how much guck? And another is, you know, how are you going to like, kick and scream and resist? Or are you going to sort of cooperate?
Jeannie Zandi: Well, and this is part of what St. John says, this is part of what’s extremely difficult. And part of what is useful. Having the experience reflected is that for most people, when they enter the dark night of the soul, even if they’ve got a spiritual orientation, it is so up ending that it is, you know, St. John councils, you know, be quiet, just be quiet. It’s like, well, good luck, you know. And as I, you know, I meet with people who are going through this, we’ve had several online series, and they come to my events and silence just stick my head again.
Rick Archer: I’ll say something. And then as soon as, as soon as you get trained to thought, interrupt me. But I have a friend that I’m going to present you a range of possibilities. Here, I have a friend whom I’ve interviewed three times Harry alto, his dark night, if it was that consisted of about 15 minutes, during which he, his customary, unbounded awareness shrank down to individual nature. From his earliest memories, as a child, he was always sort of unbounded and free. And but he heard all these people talking about, you know, bliss and all unboundedness ease and what is that and he went for a walk, and for and also, boom, he was just an individual, he said, I can’t live like this, get me out of here, you know. And about 15 minutes later, it cleared and he was back to his usual way of functioning. On the other extreme, you know, I’ve been in touch with a couple of people who are literally paralyzed, bedridden, need help going to the bathroom by an extreme, apparently, kundalini awakening, there may be other factors that might be something nutritional going on whatever. But they regarded as some sort of spiritual catharsis. But it’s so extreme, that it’s totally incapacitating. And then we have all kinds of possibilities in between.
Jeannie Zandi: and, and I would say, let’s turn that line into a three dimensional mystery, okay? Because your line, it’s still in mathematically, there’s, you know, the guy who spent 15 minutes and the little woman, the woman, you know, the people in bed, and then everything in between implies a line. And what I would like to invite is at least a three dimensional, if not more, bound to the mystery of this so we can seek to understand because that’s what we do. But we have to keep throwing our models in the acid bath of humility.
Rick Archer: Yeah. These are just theories. Everything for me is a working hypothesis. Nothing is a done deal.
Jeannie Zandi: Yeah, so where were you going? Oh, no, I don’t mean to derail you.
Rick Archer: You’re not really man. I hopefully I’m not derailing you. We’re just kind of going around a little bit on you know, what a dark night is how inevitable it is. how extreme it may be. What what can what can be what can be done, if anything to ameliorate it. Those kind of points.
Jeannie Zandi: Yeah. Okay. Boy, those were a lot of questions. I had an answer to one of them.
Rick Archer: You’re like catching a fish. He slipped out of your hands. Yeah,
Jeannie Zandi: it’s exactly like that. The basic, you know, like to say if you put your ear up to my ear, you just hear the Sahara wind’s blowing. The thoughts, the thoughts are
Rick Archer: that Well, I can reiterate those if it helps you. No, no, I think silence
Jeannie Zandi: is just good just to hang here and um, contemplate the dark night. So there are lots of forms of darkness that can have lots of different causes. And I think it’s a dangerous pension of the mind to do something like start to think I have to have a dark night. You know, I have to have a dark night to wake up, you know. And when people come to me, they start to think that because I’m speaking from my experience, but I think it’s very dangerous for us to orient in any kind of a way, or maybe not dangerous, but slightly delusional and inviting the manifestation of things that might not be necessary. Yeah. And so the
Rick Archer: people feeling bad because they haven’t had a dark night and right, or give you a dark night pill.
Jeannie Zandi: Or you have the person lying in bed, who’s going through the 10 year thing, feeling like they’re the spiritual idiot. And so all of this is a pension of the mind, to reduce what’s mysterious, into catalogo catalogue of things that we can do something about. And I would say, yes, there’s definitely a level at which it’s important to do things about things. So if you have Lyme disease, it’s important to diagnose the Lyme disease and see what part that plays in how your brains working, and how depressions working. And if you have some kind of an all of these things have to be held so lightly, so lightly, because it’s mysterious, the way that the powers of, of this whole operates. So if we get an idea, I have this illness, it’s incurable, blah, blah, blah, we can, we can settle ourselves with a heavy, unnecessary weight. At the same time, we ignore our illness and pop around like a little poo, err, thinking that the universe is going to take care of everything, and then we fall over dead because we didn’t like take care of the gangrene in her foot. And between these two, between these two, it’s like trusting God tie your camel. There’s a constant almost to me invitation to the human being. To keep, as I said, baptizing oneself in the unknown in humility in opening in, I don’t know, help. Here, I am open, I’m shutting everything I’ve built up until this moment to sort of open myself to the latest bulletins from the beloved, you know, in this empty unknown. So we have to, in a way, constantly open ourselves at the same time as do our best to address the the levels of our existence from our, you know, anybody who’s ever I think even audio said, when he was in the hospital with his stomach pain, you know, wow, the body like, whoa, right? Like, like, we have these levels, all of the levels require kind of different tending. And so if someone, you know, I see people that come to my work, hoping they’re having a dark night, because what else can explain this thing, you know, and then seeing that sometimes people have had a lot of abuse in their young lives, and what they could really use as somebody to hold the space for them to move in there and do the grieving they need to do and whatever else. But then there are also these instant healings. And so each of us has to sort of take responsibility and do the detective work, while keeping our relationship loose, with that pension to fix everything inside of a conceptual straitjacket, that then defines the outcomes because we’ve suddenly become a slave to our perspectives.
