John Prendergast – 2nd Interview
Summary:
- Author and Psychotherapist: John J. Prendergast, Ph.D., is the author of “The Deep Heart: Our Portal to Presence” and “In Touch: How to Tune in to the Inner Guidance of Your Body and Trust Yourself.” He is a retired adjunct professor of psychology and a licensed psychotherapist.
- Spiritual Influences: He studied for many years with European Advaita master Jean Klein and with Adyashanti, and was invited to share the dharma by Dorothy Hunt.
- Teaching and Retreats: John offers retreats in the U.S. and Europe, as well as online, through his website ListeningFromSilence.com.
- The Deep Heart: The main theme of his book is the heart as a portal to presence, suggesting that the heart has layers ranging from the gross to the refined to the transcendent.
- Multidimensional Heart: The interview explores the heart’s multidimensionality, not just theoretically but experientially, in John’s work with students and clients.
The interview delves into John’s background, his spiritual influences, and his work on understanding the heart’s role in spiritual awakening and presence.
Full transcript:
Rick Archer: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done over 525 of them now. And if this is new to you, and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to batgap.com “b a t g a p” and look under the past interviews menu. This program is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So if you appreciate it, and would like to support it, there’s a PayPal button on every page of the site. I don’t think I mentioned my name is Rick Archer. Most of that but in case you have never watched one of these, that’s my name. My guest today is John Prendergast, Ph.D. John is the author of The Deep Heart: Our Portal to Presence and a book called In Touch: How to Tune Into the Inner Guidance of Your Body and Trust Yourself. John studied for many years with the European Advaita master, Jean Klein, as well as with Adyashanti. And that’s his intro. It’s brief. That’s what he sent me. So it’s good. Brief is good. So welcome, John.
John Prendergast: Well, thank you, it feels like just a blink of the eye since we last spoke.
Rick Archer: Yeah, we did one of these four and a half years ago, roughly. And I listened to it in preparation for this one. And I thought it was a great conversation. So those of you who are listening to this one might even want to listen to that one first. Or otherwise listen to it afterward, because we covered a lot of stuff. And hopefully, we won’t cover the same stuff in this interview. John hadn’t written his new book, then. And that’s mostly what we’re going to be talking about. But, the conversation may meander here and there, and you can’t teach old dogs new tricks, so we might touch upon some points we’ve already discussed. And also, those of you listening again, if you have, if you’re listening live, if you have a question you’d like to submit during the interview, please submit it during and we’ll try to get to it. So the main theme of your book, seems to me is, well, the subtitle of your book The Deep Heart, is Our Portal to Presence. So a portal means like an entryway that you can go through in order to get to something. And you said in your book, this quote jumped out at me, “If there are layers to the heart, ranging from the relatively gross through the refined to the transcendent, then many of us will be able to directly or indirectly sense this in some way.” So for starters, why don’t you define what you mean by the “heart,” and then let’s talk about these layers and talk about the heart being a portal to presence. Take it away.
