Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. There have been over 330 of them now, and if you’re new to this, go to BATGAP.com and you’ll find them all organized and categorized under the “Past Interviews” menu. You’ll also find a “Donate” button, which I just always mention at the beginning, in case you don’t make it to the end of this interview, because we rely upon the support of appreciative viewers and listeners for our being able to do this. My guest today is Joey Lott. Here’s a little bio he sent me. Joey Lott is not a spiritual teacher. He’s not offering enlightenment, awakening, liberation, or any such carrot to keep you searching for something else. Instead, he’s just a fellow person who had the fortune to discover that the willingness to stop seeking for answers, for solutions to all kinds of imagined spiritual problems, reveals the peace of just being whatever is happening, which is all that is ever happening anyway. It’s not a glorious attainment. It’s not morally or spiritually elevated. It’s very mundane and often uncomfortable, exactly like your life now. Joey doesn’t do formal teaching. In an ever-changing manner, he does experiment by inviting others to join in a conversation and explore the assumptions that underlie suffering. So, thanks Joey for coming on.
Joey: I don’t think we have to do the interview now. That was great.
Rick: [laughing] That’s it. We’re done. Well, you know, here’s a funny story. I read the two books you sent me, cover to cover, although there were no covers because they were e-books, but I read them. And I hadn’t read the little note that you sent me, and I was thinking, “What am I going to do with this guy, because he seems very fundamentalist about not being fundamentalist and about not seeing things in a particular way, but he seems kind of like he sees things in a particular way.” And then I read your note and you said, “My views continue to change, as I think any real honest person’s views and writings will. I have no static dogmatic views, even though somewhat regrettably, when I reread some of the stuff I have written, it might sound as though I do.” And so I breathed a sigh of relief. And I also heard you say in one of the things you were writing that, “Here’s my view on this now, but who knows what it’s going to be five or ten years from now. It might be totally different.” So that’s the way I live my life. It’s not that I don’t have attitudes and perspectives and opinions and understandings and whatnot, but they’re always subject to revision.
Joey: Yeah, right. It seems like they have to be, otherwise I wouldn’t want to be locked in to having to live, basically live a lie, as far as I can tell. When I was really gung-ho about figuring it all out, I had a fantasy. It was a vague fantasy, but I kind of envisioned myself becoming enlightened and then I would do what I perceived other enlightened people did, which is have my own ashram with my own devotees and I would be the one that they would all adore. And now that’s … I mean at that time that sounded like a nice idea, now it sounds like hell. You couldn’t pay me to do that. There’s just no way.
Rick: Yeah, why do you suppose it was appealing then?
Joey: Well, I suspect because I was looking for something other than my life. I had a sense that I knew what my life was, it was something that I didn’t want, and this other story that I concocted, or it was a combination of concocting and something that I was sold by others, I thought, “Oh, that sounds better. That sounds like a much better option.” And at the time, I thought that that was how it worked. You had to choose something, you had to have a story, you had to have something that you called yourself and you stuck to it. You had to have an identity of some kind. And now it just doesn’t seem that way to me. I mean, you know, that might change of course, but at this point it doesn’t seem to me that I have any ability to latch on to a story and say, “That’s it, forever and ever.”
Rick: Well, you’ve got the hair and the beard worked out, all you need is adoring followers and you’re all set.
Joey: Right, yeah, I know.
Rick: Maybe you’ll gather a few from this interview.
Joey: Yeah, let’s hope not.
Rick: So, I take it from … well, the things that you’ve written, about 40 books, right? And they’re not all about spiritual stuff. I mean, you’ve written books about how to recover from Lyme disease, and books about diet, whether it’s okay to eat sugar, and all kinds of things. I just kind of glanced at them on Amazon. Are you a professional writer? Is that how you make your living?
Joey: I guess so, I guess so. I mean, I used to … I’m a hack, I guess. I dropped out of college, and it was during the dot-com boom. So, I just lucked into getting a job. I moved from Illinois out to California, got a job working as a computer programmer, even though I didn’t really know much at the time. I did fairly well at that, but I was always a hack at that. And then I got really sick, and I just realized, “I don’t want to do that anymore.” I wasn’t passionate about it. for a couple of years, I was so sick, I couldn’t really do anything and I would just … I could more or less lie around.
Rick: With Lyme disease?
Joey: Yeah, right. then after I started to regain some health, I had been wondering, “What am I going to do?” By that point, I had two kids, and basically had run out of money, we’d been living fairly frugally for a while. But, I was just trying to figure out, “What am I going to do?” And I just started writing. I should mention, I’d written before that, computer-related stuff. So I had a background in that. But you asked me if I’m a professional writer. I don’t know. I do make most of my income from writing, almost exclusively at this point.
Rick: Okay. At what point did the spiritual seeking kick in? Well, that’s an interesting question. I don’t know precisely. I can tell you, I remember when I was in college, I was miserable. Just unbelievably miserable, and that, I think, was the catalyst for really seeking. [laughs] Before that, it was amateur stuff, but then I became a professional seeker at that point.
Rick: Some people praise suffering in a way, not quite the right choice of words, but as an impetus, as a goad to get you moving, get you to realize that there is more to life than ordinarily meets the eye.
Joey: Well, that’s interesting because I don’t happen to feel that way. I don’t really have regrets, because I don’t really perceive that it could be other than what it is. It is the way it is. That said, I certainly don’t … if there was some magical power to be able to do it over again, I would not choose suffering. [laughs]
Rick: Right. This whole point about, “It is what it is, and life is what it is,” Let’s say you were back in college and you were suffering, and you and a friend were sitting there looking at a sunset or something, and you were totally suffering, and your friend was not in that state, and looking at the same sunset but feeling very happy and blissful. Obviously, our subjective state has something to do with the way we regard the world, does it not? I mean, you can’t just say that it is what I perceive it to be. It is for you, but it’s going to be something entirely different for the next guy.
Joey: Right, yeah, so I guess to clarify, when I say, “It is what it is,” I’m referring to the whole of it.
Rick: The totality.
Joey: So I’m not dividing it. Well, yeah, the totality, not in some hidden sense, not like there’s some totality outside of what is perceived, but just the totality of what’s happening right now, which is in conversation and socially, we divide that up. We say, I’m whacking the microphone, we say, “I’m perceiving it,” and then there’s what’s being perceived, and then it gives rise to the sense that, well, what’s being perceived is somehow this vast thing that maybe if I had a greater perception, a greater ability to perceive, I would perceive something greater or more than what’s perceived right now. But all I’m saying is just the simple sense of what’s happening, which is all that whole thing balled up together.
Rick: Yeah, well, I mean, we know from science, for instance, obviously that there is a lot more going on than we perceive. Our senses are very limited in their capacity to perceive the full range of the electromagnetic spectrum and so on and so forth. And if there are analogously, if there are deeper dimensions to consciousness, then perhaps we’re not experiencing the full range of those either. Or would you agree with that or no?
Joey: Well, it sounds nice. I mean, why not? I don’t have a problem with that. All I’m saying is that the assumption oftentimes, what I assumed, I should clarify, what I assumed and what I perceived was being told to me by those who claimed to be spiritually elevated, was that there was something I could do, if I just dedicated myself to it and tried hard enough, so that I could then achieve that greater perception. And to me, that was really the hell of it. And what I find is that that doesn’t actually seem to be true. It might be true. I’m not claiming that it’s not, but I can’t know that it’s true.
Rick: And that wasn’t true in your experience?
Joey: I don’t have any confirmation of its truth. That’s what I can say.
Rick: We’re going to play with that some more. So then what did you do? I got the sense that you went to see a lot of teachers, you read a lot of books, you tried a lot of things, you know, meditation, various drugs. You did everything you could possibly find to do. Give us some of the highs and lows of that if you feel they’re significant.
Joey: Well, meditation was probably the … in terms of a practice, that was the one that I was most committed to/addicted to.
Rick: What kind of meditation did you learn?
Joey: TM.
Rick: Oh, okay.
Joey: And I was very, very, very serious about it. The teacher who gave me my mantra and gave me the instruction, he said, “Just do 20 minutes twice a day.”
Rick: And you did two hours, right? [chuckles]
Joey: I would do anywhere between four and eight hours of meditation a day, for a couple of years –
Rick: Oph!
Joey: – and then it tapered off. [laughs] I couldn’t keep up that pace.
Rick: Yeah.
Joey: To be fair to TM, I mean, I’m very critical of TM, but to be fair, he did give a warning, “Don’t do that.”
Rick: Yeah. And just so you know, I was a TM teacher for 25 years. Yeah, and I’m not involved in it anymore, although I still meditate after a fashion. We used to go on long courses where we would intentionally do eight hours a day. And they were intense. You wouldn’t want to be doing that when you were in the midst of having to deal with any kind of worldly responsibilities. It just rather incapacitated you for being able to do anything other than that, while you’re in the midst of that kind of a situation. That’s part of the reason why they say 20 minutes twice a day.
Joey: Yeah, but that was the thing that I was most serious about in terms of a practice to try and get me out of suffering and get me to my fabled enlightenment.
Rick: Yeah.
Joey: Then, all kinds of other things thrown in. You know, I would pray. I took all of these to the same kind of extreme. I would pray for hours at a time. I would do yoga and the breath work, pranayama, and I would do long fasts and all kinds of things, trying to, somehow, get this whole thing under control.
Rick: Yeah, so you’re really an ardent seeker.
Joey: Yeah, I guess you could say that.
Rick: And you got no relief from any of that? It was all just ongoing suffering, or did you feel like you took a chunk out of it, through all the things you were doing, or certain things, more than others perhaps, had some effect?
