Joan Tollifson Interview

Summary:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week is Joan Tollifson. I’ll start by reading a little bio that Joan sent me and then we’ll get right into it. Joan writes and talks about the ever-changing, ever-present aliveness of here/now, which is obvious, unavoidable, and impossible to doubt. She has an affinity with Advaita, Buddhism, and radical non-duality, but she belongs to no tradition or lineage. Her main teacher was Toni Packer, but Joan has also studied with several Buddhist teachers and has spent time with a number of Advaita and non-dual teachers. She has been holding meetings on non-duality since 1996. In her books and meetings, Joan invites people to explore their actual present moment experience and to question the deep-seated assumption that we are each an independent entity encapsulated inside a separate body-mind looking out at an alien world. Instead, we may discover that everything is one seamless, boundless, unbroken whole in which there are no separate parts. Joan also invites people to question the deep-seated assumption that we are in control of our lives, or should be, and she points to the realization that everything is one choiceless happening. Joan is known for her honesty and sense of humor. Okay, we’re going to put her to the test on that one.

Joan: Here.

Rick: You have a nice laugh, so that’s a start. So, there are a couple of things that jumped out at me in this little intro that I just read. One is that you wrote about the ever-changing, ever-present aliveness. Sometimes people refer to the never-changing quality of that, and yet you use the word ever-changing, so why that?

Joan: Well, I like to say ever-changing, ever-present. The ever-changing, ever-present here-now, because I notice that both aspects are true. This present moment, this, we are always here and it’s always now. So, this still point of here-now is ever-present, but it’s also ever-changing because what’s appearing here is nothing but change and movement.

Rick: Correct. I see. Okay, so that’s why you throw both in there, it’s paradoxical. Good. I was thinking about listening to some of your talks during the past week and thinking about how I would start this, and another thing caught my eye. You say down here, “Question the assumption that we’re each an independent entity encapsulated in a separate body-mind looking out in an alien world.” Somehow when I listened to you, it got me thinking along those lines, and I have some thoughts that I want to kind of question you about. But we could perhaps move in that direction by just asking you to define a couple of common words that we’re likely to use in this interview and that everyone is using, just so that we have an understanding of whether we’re both using those words in the same way and whether we’re using them in the way that people listening might be understanding them. And those words are, you know, ‘awake’ or ‘awakening’, people say, “I’ve had an awakening,” and also the term ‘enlightenment’. How would you define those terms?

Joan: Well, first of all, just to notice that they are words. Yes. And they point to something that’s not a word, but they are words, and they get used by different people in many different ways. So, ‘awake’, I would say ‘awake’ is just on the natural state, what’s here right now, this awakeness that’s here, undeniably here right now, and by that I just mean this present moment experiencing, this aliveness, this awareness, this awakeness, that is undeniable. It’s present, whether we’re lost in a train of thought, or whether we’re in a state of open, clear presence, so to speak, it’s this awakeness that’s just the natural nature of here-now.

Rick: That all beings have, including dogs and cats and

Joan: The notion of all beings having it, that is a thought.

Rick: Yeah

Joan: What I’m talking about is not something that we have, it’s what we are.

Rick: It’s just what we are, right.

Joan: Then within that, there’s the, one of the things that’s showing up here is the appearance of separate organisms, separate people, each of whom presumably, have their own unique point of view, their own individual movie, no two of which are completely the same. But the awakeness, the awareness, for me, is the wholeness of being, the unicity, the undividedness, the natural – it’s the nature of what is.

Rick: The essential nature of what is.

Joan: Mm-hmm.

Rick: And, but if you walk up, I’m sorry, go ahead.

Joan: Well, we have the idea that, I am an individual unit of consciousness encased inside this separate body-mind that was born into this outside world and lives here for a while, struggling to survive, and then one day dies and is not here anymore. And, you know, hopefully, we think maybe my unit of consciousness will go on into another life or to heaven or something like that. But that whole picture, that takes thought and imagination. Our actual experience is simply this awakeness that’s right here, right now. Every night in deep sleep, everything perceivable and conceivable disappears. And there’s no observer left to worry about whether I’m dead or not. So, the fear of death is all sort of based on this notion of being this encapsulated unit, and that’s really, I would say, the basis of our suffering.

Rick: And so, do you yourself no longer perceive or regard yourself as an encapsulated unit?

Joan: Well, that very question, of course, again, sort of recreates the illusory problem that there’s me who either still has this illusion or me who has now broken out of this illusion. That’s where we get into the question about enlightenment, because often people think of enlightenment as ‘me’ crossing some line in the sand where ‘I’ will no longer be stuck in this illusion. ‘I’ will be free and ‘I’ will be experiencing myself as boundless consciousness or something, while all the other people, the seekers, are still lost in their illusory dream. I would say that enlightenment is seeing through that whole picture. It’s waking up from that whole picture. Therefore, it’s not Joan who wakes up from that picture, because that’s what it’s waking up from. So, it’s just seeing, it’s noticing right now that there really is no such thing as Joan or Rick.

We’ve learned that I am Joan, and you are Rick and all this, but that we had to learn that. Our actual experience, if we come back to what’s most basic and most obvious and most undeniable right now, is simply this awakeness, this presence, this awareness. And, until we think, there isn’t really a Joan in the picture. There might be a visual image of what I call hands and legs. Or, if I look in the mirror, there’s a visual image of something that I’ve learned to call Joan. But that appears here in the same way that the furniture appears here and the clouds appear here. And, if I go into my actual experience of this so-called Joan right now, this body or whatever, if we close our eyes and just tune into our actual experience, we can’t really even find this body. We can find sensations, but we can’t really find a place where I end, and the world out there begins. We can’t really find a boundary between inside and outside. We can think of a boundary, but we can’t actually find it in our experience. So, our actual experience is this one whole seamless picture. Yes, there are different shapes and colors, but it’s one whole seamless picture, one whole seamless movie. So, the notion that Joan wakes up is the illusion that is being seen through. For me, that waking up happens now. It’s not something that happened to Joan three years ago or might happen to Joan three years in the future. In fact, it doesn’t even really happen. It’s just noticing what’s always already so.