John Prendergast: Ok, yeah, thank you. Well, it’s a big subject. Actually infinite, infinitely large. So the heart is multi-dimensional. And this is not just a theoretical kind of formulation, but very much experiential in terms of my own experience in my work with students and clients as well. And so when I speak of the heart, and in the Deep Heart, I’m actually speaking to this multi-dimensionality. And so on a localized, kind of sense of the heart, is in the center of the chest. And we unconsciously often touch ourselves here when we feel deeply touched by something or moved by something or when we’re referring to ourselves. So that gives us a clue that it’s a very important center. It can be,
Rick Archer: Or even if we’re shocked by something, we might say, “Oh, my God!” and,
John Prendergast: Yeah, yeah, so it’s very interesting. It’s like the body has its own language and the hands often are speaking when the head and the mind is doing something else. Our hands, and I’ve noticed this in my work with people, are speaking a different language, often a more essential language and so there is a pointing to the heart area and, , for some people who’ve, I think had difficult upbringings or have not really been met in a deep way, the heart area can feel pretty numb, pretty flat. If there has been a lot of emotional wounding, for instance, it’s a place we don’t want to feel and don’t want to go. And yet, there can be a kind of armoring or numbness or coldness or flatness that we may initially feel there. But as we begin to kind of hone in with our attention to the heart, we open up more tender emotional levels. And often, I think in common conversation, we speak of someone as being heart-oriented, we mean someone who’s kind of in touch, more loving, more affectionate, more in touch with their hearts, and this is more a personal level. And it’s very impacted by our early conditioning. It’s where we carry most of our emotional, not all of them, but most of our emotional wounds, from relationship with early caregivers. And a lot of psychotherapy gives attention to this, for good reason. Because if we feel alienated from this psychological level of the heart, we feel alienated from ourself. And it’s very hard to be close with others, it’s very hard to be at ease and at peace with ourselves, just on a personal level. So a lot of personal psychotherapy is oriented towards revisiting and healing the wounds of childhood. Then, it actually goes very deep in the heart. And when I speak of depth, it’s like a depth of sensitivity. It’s like the willingness to feel like from the surface, I guess you can see my hand, like from the surface, and then a deepening means going back towards the back of the heart. And when people get in touch with these very, these kinds of early, very tender areas, there’s a sense of attention, they feel it, and I feel it sitting with him via a kind of empathic resonance, this very deep, very tender area of the heart. And often this is where that, there may be pain, there may be tears, there may be grief, but we’re getting to a very innocent and early stage of the heart, often, the first few years of childhood, before the heart was conditioned, very heavily. And so there’s, we get into essential qualities. And these are qualities of affection, gratitude, joy, just a sense of awe and wonder, for instance, and sometimes therapists speak of this as the magical child or the kind of innocent child. And now we’re on the border of what I call poetically, the “soul.” It’s a very still personal, and it’s very, very deep and very intimate. So there’s a sense of really being in touch with our personal self. And it allows the capacity to connect with one another, in a way that feels deeply touching, and very nourishing. So that’s kind of the impact relationally of touching this, but we also tap into archetypes, essential qualities and flow states, and sometimes ecstatic states. And so very often transpersonal psychology focuses on this area, trying to cultivate these qualities and sustain them. But it doesn’t stop there, this is the interesting thing. It’s like, then, like we’re the back of the heart, and we could feel it as a kind of vibration of light, luminosity. And then as we keep going, it’s like a falling back into this infinite field of loving awareness. And it becomes nonlocalized, I mean, initially a kind of falling back, and then a sense of it being really in all directions all of the time. And this is what Ramana spoke of when he used the word “Heart” with a capital H, as “consciousness.” So we have this range, and there’s a level of feeling and sensing and knowing, too, which corresponds to each of these levels of the heart, and it’s kind of central in the human body, below the head and, , above the lower part of the body. And it’s central just, we use the word the “heart” to mean the center of something. So it’s one of the, , we have like, any experience can be a portal, a doorway into our true nature. And there’s a major portal through the mind. And when it opens, there’s a sense of tremendous freedom, infinite freedom, and spaciousness. These are the essential qualities, lucidity, clarity, knowing we’re not the story, an image that we’ve identified ourselves with, and feeling unbound in space and time. We hear those descriptions. That corresponds very often with a mental awakening. And when the heart awakens to its depths it may lead to a sense of this Great Heart, to a sense of wholeness and being undivided with the whole of life. It’s a feeling of unconditional love and “all as well” no matter what, and a sense of oneness or, , being undivided. And the hara, or the belly in Japanese, is the lowest center and opens to different qualities. And these are like different qualities of the same awareness. But in the heart, what comes very spontaneously is a sense of gratitude, and tremendous compassion as the heart awakens.
Rick Archer: That gives us a lot to discuss, to unpack.
John Prendergast: It does, it’s quite a range of experience.