Joey: There’s no way to really know, obviously. but if I’m going to tell a story about it, my story, the one that seems most accurate, a most accurate description of what happened is things got worse. [laughs] I mean, I would get momentary relief in meditation, for example. I would joke with other friends who were doing TM. I would say, “Let’s meditate.” And they would say, “Well, I don’t meditate. I do a sitting-up nap.” Because I would feel like the times when there would be the most relief, I couldn’t tell if I just dozed off. I thought maybe that’s what had happened.
Rick: Sleepotation, we call it.
Joey: Yeah, yeah. There was definitely something that kept me going, because there was a pull to it. I felt like maybe in those moments, there was a sense of relief. And it was a relief beyond what I got in my nighttime sleep. My nighttime sleep was often tortured because I would have these dreams about striving for enlightenment. (laughs) And I would think, oh, and I’d wake up in a sweat and I think there was some really important wisdom there. I have to hold on to that. I have to follow that. But in my meditation, there would be these moments where I would feel like maybe, maybe there was something, there was some kind of deeper relief, but it could have just been a nice nap. I couldn’t tell. That was what kept me going. It was outside of those moments things got worse. So that, of course, was the addictive cycle. I thought, well, I have to do more of this meditation because it’s the only time I get the relief.
Rick: Yeah. Interesting. And how were you able, if you were meditating like four to eight hours a day, how did you have time to do anything else? I mean, how were you raising kids or maybe that’s…
Joey: Oh, I didn’t have kids at that time.
Rick: You didn’t have kids at that time.
Joey: I was living by myself and I worked from home. I was… I billed at a very high rate. I was lucky in that I got paid extremely well because I was… you know, it’s a trick. I was seen as an authority because I’d written the books on the subject. And so I could walk into any place in the world, literally. I mean, not literally, but I would literally be hired and flown across the world to go work on jobs. And they’d pay me insane amounts of money. So I was making a lot of money and I would work… I don’t know. Some were saying eight and ten hours a day. The trick was I didn’t really do anything else and I didn’t sleep much. I’d go to bed at ten, but then I’d be up… because, you know, that’s the TM thing, right? You have to be in bed by ten and ten to two is the golden period.
Rick: When you catch the angel train.
Joey: Yeah. So I was in bed at ten to two, but then usually by three, four o’clock, I’d be awake and I couldn’t go back to sleep. I’d get up and I’d just start meditating.
Rick: Interesting. So I suppose we could… I don’t know if we want to pursue too much longer. Well, since you were in TM you have the concept of unstressing. Once you start meditating a lot, then stuff starts to sort of purge itself from your system. And that’s part of the reason why they say just do smaller amounts, because if you start doing hours and hours, that purging can become very intense and you can actually get destabilized. You can have psychotic breakdowns, even if you overdo it too much.
Joey: [laughing] Sure.
Rick: I guess I gather you experienced some stuff like that from…
Joey: Yeah, I’m still not well. But I wasn’t well before that, so I can’t say that.
Rick: So it’s just an old hat for you.
Joey: Yeah.
Rick: Well, that’s interesting. And it’s funny, when we talk about suffering, most people probably would define suffering in terms of external circumstances. “Well, I don’t have enough money,” and “I don’t have a relationship,” or “I have this or that health problem.” For you, I get the sense that it was more of an existential kind of thing, just a sort of inner unhappiness or dissatisfaction or disease or something, that you were trying to resolve. Is that correct?
Joey: Yeah, well, I mean…
Rick: A sense of lack.
Joey: I think it’s not a dual thing where it’s either/or, right? I think it’s both, because circumstances certainly were an influence. But yes, I think primarily my sense of suffering has long been, as long as I can remember, a sense of, “There’s just something that’s not right.”
Rick: Yeah.
Joey: “I don’t know what it is. I can’t ever figure it out.” I come up with lots of stories to try and explain it. But fundamentally, just a sense of, “Something’s not right.”
Rick: Yeah. But now, it seems, judging from everything I’ve read, you’ve somehow relaxed out of that. You don’t beat yourself up over that feeling anymore. You’ve reached a sort of acceptance.
Joey: Yeah, I think that’s true. But the difficulty in … that’s the simple way of explaining it. And I’m happy to just say that. But the trouble is, what I’ve learned … I had this delusion, at first, when I first started writing about this stuff. It was such a huge relief for me, in my life, that I thought, “Well, this is going to be a … ”
Rick: For everybody?
Joey: “It’s going to be huge! People are going to be relaxing everywhere.” So I wrote these books, and then I started getting feedback from people. That was surprising to me, because the feedback was … not always, Sometimes people gave me feedback that was in line with what I had hoped. But more frequently, it was, “You’re my new guru.”
Rick: Yeah, right. [laughs]
Joey: [laughs] that was not at all what I was looking for. And so, what I’ve discovered is that it’s dangerous to say anything, because as soon as I say anything, then people are going to oftentimes hear that in a twisted way, to support their suffering, which is unfortunate. So, like I said, I’m happy to leave it at that. Somehow, I don’t suffer in the same way. But then that seems to be … if I leave it at that, that contributes to more suffering for other people. >
Rick: So it’s hard to make a universal prescription out of it that’s actually going to help other people.
Joey: Yeah, it seems like there’s not a way to do that.
Rick: Well, we haven’t quite nailed this yet, but do you have any idea? I know a lot of things, you’re happy to just say, “I don’t know,” but do you have any idea what caused you to reach a greater sense of ease and acceptance? I mean, there’s that old saying, “You hit yourself over the head with a hammer because it feels so good when you stop.” Did you, somehow, reach a point where you just stopped everything and there was relief in not trying anymore? Is that a way of putting it?
Joey: Yeah. So, you’ve already added the caveat, which is, “I don’t know,” but I’ll just reiterate that. But yeah, it wouldn’t be a very interesting interview if all I said is, “I don’t know.” So, I’ll speculate, because I can share my story. There’s a piece in here of my story, which I think is significant, seems significant, which is this extreme tendency for me toward obsessiveness.
Rick: Um hmm.
Joey: I’ve had this extreme obsessive thinking for, I don’t know, I don’t really know exactly when it started, but it certainly increased over the years. And right in that period when I was doing the TM most intensively, that was when it started to become … it dominated my life. There wasn’t anything that I could do that I would not obsess about.
Rick: And I just want to say I can relate. I’ve been very much that way myself. And also, I think perhaps the fact that you were meditating so much contributed to it, because you can get very obsessive when you’re meditating that much. You can start fixating on things and dwelling on things in an abnormal way. But anyway, continue.
Joey: Well, I’ll make a comment about that. I don’t dismiss that as a possibility, right? So, the TM really could be that powerful. I’m an extreme skeptic. I think I have a negative view of the TM organization. I have a negative view of Maharesh Yogi. But I’m open to the possibility that the TM technique may be that effective. I don’t know.
Rick: Yeah, I actually share your views, although for me it’s not 100%. I don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. It was a mixed bag, you know?
Joey: Sure. But what were we talking about?
Rick: Obsessiveness.
Joey: Yeah, yeah.
Rick: And the larger question is, how did you reach some kind of a greater ease and resolution?
Joey: Well, so the obsessiveness, the reason I think that’s significant is because it became such a strong force and such a driving force, from my perception in my life, that I quit my… I had started a business with a business partner. We had, I don’t even remember how many employees at the time, but we had a handful of employees. We were doing well, reasonably well. And it’s a cliche, I know, but I was washing my hands so many times every day that I couldn’t do it anymore. It was debilitating. And the anxiety that I experienced, I didn’t even want to get up in the morning because I just knew that the day would be filled with stuff that I would obsess about and that I would try desperately and futilely to get away from, using these rituals that wouldn’t work.
Rick: So you had some fear of germs or something? Is that why you were…
Joey: It wasn’t germs. It was, I was afraid of… when I analyze it, I’d say I was afraid of feelings.
Rick: And that translated into washing your hands?
Joey: Yeah, right, because the concern that I had was these feelings, I had to get rid of the feelings. In order to get rid of the feelings, I had to avoid the triggers for those feelings. The triggers for those feelings were all kinds of things. I mean, for me at the time, it was McDonald’s and Coca-Cola were the two biggest triggers. [laughs] And try and escape that living in North America. I mean, it’s not going to happen.
Rick: Does that mean you like to eat Big Macs and drink a lot of Cokes? Is that what you’re saying?
Joey: No, no, no. I was just afraid of the thought of McDonald’s, the image of McDonald’s, any association…
Rick: The corporate America thing?
Joey: In a sense, yeah, because it extended to Walmart as well. [laughs] In order to try and relieve that, I would do all these rituals, counting, hand-washing, all kinds of things. I couldn’t really function anymore, and so I quit my business. This is my story that anybody who’s read my stuff probably knows it by now, but for anybody who hasn’t read my stuff, I’ll tell the short version. I moved into a cargo van and I drove around the country looking for a way to be perfect and pure. Which meant avoiding all the triggers. But it was impossible. It’s an impossibility.
Rick: Yeah. And I became… Shortly after that, I got Lyme disease and I couldn’t even move. I was paralyzed, in this… lock inside of my brain. was physically immobilized and I couldn’t eat. At a point I couldn’t even process water. It was this nightmare of… I don’t even know how to explain it, but it was a horrible, horrible situation. And still, this mechanism that tries to escape from suffering. It’s the same sort of mechanism, right? That trying to escape suffering through, “Okay, now I figured it out. I’ll do meditation.” “Okay, now I figured it out. I’ll do prayer. Now I figured it out. It’s going to be LSD. Now I figured it out. It’s going to be fastings.” You know, all these things. It’s always trying to solve this problem of suffering. And it got so dense and stuck and fixed and locked into place that I was paralyzed.
Rick: Wow.