Rick Archer: Yeah, no, I hear you. And that’s it. I appreciate that caveat that, you know, like you said, you know, trust in God, but tie your camel, I think it’s it’s natural, and perhaps even desirable, to try to understand things, but at the same, but keep it balanced and realize that you’re not going to totally nail anything down. There’s always the element of mystery, as you said that everything is always somewhat theoretical, you know, you’re trying to gain a better understanding of all kinds of things in the spiritual world. I mean, that’s why there’s so many books and scriptures, they, they have them keep trying, they enrich our understanding, but you know, but they’re not going to you’re not going to provide their intention is not to be exclusive, the exclusive, you know, tool force for spiritual development, obviously, there has to be the experiential tool, and that’s very mysterious and non intellectual.
Jeannie Zandi: Right. And and, and so, what I would say and and this is part of what I’m what I’m writing about what I teach about what I would say to people who feel that they have a large helping of darkness, so it’s, it’s really
Jeannie Zandi: I want to say on this sweet Earth, there’s something that we don’t always Say, which is that there are some things that we can’t solve. And I want to put that as our kind of our gravity or our ground. That’s not to make us necessarily hopeless. But it is to acknowledge that the human condition includes lots of things that we apparently get to be with without a solution. That said, we are very motivated when we’re suffering to find the solution to that suffering. And it’s important to cover all of the bases, the the medical basis, the psychological basis, that can be contributing to darkness. And I would say it really matters in a way, like, in The Dark Knight, the greatest skill that I uncovered was a simply to abide in the unknown moment and meet what’s rising. Sometimes we need support in that. And that the more we get involved with the crazy mind and our freakout about it, the more suffering there is, but someone who, for example, has Lyme disease doesn’t want to just sit on their butt, being necessarily they might want to do plenty of x is very nice for the body. But they’ll also want to address this other level. A Kundalini is a whole other area. And I’m, I’m not an expert in that. But I have had people in my work who have been tremendously challenged by Kundalini openings that happened on top of a sort of a ungrounded relationship of the creature of the body to the ground and various psychological issues that just made them into a hot mess, basically, yeah. And, and some, some of those things need a variety of attention, of skills of learning, grounding, of addressing the psychic, the psychological stuff that’s coming up, etc. It’s complex.
Rick Archer: Yeah. It’s been a long time since I’ve read about St. John of the Cross. But as I recall his story, he was locked in a closet for 14 years by the administrative types who didn’t like his mystical tendencies. And, you know, he had dysentery, he was fed bread and water, he spent a lot of time sitting in his own diarrhea, it was it was not a real pleasant scene. He was beaten, also beaten. Yeah, it was it was rough. And I guess that was all happening. While his dark night was happening, that would be enough to give anyone a dark night, I would say, this is
Jeannie Zandi: funny, because he doesn’t, in my reading of him, I have yet to actually read his account of his dark night, like his writing on Dark Knight is counseling. Other, you know, nuns and monks, basically, in trying to what he wants to do is basically help these people not go down and Eddie and get stuck somewhere and stay sort of in, in the flow of the unfolding that’s happening. So I’m not sure where and when his dark night happened. And if his time in the jail cell was what, what did it to him so to speak? Well, the
Rick Archer: reason I brought that up is actually aided by the point you just made, which is trying to get the the notion that there there might, there might be things we can do, which would make which would smooth the whole process of The Dark Knight to make it not last as long to make it not be as as horrible. You know, and maybe that’s what John St. John was trying to offer. And you’ve mentioned other things. I mean, there might be therapies, there might be herbal supplements, there could be all kinds of things. I mean, for instance, this this Kundalini person I’m thinking of, you know, she probably has terrible endocrine problems and thyroid out of balance, and a lot of times huge spiritual energies, coursing through the body can really throw it out of whack. And there can be all sorts of methods to help to just sort of give us some assistance in the process it’s going through so it doesn’t have to be as terrible.
Jeannie Zandi: Potentially, I would say in my experience with with what I experienced, I would say that any what the single most comforting thing that I have experienced in holding space for people who are going through that is to have their experience mirrored because out in the world, it’s rare to find the spoken to even in the books on dark night of the soul explosion mirrored. In other words, what’s happening there? Is what happened here?
