Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest today is Jerry Freeman. Jerry is an old friend of mine from TM movement days. I’ll read his little bio here.
He’s been practicing Transcendental Meditation, then the advanced techniques of TM, called the TM-Sidhis Program. Beginning shortly before turning 19 over 40 years ago, he was trained by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi as a teacher of TM the following years, lived for some years in a semi-monastic program Maharishi founded, which is where I knew him from and has continued to study Maharishi’s teachings to this day.
He writes about Maharishi’s insights into the development of higher states of consciousness as they relate to today’s discussion of Advaita Vedanta awakening, Self-Realization, and enlightenment. He is presently working on a book on this subject, tentatively titled, The Enlightenment Puzzle: What Everyone Should Know About Awakening. In the book, his introduction states, “What I have to say here is not my own invention. What I will say here is not an official presentation of Maharishi’s teaching, as it includes numerous observations and conclusions that are my own. However, the great insights about awakening human consciousness, enlightenment, etc., are not mine. They’re Maharishi’s.”
Jerry supports a family of adopted children, working as a musical instrument maker. He makes penny whistles. His penny whistles are recommended by many Irish music instructors for their students, as they’re affordable and very high quality. They are played in performance and recordings by many of the most renowned performers of Irish music.
So that’s an intro to Jerry. Welcome, Jerry. Hi.
Jerry: It’s nice to see you.
Rick: Yeah. Good to see you in such a beautiful backdrop.
Jerry: Yeah, you can just almost see mount Arunachala over the off to the side there.
Rick: Jerry’s in Coventry, Connecticut. And I grew up in Connecticut myself, southern Connecticut. Yeah.
Jerry: In fact, you instructed the mother of my significant other in TM. She lived to be 93 and she meditated twice a day, every day of her life since the day you taught her TM.
Rick: Cool. Yeah. chip off the old block. Because I’ve done the same since. Yeah.
Rick: All right. So we’re gonna start, as we often do in these interviews by just sketching out your personal story, you know, particularly with regard to spirituality and development of consciousness and all. And I believe you’d like to actually start back in your childhood days.
Jerry: Yeah, not anything really unusual to say about that. Probably quite typical of the people that you interview. I can’t report any special experiences when I was a child. I grew up in a conventionally religious, Christian household. Starting from a pretty young age, I just kind of looked at that and never got an emotional connection. I never felt like I knew Jesus or got religion or any of the things that people around me seemed to be experiencing and felt really strongly about.
I was kind of just wondering, what is this? It doesn’t quite make sense to me. I saw these people experiencing something. I tended to be rather skeptical, even cynical, probably from about the age of three. I was really looking behind the scenes to try to figure out, well, this doesn’t quite work for me. There must be something deeper, or at least something more suitable to me than what I was surrounded by.
Around the age of 15, I was really quite disillusioned. This was during the Vietnam War, and there was a lot of generational conflict and so forth. As an assignment for our high school class, we read W. Somerset Maugham’s book, The Razor’s Edge. For those who might not be familiar, it’s a story of a young man who fought in World War One, had a spiritual crisis as a result, renounced worldly things, and went looking for greater truth. He went to India and essentially became enlightened. Maugham did a beautiful job of mapping those issues and how the Eastern approach towards enlightenment addresses them, at least in a way that could be absorbed by popular culture at the time.
Reading that book really crystallized things for me. I just knew, having read that book, “Yes, yes, that is it. That’s what I want. That’s where I’m going. That’s what my life is about.” But I had no idea what to do next.
I’ll make a comment here, which is more than an interesting sidelight. There’s a guru in The Razor’s Edge that the young man meets and has his breakthrough of connecting with something deeper. The inspiration for that character, and really the inspiration for the entire book, was a visit by W. Somerset Maugham to Ramana Maharshi in 1928. Maugham was so struck by the depth and power of Ramana Maharshi’s silence and wisdom that he wrote that book, which is considered one of his two great masterpieces.
I only found this out not terribly long ago, just in the last several years. I was struck by the fact that it really reflects the greatness of Ramana Maharshi, that he could have that influence on someone who saw him only for a couple of days. Maugham put into writing his impressions from that visit, and it changed the direction of my entire life. So, many steps away from Ramana Maharshi, he was able to have that effect on the direction of a life.
Rick: He definitely sent out some ripples.
Jerry: Hmm, yeah. So there’s that. But I didn’t know what to do. I knew where I needed to go, but I couldn’t find a path to walk on. Then, of course, one of the major events of our generation happened: the Beatles came to Transcendental Meditation and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. At that point, there was no resistance at all. It was clear that this was what I wanted. I decided, “I’m going to learn Transcendental Meditation.”
But at that time, maybe I was 16 or so, there was no teacher of TM anywhere near me. I didn’t know how to learn TM. At the same time, a drug culture was flourishing. I was a high school student and then a recent high school graduate. People around me were talking about very mystical things, experiences of going beyond, and some transcendental fields opening up that they’d had. I watched them do that and saw that some of them were getting really badly strung out. They were still pushing it, trying to have the big trip, thinking that would be it, and they’d be there.
I looked at that and came up with a set of criteria that were quite specific. I concluded, as a 16 or 17-year-old, that there must be a capacity in the human nervous system to maintain an awakened state of consciousness. These drugs that seemed to be triggering something like that were doing something artificial. Because it’s artificial, it’s doing violence to the nervous system. So, if I wanted to be enlightened, to awaken and live in that state of awakened-ness, I couldn’t use drugs because I would burn up the house that has to contain that awakening.
Then, another part of it was that I knew there were books and practices that talked about what you need to do. They seemed quite arduous to me. I thought, number one, this has to be a natural state, as I imagined it, if this works. Number two, I’m really lazy. As a teenager, I knew that if it was going to make me work too hard, I wouldn’t be suited to it. I wasn’t the right person for this, but I knew that I wanted the result.
There was someone I encountered when I was maybe 17. He commented something about meditation and Transcendental Meditation, and he was doing TM. I asked, “Oh, do you? Can you tell me how to do it?” He said, “Yeah. What you do is you lie down, tense up all of your muscles, and then relax your muscles, starting at the tips of your toes very gradually, one muscle at a time, until you’re completely relaxed. That’s Transcendental Meditation.” I thought, “phooey.” I thought something a little more forceful and forgot about it completely. I decided, “Oh, it doesn’t exist. That isn’t going to work. That’s not something that I can make work.”
Rick: They call that progressive relaxation. It was kind of popular in those days.
Jerry: Yeah, I found that out later. But it was too much work for me. So then I went to college at Indiana University. Not very long after that, I was out of my dorm room and came back fairly late. I was tired and mad about something. I don’t recall what it was, but something hadn’t worked out the way I had hoped. I came back to my room, just wanting to go to bed. My roommate had someone in the room who was sitting on my bed. He was a really sweet, well-spoken, gentle person. At first, I was just tuning him out, thinking, “When is this guy going to get off my bed?”