Joey: But that mechanism was so strong that it was still pushing me. I would still try to perform these rituals to try and relieve the anxiety of the thoughts that I didn’t want to have and the feelings that I didn’t want to have. It got to a point where I was so exhausted. I just didn’t have the energy to do it, even the mental ritual. And…so at that point, there was this sense of, “Well, maybe I ought to do something different.”[laughs]
Rick: Yeah.
Joey: I mean, you know, I’m not a stupid person. The thought had occurred to me, prior to that, but it didn’t seem possible. But somehow in this… you know, it’s like that point where, if you throw something up, you throw it up in the air, there’s that point where it’s neither going up nor coming down. And it was like that, point where there was just this little bit of space to actually entertain that in a new way and to see, “I don’t know how to do this.” And it’s not…if it was easy, I would have already done it. So it’s not going to be easy. But I don’t really have a choice because if I keep on the same trajectory, the writing’s on the wall, you know? I mean, nothing good is going to come from that.
Rick: Yeah. Well, since you were once a TM fanatic, you might remember that point in the Gita where Arjuna says, “I don’t know what to do,” and he just sits down. And the commentary at that point was that if you reach a point where you’re just totally thwarted, just totally without recourse of any sort, then you become open, you’re ready to surrender, open to whatever.
Joey: Yeah.
Rick: Yeah. So, it sounds like that’s your point about the arc of the parabola, when you throw something up in the air, that’s the point you had reached.
Joey: Could be, yeah.
Rick: So, what happened?
Joey: Well, there was no, you know, fireworks display or anything. Nothing that I could point to and say some radical change happened in a big way, but there was just this subtle shift of some kind, just this realization, I guess we’ll say. [chuckles] I mean, I really am so trained now because every word I say I know, “Oh God, the people are going to misinterpret that,” but whatever, I mean, we got to just talk freely. So, there was some kind of shift that was just, I’ll say, a sense of, “Maybe I’m not going to escape this discomfort, and maybe that’s all right.” Not all right in the way that I want it to be, but all right in the sense that maybe there’s just nothing that can be done about it, and maybe it’s the struggle to try and change all of this that makes it so horrible.
Rick: Yeah, you know, the sense I get from you, and maybe this is what you just actually said in slightly different words, is that for years you very much had the sense that you were in the driver’s seat, and “I can do this, I can do that,” and “I’m not trying hard enough, so I’m going to try harder,” and “Now I’m going to try this.” And there’s this pretty solid sense of individuality that was really doing its darndest to change things and to run the show and so on. And you kind of finally reached a climax or a point at which that had run its course, you know, and you glimpsed the futility of it. I don’t know if we want to use the word “surrender,” but there was a kind of a … well, you used the word “relaxing” a lot, which to me is quite synonymous with surrender. There was a sort of, “Oh, I’m just going to not try to run the show anymore,” and let it run itself, or something. I get the sense that that was the nature of your shift.
Joey: I think that’s probably a fair thing to say, but as you’re saying that to me, I’m realizing that even that shift, it was a gradual thing. So that realization, I wouldn’t have been able to agree with that right away. That was something that was a process, because at first, I was going to do the letting go.
Rick: Right, yes. Which is like, you know, try to pick yourself up by your own bootstraps.
Joey: Right. But somehow, I guess we’ll say that exhausts … it’s a necessary process sometimes because it exhausts that idea that it’s possible to do it. But there were these gradual shifts through, “I’m going to do it,” a despair of, “I can’t do it, what now?,” and then a sense of, “Well, what’s the worst that’s going to happen?” You know?
Rick: Yeah.
Joey: I mean, I could die, I could be … all these horror stories, you know, like the Christian story of hell and gnashing of teeth and burning and all that. I mean, that could happen. I’ve had experiences kind of like that. I mean, not literally a sense of demons tearing at my flesh, but we’ll say Experiences, under the influence of certain herbs, that have had that kind of flavor to them. [laughs] And so, I don’t even know where I was going with that, but yeah.
Rick: Well, the whole thing about relaxing the sense of control and you’re saying that, you know, for you it was somewhat gradual and incremental. I think it is for most people. Occasionally I’ll talk to somebody who has this dramatic night and day shift that they could mark on the calendar, but for most people, it’s not that easy to pinpoint. It’s just that, almost in retrospect you realize, “Wow, you know, I’m not the way I was,” in some way, “I’m not controlling things the way I used to,” or “I’m less such and such than I used to be,” that kind of thing. It just kind of sneaks up, like a thief in the night.
Joey: Yeah, yeah, that seems accurate because I wasn’t even aware of it until later on and then I looked back and I realized, “Wow, things have been different for a while.” I hadn’t been aware of that, but things have been different and that was an interesting thing to become aware of.
Rick: Yeah, I mean, that’s the way it’s always been for me for the most part, I mean, it’s just in retrospect, realizing how things have changed. Here’s a question that just came in from somebody in Hyderabad, India named Jayakar, which is related to what we’re saying, but let me just ask it in case it elicits a little bit more explanation. He said, “Joey, please talk a bit about suffering because of OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder), and having a journey in which you amplify your self-belief to tackle it,” (that last little phrase is a little different than anything we’ve touched on) “having a journey in which you amplify your self-belief to tackle OCD.” Can you relate to what he’s asking?
Joey: I might be able to, but I’m not sure I understood that part of the question.
Rick: I’m not sure I did either.
Joey: So let me say that last bit one more time, “Amplify your self-belief.”
Rick: “Amplify your self-belief in order to better deal with or tackle OCD.” Do you feel you were doing that? If he wants to send in a clarification of his question, he can.
Joey: Okay, so yeah, if I understand correctly. Thank you, to him, for pointing that out, because that is something that I’ve written about, but I forgot to mention in this version of my story, which is that there was a point in that process where I realized I’d been running away from trying to avoid stuff. I wanted to avoid feelings, like I was talking about. It involves thoughts and all that, but the feeling was really at the heart of it. I didn’t want these feelings of discomfort and uncertainty. So I had this insight, which was – not that I’m the only one who’s ever had this insight – but it occurred to me that if I take a different approach; instead of trying to run away from it, if I just go right directly into it, maybe that would be worth exploring. I had no idea what would happen, but I knew that … I did know one thing, which was that trying to avoid it was not working. And so I decided, “Well, I’ll try it out.” I remember specifically, because I was living … we lived in a tiny little cabin and there was no running water and no electricity and it was just one room. And I would wake up early in the morning and be unable to get back to sleep, so I’d get up and I’d go outside and I’d just stand outside and try different experiments. I tried this experiment. I remember the specific one where I just thought, “Well, you know, I’m terrified of sugar.” It’s just one of the … it was like McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Walmart, and sugar.” I thought, “Well, what if I just try to put myself into the – in my imagination – put myself right into the worst thing that I can imagine?” So, specific to sugar, I thought, “Yeah, I’ll just see what happens.”
Rick: Drowning in a vat of Coca-Cola, right?
Joey: That’s more or less what I would do. I would just imagine myself swimming in it and drinking it and it seemed to make a big difference. You see, there was a relief, not having to try and avoid it anymore.
Rick: You were terrified of sugar just because you had some dietary fixations about the evils of sugar and all that stuff?
Joey: I don’t know exactly, but that sounds right, more or less.
Rick: Well, I think you’ve just said something valuable there, which is what a lot of “spiritual Teachers” or people seem to say, which is that if we try to hide from our problems or our suffering or anything, or do an end-run around them, or hide, get to the transcendent and ignore them or something, we’re going to have problems. And rather than actually just feel them, face them, accept, tune right into them, in which case, well, no telling what might happen, but they actually stand a chance of resolving, if you don’t try to ignore them.
Joey: Yeah, and this is why … so I’m on some mailing … it’s a Facebook group actually, and I get emails from it, and it’s run by a guy who runs some kind of spiritual group in LA. he sent out an email or posted something yesterday with this quote from someone, I don’t know, I wasn’t familiar with the author, but it was talking about how sex is not … it’s not a spiritual thing. It’s anti-spiritual and all the reasons why, you know, it’s because it has to do with the body and the body is illusory and the world is illusory and you have to focus on spirit and all this stuff. And I was reminded of that because of what you just said. It’s true that in some spiritual teachings they do take that approach and they say what you’ve just described, which is, you know, don’t try to get rid of it or avoid it, embrace it, feel it, and all that. But then there’s a huge body of spiritual …
Rick: Stuff.
Joey: I’ll call it ‘nonsense.’ Yeah, I was trying to come up with a polite way of describing … but spiritual stuff that all these things are off-limits and that you’re supposed to get rid of them and avoid them. I used to live in LA, this was before … the Bodhi tree has closed in LA, but it was before it closed.
Rick: Which was a bookstore, yeah.
Joey: Well, it was a bookstore, yeah. And it was like the Mecca for spiritually unwell people. And I would spend hours and hours pouring through all of the stuff in there. And the one that comes to mind is Yogananda.
Rick: Um hmm.
Joey: I remember in one of his books, he says, “If you have any kind of sexual urges, you have to wipe your genitalia with ice water and stuff to try and suppress it.” I mean, this is what a lot of people are teaching. It’s not just sex, but you have to avoid certain foods, you have to avoid certain thoughts, you have to avoid certain types of people and certain types of impulses. I had been seduced by all of that, because that appealed to my sense of, “I need to become pure and perfect in order to become worthy of not suffering.”
Rick: And you were kind of an extremist by nature.
Joey: Yeah.
Rick: Yeah. I don’t know what the Buddha meant by the middle way, but if by that he meant just sort of being balanced and acting according to your own nature, then I think that is probably pretty good advice for anything of this sort. And that’s going to mean different things for different people, you know? I mean, for some people it might actually mean celibacy, for other people it certainly wouldn’t, for most people it certainly wouldn’t. For some people it might mean avoiding sugar, maybe they’re diabetic and they shouldn’t have it. For most people it’s probably not going to mean that. I can hear what you’re saying, because having been around this stuff and been involved in it for so many years, I myself, and so many people I know, have gone to extremes in their ardency to get enlightened, get out of suffering, so on and so forth. Primarily all they’ve accomplished is to make themselves more unbalanced.