Rick Archer: I think so, so they can meet somebody they can relate to who I’ve been. And on that
Jeannie Zandi: on some kind of a map. Yeah, some kind of a map other than the cultural map, which is you’re screwing up. And you need and you need, and you need to like, get yourself together. Yeah. You know, and it’s actually, it’s actually helpful to hear no, you’re actually supposed to fall apart. And, and so what I find is a whole secondary level of suffering is actually the lack of having one’s experience be reflected, put on a map, the isolation of it, the aloneness of it, while you’re surrounded, basically by culture and family who don’t know what’s happening. So yeah, worse, worse than it needs to be. Yeah, that’s, that’s huge. And then another thing that’s really, really useful, in my experience, is to restore a healthy relationship with the ways that the body purifies energy, crying, shaking, also, restoring a sense of the grounded quality of a body, because early trauma pulls us up out of that energetic relationship with ground. And so the energy just spins and pings inside the body, especially terror.
Rick Archer: Yeah, and you mentioned, you played a lot of aggressive soccer during that period. So physical exercise
Jeannie Zandi: is very, very good. Because the energies are so huge. And the the, the more that anything sort of bores down into that core fight, the more we behave like an animal, that’s why relationship is so great for bringing up that kind of stuff. It’s like, a kind of, we have no room to run. So we fight kind of thing. So as these things, these things are being stripped off, we get increasingly irritable and creature like and so outlets for that, besides just taking it out on the people around you are very useful.
Rick Archer: Yeah. And if you just lie there in bed and marinate in it, chances are, it’s just really going to get more, more and more severe. Whereas if you can balance, stabilize, integrate, you know, go for a hike, go for a swim, you know, things like that, to whatever extent you’re capable, it seems to me what I mean, even in conventional conventional world, they say that exercise produces endorphins, and you know, it helps to cure depression and all kinds of things. So must help with this, too.
Jeannie Zandi: Yeah, definitely. Yeah.
Rick Archer: Here’s a question from John in Texas, he asks, Is it possible to be in a dark night period or experience, and yet be aware that it’s a natural part of one’s spiritual evolution? In other words, not to just feel like, I don’t know what the heck is happening to me, but realize, oh, yeah, there’s a dark night, I’m just going to grin and bear it and you know, something good is happening in the long run?
Jeannie Zandi: Well, my experience is that the Dark Knight actually lifts off the capacity to have the mind have a perspective toward things. So whether the mind will try to say this is a very bad thing, the mind will try to say this is a very good thing. But that capacity of the mind is actually in a dark night, kind of the whole point of the Dark Knight is to lift that capacity off of you, of conceptualizing reality versus being immersed in it. I would imagine if someone had studied, you know, if you were a Catholic, and you had studied with St. John, you know, and you it was, so in every fiber of your being that this darkness was coming, that maybe there would be something in you that would say, Oh, this is just the dark night. But my sense is, and this is it’s this is difficult to actually put into words because the things we think are true. And the things that the things that live below our conscious awareness. As those rise there isn’t a sense of knowing something, there’s much more sense of things rising in a not knowing. So, you know, all things are possible. It wouldn’t it has not been my experience. I have not met anyone who has been in a true dark night who’s just like groovy, just you know, it’ll pass it you know, it’s too it’ll be out of here by five and
Rick Archer: but didn’t come to your retreats. And presumably those people have an advantage when they’re sitting with you talking about it and being listened to and being mirrored over those who are just out in Peoria, Illinois. I have no idea what’s happening. Oh,
Jeannie Zandi: definitely, yeah, definitely even for a moment to consider that. The big thing is, when we’re alone, inside of the condition perspective, it’s, I have to do something, I have to do something about this, I have to do something about this. And in St. John says, No, this is this is a passive passage. You don’t have to do anything about it. But to tell someone who’s frightened creature is activated. And the way the frightened creature works is I have to do something about this. And this is how we’re conditioned to even disable that for a sec for someone to rest. And this is what happens when they when they meet me when they sit with me is that there’s a sense of the capacity of rest to rest in now that your life may be complete mess, you don’t know what’s happening. Where’s the ground? Where’s breath? Where’s presence? Hello.
Rick Archer: As I was reading your, one of your articles, I wrote up a question. It took me a few minutes to write this question to phrase it right. So maybe this will be useful. Would you say that a Dark Knight happens because we’d begun to realize that outer sources of fulfillment are inadequate, but we’re not yet grounded in inner fulfillment. And this realization correlates with a purging of everything which occludes inner fulfillment.
Jeannie Zandi: Interesting. Read it again, I like it.
Rick Archer: Would you say that? It’s like we’ve well, just before I read it again, it’s like you’ve let the boat has cast off from the chute one, one bank of the river, but hasn’t reached the other bank yet. So you’re kind of in limbo land. But let me read the question. Would you say that a Dark Knight happens, because we’ve begun to realize that outers, whether voluntarily or forcibly, I’d say, we began to realize that outer sources of fulfillment are inadequate, but we are not yet grounded in inner fulfillment. And this realization correlates with a purging of everything which occludes that inner fulfillment.