Rick Archer: Let me bounce something off you and see what you think. I’ve heard it described that, everything we experience, we experience through the senses, and that all the senses have their root or their source in presence or in the transcendent. And they, we can say they radiate out from there, like spokes. And so, it’s said that thinking, ordinary discursive thinking in the mind, is actually a subtler aspect of the sense of hearing. Like I could shout what I’m saying right now, it’d be really loud, or I could speak in this tone of voice, and it’s not so loud, or I could just actually think the words I’m saying right now without saying them to you. But I would still hear them. So it’s said that thinking is a subtler aspect of the sense of hearing. And obviously, the use of a mantra takes you to subtler still levels of thought, and you can arrive at the transcendent that way. And obviously, there are visual, gross, and subtle forms, perhaps artists are more adroit with the subtleties of vision. Some people use Yantras, or visualization, as means of transcending. And it’s said that feelings are a subtler aspect of the sense of touch. Now, all the different senses, it seems hearing is the ears, seeing as the eyes, smelling as the nose, taste is the tongue, but then touch, is the whole, all the skin. But then it seems like the, and maybe you could experience subtler aspects of touch through the skin, but primarily, it seems that they, that the heart is responsible for the subtler realms of the sense of touch or feeling, just as the mind is responsible for the subtler aspects of the sense of hearing, through thought. And so what I hear when I hear you talk about the range from gross through refined to transcendent, through the heart as a portal, is following or probing or exploring, subtler, more refined, more delicate levels of the sense of touch, of feeling, and ultimately arriving at the source of all the senses. So to what extent do you concur with what I said? And how would you elaborate on it, if you wish?
John Prendergast: Well, yeah, I mean, I would say, it’s an interesting, kind of interesting view I haven’t thought too much about. I would say it is, it’s basically accurate, I would use the word feeling, and also the word “felt sense,” which is actually a combination of those two before they actually are distinguished from thought, or imagery. So it’s a whole-body sense of something. That’s a definition of a “felt sense.” And I like this word, that was coined by Eugene Gendlin many years ago. So a lot of the experiential invitation, when I work with people, is to get a felt sense, of what is in the heart area. And so the felt sense, what I like about it is, it actually includes those other dimensions of sensation, that is to say, hearing, and also vision. And some people, and this is very interesting, have more access to the depths of the heart area through visualization, spontaneous visualization. So it’s not, it’s not exclusive of that. And so too, with hearing. So people have different kind of dominant channels of receiving information and understanding, some of us are more visual, some more auditory, more, some of us more kinesthetic, but this is a form of interior perception. There’s a word for that “interoceiving,” or “interoception.” And it can use any facet, actually, of those senses. And it will vary from person to person. So for instance, in my case, I’m predominantly kinesthetic, or proprioceptive. So I sense things, when I, predominantly. And then secondarily, there’s like visual images that come in – I’m speaking of a kind of interior search mode. Like if I’m sitting with a question in heartfelt meditative inquiry, like, “What is, what’s going on?” or “What’s happening?” or “What,” some question I may be sitting with. Sometimes when I lead retreats, for instance, will do this and I’ll sit with this same question that I share with my students. Very often, the first movement will be vibratory, it’s like there’s some, it’s like a very subtle vibration, felt in the body, and then a quality of luminosity that comes with that. So there’s a visual aspect. And then after that, sometimes a word will come. But that’s kind of a tertiary movement that, and that will kind of begin to define, what, like, maybe the word that comes up is “ground” or “fear,” or, but it has something to do with what’s in the vibratory field. So what’s common to all of this is vibration, interestingly, and the vibration can be translated through different senses. And so we’re going to subtler levels, vibratory levels of experience, to the ground itself, which is, as you were suggesting, the transcendent field as the source.
Rick Archer: Yeah. It’s interesting, pretty much every experience we have, I suppose, involves more than one sense. And often, all of them. I mean, if we’re eating food, for instance, it’s smell, it may have a smell, it has a taste, obviously, it has a sight, we can look at it. If it’s Rice Krispies, it has a sound, . What else is left? Touch, we can touch the food. But I suppose in the subtle realm, so in the subtler realm, I suppose the same thing would be true that all five senses would be involved, but maybe I’m just kind of thinking out loud here. But maybe one or another would be predominant based upon the experience we’re having and also based upon our predilection, as you’re just saying, some people might be, I mean, I know people who say they don’t actually think thoughts the way most people describe them. They see things,
John Prendergast: That’s right.