Joey: Yeah, yeah, that’s what it seems like. That was my experience at least.
Rick: Yeah, so balance. I mean, to quote the Gita again, it even says that in there, it says, “Just be balanced, not too much food, not too little food, not too much sleep, not too little sleep.” And it also says, “Creatures act according to their own nature, what can restraint accomplish?”
Joey: Yeah.
Rick: And again, that’s going to mean different things for different people, so you can’t offer a universal prescription. People just have to tune in to what’s right for them.
Joey: I think that’s true, and that’s why I find so much of spiritual teaching to be offensive and harmful. It certainly was my experience that it was harmful, and I see that it’s harmful for other people because what’s implied, very strongly, by a spiritual teaching is that there’s a teaching, and that that teaching has some kind of value. But what can be taught? The only thing that can be taught is restraint. You can’t teach somebody to be themselves. [laughs]
Rick: No, but you can reassure them that it’s okay to be themselves.
Joey: Yeah, right, but that’s not a teaching. RL It can be. I mean, there are teachers who actually do that. They say, “Hey, just relax, be natural, be yourself.” And there are other teachers who say, “Pour cold water on your genitals,” or whatever you were saying earlier. So we can’t classify all spiritual teachings in one big lump. As a matter of fact, I think this thing about the middle way or a balanced perspective with regard to one’s individual life, personally I find it valuable to assess spiritual teachings in that way. So when I first read your first book, you were saying things like, “Lineage is meaningless, yoga is not important, you don’t need to purify yourself,” things like that. And I kept saying, “Yeah, but,” you know? I mean, fine, you can overdo it with that sort of thing, but there’s a middle road or a happy medium in which the concept of purification does have some significance, and yoga can have value, and lineage can be significant, and so on. It’s just that people tend to be fanatical and take things to extremes. But it’s taking them to extremes to utterly dismiss all that stuff too. I think there’s a middle ground.
Joey: Okay, that’s fair, sure. I mean, the point about it’s taking it to extremes to dismiss something entirely, but I think that it’s important to clarify what the value of something is and to be very clear about that in the offer.
Rick: Um hmm.
Joey: I think that’s where there’s a lot of dishonesty or, if not dishonesty, confusion or delusion is taking place. My experience is that nothing needs to be done in order for me to … nothing needs to be changed. I don’t need to take responsibility to purify or perfect myself in order to be, let’s say, worthy of life. That to me is given. I look out the window and there’s a tree there, a blue spruce tree, and I don’t perceive that that blue spruce tree needs to purify itself in a spiritual sense. But there certainly may be value in purification in another context, right? So if, let’s say, somebody is intoxicated with heavy metals and they’re suffering the ill effects of that, then becoming purified of the heavy metals would have value, but it’s not a spiritual value. It’s not that the person becomes spiritually elevated because they do undergo that purification. It’s just that the value is that you’re no longer intoxicated with heavy metals and you get the health benefits of that.
Rick: Yeah, well I would play devil’s advocate to that a little bit and say that my definition of spirituality is that it is a living experience, it’s not a conceptual thing, it’s not a belief thing or anything like that, it’s a living experience. We live, we experience through our nervous system. If the nervous system is, as you said, polluted with heavy metals, then there’s going to be mental cloudiness, perhaps confusion, all sorts of things, which occludes the clarity that is one definition of spirituality.
Joey: Sure.
Rick: The same can be true, if you smoke meth every day or however meth is taken, it physically damages your brain and it handicaps the ability of this instrument, this nervous system, this brain, to live life in any sense, spiritual or otherwise. When I use the word “purification” or “purity” or whatever, it’s not a moralistic thing, it would be more in terms of a physiological thing.
Rick: Yeah.
Rick: That’s where yoga and perhaps diet and things like that actually do have some significance. They can bring about physiological change these days, and meditation for that matter. These days a lot of neurophysiologists are talking about neuroplasticity and how you can actually change the very chemistry and structure of your brain by doing certain things. In fact, we’re changing it right now just by having this conversation. Everything affects it and certain things affect it one way and certain things affect it the other, and that’s where all these practices have their genesis, long before it was understood that there was such a thing in modern terms. Ancient people understood that you can bring about a change in your consciousness by doing this, that, or the other thing. Drugs are another example. Taking ayahuasca or something, it changes the neurochemistry and that changes the experience.
Joey: Right, so I guess there are a couple of things in what you said, I don’t know if I’ll remember all of them, but the way that you’re defining spirituality I think then I wouldn’t argue with you, but I don’t think that that’s how spirituality is normally sold.
Rick: Right, and so I would be on the same page with you with that.
Joey: Right, yeah. So that’s my beef with that whole thing, is that there’s a marketplace for spirituality which says, “You’re not good enough, I can help you to become good enough so that you’ll be worthy of goodness, whatever it is that you perceive that you lack,” and that to me is criminal, in my opinion.
Rick: Yeah, I agree with you, I think that’s a distortion or a bastardization of the original intention of, or the original purpose of, if we can conceive of a pure origin of spiritual teachings way back when or something, or even now, they get muddled and distorted through time, like that old party game where you whisper something in somebody’s ear and it goes around the room. By the time it gets back to you, it’s completely different. So there are all kinds of things being presented in the name of spirituality, which I think I would agree with you, are a pretty far cry from what was originally intended to be offered.
Joey: That was the other thing that you had said that I wanted to comment on. You had mentioned that from your perception, the genesis of spiritual practices or spiritual teachings is a desire to benefit. Would that be a fair paraphrase?
Rick: Yeah, I mean some guy like the Buddha or Jesus or somebody like that, they were trying to alleviate people’s suffering. They were trying to help people. They were offering a teaching which they hoped would change hearts and minds and consciousness, however they defined it. They weren’t just doing it for kicks, they were helping to benefit humanity with whatever they were offering.
Joey: And I’m willing – I don’t know, right? I personally don’t seem to have any way to know that, but I’m willing to guess that that’s probably the case.
Rick: It kind of seems like it, yeah.
Joey: Okay. But to me it’s important to – because I’m a skeptic – I think it’s important to distinguish and say that not all spiritual teachings and practices have that same motivation at heart.
Rick: Oh, I agree. I can think of examples, again I don’t know, but contemporary or recently deceased so-called “spiritual teachers” who, in my view, were evil criminals.
Rick: Well I was listening to one of your recordings and you brought up Adi Da, you know, Free John.
Joey: Oh yeah, yeah, I think him and Rajneesh are my two go-to examples, I just think they were bad people.
Rick: Yeah, and there’s going to be a whole bunch of YouTube comments, “Oh, Rajneesh, Adi Da, they were so great.” And you know, my answer to that would be that, again, it’s never totally black and white. As you said in the recording I was listening to, Adi Da wrote some incredible stuff. There was some brilliance there. A number of people I’ve interviewed were his students. Terry Patton was a student of his. I haven’t interviewed him, but he’s a really good interviewer himself. Samuel Bonder, and Mercedes Kirkel, and a bunch of others, and Sandra Glickman. They all look back at it and think, “Whoa, there was some really screwy stuff going on there, but if I just take what I need and leave the rest, I feel like I’ve benefited despite the craziness of that scene.”
Joey: Sure, yeah, yeah.
Rick: Even a broken … go ahead.
Joey: Well, you had mentioned just a few moments ago about drugs, you specifically call that methamphetamine and damaging the brain, and so preventing a full experience of spirituality. I would say that I’m very happy, I’m very grateful that I’ve never, at least knowingly, taken methamphetamine. Yeah, it doesn’t sound like a nice thing to me. But I wouldn’t make that leap, personally, to say that it …
Rick: Damages the brain? We know it does that.
Joey: Well, to be honest, I don’t know if I’d even really make that claim. It clearly is going to make some changes, and those changes, from a certain perspective, could be called damage.
Rick: Sure, I mean, you look at MRIs of people’s brains who have done a lot of meth and they have almost literal holes in them, you know, brains like … it’s like looking at Alzheimer’s brains.
Joey: But that’s based on the … there are assumptions and presumptions that are made and biases, right? I mean, we have a bias toward, we think that this is how things should be, and when it deviates from that, then that’s undesirable. And certainly, like I say, I’m grateful that I don’t have any desire to use methamphetamine, because it doesn’t sound nice to me.
Rick: Yeah, it destroys your body.
Joey: But I just wouldn’t be so quick to say something is … like you said just a moment ago, Adi Da, not all good or all bad. I would say probably the same is true of methamphetamine, even though I don’t want it.
Rick: Yeah. It did give us Breaking Bad, which is one of the best TV shows of all time, so there’s that, you know? [laughter]
Joey: Right. But, you know, the thing is that my perception, at least, or my thought, is that the dominant culture – what I’ll call the dominant culture – that I live in, is one that is very narrow in so many ways, and it says, “This is normal, and everything outside of this very narrow definition, we don’t want that.” I don’t think that’s the only way for a culture to be. I think it’s possible to have broader, more inclusive acceptance and to see the value of all things.
Rick: I agree, and obviously, there are things which are becoming normal these days which are long overdue, Like, in my opinion, gay marriage, which you could get arrested for not that long ago. President Obama was on the Ellen DeGeneres show yesterday and they were just celebrating how much progress had been made in that area. With regard to the topic at hand, enlightenment or spirituality and the role the nervous system might play in supporting it, or enabling us to have that experience, if it’s an experience, for instance, take health. The average American is probably not very healthy by comparison with what’s possible, but there’s a certain norm that we all accept as being normal, you know, “Everybody’s this way.” But if we could be even more healthy, if we could experience that, all the better, we would enjoy it. You didn’t particularly enjoy Lyme disease.
