John Astin Interview

Summary:

• Spiritual Journey: Astin discusses his path of spiritual awakening, which began when he felt a deep inner longing for truth. His quest led him to explore various spiritual teachings, eventually guiding him toward non-duality and direct experience of the Self.
• The Role of Suffering: Astin reflects on the role of suffering in spiritual growth. He emphasizes that suffering is often a result of attachment to the ego, and by letting go of the attachment, one can transcend suffering and attain a deeper sense of peace.
• Non-Duality: A central theme in the conversation is the concept of non-duality, where there is no separation between self and the universe. Astin explains how understanding and directly experiencing non-duality has transformed his life and how it continues to be a guiding principle in his daily living.
• Direct Experience of the Self: Astin emphasizes the importance of direct experience over intellectual understanding. He encourages a more experiential approach to spirituality, which involves meditation, mindfulness, and inner contemplation to reach a direct understanding of one’s true nature.
• The Role of the Ego: Astin explores how the ego functions as a barrier to spiritual awakening. He discusses how transcending the ego involves letting go of personal identity and experiencing a shift in consciousness that leads to unity with everything.
• Integration of Spirituality in Life: Astin highlights how spirituality is not just something to practice in meditation or retreats but is meant to be integrated into daily life. He explains how he strives to embody spiritual teachings in his interactions with others, through compassion, presence, and understanding.
• The Importance of Teachers and Teachings: Astin reflects on the role that teachers and teachings have played in his spiritual journey. He shares that while teachers can offer guidance, the true understanding comes from direct personal experience.
• Transformation of Perspective: Over the years, Astin notes that his perspective on life has shifted from a focus on external success to an internal sense of peace, purpose, and connection. He stresses that true happiness arises from within and is independent of external circumstances.
• Self-Inquiry: Astin touches on the practice of self-inquiry, where one questions the nature of the self and seeks to understand what is truly real. Through this practice, he found that the egoic sense of self is an illusion, and the true Self is beyond thought and form.
• Connection with All Beings: Astin shares that spiritual awakening deepens the sense of connection with all beings, seeing them not as separate but as expressions of the same universal consciousness.
• Final Thoughts: The conversation concludes with Astin emphasizing the importance of the ongoing spiritual journey. He encourages others to explore, remain open to different teachings, and trust their own direct experiences, as each path is unique.

This summary highlights the core insights from John Astin’s interview, which blends his personal experiences in both acting and spirituality, and illustrates how these two aspects have interwoven in his life.

Full transcript:

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. I say that because this may be the first one you’ve watched, although most viewers have watched many. But if it is your first, then feel free to go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and check out the past interviews menu, where you’ll find 320-something previous ones, all categorized in various ways. You’ll also see a donate button there on the site, which we very much appreciate people clicking on if they feel moved to do so, because it supports this whole project and enables us to keep it going. My guest today is John Astin. John is the author of three collections of poetic and prose reflections on the non-dual nature of reality. “Too Intimate for Words,” “This Is Always Enough,” and “Searching for Rain in a Monsoon.” He is presently at work on a new book, “It’s Not What You Think It Is: Reflections on the Inconceivable Nature of Reality.” Along with his writing and teaching, John is also a singer, songwriter, and recording artist, who since 1987 has produced seven CDs of original spiritual contemplative music, including his most recent release, “What We’ve… What We’ve Always Been.” John is a musician, and he sings and plays guitar, and he’s released a number of CDs of his songs. So, in the course of this conversation, we may segue into a song, which we’ll splice in later on in post-production, so that we won’t be introducing it, but we’ll just cut to a song that probably…that pertains to something we’ve just been talking about. So, if we do that, don’t be surprised, enjoy the song, and then our conversation will continue. Thanks. In addition to his writing and music, John also holds a PhD in health psychology and is an internationally acclaimed scholar in the field of mind-body medicine, his research focusing on the applications of meditative contemplative practices in psychology and health care. And John’s website is johnastin.com, A-S-T-I-N. So, John, you’re kind of a Renaissance man or something.

John: That’s probably a good way to put it.

Rick: Yeah, finger in many pies.

John: Yes, I’m a dabbler.

Rick: Yeah, but not a dilettante.

John: Hopefully not, but maybe sometimes.

Rick: Yeah, for the non-English speaking viewers, a dilettante means a superficial dabbler, but John’s a deep dabbler.

John: Sounds good.

Rick: Yeah.

John: I seem to have a lot of diverse interests, even if they seem connected within myself, so it keeps life interesting.

Rick: Yeah, Yeah, it does. I’m kind of like that too, although I’m sort of fanatical about this spiritual stuff.

John: I’m kind of with you there.

Rick: Yeah, that’s the hub of the wheel.

John: Yeah.

Rick: So, let’s cover it all, John. Usually it’s good to start with some kind of chronology, you know, of how you first got interested in spirituality and what…what are some of your major milestones. Do you think that might be a good place to start?

John: Sure, happy to say a little bit about that. Raised very non-religiously, thought of myself as a atheist as a teenager, and remember getting in arguments with my brother at the time, who had become a born-again Christian.

Rick: Oh, brother.

John: My younger brother, although he didn’t end up remaining in that for more than a couple years, but I felt pretty convinced that I just had kind of a materialistic view of life and the notions of God seemed to not answer the question. I remember when getting in some of these arguments with believers, And they would talk about, well, you know, God created everything, and my response was often, “Well, what created God?” Somehow that … it was like a cop-out answer somehow. In some respects I sort of still feel the same way, but it doesn’t actually really answer the question where did it all begin. So I went to college at Berkeley initially and wanted to change the world- Very politically active, and yeah that was really my focus. And a very life-altering conversation happened with a friend who … a fellow political activist, and we were sitting outside, and I had become disenchanted with what I was observing in a lot of political activism, which felt like people sort of not walking the talk in the sense of speaking a lot about harmony and connection and love and healing the world, but there was a lot of anger and a lot of vitriol and a lot of posturing, and something was like not connecting for me there, and I felt sort of disenchanted with that. So I was speaking with my friend, and she said, “Well, John, they don’t understand … most people don’t understand something very fundamental, which is the real transformation happens within ourselves.” And I never really thought of that ever in my 19 years of life, and that one little phrase sort of went off like a time bomb in my head. And I think it played a major role in kind of setting me on this journey of self-exploration, self-discovery. And I had a good friend who … we’ve had this very kind of parallel journey, and we started having conversations and sort of tracking one another’s experiences and investigations, and both kind of at the same time happened upon Eastern religions and meditation. And really I didn’t seek any of that out. It was like it just sort of came into my field, and I got very interested and passionate about it. And my kind of major introduction into that whole world was Yogananda’s teachings.

Rick: Incidentally, just before we get off the activism thing, you know, you’re probably aware of this, but these days, spiritual activism is becoming a sort of buzzword, and people like Andrew Harvey and Adam Bucko and others who are kind of putting their money where their mouth is in terms of feeling like their activism, their spirituality should be applied in some kind of meaningful way in the world. And you know, I was a little older than you I think, but back in the day, in the late 60s, early 70s, I was meditating, and there were these activists and marching against the Vietnam War and stuff. And I perceived what you perceived, which was that there’s a lot of anger and egotism and stuff, and I thought, “You know, they’re not going to create world peace. They need to sort of become peaceful within themselves.” But I’m sure they were thinking of me, if they were aware of me at all, “He’s not going to accomplish anything sitting on his butt.”

John: Right, right

Rick: But these days, you know, there are people who are sort of feeling like you really need to have both in order for it to be effective.

John: Yeah, yeah, no, I mean that makes a lot of sense. I think particularly if you’re drawn to being much more kind of politically, kind of socially engaged in those kinds…in those kinds of areas. So yeah, I got introduced to Yogananda’s teachings and was just completely enamored with the whole world of yoga and meditation, And I just dove headfirst. I became a student of his. He had a course passed on, but really, really a serious student. And I…it became such a focus and I guess obsession in a sense, meditating hours every day, that I felt inside myself that I … I had dropped out of college by the way at this point, to pursue these other interests, which I felt were not getting fed in university studies. And at the time …

Rick: Did you find that Yogananda’s meditation as you were practicing it was gratifying enough as to be able to absorb your attention for hours at a time? It sounds like you must have really been getting into it, because if you weren’t, it wouldn’t have been hard to sit there that long.

John: It was very hard to sit there that long.

Rick: Was it?

John: Yeah, probably kind of … we’ll touch on it probably in other ways too, but I … in some respects I didn’t really care for meditation that much, even thoughI… I felt I was finding benefits from it. I would have kind of periodic moments of what I would call sort of breakthrough understandings and a sense of sort of peace and bliss, but most of the time it was pretty difficult. And I struggled with concentration, even when I took up other practices later on that had a kind of a concentration, mind-control sort of element to them, I…I found was … I kept doing them, I think, as much out of some sense that I had to do this in order to realize what I wanted to realize, more than, “Wow, I really love this, I can’t wait for the next meditation.” It was rarely … I have friends who are like that, they can’t wait to go and sit for 12 hours a day, and I’m not one of those people.

Rick: I’m kind of like that, but it’s not 12.

John: That’s a little too long.

Rick: Right. I have done that, but these days it’s more like less than that.

John: Yeah. So I … at that time I thought that’s all I wanted was that, and I…it felt very single-pointed, and I toyed very seriously with becoming a monk within his order, which I thought I had lost all desire for anything else, for relationship, for children, for sex, the whole nine yards. And that turned out to not really be the case, was revealed shortly thereafter when I decided not to become a monk, and fell in love like very quickly after that. I was like, “Oh, I guess I’m not done with that very human thing.” And by staying involved with Yogananda’s teachings, I…I ended up leaving that whole world. You know, the whole question of how I stepped away from different teachings that I became involved with is kind of a whole thing unto itself. But suffice it to say, that I experienced an aspect of the yoga tradition as it was taught within his tradition, his teaching, that felt somewhat repressive, somewhat suppressive of our humanness, as very much … and you’re familiar with yoga traditions … I…I…I heard it as very much a kind of … you know, the lower chakras, or the lower energies, these very human longings and desires are somehow … well, nothing short of evil, and need to be risen above and transcended. And at first I was attracted to that, and then I started to feel something felt not quite integrated about that. I also wanted to teach meditation because I thought it was beneficial, and as much as I may have struggled with it, I also saw the value of it. I couldn’t do that within the context of his teachings, so I ended up gravitating towards more of a mindfulness, kind of Buddhist orientation. And I was also becoming aware at the same time, having returned to school and wanting to study meditation, since that’s what I was most interested in, that some of these mindfulness practices were starting to garner a lot of attention among researchers. And that all kind of coincided with my kind of … and then eventually going to graduate school and starting to…to do research on meditation at that time. I also felt something within that kind of Buddhist, Vipassana, mindfulness tradition, it felt much more … embracing of the whole of us, the whole … our whole whole… the whole thing, all of our humanness, and not sort of leaving any of it to the side. So that was very attractive to me, it felt truer somehow. So I continued to be pretty devoted to meditation, started … as I said, started studying it academically, doing research on it, and … you know, within, of course, all the contemplative traditions, there’s this very strong non-dual theme. I mean, it’s there, I saw it in Yogananda, particularly in some of his writings, but his path was also a very devotional one that had a strong kind of dualistic feel to it as well. But I always loved that non-dual piece, but in some sense I … well, I clearly didn’t completely get it experientially what that was all about. And I had been … Ken Wilber had become kind of an intellectual mentor, and I got to know him, was one of the founders of his Integral Institute way back in the 90s, and … and Ken, at the time, was speaking very highly of this guy Andrew Cohen, and I’d never heard of him. But I really respected Ken a lot, so I said, “Let me check this guy out,” so I started reading some of his stuff, and something about it was very compelling, and I went on a retreat with him in 2000, and … that was a very sort of watershed moment for me in my own journey of maturation and development. I think it was a five-day retreat, and very early on … there was a…there was actually a very cool kind of way that this happened. I don’t know … these things, you know, I don’t think they can really be explained in rational terms necessarily, how they come about, but … it was just good, good timing, I guess, grace, whatever, some combination. And I was sitting in this meditation, and he had shared something earlier about something that his teacher, Papaji, had said to him. And he said to Andrew – Andrew, come back to see him in India – and he said to Andrew, “I’m so happy that you found the friend that you’ll never see.” That’s what Papaji said to Andrew. And I was like, “Wow, that’s kind of a trippy thing to say,” and, “So happy you found the friend you’ll never see,” and all of a sudden I understood what that meant, that I could never see this because it was what was looking.