Rick Archer: That’s their mode of thinking.
John Prendergast: Yeah, it’s rather than being a subvocalization, it’s more of a visualization.
Rick Archer: Yeah, yeah.
John Prendergast: But I’d like to go back to that kind of a unique quality of the heart that you were honing in on, which is, it has a feeling tone to it. And so, it has an aspect of being, we can access being through the heart. We can access a knowing, a sense of I am. And there’s a feeling tone here that I think is unique to the heart, which is Ananda, which is joy, which is this, yeah, sublime, quiet contentment. That’s actually how I experience it. Rather than, blissful ecstasy. I mean, there can be moments of that. But this quality of joy, of Ananda, seems particularly relevant and accessible through the heart area, and of course of grief as well. So joy and grief, this is the, when we really open to life, we open to this tremendous poignancy of life, we open to a quality of joy, appreciation, love, gratitude, but also sorrow, because of the suffering and because of the loss. And if we’re really here, as a human being, we’re going to experience all of that, very fully. So those qualities sometimes blend, of joy and sorrow, and it just gives a quality of poignancy to it that’s felt deeply in the heart. And so, and grief, as well, we, the grief itself from turning away from really our true nature in order to adjust and accommodate and survive. So that’s common, I’m kind of describing kind of the architecture of the heart and some of the common feelings that arise as we go more deeply. And both joy and grief do.
Rick Archer: As you were saying that I was thinking of the extent to which most people are pretty shut down in terms of all their senses, and how there have been geniuses who, of one or another sense, so Mozart or Beethoven would be geniuses of the sense of sound, and great artists of the sense of sight, and maybe of, a great cook or a food critic or something of the sense of taste. And, but with the heart, when we think of the geniuses we kind of might think of Mother Teresa or Saint Francis or somebody who seemed to have an incredibly developed heart, and who just really, poured out love and compassion and everything for other people, but in many cases, who was also acutely sensitive to the suffering, which is why they often tried to do something about it. Rather than just walk by the person in the gutter, they’d picked them up or try to do something.
John Prendergast: Yeah, I mean, these are people, yeah, that we do think of, St. Francis, Rumi is another, there’s a tremendous passionate quality for the beloved. So we’ll find compassion, we’ll find devotion also. Not, maybe devotion to, what we would, religious people would call the divine or God or to a religious figure. For me, this is kind of an interesting subject because in my own process initially I, as , I came in through TM and mantra, and then self-inquiry and so it was really kind of the subtle mind and using that kind of quality of clarity. But as this awareness has really deepened, and there’s been a, a “waking down” the qualities of the heart have just come more and more into the foreground with a sense of devotion. But devotion to what, exactly? Or to whom? I can’t say. And I would say, devotion to the truth. , this is like, a love of truth. And so this is another quality of the heart that ability to feel profound compassion, and to be able to act on it, too, because sometimes we can get overwhelmed by empathy, and compassion. But there are many figures, who are geniuses of the heart who have that quality of transmitting tremendous love and compassion that’s healing. And then it
Rick Archer: Or forgiveness, somebody like Nelson Mandela, who was in prison for 27 years or something, but then just didn’t hold any resentment toward his captors and forgave them.
John Prendergast: Yeah, good example.
Rick Archer: Or even Christ on the cross, “Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.”
John Prendergast: Mm hm. And there’s a love of beauty also. There’s an aesthetic sensitivity, that, it can be felt throughout the body, but often, when we see, like speaking of Christian symbolism, when I was at St. Peter’s Cathedral, maybe three years ago in the Vatican, and looked at Michelangelo’s Pietà, where the figure of Mary is holding the corpse of Jesus. It’s an extraordinary work, just visually to see this figure of compassion, like the great mother holding the suffering of the world. But it’s, there’s so much beauty in it, too. I mean, it’s both beautiful, and compassionate, and wise, and, so all of these can blend in a beautiful way.
Rick Archer: Can you imagine being able to create such a thing?
John Prendergast: It’s hard to imagine.
Rick Archer: Unbelievable.
John Prendergast: It is. To have a, a block of marble, and to unfold that form.
