Jim Dreaver Transcript

Jim Dreaver Interview

Summary:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. This is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. For more information or to help support our efforts, please visit us at www.batgap.com.

My name is Rick Archer and my guest today is Jim Dreaver. Jim is a native of New Zealand. He is a writer and teacher in the non-dual lineage, which says that the spiritual and material are one and what is real is right here now. His own inner journey took 20 years and then he finally awoke to the freedom that is his true nature, and everyone’s true nature. His mission now is to guide others to the same realization, but in a much shorter time. He currently teaches at Esalen Institute near Big Sur and in Los Angeles, New Zealand and Australia. So, welcome Jim.

Jim: Thank you, Rick.

Rick: So, how’s it going in terms of helping people realize in a much shorter time?

Jim: It’s happening. As I say, it took me 20 years and I feel that I’ve had one person wake up within around nine months of sessions. I’m always fine-tuning the teaching, fine-tuning my approach and so I become better and better. It’s obvious, right? We are just here now. This only now is real, as Barry Long, the spiritual teacher said. You’ve heard of Barry Long?

Rick: Well, I interviewed Bernie Prior a few weeks ago and he was a student of Barry Long.

Jim: Yeah.

Rick: Otherwise, I didn’t have much exposure to Barry.

Jim: But you know, the power of now, as I’ve told you, now is all there is.

Rick: So, when you say somebody woke up or when you say you woke up, what do you actually mean by that? Not that it’s a new concept to anybody who is listening, but it is kind of good to get each person’s definition of it, because the definitions seem to vary a bit.

Jim: Right. So, what happened with me was, during my last year in chiropractic college in Davenport, Iowa, I had this health crisis and thought I was going to die. I thought I would die during the night. I couldn’t breathe and it turned out to be extreme anxiety. That started me on my spiritual journey and I was introduced to Zen, Yoga and the teachings of J. Krishnamurti. I had an enlightenment experience in 1977 in Santa Rosa, sleeping next to my first wife. I woke up and I noticed a sharper sunlight coming from the chink in the Venetian blinds. All of a sudden, my gaze was transfixed by these dust motes dancing in the sunlight. I heard a mourning dove cry outside and every thought in my mind just fell away. And I experienced total peace and oneness with life. I had never had an experience like that. I had never done any drugs at the time. And it was just a pure experience as if everything I was seeking was here right now. I realized that.

Rick: You had done some meditating by that time, right?

Jim: I had been doing TM meditation for two years. And then gradually, the experience had faded and I reverted somewhat back to my normal egoic uptight self, really believing I was this “me.” But something changed permanently, as if a hole had been punched into my consciousness. I was seeing the reality behind reality and I somehow knew I was that reality. So that began a journey of 18 years. For the next 18 years, even though I lived a normal life, you know, going skiing and being a chiropractor and going to the theater in San Francisco and partying and so on, behind it all was this quest for enlightenment, for freedom.

Rick: And what forms did that quest take? Did you continue meditating? Did you visit teachers? What did you do?

Jim: I continued meditating. I came to hear Krishnamurti speak here in Ojai in 1977. I had a number of other teachers like Dada, who was not a very well-known teacher from India. And then I met Jean Klein in 1984 and he was the one who guided me to the field. It took a number of years, 11 more years before I woke up. And when I woke up, this is what brings me to the subject of awakening. I was lying in bed 20 years ago this spring actually, when I woke up in Northern California. And I was lying in bed. I woke feeling somewhat depressed. My son was 11 at the time. His mother and I got divorced when he was six. I was paying child support and my son was staying with his mother down in Sebastopol and I was living in a little cottage up on a hilltop near Sebastopol. I woke up feeling depressed. I had difficult financial circumstances and probably that was a cause of depression. I was about to get out of bed and go and meditate because I knew how to clear the depressed energy. And this particular morning I laid there in bed and I said to myself, “How come this is still happening to me? How come I’m still being depressed? How come I’m not free yet, because I’m pretty free already?” And then I remembered something Jean Klein had said, “You’re not the person you think you are. Find out who you really are and you will be free.” So, I closed my eyes and went deeply into the interior of my own being with the question, “Okay, Jim, you say you’re depressed. Who is this “me” who is depressed?” I looked everywhere inside myself for the thought form, “I feel depressed. I am depressed.” I couldn’t find it. It was a thought form that comes and goes. But the “I” as awareness, as consciousness was right here. And somehow when that realization happened, the depression dissolved and I felt fine. I went about my day. And the same thing happened the next morning and the next morning. Three mornings in a row I awoke feeling depressed. And after that third morning it was all over. I realized, “My God, this “I” that I’ve been identified with, this “me” that I’ve been taking myself to be ever since about age two, was just a fiction of my mind. It created all the feelings and emotions and the contractions, the anxiety, the guilt. It all just washed away.

Rick: So, you say you realized that. That has a bit of an intellectual or conceptual connotation, but was there more significantly an experiential shift at that point?

Jim: The experience was just a feeling of great ease and flow and harmony. That was the experience.

Rick: So, there was both an experiential and an intellectual component to the package.

Jim: Right, exactly. The intellectual was, “My God, I am not my story. I have a story, but I am not my story.” Experiential was this feeling of great, I called it ease, flow and harmony. When you are awake, that is the basic experience. You’re always at ease. You’re always in the now. You are always harmonious with what is.

Rick: And it stuck.

Jim: It stuck. It’s never shifted for 20 years now. There is a phenomenon called residues because we still have an ego. We still have an “I” thought. Residues of old ego patterns can arise from time to time. I remember having the first residue come up six months later when I again experienced getting caught up in my circumstances and I began being concerned, worried about my finances. I thought actually I was losing my awakening. I hung out in this state of uncertainty for about four hours and then suddenly it just dissolved, shifted. I was back in the flow again, back in the state of ease, harmony and flow.

Rick: So, over the last 20 years I’m sure that life has thrown plenty of things at you, including several strokes which you will talk about. But regardless of what has come your way, that ease, harmony and flow has persisted, predominated.

Jim: That is the abiding experience. And that is what I would say when somebody wakes up to their true nature, they realize, “Well, I am always in the state of ease, harmony and flow.” And yes, excuse the expression, “shit happens,” you know, things happen so as to rock us up. Jean Klein was the one who told me about residues. And I know Jean Klein himself experienced residues of old stuff even when he was older. I saw him six months before he died here in Santa Barbara and he couldn’t do much. He needed round the clock care and for a dignified, sophisticated European man, I’m sure it was somewhat disturbing to his well-being, but what choice did he have? But when I sat with him, the light of consciousness, the clear light of consciousness shone through his eyes as brightly as ever.

Rick: I think you would probably agree that everybody has residues.

Jim: Yes, we all have residues.

Rick: Traditionally, it’s pretty well discussed and understood that we have residues. In fact, in some cases, in some people, those residues can be quite substantial. You know, there are people who appear to have undergone some kind of awakening, such as Adi Da, but who had some pretty outrageous residues that they kept indulging in for the rest of their lives. That is a little bit of a puzzlement to me.

Jim: Yeah, I don’t know. I knew of Adi Da very well. I have read his book, The Meaning of Listening, and I had a friend who was a doctor who had delivered a couple of his children, actually. And yeah, he was a paradox. I remember Samuel Bonda. I don’t know if you have had him on the show.

Rick: Yeah, I’ve interviewed Samuel and Linda, yeah.

Jim: I remember when he was about to leave the organization, about to leave Adi Da’s side after being with him for 20 years, Adi Da threatened him with lifetimes of hellish karma if he ever left.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. I don’t want to get us sidetracked, but it is kind of interesting to ponder. If we really want to understand what this whole enlightenment, awakening thing is all about, then these things come up and you have to come to terms with them. I mean, teachers behaving badly and so on. It is certainly not going to be the focus of this interview, but if we really want to understand what enlightenment is, then a lot of people are thrown by these occurrences when they are impacted by them personally or read about them and so on. I have seen people just give up on the whole spiritual quest or just get very disillusioned or get very confused. And so, I think it’s important to probe such things and try to come to some sort of understanding, and the residue idea helps, in my book. And also, Ken Wilber’s idea of lines of development and stages of development and so on, that “one awakening does not enlightenment make” necessarily. There could be many stages of awakening and there could be some in which there are still some fairly undeveloped lines of development, along with some fairly well-developed lines. So anyway, I don’t want to go on too long, but what do you think about all that?