Rick: Right. And it was just like something just kind of went off inside me in that moment, and I recognized that, wow, I’d been spending … God, now it had been … I think that was 2000, I was like 40, early 40s, I’d been slogging away for years, you know, meditating and doing practices and chanting and trying to realize … you know, it’s a familiar story that you’ve heard many of your guests share, I’m sure, in one form or another, but … that discovery that I was what I had been looking for was … it was really shocking. It was like … it’s hard to describe, but … it was interesting. It had a very emotional impact at a certain level, which was the sense of this kind of bittersweetness that I’d been … or what I’d been doing, I’d been like looking for so, so long, for so hard, you know, struggling, grasping, seeking for this and all along it was what I was. It was like, holy shit, it was just mind-blowing, you know.

Rick: Looking back now, do you feel like all that struggling and seeking was a waste of time, or do you feel like somehow, in a paradoxical way, it actually brought you to the point where you could sort of see what had been there all along?

John: Yeah, I … there’s no way, of course, to know the answer to that.

Rick: I’m kind of inclined to see it the first way. You know, you talk to people who have meditated for 30 years and then they all of a sudden have this awakening and then they say, “Oh, you don’t need to meditate, just be awakened,” or something, and I was thinking, “No, man, it had to do with what you’ve been doing for 30 years,” you know, even though it takes a thorn to remove a thorn. It might not make sense from your current perspective, but it had an effect.

John: Yeah. Well, clearly, I mean, everything that we’ve ever experienced has shaped something about how we are now. So I can’t even look back at anything, even things I can now look at and go, “Well, that wasn’t very wise,” you know, “that’s all shaped me.” So I’m not going to question like somehow I was wasting my time, because I don’t believe that. That being said, I do think it’s a very open question right now for me, and even within the whole kind of field of contemplative studies, which is can you take people who are, call them meditation-naive, who haven’t been doing a lot of practice and training of awareness, if you will, and introduce them more directly and more immediately to…to these things.

Rick: Yeah, maybe you can. Are you familiar with Jeffrey Martin? You know what Jeffrey Martin is up to?

John: Yeah, I know Jeffrey.

Rick: Yeah, he would probably concur with what you just said.

John: Yeah, I mean that’s my…that’s my sense is that, my intuition is that…that at least for some people there’s going to be a natural openness there that doesn’t require years and years and years of kind of banging their head against the wall. But I don’t know. The ways in which people come to discover what they discover is … there is no formula. I think that’s just a myth.

Rick: Yeah. Well, there’s some people who aren’t even looking for it. They’re just walking down the street or eating breakfast or something and all of a sudden this big shift happens and they think, “What is this?”

John: Yeah. Well, you know the…and I’ve been writing about this recently because it feels really … my observations of myself and many other people, this feels very central. Kind of a… I see it as almost like a fundamental misunderstanding that we kind of continue to fall prey to our experience until it starts to kind of wear away and only try to describe it. So the event that happened on that particular retreat was…felt quite spectacular. It wasn’t like a lot of … it wasn’t showy in the sense of like phenomena because I don’t seem to be really wired that way. But it was very … it felt very special, very profound, very incredibly meaningful, like more meaningful than anything. So it was very big in that sense and it was so moving to me that I…that I was literally like weeping for like a couple of days. It was like just … I couldn’t stop. I was just so moved by it. But then here’s a very interesting thing that happened after that that I think I’m still getting. So here was this big moment,and then another meditation session a couple of days later and I’m sitting there. And it’s like it’s already been recognized that this is it. Literally, this is it. And I’m sitting there meditating, and there’s this sense like it’s like the oldest, most familiar feeling in me of like grasping is the best way to describe it. I’m like looking for something other than this. And that’s what I was doing. I could feel it. I could feel the pain of it. And it was interesting because it was this whole sort of non-dual thing. It was like nothing about really God or devotion happening in my experience or in this retreat. But the next thing that happened was something I’d never really experienced before and never experienced afterwards, which was a voice. And the voice said to me, right in the middle of grasping, it said, “Isn’t this enough?” And it felt like reality speaking to me. And then the voice went on and said, “Can you feel how much grace there is in this? Just as it is.” And I immediately kind of broke down again and I saw kind of the fool’s errand that I was on of looking for it in a…to look a particular way, I think was the crux of that understanding. And I think that that, through all of my subsequent experiences and involvement with different teachers and teachings, it’s been a process of wearing away at this idea that the truth or God or reality or spirit or whatever you want to call it looks a certain way. And that is when I listen to other people who are attending teachings or satsangs or speaking to me, one form or another that tends to be what’s at the root of the question, which is, “It couldn’t be this, this particular moment of discomfort or confusion or … so get me out of this, or get me …” And it could be in a very conventional sense, not even a spiritual satsang-type person, but just somebody who wants to feel better in their lives psychologically or mentally and emotionally. It’s like, “I don’t want to experience what I’m experiencing. It’s uncomfortable.” With a spiritual seeker it gets in some ways even more complicated because there’s this kind of whole architecture, this superstructure of, sort of, not only is this uncomfortable, but it’s definitely not an enlightened state, and it’s definitely not divine. So there’s this additional overlay of … which leads to this kind of … in a sense, moving in opposition to our own experience, which by any other name is suffering. [music] I have no more ideas anymore about God or the Absolute. And if you want to talk with me, then ask me whether I know. Instructions Cause all I want to know is have you noticed that something, something is here my friend. All I want to know is have you noticed. I have no more ideas about God or the Absolute. I have no more ideas anymore about God or the Absolute. And if you want to talk with me, let us meet where there are no obstructions cause all I want to know is have you noticed that something, something is here my friend. All I want to know is have you noticed that something, something is here my friend I have no more ideas about God or the Absolute. Only the mystery is here. I have no more ideas anymore about God or the Absolute. I have no more ideas about God or the Absolute. I have no more ideas about God or the Absolute. I have no more ideas about God or the Absolute. I have no more ideas about God or the Absolute. It’s only the mystery. It’s only the mystery. It’s not to see. Only the mystery is here. It’s only the mystery. It’s only the mystery. It’s not to see. Only the mystery is here.

Rick: Yeah, I mean I guess maybe the ordinary person goes by the “life sucks then you die” philosophy. Or as I saw some cartoon where these two dung beetles … it was the dung beetle bar, right? And there’s a dung beetle sitting there drinking his drink and the bartender is a dung beetle, and so the guy sitting there drinking his drink said, “So is this all there is to it, Louis? Eat shit and die?”

John: Yeah, but I would say that there’s a paradoxical issue here, which is that on the one hand, yeah, you don’t want to be constantly looking for something other than what you’re experiencing. You need to settle into and accept the present as it is. But on the other hand, that is not to say that it couldn’t get better. It’s like there’s some Zen saying, which is, “You’re all perfect just as you are, but you could all use improvement.” And I do talk to people, and I’m sure you do too, who argue that, “Hey, everyday ordinary perception, that’s it. Don’t look for anything more, just accept that.” And I find that discouraging. I would find that discouraging if I believed it, because I realize, both intellectually and through my own experience, that there is more and there will always be more. And I’ve read in your writing something about an ever-deepening appreciation kind of thing. But on the other hand, if you’re not loving what is, to use Byron Katie’s term, then you’re not accepting the foundation upon which that more may actually develop. What do you think about all that?

Rick: Yeah, no, I mean, the other side of the paradox, of course, is that if there’s something deeper, more subtle, more fulfilling, more awakened, all the different versions of that, it can’t be found in anything other than this.

John: Right.

Rick: Right? So that’s obviously the value of, you know, you don’t have anything but this. Now I think what might make that, one might hear that in a way that would be depressing or discouraging, has everything to do with how we’re defining this. And that I think is really, you know, if I look at my own process of … so let’s say we have an experience that feels very profound, and people will call that an awakening often in these circles. And then we have, of course, that fades because that’s the nature of phenomena, right? I mean, just like that. That’s how quickly it fades, everything. But some part of us wants to recapture that because of how it felt, you know, whether it was blissful, whether it was liberating, all the different dimensions of it.

John: And that’s natural.

Rick: It’s natural. That effort to try to have some experience that feels, at a more conventional level, it feels good and we want to try to hold on to it in some way, sustain it, or if it’s more … we have spiritualized that as more awakened or more enlightened, we also want to hold on to that. But it’s a similar dynamic, right? And it just simply can’t be done. I mean, I’m interested in reality and I look at reality and I see that reality slips away in every instant.

John: That’s one way of looking at it. Otherwise reality continues to be here in every instant. That’s another way.

Rick: Right, which is the same thing. In a sense, it’s just constantly morphing and taking different shapes. I mean, that seems to be its nature. I mean, no two instants seem to repeat.

John: No. But there is an understanding of an underlying continuum that doesn’t morph and change, and it may not even be perceived as underlying, it may be perceived as predominant.

Rick: You know, this is an interesting question, Rick. That is not my experience. My experience is that there’s not some realm where everything is impermanent and changing, and then some sort of underlying realm that’s changelessly � this is classically how it’s framed, sort of the changeless sort of awakeness or awareness that somehow knowing all of that change. That’s not my sense of it.

John: But right now, I mean, you and I are talking and our bodies are changing and our words are changing and the furnace is going on and off and this and that, but we’re aware, we’re aware, we’re aware. There’s a continuous awareness that doesn’t oscillate or fluctuate, regardless of the changing things that change. Not only we are aware, but that even puts it into personal term. It’s almost like, one way of putting it, and I don’t mean to get teachy here, but imagine that awareness is like a tone that’s playing and it’s been playing all your life, and you know, this “mmm” in the background or something, and after a while you’d tune it out because there wouldn’t be any point in listening to it, but if you ever chose to do so, “Oh yeah, there’s the tone, still playing.” But of course that’s just a metaphor, but it’s that by virtue of which we’re able to hear each other and see each other and so on, that doesn’t change, even though the hearing and the seeing may come and go, “Yeah?”