Jeannie Zandi: I would say again, you know, you know, where I’m going, I can feel that seesaw undercurrent, and I want to, I just want to bow to the, to the inquisitive mind and, and I have one that had that makes connections and discovers things and has insights. I remember reading something that the Sufi Eben RB, who was called the shake of shakes, and he was a grandpa when Rumi was a toddler. And I read something that he wrote about crucifixion. And about, I could feel 100 corners of my experience, and knowing sewing together, because of something that he said it was like, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, it was beautiful. And then that gave me more of a capacity more of a vehicle to speak to certain things. So All hail the amazing inquisitive mind, and all hail all of the, the sort of, and I’m thinking about my daughter right now. And something that that she wrote for school when she was talking about how she absolutely adores, unknown, and adores the human penchant for building models that never quite encapsulate the unknown, and how thrilling it is for her that there’s always more unknown to discover, which, which implies more exploration and more models. And then, you know, and each one of these is a is a tiny view into this massive reality that we’ll never encapsulate with the mind and yet, we keep trying so,
Rick Archer: so science, science builds, builds, models, tests, some revises, then that just keeps doing this and it has its, you know, it’s not everything but it’s something
Jeannie Zandi: great fun it is. And I want to say with all humility this this reality it’s we have to keep invoking mystery in here. So what you’re what you’re suggesting about the dark night, maybe I feel like we would have to and you know, I I’ve spent my life at different times wanting to sort of, in my mind crafting another study. Could we get a population of all people across the earth who’ve ever experienced a dark night and find out where they just you know, sitting on the couch drinking beer watching I Love Lucy could give a crap about spiritual anything, you know what I mean? And then suddenly, the Dark Knight hits I mean, why it comes, how it how it comes, who it comes to how long it lasts. To me, your theory sounds pretty good. Certainly it could apply to me in that I already had a good sense that fulfillment wasn’t going to come from the outside. But I honestly don’t know.
Rick Archer: Okay. Well, I would have been rather surprised and somewhat disappointed if you’d had said, Yep. Rick. That’s absolutely it. You nailed it. We totally figured it out now. Like that? Well, it’s, it’s, this is the way my mind works. And, but it’s, and I sometimes actually get criticized for it. But you know, there’s always this sort of little paradox thing that happens, I even have a T shirt that says paradox on it where I fly theories, you know, but then I not, I’m not trying to sort of nail things down with any finality. You know, I just, it’s just like, poking it in from different
Jeannie Zandi: races. You’re fun. Yeah. Right. This is your fun.
Rick Archer: Right? And here’s another one for you. Do you think, I don’t know why maybe NASA is gonna know what you’re gonna say. But do you think that a regular spiritual practice of some sort can kind of chip away at the darkness so that it’s removed incrementally with so that it doesn’t have to be swallowed? It’s like, you know, eating a, they have those hot dog eating contest where people eat 50 Something hot dogs in a very short amount of time. All right, so there’s that. And then there’s, you know, having a hot dog a day for a month or two.
Jeannie Zandi: I definitely understand that. And again, it’s it’s another mathematical, it’s, we’re going back to the mathematical one, you know, the quantity of dark and can we empty some out? No, we can we want to? Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, I again, want to invoke the 360 degree mystery. And and say that, so from the age of, so I had a decent childhood, you know, sort of a average American childhood, you know, no, no huge traumas. And when I was 23, I found counseling. And it was, I was beside myself with glee, because I discovered that I could focus my attention on sub optimal aspects of myself reactivity, grief, whatever. And I could actually move that pain out and experience freedom, I was like, wow, like, bring it on down. Let me find everything in me. That’s, that’s a little funny. And, and drill down, right. So I did a ton of that, by the time the Dark Knight hit. That was my way that that had been probably about 13 years of teaching this having lots of sessions moving lots of stuff out, not in any kind of it was very clean, it was just like this clean burning thing that was like my hobby. And if I had a spiritual practice, it was crying. It was I would give myself, you know, and I find a lot of company in the Sufis in this, you know, it’s like, this sort of dropping into the longing and the heart or the loss. And just, it became like, a beautiful thing as though crying was this like, worshipping this opening of the heart, you know, it wasn’t this grim dark thing, it was like, the same as laughing only with some moisture, you know? Yeah, this is how it was for me, and, you know, crying from being touched, you know, whatever. So then the Dark Knight hits. And I have to say, for myself, thank God, I had this capacity to move energy, because there was more energy than I knew how to move. Now, this energy was not like childhood, this child had that it was much deeper than that it was much more unconscious than that was much more primordial than that. Like, if, and so, I think part of the model that you’re talking about assumes a kind of a a holding tank of sort of dischargeable stuff, right? Which which we do have and, and I would say as I watch people whose Dark Night Experience uncovers trauma, like I mean, deep trauma, PTSD, type trauma, or people who haven’t done any emotional work all they’ve done a spiritual work, and they get their top popped off. And then there’s just so much chaos, so much conflict so much coming up. So I would say, Yeah, it really does help Have some, you know, I think it says something about, like you’re going to eat, whatever you don’t face before you’re going to face it after. So you know. So there is something, something valid, I think to what you say that that it is useful to have methods to move energy and to have face some of these things. But in the dark night, there is a level of conditioning that is pre verbal, I don’t know, if it’s pre lifetime, that is very dark, very nonverbal, very, I can’t see very terrified, very creaturely. That is, as far as I can tell, pretty hard to face unless you’re forced there. Because we will do the animal will do anything to get out of going into that room where it thinks it will be destroyed. And we are deeply convinced that if we go into the room where we feel that bad, and for most of us, it’s just unconscious, we just don’t even know it’s living down there. You know, if we go into that room, we’re gonna die. And so the the human psyche is absolutely amazing at crafting ways to distract and suppress and repressed. And so partly the, I think the Dark Knight forces one into rooms, that would be very difficult to get into otherwise, except for maybe some of the crises that happen to people where they’re, they’re pinned, you know, they lose the work they do they lose the love, they had they lose their house, they and they’re just faced with, you know, they get a one way do not pass go do not collect $200 trip to the dark regions of their psyche, you know,
Rick Archer: must be the Lord of the Rings, the closer Frodo got to the mountain, the harder it was for him to proceed, you know? Yes. And he couldn’t even have done the final thing of throwing the ring in unless Gollum had been his finger off and jump, you know, fallen in himself with it. Yeah. He couldn’t have taken that step.