Jim: Well, I’m working on a new book and I have a chapter called “Healing the Wounds of the Past,” because this is exactly what you’re referring to. Many Indian gurus, for example, came here and they had extraordinary energy, extraordinary awakenings.

Rick: Charisma, yeah.

Jim: Charisma, yeah, and ability to transmit the energy and awaken others. And then they had all this dark stuff going on, sexual stuff, power stuff, money stuff, and I think it was because of their unresolved childhood wounding issues. So, we have to explore that. And this is one of the ways I work privately with people. You have to have healed your past completely. You have to be at peace with every person in your past. Otherwise, your past will come back to bite you in the ass.

Rick: I think, in the case of the Indian gurus, it is sometimes a cultural thing too. They might have been raised in an ashram situation and were not exposed to all kinds of stuff that they are suddenly confronted with when they come to the West. Then they have all kinds of issues around that stuff that they didn’t know about. So, the question from what you just said is, to what extent is healing your past a prerequisite to awakening, and to what extent can it be handled after awakening?

Jim: It’s both. For example, I am in a new relationship with my sweetheart, Tanya. I’ve been married twice, divorced twice, and Tanya is a bit younger than I am. We have been together now for almost three years. And I had a certain degree of mother wounding that I was not even aware of. Mother wounding and father wounding happens when you do not have a clear memory of being loved or nurtured by your mother or father when you were young. And so here I am, and I’m 68 years old now.

Rick: 68?

Jim: 68 years old.

Rick: Wow, you look pretty good for 68.

Jim: Well, thank you.

Rick: Better than I do. I’m only 65, at least on the video.

Jim: So anyway, I had become aware of this mother wounding and how it comes up, how it manifests. I’ve been looking at that more and more and getting free of that issue. And I’ve been awake for like 20 years now. So, awakening just means you no longer suffer personally. But you can create suffering in other people if you still have these unconscious patterns. So, the work of refinement, of attunement, of refining one’s awakening is an ongoing process.

Rick: Yeah, I think so. Lifelong. So, since awakening, have you done that refinement and attunement and so on completely on your own? Or have you ever actually engaged in some sort of therapy or sat with some other teacher, or counselor of some sort in order to facilitate it?

Jim: No, I haven’t personally. I have just done it on my own. See, the issue just has to be faced. Shankara was supposed to have said, “Realization consists of seeing the truth, not in the least of ten millions of acts.” So, it doesn’t matter whether you meditate or you become a yogi or purify or fast. None of that will awaken you. Only through seeing the truth do you awaken. And seeing that you are not this “I”, you’re not this “me,” you have an I, you have a me, that is awakening. And then seeing that, “oh, I have my past, I have a tendency to lust after women,” which is one of the things about mother wounding. People are always looking for the one, the perfect one out there. And even when they have got the perfect one, they are still looking for the one. That tendency, you just have to see that in yourself. Oh, I see that. And then through the very seeing, you get a little bit freer. When you see it from a place of true clarity and presence, when you see your own behavior from a place of true clarity and presence, that is freeing.

Rick: Incidentally, Shankara also said that jnana yoga is not necessarily for everyone, that final insight into one’s true nature, and that karma yoga, seva, things like that might be prescribed or conducive to the purification that would bring one to a state of readiness or worthiness or to the ability to engage in the kind of discrimination that might be needed for that final step. So, I’m sorry, I kind of lost the train of thought of what you just said towards the end there.

Jim: Well, you know what?

Rick: What? So did you?

Jim: No. I had this insight 30 years ago, “There will be another train along at the station any moment.”

Rick: Okay, good.

Jim: Because it is not about the words. It is always about the presence we share with each other.

Rick: Okay, so we are talking about residues and we are talking about working out this stuff that there might be still plenty to work out even after realization, after awakening. And you said for you it has been a process that you have been able to do on your own. And okay, now I’m remembering the question I wanted to ask, which is that after awakening, and where that ease and frictionlessness that you mentioned earlier has come to be the norm, have you found that there is a sort of an acceleration of the working out of stuff, that it comes up more readily and is resolved more readily than it might have been when you were more ego-bound?

Jim: Yes, I think so. And particularly, I live a normal life in relationship with Tanya, my sweetie, who is very much a heart-oriented person. She is a beautiful, open-hearted, loving person and a bhakti, a true bhakti, a lover of God. So, relationships, as you know from your own marriage, are the best place to work out a lot of this stuff. So, I get to meet myself every day. She has a beautiful six-year-old daughter, Bailey Rumi Martin. And I have a 30-year-old son by my second marriage. So, I get to be a stepfather to Bailey and notice my issues around that, too. My tendency to want to be by myself or not participate, it all comes up.

Rick: Yeah, there is that saying, “The world is your guru,” and I think an underlying principle to that is that if everything really is orchestrated by some cosmic intelligence which permeates everything and abides everywhere, then the things that happen to us are not arbitrary and capricious. They are actually perfectly designed to bring about whatever it is we need to learn.

Jim: That’s exactly right, yeah. It’s all perfect. Life is the true teacher, relationship is the true teacher.

Rick: Yeah. Okay, so you had this awakening 20 years ago and it sounds as if it was a real watershed event for you. After that day, whatever day on the calendar that might have been, life has been different than it always had been before that day. Was there any period even before this final awakening where you “got it, I lost it, I got it, I lost it” or that kind of thing?

Jim: Absolutely, several times. I thought “that was enlightened now.” I remember once going to a Jean Klein event, a workshop at Mount Madonna Center in Northern California and I was strolling down to the afternoon dialogue from my cabin where I was staying and I had this epiphany. Suddenly my I-thought jumped out in front of me. I saw my I-thought and I realized I wasn’t that “I.” And I felt tears, tears of joy that I had seen that, “Wow, I’m not this I-thought that I’ve been so identified with my whole life. I’m this pure awareness.” I shared it with Jean and he has actually recorded in one of his books, “Transmission of the Flame.” And he said, “You have in a certain way understood that you’re not a person. Live in this understanding and you’ll be a happy man.” And in the next few days I thought, “Wow, I’m here now.” I literally thought, “Wow, I’m here now,” and that is the proof that I wasn’t here. Because then some more suffering happened and I realized I wasn’t finally enlightened after all, but I was a bit freer.

Rick: Yeah. What do you say to these people whom you see often in chat rooms online. I don’t know if you frequent the chat rooms, but they will take an explanation of the kind of thing you just said, that you’re not a person and you’re already free and you’re already enlightened and there are no stages of development or levels of development and you don’t really need to do anything and just kind of realize it, and they go on and on like that. I keep getting the flavor that it’s largely a sort of conceptual, intellectual thing. They have read too many books and they haven’t necessarily imbibed the experience that they have learned to describe with some degree of eloquence.

Jim: Yeah, I agree. It’s kind of a pure advaita, pure. You know, it’s almost like an advaita police or something like that.

Rick: Yeah, they are actually called that. I mean that term is actually used, you know, “Please pass the salt. Who wants the salt?” That kind of thing. Anyway, go ahead.

Jim: So, I do it. So, this brings me to a point. My teachings, as I said, continuously evolve. In this new book, I’m working on the premise now, that the most powerful realization we can have is, “Wow, I’m not my mind. I have a mind, but I am not my mind.” I mean that is one version of the most powerful realization we can have. Once you see that you are not your mind, you have a mind, but you are not your mind, then you are free. Then you are abiding in the ease, harmony, and flow of the awareness or consciousness that is your true nature. And of course, awareness and consciousness are just pointers of what we fundamentally are.