Rick: I don’t know, it’s interesting because even there’s traditions, and I don’t think we have to reference traditions necessarily, but that speak about that there’s no awareness without phenomena, and so it’s phenomena that reveal the nature of awareness. That’s how awareness is known, by what it is illuminating. And so from that standpoint, what we call awareness is, I mean I think it’s quite paradoxical in a sense, because everything is morphing and changing, and for me what is constant is that something is here.

John: And that something is …

Rick: And what is here is constantly changing. But continuous, the continuity is, you could call it presence, but I wouldn’t call it awareness necessarily, I would just say that something is here. And what’s here is inconceivable and takes an infinite, diverse number of forms and shapes and colors and textures, but it’s here.

John: Fair enough, I mean we could debate whether it actually may be awareness. You know, we could reference physics to say, “Okay, there’s all this changing stuff, but you boil it down to the molecular and the atomic and the subatomic, and then there’s this sort of underlying vacuum state or unified field or something, out of which all those things are said to arise, and it’s a continuum, even though those things might assume different forms as they transmute into one another.” And there are physicists who argue that that unified field actually is consciousness or awareness, and probably the vast majority would argue that it isn’t, but anyway, that’s just something to play with.

Rick: Yeah, I mean here’s where that’s not just like idle intellectual speculation, where I think it’s potentially relevant to people who are exploring these things, which is, there is a tendency, and I’ve been involved with what people would call more awareness-based teachings, where there’s a kind of a tendency to reify awareness as something, like everything else is not a thing, but awareness is a thing that’s in the sense of, well, listen, if it’s something that has constancy, then it suggests sort of thingness, it suggests a kind of substantiality to it, that’s what makes it … does that make sense?

John: Yeah, I hear you, and I think you can look at it that way, but it’s sort of a contradiction in terms, because we usually reserve the word “thing” for things that have physical substance to them, and we’re not saying that awareness does, but people who would argue the way you just described would probably say, “Well, this actually doesn’t have any ultimate reality because it’s changing and one day it won’t exist, but that which is awareness will always exist.” What is that the Gita says? The unreal has no being, the real never ceases to be.

Rick: Right, the real never ceases to be, but the real is forever changing. And that’s what I meant by “something is always here,” that’s the being, something … this is the presence of whatever this is.

John: Okay, if the real is always changing, let’s keep playing with this because this is fun. If the real is always changing, what is the real made of? That which is always changing, what is it made of, if we boil it down to more and more fundamental levels of …

Rick: That’s a million-dollar question. That is the question. And to me, the answer to that is, it’s the ultimate koan and it has no answer. And that is that we never get to the bottom of what it is. We never arrive at … to me, both whether we’re talking … because I’m also a scientist, whether we’re talking science or we’re talking contemplative spirituality, we have as humans a search for ultimacy, it would seem. So if we’re talking about the actual …

John: It’s really getting to the bottom of what it is.

Rick: If we’re talking about the real creation here and the actual reality of the world we live in, then taking this cup as an example, you know, a hundred years ago this cup didn’t exist, a hundred years from now it may not exist. But the atoms that comprise it existed, they’ve been around for billions of years, so maybe the atoms are more permanent than the ceramic, relatively. And those atoms, what are they if you boil them down more deeply, more fundamentally? And if you keep going as far as one can conceivably go, even if perhaps physics doesn’t have the instrumentation to do so, do you not arrive at something which doesn’t change or which is a continuum, an eternal continuum, which gives rise to apparent changing forms and phenomenon but which in and of itself couldn’t change, wouldn’t change, doesn’t?

John: Well I think it’s … remember my earlier comment about the God explanation was a cop-out? We’re kind of touching on a very similar thing, which is, we may give it whatever name we want, but can we actually reduce reality scientifically or spiritually to the final answer, to what it actually is, like the fundament, you know, what is it, what is it at its root? And my … putting science aside because I’m not a physicist and they certainly haven’t arrived at the final conclusion, and my deepest hunch is they never will get to the bottom because that’s what makes infinity, infinity, is that you never get to the bottom of what it is. It’s unfathomable. And if we look at our actual experience, which is what I’m most interested in with respect to our conversation, that’s what I find … the only thing to explore really is our own experience as far as I can tell because that’s what we got, there’s nothing else. And if we explore our experience, speaking from my own standpoint, I never get to the bottom of what it is, experientially. And so I never land, like, now I’ve landed and I’ve finally arrived at what it actually is as something definite. And we as humans, because we have this thing, the mind and reason, and it seems understandable like it should sort of make sense in some kind of nice, neat, tidy … here it is. I’ve got the framework that tells me what it actually is, but we see this of course throughout the history of the traditions too, this very strong theme of the inconceivable, indescribable, unresolvable nature of reality, that we actually never do get to the bottom of it. And that’s what’s so amazing about it to me. That’s what’s actually so liberating about it because you can’t pin it down, you can’t say what it actually is.

Rick: But you can be what it actually is, in fact you are what it actually is.

John: Right, you just don’t know exactly what that is because it’s not definable. It’s open-ended.

Rick: Because it’s beyond the intellect, beyond the senses, beyond the mind, beyond the words, and all that stuff. Just the way we describe it, you can’t know what it actually is, it’s indescribable, and so on, because what we’re saying here, what we’re saying when we say that is, “Well, there are no thoughts or words or anything which can do justice to it, or which can contain it, or which can be … one can only be it.”

John: Right. And what’s extraordinary about that, Rick, for my … the more I look into this and think about its implications for us as humans, kind of often feeling like we’re stuck in our lives and struggling in one form or another, is that inconceivability and indescribability doesn’t merely apply to these esoteric realms, but it applies to every dimension of our human experience.

Rick: Absolutely. I mean, try describing to me the color red.

John: Exactly. I was just writing about that just this morning. Like if you … we have a name for it, right? Which is an incredible aspect of the intelligence of the universe that it can see, and here’s one way to understand it, it’s pattern recognition of some kind. Like we’re recognizing … I don’t know what it is exactly that we’re recognizing, but here it is, and the names and concepts that we have for all of this stuff that’s within us and surrounding us is … instantaneously it’s all right here, right? We know what these things are, we have concepts to describe them, make sense of all of this patterning. But if we actually look a little bit more closely at what it is we have this name for, whether it’s red or a human being in a computer screen and … Taste of an apple or whatever.

Rick: Everything.

John: If we look a little more closely, we realize that the concepts that we use to kind of organize these patterns of whatever … are they patterns of information or energy or … I don’t know what they actually are, but what…whatever it is that we’re beholding and seeing forming itself as patterns that we then give concepts and names to, when we look more closely, like color is an amazing thing. It’s like, well what is it? We look up in the sky and on a clear day and we have a name for this thing, it’s called blue. But it’s like … the name actually, the concept, tells us virtually nothing about what it actually is experientially…like So we actually go into what that actually is and it’s just unfathomable, isn’t it? What that is actually … and what’s so, to me, just mind-blowing is how this is the case with everything we experience. And yet language is so powerful that … and conceptualization is so powerful…that…and facile in the sense of, “Oh yeah, I know what all these things are because I’ve got categories to place them in, right?”

Rick: Yeah. As a species, as a society, we agree upon certain concepts and terms so we can function.

John: Right.

Rick: I mean, we all agree what red is and we know how to all stop at stoplights.

John: Right, so it has some kind of functional utility for sure.

Rick: Yeah, and that’s because most of us experience red unless we’re colorblind and even then we would know, “Okay, it’s the top light,” you know, so we have a concept of top and yellow is the middle one. But I think the significance of this for our conversation is, what if the experience of pure consciousness, or whatever we want to call it, were as common as the experience of red in our society? Then we might have more readily agreed upon terminology for it. In fact, I mean, you look at the Vedic civilization or perhaps even Buddhist civilizations and enough people were experiencing that stuff and talking about it all the time that they actually have a lot of words for it and words to sort of define the various nuanced differences between types of experience of it. And much as the Inuit people have 30 words for snow, you know?

John: Right, well what if the experience of what you’re calling pure consciousness or pure awareness or whatever is equal to the experience of looking at the color red?

Rick: What do you mean equal?

John: You know, the Dzogchen teacher Longchenpa, he’s just one of the most beautiful articulators of that tradition and he would sometimes talk about the equalness and evenness of everything and I never really understood exactly what that meant, but something about it felt … had some ring of truth. So the experience of red is equal to the experience of pure consciousness or any other experience in the sense of its inconceivable infinite nature. What it is, it’s a…there’s a word that characterizes some aspect of it in a very crude over-generalized way like every word does, every concept. But what that experience actually is, is bottomless infinity. And that’s true whether it’s the most blissful moment of inseparability you experience on retreat or wherever ,to the moment of complete confusion and chaos reigning supreme in your consciousness. And in that sense they’re equal in the sense of their infinite nature, their inconceivable nature. And that turns out to be incredibly, and I can say a little bit about this, we can get into talking about the psychology piece of this, but that to me holds the keys to our freedom ultimately, that understanding.

Rick: To that I would say that if you’re in a state of confusion and chaos you’re probably not going to be appreciating the infinite quality of everything, but I think it’s possible to implicate a state of being, a state of functioning in which throughout your normal everyday experience you do apprehend and appreciate the infinite nature of everything, because that’s what everything actually is, is comprised of, is this sort of infinite stuff, so to speak, the non-stuff of consciousness or being, or whatever you want to call it. And I don’t claim to do this, but I have friends who do, who say that as they walk down the street or eat their lunch or whatever, everything is appreciated in terms of pure consciousness, in terms of the self, primarily, predominantly. Secondarily it’s appreciated as mashed potatoes or trees or whatever,

John: Right Right.

Rick: but really that’s their sort of ordinary everyday way of living. But again, to say that somebody who’s in a mental hospital or something, utterly confused and psychotic, that you could actually say to them, “Hey, this is freedom too,” it’s not going to do them much good.

John: Well, no, no, no, I wasn’t suggesting that.

Rick: Well, just to take an extreme example of confusion.

John: Sure, yeah, no, no, no. It seems that for most of us it requires a little bit of looking, a little bit of experiential exploration to actually … because again, as I was saying, because of the nature of language and conceptualization, we’ve sort of formulated conclusions about what things are. We’ve already … most people would say, “I know what these things are,” and they feel that way because they have a kind of familiarity with something and they have a way of framing it and categorizing it.

Rick: You mean everyday things like trees and cars and stuff like that?