He was talking about Transcendental Meditation ™. He explained that the nature of the mind is to naturally go to whatever is the most satisfying. TM uses a mantra, a sound, in a way that allows the mind to effortlessly disengage from its outer focus. The mind then naturally settles down. The more settled it becomes, the more pleasing and satisfying the experience becomes, until eventually it transcends completely and you experience pure consciousness. I thought, “Yeah, that’s it. That’s what I want.”
He had been meditating for four months, and I thought that was really awesome. I believed he must truly be enlightened. By the way, the day before yesterday marked 42 years since I learned TM. I learned on October 17, 1971. TM was definitely the right technique for me, no question about that.
As soon as I could, as you’ve already read from that little bio, I went to see Maharishi. He was in California every summer at that time. I spent a month with Maharishi in a fairly large group. It’s not like I sat right at his elbow, but it was quite profound. That was also a preliminary course required to go to teacher training. So, I went to TM teacher training.
Rick: So before you go into that, was there anything particularly noteworthy Do you want to mention in passing here about anything you’ve experienced, or you want to just kind of carry on, and we’ll, we’ll get into that stuff later.
Jerry: I found that it really matched what Maharishi was talking about. It wasn’t very long after I started meditating that I began to find that transcendental consciousness you dip into during meditation became more and more familiar. All the way along, I felt that Maharishi was describing very well how this practice works and what most people can realistically expect to happen if they’re regular in the practice.
Rick: Yeah, as you know, I interviewed a couple of Ramana Maharshi experts recently, Michael James and David Godman. Michael James had an interesting definition of atma vichara or self-inquiry, which was Ramana’s main teaching. He said the best interpretation or translation of vichara is investigation, rather than inquiry, which implies a kind of experiential progression.
David Godman gave this analogy: if you want to tame a bull and keep it in the barn, don’t beat it or force it. Just give it some fresh grass and the bull will follow you into the barn. We touched upon the notion of the traditionally described blissful nature of the self, Ananda. This can be used to our advantage if we go about it properly, allowing the mind to effortlessly fall into that state. As the mind encounters greater charm moving in that direction, it doesn’t have to be coerced in any way.
Jerry: I feel that in popular awakening, Advaita, or self-realization culture, the mind tends to be treated as an adversary. I think that’s problematic and reflects the need for the most suitable technique for each individual. That may not always be the same technique. If a technique requires straining, is uncomfortable, difficult, or doesn’t bring that contact with the most silent level, I suggest people take a look at TM in particular.
There’s a traditional description that the mind is a monkey, bounding here and there. Somehow, we have to tame this monkey mind. But if you really know about monkeys, there’s a logic to what a monkey does. A monkey goes bounding around, looking for something more interesting. To tame a monkey, you just give it something really sweet, and the monkey will go there.
This aspect of the nature of the mind reflects a misunderstanding that has permeated our efforts to reach deep silence. I watched both of those interviews and thought they were wonderful. David Godman talked about not getting to that silence by struggling with or fighting the mind. There’s a very often quoted saying that the self reveals itself to itself, by itself, alone. It’s the attractive power of bliss consciousness that, in any successful practice, brings that result. Regardless of whether the practice involves focusing or watching, it’s always the natural tendency of the mind to go to that most satisfying bliss consciousness. It’s going to bring it there.
Rick: In a way, you can’t blame these teachers who criticize practices and say that they’re only going to reinforce the notion of the practice itself. If they’re referring to some sort of practice that involves effort, then indeed, it’s like trying to calm choppy water by pushing down the waves; you’re only going to create more waves. They’re absolutely right in that critique.
However, not all practices involve doing that. Therefore, not all of them reinforce the sense of a “me.” Some practices allow those rigid boundaries to dissolve and disappear, leaving the unbounded self in its pure state.
Jerry: it’s important not to generalize about practices, because they’re not all the same. And one person may be particularly well suited to one practice, and another person may be particularly well suited to another practice. You know, I can just tell you that I was I was just perfectly well suited to the practice that Maharishi taught, and I’m grateful for that.
Rick: Yeah. And ironically, some people, they’ll do a practice with great ardor, and diligence for quite some time, like Adyashanti, I’m thinking of. You know, he was going as much as anybody could be, really working hard at his meditation, but it involved effort. And finally, his breakthrough came when he just kind of gave up. And it was a slingshot effect, you know. So you know, maybe that’s one way of going about it, you do something which involves struggling with pain. And when you finally get tired of it, you give up and something profound happens.
Jerry Freeman :
It’s almost like the description of what happens is kind of a reverse metaphor. But the way to get out of quicksand is if you struggle against the quicksand, you’ll end up mired in the quicksand. The way to get out of quicksand, is to relax, and just settle down and be very still and very slowly, because it’s quicksand, it isn’t water, just swim very gently, and you’ll find that you don’t sink into the quicksand. :
Rick: Interesting.
Jerry Freeman :
So, you know, that’s if you’re struggling against the mind, then you’re mired in the quicksand.:
Rick: It’s also the way to escape a riptide. You know, you don’t try you don’t try to swim against the riptide. You’ll drown. Just relax, and you’ll eventually get drifted off to the side. And then the riptide, you’ll no longer be in its current.
Jerry: Well, this is this is very useful. I’ll have to keep it. Yeah, you probably saved my life.
Rick: Okay, so that’s good. So you went off to teacher training?
Jerry: I taught TM full-time for a few years. I’m terrible at remembering exactly when something started and stopped, and what year it was, so I can’t help you with that. But in any case, I loved it. It was wonderful to see people from all different backgrounds and situations meditate for the first time. It was a common experience. I remember one person meditated, opened her eyes, and said, “I feel so relaxed. Like I never feel.” Someone else said, “It’s like warm water on parched earth.”
This might be a good time to give you a little quote. Where did I put that? There it is. This is from a friend of ours who is actually a spiritual teacher himself, and he learned…
Rick: Who I actually interviewed a few years ago, but we don’t have his permission. So I won’t mention his name, but you go ahead with a quote.
Jerry: Alright. So anyway, actually, we do have permission. It’s Sage Mohasada. In your interview, he’s Raven Mohasada. He said, “I’ve been meditating for more than 25 years. The meditation I had during the private instruction period, during the very first session of the introductory TM class, was the best meditation sitting I have had in my entire life. That kind of experience left a strong impression and points to something quite profound. A whole new level of something was opened up to me during that time.”
It brings tears to my eyes just reading that. He’s such a sweet soul. I was so thrilled to get that report from him.
Also, the local teachers here at the Hartford TM center, from time to time, every few months, have someone come to them, probably about our age or maybe younger, who has been practicing different techniques, often quite arduously, for years and years. They learn TM and say something like, “This is a very sophisticated technique. This is a very good meditation. I had no idea. I just thought, TM, TM, TM.” It’s out there, you know, “stress release, stress release.” But experienced meditators who have been practicing various kinds of meditation often report that they’re really very pleased with TM.
Rick: Yeah. So, incidentally, I just want to mention that this interview isn’t going to be one big commercial for TM. Obviously, Jerry and I have both benefited from it a lot. But we’re both very open-minded about the value of other teachings and the legitimacy of whatever path might suit someone, as Jerry was saying a little while ago.
Jerry: That was the commercial break. Yeah. Get back to it. Sure.