Rick: Yeah, by the same token, would you say, “I have an ego, but I am not my ego.”

Jim: Exactly. So, I have an “I” thought. So, I have a section in my new book, a little lesson called, “Noticing Which ‘I’ is Active in You.” So, is it the ego “I,” the reactive ego “I,” which thinks, “Wow, I don’t like this happening at all!” Or is it the awakened “I,” the functional “I.” And when we are awake and free, we speak always from a functional, awakened “I.” “I must go to the doctor. I must get my car fixed. I must get my gas, Buddha at the gas pump,” right? Which is why you came up with this beautiful name.

Rick: Yeah. There’s a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon where Calvin is pounding nails into the coffee table with a hammer, and his mother comes in and says, “Calvin, what are you doing?” He looks at her perplexed and says, “Is this a trick question?” And I thought of it when I was reading your book because, if you’re pounding nails in the coffee table, you don’t feel it. But if you accidentally hit your thumb with a hammer, you feel it. So, there is a different sense of “I” which functions, and Jesus would have felt it, and Shankara would have felt it, and Ramana Maharshi would have felt it. There is still some distinction in terms of our experience between this localized biological entity and the tree or the coffee table, whatever.

Jim: Yeah, that is actually one of the main things I look for when I do satsangs or workshops or private sessions. I am looking for where people are still identified with and how they use their “I” thought. Does that suggest identification with their “I” or are they free? And usually, it is some kind of identification, deep identification, which I’m not even aware of. And that is where a teacher can play a role or a guide can play a role, helping people become aware of, “Oh, I see how I’m identified with this.”

Rick: Would you say that there are degrees or levels of identification? You could be cruising along with a sense of not really being very identified, but then something can come up which really triggers your identification and shows you that you are really not as free as you might have thought you were?

Jim: Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. That is true in relationships. And I remember sometimes I can identify myself, or have a residual identification with the “me,” the “I,” the ego, the old pattern. I remember the most recent one that happened when I was feeling being controlled. And I thought to myself, “God damn it, I’m being controlled.” And then I suddenly watched, I saw it from my wholeness, my global perspective. I said, “Wow, that is an old, old pattern.” I’ve been running away from control all my life. I ran away from home physically when I was 14.

Rick: So, did I.

Jim: Yeah, well there you go. And so that ego pattern can still arise from time to time. So, I help people see what they are not seeing themselves. That is the function of a guide.

Rick: So, do you think that if we have all these residual things, attachments or impressions or whatever they are, and that they come up from time to time under certain circumstances and if we kind of work through them and move on, then we are perhaps a little bit more free than we had been because something has been cleared out. If that is the case, do you think that even in someone like yourself who has been awake for 20 years, there could still be a lot of stuff that is buried there, a lot of residual stuff? And if it somehow theoretically were all just to be cleared out, all of a sudden, you would experience even a much more profound degree of freedom than you are experiencing right now?

Jim: Well, I’m open to that, but I’m a pretty inwardly vigilant person, and I’m a double Sagittarian. Sagittarius is the truth seeker of the zodiac, so I am really attuned to truth. And so, I’m just here now. There is only here now. And so, I am always open to a bigger realization, but that hasn’t happened.

Rick: Well, I’ll ask you a question about that in a second, but perhaps you could quote that Nisargadatta quote where he was in his 70s and someone brought up the point about him reacting to certain things or something, do you know the quote I’m talking about?

Jim: Yeah, exactly. Well, it’s in the book I Am That. Somebody asked Nisargadatta, “Do you ever experience fear?” And Nisargadatta was really honest in his answer. He said, “Occasionally, an old reaction, mental or emotional, happens in the mind. Is it once seen and discarded? After all, one still has a personality, so one is still subject to the personality behaviors.” And actually, I read that before I woke up, 30 years ago, and that liberated me at some level tremendously because I was such a perfectionistic person. I thought enlightenment had to be perfect. Once you were there, once you are awake, then you felt no more fear at all. Now, speaking of fear, it gave me permission to relax at a deeper level. That is what the Nisargadatta quote gave me. And then I’ll talk about the strokes now because that was the first time I actually experienced physical fear. When I had these series of strokes over five months beginning in September 2003, I was working as a chiropractor, and to backtrack a little bit, I had always resisted being a chiropractor. It was not my thing. I wasn’t passionate about it. I was a good chiropractor, and I enjoyed working with people. Something in me resisted. I wanted to be a teacher. But once I woke up in 1995, all resistance melted. It still wasn’t my passion, but I no longer resisted it. That’s the thing, when you wake up, all resistance in you goes to whatever arises. That is another way of looking at what awakening is.

Rick: “Resistance is futile.”

Jim: Yeah, exactly. Resistance is futile.

Rick: I think that’s from Star Trek or something.

Jim: So anyway, eight years went by. I was doing satsangs in Sebastopol and doing a few private sessions and working my chiropractic practice, and I had these strokes. And after the sessions, I had to quit practice. And I remember thinking, “Well, thank God I’m now out of practice.” And then I had a third stroke, which was really intense and devastating, and put me in the hospital for six days. And I remember when I was lying on my gurney in the ER when I went to the hospital after the third stroke, the physician came by and said, “You need to sign this waiver.” And I looked at it. He was an intervening radiologist. He was going to do an angiogram. They would inject a fluid in my femoral artery and go up into the brain. And they would look at my brain on a TV and see if there was a block there, a blockage. And if he could, he would insert a stent to open up the blockage.

Rick: But it might kill you.

Jim: Exactly. There was a 25% chance of either having a major stroke, even worse, or of it being fatal. And I just remember this fear coming over me. “Fuck, I could die.” And then I’d relax and breathe and sign the dotted line. And it turned out that the blocked arteries are too deep, so I didn’t get a stent anyway. And I remember after six days in the hospital for intensive care, I was driven home to my then girlfriend’s place in Santa Rosa. And I couldn’t smooth the right side of my face. I could hardly raise my right arm. I walked with a limp. I had lost 20 pounds. I couldn’t think clearly. I couldn’t speak properly.

Rick: This is all post-awakening.

Jim: Post-stroke.

Rick: But it is also post-awakening.

Jim: Yeah, right. And I just floated the whole thing. I had this one moment of fear, and then I realized, “Wow.” And I just relaxed and signed the waiver. But after I came back to my girlfriend’s house, I could not think clearly. But as I was lying in bed in her place, my thoughts gradually settled and cleared, and I had this single discreet thought, “Thank God I’m free. Thank God I’m free.” Because I knew myself as consciousness. Once you know yourself as consciousness, as this “here now,” you realize that what you fundamentally are was never born and never dies. That frees you from the fear of death.

Rick: Yeah. And I want to emphasize that that is not just an intellectual concept. That is your experience.

Jim: That is my experience, yes.

Rick: Because, we can all read books that give us those concepts and read NDE books and so on and so forth, but you are living from a place where, primarily, you are that which never dies.

Jim: Exactly. And that is your embodied experience. And you just face your actual death, if it happens, it will happen one day, but the same way you face life, you are just right there, you are here now, present with what is.

Rick: I think one nice way of explaining it and understanding it is that we can think of dimensions, and there is that dimension which never dies and which is perpetual and silent and stable and rock-like, and then there are these more manifest dimensions which die and change. But you know, if our experience incorporates the full range, then there is a kind of a safety and security established in that dimension which is indestructible.

Jim: Yes.

Rick: Your whole story, by the way, reminds me of the Garden of Gethsemane, when Christ knew what was going to happen to him and apparently, this wave of fear came up. It is as if, “Can you let this cup pass from me?” And then he relaxed and said, “All right, Thy will be done.”