Does the story or the sense of being encapsulated Joan still happen here? Yes, it does. Part of that is functionally necessary. I mean, if you’re going to cut up a carrot for your lunch, you have to be able to distinguish between yourself and the carrot or you’re going to be in trouble. Yeah. In order to plan this interview, we had to be able to distinguish between Joan and Rick or we would not have been able to organize this. So, if I couldn’t distinguish between myself and my computer, I wouldn’t be able to operate it. So, there’s a certain sense of being Joan that’s functionally necessary and that appears as needed. And there’s a dysfunctional, I would call it dysfunctional, sense of being Joan that also appears sometimes when I feel defensive or hurt. You know, someone has insulted me and I feel that sense of contraction and defensiveness and anger or whatever. In that moment, there’s obviously some kind of identification as Joan, as this entity. So, yes, that happens sometimes.

Are there people for whom it never happens? I haven’t met such a person. They may exist. I don’t really care whether they exist or not. I can only deal with what’s right here. As far as I’m concerned, even if that experience hadn’t happened for the last 30 years, I would still have no way of knowing whether it might not happen again in the next five minutes. So, to say this is gone for good for me seems like delusion again. It seems like, again, buying into the story of me. It doesn’t really matter whether it happens or not. It’s just another happening in this movie of waking life.

Rick: Well, has the frequency or intensity of it diminished over the years as a result of all your involvement with spiritual things or whatever? I mean, your tendency to get upset or defensive or whatnot. Looking back 30 years, perhaps that happened a lot more often and a lot more blindingly than it happens now?

Joan: Yeah, although, just to notice that in order to say that, we have to go into thought and imagination and memory and we have to construct the story of Joan moving through time. And so, it’s a fictional story, however relatively true it might be. It’s a fictional story. So, yes, I could say, you know, this happens less frequently, but that might be just because I’ve gotten older and wiser and, you know, it might have nothing to do with the meditation and the spiritual work and therapy.

Rick: Yeah, it might not, but you do tend to see perhaps a greater likelihood or frequency of people for whom this sort of, development or experience or whatever word you want to use takes place, who are involved in spiritual things as opposed to just hanging out on the couch drinking beers every day for decades. It does seem to have its value in that way. And we can safely assume that anything we’re saying, about Joan or Rick or anything else, sure, on some level it’s totally a story. I mean, that’s a given. But in order to actually have a conversation, you do have to use these concepts. If we just want to bring it down to the level of pure being, we can just sit here with our eyes closed for an hour and a half and it won’t be much of an interview.

Joan: But I think the danger here is that, I think there are things that can be really, helpful, relatively speaking, like meditation and so on, but the danger in sort of making a cause and effect relationship is that, then it’s like we set it up where you need to do something to get this. Or this is the desired goal and we’re going to try to get there. That way of looking at it perpetuates the very illusion that we’re waking up from, which is that, we’re trying to get somewhere else because actually, wherever we go, here we are; this is it. This is it. So, it seems to me that we’re very fixated in this culture anyway on self-improvement and trying to fix ourselves and feeling like there’s something dreadfully wrong with us and, of course, it does seem like there’s a lot of things wrong with the world. And so, to just notice that right now, this is it, this is all there is.

Rick: I think life is very paradoxical and talking about this stuff is very paradoxical because almost anything you say, you can say the opposite and kind of see where that has its significance also. And neither one is sort of like the absolute, complete truth that you can completely rest on, without the other kind of having to say, “Wait a minute, how about me too?” That also.

Joan: Yeah, we can’t ever capture reality, whatever this is, right now, right here. We can’t capture it in words.

Rick: No.

Joan: Words can describe it, they can point to it, they can praise it and celebrate it, but they can’t capture it. And, no matter how we try to say this, it’s never quite right.

Rick: Right, you can only sort of point the finger at the moon, but it’s not going to be the moon.

Joan: Yeah, so people say different things that sometimes sound like they are completely opposite and contradictory, but they may both be true.

Rick: Yeah, so, on the one hand, there’s nothing that can be done to bring about awakening. On the other hand, there are things that one can do that apparently are conducive to awakening happening. And again, it doesn’t happen, but then again, it does. I mean, you can just go back and forth and back and forth. I mean, there’s this Zen Roshi, you probably know his name, I forget, someone told me, but he said, “Awakening may be an accident, but spiritual practice can make your accident prone.” And you know, harkening back to what you were saying earlier about an encapsulated being kind of looking out on an alien world, or like this individual thinking, “Oh, I’m going to be such a better individual when I get enlightened,” and so on. It’s kind of like the wave thinking, “Oh man, I’m going to be such a cool wave when I become oceany,” or something like that, whereas in fact, what ends up shifting and happening is, the ocean realizes, “Wait a minute, I’m this totality, I thought I was just a wave. I’m something which contains all waves.”

Joan: Yeah, and every wave is perfectly what it is, so it’s like you can’t really separate, you know, again, in our conceptualization, we always want to divide things up, that’s what thought does. And then we separate good and evil, and light and dark, and enlightenment and delusion, and then we want to be sure that ‘I’ get to the sunny side of the street forever, and have only enlightenment and clarity, and get rid of all the messy, bad stuff. And you can’t really pull them apart that way. The fact that I spent a number of years in my early youth as an alcoholic and a drug addict is just as much a part, I feel, of whatever insight has come about as years of meditation. You can’t pull them apart, but I wouldn’t advocate that anyone go and drink heavily or take drugs, and I don’t advocate that anyone go and meditate either. I certainly wouldn’t discourage it, and I sometimes invite people to explore the present moment or just be aware of the present moment in a way that could be described as meditation, or I invite people to just be silent. But you know, I don’t advocate any kind of path because what I’m really pointing to is that the totality is already here, here now is already here, and whatever is happening is all one whole happening, and everything that happens is an expression of that.

Rick: And yet you yourself were on a number of paths for a number of years, a lot of Zen, and sat with this Toni Packer and some other things that you engaged in. Yet you would say to someone who is considering doing some similar things, like, “Don’t bother, it’s all right here, now”?