John: Yeah, everything. Any human experience, but yes, everyday things as well. And so you’re…I’m talking about a kind of a deconstructive inquiry in the sense of, “Let’s actually take a look.” Like if you think you know what this is, like, look again. Like, let’s look a little bit more carefully. I’ll tell you a kind of a story as it relates to psychology and it’s one of the hats that I wear. So I teach a class, a graduate school class on … it’s called “Evidence-Based Approaches to Therapy.” So it’s looking at these different schools of therapy and psychotherapy and counseling and understanding … I’m teaching people about what’s the state of the science about the effectiveness of these different approaches. So a little bit about the approach and the theory behind it. And I talk in the class a lot about … I use the example of the blind man and the elephant and I say, “These different schools of thought of cognitive behavioral therapy and psychodynamic therapy and the mindfulness tradition, they’re … each person in a sense, they’re looking at reality from a particular perspective and it’s the kind of the map that that theory is bringing to reality and they’re understanding the client all very much in terms of that framework that they bring to it, right?” So we look at the evidence and basically if you look at the evidence of psychotherapy research including drugs that are used or pharmacology, it’s sobering in the sense that after whatever, 50, 100 years now of scientific psychology and psychiatry, our capacity to actually really liberate people from their…the things that distress them in their lives in some kind of enduring way is very poor, very poor. So even the best evidence-based methods that science would say, right, the most effective methods help some people to some degree, but many people… they’re not very effective, okay? So at the end of the semester I ask the students, I say, “So let’s explore this a little bit. Why do you think that might be the case? What are we missing? Are we missing something fundamental about our understanding of human psychology?” And people come up with some interesting ideas and then that’s when I kind of save what we’re talking about for the very end of the class and I say, “Look, just try this on as a hypothesis. I’m not saying this is the way it is…but…” And basically what I say to them is, “It’s a curious thing. We as human beings are obviously very fascinated by studying the things in the world and getting like we were speaking about earlier, getting to the bottom of what they are. So the chemist is diving into chemicals to explore them and the neuroscientist is looking at the brain and trying to get to the basis of neural functioning and the physicist is looking at the quantum realities and again, trying to understand what is this made of, right?” And I said, “What’s interesting,” I said to my class, “is that as humans we haven’t, it would seem for the most part, applied a similar sort of curiosity to our own experience. So I said, “Let’s take anxiety.” Okay, lots of people go to therapy to deal with anxiety. S… and then we come up with all these treatments and we measure anxiety, but throughout this whole process really neither the client nor the therapist or the scientist studying these methods has asked this fundamental question, which is, “What is anxiety?” What is it, not as an intellectual question like, “Well, it’s the neural firings in the amygdala,” which is cool, you know, that we can explore a question like that through those means, but I’m asking it much more as a first-person kind of inquiry. Like what is, as an experience, what is it? In the same way that we would say, “What’s the table made of,” fundamentally, what’s the experience of anxiety made of? Because in a way we’ve skipped over the most important question. We’re trying to solve a problem about something that we don’t even know what it is yet, but we’ve assumed that we know what it is and we have a very general sense of, “It’s painful, I don’t like it, it’s uncomfortable and I want to experience something else,” which is very natural. But my very strong sense of this is that the freedom comes from actually investigating what it’s actually made of experientially, because what we discover is that it isn’t what we thought it was as we were beginning our conversation with, that it’s much, much more … it transcends what we think it is. It’s utterly beyond what we think it is and it turns out to be, it’s God. It’s made of …it’s made of infinity, it’s made of the … whatever. It’s made of …it’s made of reality. That’s not something you can say what it actually is because it’s infinite, but that turns out to be incredibly liberating when you realize there’s not something … it’s really the basis of emptiness teachings is that we discover that things don’t have the kind of substantiality that we actually are sort of labeling and conceptualizing. Leads us to believe that they actually have.

Rick: Well if you take that leap of course, then you can immediately reduce everything down to God or to the infinite. It might be also good to have a few way stations on the way to fill in the gaps.

John: Tell me about that. What do you think about that?

Rick: Yeah, well okay, well to take anxiety as an example, the neurophysiologist might say, “Well it’s certain chemicals,” and the psychologist might say, “Well it has to do with your upbringing as a child or something.” In spiritual circles, the Upanishads say, “All fear is born of duality,” if we want to throw in … equate fear with anxiety. And that kind of brings it into our ball court here, which is that if we are experiencing fear or anxiety, it’s because we’re functioning dualistically. And if we could sort of transcend the subject-object spit…split and experience or know the unity of things, like you were saying, it’s all God, then the anxiety hopefully would …would dissolve. But that…you can’t just do that intellectually. It’s kind of a cop-out to just say, “Oh, it’s just God,” and meanwhile you go on feeling anxious.

John: Right, but if you actually … I mean, there’s sort of … you could break it down, including spiritual teachings, into sort of two camps, if you will, and I don’t necessarily think of it this way, and they’re not necessarily mutually exclusive. But one is, in either subtle or not so subtle ways, still sees a state like anxiety or fear as a problem that must be solved. And the spiritual teachings are going to solve it transcendentally by realizing some dimension that’s not afraid, let’s say, or get to the root of it, say, if it’s a dualistic understanding that’s giving rise to fear and anxiety, whatever. But it’s still actually seeing that particular expression of reality, for lack of a better word, as a problem that needs to be solved. And there is…I think that that’s a … look, you and I are using language, of course, and we’re bringing perspectives to bear upon a reality that can’t actually be contained in any of our language or perspective, so let’s just like lay that out there. So what you’re describing, that kind of … is a particular perspective that can certainly benefit people. But there’s another perspective that I’m sharing, which is … I would consider it a different approach to this, which is … considering that what we typically think of as problems that we have to solve, either medically or psychologically, or spiritually, may not actually be the problems we imagine them to be. But that, in large part, we are defining those problems into existence by the way in which we conceive of those things to be. That they’re actually … and if you start to look at something like anxiety, a great example, and you start to actually see what it’s … it doesn’t hold together. It’s an abstraction, actually. It’s an abstract thing. There’s no such thing as anxiety. It’s an abstraction. As a experience, it’s tangible. But the deeper we go into what it actually is experientially, the more we discover how open it actually is, how open-ended it is, how undefinable it actually is. And the more we explore that, in my own sense of this, my own experience, and working with other people, the more people begin to discover a sense of freedom in the midst of that, rather than freedom apart from those experiences or transcendent of those experiences.

Rick: Yeah.

John: Does that make sense?

Rick: Yeah, it does. Let me throw a few points back at you.

John: Yeah, yeah, of course.

Rick: The way you just … hopefully I’ll get this right, the way you just phrased it, but it … I mean, it doesn’t actually exist as you think it is. How did you say that? It doesn’t actually …

John: It’s not what we imagine it is.

Rick: Not what we imagine it is. But nothing is as …

John: In fact, it’s inconceivable, and this is true of everything, of course.

Rick: Yeah.

John: So the notion that I am stuck in anxiety, aspect of that conceptualized framework of myself being stuck in some state of mind, all of those are abstractions.

Rick: Right.

John: Because when investigated, each one of those breaks down or opens up and is discovered to be utterly transcends what we imagine that it is. So the transcendent doesn’t lie outside of the afflictive state of mind in some space of dispassionate awareness, it’s actually in the belly of the beast. The beast itself is made of, you know, call it whatever you will, natural perfection or reality or God or, you know, it’s made of infinity, it’s made of the inconceivable reality itself. What else could it be made of?

Rick: Yeah, I agree with that, and I think I’m cool with what you’re saying, it’s just that I’m a little … not that, you know, the truth hinges upon what I think.

John: But any questions you have about it are fantastic, because that’s good, you know, I’m interested to hear whatever about it strikes you as maybe not quite, you know, understandable … not understandable, but maybe not practical or maybe … yeah, I’m very open, I’m just laying out kind of my own experience, and I have a strong sense of the utility of this for people in their day-to-day lives, and it’s not an abstraction.

Rick: Well that would be the key word for me is “utility,” and also I have a caution about dumbing down awakening or enlightenment. You know, you hear people saying, “Oh, you can be enlightened and still be angry and depressed and a total screw-up,” you know, and all that stuff, and I think, “Well, you’re really not doing justice to the idea of what it’s supposed to be,” and I don’t even use the word because I feel like there are so few examples of it in this world, and most people are making good progress, but they’re…I kind of reserve that for a more superlative degree of development. But I would hope, and maybe you’re saying this about when you mentioned the word “utility,” that spiritual development, however we want to define it, would dissipate at least the predominance of experiences of anxiety and fear and other negative traits, and traditionally it’s characterized as doing that.

John: Right.

Rick: Because again, you mentioned the word “utility” or “utilitarian,” I think there’s a practical value to this stuff,

John: Totally

Rick: and it should actually make one happier in life and make life go more successfully and smoothly. It shouldn’t just be some pie-in-the-sky thing and you’re still a jerk, you know? Or you’re still miserable, or whatever.

John: Right, I mean, to use an extreme example, people who recognize what I’m describing here are … it’s not likely that they’ll be flying airplanes into buildings and blowing people, right? And there’s a reason for that, right? Because … well, maybe that might be a good example because that’s a classic example of fixating on a particular map of reality and imagining it to be true, which is the essence of dogma, right?

Rick: Yeah, and I think you addressed that nicely in your “Rain in the Monsoon” book. In fact, I took some notes on that, that fixation and fundamentalism and the assumption that we know the truth and all that is very dangerous.

John: You know, and your question, I mean, is a good one, Rick, about … of course, how does this roll out in a person’s life? And I … the paradox here, say, around some … like you say, you know, you would expect as someone matures as a human being, if you want to take it out of esoteric language, and they just develop themselves, they develop greater awareness, greater sensitivity, greater awakening, sort of clarity and wisdom, that they’re going to tend to be less reactive, they’re going to tend to be less fixated on their own ideas and points of view, they’re going to tend to be less defensive, they’re going to tend to be less conflictual, they’re going to tend to be less fearful, all of that … and makes complete sense. I think that … but, if you will, the radical proposition, and it’s not like my own, I mean, it’s shared by other people, teachers and traditions as well, which is that the paradox is that we don’t… we don’t get to the freedom from fear by making an end around, but we actually discover it right in the middle of whatever, right?

Rick: Yeah.

John: Because it’s right there. And that … so it isn’t necessarily kind of a, “Oh yeah, well, anything goes,” although in a sense anything does go, because reality could show up in any number of ways, and then it’s always a question of like, in the moment that it’s showing up and appearing however it’s appearing, what’s our understanding of it? What’s our engagement with it? What’s our… and that’s just a moment-by-moment thing, you know, in my sense of it, and that’s not whatever we may have realized a moment ago or two weeks ago or a month ago is in a certain sense irrelevant to what’s actually happening right now. Where is our…where are we defaulting? Where are we going back to as our own understanding? One thing I was going to say, too, that I think is a really important piece.

Rick: Is this related to what you were just saying?

John: Yeah, unless you had another question.

Rick: Well, I was going to throw something in, but if this is related, keep going.

John: No, no, no, go ahead. I can bring this up later.

Rick: Okay, well, not too much later, but I was just going to say that, you know, relating to my own experience, if I’m meditating, let’s say, and this could also apply to the waking state, if I’m experiencing some emotional discomfort or physical discomfort or something, I mean, my attitude is not to try to do an end-run around it and get to the transcendent, but to sort of dwell right on it and kind of go to the heart of it, and then usually you find that it does dissipate. And I just also wanted to throw in Ken Wilber since you mentioned him earlier, and he says, “Well, there’s waking up, but there’s also cleaning up and growing up,” and he has this idea of lines of development and that, you know, one can, these various lines of development emotional, intellectual, consciousness, this and that can get a little bit out of correlation with one another or greatly out of correlation with one another.

John: We have many examples of this.

Rick: Yeah, yeah, we do.

John: And ourselves as well, probably.

Rick: Right.

John: No, no, I mean …

Rick: Continue on, yeah.