Jim: Yeah, exactly. And then so I had this thought that, “Thank God I’m free.” And then a few minutes later I had another thought, “Well, I’m free, but do I want to live? Do I want to live?” And I realized then that if I wanted to live, I had to use my mind to form an intention to heal myself. That is the power of intention. I was only 57 at the time, my book, Angel Story, Beginning of Life, wasn’t yet finished. I enjoyed teaching and, you know, “hell yeah, I want to live.” So, I formed this clear intention, “Yes, I want to live.” And that is using the mind to form a clear intention. And then every day I visualized my brain, my blood vessels opening up in my brain, the blood flowing through, healing the things that needed to be healed. I began walking again and went back to the gym again and here I am today.

Rick: That’s great. Incidentally, the fellow who does all the video post-production for this show, Ralph Preston, had a fairly serious stroke some years ago and it was predicted that he really would not be able to walk or do all kinds of things ever again. And he applied himself to rehabilitation with great dedication and now he hikes on the beach and rides his bicycle and he works with other people helping to rehabilitate them. And I just want to do a shout out to Ralph of appreciation for him and what he has gone through.

Jim: Yeah, yeah. Stroke is the third leading cause of death after heart attack and cancer, so it’s pretty serious stuff. So, anyway, that’s the story of my strokes and of course I have a story about my strokes and as time goes on it’s been like, gosh.

Rick: Ten years or more?

Jim: Ten years more, yeah, yeah.

Rick: So, this whole thing of story, we haven’t talked about that too much, but there is a lot in your book and in your teaching about “you are not your story.” Other teachers teach that way too, talk that way. So, let’s talk about that a little bit, about what one’s story actually is and why it’s important to realize that you are not your story and so on.

Jim: Yeah, good.

Rick: And your story began your life, I mean, that is the title of your book here. So, it is important to talk about.

Jim: Yeah, so we all have a story, we are storytelling people and we all have a story, we all have many stories and the older we get the more stories we have, right? But the thing to notice is that our stories come and go, they shift and they change and we have forgotten many stories from when we were younger. So, the realization is that, “Wow, I have a story, but I am not my story because it comes and goes.” And this is what I teach people, this is the main thing I teach. You’ve got to be inwardly vigilant and watch how your thoughts and stories and beliefs and everything comes and goes. And as you watch them come and go you ask yourself, “So, what is always here?” And you, as awareness, of course, are always here, you as presence, as consciousness, as beingness are always here. So, enlightenment or awakening is about discovering what is always here.

Rick: Yeah, so in your book you offer some examples of stories: I am not worthy, I feel guilty, I feel ashamed, I was an abandoned child, abused, wounded child, nobody would want to be with me, life is tough, unfair, this should not be happening, the only way you can get ahead is by ripping people off, you can’t trust anyone, I don’t manage money well, and so on and so forth. So, there are all these stories that are based on people’s experience, but what you are saying is experience can be deceptive. Well, go ahead, you respond.

Jim: Well, maybe you were a lost and abandoned child when you were young, but you’re not being lost and abandoned now, so you come back to here now. And I remember I was teaching in Esalen, you mentioned Esalen, I actually am not teaching there currently, but I taught there for this work for eight years. One Esalen workshop, a woman came in, she was in her mid-40s, and she was very overweight, and she would shield herself, because she was shielding herself against men through weight. It turned out her father had molested her and abused her sexually when she was very young. And she had never forgiven her father, she carried the memory of her father’s molestation. She shared her story, and I remember listening to her, and she sang to me in the group, “How can you say my story is not real, it really happened?” I said, “Yes, it was real then, but it’s not real now, no one is molesting you right now in this moment,” and she got it. She realized that, and by the end of the workshop she said she had begun to forgive her father already. So, that is how people become free, they realize the story was real once, but it is not real now. What is happening now is what is real now.

Rick: But there are things that are happening to people now that are pretty intense. I mean, they might be going bankrupt and losing their home and not knowing if they should be afraid they’re going to be sleeping on the sidewalk or something. So those things are happening, there are things happening in the moment, not just things that happened years ago.

Jim: Right. So, that is a situation I would say, let’s take a person who is sleeping on the sidewalk. So, this leads us to the understanding, the seeing, that we have all these stories about reality, such as I’m sleeping on the sidewalk now, I’m homeless.

Rick: I’m just waiting to buy the new iPhone.

Jim: Yeah, right. It’s good, that may be someone’s story, but maybe somebody’s on the street and they don’t have a roof over their head, and they don’t have any money to buy an iPhone. So, I would counsel them in this way. So yes, you’re homeless, but right now, do you know the storyteller? Do you know the “I”, the “me?” Because the storyteller, the I, the me, the ego self, which is behind all the stories, when you look into that, this I, this me that you take yourself to be, you discover that the storyteller is no more real than the stories it tells. It’s the biggest story of all, this I, the me, the storyteller. When you see that, wow, I am the storyteller that I’ve taken myself to be all these years, that has difficult circumstances, that is on the streets, when you see that that’s not real because it comes and goes, and you’re not anything that comes and goes, then let’s take a pause, a break, and suddenly you discover yourself in this place of just pure awareness, pure beingness.

Rick: Now, you had an advantage in a way, and I’ve had an advantage in terms of spiritual practice going on for decades. In my opinion, it makes it a lot easier to see this stuff. But if you get a room full of people who have never really had a background like that, and you just start saying these things to them, isn’t there a tendency to become somewhat manipulative of one’s experience and just sort of start playing mental games with yourself. They might be trying to see this and trying to have that perspective, without really having undergone the kind of transformation that might make it easy to see that stuff quite spontaneously and naturally, without having to work at it? What do you think? In other words, well, if you’re having trouble with that question.

Jim: No, I’m not having trouble with that question at all. I don’t have trouble with any questions. What I want to say to you is that, as I say in my new book, the teaching is in the words, the transmission is in the silence. So, it’s not about thinking about any of this stuff. It’s about, yes, I also sometimes say we shift from silence to story, from story to silence. And the more grounded we are in the silence that is our true nature, the presence, the beingness that is our true nature right here, right now, the more we see, “ah, this is so, I see what he’s talking about,” I have a story but I’m not my story. People begin to see that for themselves. They begin to glimpse that. Maybe they get a small glimpse, but they begin to have a glimpse.

Rick: Yeah. So, to take an extreme example, if we were to walk into a psychiatric hospital and give a talk to a room full of psychotics, just to take an extreme example, and say you’re not your story and blah, blah, blah. It just wouldn’t, it would be like Christ said, throwing the seeds onto rocky ground or something. There wouldn’t be the receptivity to really know what you were talking about. So, what you are saying is that if one could culture the ground of silence, then such instructions, as you might give in a seminar, become more fruitful. So how do you culture the ground of silence? How does one?

Jim: The more present the guide or teacher is, the more established in true presence and beingness, the more effect you have. I am a Vietnam vet. Did you know that about me?

Rick: Sure, from your book and your talk.

Jim: Yeah, yeah. And so, I’m doing some work with vets now.

Rick: Good.

Jim: Veterans and Iraq veterans and Afghanistan and even Vietnam veterans. And so, veterans actually train to be supremely present, right? That is the main thing about being a combat warrior. You have to be extremely present and on the lookout for the enemy. So, this gift of extreme presence, supreme presence, they already have that. So, translate that into civilian life. It’s about being supremely present. Breathe and breathe into your belly, unlock your knees, get the sense of being here now. And then from this place of being supremely present, then we begin to look at these things.

Rick: The trouble with veterans is that, if they have PTSD, they tend to be locked into the fight-or-flight response, long past the time when it was appropriate. It has become habitual and that is what stress does with people. So, you are saying that you can get them to decondition from the fight-or-flight response by what you were just saying: breathing, unlocking your knees. So, you’re teaching a little bit of a meditative practice where they can chill a bit and settle into a more silent state.

Jim: Right, exactly. I used to teach this work called somatic technique to chiropractors. I did professional chiropractic seminars for many years, ten years, to teach chiropractors. I learned it from Thomas Hanna. Thomas Hanna was taught at Esalen and he taught the somatic work. And so, this work is very much about being in the body, being in the body in a relaxed, harmonious way, being very aware of your body, moving, being supple. I still have a yoga practice I do. And so, this technique of breathing down into your belly, unlocking your knees, relaxing your shoulders, wiggling your jaw loose, becoming very present here now is a simple meditation or somatic practice which brings people more into the presence. Then they are more available to hear whatever I want to say next.