Joey: Still don’t.
Rick: Yeah, you still don’t. Rather be without it. So I’m just saying that even though it may not be the ideal of how the brain could operate, there’s a certain accepted norm of how the brain is supposed to look and how it’s supposed to function, and if you do meth for 10, 20 years, your brain’s not going to look like that, you know? It’s going to be damaged. So, by societal norms, it’s going to be subnormal. This whole discussion may seem tangential to people, but I think it actually kind of relates to what we’re talking about.
Joey: The danger in that, and the reason that I just don’t subscribe to that view, is that it excludes people, it marginalizes people, and it devalues people because of these … because we’ve … arbitrary isn’t the right word, but I can’t think of a better word, so, arbitrarily, we’ve defined things as good or bad, acceptable or unacceptable. And even if we want to qualify our statements and we say, “Well, I don’t really mean that brain damage is bad, I just mean that it’s unacceptable or that those people are less than,” that’s really implicit in that kind of statement, that a person who’s done … who’s taken methamphetamine for 10 years, who has brain damage, by this definition, is “less-than.”
Rick: I’m not saying that they should be condemned or that they’re an inferior human being or anything like that. I’m just saying that, practically speaking, I am less a tennis player than Serena Williams, right? She has certain physiological capabilities, which I certainly do not. I don’t consider myself inferior as a human being or anything like that because of it, but there’s just a certain … definitely inferior as a tennis player.
Joey: Yeah, but if we’re saying that somebody is spiritually inferior because they have taken methamphetamine for 10 years, you may, for yourself, you may have an understanding of what that means that’s not really an insulting thing because the way that you’ve explained your view of spirituality is that it’s just a kind of … it’s a capacity to tap into a kind of state.
Rick: Well, sort of. I mean, it’s a capacity to appreciate the fundamental reality of life, you know, and it’s a capacity for that fundamental reality to awaken to its own nature through the instrument of a nervous system, a body, a living entity. And ordinarily, in the vast majority of people that capacity is occluded, it’s not enlivened, and so most of humanity lives in suffering, in a kind of a darkness that I think all the great spiritual teachers of history have tried to waken them up out of. I realize that’s a traditional understanding and you’re welcome to continue to disagree with me, because it makes for an interesting conversation.
Joey: Well, yeah, I do disagree with you, because my experience is that there is already awakeness, that’s what’s happening. This is already awakeness. I don’t know how it would be possible … if there wasn’t awakeness, I don’t know how any of this would be possible. This is already that. So, what spirituality, even the spirituality that you’ve just defined, is proposing is that there’s something hidden. There’s a greater awareness, a greater awakeness that is hidden from us unless we are perfect and pure enough to be worthy of it.
Rick: Perfect, pure and worthy are words I wouldn’t use, but I would agree with the first part of what you said, which is that there is a greater reality and this is that, as you often say. And now we’re really getting to the heart of what you say over and over again in your books, which yeah, “This is it, what else is there? How could the reality be anything other than what it is?” But whether that’s experienced or not, it’s one thing to not have any concept of it whatsoever, which is probably where most people in the world are at, it’s another thing to have an intellectual understanding of it, which many people have, and it’s another thing for it to be actually one’s living experience. To take an example of the understanding thing, you can write the word “sugar” on a piece of paper and drop it in your tea, but it’s not going to make the tea sweet. So, oh, sugar, I shouldn’t have said sugar. [laughs] So a concept of, “This is That,” and “This is the Ultimate Reality,” and so on and so forth, is, in my book a far cry from actually living that in your very bones as a conscious experience, 24/7.
Joey: Well, it seems that way, but my view is that it seems that way only because we’ve defined and we’ve agreed that there is something else. So we say, “I know that there’s some greater reality,” whatever we want to call that, Consciousness, Spirit, God, whatever, “and I know that that does not include suffering.” That is pure, pure, it’s pure. I mean, it’s pure love, it’s pure acceptance, it’s pure whatever. And so, by this definition, what’s happening right now is not that. So, therefore, I need to, somehow, arrive at that greater reality. I need to do something in order to arrive there. But what I say is, just drop the definition for a moment. If we drop the definition, then there doesn’t need to be anything done. We don’t need to get rid of what’s happening and we don’t need to arrive at something that’s hidden.
Rick: Yeah, and what I would say is, I would agree with part of what you said, which is that, yeah, how could what’s happening right now be anything other than that, if that is the ultimate reality? What does it say in the Gita, “The unreal has no being, the real never ceases to be.” And so, how could there be anything other than that, right?
Joey: Yup.
Rick: But that does not necessarily mean that … first of all, it’s apparently obvious that not everyone in the world sees it that way or experiences it that way.
Joey: Yeah.
Rick: And secondly, as you said earlier, when you began teaching, and maybe you didn’t quite say it this way, but when you put yourself out there and started writing books and started saying this stuff, you discovered that people who listened to you didn’t necessarily get it. I mean, first of all, you mentioned they wanted to put you up as a guru, but also I would venture to guess that just reading your words, that “this is all there is,” didn’t necessarily do it for people in many cases.
Joey: No. That’s right, that’s part of the problem, I think. I was naive. I thought, like I said, because it was such a tremendous relief for me, I thought, “Everybody’s going to flock to this.” I don’t know why it wasn’t obvious to everybody to begin with, but this is just going to do it for people.
Rick: Yeah.
Joey: I now realize, because it’s obvious, nobody wants that. People have been sold on the idea that there’s some greater reality that they can escape To, and that’s a much more appealing thing to sell than to say, “This is already it. All the stuff that you’re trying to escape from, that’s it.”
Rick: Yeah, but we can pick through your words apart, “There is some greater reality that they can escape to.” First of all, “some greater reality” kind of puts it beyond, like it’s off there in some heaven or transcendent realm. That “they can escape to” implies that it’s something that the individual can transport himself from point A to point B and then he’ll be in that, and then he will have escaped. And so all that is fallacious actually, if we consider what we’re actually talking about, which is …
Joey: Well, I … okay, go ahead.
Rick: Yeah, no, you continue. That was enough.
Joey: Well, I just think that to be fair though, my critique is of much of, not all – I’m not going to lump it all together – but much of popular spirituality. You use the word “transcendent,” I called it a “greater reality,” but you call it “transcendent.” I mean it’s right there in “transcendental meditation,” that’s what’s on sale.
Rick: Yeah, yeah, the whole idea was you would go from the gross to the subtle to the transcendent and then you’d be in the transcendent and you would have transcended the relative world and so on.
Joey: Yeah.
Rick: Yeah. Of course that wasn’t considered the endgame, that was considered to be the first step and then eventually you were supposed to, through time and integration and practice, have that be obvious in your daily living experience, not just something that you have when your eyes are closed. So anyway, that’s just one way of looking at it.
Joey: Yeah, well, I mean, so I understand, I think I understand, your criticism of what I was saying, which is that you’re not necessarily proposing that there is something, some reality that’s set apart that somebody has to arrive at. But all I’m saying is that that was what was sold to me.
Rick: Yeah.
Joey: I see that being sold to others to a large extent, and that’s what I’m critical of.
Rick: Yeah, and I think I pretty much agree with you, with some provisions, but I understand what you’re saying and I think it can lead to escapism and disassociation. And in fact, I’ve talked with various spiritual teachers who are trying to counteract the tendency that they have seen in many people to become disassociative and actually suffer some sort of breakdown in their personality as a result of this emphasis on, “The world is an illusion and I have to get to some other real realm, and this is not the real realm,” and all that kind of stuff. It can make you very impractical and so on. But the one point I would emphasize though is that the way people in general ordinarily live and perceive the world is not sufficient to say, “That’s it,” because in their subjective Experience, they are not appreciating or apprehending or cognizing the deeper reality. There is a deeper reality, it’s not really deeper, it’s on the surface as well, it’s all there is, but it’s not being lived experientially. And if it were, we would, I think see a very different society around us. So there’s kind of a catch-22 here between recognizing that this is all there is and there couldn’t be anything else, but in the same breath recognizing that there’s a difference between understanding that and actually living it, knowing it in your very bones. It’s not a concept, that’s what I’m trying to emphasize. There’s nothing conceptual about it. Concepts don’t cut it in this realm.
Joey: I agree, but what I’m suggesting is that the only obstacle – again, the language here is wrong, but I’m just speaking freely – the only obstacle is that there’s some clinging to a concept to begin with. And I’m not saying we have to get rid of the concept or even get rid of the clinging, but just to see that that is not the whole truth.
Rick: Yeah, I think I agree with that.
Joey: I think that frees up all of that energy and then it’s recognized that it is being lived, it can’t be other than being lived. It’s just … if somebody’s … They work road construction all day and then they come home and they smoke meth, that is it. And the trouble is that we don’t want that to be it.
Rick: Well, let’s play with that for a minute. Sure, “that’s it,” I guess, and priest molesting children “is it,” and Auschwitz was it, and the Zika virus is it, and all the good, the bad, and the ugly of life is it, appearing to assume different guises, different forms. And would you agree with that?
Joey: Not exactly, because there’s a subtle implication in what you’re saying, just that last little bit that you tacked on about …
Rick: Appearing to assume different forms?
Joey: That’s right, yeah, because that’s saying that “it” is a thing that is somehow hidden, right? Because we don’t perceive that, we don’t perceive some universal “it,” we perceive what we call “individual form.”
Rick: Some people perceive universal “it.”
Joey: Right, right, that’s true, apparently. If we take their word for it, then yeah.
Rick: Right.