Rick: Yeah. But I just wanted to say in response to what you just said, that the ease and simplicity of it has been a point of criticism for many people. Many have thought, well, something so easy can’t really be heavy duty. In fact, I thought that myself when I first learned it. Even though I was profoundly benefiting from it, I thought, okay, this is great, but I need to get on to the real stuff because I want to get enlightened. So, I was looking into joining Zen monasteries and stuff. I thought, this can’t really be the ultimate teaching because it’s so darn simple. But I eventually changed my thinking on that.
Just because it’s simple and effortless doesn’t mean that it’s lightweight or for kids.
Jerry: Well, one, one thing about it is, anywhere you go, a really good teacher is going to say there’s nothing to do, right? You know, you cannot reveal your, you cannot, by your own efforts. Awaken Your yourself. And, okay,
Rick: Which makes it sound like you’re saying don’t do anything. But that’s there’s a subtlety to it. That’s not quite what’s the technique of Transcendental Meditation.
Jerry: You know, effortlessness sounds very nice. But the fact of it is, it is a technique that profoundly involves not doing, right? It allows the self to reveal itself. And that’s …
Rick: Now one might ask, “Okay, but yeah, you’re thinking a mantra, isn’t that doing?”
Jerry: Well, that’s, that’s the technique. And that’s why you have to, you have to go through the steps of instruction to learn how you make use of that to allow the mind effortlessly to settle down into that, you know, more blissful silence.
Rick: So, yeah, okay.
Jerry: So then I taught for a few years and learned the TM-Sidhis Program. During the time I took off to raise some money to go to an advanced course with Maharishi, I began my career as a woodworker and carpenter. I spent a couple of years learning that, and there was this really important project. People were being called to build this dome in Iowa. The call went out, so I came to Fairfield (I’ve been there numerous times) for that project, which is the Maharishi Patanjali Golden Dome of Pure Knowledge, a rather famous structure by now.
It was discovered that I could build things. I’m more comfortable working with my hands and making things than I am giving lectures and setting up events. Together with Max Sutherland and Jeff Murphy, we were in charge of the design and structural construction of the wall all the way around. We had to figure out how to make the arches for the 135 windows. Max, a boat builder, knew how to make wood go in nonlinear shapes, so he mastered that.
I caught the attention of the people organizing various projects and was invited to Washington DC for some renovation work. The purpose of building this dome and the renovation work in Washington DC was to provide a setting where large numbers of people could meditate and practice the TM-Sidhis Program to create coherence in collective consciousness and try to reverse some of the negative trends in the world.
There’s now quite a bit of good published research, about 50 or so studies in well-respected journals like the Journal of Conflict Resolution, sociology journals, and psychology journals, showing that there actually is an effect. You can bring large groups of people together in conflict areas and have them meditate. There’s a saying, I don’t know the Sanskrit, but it goes something like, “In the vicinity of satva, enmity ceases.” You can actually see that work. When a large group is together for a few weeks or a month or two, you begin to see changes in the proximity of that group, whether there’s conflict or violent crime.
Rick: The underlying principle is not just that people are smiling at each other and the ripple effect is going out. It’s that consciousness is a fundamental field, really the most fundamental field in creation. By having a group of people experience and enliven that within themselves, they enliven that field for the entire vicinity. It’s like if the ground in a forest were made more fertile, all the plants would begin to benefit and grow more heartily.
The idea is that criminals, for some reason, are a little bit less inclined to commit criminal acts if the field within which they reside has been enlivened a bit.
Jerry: Right. And that’s the field where everything is connected. Ultimately, there’s only one. In physics, that would be called the unified field that gives rise to all the specific fields of matter and energy. In subjective terms, there’s only one consciousness, which can be called Brahman or transcendental consciousness. When that’s enlivened in one person, it connects to every other conscious person. Even if that other person is in a very dark state of consciousness, not very awake, the connection will reverberate, resonate, and help them wake up.
We mentioned Ramana Maharshi and many other examples. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was another. When you’re around them, their influence is not simply by the words they say or the mood they create in the room. It’s like walking into something almost liquid, with a silence that has an intensity to it. You know there’s something at a very deep, universal level that is intensely alive. It connects you at a deep level inside yourself. It’s not a connection through the mind and senses; it connects you to your own basic fundamental consciousness.
Rick: Yeah, it completely reorients you. David Godman, of course, was telling stories about Papaji, Nisargadatta, and Ramana. The main thing was being in their presence. It wasn’t so much what they were saying, but the influence of being in their presence that really transformed you. Ramana himself said his main teaching was silence. He didn’t just mean not talking; he meant that kind of deafening silence experienced in the presence of someone who is so profoundly established.
Jerry: Yeah, it’s very real, very real. So, back to the sequence. I worked for some years doing these renovation projects. During that time, Maharishi developed this semi-monastic program, the Thousand-Headed Purusha Program, which you and I both participated in for a number of years. I can’t tell you exactly when I joined that group because we were just absorbed into it. We were simply told, “Okay, you’re in the Purusha program now.” I don’t know when that was, just somewhere along the way, and I was there for some years.
The thing about that program was the intensive practice for some hours every day. And also…
Rick: Like, sometimes six, eight hours a day or something.
Jerry: Yeah. And we were also just completely immersed in Maharishi’s teaching. At times he was with us. When he wasn’t with us, whatever discourses he had done were on audio tape and videotape. This is being organized now, and it might take another decade or so before it all gets completely organized and indexed. But there’s a tremendous trove of material there. We would have the videotapes as they were coming out. So, every night for some number of hours after whatever work we were doing or whatever practice we had done, we would just be immersed in that.
I feel as though that was the period when I was able to connect the things that Maharishi was saying and the ways he was talking about things that sounded quite abstract and maybe technical. He talked about Vedic literature, how the Vedic syllables emerge from the primordial base of the universe. These were very abstract-sounding things. But I began to realize that Maharishi spoke in a way that could be meaningful on numerous levels simultaneously.
At some point, I decided, well, he’s been talking about this stuff and talking about it. I’ve been thinking, well, he’s just got this fascination with this VEDA thing and goes on and on about it. Then I thought, well, he’s making me sit here and listen to this. I think it’s conceivable that he’s actually trying to tell me something. That was a kind of breakthrough. I started to think, okay, he’s saying this, how does that relate to me? How does that relate to my experience? How does that relate to my life? In that context, a lot of what Maharishi was talking about came to life and set the tone that has been the focus of the rest of my life.
One thing that I think is significant is people have a tendency to think of experiences of consciousness or awakening as something that you meditate on, do your practice, and then look at what that was like and what happened there. That’s your experience, and then you just go about your day. But it’s all experience, and the principle is… this might be especially meaningful to the TM community because we have a tendency to just do our program and then go out and forget about the program. But it’s all interconnected. The things that Maharishi said about consciousness and how higher states of consciousness unfold and how consciousness interacts with consciousness – that’s happening all the time, 24/7.
So that really set the way I go about living my life and approaching anything that happens. I left Purusha around 1993. I had a health breakdown and needed to deal with that, so I had to leave Purusha. I was devastated because my complete identity was tied to being a Vedic monk. The only way I could have left Purusha was if something had forced me to go. It took me a while to readjust and find my identity in a more universal way.