Jeannie Zandi: Well, in this is what St. John says, We do everything that we can do. And then the Holy takes over.
Rick Archer: Yeah. I guess you know, one of the sentiments behind most, a lot of my questions and behind the the very existence of this show, is the feeling that some sort of mass awakening is taking place. And that, you know, many of the things that people who’ve been on a spiritual path, for some time have experienced, are becoming or will become epidemic, and that it’ll be really valuable for us as a spiritual culture. We’re talking earlier about that sort of network to have tools available there is evolved and effective as possible to offer on a wider scale as they’re needed. Yeah. Do you have a sense? Yeah.
Jeannie Zandi: Well, first, I just want to say have a sense of your heart. And I just want to acknowledge that. Thank you. Yeah. It’s like it’s touching here, the heart underneath what you’re saying.
Jeannie Zandi: Certainly, even if we cast aside all spiritual orientation, and we just look at the Earth and the dwindling resources and the the way that as resources dwindle, more and more of us are faced with, in a way. As Resources dwindle, our capacity for distracting ourselves from our essential pain dwindles. So we can all be groovy, when we have plenty of food and you know, our hot tub and our friends and we feel pretty good. And then put us in a boat with 12 Others of us with no water and no food and see how quickly we turn into ferrets. Yeah. And nothing against ferrets.
Rick Archer: Ferrets are relatively friendly compared to what we might turn into. Maybe 400 Ward Rangers or something.
Jeannie Zandi: Yeah. Yeah, Wolverines. Yeah. And this part of us stays pretty hidden in Western culture, in certain layers of Western culture, but as we pressure we can feel very spiritually above it all, when we look at other people who are maybe battling with more basic things than we are,
Rick Archer: but the opioid epidemic, for instance,
Jeannie Zandi: right, and this is so basically whether or not we have a spiritual perspective, as resources dwindle, we will need more capacities to meet the rising discomfort in us, that tends to act itself out on ourselves and others and that’s our model in our culture. It’s sort of whose fault it is. Let’s punish them. And there’s not a sense of owning and transmuting The energies of transformation, so that the animal aspect of us actually gets dealt with in a way that turns it into the ox in the final Oxford or picture where the little Buddha is just riding in without a rain on this tremendous ox, because we have brought consciousness and kindness to the corners of our being that are unconsciously animal like, and so I totally agree that that we need tools, and I call it technology, it’s like we are missing as a culture that are widespread orientation toward a technology of dismantling the bomb, B O M be the bomb of sort of the ticking, angry, hurt creature. And I feel like I have some of that technology. And I feel that this dark knight book, it’s a survival guide that I’m working on will hand that technology. I know I have one student who is a longtime Buddhist, who said she can’t wait till my book comes out because she was going to hand it to every Buddhist teacher, she knows because a lot of people are entering the dark and a lot of teachers haven’t. Either they haven’t had that experience, or they don’t know what to do with those people. And and there’s a lot, there’s a lot of pieces to it,
Rick Archer: that we can do another interview when your book comes out. And somebody should read a book like that on Kundalini too, because these people that I hear from, they’re out there, nobody knows what they’re going through. If they see a doctor, the doctor is just going to give them psychic psychotropic drugs or whatever they’re called, you know, which they totally great against the the nervous system in terms of what they actually need. So there really needs to be and there are some people, you know, like, Yeah, John shaver, pizza, Harrigan and Bonnie Greenwell and others who specialize in kundalini situations, but they’re, there almost seems to be like a clinic or that people could go to when they’re really in a state of emergency.