Joey: But I’m assuming that you don’t.
Rick: Yes and no.
Joey: Okay.
Rick: Yeah, I mean, sure, I perceive forms, I don’t necessarily perceive forms as Consciousness. I’m looking at my computer monitor right now, I’m not seeing Consciousness, I’m seeing a computer monitor. In my experience, right now as we speak, there is also the realm which is immaterial, which is Consciousness, which is pure silence, which persists along with changing appearances and forms and so on, and somehow this and that are more of the complete package. Whereas if I look back to 50 years ago, it was only forms, no sense of the thing I just described.
Joey: Sure, okay, that’s fine. The point I wanted to make though is that I don’t feel that it’s necessary or helpful to invent something that’s not directly – again, the language here is wrong – but something that’s not directly perceived. So, to me it’s okay, even though it’s not something I can grab hold of and feel satisfied about, but it’s okay to just say that this, what is perceived, the perceiving, this right now is it. I don’t need to invent something behind it.
Rick: But if you postulate something behind it, are you actually inventing it or is it actually there and you’re just not perceiving it? There are people who perceive all kinds of things that you and I may not perceive. Are they inventing those things or are they just perceiving or appreciating something that’s outside the realm of our experience?
Joey: That model, I mean it’s a model which says that there’s some great “out there,” and some … we each have an individual capacity which will vary from person to person and from time to time, to perceive that. So if I only have a level 5 ability to perceive that “great out there,” and somebody else has a level 20, what I’m saying is, why do we need to do that? Why do we need to create a model in order to … it’s already direct, there’s already this directness. Why do I need to have a model and impose that model onto it, when it’s already direct? There’s no need to create indirectness.
Rick: Yeah, I appreciate the way you put that, and I must confess that I buy into that model that you just described, and it’s interesting to juxtapose our two positions on this. I know that, in one chapter of one of your books, you spoke against comparison, comparing yourself with Ramana or with Papaji or whoever, but just for the sake of conversation, imagine that you and I could suddenly – it’s very hypothetical of course – but we could suddenly step into Ramana’s sandals, so to speak, and perceive the world as he perceived it, perhaps we would notice a vast contrast between the way we’re perceiving it now and what he was experiencing. I suspect we would. Of course, this is very, very hypothetical, but it sort of illustrates the point that there may actually be degrees of evolution of one’s appreciation of deeper reality, or “this” as you put it, and when you and I experience “this,” we’ve got it to some degree, but there could be a maturation of it, so that you yourself, 20 years from now, might mean something quite more when you say, “This is all there is,” than you are able to mean now, in light of your own experience.
Joey: Yeah, sure, that’s possible. Anything is possible. I just want to add though, if we could step into Ramana’s sandals, maybe we could also step into the work boots of the guy who smokes methamphetamine, might be surprised to discover what his perception is.
Rick: Might be, but if I had to choose one or the other, I think I’d go for Ramana’s sandals.
Joey: I don’t know. The thing about Ramana that’s so interesting is that … I mean, it’s easy now because he’s dead, but …
Rick: There might be some living examples.
Joey: We build up this whole … right, no, there may be, but I’m just with Ramana because Ramana is a very popular …
Rick: Right, he’s like the gold standard.
Joey: Yeah, yeah. There’s this myth, this whole great myth that’s built up, and I mean, everybody has their individual take on it. When you read the stories about him and what happened to him in his life, I don’t know, I’m not so sure I’d necessarily want to be in his sandals. I mean, it sounds pretty intense, and not always in a positive way. I mean, we make assumptions that a guy sitting in the catacombs for days on end, not eating or drinking…
Rick: And being eaten by insects boring into his legs, right?
Joey: Yeah, we assume that he’s doing that because he’s in some sort of blissed-out state, that that stuff doesn’t bother him, but maybe we’re wrong about that, we just don’t know.
Rick: Yeah, we don’t know. I’m going to ask a couple of questions that people have sent in and we’ll come back to some of this stuff, but I just want to do justice to some people’s questions and it’ll probably touch upon some of the things we’re already discussing. Here’s a fellow named Samir from Philadelphia who asked, “Some say that there is the still and permanent awareness in the background in which temporary experiential phenomena happen. Some say such awareness is just another concept of mind and there are only experiences which are undoubtable, direct, vivid and effortlessly spontaneous.” This is kind of what you and I were just discussing. “What is your insight regarding this?”
Joey: Well, I can only just describe my own experience so I would hesitate to call it an insight necessarily. But what I can say is that I was lured by the carrot of this non-changing awareness, the Consciousness and whatever people want to call it. They argue it’s not consciousness and awareness are not the same thing, it’s this, that and the other. I was lured by that, that whole promise, whatever people call it. I was trying to figure it out. And it seems to me that all that ever can be … I can’t find any of it. That’s the honest truth. I just can’t find any of it. To me, when I really take an honest look, this division between experience and Consciousness and awareness and objects and all that, I can’t find it. And I don’t think that’s a transcendent thing. I actually think that’s likely available to everybody if they just take a look.
Rick: Well as far as I can tell, you haven’t fallen asleep during this interview, so you’ve been aware the whole time, there’s been awareness the whole time. In your experience, there has also been various words that you and I have been speaking, we’re moving around a little bit, and you’ve been perceiving that, maybe some noises in the background, some sensations in your body. There’s been all that changing stuff, All that stuff has been experienced by virtue of your awareness, of your being aware. If you were not aware, you couldn’t be aware of anything.
Joey: But I don’t know how to find that.
Rick: How does the eyeball find itself?
Joey: That exact phrase is what people often send to me, and I’m not sure what it means, to be honest. I understand that literally, “the eyeball can’t see itself,” but I guess what’s implied by that, or what’s meant, is that there is a thing called Consciousness or Awareness or whatever we want to call it, that is aware or conscious, and because it is the thing that is conscious or aware, it is not conscious or aware of itself, except unless you do TM and you do all the advanced siddhis and then maybe …
Rick: No, no, no, even then, even then. And the terminology is very tricky, because it’s not a thing. You said, “I don’t know how to find that.” it’s not something that I can find, because that objectifies It. That makes it into something that, “Here I am over here,” finding this over there, and then who is the “I” that is finding it? If I’m aware of it, then you’ve got two awarenesses, my awareness being aware of this awareness thing.
Joey: Yeah, right.
Rick: But obviously it’s not that. It’s sort of the foundation, the ground, the ultimate vantage point from which everything is known or seen, but you can’t step apart from itself and say, “Oh, here it is.”
Joey: Well, it’s just not the way that I like to talk about things because I find it unnecessarily confusing to talk about Awareness or Consciousness because I don’t think anybody … nobody is going to find it. So I prefer to deal at present, just because it’s more appealing to me, just to deal with that uncertainty, because I feel that’s what we’re looking for. We’ve been promised by various people that they’re going to help us to find … they say, “I’ll help you to know yourself. I will help you to know that you are the ultimate reality. I will help you to know that you are Consciousness,” and whatever. But the promise, whatever language they’re using, is that, “I’m going to remove your uncertainty. You don’t know … right now you’re uncertain, you don’t know who you are. Right now you’re uncertain, you don’t know that you’re Consciousness. I’m going to remove that. I’m going to help you know certainty about life, reality, who you are.” But I don’t find any such thing. I can’t find certainty. I can’t remove all doubt. And to be honest, I don’t want to because I don’t see that there’s any real value in that because that’s saying, “Now I’ve got to work to exclude stuff.” Who wants to do that? Not me. So I just don’t really like to talk about Consciousness or Awareness. I prefer to just say, “Look, do you feel an uncertainty, an angst, an anxiety, an unresolved sense within yourself?” so to speak. And if somebody says, “No,” well then, okay, I don’t have anything to offer. But if somebody says, “Yes,” then I say, “Okay, maybe I have something to offer.” And what I can offer is to say, “My experience is that I didn’t need to get rid of it. It’s okay for it to be there. It’s also included. Nothing needs to be excluded.”
Rick: Yeah, and to use the old TM analogy, you know, if you want to get rid of darkness in a room, what do you do? You don’t try to get rid of it, you just add some light and then it’s gone. So, this effort to exclude the angst and figure out the angst and so on and so forth, you know, could be like a dog chasing its tail trying to do that.
Joey: That’s right, yeah.
Rick: It sounds like you kind of sat with a lot of teachers who said to you, “I’m going to help you do this. I’m going to help you find this, get over this,” and so on, and you came away a little disillusioned with that whole scene.
Joey: Yeah, right. I mean, I definitely visited with teachers who were very explicit about it, who would say, “I’ve got the answer. You come pay me enough money and sit with me enough and I’ll sort it all out for you. I’ve got the answers.” There were plenty of others who didn’t say that explicitly, but it was implied because they had the look, they had the name, they had the whole thing. And they were sitting on stage and I was sitting there with all the other dull-eyed people. And so yeah, I was disillusioned by that because I don’t think it’s honest. I don’t think anybody can do that.
Rick: Yeah, I think personally that there can be some benefit from association with some people and so on, but I don’t think they’re doing it for you. I don’t think it can ever be that way.
Joey: Sure, yeah, right. There’s benefit in association, but that’s in general, right? I get benefit by association with my children, but it’s not because they have some great teaching that they’re imparting to me.
Rick: Yeah, if you had a time machine though, would you like to go and listen to Jesus offer the Sermon on the Mount or sit around the Buddha and hear him offer his thing and that? Would you find that potentially edifying?
Joey: Not at this point, no. It’s not that I devalue anybody in there, what they have to offer, it’s just that it’s already here. That’s my sense of it. That’s my experience of it. I don’t need to go back in time. I don’t need to sit with the great master. I don’t need to do any of that because this is it, it’s already here. This conversation is already offering that. I couldn’t possibly get something greater from looking for it elsewhere.