John: Yeah, and I think that … the one thing that … we’re talking about experience and that’s really kind of … that’s what I’m inviting kind of us to explore and other people to explore, what is the nature of our experience, actually, because that’s what we got. And we are kind of walking around, running around in our lives, sort of really assuming that we know what things are, and we’re not necessarily stopping to question that. And it turns out that that stopping to question it, my sense of it, is a really…it’s an exciting exploration, it’s a remarkable exploration, it’s a awe-inspiring to actually look into our own experience and begin to discover that things are way beyond what we think that they actually are. You know, the little … it’s kind of like in some of my recent writings I keep finding myself returning to the map and the territory, you know, that language, or any of our conceptual frameworks to make sense of our experience or the world or other people are … they’re just that, they’re like a map to that territory. Let’s say, you know, I have a map of who you are, I’m your partner, and I kind of have a working model of who you are at some level, and this is all very implicit, it’s not very explicit, right? But my map of you, of who you are, my concepts of who you are, which is based on a lot of my experiences of you of course, just like the map of New York, couldn’t hope to capture what you actually are, right? Not even close.

Rick: No.

John: So the actual experience of … like think about this experience, like okay, if you were to describe what’s going on here, well, two guys are having a conversation about the nature of reality over this thing called Skype and they’re using a computer, and that’s abasically like a shorthand way of explaining what’s actually happening. But what’s actually happening is … it’s unbelievable, isn’t it?

Rick: Oh yeah.

John: I mean, think about the … I mean, I’m going to say infinite array of phenomena that are taking place in the midst of what I just described.

Rick: Oh yeah.

John: From sensations to memory to consciousness to thoughts, feelings, subtle sensations and energies and things that we don’t even have words to describe. And all of that is happening … I mean, it’s like each instant is so information-dense, it’s so packed with … right? It’s just …

Rick: Yeah. No, it gives me goosebumps to hear you say that. I think about this all the time. I mean, look at your finger. It has billions of cells in it, each one of them, not to mention all the sort of the structural and anatomical and nervous and venous and all the different systems in it. And each one of those cells is more complex than Tokyo, you know, in all of its detail. And it’s self-repairing and self-replicating, and that’s just your finger, you know. And it just goes on and on throughout the entire universe. Every square cubic centimeter of it is just packed with unimaginable complexity and intelligence. And we just kind of saunter along without even kind of thinking about this stuff. We take it for granted, you know, because I suppose it wouldn’t do us much practical good to think about it all the time. But when you do, when you pause to think, it’s like awe-inspiring.

John: Well, maybe, yeah, it is awe-inspiring. Maybe that is actually … you talk about … I mean, that may feel like some sort of luxury or something, but maybe … talk about a…an incredible practicality. I mean, if that kind of investigation, which can be very light and playful, it doesn’t need to be a heavy-handed, you know, onerous, “I’m slogging away at this,” and overly dramatic thing, but it can be a playful investigation into what’s here experientially. And of course, that includes the circumstances within which … call it the external world, if you will. But that is awe-inspiring. It’s…the fact that it’s even here and appearing is awe-inspiring. So that’s pretty practical to me, because that gives rise to a sense, a felt sense, that human beings deeply aspire to touch in their lives, and that’s pretty damn practical to me.

Rick: This to me is where God comes in, because if you consider what we’re actually talking about here, we’re talking about a display of intelligence that is vast beyond imagining, and that is just continuing to orchestrate this amazing thing, and has been doing so for all eternity probably, throughout all conceivable space and time. And we’re…it completely permeates and interpenetrates us, we are that ultimately, essentially. So that kind of thing, that sense just grows and grows and grows. And who was it, I think Albert Einstein said that if you’re not continually in a state of awe, then you’re not paying attention.

John: Right, you’re not paying attention. No, I mean to me it lights me up, it just excites me with a kind of … it’s a… its own ecstatic exploration. And it’s also not … I mean there’s kind of the contemplation of it at a more mental level, but that…which is also beautiful, you know, of like maybe a scientist is investigating the hundred trillion neural connections in the brain. I mean, come on, that’s just like … it’s unthinkable, right? So that’s… but even at the experiential level of like, you know, the sense of touch, and like what’s actually happening there. You know, you touch your friend or you touch your lover, you know, you feel what’s actually there and you go into that, like it’s a whole universe inside of that. Literally. There’s a whole universe inside of that. And that’s … I’m laughing because I’m thinking about it, I was talking to a client, I was doing a Skype session with her and she was struggling with some different emotional states. And I was speaking kind of like you and I are speaking right now, and she said, “It sounds like you’re on some sort of drug or something, like you’re describing reality like a bio-oxygen or something.” And I just laughed because I hadn’t taken any drugs for the last, well, you know, 40, And I was like… and I wrote this little piece about it that says, “Reality, the greatest drug,” because it’s a total 24/7 acid trip. I mean if you actually…

Rick: Well, we’re full of drugs, you know, it’s by virtue of …by virtue of chemicals that we’re able to have this conversation in part.

John: No, and maybe that’s part of what the substances do, I don’t actually know this in terms of the biochemistry of it or whatever, the neuroscience of it, but I have a sense that it, it’s simply opening up some … in a sense it’s revealing, we’re talking about the information density and the ways in which we sort of for seemingly utilitarian reasons are censoring out so much of that, the richness of the ocean of data that we’re swimming in of experiential phenomena, that it’s as if that censoring apparatus, maybe through some of these substances, gets quieted a little bit, enough so that we start to actually touch into, “Wow, how much is actually here of a subtler nature that we’re just sort of overlooking because of the overlay of ideas about, ‘Yeah, yeah, I know what that is, that’s a tree,’ or ‘Really? Take another look.’ I mean, it’s quite something.

Rick: There’s a lot of threads to this conversation that we could pursue. Well, just on the censoring one, and you know, if you ever took acid back in the old days, which you probably did,

John: yeah

Rick: obviously you wouldn’t want to have that go on perpetually, you’re happy to have it shut down after a while. But I think one way of looking at spiritual development is it builds in us the capacity to be more and more and more uncensored or unclosed down, and you know, if you were somehow able to pop from where you were 40 years ago to where you are now, it would probably be too much. I mean, there’s a verse in the Gita, or a chapter in the Gita, where Arjuna begs Lord Krishna to show him

John: wants to see

Rick: want to see his Divine form, you know, basically he’s asking for omniscience. And you know, Lord Krishna first says, “No, you can’t handle it,” and Arjuna kind of pleads, and then he says, “Okay, here you go,” and then he pretty much spends the rest of the chapter begging him to take it away

John: yeah

Rick: because it’s just way too much. But I think that it’s kind of interesting to consider that we can build the inner strength or capacity or whatever it is to be open to a huge range of phenomenon and to integrate that with practical everyday life, and it makes life a lot more interesting than if we’re all shut down.

John: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that in keeping with kind of what some people call the direct path kinds of teachings, that for me it’s like when I was more in a kind of an awareness sort of model, if you will, I found it very…much more powerful to help people to recognize that awareness is already present, that this is already a functioning thing that you don’t have to contrive, you don’t have to cultivate, you don’t have to create. I would say in the same sense, this sensitivity of these subtler kind of non-conceptual, if you will, dimensions of experience is also happening. In fact, it’s happening all the time. It’s how … here’s a simple example that you and I are processing this conversation, there’s a processing of this conversation and the use of language and conceptualization and understanding one another’s, presumably, what’s being said, that is all occurring completely non-consciously. There’s no intentionality really, very little if any. We don’t know how we’re formulating concepts. We don’t have access to how that process is actually occurring. That to me is the … and so I don’t have to create that intelligence. That intelligence is already operating. I can simply recognize that it is operating and the recognition of it, like the way it works with attention, that what we recognize tends to kind of come alive.

Rick: Yeah, but we’ve spent a lifetime …

John: So we’re recognizing these dimensions of ourselves that aren’t really typically being noticed and recognized.

Rick: True, but we’ve spent decades playing with concepts and using…and practicing using words to express them and so on and so forth. And so we wouldn’t have been able to have this conversation 40, 50 years ago, maybe at least not the way we’re having it. And you’re a musician, I’m kind of reminded that, let’s say a professional level, the conductor of the New York Philharmonic, when he listens to an orchestra, he hears all kinds of things that I wouldn’t hear, because he has the training and he’s cultured the capacity over the course of his lifetime to have that sort of appreciation. So I think this is also true of what we’re talking about in terms of perception and the experience of life. It is what it is, obviously, but there’s also a vast range of potential for culturing a deeper appreciation of it.

John: Absolutely, absolutely.

Rick: Okay. I guess we’re on the same page.

John: By the way, just a little bit ago your image was starting to freeze a little bit, I don’t know if it was a problem on your end or my end.

Rick: I think your bandwidth is a little choked up there. I’m on fiber optics so I have no end of bandwidth, but we’re okay.

John: It’s probably me.

Rick: It would have recorded my side of the conversation anyway, because I’m doing that independent of Skype. So let’s see, let me just double check my notes here from you, but in the meanwhile feel free to bring up anything that you feel like you want to bring up, or that you know, related to our conversation, or maybe something we haven’t even pursued yet. You want to do that before I start looking at notes?

John: You know, one of the things that I wanted to touch on that I was going to say something about earlier and was even going to begin our conversation with, I’ll bring it up now, an hour and a half into it. You know, I started to share some of my spiritual journey and I stopped quite a ways back in I’ve been both involved directly and then also an observer of people engaged with different teachers and teachings. I think a question that I think is really worthy of people’s exploration is this question of authority and how it is … we do it in these circles, in these worlds that you and I are in and having conversations within, without even thinking sometimes about who it is we reference as sort of authoritative voices in the world of spirituality and consciousness exploration. But why do we do that? It’s a really interesting question and we do it, as I said, often without even thinking. People have a certain stature that’s … whether they’re various, you know, sort of exemplars like from traditional religions like Jesus or Krishna or more contemporary esoteric teachers like Ramana or Nisargadatta, or…and then, you know, living teachers as well. The same process goes on where we start to study with a teacher and I’ve just … well I’ll share a story with you that happened as I was transitioning from stepping away from Andrew’s teaching, and I met Adya and became close with him, both as a friend and as a mentor. And he said maybe the most important thing he ever said to me was in a private conversation and he said, “John, no matter how many spiritual authority figures we appeal to, we always come back to the aloneness of our own experience. Like that is the ultimate authority, it’s our own experience. It can’t be anything else. That’s all we have.” As far as I can tell, as I was saying throughout our conversation. And it’s just, I think, useful for people to … I mean, one observation that I’ve made and I’ve seen it and I feel …it’s just… I think it’s just whatever grace or dispositional wiring or karma or whatever, that I have a tendency to not quickly turn authority over to another voice, even one that many people are perceiving as a spiritual authority, which doesn’t mean that I’m not open to being mentored by them in profound ways. But my observation has been that people frequently do turn their…themselves over to the authority of the teacher and I think it’s highly problematic. I think it’s… I think it’s a really interesting question why it is that we do that and seemingly do it so easily. And we see the same thing in traditional religion. I mean, people are just ceding authority to the Pope or to Mohammed or pick your favorite authority figure, but what’s that based on? We are the ones granting them the authority, but we never really stop to consider that. Like, you’re giving them the authority, right? It’s not like it’s just there. So we are the ultimate holders of that authority, but we give it over to the other and turn our … it’s just a …it’s a perplexing kind of thing to me.