Joan: No, I wouldn’t say, “Don’t bother.” I would neither say, “Don’t bother,” or “Go out and meditate,” but it’s more just trusting how life unfolds, and it unfolds for different people in different ways. Looking back on my life, one moment there was doing drugs and getting drunk, another moment there was doing Zen, very strict Zen practice, another moment there was being with Toni Packer, whose approach was very open and non-regimented and explorative, and another moment there was going off to listen to radical non-dual teachers who said, “There is nothing to do, this is it,” and another moment it was being in satsang with somebody and gazing into somebody’s eyes. So, you know, and then the mind afterwards comes in and says, “Well, this caused that,” but that’s some kind of overlay. So it’s, as I see it, this whole movement of life isn’t really divided up into me and you and enlightenment and delusion. I mean, these are words and they point to something and they’re functionally useful. So, like enlightenment to me is seeing the wholeness of everything, seeing that everything is myself, there is only this one being. Delusion is thinking that I’m encapsulated inside this body-mind, I’m a separate little entity and I have to, you know, defend Joan. But this totality of here and now, this totality, whatever word we want to call it, includes both enlightenment and delusion. It includes…

Rick: Light and dark, fast and slow, hot and cold, big and small, you know, all the parallels.

Joan: Exactly, and there isn’t really an owner of any of these things. You know, the idea that ‘I’ am deluded or ‘I’ am enlightened is the mistake that enlightenment sees through. Delusion is the idea that ‘I’ am deluded and certainly that idea can pop up sometimes. There can be a thought, ‘I’ve ruined my whole life’. ‘I’m a failure’ and in that moment, if that thought seems real in that moment, that’s delusion. But it’s just another movement in the show. There’s sort of, it’s a, a kind of a, sometimes we think, oh my goodness, that’s delusion. I have to get rid of that, so that I can be enlightened and never have that kind of a thought and then I’ll be okay. But that thought again is delusion.

Rick: Well, speaking of this totality and we’ve alluded to it in various terms in the last few minutes, the wholeness, the totality, being, whatever we want to call it. I think, some people of course would argue from a strict materialistic point of view that there is no totality or being or innate intelligence to life. It’s all just a function of brain chemistry and when we die, we die and that’s the end of it. But most people listening to this show would sort of resonate with the idea that there’s, some presence, awareness, being, some attribute the quality of intelligence to it and it’s apparently given rise to this whole vast, complex universe where, you can take a pinpoint at arm’s length with a Hubble telescope and see 10,000 galaxies in it and just, or you can go down to the microscopic level and see so much intricate complexity and fascinating mechanisms of the way things work. And I like to sort of think, and maybe this is just a concept, but it makes sense to me, that we human beings are, and all beings really, but especially when you get to the human level, we’re the instrumentality through which that intelligence knows itself or experiences itself. We’re like the sense organs of the infinite, so to speak. Are you with me so far? I mean, do you want to differ from that line of thinking or?

Joan: No, I can resonate with that. I mean, but just to notice that however we understand what’s going on here, it is a conceptual picture.

Rick: Yeah, well we’re talking, therefore we’re involved in concepts.

Joan: Right, but I mean, it’s, to me this is such a crucial thing to keep pointing out because, people sort of say, oh yeah, of course, the map isn’t the territory, the word water is not water, I know that. But actually, that’s exactly where we get caught again and again, is that these conceptual pictures start to seem very real and then, pretty soon we’re really worried, like well what is going to happen to me if I fall off the edge of the earth. Which is just a false concept. So, this, when I say totality, unfortunately as soon as we use a word, it kind of makes it seem like we’re talking about something. And what we’re actually talking about is not something.

In Buddhism, they often use the word emptiness, by which, as I understand it, they don’t mean a big empty room, they mean that everything is empty of itself. Everything is empty of solidity, empty of form. They say in Buddhism that a complete understanding of impermanence is that there’s no such thing, there’s no impermanence. Because our first understanding of impermanence is that there’s all these separate objects and they’re all impermanent. There’s me and I’m impermanent. But when you really see that there’s nothing that actually forms as a solid, persisting, independent thing, there’s only flux and change, then there is nothing to be impermanent. Our picture is I am this little boat that I’m steering down the water course of life, rather than there’s nothing but the water course, there’s nothing but flow. So, we start to conceptualize what’s going on here and we can think of it as consciousness or we can think of it as subatomic particles or we can think of it as a dream or we get all these different pictures, conceptual pictures, but right now ‘what is this?’ We don’t really know and there’s no word that really captures this, whatever this is.

Rick: Well a physicist would concur with what you just said basically, they take the water glass, break it down, go deeper and deeper, you get down to a point where it’s all just sort of virtual fluctuations in the vacuum state or something, and there is no water glass, there is no water, there are no molecules or atoms or anything else, those are all sort of more concretized levels of reality which fundamentally have no substance or no reality to them.

Joan: Yeah, so like we have an idea that there is like a brain and then we think, well now is consciousness, just to see how we have, you have to have these ideas of separate things to come up with this. There is a brain, now is consciousness in the brain or is consciousness here before the brain? Will consciousness still be here after my brain is dead or won’t it? All these questions sort of presume that these things actually exist as separate independent things and when you see that it’s all one whole happening, there is no question about will I survive death because there is no one here to survive or not survive. Is consciousness in my brain or will it be here if my brain is like the TV that’s picking it up and dispersing it? all those questions again are based on accepting our conceptual divisions of things as real.

Rick: Well that kind of gets to what I was leading toward there a few minutes ago, which is that, if we really take it down to the most fundamental level, either from the perspective of physics or these more metaphysical perspectives, both fields of thinking would concur that ultimately, as you say, there is no individual or individuality or anything else, it’s all just one sea of whatever. But then there is that paradox where things appear to become concrete and to individuate, you can’t ignore that. As you say, if you are going to cut carrots you are going to cut your finger off if you ignore that. In Sanskrit they have this useful term which is ‘mithya’, which means ‘dependent reality’, and they use the example of a pot, where you have a pot and it looks like a pot, you can turn it into a drum, you can hold water in it, you can put beans in it, whatever, but if you get right down to it, it’s only clay, there is no pot, it’s just clay, you know, so how can you say there is a pot? On the level of clay there is no pot, but on the level of apparent reality there is a functional thing that we call a pot. And so, I mean, that illustration is used to kind of clarify what we are trying to say here which is that, sure, if you want to take it to its ultimate, this conversation isn’t taking place, the universe never manifested, it’s all just pure void, as the Buddhists like to put it, or fullness as the Hindus like to put it, nothing ever happened. But if you want to have a conversation, then you have to somehow compromise or concede a little bit with relative so-called realities in order to actually have words, have thoughts, distinguish between you and I, and so forth. But you can kind of keep that in a larger perspective and not buy into it too seriously.