Jeannie Zandi: We need a number of clinics all over constantly in desire for these people. You know, we all when we go into the dark night, we’d like we long for some quiet place by the ocean where we’re sitting in our little wheelchair with our little flannel lap blanket, and someone’s just bringing us mush. And we’re just staring out at the, you know, someone’s handling everything because to to be a caterpillar who’s liquefying without a cocoon is tremendously, tremendously painful. And
Rick Archer: unfortunately, I think a lot of these people end up in psychiatric hospitals.
Jeannie Zandi: some do and some, you know, yeah, I mean, and it doesn’t take you know, people don’t actually have to leave their lives. This is the beauty of the wisdom of healthy young Is that healthy containment, a cocoon, an egg, a nest, a belly with a baby in it, that healthy containment allows transformation to happen inside it. And when people start to learn the lessons of containment within their lives, they can start to set up structures within which some of that transformation can happen. But when you don’t know the lessons of Jung or yen, the the transformational energy inside the structure and the structures that allow it then you’re just out there getting buffeted without, you know, like a poor little caterpillar liquefying as you’re trying to build your cocoon, and the world is taking it apart.
Rick Archer: Let’s take a brief break from dark night. Here’s a question. Yeah. Question from Maria in Boulder, not too far from where you are. Maria asks, you mentioned that you support people in reconnecting with the innocence of a child. So what would you say is the difference if there is one between the innocence of a child and the spontaneous wisdom of a sage?
Jeannie Zandi: Wow, what a great question. Not much.
Rick Archer: Like it tell you one thing, you know, Ken Wilber talks about the pre trans fallacy. Yeah, yeah. If heard of that. Yeah.
Jeannie Zandi: I’m not super super educated. And I, I would say, you know, I got to do this research up close, you know, because my child, you know, came out when I was being deconstructed and you know, her childlike innocence lacked this sort of know, how about things like traffic? You know, so a mature sense of childlike innocence includes levels of sophistication. And I’m not talking about condition things because I might have had some no As an adult, that she would have blown out of the water by her open freshness, that would have shown itself to be conditioned garbage. But there are certain things that it, it helps to, you know, it’s like if we all were children, and then we just grew up, there’s a, there’s something else that’s almost like, the way that in the way that the human embodiment gets tested and transmuted. In the process of maturing, that, you know, also, the innocence of a child often has a lot of narcissism, and there’s not necessarily a sense of the, of the whole of one’s part in the whole. Yeah, the sense of, of being sort of, grounded in having most like, had an egoic structure, and then moving through that, that that has sort of a deeper, wiser, a deep wine taste, to the innocence and awareness of, you know, of death of suffering that a child might not have. On the other hand, you know, walking up to dead things, my child was little, you know, we would walk up to a dead bird, and I would keep my conditioning as best as I could offer her, I wouldn’t say anything. And I would let her curiosity lead. And to see that she had, she didn’t have a fear of death. She didn’t have an idea about dead being bad, was just sort of another curious thing. And, and, in fact, one of the things she said when she was young was, oh, there’s lots of adventures ahead like death. Well, she
Rick Archer: said that, she
Jeannie Zandi: she said a lot of cool stuff. Yeah. Yeah. So that that’s more of a question. I wouldn’t mind just planting in me as a percolating seed. Because I think it’s a it’s a great, it’s a great question. But I also, I don’t, you know, Sofia also said something very interesting. She said that. The way you can tell an adult is not by how big they are. She said, Because there are some very big people who are children. She said, the way you tell them as adult is by how serious they are. And she was talking about this grim thing that settles on us in our conditioning. So we take everything Grimley. And so what I’ve noticed in being sort of, in a way, there’s an aspect of divine child about my embodiment, is that the goofiness and the silliness and the innocence, that we feel like we are supposed to outgrow is actually such a wellspring of healing for other beings. And I feel like humor and playfulness is really at the, at the heart of, of embodying this, this mysterious. I don’t even know what to say there. I have a word.
Rick Archer: Well, one thing that came to mind, as you were speaking was that, you know, there are all these, not only does our body grow as we move from infancy through childhood to adulthood, but there are all these different faculties that grow in and that you know, that can be developed to profound degree intellect, what is one heart is another, and, and if as long as those things aren’t, are kind of developed in a lopsided way in which they’re thought to be sort of the BL and Endo, as long as they’re kind of understood and experienced as components of the complete system. And everything is in balance. There’s a huge difference between a young baby or child and you know, fully blossomed, adult blossomed in this in a spiritual sense. Someone like Shankara, who had this incredible intellect and incredible heart and incredible depth of being. So you know, and someone like that, and we’ve, we’ve all been around, you know, saintly types, I’m sure and seeing their innocence and their child likeness, but they’re not simpletons. They’re not some, you know, they’re not simplistic.