What I found was that I had received a pretty complete package of practices, understanding, and reference from Maharishi’s teaching. It was enough. You could say it would be better if I didn’t have to leave, but that’s just the way it was. There’s a way where everything is as it should be. Even though it was traumatic for me to make that transition, I found that I had the whole world. I was no longer in this somewhat closed environment. Lo and behold, everything that Maharishi had talked about reverberated and resonated through everything I encountered. It’s been a wonderful process and journey, which never ends. It just gets more wonderful.
Rick: Cool. Now, I know there’s a delicate balance between talking about your own experience and discussing the principles of knowledge that pertain to your experience. Many teachers and spiritual people, like the Dalai Lama, won’t say they’re in a particular state of consciousness because there’s a certain humility. It’s built into the Buddhist tradition that you don’t make proclamations.
So we’ll proceed, and I think your words can speak for themselves. If they convey some experiential authority as opposed to just philosophical familiarity with the topics we’re discussing, then people can pick it up that way. If they think you’re just a philosophically astute person and want to leave it at that, then that’s okay too.
Jerry: Sure. And some people think I’m not such a philosophically astute guy.
Rick: So, in the notes that you sent me about what we might talk about, the next thing you mentioned were seven major states of consciousness and the confusion about states which is what’s led to the idea that experiences of higher states of consciousness are inevitably transient. And, you know, as, as we’ll discuss, Maharishi outlined seven major states of consciousness, I don’t know if that’s the only valid road map, I’m sure there are other ways of breaking it down.
Jerry: I agree with that. There are other dimensions that you can also map. And I’ve seen some of your people that you’ve interviewed, do that just beautifully. And it really kind of fills in a picture of, you know, quite a wonderfully complex humanity as it goes through this expansion of all of the potentials on all of the dimensions that are there.
Rick: Yeah. And there’s no end to the degree of detail one can investigate. If somebody asks you how to get from New York to LA or New York to San Francisco, you can say, “Take I-80.” That’s the short version of the explanation. But the details can be expanded to never-ending degrees if you want to map out the trip in precise detail.
The whole thing about states of consciousness, like Maharishi’s seven states analogy or seven state structures, is a bit of a “take I-80” explanation. He went into some detail, but people who have experientially traversed that map say, “There’s a lot more richness and detail than I first anticipated.”
Jerry: Exactly. And I think that’s such an important point. It’s about pointers. Inevitably, the description of a reality is always going to be different from the reality. It’s really important not to attach yourself to the expectation you’ve developed, no matter how familiar you are with the description and how clearly you understand it intellectually. The actual reality is always different. It’s always bigger and often complex.
In situations where you thought something was going to be completely simple, you might have thought the whole world would dissolve into pure being. And guess what? It did. The whole world dissolved into pure being, and it’s still there, with all the diversity. You find out that on a granular level, there’s almost more diversity, more going on, and everything is completely simple.
When we talk about the development of these states of consciousness as Maharishi delineated them, there’s a tendency to pin a very simplistic expectation that causes some confusion. People might not know where they are because they think, “Oh, well, this is going to have to be exactly like this.”
The descriptions in Vedic literature, Buddhist literature, and almost universally tend to be cut and dried. For example, in Buddhism, an awakened person might have a certain name, and I don’t know that tradition well enough to recall the names. That person might be born again once and then be enlightened. Another category might be enlightened in this lifetime but only at a middling level and not qualified to teach. Another might be at a higher level and qualified to teach.
But the gradations aren’t like walking through a door into a different place. It’s more of a sliding scale. As these states of consciousness unfold, they may blend into one another and come along gradually. It isn’t always clear when a certain threshold is crossed. So, it’s important not to pin too tightly to those very precise descriptions and expectations.
Rick: Yeah. A couple of comments here. One is something you said a minute ago, which is that when the actual experience dawns, it may not resemble your expectations. You might not even realize it has dawned. I’m thinking of Suzanne Siegel’s book Collision with the Infinite. She had been a TM teacher and had all that knowledge, but then drifted away from it. At a certain point, she was getting on a bus in Paris and suddenly had a profound awakening into what we would call cosmic consciousness. It totally freaked her out because there was this loss of a personal self. She tried for 10 years to locate a personal self and had no idea what was happening to her. She thought she was crazy. The whole thing had actually been explained to her in detail some years prior, but she had formed a conception of it that didn’t match the reality. It caused her a lot of disturbance.
Jerry: Let’s, let’s go through the actual, how this unfolds. Okay. The first thing I’ll say here, we have a good understanding of the development that happens in a human being.
Rick: Who’s we?
Jerry: Civilization. We have embryology, which is a highly developed science. We know how every cell differentiates, which groups of cells will become specific organs, and how the brain begins to develop at certain stages of gestation. We’ve got that map down.
We also have developmental psychology, where we know, to a good degree, at what stage an infant begins to recognize it can control things in its environment. That’s when they start throwing things and watching where they land. There’s a development through the stages of childhood and adolescence. Moral reasoning begins to develop at a certain stage, and that’s known. It’s a good map, and it’s deepening all the time. We have a good sense of that unfoldment.
What we don’t have, as a culture or body of knowledge, is a good systematic understanding of further unfoldment. I’m absolutely certain it’s just as natural as the development of the embryo and the stages of childhood development. In the future, perhaps in some decades, I hope this will begin to be mapped in a similar way and become standard.
Rick: Seems like some cultures had mapped it, you know, maybe certain ancient cultures, but it’s such a different language. And, you know, the culture was so different that it hasn’t, we haven’t been able to translate it into our current culture and language. You know, we read these Vedic texts, and all, it’s just sort of needs to be a new seeds yield a new crop?
Jerry: Well, the other thing about it is that these states of consciousness are uncommon. And it doesn’t mean that they’re abnormal, or unnatural. You could almost think of it as a as a kind of arrested development. But if we think in terms of lifetimes, then it seems more natural, that this development just takes longer, and it may take more than a lifetime. And you may not see it, if you just look at the average of humanity.
Rick: And if they were common, I mean, if 90% of the people in the world were in some stage of awakening or enlightenment, then it’d be like, yeah, what’s the big deal? We understand this and our psychologists and so on would have it all very nicely mapped out.
Jerry: Yeah. So just to make this simple, I’m going to pin this to some background that may be familiar to people with a background in Vedic, yoga, or Vedanta traditions, because that’s what I’m familiar with. Very simply, we can number them.
The first state of consciousness is deep sleep. The nature of deep sleep is that the senses are asleep, the mind is asleep, and the body is basically inert. You can find that in the Upanishads called “swapna.” Not much to say about it.
The second state of consciousness is dreaming, called “Shushupti” or “Taijasa” in Sanskrit. In the dreaming state of consciousness, the mind is awake, but the senses are asleep. There’s a lot of experience, but that experience is only happening internally, in the mind. You say, “asleep to the world,” meaning the outer world is not accessible to that state of consciousness.
The third state of consciousness is the waking state, called “Jagrat” or “Vishva.” Vishva means “world.” It’s interesting that it’s quite a common saying, “He was asleep to the world.” In Sanskrit, being awake is called being awake “to the world.”