Joan: Yeah, and that seems to be, what I do in my talks and books and stuff is to sort of keep reminding us of the larger picture. That just seems to be the interest that the universe is manifesting here. But as you say, it’s not to deny relative reality. There’s that great story in Zen about, it has a lot of different versions, but it’s something like, before I took up Zen, there were mountains and valleys, and then after I started the practice of Zen, there were no mountains and no valleys, and then with enlightenment, there were mountains and valleys. It’s like the middle stage, the sort of, is the stage where you’ve realized the absolute, you’ve realized that it’s all one, you’ve realized that there’s no separation. Sometimes people think, well that’s all there is, that it’s all one. But in the last stage of that story, there’s mountains and valleys again. Now is that the same as the first stage? I would say, the first stage is our ordinary view, in which we think that mountains and valleys are totally separate, independent things that actually exist and persist through time as independent, continuous things, separate from each other. The final view, there are mountains and valleys, but we see them as one whole happening, as inseparable aspects of one seamless whole happening. And we recognize that the mountain is nothing but continuous change, it’s moving. I mean, Dogen realized that centuries ago. He said the mountains are moving before physics, and it’s true. Even things that seem very solid are actually moving. So, there is certainly the appearance of someone named Joan who has progressed over a lifetime. It’s kind of like when we listen to music, if we just had the note that’s in front of us right now, if we just had that one note, it wouldn’t mean anything. It wouldn’t make any sense. There would be no beauty to it, there would be no music. It depends on the context, the memory of the notes that came before. And yet, each note happened now, when it happened, and the memory of it and the context is now. And so, it all happens now, but there’s a sense of it unfolding in time, and we certainly aren’t going to deny the past, but it’s actually not back there somewhere, the way we think it is, any more than anything is out there somewhere. Everything is right here, right now. And so, there is this sense, if you’re watching a movie and all you have is the frame that’s right in front of you this instant, it wouldn’t make any sense, there would be no movie. So again, there’s this sense of a life story that’s unfolded in time, but it all happens here now, and when you actually go looking for the past, where is 20-year-old Joan? She’s gone. She’s gone.

Rick: She’s totally stoned and she’s just having this dream.

Joan: She’s back there somewhere.

Rick: Whoa, isn’t this wild? What a long, strange trip it’s been.

Joan: Woah, yeah.

Rick: Well, this kind of gets back to this point of paradox. I think if a person kind of gloms on in a fundamentalist way to, there is no story, nothing is happening, yada, yada, it tends to be kind of imbalanced in a way. My wife is saying, how could you have the show. And this thing of Dogen, the mountains are there, and yet it’s different than the early perception perhaps that all there was, was mountains. He’s kind of passed through the emptiness phase and then realized that the reality involves mountains which at the same time aren’t mountains. A body which at the same time isn’t a body, a personality which at the same time. It’s like there’s this paradoxical simultaneous recognition of absolute and relative together and forming a wholeness that’s larger than the sum of its parts, as it were.

Joan: Clearly, in my opinion, some people do seem to get kind of stuck in the absolute view. They completely deny, “I’m not Joan, nothing is happening.”

Rick: Yeah, I mean I would say to them, “Hey, send me all your money then, because you apparently don’t need it.”

Joan: That’s interesting because there’s an old story in Advaita about Shankara, this great Advaita master. I’ve heard different versions of the story, but basically something along the lines of, he’s always saying that it’s all one or it’s all a dream or something like that. So, his students decide to challenge him and see if he really believes this. They get on an elephant, they charge him with an elephant, and he jumps out of the way and they say, “Aha! You don’t really think it’s all a dream. You don’t think it’s all one.” And he said, “Well no, my jumping out of the way is part of the dream. My jumping out of the way is part of the one, is an aspect of the one.” And so, it’s like the relative, I would say the absolute includes the relative, it just doesn’t get stuck in it, you know. But it doesn’t deny it, it’s not anti, it’s not against it.

Rick: Yeah, I mean the ocean still has waves even though it realizes it’s an ocean. It doesn’t just become this sort of crystal clear, placid.

Joan: Right. People often get the idea that enlightenment means that you could charge me with an elephant and I’m just going to stand there and let myself get flattened because there’s no me here. That, as far as I’m concerned, is a complete misunderstanding of enlightenment.

Rick: Yeah, I mean if you think of the Gita, there’s all these verses in, the second or third chapter where Lord Krishna is saying how there’s really no author of action, the gunas of nature take care of it and the realized person says, “I do not act at all.” And yet he’s telling Arjuna, “Get out there and fight this battle, do this intense action, but do it from the standpoint of recognizing that you are not the actor.” So, I mean, boy, in a way, some people kind of dismiss traditions these days, but there’s so many amazing stories in the traditional literature that really stretch you this way and that and kind of inculcate the appreciation of the paradoxical nature of life. Just when you think you have a cozy niche to cuddle up in, they hit you with something else that shows you the complete opposite.

Joan: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of people who criticize things like Zen or meditation. The things they say about it often indicate to me that whatever version of it they encountered is really not the version I encountered. And sometimes we mishear what a teacher is saying to us or what some author whose dad in a book is saying to us and then years later we hear it again and we revisit it and we hear it in a whole new way. So, Toni Packer would say to people things like, “Can we see that that’s just a thought?” She would ask it as a question, “Can we see that that’s just a thought?” And then people in their minds would often translate that into, “You should see that this is just a thought.” And Toni was from Germany so she had a German accent, so it would be like with a German accent.

Rick: It sounds very authoritative.

Joan: Yeah, “You should do this, and you’re bad if you’re not doing this.”

Rick: We have ways of making you see that this is just a thought.

Joan: But that was not what she actually said. And that’s what often happens is that people feed back to me sometimes what they think I said and it’s got this subtle little twist in it that’s actually completely changing it. So, I do think that there is tremendous beauty in a lot of these traditions and in Zen and Advaita and Buddhism.

Rick: Yeah, I mean these guys really paid their dues and it’s not to say that we need to live in the past, but there’s certainly a lot of wisdom to be gleaned if you know how to interpret it. On this point of uncertainty or paradox, there’s a nice saying from the Bible where Christ says, “For the foxes have their holes and the birds have their nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” My understanding or interpretation of that is just that he was beyond conceptual cubbyholes. There was no niche in which you can sort of say, “I’ve arrived, and this is the perspective.” It’s funny because people often feel like enlightenment or awakening is going to be a state of certainty, like I really know the truth about things now, but really it seems it’s more of a floating in a, wasn’t that in Zen they have this sort of ‘don’t know mind’ phrase or something like that? It’s a floating in lack of certainty.