Rick: Yeah, and you know there’s a phrase that Tammy Simon uses, “sounds true,” when she does her interview, she in her mellifluous voice she says, “Sounds true, your trusted partner on the spiritual path,” you know, and that’s a nice phrase, “trusted partner.” It’s like there’s a certain trust and respect, transfer this to the issue of teachers, and yet there’s a sort of a partnership thing, sort of a friend, “mitra” I believe in Sanskrit means “friend,” and so it kind of helps to undercut the…the hierarchical dichotomy that often creeps in. But that is not to say that we should eschew all teachers or anything,

John: No, no. no

Rick: because we couldn’t even get through high school if we did that. There has to be a sort of a recognition that some people know more than us about certain things in whatever field of endeavor, but obviously there have been so many unhealthy situations in the…on the spiritual scene that as you say, it’s an important thing to take a look at.

John: Yeah, and I think as it relates to our discussion about experience and what is experience, that that kind of inquiry that I’m speaking about. I wrote something the other day about this, that in a sense, if you think about conceptualizing, there’s kind of an analog here I think with the teacher as authority about reality, which is that in a sense with our interpretive mechanisms, interpreting reality, we’re in a sense … one way to think of this is we’re in a sense telling reality what it is through those interpretations, and it’s natural. In fact, if we make it impersonal, which it ultimately is, that this is the intelligence of the universe that’s doing this interpreting, we wouldn’t even know how to begin to formulate these conceptualized frameworks to describe reality. Intelligence of nature is doing that. But it…there’s an alternative, which is what I’ve been sharing about really, which is what if we let experience tell us what it is, in a sense? Because what it is is beyond what we imagine it is, as we’ve been saying, what we conceive of it to be, because we can’t conceive of it, it’s beyond our capacity to conceive of it. So that kind of invitation I’ve been speaking about of looking at what is the nature of our experiences, this is another way to kind of understand what I’m saying, which is, let your experience be the authority. What is it?

Rick: Yeah

John: Does that make sense?

Rick: It does. It reminds me of something Maharishi Mahesh Yogi once said. Some reporter asked him how many followers he had, and he said, “I don’t have any followers. Everyone follows their own experience.” Of course he kind of violated that later on, but that was…that’s the point he was trying to make, that ultimately it’s your own experience that should be the acid test of whether any teacher or teaching is worth spending time with.

John: And the acid test of what’s real, actually. Because if you say the only reality is the reality of our experience, then there’s only one thing to investigate, which is that domain of experience, call it a field of experience or a wall-less room of experience or whatever, it’s this vast, boundless field of experiencing. There is no other reality than that, until there is one, and that will be a new field of experiencing. So that’s the thing to investigate, and to me the best teachings and teachers are the ones that are really… they’re directing us to that, they’re directing us not to kind of … and this has been one of the reasons I’ve stepped away from many of the teachings and teachers I’ve been involved with, despite getting a lot from my involvement, was I found this sort of tendency, which is an old story, of the teaching develops its own kind of framework of making sense of reality, and it’s sort of a teaching tool in part, but before too long that framework starts to become the object of devotion, right? Rather than the inconceivable territory that that map is trying to illuminate, and that’s how you end up with religion and dogma and in more contemporary terms, teachings that are either cult-like in nature or bordering on that, in terms of…a kind of a framework becoming … or as part of that, the personality of the teacher and the ideas of the fantastic nature of the teacher and the supernatural nature of the teacher. To me, maybe those have their own benefits, but more often than not, I don’t think they… I don’t think they actually really liberate people to investigate the nature of their own experience.

Rick: There’s a tricky thing here, and I just was listening to Adya talk about it the other day, and that is that it’s natural in a certain stage of our development for devotion to begin to blossom. And devotion likes to have a point of focus, it’s not just an abstract sort of feeling, it wants to sort of focus on something. And Adya was mentioning Shankara writing wonderful devotional poetry, and of course there’s Ramana with Arunachala, and Nisargadatta singing bhajans and doing pujas and all that stuff. So all the non-dual giants had a devotional nature to them, but the question is, if the devotion is focused on a living teacher, does the teacher have the capacity to handle it without it going to their heads, without it becoming an unhealthy thing for his students? There’s a very popular teacher these days, I guess I won’t mention his name, but I’ve heard that these days people are prostrating at his feet and even kissing his feet and so on, and I’m thinking, “Uh-oh, is this thing going off track? Is that really healthy? Does he have the capacity to allow that, or should he allow that, without it becoming…going off on a tangent?” So it’s a delicate issue, I think it’s something that has to be considered on the spiritual scene, because again, I think the blossoming of devotion and love is an inevitable stage in one’s development, and it needs a channel of expression, but it just has to be healthy.

John: I wonder why, let’s say it’s a natural … there’s something about the movement of devotion and I think it’s related to what we were speaking about earlier around this sense of awe and just complete bowing in the face of the inconceivable intelligence of the universe, and I have a sense of that, particularly in certain moments where there is a sense of like falling in love with that, which is of course what’s giving rise to everything clearly, what else could it be? So … but I’ve never quite understood why, what would be the value of directing that towards a single human being. I mean there are certainly schools of thought that that is not only beneficial but even a requirement in some sort of guru yoga, but I don’t … my observation at least has been is that that is a distraction from the heart of the matter, which is, “What is this?” Not “Can I imagine that someone has greater access to it than I do somehow and continue to believe that?” But it’s like, “This is fundamentally about us discovering what we are, not worshipping it in the form of some other and imagining that they have somehow … ” That’s not to diminish the value of mentoring and being taught, because I don’t mean to imply that at all, but those feel like different things somehow. And I think that…that kind of worship of the teacher though has a lot of staying power. I mean I see it keep … even in very educated contemporary Western culture, there’s a strong draw to … I actually believe … Here’s what…here’s my own hunch about this Rick, because I’m just exploring this for myself, like what’s at the root of that. And here’s one piece of it, which is that … remember how earlier we were talking about the big experiences and that we tend to kind of associate that with liberation, with freedom, with God, the really big ones. And then we feel like, “Well somehow this isn’t quite that,” like this sort of ordinary moment of having a conversation. So there’s something we … I was talking with someone the other day about this teacher and their focus was all about this amazing transmission that they could get from this teacher and how that made them feel so extraordinary. To me, that’s really to miss the point. I mean that is not the point. The point is not to have extraordinary experiences, unless those extraordinary experiences … the real extraordinary experiences in my mind are the ones that reveal the extraordinary nature of all experience. That’s the experience to have. And that can sometimes feel very extraordinary to recognize that. But then there you are, you know, it’s the old like, “Chop wood, carry water,” I mean it sounds so ridiculous, but it’s like, it’s 100% … right? Like we’ve been saying all along, it’s 100% in each and every momentary instantaneous flashing of reality. It’s just this, it’s always just this.

Rick: Yeah, it is. And that is not … since you mentioned transmission, I wouldn’t totally dismiss the value of that either. I mean you always have to kind of play devil’s advocate with every point that comes up because there’s always the other side to it. Like for instance, you see a picture of Amma over my shoulder and a point she made one time is that it’s valuable to be in the presence of an enlightened person. It’s like if there’s a sort of a brightly burning log and you have another log and you want to get it burning, put it close to the burning log and it’ll catch. So there’s definitely something to that. I mean Adya has his retreats and a lot of people say they wake up in the presence of him and the people in the room, all kind of creating a collective consciousness that is conducive to waking up. And so I’ll let you respond to that in a second, but I also just want to throw in regarding the devotional thing a question, which is that if you’re feeling … let me just ask it in a general sense,

John: Yeah.

Rick: is it possible for the heart to be really full of love and just overflowing without it wanting to take a particular focus or a particular channel? I can think of so many examples where it has taken and does take a particular focus, I can’t think of too many where it doesn’t. Even great sages, they’re always like prostrating to a mountain or to their guru or to somebody, they kind of choose a point of focus for their devotion. So two points there.

John: Yeah, it brings me back to an experience I had many years ago where, I won’t name the teacher, but I was invited to sing at a satsang, a very well-known teacher in a lineage. And so it was happening in someone’s home and all the devotees were just … I was not a devotee, but I was invited to perform there. The devotees were really like buzzing around, like they were so excited that the guru was coming to their home and it was just like all the preparations were being made. First of all, right off the bat there’s something about that I just … I don’t grok. I don’t stand that.

Rick: Have you ever been in a phase when you were that way?

John: No. I mean I’ve been involved with teachings though where that was definitely happening. And you know, I never quite … to me it seemed like missing the point somehow.

Rick: Yeah, I mean I’ve been there and done that myself, but you know, it’s like, “Okay, moved on.”

John: But there’s different forms that this can take too around kind of the surrendering one’s authority. This is a more extreme example, but here it’s to answer your question about the direction, directing that energy of devotion. So, and they were certainly directing it towards her and they were … I remember I made the terrible mistake, unbeknownst to me, of using the bathroom that was being reserved for the guru.

Rick: Oh, yeah.

John: And they had already cleaned it and they literally went back in the bathroom and cleaned it, spent another half an hour in there cleaning after. It sounds ridiculous, but it speaks to this sort of belief in the specialness of this one that we’ve elevated. And in a sense, there’s two sides to it. It’s accurate in the sense that they are worthy of the ultimate respect and devotion, just as everyone else is, right? And that was the piece that’s like, “Why are you not treating everybody that walks in the door the way you’re treating her?”

Rick: That’s a good point, that’s a good point. I mean, you see situations where people are all gaga over the teacher and yet they’re treating everybody else like crap. Or just not … I mean, we’re supposed to see God in all beings, right? Ideally. So, I would say that that kind of respect and appreciation shouldn’t be reserved just for the special teacher, although there might be something special about your relationship with the teacher, just as there would be with your wife, but you should treat everyone with the kind of decency with which you’d want to be treated, and compassion.

John: Yeah, I’ve had… I’ve had experiences, you asked if I’ve been involved in those kinds of relationships with teachers, where I felt such a sense of gratitude for what…for the relationship and what I had been learning from them that I just broke down and shed tears of just feeling grateful for the presence and their life. So, I’m actually pretty wired to be quite devotional in a certain way, but it’s just not as a follower in a sense.

Rick: Yeah, I got you. And that’s good. I mean …

John: And it’s really more a question of what that piece of us that … Audrey one time said something about, “We keep putting it out there until we’re willing to see where it actually is.” And that sounds simplistic, but I think it’s really profound because that’s what we are. That’s what we are through and through and through and through and through, and it’s all about just growing in the appreciation of that, like the impossibility of being anything other than the absolute reality, that we can’t be anything other than that. And that…that doesn’t diminish that there’s people in our lives who can help us to discover that, because that’s what teachers hopefully are all about in the end.