Rick Archer: Jeez, talk about genius. , you mentioned your TM background, you may have remembered Maharishi used to say that he felt that self-realization was a prerequisite to the significant unfoldment of the heart or of, yeah, of the heart, of devotion. And that, without that foundation, it was like a little pond trying to rise up in big waves couldn’t do it, but , like, if, but an ocean can do it. So he kind of recommended becoming oceanic in our awareness. And then on that foundation, being able to, the next phase of unfoldment would kind of naturally occur.
John Prendergast: Well the Indian system, this is bhakti and , from a personal level, there’s, it’s “bhakti.” But when there is the knowing intimately of true nature, then it’s “para bhakti” or the “highest” bhakti. And this, it’s, we usually think of, it’s an impersonal quality of love and devotion, and often we associate that word with something other than love, but it’s, it has that quality, it does. It’s not egoic it’s non-personal.
Rick Archer: Right. But it kind of makes sense in a way that, if the Self hasn’t been realized, there’s generally a lack of awareness, often a kind of a dullness or something and so, and even to speak of, like, really appreciating something, which is kind of what love is, really having profound appreciation if you don’t know who the appreciator is, is there really any standpoint from which to deeply, deeply appreciate? And it’s kind of interesting what you just said that you find yourself, you went through all this inner development then now you find this devotion, even if it’s without an object and kind of, it almost sounded like you could have used the word appreciation there, just even visually things are more beautiful and stuff, there’s just this enhanced appreciation for,
John Prendergast: Appreciation and, gratitude. It’s just right next to it. There’s just like savoring, the just most ordinary moments in our life, I mean, this is , we have a lovely conversation but to be doing the dishes or , just driving the car and just, when we are out of, kind of, our egocentric, egocentricity and just available, there is such appreciation and gratitude for simplicity, simple moments of life.
Rick Archer: And gratitude, yeah. You mentioned that you often feel this devotion without necessarily having a focal point to it. Do you feel that also with the gratitude, there’s just this feeling of gratitude, but not toward anyone or anything?
John Prendergast: That’s right. I mean, there’s great, grateful for many things, of course, in my relative life, my friends, my family, my, just surroundings. But mostly gratitude to be, gratitude to be awake and aware, it’s like this incredible evolution, of form allowing the experience of itself. So the gratitude for being is actually predominant, and the gratitude for everything else is secondary.
Rick Archer: what I get a lot, and see if you can relate to it, too. It’s just, like walking down the street, looking at the sidewalk, looking at the grass, looking at the trees, just experiencing ordinary stuff, there’s a almost constant appreciation of what a miracle I’m actually looking at.
John Prendergast: This is it.
Rick Archer: Yeah, without actually, getting too intellectual about it, but just a feeling of what a marvel is right in front of our very eyes all the time. And if we want to look at it scientifically, what’s actually going on with the cells and the molecules and everything else is just this vast intelligence at play. And we are, it, we’re in it, and it’s in us, and it’s just like this, we’re a fish in that ocean. And that’s where, for me, the devotion and gratitude starts to really amp up, the sense of, “I’m having this divine experience,” even though I’m just walking down the sidewalk.
John Prendergast: Well, and you’re having it right now.
Rick Archer: Yes, exactly.
John Prendergast: As you talk about it, I could feel that.
Rick Archer: Yeah
John Prendergast: It’s beautiful. , and the intellectual part is secondary. , you can
Rick Archer: You can, talk, you can intellectualize in order to verbalize it.
John Prendergast: Bur primarily,
Rick Archer: But you don’t have to do that. Yeah.
John Prendergast: No, primarily, it’s a direct sensing. , it’s a felt sense of reality, and a gratitude that just spontaneously pours out because of that. We’re not trying to be grateful, we’re not practicing gratitude. It actually comes from the knowing of what this is.
Rick Archer: Yeah
John Prendergast: The knowing and the being of it.
Rick Archer: And I can clearly remember like 50 years ago, just looking at a similar scene, looking at the trees or something and feeling kind of dead inside and everything was dead outside. There was just no, no magic to it like there is now.