Jeannie Zandi: Yes, I was just gonna say, I almost wanted to say and neither neither children, although everything that you just said, is absolutely accurate. And part of to me the joy of being an adult human being, who is open, is that there are so many colors in our palette to paint with. And part of what I, part of what I teach and hold space for is the exploration of Yin and the exploration of young the energies in us a fierceness of taking a stand. Because the heart is not all just mush. It’s also passionate. It’s a passionate sort of standing in the truth kind of thing. And, boy, is there such a joy and a capacity to be a servant of the truth. When your whole palette is firing to mix a metaphor there. Yeah. Engines and paint boxes now together were thrown around a lot
Rick Archer: of metaphors today. Well, they discovered a week ago that YouTube automatically will transcribe any interview under two hours. So this has an incentive to keep them under two hours. And it’s quite accurate actually. And we want we hope to use those transcripts to make this available and a number of other languages because Google uses artificial intelligence to translate into about 10 different languages. And this is a good plug for my translation and transcription team. If anyone would like to join it to get in touch. There’s a page on the website about it. But I’m saying that as sort of a prelude to, you know,
Jeannie Zandi: yeah, we need to stop.
Rick Archer: Yeah, but not immediately. And there’s, there’s one thing that maybe we could talk, I started out this interview reading your question from somebody who was asking about the holy, and maybe we could just talk a little bit about God. And in the remaining minutes, not in the sort of conventional religious sense, but you know, what we what, in the sense that you and I would appreciate, and most of the people listening to this and want a question. Yeah, I mean, you know, for instance, from calling from your book, you know, here I’m quoting something that I will not mind. All I want is truth, or make me an instrument of your peace. You know, and
Jeannie Zandi: yeah, so I can say something.
Rick Archer: Yeah, go ahead. Here’s another truce phrase to prime your pump reliance on a sense of separated personhood to a joyful reliance on God. Yeah, something you said.
Jeannie Zandi: Yeah. So first off, man, is it hard to talk. And, you know, I feel like, you know, I used to sit in a sweat lodge quite a bit with a friend of mine. And I noticed that the prayers that were the most beautiful, were not the prayers where people were trying to be beautiful. They were the prayers where people knew they couldn’t speak, it was unspeakable, and yet they tried anyway. And so I want to say that I’m always in that mode of being deeply aware that what I know, in my direct experience can never be spoken. And yet it feels like a worship to attempted a beauty, a sacrament to attempt it. And I also feel a deep level of integrity and care, in answering things as an conceptually and born of the deep wisdom, energy aliveness of the moment, that the things that I say, are given to say instead of things that my mind would say, that are a degree removed from actuality, you know, and, and so the holy, that’s the word that I use, because I feel like it sneaks in the side door, a lot of people have a lot of conditioning around God, the word God, and I take that on with people and encourage them to look into that. And, you know, anywhere that we’re, I can’t go there. Because I have stuff is like, you know, let’s go there. Like, let’s go there, let’s see, is there so as long as we are identified, as a me well, this is really difficult to speak. There is, in fact, there’s a Sufi story about a fellow who experienced enlightenment, and then grieved because he’s so loved the language of duality. He’s so loved the love language of praising God. And I can remember lying in bed with my little daughter, and singing to her, used to sing our 15 songs every night 15 songs, just, and this voice, I’d be lying there in the dark, and this voice would come out of the darkness and sing, and I would watch it sing. And there was this, and we would say, I love you, I love you. And when I would say I love you, I knew to a degree that that how do I say this? That I love you was the way that the divine danced here, but that it wasn’t wholly true because there was a oneness. And yet there was this beautiful way that the Holy dance is in duality. I love you. The beautiful way that it it. You know, it’s like this is as far as I can tell. This is what we’re doing here with this beautiful dance of High, high, you know, and then in the high high, like, sometimes I do dyad exercises in my work. And there’s there’s a people experience as they speak at the beginning high, high high and then pretty soon there’s just this, this oneness, how can I even speak and yet the high, the high can actually speak the oneness, it can also speak in duality. And so there’s a sense for me of a simultaneity of instrument. And, you know, it’s, it’s so it’s like, almost like a membrane and visible membrane, or, you know, the picture underwater. You know, it’s like, it’s a picture, but it’s made of gossamer. You know, there’s just this little sense of a, of a geniusness of the genus, and this amazing worshipful, blissful, joyful, yes, SNESs about, you know, in that, you know, where’d the genie go? And yet, you know, this is the language like, and when we, when separation is, more what we’re living from, there can be a beautiful way that the heart can rise in appraising in a, a help, you know, I don’t know how help that more than glorify something outside, open something inside, you know, to a kind of an openness outside of this sort of little shell that we live in.
Jeannie Zandi: So, this question I almost just want to answer with, like, poem after poem after poem and, and, and no logic at all. You know what I’m saying? Because it’s, it’s mysterious, how, how form and formless form and formless are dancing all the time. And it’s not that we’re here to do away with perform as much as be. It’s like a play thing.
Rick Archer: Yeah, Shankara said, the intellect imagines devote imagines duality for the sake of devotion. And he was the founder of Advaita, really, and, you know, was also a great devotee of the Divine Mother. And I can’t actually think of a non dual authority, quote, unquote, such you know, like Nisargadatta, Rama Papaji, all of them were had tremendous hearts, and were great devotees and lovers of God and did all sorts of practices of worship and poojas love loud, John’s and all that stuff.