Rick: That’s nice. I mean, that speaks well of where you’re at in a sense, just this sort of deep acceptance and appreciation of what you’re experiencing now. I think that’s valuable. And I also just want to add that I think skepticism is a really healthy attitude and I actually admire that in you, that you don’t just swallow beliefs whole and you question everything. Personally, I think that’s much more conducive to maturity in any sense, spiritual or personal, than just buying into things which you don’t actually know, or can’t even know experientially. Here’s another question somebody sent in, this is a fellow named Theodore from Norway. He asks, I’ll try to make this as clear as possible, “Thank you for your ever-changing work. When I first read and watched you, I was sure you were enlightened, had it, despite your insistence to the contrary, but your honesty has slowly revised my belief systems and let me dare to think that maybe it is true that this is it, which seems less and less frightening now.” And then he has a question here, “Say I’m in the middle of mentally punishing myself for what I’m currently doing or not doing. Does that prove that I exist and that this “I” then could or couldn’t be doing something other than what’s happening? It’s all just a bunch of insignificant blabber, isn’t it?”
Joey: Well I wouldn’t be so quick to call it “insignificant blabber,” just because … so, I don’t look for meaning in anything. Well that’s not true, that’s human nature, we look for meaning, we’re meaning seeking beings, but I gave up on the idea that there’s going to be meaning in it. So when I say that I wouldn’t dismiss the blabber as insignificant, I think was the word. I don’t mean that I’m going to be trying to find the coded meaning in it, but I think it has its own value just to be here, like I can appreciate a sunset.
Rick: Yeah and it doesn’t mean anything intellectually.
Joey: Right.
Rick: Right.
Joey: So the same with the blabber. I think that it’s possible to appreciate it for what it Is, but does it prove that there’s somebody who’s doing it? Not to me, because it’s hard for me to take ownership of stuff, because I don’t know where that begins and ends if I say, “This is mine and that’s not mine.” At what point would that become true? Do I take ownership of my own conception or my own birth? At 21, do I start taking ownership? At what point does that ownership fall on me?
Rick: Yeah, good point. I’ve had several conversations with people lately about their not really being a doer or an owner of this life, and I don’t know if we want to get into all that right now because it’s a whole big thing, but I’m coming to appreciate that more and more. And what you just said about, “I can appreciate a sunset,” and we said, “Yeah, it’s an experience, it’s not a concept,” yet when you said that sentence, I knew what you meant because we used concepts to communicate it. We both know what a sunset is. So concepts have their value but obviously the word “sunset” is a far cry from the actual experience of one.
Joey: Right, but it’s its own thing, right? So again, I wouldn’t say, “Oh, well it’s a concept therefore let’s devalue it.”
Rick: No, it has its utility, otherwise we couldn’t talk about sunsets.
Joey: Well, also just in and of itself, without even having to have utility, because to say “utility,” am I going to judge everything by its utility? I don’t want to do that either. It’s too much effort to try and judge the value of things based on its utility, and useful to who? Then I’ve got to judge too many things, so it’s nicer to me just to appreciate everything just for what it is.
Rick: Yeah, I agree. But it sort of pertains to our conversation, which sometimes people might say, “Well, all these spiritual concepts and words are useless, they’re a waste,” yet we couldn’t be having this conversation without them, or any conversation without words. So we could discuss our favorite food and it might be an interesting conversation, and maybe we could trade recipes or something, but it’s not going to nourish us. We have to have the actual experience that these concepts pertain to. And I would say the same is true of spiritual stuff. There is an experience there to be had and concepts don’t cut it, so don’t mistake the concept, don’t mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself, as the old Zen saying says.
Joey: Yeah, but I’m just going to be contrary, I guess –
Rick: That’s okay; I like this.
Joey: – because that’s saying that the concept, the conversation, the words, the ideas, that that’s somehow not as spiritual as something else.
Rick: It’s a pointer, we’re referring to something with these pointers.
Rick: Yeah, but I’m suggesting that it doesn’t have to be a pointer, it’s just it. So rather than have to point to anything, it’s just it. The pointing is it.
Rick: As is everything.
Joey: Yeah, that’s my point. [laughs]
Rick: Okay, on that point I’m going to bring up another question. This is from a guy named Sefer in Denver who asks, “Joey, you always say there is no greater reality and this is it, enlightenment or awakeness already is and should not be sought. How about the realization and relief that you attained? Many of us define enlightenment as that, a change in perception that allows you to relax and surrender, not seeing yourself anymore as a doer who has free will, not seeing yourself as a separate identification, etc. Is that something we can or should seek?”
Joey: My view initially was that there is something that can be done. And maybe there is, but what I’ve come to see is that – I was blind to this at first -, but the problem is, if I say there’s something that you can do, even if there’s some kernel of truth in that, it takes us away, in a sense. Not really, but it makes us imagine that we’ve been taken away from the immediacy of what’s happening.
Rick: Yeah, I think it’s a paradoxical thing, you know. There isn’t anything you can do, there is something you can do, and both are true and both are not true. It’s one of those funny paradox things.
Joey: Well, the other way to look at it is there is absolutely something you can do and you’re already doing it.
Rick: True.
Joey: You can’t escape that, it’s already happening.
Rick: So perhaps the takeaway point from that is, do what you feel inclined to do.
Joey: Or not. I mean that’s the thing about it. You can’t figure it out or I don’t think you can figure it out, maybe somebody can figure it out. I didn’t figure it out.
Rick: Well, there may be modes of doing that don’t involve figuring out, you know, the things people … for instance, meditation is a type of doing, you could say, it’s a non-doing kind of doing, but it’s not an attempt to figure anything out, but it has some effect. That’s why …
Joey: Yeah, right, it certainly does. It has the effect, whatever effect it has. Breathing has its effect, and taking a walk has … yeah.
Rick: Everything has an effect. That fellow from Hyderabad, Jayakar,he sent a clarification of what he was trying to ask. He said, “What I was saying was that in those thoughts you get caught up in, and it becomes a habit, and there’s no courage to face it. How can I face it?” I think what he’s saying is, he has some OCD problem, he gets caught up in thoughts, repetitive obsessive thoughts, and it seems to take a certain courage to face it, perhaps to break that habit, and maybe he feels he’s lacking that courage. And so, how does he summon up the courage or deal with his OCD? Do you have any recommendations?
Joey: Well, this is the unfortunate thing, just in my … I’m tapping the microphone again, sorry. The unfortunate thing, in my experience, is that I don’t seem to be able to make that happen. There are certain experiences where I say, “Ah, I had the courage to face it, it isn’t that wonderful,” and there was a great outcome. And then I want to repeat that, always. I always want to do that, but I don’t seem to be able to reproduce that at will. So the acceptance, if we want to call it that, is the acceptance of all of it. So even though sometimes, maybe even most of the time, maybe even all the time, there doesn’t seem to be the courage to face the things that we’re trying to avoid, that we’re afraid of.
Rick: Accept that.
Joey: Yeah, right. I mean, the funny thing is, I mean it’s tragic and funny, is that, like I said just a moment ago, that question, “Is there anything you can do?” Yeah, you’re doing it, you can’t not do it.
Rick: Yeah.
Joey: You’re always, always, always facing and accepting whatever you’re facing and accepting. You know, it’s just that it’s not going to be other than that. That’s the problem, at least I’ve often wanted it to be other than what it is. And I come up with all … I mean, I’m not terribly original in my – we’ll call them insights now, I guess – I’m not terribly original in my insights. I’m sure many, many, many other people have had these same sorts of insights. Where was I going with that? I don’t know.
Rick: About the OCD, the fellow from Hyderabad, how to have the courage to deal with these things.
Joey: Yeah, and it’s just that you do, you already do. It’s just not in the way that you want. That’s the rub, right? I mean, we want it … I always wanted it to be the way I want it to be. And when I would … oh, right, I was saying, there are other people who say similar things. And I would hear people say things like, “Just accept it” or “Surrender,” or “It is what it is,” or “This is reality,” or whatever, and I would interpret it to fit into my understanding and the way that I wanted it to be. I would hear it as, “Okay, if I can accept it the way that I should be accepting it, the way that I think it should be accepted, then that’s going to be better.” But what’s actually being said is, “Just accept it the way that it is.” And by the way, that’s already being done.
Rick: Yeah. What I gather from what you’re saying is just to go easy on yourself and just be … you often use the word “just relax,” you know, just sort of cool it, chill. I mean, you know, there’s that old saying of, if you tell somebody, “Don’t think of a monkey,” and he’s, “Oh, I just thought of a monkey,” or, “I shouldn’t be thinking of a monkey,” “I’m still thinking of a monkey,” you know, it’s like, “Just relax,” and then the next thing you know you won’t be thinking of a monkey. You know, there’s this sort of … it’s almost like the attempt to fight against something or control something or restrict something within ourselves often only accentuates it.
Joey: Seems to. But the thing is, sometimes that happens.
Rick: That too.
Joey: And that’s why I think I was naive at first when I suggested there might be a prescription, because it doesn’t seem to work that way.
Rick: Yeah. Or different strokes for different folks, and there might be a world of different prescriptions and people have to sort out what works for them and what doesn’t.
Joey: Yeah, right, and it doesn’t seem like there’s any choice in that either. I certainly wouldn’t have gone through all of the stuff that I went through and looked for answers in the places that I looked for answers had I known what I know now, right?
Rick: Yeah. On the other hand, I would say that going through all the stuff you went through and doing all the things you did, kind of in a roundabout way got you to where you are now, and you know that you had to go through all that in order to arrive at where you’re at now.
Joey: Well certainly in that linear story thing, yeah, that does seem to be the way. And that’s why I say I don’t really have regrets, because it is what it is. I don’t seem to have the ability to even think about that kind of thing, like, “Oh, maybe if it only had been this other way.”