John Prendergast: Well, that’s it when there’s deadness inside, there’s deadness outside. When we’re shut off, when to shut down internally, we’re disconnected. And this is our greatest suffering, by the way, this sense of aloneness and alienation. And it comes from not knowing the true nature of the heart and of ourself.
Rick Archer: Yeah. Now, I’m not for a moment suggesting that I have arrived some kind of state or anything like that. I mean, if you compare yourself with someone like Mirabai, or, the great devotees, and, what’s her name? St, not St. Francis. Mother, no. Who’s the Spanish saint with St. John of the Cross?
John Prendergast: Yeah, Teresa of Avila.
Rick Archer: Teresa of Avila. Yeah. When you read their devotional literature and the kinds of experiences that they had, you realized that you’re still kind of in kindergarten, at least I do. But there’s some flavor of it anyway, which is great.
John Prendergast: Well, this is it. And it’s important not to compare. It’s like, what you’re touching what we’re touching right now, is what everyone has touched, in this, in this sense of spontaneous gratitude and devotion. , and
Rick Archer: Yeah, it’s just a matter of degree, and we are, where we are, and we just continue to grow.
John Prendergast: Yeah, and when we do, it’s really important to let it in. , this is one thing I noticed, it’s, in my work with people, it’s like, we can, it’s not so difficult to touch it, but often the mind will dismiss it or go on to something else, because it has an agenda. But to actually, when we’re, sensing directly, as we are now what this is, it’s like to actually slow down and let it in and recognize what it is. Right? Not just to state. Right? Not just an experience. But actually a knowing, a direct knowing and feeling of what’s true, what’s most true. And when we do, when we really let it in, the body mind begins to orient and reorient towards this, because this is, this is our true nature. And this is the true nature of the body and the mind, of our thinking and our feeling and our sensing, and the body and the mind are heavily conditioned. But when it touches this knowing, and recognition, ’cause this is all about recognition, as far as I’m concerned, the path of recognition, when there is a recognition of this, to really let it in, not grasping, right, because it’s not an object, but it’s almost like letting the body mind be saturated by this knowing and this feeling.
Rick Archer: So why wouldn’t the person let it in? And how, how would they shut it out? And why isn’t it in – why isn’t it more lively in people’s awareness? As a rule?
John Prendergast: Yeah, this is the question of resistance. Right? And it’s a very important question, a big question, as well.
Rick Archer: Well, don’t you think, I mean, the average person, if we look at all the millions of people in the world, I was just, somebody sent me a video of the traffic jam in Los Angeles, it was Thanksgiving, traffic, just bumper to bumper, taillights, as far as the eye can see on the freeway.
John Prendergast: Beautiful. Beautiful lights.
Rick Archer: Yeah beautiful lights, like, almost like Christmas. But , people are buffeted and jostled and impacted and, stressed and tired and , that life comes at you, ? And it seems to me that it’s the buffeting of life that, from infancy, that tends to calcify or encrust, our sensitivity. And probably you would agree with that you can elaborate on it. But then how do we reverse the process?
John Prendergast: Although I think the buffeting is often more relational. , it’s not…So for instance, it’s like traffic is one thing, we can handle that. , but, or maybe not. But, when we’re, when we’re in relationship with someone, particularly like a parent, who is negligent or abusive, that’s a much more difficult situation to navigate. So we do shut down.
Rick Archer: Yeah, and that kind of stuff hits us when long before we’ve learned how to drive.