Rick: Okay, and do you just do that in your workshops or do you advocate that people kind of make a habit of it?

Jim: Yeah, well I teach people how to do this whether I’m doing workshops or private sessions because you become more aware of yourself. People are so distracted these days, right? They’re so caught up in Facebook, Twitter, and they are always on their smartphones. I don’t even have a smartphone at this point.

Rick: Me neither, I have a dumb phone. In fact, I just bought my first cell phone about a month ago and haven’t used it yet.

Jim: Oh, is that right? I have had a cell phone for years but it’s a flip phone. My sweetie Tanya, of course, has an iPhone and she’s on it all the time.

Rick: Yeah, anyway, it’s almost a parody. You see cartoons like that all the time where people are walking down the street staring at their phones and you see things on the news where people are running into lampposts or stepping into traffic or whatever. So, there is definitely a lot coming at us in this culture. I think what you are saying is that we are so habituated to sensory stimulation that we never give ourselves a break, never give ourselves a moment’s silence.

Jim: Right, so it’s one person among many. All the people you interview on your show here, we are all doing the same thing. Waking up to our true nature is the solution to suffering. It’s the solution to individual suffering and it’s the solution for global suffering.

Rick: Yeah, we could talk about that a bit. I don’t know if we’ve exhaustively covered all the points we brought up yet, but maybe we’re not supposed to do that. This is a sort of a potpourri, you know, a smorgasbord we’re having here and people can get more into your work later on. But I like your emphasis, that individual awakening is the unit of world betterment.

Jim: Right, I mean look at my history. I was a normal kid in New Zealand, I  ran away from home. My parents were married but divorce wasn’t common. My parents didn’t like each other but “I stayed together for the kids,” you know.

Rick: Sounds familiar.

Jim: And I didn’t know anything about spirituality although I was inclined in that direction. I remember eating health foods in a young age because I was really into wheat germ. I remember wheat germ was a thing that I ate when I was in my teens.

Rick: Yeah, you and I have a lot in common. I used to eat wheat germ and drink tiger’s milk and stuff like that.

Jim: Yeah, but it’s all brought us to this place here now. We are right here now and so awakening brings you to here now. It brings you back to what is fundamentally true, always true in this present moment. And you realize that when you are here now, free of your story, you realize that you have a story but you are not your story. You are free of the “I” story, the storyteller, and you are free. Then you are awake and you realize, “wow, this feels absolutely the best.” This is the greatest realization of all to realize this. And so, you want to share it with people. Some people share it just with their neighbors or friends or family. Others, like us, are more interested in taking the message out there into the world.

Rick: Yeah, and perhaps you could elaborate on that. To my understanding, individual awakening, if you’ll pardon the oxymoron, is conducive to world transformation, not merely because awakened people might tend to share it overtly through giving talks or writing books and so on, but just because of what they are. Even if they just live a normal life and keep it a secret that they have had an awakening, they are going to radiate an influence. And if enough people were radiating such an influence, we would see a very different world.

Jim: Right. I remember Maharishi, your original teacher, talked about 1% of the world waking up.

Rick: Yeah, he even got down, at a certain point, to the square root of 1%, because he realized 1% wasn’t happening. But I think actually it is happening these days. There seems to be some sort of epidemic taking place, as evidenced by this show and all the people I have to interview and all the people like yourself. In the 1950s you wouldn’t have seen anything like this. There was Yogananda and there were a couple of things, but there really wasn’t much in the world, in the national collective consciousness.

Jim: Right. Yeah, I know a man, a friend of mine, who was in the Yogananda organization for years and eventually left in disillusion, because it promised self-realization, but he wasn’t self-realized.

Rick: The person, your friend, wasn’t?

Jim: Yeah, right. He worked in that organization for many years and then he met me and we began having non-dual discussions, dialogues, and he had an awakening, and now he’s off and running on his own.

Rick: Oh, good. That’s good.

Jim: And he is teaching.

Rick: Yeah. Well, I think people come into this life at different stages of development, and I know people who have been self-realized since childhood, and I know others who have been meditating for 45 years and aren’t self-realized. So, we all have a different row to hoe. But, getting back to one of the points you brought up in my introduction to your book, you think that 20 years is too long a time to spend, that it really can be shortened down to 9 months, 3 years, or something along those lines.

Jim: Exactly. Definitely, some people need 9 months, others a year or so. When you really focus on this work, when you really want to wake up, you have to have an urgency, an inner drive to awaken. That has got to be there, I think. And some people wake up spontaneously, like Eckhart Tolle, or Byron Katie. They weren’t even seeking it, but it happens. So, what I’ve learned in this world is anything can happen.

Rick: Yeah. Of course, in their cases, they had sort of bottomed out. Byron Katie was in a halfway house or some kind of rehabilitation house, and Eckhart Tolle was on the verge of suicide. They had somehow bottomed out and bounced up. But as you say, it can happen so many different ways.

Jim: Yeah, there is an endless variety of ways it can happen.

Rick: Yeah. But what is it you do to cut 20 years down to 9 months or 2 years? How are you able to cut short what for most people is a decades-long process?

Jim: By the degree of presence I bring to my work, by the degree of focus on what is essential, what must be seen essentially. You must see that you are not your story. So, I take real-life examples. When I am working with an individual, I ask them where they are suffering, where they are not yet free. I keep bringing them back to that, and they get free. There is no longer an issue for them in that area. So, where you are not free now, where you are not free now. And again, where you are not free, where you are not free, until suddenly they realize, at some point.

Rick: So, you dig right to the core of it.

Jim: Right, to the underlying core. And in most cases, it usually dates back to early childhood trauma. They’re still identifying with this “I,” this “me” that was abandoned, neglected, abused, didn’t feel wanted. And when they see that, the more they see that clearly. And I have little practices like self-forgiveness and being with a person as if you’re afraid of your father or you’re afraid of your mother, being with them even though they are now long dead, inviting them into your meditation, look into their eyes and being with the fear that comes up until you can see their eyes with compassion and kindness. You see that they are suffering because they were abused as a young child. And so, I help them see all that.

Rick: So, you were with Jean Klein for about 11 years, but by your current standards are quicker than that. So, I’m sure you don’t want to compare yourself in that way with Jean Klein, but in a way, you’re doing something that gets right to the core of it more quickly than whatever he was doing.

Jim: Right. Well, he was always teaching the direct path, right? The direct path is right here, right now. And so, each student of his who is teaching now has found their own way of doing that, presenting that teaching. My teaching is really helping people see that they are not this, or they have a story, but they are not their story. They are always, always this aware, conscious person who is present right now. And there is a lot of silence in my dialogues with people, a lot of connection, just pure connection on a being-to-being level, even on Skype, there is a lot of silence. One person I worked with recently, he talked about being a longtime meditator. Maybe you know him, you know his name, he has done TM for 30 years, a guy in his 60s, but he never quite felt free, never realized true freedom. And he had many moments of freedom and he knew his true nature. He had many experiences of his true nature, his ease and bliss and harmony. But there was this chronic constant ball of unhappiness in his stomach, as he described it, which was sometimes more intense than others. So, as he explored his story, it turns out that he had a problem with his sister. He didn’t like her. They had a conflict. And so, he went more deeply into that. And as he went more deeply into that, and he became more forgiving and was seeing more clearly, “wow, I do have this issue with my sister.” Just having seen it is freeing, seeing is freeing. And the more deeply you look at something, the area where you are stuck, that you have a problem with, the more free you are of it. And the more you relax, you feel more present. And then eventually he realized he had totally forgiven his sister. He no longer had an issue with her and that ball of unhappiness was basically gone.