Rick: Let’s take a quick break. [Music] [Music] There’s nothing I can do to bring you closer, nothing I can do to bring you near. [Music] Cause everything I seek is always present, everything I seek is always here. [Music] There’s nothing I can do to brighten this awareness, nothing I can do to make it clear. [Music] It’s already shining of so brilliant, illuminating all that’s here. [Music] [Music] So how can I grow closer to you, when you are this thing I call me? [Music] There’s nothing I can do to bring you closer, nothing I can do to bring you near. [Music] Cause everything I seek is always present, everything I seek is always here. [Music] There’s nothing I can do to brighten this awareness, nothing I can do to make it clear. [Music] It’s already shining of so brilliant, illuminating all that’s here. [Music] [Music] So how can I grow closer to you, when you are this thing I call me? [Music] [Music] [Music] how can I grow closer to you, when you are this thing I call me? [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] So how can I grow closer to you, when you are this thing I call me? [Music] how can I grow closer to you, [Music] when you are this thing I call me [Music] how can I grow closer to you, when you are this thing I call me? [Music] how can I grow closer to you, [Music] when you are this thing I call me? [Music]

John: Yeah, I was just reflecting on this conversation we’re having about the special beings and the attraction that we have to … I think it ties into some sort of romantic ideals that we have around … you see it in the spiritual literature of these extraordinary beings doing miracles and that also often go to credible lengths of discipline and to realize what they’ve realized and whether they’re sitting in retreats for years and years and … I…this is a kind of a newer sense that I’m kind of intuiting and I’ve shared a little bit of this with people and people seem to find this helpful in some ways so I’ll share it here. I wrote a piece recently about what I call the over-dramatization of the spiritual path and how I don’t see that as often very helpful. I just wanted to read a little piece if that’s okay.

Rick: Yeah, sure.

John: just one section.

John: So I say, “It sounds so dramatic, doesn’t it, to give up everything for the sake of truth?” You kind of like…are you willing to like…You know, you hear teachers talk like this and it stimulates something and I think it ties into kind of beliefs that we have that that’s what they’ve done and that’s how they’ve managed to become so enlightened is that they’ve sacrificed it all for the truth. It sounds very dramatic, and I’m just raising the question as to whether that’s…we talked before about how much utility does that perspective actually have for us. And, I’m questioning that. So it sounds so dramatic doesn’t it to give up everything for the sake of truth? All our desires, all our beliefs, all our control. The question is, is it really true? Must everything be given up or let go if in such an absolute and dramatic fashion in order for profound transformation to occur. What if all this dramatizing, romanticizing, and absolutizing of the spiritual path wasn’t necessary? What if we didn’t need to surrender anything or everything? What if it wasn’t necessary or even possible to give up all beliefs. To stop thinking, interpreting, conceptualizing, or surrender the ego into the fires of truth? Could it be that it’s possible, even more effective, to engage in spiritual practice and inquiry without this dramatic sense of urgency and seriousness, but instead come to it in much more the spirit of lighthearted curiosity and playfulness? Could it be that the overly romanticized do or die, “I must surrender and die to the separate self at all costs” mentality is precisely what perpetuates the sense that we are in fact bound, stuck, separate selves in the first place?

Rick: Yeah, well those are all interesting questions, possibly rhetorical, I could probably give my opinion about every single point that you made there, but if I were to do so, I would do so in a both/and nuanced kind of way, because there are arguments to be made on both sides, if there are many sides perhaps, and different ways of interpreting all those different questions. And different interpretations of what it means to give everything up. You might give everything up in a very real sense and yet still have the nice house and the nice car and everything else, and yet you might be more actually renounced that some guy living in a cave. So…

John: Well if reality is all that there is, then does it actually make sense that you would have to give up anything to recognize what you are? That doesn’t even make logical sense.

Rick: Yeah again, there’s

John: You are it with all your warts and the whole nine yards. Now does the recognition of that transform the human being in some profound ways in the way that they move in. the world. I’m not denying that for one second, so, it’s to your earlier question about that could easily sound like a nihilistic you can do whatever…you can be a total fool, acting in ways that creates suffering, and that’s not what I’m talking about. But, as the entry point into discovering…that we…we have…it’s built into so many of the way teachings are talked about and formulated about and people engage with them with this sense of truth or God or reality is something that I enter and then can exit. That’s really how it tends to be. And what if we’re clearly entering and exiting experience as fast as I can snap my fingers or faster but as far as I can tell the only thing we are entering and exiting is reality. So, there is no entering or exiting, we are always that. And we’re always this and there isn’t anything but this. So the recognition of that of course can bring such, like I said, such profound gifts into one’s life of greater ease and greater relaxation and less fear and more openness and less … so yes, those are byproducts of recognizing that. But if we fall into that, what I was really speaking to with this over-dramatization, it sets up this kind of opposed framework of, “Well, if we’re not surrendering at all, if we’re not dying to the ego, if we’re not really giving it all up with full 100%, I’m going to stay awake and sustain this. You know, if we don’t come at it with that sort of warrior-like spirit somehow, we’re going to miss the boat. But meanwhile, we’re in the boat. There is no missing the boat, we’re in the boat.

Rick: Again, it’s all so nuanced and paradoxical, but I’ll give you an example of giving …

John: To be sure, I’m not denying that.

Rick: And there’s the question of which is the cart and which is the horse. For instance, I took quite a lot of drugs for a year or so before I learned to meditate, and some people might … it might be said, “Oh, well you really have to give up that sort of thing, drugs, in order to get spiritual in a serious way.” Well, in my case, when I learned to meditate, I totally lost the desire for drugs because I found that it was providing probably what I had been looking for with drugs, but in a very wholesome way, and my life totally turned around. So, I didn’t feel like I had given up anything, I had just lost interest in something because I had found something that interested me more. And so, I think the whole thing of renunciation, if you force somebody to give something up, but you don’t provide something better, they’re going to be unfulfilled and it’s going to be a strain. Or if you impose that upon yourself, that I’m giving up relationships and I’m giving up money, but you don’t really have anything to fill the void, you’re not going to last very long or you’re just not going to be very happy. But you can begin to fill the void, so to speak, without giving things up, and then certain things might drop off because they’re no longer needed. They were artificially providing something that you actually begun to genuinely have without the need for the crutch.

John: For sure. It came out of some sense of lack that we imagine that we possessed, and we discover that we don’t, and yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. But again, in that example, the letting go, if you want to call it that, is simply a symptom of discovering that we don’t have to hold on to a lot of the things we imagine we had to hold on to.

Rick: Yeah. And your point about …

John: But we can discover that. Yeah, go ahead.

Rick: I was going to say, your point about zeal, you know, and I think there’s … again, it’s always this both/and kind of thing. There’s a place for zeal if you’re feeling zealous, and even Patañjali in the Yoga Sutras said that those with the vehement intensity realize the most quickly. But I’ve seen so many people try to be that way and to strain, and end up cracking up or snapping back to the other extreme or something like that.

John: And Rick, all I’m really doing is, I’m not saying that that’s not a legitimate way to approach it. Don’t get me wrong. What I’m questioning is just what the supposed authority figure Patañjali said, that that’s the way to do it. Essentially that’s what he’s saying. And we hear that and it comes from a supposed authority figure, and we take these things on. And I’m just this voice, I’m kind of in this way, as long as I can remember, being a little bit of a renegade, just in the sense of saying, you know, what was the old bumper sticker, you know, question reality. But in this … question authority, right? So don’t question reality, question authority. That tells you how reality is, or should look, or be. And it’s like reality looks like it looks, and it has its own intelligence and its own way. And this is of course I think also one of the problems with kind of cookie-cutter approaches to human growth and maturation or enlightenment, if you want to use that word. It’s a problematic word. But just that we have our own … we’re so utterly unique, you know, in a very incredible way. And it makes sense that we would find our own way in a very … in a way that is like no other one’s way.

Rick: Yeah. No, that’s totally … I’m totally with you.

John: But I think it’s important for you, you know, to make sure that what I’m saying isn’t sort of misinterpreted as somehow … if one feels that fire of zeal and earnestness that they shouldn’t just totally go for it in that kind of way, because that’s awesome if that’s how you’re inclined. All I’m saying is that it may not be a requirement and maybe in some cases could function as something that perpetuates a sense that there’s something wrong with me. Which is, you know, maybe one of the fundamental delusions, which is a belief that there’s something wrong.

Rick: And I think it’s good to remember that every day is life, you know, and we don’t want to pass over the present for some glorious future. Also, I mean, you remember that quote from the Buddha where he says, “Don’t believe something because somebody else says it, or even if I say it.” You know, you have to go by your own judgment, your own experience. So I think that’s good advice.

John: Yeah, do the experiment, check it out for yourself. Don’t take anybody’s word for it. Sadly, my observation of a great deal of Buddhism is that there’s a lot of deference to authority and it doesn’t always take that particular piece of it to heart, but it is what it is.

Rick: Well you know, I’m glad you brought up the word “experiment” because I think that spiritual practice or spiritual progress or whatever should ultimately be regarded as a scientific endeavor, a scientific experiment. And you know, in science you don’t just believe something because some guy said it’s true, you check it out for yourself. And you don’t…And we respect certain scientists, Newton and Einstein and so on, but that doesn’t make them infallible. You know, maybe, you know, we’ve learned a lot since those guys lived. And so I think it’s real healthy to take an experiential, experimental, rigorous approach to spiritual progress. And you know you were saying earlier …

John: Yeah, I agree 100%.

Rick: I just want to add one thing. You were talking earlier about whether science could ever discover ultimate reality. I think that ultimate reality can be discovered, can be known, can be lived, but we have to look at what kind of scientific instrument we’re going to use to discover it. And I would argue, if you watch my talk from the Science and Non-duality Conference, that the human nervous system is the ultimate scientific instrument. It’s far more sophisticated than the Large Hadron Collider or the Hubble Telescope or anything. And if we know how to use it, we can discover all sorts of things that contemporary science with its instruments hasn’t even come any more close to discovering.

John: Well that same body-mind mechanism, you know, whatever, for lack of a better word, is what’s creating the scientific instruments anyway.

Rick: It is, yeah.

John: So clearly that’s where the juice is, is in that intelligence that … and of course, you know, the intelligence just seems to be here. You know, it’s not something that we appear to have created somehow in the same way that we might have made a computer.

Rick: Right. Okay, I’m going to look at some notes here from what you wrote, just see if there’s any little things I want to pick up on. Oops, type the password into my i-thing here. Oh, come on. Sorry. There we go. I’ll just riff on a few things that I picked up from “Rain in a Monsoon.” Is that the title of it, “Looking for Rain in a Monsoon?”

John: “Searching for Rain in a Monsoon.”

Rick: “Searching for Rain in a Monsoon.” Let this not be a one-time discovery, but an ongoing, ever-deepening realization in your life. I’m just going to read a few things that you said in that book, and you just interrupt if you’d like to riff on those a little bit, but I like that one. What we call …

John: I’ll say one thing about that.

Rick: Go ahead, yeah, say that.

John: Can I say one thing about that?

Rick: Yeah, please.

John: To me, it connects directly with all that we’ve been discussing around this quest for ultimacy about what this is. The notion of having sort of … I’ve found out what it is and kind of foreclosing like we figured it out, to me just … it doesn’t comport with my own experience. And so, It feels endless, it feels bottomless, it’s infinite, so it just makes intuitive sense and real living sense that the discovery of what’s the nature of reality is unending and inexhaustible. That’s … anything else feels like a pretense somehow, of a kind of an arrogance, like, “Oh yeah, I figured it out.” Really? Come on. I mean, I can’t seem to adopt that point of view.