So those are the three common states of consciousness or relative states of consciousness everyone experiences. The significant thing about a state of consciousness is that, as a general principle, they’re mutually exclusive. There can be some drifting in between, but generally speaking, if you’re in the dreaming state of consciousness, you’re dreaming. You can’t wake yourself up from a dream by dreaming that you woke up. All that will happen if you dream you woke up is that you might find yourself in a dream room that you woke up in.
Rick: I’ve done that, like, dreamt that I got up and brush my teeth and did all my bathroom stuff. And then I realized, oh, wait a minute, I’m still sleeping.
Jerry: Exactly, exactly. These states of consciousness, each one is really complete and self-sufficient. You can’t simply decide to go from one state of consciousness to another. You may have a way that helps you fall asleep every time, but it’s not by patiently sitting there and thinking “Sleep,” and then you’re asleep. That’s important to understand.
Then there’s the fourth state of consciousness, which is also described in the Upanishads: transcendental pure consciousness. That is just silence.
Rick: Turiya, right?
Jerry: Turiya, sometimes called Samadhi or Nirvikalpa Samadhi, means Samadhi without sensation. In this state, the mind and senses are completely silent, but consciousness is fully awake. This state of transcendental consciousness has the quality of bliss consciousness. The goal of a meditation practice is to develop the ability to dip into that Samadhi and cultivate the nervous system’s capacity to sustain it.
In the Upanishads, there’s something called Turiyatita, which literally means beyond the fourth. This is a general expression, and we can discuss what is beyond the fourth. We’ll discover several stages beyond the fourth, referenced in other parts of the Vedic literature. Gradually, with experience of that contact with the fourth state of consciousness, one can sustain that inner silence, that eternal, unbounded inner reality, while doing things, thinking thoughts, and being active. Eventually, this becomes stabilized and is a permanent state of consciousness.
Maharishi called this state “cosmic consciousness.” The words cosmic consciousness have been used in other ways by other teachers, so it can be a little confusing. In Sanskrit, it’s called “Sakshi,” which means witness. You can call it “witness consciousness.” Pure consciousness is now understood to be my Self, my real self, the sublime self, which is pure eternal consciousness. A transformation takes place where everything previously considered to be me is seen through and discovered to be just some phenomenal thing going on. My mind isn’t me; I thought that was me. My little ego that motors around and feels important about itself isn’t what I am. The whole psychology and individuality are now experienced in a permanent way as not being who I really am.
From that inner silence, the whole outer world is seen as transitory. The way one describes this may vary according to one’s background and the teaching one has come through. Some might say it all doesn’t exist, it’s all just illusion. The ego and mind are nothing, not real, just nothing moving within nothing. In traditions where this isn’t thought of as the Self, it might be seen as a great vastness that is my abode, with everything else being other than that and having an unreality about it.
Maharishi didn’t talk about the manifest in such a dismissive tone. He talked about 200%, where we take up residence in the true Self, called Atman. From there, the outer world continues, and we have 100% of the outer and 100% of the inner. There are different ways of talking about and approaching this, but it’s still the same thing: the awakening of the silent, infinite, eternal base within, with everything else that is outer seen as not that.
Subjectively, the personality gets pushed to the surface. I used to think I was this guy with certain characteristics of personality. But when I become what I really am, which is infinite, unbounded silence, eternal Atman, I see those things are kind of on the outside. I’m way deep in here, looking out at that which is out there. That’s a description of what we’re calling cosmic consciousness, the first permanent awakening. It’s rare and extremely uncommon if you look at the population of people. We encounter more people in that state because we can network and like-minded people coalesce. But even though it’s extremely rare, it’s still just one unfoldment, the first permanent awakening.
A very important thing about this is it is a major state of consciousness. The nature of a major state of consciousness is that it is complete and self-sufficient. It has its own perfect logical structure of how everything fits together. Cosmic consciousness is a big deal. If you’ve been overshadowed by the illusory world, living in a state of identification where whatever you’re involved with is what you are – a businessman, a teacher, a carpenter – and if you take those things away, you feel like your existence is threatened. You go from that to the state where you are eternal, absolute, unbounded, and untouched by all of this. That’s a very big deal.
There’s a temptation, if we don’t have this whole map, to think that’s the whole enchilada. Without knowing that it’s really just a good start, a way station, a base camp halfway up the mountain, people might teach with absolute certainty that they are awakened. The teachings often say – and these are valid things to teach – give up the separate self, there’s no me, there’s nobody there. This teaching is problematic because people might try to create that by erasing the mind, ego, and personality, trying to get rid of all of it without the direct awakening of pure awareness. This can strand people because they’ve done something to themselves psychologically that disconnects them from the only world they inhabit. For this witnessing, this “I am untouched by everything” awakening to be real, the Self has to awaken. You can’t construct that awakening by working on the elements that will eventually be transcended. You can only do it by transcending them.
Rick: And it’s very much an experiential thing. It’s not conceptual or intellectual. I just want to emphasize that because so many people go about it by listening to these teachers and reading these books, and dwelling on the concepts, and getting kind of a little bit hypnotized by those concepts. So familiar with that they get good at talking about them. They get good at expressing those concepts, and they get on the chat groups and start teaching, pontificating there.
Jerry: And it’s important to have these concepts, it’s important to sense and know, “Okay, there is this ahead of me and that’s something that I aspire to.” But it’s important not to become attached again to those pointers.
Rick: Yeah, that’s the old Zen, finger pointing at the moon analogy. Why don’t you touch a little bit of, you mentioned witnessing, why don’t you touch upon the notion of witnessing sleep as a sort of an acid test for this actually being an experiential reality and not just conceptual?
Jerry: So this Atman, this silent, eternal, infinite self that has awakened in cosmic consciousness, awakens permanently. We’ve talked about how pure consciousness is maintained during activity. Now, two states of consciousness are maintained simultaneously: pure consciousness and Vishva, the waking state, the world. But it is also maintained through dreaming, so you witness your dreams.
John Hagelin, when he talks about higher states of consciousness, mentions witnessing deep sleep. He’ll say something like, “Sleep becomes very pleasant, I highly recommend it.” What happens is that pure consciousness is never lost, even during dreaming, which is a clearer kind of experience. You wake up and think, “Oh, I was awake in my true self, and I was dreaming. Somehow the mind was doing the dreaming thing.”
Deep sleep becomes essentially the same as the Turiya state. Deep sleep becomes what Samadhi would have been before the capacity to maintain pure consciousness together with activity. That silence, which is beyond time and space, is there even during the deepest sleep. Different people experience that with varying amounts of clarity. Some people will say, “I knew I was there the whole time.” Others will say, “The way I know I was there is the continuity.” Because you don’t experience time in deep sleep, there is no sense of ever not being there. The thread of Self is completely unbroken, like the thread of a rosary that goes through the beads, completely continuous.
Rick: Anyway, so it’s a good acid test, because you can’t maintain a concept while you’re sleeping. And yeah, so if this realization is conceptual, it’s not really the realization and, and the sort of the criterion of having actually experientially awoken through his awareness is not going to be lost throughout that awakening.