Joan: It’s more of a letting go.

Rick: Yeah, letting go, precisely. That’s what Adyashanti was saying when I interviewed him just the other day. He said even in his own life there’s a continual letting go. It’s like he doesn’t even sometimes realize what he’s letting go until after it’s gone, like the Joni Mitchell song, and then he realizes, “Whoa, that’s gone.”

Joan: Yeah, because it’s the recognition that there’s an openness here that’s actually the nature of here – this openness, this awakeness, is not knowing. That doesn’t mean not knowing in the sense of being ignorant of the facts or something, but it’s not knowing in the sense of not grasping, not clinging;

Rick: beautiful.

Joan: not that seeking mind that’s always trying to get it, trying to have some experience or get some understanding or figure it all out. It’s the absence of that; it’s the relaxing of that. It’s like a fist that’s been very tightly closed suddenly just relaxing and opening.

Rick: I think ‘relaxing’ is an important word there.

Joan: And paradoxically, what happens in this enlightenment or opening is the realization that this openness is so open and so all-inclusive that it even includes contraction, you know, that enlightenment is the recognition that everything is included, everything is myself, even delusion is an aspect of this, so.

Rick: But there is a tendency, isn’t there, for human beings to want to contract and to grasp and to seek certainty in uncertain things. It’s like this fundamentalism is so insidious and so universal really, it shows up in so many ways, I mean religion and politics and neo-Advaita and all kinds of things where we abhor uncertainty as a species, it almost seems. We really want to sort of feel some security in a fixed vantage point. And ironically, that makes us less secure, because fixed vantage points are always subject to being upturned, being refuted.

Joan: It seems like it’s a survival function, that in a certain area of life it works very well. When we’re trying to figure out how to take the bus from here to there, it works very well. But when we’re looking for the nature of life or love or happiness or freedom, it doesn’t work.

Rick: Yeah. I used to be a student of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi for many years, and he had this nice little talk he gave where he talked about how routine work kills the genius in man. He said that on the one hand, you need sort of practical, focused, repetitive things in order to accomplish anything, in order to do your job or whatever, but on the other hand he said it sort of kills the unbounded creative dimension. The whole point of the lecture was that both need to be cultivated so that one can remain in one’s unbounded status while yet focusing sharply and doing what needs to be done in the practical world. So, I don’t know if we’ve gotten too conceptual on you there, but it seems to pertain to the point.

Joan: Yeah, I wouldn’t say that.

Rick: Yeah, okay. Well yeah, so like taking a bus for instance, you can’t just sort of wander out in the street and just sort of take whatever looks like a bus and wherever it’s going, you have to be very practical. Well, where is this bus going and is it going to get me there on time? And be quite specific and analytical about it.

Joan: Yeah, no, there certainly are both things that are part of the functioning of life, the ability to concentrate on something very narrow and the expansive openness that, relaxing into all of it, are both aspects of life.

Rick: It almost seems though that unless there is some kind of recourse to or access to expansiveness, like you were always saying, you say in your lectures you’re always reminding people back to the sort of unconditioned or universal quality of things. But unless there is recourse to that, one gets more and more habituated, constricted or conditioned to the point where there is level after level of conditioning, very deep and very impenetrable, and not necessarily easily seen through in an instant, even though one would like to have that happen. But it does take time sometimes for people to kind of work back through all that and for things to be let go.

Joan: Well again, it takes time in a sense, and we can construct a story of that, but it’s actually immediate. There isn’t really anything to let go. There is no one to let go. It’s already happening. This movement of life or this infinite self-realization, whatever we want to call it, is already happening; it already is. We have a sort of an impulse to try to control it or manage it, which is also part of what’s happening.

Rick: But if someone had come to you at the nadir of your drug and alcohol days and said to you, “Joan, there’s nothing to let go. It’s already happening”, do you think you would have snapped out of it? Wasn’t there a heaviness or a depth of confusion that wasn’t just going to go in an instant?

Joan: Well, interestingly, it did seem to go in an instant.

Rick: Oh really? Okay. Tell me about it.

Joan: Well, you can make up a story in which there’s a process, but it seemed like at a certain moment, I can remember trying to stop a few times, but not successfully and then suddenly, things just got really really bad and there was a stopping. I went into therapy at that point and I could say, I sobered up through therapy and I don’t know if I would have stayed sober without therapy at that point, but it seemed like it was just a switch that happened, rather instantly and I can’t really pin down what happened.

Rick: But then you had years of therapy and Zen practice.

Joan: No only an year of therapy,

Rick: Yea that, your zen practice and all your spiritual things you did, which undoubtedly had a culturing influence. You didn’t go from day one stopping alcoholism to where you are now. I know this is very progressive sounding and path sounding and individual sounding, but again, getting back to the paradox point. I had a similar story to yours, maybe not as dramatic, but I was really into drugs for about a year and one night I was sitting there on acid and my mind was just all whirling around, bouncing off the walls and I picked up a Zen book to kind of focus my mind on something wholesome and I was reading ‘Zen Flesh, Zen Bones’, you remember that little book?

Joan: Paul Reps, yeah.

Rick: Right, great little book, and as I read it, it dawned upon me, these guys are serious and I’m just screwing around and if I keep doing this, I’m going to live a miserable life. So, I thought that’s it, I’m going to stop taking drugs, I’m going to learn meditation and I’ll see what happens, and that to me was a definite watershed moment, a real turning point. But then having practiced meditation for 44 years, I’m a dramatically different person than I was at that point. It wasn’t just aging, there’s been an influence, and yet there was something in my experience at that point, some element or dimension that’s exactly as it is now, the same thing, nothing changes at that level of life. It’s both ends.

Joan: Yeah, it’s always now and everything that happened, happened here. It’s like in this still point of here and now, the whole thing. We conceptualize Rick who went through this process, or Joan who went through this process, but that’s a conceptualization and actually there is no Joan apart from the whole rest of the universe. It’s one whole movement, and I am not interested in prescribing a progressive path to people, or saying, this is what you should do. I am interested in pointing to the unfolding that’s already happening, that can’t be avoided, that happens by itself. For you and me, what unfolded was stopping drugs or alcohol and meditating. For various people that I drank with in the bar, that isn’t what happened, some of them are dead.