Jeannie Zandi: I mean, in Ravana, with his mountain, yeah, really. It’s like when people reduce spiritual truths to things like, I should be able to be open anywhere. So even though I have this deep longing to go to Tahiti, I’m gonna stay here. And, you know, it’s like, that’s Ramadan went to the mountain, he stayed, it stayed at the mountain, the mountain was his place, you know?
Rick Archer: Yeah, I think the reason is worth mentioning is that there’s a sweetness to that to the blossoming of the heart and to the whole quality of devotion, that it’s nice to know that that’s part of spiritual development, because otherwise, it can sometimes take on a kind of dry, well, character and in some ways that it’s presented.
Jeannie Zandi: And again, in our culture, and threaded through our approach to spirituality is a worship of young over the life giving aspect of Yin, both of them being the two dancing energies, as life energy comes into this plane. And we will tend in our culture until examined or kidnapped by experience, to vow to the Father energies over the mother energies and to see things like a tender heart, you know, a tender heart is such an aspect of awakening, a sensitive tenderness, such an aspect, but But we, we like to glorify the All Knowing and the, you know, the powerful and the truth. And that’s all, you know, heart without truth is just a sappy bog. But truth without heart. And, you know, it’s it’s, I don’t even know if that exists. It doesn’t exist.
Rick Archer: Yeah. At least not in its entirety or its totality. It’s half baked,
Jeannie Zandi: baked. And we all know what getting a half baked potato is like,
Rick Archer: I know. She can’t even eat it. They might melt butter, but you can’t eat it.
Jeannie Zandi: So how are we doing right time?
Rick Archer: I think we better wrap it up. Before we go over past the witching hour. Yes. It’s cool that Google does this now YouTube. So it’s been really great. Janie, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. I enjoy preparing for this. And I hope you know a lot of people get in touch with you. Jeannie Sandy calm is your website, right? It is. And it does this cool little thing I have to find out how you do that. But there’s a thing where you scroll down and all sudden the big genies and he kind of gets small on the menu moves over. And it’s really neat the way that’s that works.
Jeannie Zandi: I’m blissfully ignorant of the technology behind this site, having been in the software industry for 20 years, some
Rick Archer: JavaScript thing or something. Anyway, there’s a lot of good stuff on the website and some very nice articles that people might like to read. I enjoyed reading them. And when do you think your book will be finished?
Jeannie Zandi: I have an idea. It’s just so I have
Rick Archer: an outline predictable gestation was like babies,
Jeannie Zandi: it wants its wanted to be written since 2002. Because every single day, since 2002, someone has needed this book. And I can’t wait to have it and be able to hand it to people. And it’s, you know, very, very busy schedule. So I work on it when I can and I hear I may have a little bit of help assembling the information. We’ll see if that pans out. And that that will be a big, big help.
Rick Archer: I’m sure it’ll be good. So good luck with that. already. So do you do any kind of one on one Skype things? Or you mainly just do groups here and there?
Jeannie Zandi: Yeah, I don’t do one on ones except. So I I do online stuff. I do retreats, I speak here and there. I don’t do any one on one stuff except for with pretty senior students who are in leadership sorts of positions. And although there’s a, you know, in my online things, people have a good amount of access to me. Yeah. And so, yeah, and I have a couple retreats in the summer coming up in Santa Cruz and Breitenbush hot springs, which is a favorite. And yeah, if people want to get a little flavor of me, open circle will have me open circle center.org will have me on June 11 In the morning, 10am pacific time if people want to get a flavor of my more space holding aspect rather than my interview aspect. Okay.
Rick Archer: And that’s we’re talking 2017 For those who may be watching later, but if they go to website genies any.com they can find out what whatever you’re up to whenever they watch this.
Jeannie Zandi: Yes, indeed.
Rick Archer: Yeah.
Rick Archer: So let me make a couple of general wrap up points. I’ve been speaking with Jeannie Zandi. This is an ongoing series of interviews. If you’ve enjoyed it and want to check out others go to bat gap, comm bat gap, and explore the menus. You can also there’s an upcoming interviews menu where you can see what’s scheduled going, you know, in the future. And as I said, In the beginning, this whole thing kind of depends upon support from people who appreciate it. So if you feel like contributing in some way, there’s a PayPal button on the site. And you can sign up to be notified by email of new interviews when they’re released. You can also you know, sign up for the audio podcast on iTunes or Stitcher, one of those platforms. Also, if you happen to be watching this on YouTube, I would appreciate it if you actually subscribe to the channel, because the more subscribers you have on a YouTube channel, the more YouTube kind of like pays attention to you and you can talk to people on the phone and they help you with things. And also, I’d like to, I’m only at about 28,000 subscribers, but if I reach the 100,000 mark, it’s like becoming an Eagle Scout or something in terms of your status with YouTube. So something to strive for. So thanks, JD I really appreciated it and thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching and we’ll see you next time.
Jeannie Zandi: Thank you, Rick. Thank you, people.