Jerry: Awakening is exactly the right word for it. You awaken. When you awaken from dreaming, you don’t expect to wake up. You may start to have a little waking and going back to sleep, and that happens with this as well. You may have glimpses, and those glimpses may become more frequent and longer, where you go in and out of it. But you never know from minute to minute. You just wake up, look at the clock, and think, “Oh, it’s six o’clock, I guess I got to get up,” or, “Oh, it’s 4:30, I guess I’ll go back to sleep.” That’s what awakening is like. You cannot build an awakening in the mind by working with it intellectually and conceptually, trying to create a model of an awakening.
From there, you have the Self, which is eternal, absolute, and unchanging, and you have the world, which is material, objective, and not eternal or unchanging. A similar progression takes place as when one transcends thought and eventually reaches the Self. Initially, our perception of the world is on the surface of things. But because there’s now this connection with the deepest level within, it creates the capacity to see more deeply. As the perception of the outer world becomes deeper and more subtle, the same thing happens as we discussed earlier: the attention goes to more and more pleasing levels. Subtler is more pleasing, more unbounded, and closer to that pure level where everything is bliss.
Rick: But now we’re not talking about during meditation, we’re talking about during activity.
Jerry: And we’re not talking about inner. We’re talking about eyes open seeing the world and finer and finer and finer values of the world, of the objects of perception. And the heart opens up. And that’s a very powerful force. Now the heart, you know, the heart can overtake anything. So what have we got there? It’s got to be a crow. Can you hear?
Rick: Yep. Yep.
Jerry: So he’s giving his discourse.
Rick: The crow approves.
Jerry: Or disapproves. You begin to approach that same silence you found within yourself at the subtlest level of what you see outside. Every perception, every contact, every experience of anything in the material world, even the scolding of a black crow, becomes delightful.
As that develops, the characteristic of devotion opens up, manifesting in infinitely many different ways, reflecting each person’s own personality. It may come out as deep devotion in a religious sense, with the concept of God or a particular form of God that is precious to that individual. It may also be a more generalized devotion, where the heart goes out and is completely overtaken with devotion to the perfection and beauty of everything encountered.
Maharishi describes this as God consciousness. As God consciousness develops, it involves the psychology and the whole personality. It’s a territory where it’s not easy to find clear delineations or transition points from one thing to another. The experience of finer and finer values of perception of the outer world can start even before cosmic consciousness. That devotion may already be well developed in a person and simply deepens and comes to its fulfillment along the way. It’s more of a continuum that reaches its fulfillment in the awakening of what Maharishi called unity consciousness or Brahman consciousness.
Rick: Even though some people are very devotional by nature and have developed to a great extent, before self-realization, there’s a certain kind of impediment to the full blossoming of that devotion. If the Self hasn’t been realized, who is it that’s appreciating this thing? If I don’t know who I am, who is it that appreciates the tree, the flower, or the crow?
Devotion can really begin to take off after the Self has been realized because there’s a foundation for it
Jerry: And ultimately, what the devotion wants is, to be unified, to be one. And that unification can only happen on the ground of the fully awakened Self. Because as we talked, in the beginning, there’s only one consciousness and on that level, everything is connected.
So to be united with my Beloved, to be united with my God, that happens on the level of unbounded, pure consciousness which has to be awakened in order for all of that devotion to really come to its fulfillment. And here is a beautiful thing. It’s impossible. The world is the material world. And the senses are the material senses, and they can take our perception to the finer and finer and finer values, but they’re still the senses and the world is still the world.
It’s the heart that does this impossible thing of bridging across that impossible chasm and unites everything in the entire universe within the Self. It’s the heart that does that. So now we’re talking about the seventh major state of consciousness. And this, I would say, is the full awakening, with an asterisk. It never ends. It always will keep unfolding. But after this, the unfoldment is just going to be expansion and deepening integration, but that also never ends.
So the seventh major state of consciousness is the state of consciousness where at one time there was the Self and there was the non-Self, inner and outer; real, unreal; absolute, relative; eternal, temporal. But in unity consciousness, in Brahman consciousness, my Self is the Self of all. There’s only one Self. And in Sanskrit … and we see this I was going through from the Vedic perspective, we have the names in Sanskrit of these four states of consciousness.
Fifth state of consciousness is when Atma, is fully awake, Atma is that infinity, that infinite unbounded Self within and then we have one of the great sayings, one of the Mahavakyas, “Atman is Brahman.” Brahman is “the great.” It is the all inclusive, and one discovers that this Atman, which was once inner, is actually all-encompassing. And there’s nothing that is outside of the Self, everything is within myself, everything is myself, there is no other. And now I and, my Beloved, are truly one.
So that’s the seventh major state of consciousness. Some people will experience these sequentially. And they’ll be very clear, and someone can say, “Yeah, there was this period of time where I felt really completely uninvolved with everything. And I just, there was this great silence and everything just went along on the outside, and it just was like that. And then that changed into something else. And I started to have a different relationship with the world and things became more fascinating. And then that changed into something else. And I found that it was all me.” You know, you’ll have people describe like that.
Some people awaken all at once some people awaken right into Brahman consciousness. Some people awaken spontaneously, without any practice at all. They may go through some sort of a crisis that brings them out of the world and brings them to the inner Self. There may be no such thing. They may be just motoring along and poof, whoa, you know, “What happened?”
And there may be a gradation where it really isn’t quite clear anywhere along the way, because one thing just very gradually, I think you call that the oozing pattern. So it’s not as though this description is somehow going to just unmistakably describe, you know, point by point exactly how each person is going to experience this. But I feel completely that this is just an unfoldment of human development that’s in the DNA. You know, it may express itself a little differently in this person and a little differently in that person. But I do feel very strongly that this unfoldment is built into a human nervous system. It’s a fundamental part of human life.
Rick: You mentioned that some people might awaken just awaken to Brahman. Just like that, if they do, then is there a sort of a catch up period where certain developmental stages that ordinarily would proceed, awakening to Brahman have to be brought into line and so …
Jerry: There is anyway. So this also is different for different people. Let me let me define something here because I’m using the word Brahman. And in orthodox usage, there’s more than one way to use that word. So I want to be clear about this. Sometimes it’s used to refer to an underlying, all encompassing, universal reality that is sort of “out there.” And that’s not the sense that I’m using it that. We might be able to call that “Parabrahman.”
But Maharshi said … we also have this Mahavakya, “Brahman is the knower.” Very important. “Prajnanam Brahma,” “Brahman is the knower.” Maharishi said, there is no Brahman without a knower of Brahman. There is no Brahman without a human knower of Brahman. Brahman is a human being in Brahman consciousness. And there are several things that are important about that. One is Brahman is all encompassing. Brahman is that which accepts everything and rejects nothing, you know, and there’s a fairly well known, saying, “Brahman is the eater of everything,” “Brahman devours everything.” It does that. It devours everything, as the human knower of Brahman, such that all of the territory of a life is incorporated into that wholeness.