Rick: Wow, interesting. So, there is a psychotherapeutic quality to what you are doing with people. How long did it take you to determine that this issue with his sister was important? Did it come right up?

Jim: It came up in the first few sessions. And then, it took a few more sessions. He had a series of 10 sessions with me. I’ve done a lot of psychotherapy myself in the past. Before I woke up, I remember doing psychotherapy, we were working with a psychotherapist on my relationship with my second wife. I actually had experience of working with a psychotherapist and I was exploring whether I wanted to divorce my second wife, which I ultimately did. And I was studying with Jean Klein and absorbing his teaching. Then suddenly, I found myself crying in the midst of a psychotherapy session at the thought of leaving my wife. And then I had this experience, I shifted back my awareness and I was able to observe myself crying. I, as consciousness, was able to observe Jim Dreaver, the character, crying and weeping. And that was a moment of epiphany because I realized, “wow, I’m not my story then, I’m not my tears. I am the consciousness in which the tears in the story appear and disappear.” That was an illuminating moment in my journey.

Rick: Yeah, a little bit of a shift in topic, but you mentioned it has been about 20 years since your awakening and we have talked about residues and working through residues as they come up. If you look back over the last 20 years, is there something much more refined or more rich or complete, in some way, about your natural state now than there was, let’s say, a week after your awakening? Has it continued to evolve in some way?

Jim: Absolutely.

Rick: Can you describe that?

Jim: Absolutely. It’s deeper, more mature, richer, more clean, more clear, fewer words, but the words are more right on. More embodiment, I would say, more embodiment.

Rick: Yeah. Would it be true to say that, as far as your innermost true nature is concerned, that can’t really change because it is non-changing in its nature. But as you just used the word embodiment, the embodiment of it, the living of it, the expression of it through your mind, body, senses, intellect, words, all those things, that there is plenty of room for continued improvement or refinement in those dimensions.

Jim: Absolutely, yeah. Right, it is. It is more embodied, it’s expressed more cleanly, more impeccably, and I’m sure that will continue to refine and evolve, but the knowing of my true nature, which is being my true nature, once you know yourself as consciousness, you know yourself as the universe. That is the realization. You are the universe expressing through these eyes, just as everybody else is the universe expressing through their eyes. If everybody realized they were the universe expressing through their eyes, feeling with their heart, sensing with their body, listening with their ears, then we would have a world which would be truly, universally harmonious, cooperative, working together to solve the problems of living, the challenges of living.

Rick: Yeah, I hear people say that, who use that expression, “I am the universe,” but, to my mind, it is as if the universe is a manifest thing. There are planets and stars and galaxies and all that stuff, and so, are you somehow saying that you are all those cosmic events and bodies expressing through this human body, or do you really mean more like universal awareness?

Jim: Exactly, exactly.

Rick: That expresses through this body as it manifests as the moon or as the sun or as it expresses through the antelope or whatever.

Jim: Yeah, thank you for that correction. I will bring that to my attention. Yes, I am the universal awareness. We are the universal awareness of consciousness. And once you know yourself as the universe, an important part of my teaching is that once you realize your true nature, you realize you are bigger than anything that can happen to you, even your own death. That is how you can be at peace with it, even the worst pain, you are bigger than that. As universal awareness, you are infinite. You’re right, the universe is infinite, vast.

Rick: Yeah, I think that is important. You read stories of people who have had NDEs, near-death experiences, and generally speaking, after having had such an experience, they are not morbid about it, but they look forward to death because they realize it is not the end of the story and it’s actually a beautiful thing, not a scary thing. This essential nature of what I am cannot be exterminated. So, what a much nicer way to live than in a state of, “Oh, well, I’ve only got 10 years left and then I’m going to utterly cease to exist.”

Jim: It is a nicer story, I agree.

Rick: Yeah.

Jim: But it is still a story, right? I mean, I write about the subject of death in my new book. I write about the subject of death in the end of the story, beginning of life too. We have heard many stories of what happens after we die, right? Reincarnation, a golden light, a tunnel where you meet your loved ones who have passed over, and these are all nice stories. You can choose whatever story you want to believe, but ultimately when you are truly free, you let go of the story and you are just here now, and you live here now. You are always living in this moment here now.

Rick: Yeah, so I agree that those are stories. They may be true stories. Maybe that stuff does happen after you die and so on, but it is not by virtue of believing in those stories that you are going to get any real freedom from fear. It is by actually experientially knowing yourself to be that which is beyond change, right?

Jim: Right, exactly. Beyond change. That is the key. What does not change? There was a website, it used to be called nevernothere.com.

Rick: Oh yeah, Richard Miller.

Jim: Yeah, the last I heard, he was in Thailand living with a much younger Thai woman. Anyway, so never not here describes perfectly what enlightenment is. Enlightenment is awakening to what is never not here, which is awareness of the consciousness we are. Everything else comes and goes. Everything else changes. Everything.

Rick: Yeah. The Gita says, “The unreal has no being. The real never ceases to be.”

Jim: Yeah, beautiful.

Rick: And there is a tendency for people to say, well, I’ve heard you say in your book or maybe in your talks, if you look within, you cannot actually find any little nugget of a personal identity that is in there, like a puppeteer pulling strings. And there is a whole group actually which leads people through a process where they see that, and then they kind of proclaim the person to be liberated because they have seen that they cannot find any personal entity inside. Personally, I think there is a bit more to it than just going through an intellectual process, but there are also people who reject the notion of reincarnation and so on because they say that for that to be a real phenomenon there would have to be an entity which would move from one body to the next. And yet all the ancient traditions, or most of them say that, well, that is actually what happens. So personally, I do not see an incompatibility between those different perspectives. I think it is a matter of where you take your stand, but I have said enough now, let’s let you respond.

Jim: Yeah, so I personally think I would choose a story, reincarnation as a story, because I’ve actually had two experiences of reincarnation before I woke up.

Rick: Past life things?

Jim: Yeah, right. Very powerful, very real. I was led through a neurotic regression about 40 years ago, and I experienced two past lives which made perfect sense of things I was struggling with in this life. So, the fact is that as a human being we incarnate, right? I have one child, and now I have a stepdaughter. And so, when a male and a female come together and make love and they…

Rick: Have children.

Jim: Have children. Then that is incarnation. Once you wake up, you realize there is no person who incarnates. It is just physical incarnation, biological incarnation, which has gone on since the beginning of human history. So that continues. When this body dies, when Jim Dreaver dies, he will live on through my son. This energy was kind of me and was Dreaver-like, right? My son bears some resemblance to me and to his mother, and he got his own unique patterns.

Rick: There may be more to it than that, though. As we were saying earlier on, that you have an ego, but you are not your ego. There is an “I” sense that you have, and in Sanskrit they call it the “jiva,” that there is some subtle entity, some subtle body that outlives the physical body and actually takes birth in a new one, as you experienced past lives when you were regressed. And so, I do not think that is incompatible with saying that is not ultimately what you are, that jiva that reincarnates. You are ultimately the universal awareness as we were discussing a few minutes ago, it is just a matter of being a little bit more multidimensional about it. And actually, the woman I interviewed last week, Aisha Salem, says that most of her instruction, and she is really quite a profound person, has been from Tibetan Buddhist masters who died hundreds and even thousands of years ago, who are somehow living on some level, intervening and guiding people on this plane of existence. So, I don’t want to get too esoteric on us here, but I am open to those kinds of possibilities. There is a tendency with some people to just brush them all away and say, “No, that is all just imagination.”

Jim: Yeah, you know, we live in a world where there is this multiplicity of dimensions and experiences, and the more awake and free you are, the more you are open to everything.

Rick: Yeah.

Jim: So, take ego, for example. A little bit of the Jim Dreaver ego is in my son Adam Dreaver. Because of the ego patterns, maybe that is how it carries through.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. Well Christ said, “The sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons,” or some such thing.

Jim: Yeah, right, right, exactly.

Rick: I actually had experiences on long meditation courses of experiencing my parents within me so vividly, it is as if the whole flavor of their personality was seen within my own makeup, and I was working through that and dwelling on it and all.