Rick: Right, me too.

Joan: But that’s all part of this one whole seamless movement.

Rick: Yeah, there’s no denying that, I wouldn’t dispute that for a second, it’s all part of the big picture. I’m sorry, go ahead.

Joan: That to me, is the most liberating realization. We have this picture that I’m trying to get to a place where I’ve gotten rid of all my neurosis, all my bad habits, all my addictions, all my compulsions, all sense of egoic, encapsulated Joan defensiveness, all of that is completely gone and all that’s left is this wonderful, pure, radiant Joan. There’s very much of a me in that picture, radiant Joan who is just, exuding enlightenment and clarity and love in every moment, and everyone loves her and she’s always happy.

Rick: Might as well throw in ‘wealthy’ while you’re at it.

Joan: And wealthy. It’s so liberating to really see that none of these ‘neurotic things’ have to fall away. That’s not to say that I’m condoning bad behavior or that I’m promoting it, but just that nothing has to be different than how it is, nothing has to fall away. Tt’s already here, this seamless happening, this unicity, this being, whatever you want to call it, is already here. It’s what is, and for me that has been very liberating. Seeing that there’s really no owner of what’s happening. It’s not happening to me, really just getting that.

I often say, there’s different cities have different weather, there’s more cloudy weather and more thunderstorms in Chicago than there are in Los Angeles. And we don’t take that personally, that’s just the weather. We understand that it’s just different conditions. Likewise, some body-minds have more stormy weather, more tendency towards addiction or whatever. A lot of these things we used to think of as being moral or spiritual failures – the more that we learn about neuroscience and whatnot, the more we find out how much genetics and neurochemistry and the condition of the brain and all kinds of things play into it. In fact, the whole universe plays into everything. You could say that everything is the cause and effect of everything else. There’s no owner of what’s happening here, there’s no, there’s no thinker of my thoughts, there’s no doer of my actions, there’s no chooser who’s making my choices. My choices are unfolding. They’re part of this whole happening and they happen by themselves.

Rick: No, that’s all good.

Joan: Because the picture that there’s me in here, is again, this discreet little unit of consciousness encased in this body.

Rick: Little puppeteer.

Joan: Yeah, me, who’s steering my little boat through life, is tremendously, there’s so much pressure in that, to do it right and to get somewhere and it’s never good enough and to realize that you’re already the ocean. That’s all there is. There’s all kinds of different waves and the waves are always changing and it’s all the movement of the ocean.

Rick: It’s a great relief.

Joan: It’s a great relief.

Rick: Yeah, it takes a load off your shoulders.

Joan: It’s a huge relief, yeah. I think one of the pitfalls in progressive practices is that, and I’m not saying this is their intention and certainly the best teachers of those kinds of things certainly see through this and point to seeing through this, but the pitfall in any kind of progressive path is that it kind of reinforces or can reinforce that sense that there’s me who’s meditating and I have to, I have to meditate correctly, and I have to meditate enough and maybe if I meditated more and oh, maybe if I went to another retreat and if I went to a few more satsangs and if I meditated another few hours every day and did a few more body scans and this and that, maybe I could finally be okay.

Rick: Yeah, I hear you. I mean, I live in a community where there’s like 3-4,000 people meditating and I’m not officially part of that organization anymore, but there’s very much in the psychology this ‘carrot dangling about, 5 feet in front of you’ mentality where if I just get on the next course, or if I get this technique, or if I could just afford some Ayurveda, or take these herbs, or live in a house that faces east, or all these things are going to make a big difference and someday I’ll be enlightened. And then there’s this edifice built up of what enlightenment is like, which the bar is raised so ridiculously high as to include the ability to levitate, and so people think, “Well, I’m nowhere near that, so I’m pretty much going to give up hope for this lifetime.” It’s definitely a progressive path to the max, and I completely concur with the points you just made. I think that on the flip side there can be the non-progressive path, way too much emphasis to the point where there’s no appreciation for the potential value of some of these things that can be conducive to awakening or traditional practices and whatnot. I think there can be an overemphasis on that, and to my mind anyway, the healthiest approach is a balanced thing where the best of both worlds and without the pitfalls of either, if that balance can be found.

Joan: Well, you’ll love me then because that’s kind of what I do is that balance.

Rick: Good, I love you already.

Joan: But I find that there’s a real place for the extremes also.

Rick: That’s true. Everything has its place.

Joan: Everything has its place.

Rick: All is well and wisely put.

Joan: Like those teachers who just say those uncompromising, radical, non-dual teachers who just say meditation is crap. Actually, very few of them say that. I can’t think of one who’s actually said that. In fact, they all say meditation happens if it happens, at least the ones I’m familiar with. But they certainly would poo-poo. They frequently say things like, “You meditated for 30 years, and it got you nowhere,” and just kind of put it down and emphasize that this is already it and nothing needs to happen. And kind of make mock and deride progressive paths in some way or other. But there’s a place for that, which is that it really cuts that.

Rick: Yeah, you’re right.

Joan: And when you compromise on it, which I do, when you can sort of see both sides and you don’t hold that firm line, you compromise and you’re willing to sort of go in the other direction. There’s a certain kind of sword cut that you can deliver with that kind of uncompromising approach. For some people, it may be really appropriate to be on a progressive path where they really believe that it’s really important that they show up every day for zazen and they go to their one or two sesshins a year and that they have dokusan with their teacher x number of times. It seems to me that we have kind of a desire to find the one true expression and to get it pinned down. This is it; this is the one true expression that has it all. But actually, every expression is an aspect of this seamless whole and it all works together. It’s like my left eye sees a little differently from my right eye and you put them together and it’s my whole vision. It’s like we’re all this whole vision, and so it’s like there’s a place for everything. Speaking personally, I feel like all of those different things have been helpful for me at different moments.

Rick: Yeah, I really appreciate you saying that. I was sort of guilty of violating my own little point there in saying that the balanced way is the best. You broadened my perspective just now, and I would broaden it further to say the fundamentalist Christians, the atheists, everybody else, just fine, doing what they’re doing. It’s right for them. Maybe it won’t be right for them in ten years, they’ll do something else, but all these little facets are part of one big jewel.