Rick: Right, and Adya said that too, and if he said it, it must be right, right? I’m just kidding.

John: There you go, spiritual authority. Okay, here’s another one. What we call reality is really an interpretation the organism is rendering upon whatever is being experienced. You already kind of covered that one quite a bit.

John: Right, and …

Rick: We’re all filters.

John: And like many things, if there’s something valuable to that, which my sense of it is, it sums up a lot of what I say, there’s no end to what the implications of that actually are for our lives, because so much of our lives are driven and dictated by our definitions and our quick and dirty sort of sense of, “Yeah, I kind of know what’s going on here. I got a handle on this, because I’ve got language, and language is amazing at giving me that quick and dirty kind of caricature of what things are, but it’s just that. It’s not really telling me what they actually are.” So that one sentence, I could live with that one inquiry, and in a sense do, in a wonderful sort of never-endingly entertaining way. I mean there’s no end to the entertainment of that exploration. What’s actually going on here? It’s way more than we think.

John: Absolutely. Incredible string band, whatever you think, it’s more than that. Here’s another one, “By allowing the river of experience to move and flow as it does, a flow we’re really powerless to stop anyway, we increasingly discover an ease and comfort that is naturally present and available within and as the flow of experiencing itself.” And then a little bit later on I think you said, “Life is naturally at rest.”

John: Yeah, it’s not fighting with itself, because it is itself, so it can’t fight with itself, even when it’s seemingly fighting with itself in apparent opposition to one of its expressions, it’s really not, because it’s still that expression in that moment. So yeah, I mean at a very human level, attempting to kind of alter the flow of experiences, it just doesn’t work very well as a method for gaining well-being, it tends to not work well at all. Even if we’ve been trying for generations to do that as human beings, to sort of manipulate our way into a better state of mind, but it turns out to not be necessary because the present state of mind is really amazing. You don’t need to have another one, even though you will have another one in the next instant.

Rick: You will, yeah. Guaranteed.

Rick: There’s a principle in physics called the law of least action, which is that in natural phenomena such as an acorn falling out of a tree or even throwing a ball or something like that, it takes, out of all the infinite number of courses or paths it could take, it naturally takes the most efficient one. And so if we can get ourselves functioning from that level at which nature itself functions, then I think our life is going to take on that quality of maximum, optimum degree of effortlessness and least possible expenditure of energy. And that kind of relates to another point you made here, relax mind and body completely. That’s easier said than done, I would say, because the mind and body, they get all keyed up and conditioned. And let’s say you just sit and close your eyes and sit in a chair, you notice that, “Oh, my mind is still cooking along here, my body feels kind of agitated,” maybe you can relax it to a certain extent, but to me, to my mind, complete relaxation would be like you’re going into Samadhi and there’s no mental activity and the body is in a state of deep, deep stillness. So I think it’s really good to … go ahead.

John: I would probably reword that maybe now in a way, I mean I think it … because my understanding of when I say relax body-mind completely, and that’s sort of an old, you know, kind of instruction anyway in certain traditions, that we tend to think of contemplative practice as going from state A to state B. So state A is one of turmoil or tension or agitation and I’m going to go to state B, it’s more relaxed. So you hear an instruction like that, it’s like, “I’m going to definitely get from where I presently am to something that’s more relaxed.” Wow, you even said completely, well it’s definitely not completely, so it’s a bit of a setup, and so I would say, rather to see that … in a sense to make no effort to try to have experience be other than it is, that feels more … because something like agitation when left as it is, it changes that experience, you know, often dramatically and it’s recognized to be part of the flow of existence itself, it’s recognized, you begin to discover more of its transcendental inconceivable nature. So that in a sense is … so it’s not trying to get to relaxation, it’s just leaving things as they are.

John: Yeah, that’s really good and actually that was the next point of yours that I jotted down here, which is, you said, “Much of the internal suffering we experience stems from our efforts to try to escape what is arising.” And I would actually extend that to meditation as well, that there are many different ways to meditate, but to my mind, in my experience, if they involve trying to get your experience to be something other than it is at that moment, then you’re struggling, you’re straining, you’re interjecting some effort which is only going to impede the purpose for which you sat down.

John: Right, right. Yeah, and it suddenly reinforces that sort of, you could say, we could say, a fundamental innocent misunderstanding that, you know, the fulfillment and satisfaction that we’re searching for lays somewhere other than right here.

Rick: I would recommend people to listen to this, on Adya’s website there’s some really nice kind of like free videos or audios you can download about kind of a natural way of meditating that he describes, I think it’s spot on. Embracing uncertainty, I think we’ve kind of touched upon that a fair amount, although we’ve both been expressing opinions with not total uncertainty here, but you know, it’s always good to take everything with a grain of salt.

John: When Socrates said, “The only thing I know is that I don’t know anything,” that was apparently Socrates, so that’s pretty much about where I’m at these days. At least not anything definitive. I know all sorts of things, I have knowledge about this, that, and the other thing, but it’s provisional.

Rick: Yeah, provisional, you don’t want to be adamant about it.

John: Partial.

John: Right.

Rick: No, I mean …

John: Absolutely sure. Well yeah, because that knowledge is yet another map, an interpreted map, and as we said, the map is not the territory, it never can be. The territory always outstrips the map in terms of its complexity and richness and subtlety and dimensionality, and that just seems to be the way it is. Reality can’t be put into a box. As much as we might endeavor to do it.

Rick: Yeah, I think it’s a natural tendency to try to.

John: Absolutely. It seems to be, we’re doing it. And I don’t think we actually have to shut off that mechanism by the way, nor I think can we, that the interpretive map-making, model-building mechanism of consciousness. Because A, I don’t think we can, and B, it has its own utility, and C, we can recognize that the … it’s like the map of New York and the city of New York, we don’t have to throw the map away to recognize that the map doesn’t capture what it’s actually portraying. And so you don’t have to discard the map. You can keep using the maps to whatever extent you find them useful, but recognize that they’re just like barely touching on what’s actually here, which is …

Rick: Yeah, hold them loosely.

John: … hold them very loosely, and that has a lot of practical application in life too, in terms of speaking to other people and sharing perspectives, right? You know? Right? We talked about the world and the crazy state that the world seems to be in, I mean, you can boil a lot of it down to people adopting rigid perspectives and being unwilling to recognize the partial nature of those perspectives.

Rick: Boy, isn’t that true? Politics, religion, all those things. And even kind of search for reality.

John: My map’s better than your map.

Rick: Yeah, really. I was chuckling earlier because we were talking about God and the immense intelligence, the governing everything, and I started to laugh because I was thinking about these materialists who say that the world is… the universe is this mechanistic thing and that there’s no meaning or purpose to it and it’s all just a random chance occurrence and all that. I think, “God, how can they think that?” And they’re so adamant about it, and so dismissive of anybody who tries to attribute any kind of intelligence to what’s actually going on.

John: Yeah, I know. Yeah, I mean, who knows? Even if it was mechanistic in that sense, our actual experience of it seems to be anything but that. So, you know, who knows? It’s like even if consciousness is being produced by the brain, which I don’t happen to think that’s very likely, but let’s say that somehow it’s materialistic and you have the firing of neurons gives rise to qualia. I don’t know how that would work, but let’s say that it does. It doesn’t take one thing away from the qualia. The qualia is…continues to be astounding, inconceivable, you know, really for me kind of blissful to feel the qualia, you know, because it’s so rich and so without end.

Rick: Yeah, I missed the opportunity to tell this funny story, but there was an episode of The Office where Steve Carell is driving and he’s following the GPS, right? And the GPS says, “Turn right,” and there’s a lake there and the other guy in the car is saying, “Stop, stop!” And he said, “No, no, it’s telling us to go this way,” and he drives his car right into the lake. So, kind of a funny point about following maps.

John: Exactly, exactly. And yeah, we do that more often probably than we realize in some ways.

Rick: And maybe this is a point we can end on, another thing I jotted down that you wrote. You said, “In allowing ourselves to be totally vulnerable, we come to find a profound invulnerability, the discovery that experiences cannot harm us because they are not separate from us.”

John: Yeah, that’s amazing. That’s amazing to feel that sense of phenomena like these difficult states of mind that we spoke about earlier that many people struggle with. We have this sense, you know, the framework is one that’s set up as the perceived and the perceiver, and to actually look at that and see what’s the actuality of it. And the actuality of it, of course, is that you can’t really find a clear dividing line between what we would think of as the one perceiving this phenomena and the phenomena being perceived. And it’s much more a sense of experiencing, I think is the best way to put it. And that this is, these states, to see them as expressions of life, expressions of us as life, rather than as things that we’re sort of feeling at the mercy of or victimized by, completely turns it all upside down on its head. [Music] Out beyond ideas of right and wrong, there is a field where I will meet you. Out beyond ideas of right and wrong, there is a field where I will meet you. When the soul lays down in the grass, the world’s too full to talk about. When the soul lays down in the grass, the phrase “each other” doesn’t make any sense. Out beyond ideas of right and wrong, there is a field where I will meet you. Out beyond ideas of right and wrong, there is a field where I will meet you. When the soul lays down in the grass, the world’s too full to talk about. When the soul lays down in the grass, the phrase “each other” doesn’t make any sense. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

Rick: Thanks John, this has really been a great conversation. I think we could go on and on. A very interesting guy to talk to. And as always, I’ll be creating a page on BatGap dedicated to this particular interview, and on that page we’ll have links to your website and to your books on Amazon and so on. So people can go there and follow the links if they want to find out more about you. And I presume, you know, you mentioned you do a Skype session with someone, so you do Skype sessions?

John: Yeah, I find working individually, I think, I’m not going to say more potent, but I think it can just be very helpful, more clarifying, and it can sometimes happen more in group sort of settings. But just to have that kind of individual ability to kind of inquire into a person’s experience and understanding, so yeah, I find them very rich.

Rick: Good. Do you also do group things, like do you have retreats or anything like that sometimes, or give satsangs?

John: You know, I have some in the past and I’ve been feeling some pull to do more recently. I feel like I’ve been cooking for a long time and feel myself having come into some way. I mean, I’m always kind of endeavoring to find the simplest, least esoteric, most accessible ways to communicate about this stuff, because I sometimes have found teachings to be filled with lots of difficult-to-access jargon and language, and so I don’t feel like I’ve arrived at the optimal way to communicate about what can’t ultimately be spoken of very well. But I keep sort of trying and feel like a strong compulsion almost to try to do that. But it feels to me like I just have a kind of sense of, I actually have more to share than I have before, and so maybe there’s a pull to start to teach more, so we’ll see.

Rick: Yeah, so do you have some kind of sign-up thing on your website where people can be notified by email?

John: Yeah, people can find me and be in touch with me directly via email through the website.

Rick: Okay, great. All right, well thanks. So thank you to those who’ve been listening or watching. As I mentioned in the beginning, this is an ongoing series, so go to www.backgap.com to check out all the previous ones, to be notified by email of each new one as it’s posted, to sign up for the audio podcast if you wish, to donate if you wish, and explore the website, there’s some good stuff there. And we’ll be continuing to do this, so see you next time.

John: Thanks Rick, it was a pleasure talking with you.

Rick: Thank you John, yeah, it was really fun.

John: Yeah, enjoyed it.