And in the process, this is kind of kind of an interesting thing, because the experience of Brahman consciousness is complete. That’s the nature of the state of consciousness and the nature of Brahman consciousness is it’s all inclusive, and it contains everything, everything is now within Brahman, and you can’t find an “out there,” you can’t find an outer anywhere. So what about things that still need to be worked out? You know, what about what you were saying is there is there some catching up that needs to be done. In general, everything is within the Self, but whatever needs to be done, whatever project there might be, you know, whether I have to work through my relationship with, you know, my parents or whether I have to develop some skills in the world or whatever those things are. Whatever sort of work there is to be done, that all happens within Brahman.
And there’s a paradox. Brahman is complete, Brahman is infinite. And Brahman as that infinity cannot be any different than that complete infinity. And Brahman is ever expanding. It’s completely paradoxical. And that’s the nature especially of that highest state of awakening that every paradox … the world doesn’t exist, and there it is, you know, every paradox you can think of just cheerfully, happily, with absolutely no problem whatsoever is there within Brahman. Paradoxes are no problem for Brahman.
Rick: Yeah, you’ve probably heard me say on some of these shows that I love the word paradox and I probably ought to get a t shirt made with the word paradox on it. Well, somebody sent me one this last week I should so thank you, whoever that was. I’ll wear it to the Science and Nonduality Conference.
Jerry: So this brings up the very important territory of Lesha Avidya
Rick: Yeah, and just before you, just to give a concrete illustration what you just said. Everything is included within Brahman and “Ouch, dammit! I just stubbed my toe.” And that happens with within the wholeness, within Brahman. But so that wholeness, that Brahman doesn’t negate relative experience and some, which can be, you know, quite difficult.
Jerry: Yeah, and I am everything and everything is within myself. And it’s a complete oneness. And I’ve got this attitude that I still have, that I just isn’t really very good. And I just need to work on myself because I still have that. And I’m everything.
You know, people come along and think, because they have a preconception that an awakened state is going to be this pure pristine perfection that they assume. “Okay, I’m awakened, I don’t have any more work to do. I’m done. I’m cooked.” So then you see people, you know, kind of getting themselves into predicaments, because, maybe there is something there that that has come along that they really should be working on.
Yeah, and the word Lesha Avidya is familiar to people that are familiar with Maharishi’s teaching, but it may be less familiar to others. The word Lesha Avidya means the faint remains of ignorance. Lesha is faint remains and Avidya is ignorance. Combine them and you have the word Lesha Avidya.
Well, Maharishi said there is no Brahman without Lesha Avidya. He said it’s a cruel thing to say that Lesha Avidya is the basis of Brahman consciousness. But you can’t, now I’m not quoting Maharshi, you can’t be Brahman, which is the totality lived by a human being, you can’t be Brahman, unless you still retain enough illusion, to continue to imagine that you’re a separate human being, you can’t be Brahman, without that faint remains.
So, you know, somehow, the universe, the unbounded infinite consciousness manages to see through these eyes and type with these fingers on this keyboard. And that’s possible through the agency of Lesha Avidya.
Rick: Right, because if you really wanted to boil it down to the ultimate reality, there are no eyes, there is no keyboard, you know, just all melt into this homogenous wholeness with no differentiation, no distinction, but if that’s going to be the reality, then there’s no functioning, there’s no living.
Jerry: This is much more fun. See, here’s a really important thing. Everything is as it should be. Everything is perfect. We have this kind of militant way of talking about the mind. You know, you must destroy the mind. Only when the mind is destroyed will you be liberated. Only when the ego is destroyed will you be liberated.
The mind is part of the perfection of the universe. The ego, you know, that’s a bad word. Oh, my goodness, I’m gonna use the E word. The ego is part of the perfection of the universe. And as these states of consciousness unfold, one transcends the mind and the ego. One sees through them and realizes, “Oh, these are illusory, these aren’t the real me.” But it is through the agency of these illusions that it’s possible to become enlightened, that it’s possible to become fully awakened.
Now, people that are familiar with this teaching about Lesha Avidya often have the idea, “Oh, if someone is enlightened, then that faint remains of ignorance, that must be just some really very mystical kind of ignorance. You know that ignorance must be something completely different from anything that I know of that I would call ignorance.” But it isn’t. It’s just however much ignorance you brought along with you when you crossed that threshold and awakened into Brahman. That’s Lesha Avidya.
Rick: Oh, really? I mean, that amount doesn’t get diminished go further over time?
Jerry: Absolutely it does. And this is how Brahman continues to expand. This is Brahman devouring everything. Yeah. So
Rick: The remains can get fainter and fainter. But there’s always got to be some remains.
Jerry:
They do. Firstly, maybe a lot. You know, those in the Zen tradition, I think they say, for the first 10 years after somebody awakens, you kind of keep your eye on them, because they kind of “stink of enlightenment,” and they’re not quite, you know, completely ripe yet.
Well, Lesha Avidya comes along. Now, how can this work? How can you have the ignorance all completely thinned down to almost nothing, and then awaken? You know, you’re just going to awaken and that’s going to burn away. So it’s a progression. Ego thins out, and we can find in some exemplary teachers, that the ego is just so thin, or just the faintest, gossamer thin amount, but still, you know, they would be interested in things, they would have motivations. They clearly knew where and who and what they were in relation to the outer world. But there’s always going to be something there.
A couple of words that are helpful are Ahamkara and Asmita. Ahamkara means the sense of I and mine, and that’s the Sanskrit word that often is used to translate ego. Asmita refers to the sort of accumulation of conditionings that color that little me in ways that give the ego a bad reputation, you know, that make it egotistical. And Asmita becomes thinner and thinner and thinner and thinner and thinner. But Ahamkara, if you look into the Vedic literature, Ahamkara is part of nature. You know, you have eight properties of nature, which the finest is Budhi or sometimes called Mahat, and then Ahamkara, and then Manas. And then the five senses or the five elements. Well, that’s throughout everything. That’s part of it. That’s baked in the cake.
I want to just talk for a minute about, specifically about Ramana Maharshi. And some things that David Godman said last week that I think are quite significant. I was quoting Ramana Maharshi when I said, the ego must be destroyed to be liberated. The mind must be destroyed to be liberated. And I wrote this down because I wanted to be sure to get it word for word. This is a David Godman quote. And he said, “When Bhagavan said ‘mind has to go,’ he’s not talking about thoughts, which is interesting. Bhagavan would often sit there and someone would walk in. He’d say, ‘Oh, I was thinking about you, and you showed up.’ Thoughts were still there. Mind for him, is the mechanism that coordinated all your thoughts, decided it was a person inside a body and saw a world outside of itself.” That I really feel is the key to this.
“He said that the whole superstructure is a creation. It’s a badly running, badly functioning program in your brain, if you like. This whole idea, there’s someone in there who sees something out there, that the person in there has to choose how to decide and interact with what’s out there,” he said, That’s mind. He said, “The world as an external entity, ceases.” That’s Brahman consciousness. That’s Brahman consciousness. And clearly, there were mental processes going on. And I would look at that and say, well, okay, I would say Ramana had a mind. But Ramana is defining mind as that agency that divides inner from outer. Well, ego does that also. So what happens is, mind if I’m allowed to use the word is absorbed into Brahman, dissolves in Brahman. But paradox, even dissolved in Brahman, it continues to be able to perform its role. We can still have thoughts. Ego is absorbed into Brahman. And I think Ramana would say, ego has been destroyed. I don’t think that there’s a contradiction. I don’t think there’s a conflict.