Joan: Yeah, it really is. It’s one whole happening and from the perspective of the universe, it’s all very inconsequential. Which doesn’t mean I don’t have my opinions about political things. I don’t want fundamentalist Christians dictating what goes into the textbooks or something, and I have a strong opinion about that. I don’t want evolution taught in the schools.

Rick: You mean creationism?

Joan: Yeah, creationism. Now someone will pick that out of this whole thing.

Rick: Yeah, they’ll cut that little bit.

Joan: “Joan said…”

Rick: Just don’t ever bother running for president, you’re cooked. You’re just saying you definitely have your own political philosophy and convictions about things. You haven’t become just a big ball of mush. You feel certain ways about certain things, but that’s just your expression, you’re probably going to say. That’s your particular flavor.

Joan: Exactly, I think some people have the idea that non-duality or enlightenment means that you don’t have any opinions anymore and you’re just fine with everything. I think that’s a false picture because there is a personality, there are opinions, there are preferences. It’s just seeing that there’s no one behind them, no one in control of them. It’s like we don’t choose what political views we have. I didn’t choose to be a progressive or something. In fact, years ago when I was in high school or grade school or something, I was for Barry Goldwater, I was like a young Republican.

Rick: Well, I think it’s a good thing you took all those drugs then.

Joan: Yeah, somewhere in there I switched, but it wasn’t like there was anyone in control. It’s just like we don’t choose our political views. Certain news sources I think are completely full of lies and other news sources feel reliable to me. There are other people who have exactly the opposite sense of what is reliable and what isn’t. Do we choose that? No, it’s just kind of how we are by nature. And everything our sexual preferences, our political ideas, our opinions on things, it’s all happening choicelessly.

Rick: Yeah, this is interesting. I agree with you, not that it matters, but do you think there’s even one iota of choice? I mean is there like a little, are we like 100%, 99% choiceless, but there’s 1% where we have a little bit of volition and we can kind of steer the boat. Like if we’re going down a fast river and we pretty much have no choice but to do that, but we have a little bit of choice as to which way we steer our canoe within the course of that river.

Joan: Well, I think that we can’t put this ‘happening’ into words, correctly. So, whatever we say is a little bit wrong. So if we say there’s no choice or there’s choice, they’re both offs in some way. There’s certainly the appearance of choice. I mean, it appears that I chose to say yes to your invitation to do this interview, and it appears that you chose to do an interview with me, and it appears that I chose to wear this shirt and that we chose to turn on these lights. So, there’s the appearance of making choices. You could call that rowing the boat or steering the boat, but how did all those choices happen? When I look right now at where these words are coming from, I don’t find anyone back there, who’s authoring them. I find them just coming out. Even if I were reading a prepared speech that I had written last night, it would have just come out last night and the writing it down would have just happened. Whatever went into you deciding to ask me to do this just came together and happened. Similarly, I get the email and for whatever reason, I say yes. When you look at where that choice is coming from, and then I often invite people to explore because it doesn’t help to try to think this out philosophically. I like to invite people to just watch, as you make choices. From the smallest choices, like you’re sitting down and you decide to get up, to something bigger like you decide to take a job or get married or something.

Rick: sell your house;

Joan: Sell your house. Just watch as that choice unfolds and see if you can catch the decisive moment or if you can find anyone in charge of it. What’s discovered here is that there’s nobody running the show. It’s all happening. There’s certainly the appearance that if I want lunch, I have to go in and do something. I can’t just sit here and say there’s no choice, I’ll wait for Grace to provide me with lunch. I’ll probably be hungry. But when I look at what prompts me to do that and how it all unfolds, I don’t find any central chooser in there who’s in control. In fact, this is what neuroscience is finding more and more. I just read a really interesting book called Incognito, which is by a neuroscientist. He uses that term, a team of rivals, that is in that book, that Obama used for his character. That team of rivals is in some history book.

Rick: Abe Lincoln, he got it from Abe Lincoln.

Joan: or Doris

Rick: Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Joan: Yea, anyway. This neuroscientist who wrote the book uses it for the brain, that the brain is a team of rivals. Even on that level, they haven’t found any sort of entity in there who’s calling the shots. So, to understand that it’s all happening by itself, as one whole happening, choicelessly, is again, very freeing and liberating. You really see that if I can’t do anything other than exactly what I’m doing, I can’t want anything other than what I’m wanting or thinking. The same is true for other people. If we really got this, our whole legal system, our political world, it’s all based on the idea that everyone has free choice. If we really got that someone committed murder and didn’t have a choice, we might still lock them up to protect the community, but we wouldn’t feel like, “Oh, we’re going to punish this person because they should have done better.” So that’s very liberating, but if this is misunderstood, and we sort of slip into this thing where the mind thinks, “Aha, not having a choice, that’s the correct spiritual position.”

Rick: “So I’ll be wishy washy”

Joan: “And so I am going to really try hard not to do it, not to be choosing anything. So, let’s see, well I can’t go to the retreat because that would be a decision and that would be doing something.” And all of that, if you look, is also just happening.

Rick: Or one might say, “Well, there’s really nobody doing anything and therefore it doesn’t matter if I rob this bank because it’s not really me doing it.” It’s happening and just as good as not robbing the bank. There’s a bit of research I thought you were actually going to refer to, which is, when you started to mention research, which is that they’ve discovered that the impulse to say move your arm or something appears in the brain like several seconds before you actually, have the conscious impulse, the conscious desire to move the arm.

Joan: Yeah, and there are these fascinating experiments too where they have some people who, the two sides of their brain have been divided for one reason or another. And so, I’ll get this wrong because of my memory of it, but it’s something like the person, they show them flash cards that one side of the brain sees, like the flash card will say something like, “Get up and go to the refrigerator and get a Coke.” And the person will go and do that and then they’ll come back, and they won’t be able to remember because of the division that they did that because they saw it was on a flash card. And the researchers will say, “Why did you go and get a Coke?” And the person will say, “I was thirsty.” The brain constructs.

Rick: They won’t remember that they had that instruction.