Jim: Right, right. My father was a great snooker player and loved to play poker, and my son is now a professional poker player amongst other things. And I was good at poker too, and at snooker when I was younger, but I was looking for the thing that I wanted to do most. I just always wanted to find the one thing that I could excel at and focus on that. I could do many other good things well, but I wanted to find what I excelled at, and this is what I’m doing now. So, this question of the gambling lineage is there too.

Rick: The family dharma.

Jim: Yeah, exactly. I am sure my father’s father was probably the same.

Rick: Interesting. Alright, so your book and your story begin your life. I just wanted to quickly breeze through the chapters. I have read about half of it. Every week I have a new book and I get as far as I can through each one, and I was really enjoying this one. So, if we just read the chapter titles, and you interrupt me if you feel like there is something in that chapter that we have not talked about yet that you would like to elaborate on a little bit.

Jim: Okay.

Rick: Okay, so, “Introduction to the Practice of Freedom,” chapter 1, “Be present with your experience,” and you mentioned the practice of meditation. Chapter 2, “Notice the Story,” we’ve talked about that quite a bit. Chapter 3, “See the Truth.” Chapter 4, “Questioning this Me,” and in it, there is the practice of self-enquiry and the practice of freeing. Chapter 5, “Awakening to Freedom,” chapter 6, “The Power of Love.”

Jim: Okay.

Rick: Okay, good.

Jim: Let’s discuss love. So, I have a saying, “Awareness without love is dry and empty. Love without awareness is messy and emotional.”

Rick: Nice.

Jim: “When the two come together, we dance in freedom, joy, and harmony.”

Rick: That’s beautiful. Did you write that?

Jim: Yeah, I wrote that.

Rick: Very nice.

Jim: So, this is the dimension that Tanya, my sweetheart, has brought into my life. She has brought the love dimension, because I have always been intellectual, detached, my psychological makeup was kind of stand-offish. She has really brought this dimension into my life, a whole dimension of love and beauty. She is the most loving person I have ever met, and so it is great. I have really opened up to this dimension of love, and love is what it is all about. Human relationship is about love and kindness and generosity and compassion. And so, awareness, as I see it, the more aware we are, the more present we are, the more our heart opens. The more free we are of our story, the more our heart opens to love and to all those wonderful warm and juicy things. Warm and cuddly, as I describe it. I have never been a particularly warm and cuddly person myself, but my God, I love to cuddle with Tanya.

Rick: That’s great. I have been thinking about what I might talk about at the Science and Nonduality Conference in the fall. And when you think of the title “Science and Nonduality,” both of those have, or could have, a rather dry, heartless connotation. You think of the scientists with the pens and the pocket protector and the glasses, and there have even been a lot of nondual teachers who are kind of emotionless and flat, and yet the greatest scientists, like Einstein and Niels Bohr and others, were these deep mystics, who had really almost a religious appreciation or a mystical appreciation for the universe and whatever intelligence is governing it. And also, the greatest leaders in the nondual field, people like Ramana, Shankara, and Nisargadatta, were great devotees, as well as being these brilliant, clear intellects who wrote devotional poetry and sang devotional songs and all kinds of stuff. So, there is definitely that dimension, and I have noticed that it develops a little bit sequentially sometimes, where people will be in a stage which is flat and nondual but without a whole lot of heart, and then the heart thing will begin to dawn.

I just want to read a brief thing here. Adyashanti and my friend Francis Bennett are going to be giving a talk up in San Rafael towards the end of March, and from the excerpt announcing that talk, they say, “This postmodern Western movement of nondual spirituality may be in the process of a second-wave expression, which may perhaps be more heart-centered than the first. That is, Adya and Francis will consider together a more devotional and integrative based spirituality that is more appreciative of embodied human values and that is more open to an orientation of service and social justice in a world in crisis.” So, I see that trend happening in the so-called nondual community, where there is a kind of a heartsyness that is beginning to bubble up more and more.

Jim: Yeah, beautiful. That sounds like a beautiful event.

Rick: Yeah, you can probably go onto either Adyashanti’s or Francis’ website and you will see an announcement of it. I think it is on March 26 or so, up in Santa Rosa. And of course, if you are watching our interview two years from now, forget about it. This is 2015. There will be other things. All right, so what more would you like to say about love? I kind of cut you off and started talking a lot.

Jim: Well, one of my favorite quotes is from Ramakrishna, actually. “The mind will get you into the courtyard of the beloved, but only the heart will allow you to enter the bedroom.”

Rick: Nice. Well, that is kind of like what we are saying here, isn’t it?

Jim: Yes, it is.

Rick: Yeah, that there is an initial awakening that may have something to do with the mind. In fact, speaking of Adya again, regarding awakening, he always spoke in terms of head, heart, and gut.

Jim: Right.

Rick: Nice.

Jim: Yeah, so that is really the emphasis of my new book, because of the energy of love that Tanya has brought to my life and helped me awaken to. But in my journey, I had to become free in order for my heart to open.

Rick: I think most people do. I think if there is not that foundation of deep freedom, then, as they say, trying to rise up in great waves of love is like a small pond trying to rise up in great waves. It cannot really do it. It just stirs up the mud at the bottom. You need to be an ocean for the tidal waves to really start to rise.

Jim: Right, so along those lines I say now that once you have found freedom, what is there to do but to love and to serve?

Rick: Beautiful. Which is another great point, I mean, to love and to serve. Do you have the sense in your own life that you have become more and more like an instrument of the Divine, if we want to use that word. You went through a preparatory stage and then you reached a certain degree of realization, and now it is as if you have given your life over to some greater purpose, through which, or on behalf of which, you are helping to raise world consciousness?

Jim: Yeah, in my own small way I am, yeah, I definitely feel that.

Rick: Yeah, I think a lot of people feel that who are working in a spiritual capacity like yours, that it is not about them obviously, and they are serving as a conduit or an instrument of some sort.

Jim: Yes, yeah, exactly, beautiful.

Rick: Nice. Okay, so in the love chapter there are some practices for forgiveness and practices for eye gazing, and then chapter 7 is Creating a New Story for your Life. Anything in there you want to touch upon?

Jim: Yes, I want to talk about that, because we still have a story, and as we get freer and freer, we get clearer and clearer, our mind actually becomes much quieter, because we are not telling ourselves any stories anymore. We have seen through this “I” who is the storyteller, so our mind is actually about 80% quieter. I have long periods with no thoughts at all. I am just here, now, present, aware, and then I will use my mind if I want to communicate or create something. And so, I write about the power of intention in my book, in the last chapter, the power of manifestation or intention.

Rick: In this book or the new book?

Jim: Yeah, yeah, this new book. This book, “The Endless Story of Being Alive.”

Rick: Oh yeah, “The Practice of Manifestation,” yeah.

Jim: So, the more we know we are not our minds, the more we can use our mind as a powerful tool. I remember Erich Schiffmann, a friend of mine from LA who is a well-known yoga teacher, he said to me once, about 30 years ago, “The mind is the ultimate toy. The mind is the ultimate toy.” And so, when we can really use that toy of the mind to create with and bring what we want and need into our lives. For example, I used the power of intention to heal myself from my strokes, right? When I had this realization that I don’t want to die, I had no fear, but do I want to live? And yes, I want to live. I remember my son, when he came to live with me in LA. I moved down to LA in 2008, and in 2011 he came and lived with me. He was a mess. He was addicted to weed. And he would drink alcohol, he would get drunk and violent, and I was the only one who could handle it because I was awake. And I love my son. So, I gave him space and eventually I realized that what he needed from me was to trust him. He is a computer programmer and now a professional poker player. And so, I learned to do that. I trusted him completely. And eventually, after a year, he got sober. He stopped his use of weed and alcohol. He has been sober now for two years, clean and sober. He did a complete 180 in his life. And I visualized that. I used the power of intention. I visualized my son. Every morning I would go out and do exercises for my stroke recovery, and I visualized my son healthy, happy, and successful. I did that for years, long before he moved in with me, because he was struggling before then. And then I dropped the visualization. I figured that the universe now knew what I wanted and it was clear, and I stopped visualizing. And then, low and behold, a year or two later, he got clean and sober. I visualized the same thing. I wanted to meet my perfect partner, my ideal partner, beautiful on the inside, beautiful on the outside, spiritual. Because I was single for years after the stroke. And so, I visualized meeting her. I had this visualization in mind, formed this intention, and I was doing my morning exercises. Then I would drop it. And then again, I finally dropped it all completely, because I figured the universe knew what I wanted. And then a couple of years later, I was teaching a workshop here in Santa Barbara in 2012, July 2012 and I met her. I met this beautiful, younger woman, Tanya. And we have been together now for almost three years.