And the other thing is also, in David Godman’s interview, I believe I heard him say, quite clearly Ramana understood and taught that in the ordinary state of ignorance, it’s useless to try to wrestle with the mind and try to wrestle with the ego. It’s useless. It’s only by Self … What was the phrase?
Rick: Self inquiry? Atma Vichara.
Jerry: Yeah. It’s only by Atma Vichara that you can destroy the ego, it’s only by Atma Vichara that you can destroy the mind. I agree 100%, with this little caveat, that the word “destroy” is a very sort of militant word. It gets absorbed into the wholeness, and inner and outer is destroyed. There’s no inner, there’s no outer.
Rick: Drop a sugar cube into some water and it gets destroyed. But the sugar is still in there.
Jerry: Yeah. And it’s still able to have the taste of sweetness, right. Nice. So just something that that might be interesting to do. I’ve collected three or four descriptions from people that report that they are awakened, and I haven’t attached the names with these, but some of them are people that you know, and even have interviewed.
One person said, “A flood of instantaneous knowing came all at once, that you and I and all of us are That. No, one higher, no one lower. Love is the calling card of this reality.” And the same person. As she went through the stages of this, went through a stage where she very strongly had the feeling, “I don’t exist, there’s no me.” You know, the ego is completely gone as this “There’s nothing, there’s only this vastness.” And she said, “In the beginning, I was so annoyed with this leftover personality,” you know, because people attach themselves to the idea that they must completely wring out every last drop of individuality.
And people get stranded there. And there’s a problem that comes up. And it’s a big problem. Because if you’re in that, witnessing from state where you can say, “Well, all there is, is this vastness and everything doesn’t exist. There’s no me there’s no ego.” If you’re in that state, and you’re indoctrinated, I’ll use the word dogma,” that awakening means there’s nobody there. If you’re if you’re really attached to that, then you’re not going to be open to the possibility that maybe there’s still an ego because that’s antithetical to what you believe I’m awakened, therefore, I have no ego.
Rick: And, and conversely, I detect some ego here, therefore, I couldn’t be awakened.
Jerry: Also true or I detect some ego and you therefore you couldn’t be awakened, right. So there are situations that arise where a teacher is just so confident, and the people around him or say, “Well, this guy is really egotistical. And once in a while you have a very courageous teacher who realizes, “Oh, wait a minute. I’ve been deluding myself here. I actually do have a personality. And there actually is an ego in there.” But this individual was not so tenacious with that.
But that way of looking at that stage of awakening, the way station, you know, the base camp station stage, she came in with that orientation. And then looking around, “Well, there’s still somebody here. I thought it was completely gone.” But, you know, it becomes more subtle, because obviously, you’re working on the level of pure awareness, where these things are just functioning within awareness. They’re not these hard, solid, material things like they once have been. But she said, In the beginning, “I was so annoyed by this leftover personality.” I love that.
Someone else said, this is someone you know, you can probably tell me who it is. “When I awakened, I saw God is not separate from me. God is the ground of my very being. Everywhere I look, I see God is in everything, and everything is in God.” That was Francis Bennett, whose whole life was oriented towards devotion and lived for a number of years as a Catholic monk.
And then, this is the last one, “One day the world took on a luminous glow as I was walking. The trees sparkled with amazing light and colors became brilliant and more vibrant than in our normal reality. I could see my feet stepping on the pavement yet I was not moving. I passed a woman on the street and felt immense love for her. I felt her as my self. cars passing by reflected brilliant light off their bumpers that seemed almost blinding. Everything was moving within me, the trees, the woman, the cars. I was all of this. Someone spoke to me and I heard myself speak. Yet I didn’t say a word. I was not moving. Yet walking and talking was happening. I knew myself as stillness through which all movement occurs. Samadhi bliss, Grace, exquisite beauty. This world is the other world. The other world is this world and it exists as us this broad a vast opening of the heart that now new itself is the totality, including the body mind in the world. No separation anywhere ever. All is perfectly divine.”
Rick: Nice. Who said that one?
Jerry: Oh, what is her name? I haven’t got her name clear in my mind. It’s a wonderful, lovely woman, someone that I that I found on social media that just friended me about two weeks ago. So that that description, by the way, contains descriptions of God consciousness and clear description of Brahman consciousness. Because she’s talking about seeing the finest level of the relative and everything looks luscious. It just it there’s a sort of a luminous …
Rick: Golden glasses, as Maharishi used to say.
Jerry: Yeah. And people also will experience this in slightly different ways into different degrees, and also, it habituates. So you know, you don’t just walk around and say, “Oh, my God, where’s my sunglasses?” But the world retains a character of magic about it.
Rick: Beautiful. Well, that might actually almost be a good point to wrap up on. You lose.
Jerry: I have one more thing I’d like to give you here. This is from the Gospel of Thomas. Jesus said, “If those who lead you say, ‘See, the kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside of you. And it is outside of you. When you come to know yourself, then you will become known and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living Father, but if you will not know yourself, you dwell in poverty. And it is you who are that poverty.”
And just to be clear, because he says the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you, in the same Gospel, Jesus said to them, “When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside, and the outside like the inside and the above like the below, then you will enter the kingdom.
Rick: Beautiful. Well, thanks, Jerry. This has been great. And we’re going to do it again one of these days, because there’s lots to talk about. But we’ll like PT Barnum said, “Leave them wanting more.”
So let me just wrap it up. I’ve been talking to my old friend Jerry Freeman. Jerry does not have a website about all this stuff. But he does have a Facebook page, and I’ll be linking to that. And he’s very active on Facebook and, you know, writes and talks about a lot of the stuff on Facebook.
For those listening or watching, this is an ongoing interview series. Jerry is, I think, number 199, or something. And so they’re all archived on YouTube, but it’s easier to navigate them on BatGap.com because I have indices. They’re both chronological and alphabetical, and you can explore all the interviews that have taken place. You can also subscribe either to the YouTube channel to have YouTube notify you when new ones are posted. But you can also subscribe on BatGap.com to be notified by email each time a new one is posted.
There’s also a discussion group on BatGap, which is titled “Forum” and I’ll be linking to Jerry’s page in that discussion group from his page on BatGap. So I’m sure that discussion will get rolling and Jerry will participate. There’s a Donate button there, which I very much appreciate people clicking. And not only clicking but actually donating if they can.
And there’s an audio podcast of this. So if you don’t have the time to sit in front of your computer and watch interviews and see Jerry’s beautiful face with his Connecticut background, you can at least listen to the audio while you’re commuting or something. And so you’ll see a link to that on every interview on BatGap.
So good. That’s it. Next week, I’ll be at the science and non duality conference. And we’ll probably be doing an interview or two out there. We’ll see what happens. So thanks for listening or watching and we’ll see you next week. Thank you, Jerry.
Jerry: Thank you.