Rick: Yeah, what’s the point in doing that? I agree. Well, you were an interesting guy to talk to. Theoretically, I could take the chapter titles of your book and we could have a whole conversation for half an hour about each chapter title, but I don’t think we’re going to do that. We’ve been going on for a couple of hours, but I’ve really enjoyed this. I think you’re in a good place and I really enjoyed exploring these things with you. My wife passed me a note in the middle of it saying I was talking too much, so sorry about that.
Irene: Somebody sent a question.
Rick: Oh, somebody sent a question here. What’s the question? Yeah, let me just lean the mic over to her.
Irene: You sent it to me by mistake. “You speak clearly to the dangers of moral authority in relation to the spiritualized concepts of purification, transcendence, etc. Do you think right at all about the effects of biases of human-centered consciousness in perception of a diverse natural world?”
Joey: I understood everything except I think I missed one word.
Rick: What was the last part Irene?
Irene: “Do you think right at all…
Rick: Do you think or right, W-R-I-T-E?
Irene: “…at all about the effects of biases of human-centered consciousness in perception of a diverse natural world”
Rick: I wonder if this has environmental implications in terms of our perspective or our orientation.
Irene: The first question was about dangers of moral authority in relation to the concepts of purification, transcendence, etc.
Rick: Yeah, dangers of moral authority in relation to the concepts of purity and transcendence. I mean, some would say that our whole devastation of the environment is due to a worldview which regards the universe as mechanistic and meaningless and we have dominance over it and so on and so forth, rather than being a more sensitive, maybe feminine appreciation of the intelligence of nature and the fact that we’re not biological robots and that animals have feelings and all that kind of stuff. Anyway, that would be my elaboration on the question.
Joey: Yeah, it’s an interesting question, in part because it is something that I feel very strongly about and I have … something that I’ve tried many times to write about and I haven’t done so in a way that’s satisfying to me. So it’s …
Rick: Take a stab at it here. What do you …
Joey: It’s percolating.
Rick: What do you think?
Joey: Oh, well, I mean, the person who wrote that put it very eloquently. I don’t know that I could put it more than that. I mean, the dominant culture is based upon so many assumptions of human supremacy and rights that trump all else that we’re largely blind to … it’s like I was talking about earlier, that culture is, in so many ways, very narrow. And we don’t even know how blind we are. We don’t even recognize that, but if we could … if we could just … well, okay, so this is something I was thinking about recently. You know, there’s a … I mean, this is just one tiny little example, but you know, there’s this thing that they call “colony collapse disorder,” ridiculous name …
Rick: Like with the bees, for instance?
Joey: For the bees, yeah.
Rick: Right, right.
Joey: And … the honeybee.
Rick: The honeybee.
Joey: And so there’s legitimately a major concern about the bees. I mean, we keep bees here. So the queen bees used to live … I’m told, used to live on average about ten years. And now they’re living less than two years. And people are scratching their heads, wondering why. Well, the thing about this is that what I thought of was, if you have a child and your child’s life is in danger and you have, let’s say … well, let’s say you could point to some activity, some group of activities. You don’t know exactly which one, but you know this whole group of activities is like You wouldn’t take … I wouldn’t take the position of, “Oh, well, I guess we’ll just wait and see until we can figure out which of these things … we have to identify it positively.” I would say, “No, no, no, stop all of that right now.” That would be, if it was my child or if it was me. But when it’s some other … when it’s somebody else, I mean, even if it’s some other human, especially if it’s some human far away who doesn’t look like me, who speaks a different language and lives in a different way. But then even worse, if it’s some other species entirely, or a larger, organism, ecosystem, community, or whatever, then we just say, “Well, you know, we’re not sure. We’ll wait and see.” Because business as usual has to continue. It seems like it’s not congruent, like I just pointed out, because if it was my child, I’d be very clear about it. And I would put my life on the line to stop whatever it is that I think is the cause, and I wouldn’t wait for proof positive.
Rick: Yeah, and the interpretation of that is that the bees are our children, and the polar bears, and all of life, you know? We are the larger reality, and if we’re destroying the rainforest, we’re destroying our own lungs. If we’re exterminating species, 150 to 200 of them a day, we’re lopping off our own fingers and toes. There’s ample evidence that neonicotinoids are killing the honeybees and the bees, and yet the companies who, rather than saying, “Oh, we shouldn’t be making this stuff,” the companies spend PR money trying to cast doubt on the science. Same with the whole climate change thing. So there’s a whole book about this called “Merchants of Doubt.” To me, it arises from a very narrow-minded, egocentric kind of consciousness that I hope that spiritual awakening will help to rectify, because I actually do think it has societal implications in making people more attuned to nature’s intelligence, and more compassionate and broad-minded, and so on.
Joey: Yeah, it’s just unfortunately, in my view, this gets back to the heart of some of the stuff we were talking about earlier. It seems more clear to me now, when you talk about spirituality, you have a definition of that that is different than what is popularly presented, and my view is that popular spirituality is in a very different direction. I think it’s like the endgame of this whole thing. Popular spirituality is about how I’m going to save my ass, you know? It’s like, “Everything is going to hell around me, but I’ve got transcendence on my radar.”
Rick: Yeah, yeah.
Joey: That I think is, again, that’s offensive to me, so I just can’t be enthusiastic about that kind of thing.
Rick: Yeah, I agree with you, and that’s definitely not my orientation. I feel like we’re all part of the web of life. We can start getting into the way Native Americans talked about it and all. John Donne in that poem, “No man is an island,” you know, “Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” Anything that is happening to anybody, anywhere, is happening to me, and vice versa. And so we’re all in the same boat, and if the boat goes down, we all go down. To me, spirituality is an important component in turning around the way mass consciousness is oriented. Obviously there needs to be political things and technological things, and you know, we need to stop doing this and that, and you can’t just say, “Spirituality is just going to solve it, and I can just sit here in meditation, and it’s all going to work itself out.” All that stuff has to be dealt with, and we need all kinds of solutions on all kinds of levels, but this is an important and very fundamental part of the mix, in my opinion, because ultimately everything we see around us in society, all the industries and the economies and everything else, are an expression or a manifestation of human consciousness or psychology. If we want those things to change, then perhaps we need to change the thing that gives rise to them, which is human consciousness or our way of being, our way of thinking.
Joey: Yeah, it works, I mean, I think it works both ways. That’s the trouble, is that you have a monster that’s been created that now influences the creator.
Rick: No, you’re right, you’re right. And so I guess, maybe a chicken and egg question, but I feel like consciousness is more fundamental and therefore more pivotal. If we really want to tame that monster, then this gives us a handle. We may seem helpless in comparison to the big multinational corporations and all that, but there actually is a power in… Those subtle levels are more powerful, you know? I mean, the atomic is more powerful than the molecular, and the molecular is more powerful than the mechanical. So, if we can actually effect the change at a more subtle level, it can have ramifications on all the grosser levels that merely working on the gross levels won’t enable us to achieve.
Joey: Maybe.
Rick: You can say I like to play with ideas. Maybe these things are nice theories, and let’s see how it pans out. I’m not saying this is some kind of gospel truth here or anything.
Joey: Yeah.
Rick: Okay, I don’t think any more questions have come in. Let me just take a quick check. I haven’t heard anything from Dan in London who fields me the questions. I think we’re good. So we’ve said a lot, and you have a lot to say, and I think you’re a real interesting guy and I encourage people to check out your website. It seems like you’re writing new things all the time and all. You have a blog, right, where you post stuff. So what is your website?
Joey: joeylott.com.
Rick: joeylott.com, J-O-E-Y-L-O-T-T dot com. And you have some kind of email list or something that people can get on to be notified when you post new things.
Joey: Yeah, right. There’s a sign-up form right on the front of the website.
Rick: Do you do individual Skype sessions with people or anything like that?
Joey: I do. But I don’t …
Rick: You’re not real crazy about doing a lot of them.
Joey: Well, I’m not sure how to continue doing that. I feel conflicted about taking money for them, but it’s hard to set aside the time without the money.
Rick: Yeah. So I’m at best ambivalent about it.
Rick: Yeah. I guess it depends on whether you have other means of supporting yourself. Money is not necessarily the root of all evil, and if you’re doing that all day and starving to death, you wouldn’t be doing it too long. Also, people value something sometimes more if they have to commit a little bit. If someone just wants to talk to you out of some kind of trivial curiosity, maybe charging a modest amount would weed out some of that.
Joey: Yeah, I don’t …
Rick: Well, anyway, I’m not trying to talk you into doing it. [laughter] Do what you want to do, whatever.
Joey: Yeah.
Rick: All right, thanks Joey. Well, let me just make a few general wrap-up points. I’ve been speaking with Joey Lott and very much enjoyed this conversation. I’ll be linking to Joey’s website and some of his books on the page that I’ll create for him on BATGAP.com. And as I said in the beginning, there have been hundreds of, yeah, hundreds, 330 something interviews like this so far, and I intend to keep doing them. So if you want to check out some of the past ones, go to BATGAP.com, check out the past interviews menu. If you’d like to be notified of new ones, there’s a place there to sign up to be notified by email about once a week when a new one is posted. There’s the “Donate” button, which I mentioned earlier, kind of depend on that sort of support. And there’s also an audio podcast of this, which is very popular, almost as many people listen to that as watch the videos. So there’s a place on BATGAP to sign up for the audio podcast. So thanks for listening or watching, and thank you again, Joey. I really did enjoy talking to you. If I ever get down to Santa Fe, I’d love to meet you.
Joey: Sure, and thank you very much. I enjoyed it too.
Rick: Okay, bye-bye.
Joey: Bye.