Joan: Yeah, it doesn’t really know why it did it, but it constructs what seems like a plausible explanation and believes its own explanation. When you really start to look closely at how things are unfolding, you really can begin to see that it’s like in addiction. We say, “Well, I want to quit smoking, but I can’t.” But, at some moments we want to quit smoking and then at another moment, wanting to smoke overpowers wanting to quit smoking. The wanting to smoke at that moment is stronger. Now, can we choose what we want? It doesn’t seem like it. I mean, it’s just all of a sudden there’s an overpowering urge and sometimes there’s an ability to just sit down in meditation and feel the sensations of that urge and sometimes that will work, and we don’t light up the cigarette. Or for some people, that works completely. I mean, I quit smoking in 1974 and have never lit up again. And I have friends who have tried to quit again and again and they just can’t. My father was like that. He was dying of emphysema, and he was still running across the street to get cigarettes from the lady across the street every now and then.

Rick: Yeah, conditioning is very powerful. Well, this whole discussion actually kind of points to an interesting point, which is that we think that we’re in control of our world and we think that we’ve sort of got it all together and so on, but really, we are all like little, tiny people on the Universe. Even from a scientific perspective, the fraction of the total spectrum of light that we’re able to see and the fraction of anything we’re able to perceive through any of our senses, is such a minuscule amount compared to the totality that, it really does seem silly in that light to give such predominance to the individual authorship. Are you still there, your picture froze.

Joan: Yeah, I’m here.

Rick: Good. To my mind it kind of bolsters your point that there really is no one running the show and it helps to bring about that sort of relaxation into what is. I’m not saying it as well as you do, I’m kind of fumbling here, but you know what I’m trying to say?

Joan: Yeah, it’s just all happening by itself.

Rick: Yeah, things happen automatically.

Joan: It’s all one whole happening, including the thought that I have to do this. And the thought creates this mirage in me, like if I say something and then a thought pops up, you shouldn’t have said that. That thought kind of creates the mirage of me who chose to say that and could have said something better. The thought just pops up and the mirage just pops up, the whole thing happens by itself.

Rick: So, we just had a little technical glitch, Joan and I, and we probably just edited that out of this recording, but I was getting very vague and rambling and trying to make some point about authorship of action, and perhaps Joan can come back and clarify what I was trying to say.

Joan: Well, I think we were sort of seeing that there was no one doing anything, that it’s one whole happening.

Rick: That’s it.

Joan: But there’s still the appearance of making choices. So, when I was teaching grammar at a college a few years ago, I don’t get up in front of my students and say, there’s no you, there’s no way you can, you’re either going to learn this or you’re not. Of course, I say this is what you have to learn, this is what’s in the homework for tonight, this is what you should go home and do. Because that’s how this is functioning, but when I really look back to see where all of those things are coming from, they’re coming from the whole universe, they’re coming from totality, they’re not, there’s no Joan in there. Whether my students are capable of doing the assignment or not is also the movement of life itself. If I really see that, and if they fail to do the assignment, I’ll still give them an F, but I’ll be more compassionate, I’ll have more understanding that the fact that they went home and didn’t do the assignment was the only possible thing that could’ve happened for them at that moment. Doesn’t mean I might not urge them to do better next time, but again, that urging, if it happens, is just happening. And whether they can do that or not, is just happening.

Rick: Yeah, that’s very good. I really enjoy that. It helps me put things in perspective. I tend to get a little bit too judgmental sometimes about things, I see Sarah Palin on television and it’s like, “Argh!” People just do what they do.

Joan: Yeah, my and your response is also just happening. She’s just a movement of the universe and Rick’s anger at her, or Joan’s anger at her, is also just a movement of the universe.

Rick: Yeah, beautiful. Well, I really enjoyed this. I apologize if at times I kind of became a little long-winded trying to state certain points. That was just the movement of the universe too, I’m sure.

Joan: Yeah, no, I didn’t. You were great.

Rick: Thanks.

Joan: I really enjoyed talking with you.

Rick: Sometimes when I try to express an abstract point, my mind kind of becomes abstract and I kind of lose the focus of what I’m trying to say, you know, it’s a bit of a balancing act.

Joan: Well, it’s kind of interesting because when we’re trying to say something, we’re kind of working on this sort of conceptual map world, you know. And sometimes it just kind of disintegrates and it’s like we come to this place, which is like, “I don’t know what’s going on here”, which is really the truth.

Rick: Yeah, interesting thing. So, Joan lives out in Oregon. Do you give actual in-person satsangs or do you do stuff mostly on the phone or by books?

Joan: I do. I hold meetings here in Ashland and I do phone meetings with people and Skype meetings and write books.

Rick: Yeah, so I’ll be linking to your website from www.batgap.com and people can go there and I’m sure they can get in touch with you through that if they’d like to either come to a satsang or be in touch with you on phone or Skype. I will also link to your books in case they would like to read them. You probably have some kind of mailing list or something where you notify people.

Joan: I do, I have an email list that if people just send me an email they can get on the list and then I hardly ever send out any emails, but if I’m going on a tour, which I hardly ever do, or if I’m coming out with a new book, which I do have two new books coming out next year, then I send out an email and I let everyone know.

Rick: What are they going to be about?

Joan: One of them is about non-duality and it’s similar to my last book, which was a bunch of talks and dialogues about non-duality, but the new one is not in dialogue form and it’s much shorter. And it’s just sort of an attempt to put non-duality in a simple, concise way. And the other one, which I’m still finishing up, has more of my personal story in it, like my first two books, and it focuses a lot on death and aging, and non-duality.

Rick: And they’re coming out in a year or so, you say?

Joan: They’re supposed to both come out early in 2012.

Rick: Good, perhaps I’ll read them myself. Okay, so let’s conclude. I’ve been talking with Joan Tollifson and this is a little interview series called Buddha at the Gas Pump. I think Joan is number 86 in the series. And next week I will be interviewing a fellow named Krishna Gauci, who actually lives in Portland, not far from you.

Joan: Uh-huh. Well, it’s been really nice talking to you.

Rick: Yeah, it’s been great talking to you. I just want to say to people that have, depending on how you’re hearing this, you might be on YouTube or something, if you go to www.batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, you can see all the interviews there and sign up for a podcast if you wish. There’s a little discussion group there that springs up around each interview, people start talking about what was discussed and so on, so you can participate in that. If you like, you can get on my email list, which goes out about once a week, announcing new interviews as they’re posted. So, thank you for listening or watching, thank you Joan, and we’ll see you next week.

Joan: Okay.