Rick: How much younger is she, if you don’t mind my asking?

Jim: Twenty-five years younger.

Rick: Wow.

Jim: Yeah, yeah. She’s 43 and I’m 68. And we have a beautiful relationship. You know, we have our challenges, but the love between us is so deep that ultimately love conquers all, right? Love heals all wounds. Love heals all challenges.

Rick: That’s nice. And this is a good point, I think, because visualization and all is a popular thing. People put little post-it notes on their refrigerators, on their shaving mirrors, and so on. And there is that movie, The Secret. But what you are saying, I think, is a refinement of that idea, which would be good for people to understand, which is that it is not enough to just have the desire or the intention or the wish. It is important to entertain it from a much deeper level of awareness, from a liberated, realized state. It has much greater potency than if you just entertain it from some agitated, bound, fear-based condition. It is as if you can think of the physical creation. The physical level of this book has a certain weight to it. I could drop it or something. The chemical or molecular level has more power latent in it. I could burn it and it would release a lot of energy. The atomic level could probably, you know, fuel the entire United States for a year if we could release all that energy. So subtler levels are more powerful, and what you are suggesting is that, having had this realization 20 years ago, now when you visualize something, it is from a deeper level. The arrow flies a lot further because you have pulled it back on the bow, you know? And also, I think dropping is important, because, as you say, the universe got the idea. “All right, I know you need a partner, so I got the message. If you could drop it, we will take care of it.”

Jim: That is beautifully said, Rick, beautifully said. I couldn’t have said it better myself. That is the essence of my Chapter 7, Creating a New Story for Your Life. You have more power, you are more focused, you have more intention. You know, Werner Erhard said back in the 70s, “You get what you intend.” So, the power of intention is extremely valuable, and that is how everything human-made, from the tiniest microchip to the biggest jumbo jet and everything in between, came, was born of an idea in someone’s mind, their intention. So, this is how to use the power of intention in a clean and clear and focused and very powerful way.

Rick: And incidentally, the idea of dropping the intention once you have entertained it harkens back to the Yoga Sutras where Patanjali talks about the process of sanyama, which is: you have an intention and then you just let it kind of fall back into samadhi, fall back into the self, and then the result comes forth. It’s not through doggedly hammering away at the intention, but by entertaining it and then just kind of transcending on it.

Jim: Beautifully, beautifully said.

Rick: Great, so we’ve gone through the chapters of this book and now you’ve written a new one, or you’re in the process of writing. So, do you want to give us a sneak peek about that one?

Jim: Well, the working title is “The Most Powerful Realization of All,” and it is really about the understanding that clears your mind, opens your heart, and frees you from suffering. It is the understanding that you are not your mind. You have a mind, but you are not your mind.

Rick: How does that differ from what you have been saying in this book?

Jim: It is the same thing, but just a deeper, clearer, more compelling way maybe. Maybe some people will be moved by End Your Story, Begin Your Life more. I’m a writer. I started as a writer. That is why I went to Vietnam. I wanted to be a novelist like Ernest Hemingway, and I started out writing novels. Then I had this health crisis, which set me on my spiritual path. So, I began writing books about man’s search for meaning, which is of course my own search for meaning in life. So, I’ve always been a writer. What a writer does is write books, right?

Rick: Good, and writers tend to evolve as they go along and get better at it, and go deeper into it, and so on. So that’s great.

Jim: Right, and particularly if they are on the path of awakening.

Rick: Yeah, right.

Jim: A lot of novelists, like Ernest Hemingway for example, were not on the path of awakening, and he self-destructed.

Rick: Yeah, but those who were, like the American transcendentalists and people like that, there is always a new horizon and a deeper level that you can touch upon.

Jim: Right, and speaking of new horizons, the more awake we are, the freer we are of our story, the more we live in the present here now, and the more we realize that every moment is new, every moment is new.

Rick: Yeah, good. Okay, so on a practical note, what are the various ways in which people can engage with you? Most of the people are going to be living far away from where you live. You mentioned Skype conversations. You travel to Australia and New Zealand, as you said in my introduction. If people are interested, but they happen to be living in Czechoslovakia or somewhere like that, what should they do?

Jim: Well, they should email me from my website, and then I’m going to be doing an online satsang series starting shortly.

Rick: A live streaming kind of thing?

Jim: Exactly, exactly. And maybe audio, I would like to do video, but I am not sure whether that would work better or not. I don’t know, but I will do an online satsang probably once a week, so people can get on to that. I would like that to be a worldwide thing. Of course, it can be on the internet.

Rick: Yeah, great. So, you’ll announce that on your website, I presume?

Jim: I will, I will.

Rick: Okay, and do you have a thing on your website where people can put in their email address and be notified of such things?

Jim: Exactly, yeah.

Rick: Okay. Plus, there are quite a few hours of YouTube videos and audios and videos on your website that people can listen to. And there is your book, and I’ll be linking to that and any other books you have written from your page on www.batgap.com. I suppose that pretty much covers it, right?

Jim: Yeah.

Rick: Okay, so yeah, on your page on www.batgap.com, I’ll link to it. It’s just www.jimdreaver.com, D-R-E-A-V-E-R, right? But I’ll link to that in case somebody’s driving their car and they forget what it is, go there. And I’ll also link to the Amazon pages of Jim’s book. Anything else in particular that we should announce before we get to more general things and conclude?

Jim: Yeah.

Rick: That about covers it?

Jim: Yeah, that about covers it, Rick. I just want to say, you did a great job, brother.

Rick: Oh, thank you. I love doing this.

Jim: You’re doing a great job.

Rick: I love doing it. As you were saying, you do what you love and that is what you are best at, the thing you love. I also do have a day job, but this is where I really feel that all the cylinders start to fire.

Jim: I can see you. You’re shining now. You are radiating.

Rick: Yeah, it really has that effect. I come out from these interviews and my wife says, “Wow, you look like you have been out jogging or something. You have color in your face.” It really wakes you up, especially talking to somebody like you. So let me just make a few concluding remarks. This obviously is part of an ongoing series, this interview. There are about 280 of them now and there will continue to be others. So, if you would like to be notified every time a new one is posted, go to www.batgap.com and sign up for the email notification thing. You can also subscribe on YouTube and YouTube will notify you when a new video goes up. There is an audio podcast of this, so you can listen on your iPod or whatever. There is a page which gives you the options for signing up for that. There is a “Donate” button which we rely upon people clicking in order to be able to do this and continue to expand it. There is … what else is there? That’s about it. Explore the menus on BatGap. The past interviews are archived in various ways. There is an announcement for the future interviews and so on, but poke around. It’s not too complicated. You’ll get it. So, thanks a lot, Jim. I really appreciate having had the opportunity to talk with you.

Jim: Thank you, Rick.

Rick: Yeah. Next week I’m going to do an interview with a local friend of mine who has a very interesting story and the week after that is Hameed Ali or A.H. Almaas.

Jim: Oh, sure. I know him.

Rick: Yeah. I’ll be interviewing him for the second time next week. I really enjoy talking to him. So, thank you everyone. Thank you, Jim, and we will see you next time.

Jim: Thank you.