John Prendergast: That’s right. Yeah. And long before we know how to make sense out of our experience. I mean, sometimes this happens so early on, we’re hardly, we can hardly make sense out of our experience. And so we, we armor ourselves, and then that becomes our default mode. Right? We’re armored, we’re cut off from, from really what’s essential within ourself, and then we identify with it. So we take ourselves to be that armoring, that shell, basically. And then there’s another point here, which is, which is really quite interesting for me, which is, in my work with people on retreat in particular, but in one-on-one mentoring, people can kind of drop the shell, and have a direct, really, knowing recognition of themselves, and then they return to their default mode. And then they’re still afraid of letting go. This is very interesting. So it’s like, there are different levels in the body mind that, I think, are impacted by these letting goes and openings. Some participate in them more consciously, and some less so, and were pulled back by those less conscious elements that kind of crystallize, a more, a separate sense of self. So it’s a gradual process. And there’s a fear, there’s a very important existential fear here, which is of annihilation. Because it from the point of view of the mind, the letting go looks like death, death of the body. And those two are very often confused, the death of the story, the death of the self-image, and the death of the body. And so, terror often arises in this quest to come home to who we really are. And that’s an important part of the resistance too. Part of it is just, dealing with the vicissitudes and challenges of life and the shocks as you were suggesting, and then getting into a default mode, and identifying with it, but part of it also is the kind of resistance that our mind-oriented identity has with the unknown, because the unknown is equated with something dangerous. And so we’re constantly trying to know in order to be in control, in order to be safe. And so to be, actually see that mechanism, working in our life, with more and more clarity allows us to be less at effect of it, and is part of the process, I think, of awakening.
Rick Archer: It seems there must be something natural and necessary and even beneficial and helpful to the armoring that accumulates, in our early years, because it happens to everybody. So it couldn’t be, something that’s not supposed to happen. It happens to everybody, obviously.
John Prendergast: It’s a developmental stage.
Rick Archer: Yeah. And obviously, in certain families, it must happen much less than in others. If you have a really warm, loving family with highly involved parents who aren’t all messed up, then perhaps you go through your childhood relatively unscathed, although there’s always school. But, I don’t know. So it does say, and maybe it correlates, you could tell us as a psychologist, whether it correlates with the formation of an ego structure, which everyone says, is necessary in our early years. We have to have some, some people say you have to have a strong, healthy ego in order to eventually transcend the ego. It has to be healed and made whole before we can even talk of seeing beyond it.
John Prendergast: Yeah, there’s some truth to that. So there’s something that is, kind of, natural and developmental in terms of developing an individuated sense of self, it’s actually very healthy, to demerge from our parents and our family and to follow what feels authentic, in terms of our own experience of ourself. And that’s an important process. But it is different. And so , a self-story and a self-image accompanies that process of individuation. But the interesting thing is, as the individuation increases, then that story in that image is felt more and more as a bind, kind of a binding for us, like a heavy coat, and, and we’re wanting to shed it more and more, it’s like, we want to go on to the next stage, developmentally, which is to free ourselves of those images and stories, relatively speaking we still have them, but we hold them very lightly, and we recognize what they are. And interestingly, that actually supports the process of individuation, which is to say we’re more uniquely ourself as an individual being, but we’re also opening to this deeper dimension that we had abandoned, that we weren’t fully conscious of as children, we kind of circle around and reclaim that native innocence, but with the discernment and clarity and maturity of an adult. And I think this is a full blossoming of the human, like the recognition of our transcendent ground, our roots, and a really mature, developed individuated expression of that. And so there’s a creativity that emerges from that, that’s, so it’s not passive, it has a dynamic quality to it. And this is why I’ve been drawn to more tantric approaches too. Like, it’s not, like, enough to simply recognize the transcendent nature of life, it’s like, we really want to live it, in a very vivid and individuated way.
Rick Archer: Yeah. And it’s interesting, because one might think that, if ultimately we’re all the same person, and we all, we’re all , we are that unbounded consciousness and so on and so forth, that if we were all to realize that we would all kind of be the same, we would, but quite the opposite is true. It’s like, I mean, look at the diversity of the Amazon rainforest, that of which, whatever of it hasn’t been cut down yet. But there’s such a, there’s a nourishing ground, which causes a great diversity and flourishing of all the things that grow in it. So , I think that if we had a world in which everyone or pretty much everyone was self-realized that there would be incredible diversity and creativity and uniqueness of expression, every personality would have its own vivid characteristics and so on, while yet at the same time, everyone felt unified with one another at a deeper level.
John Prendergast: This is it, the sense of shared ground. And so there’s a deep respect for that diversity and even a celebration of it. So as you’re speaking Rick I’m noticing another quality.
Rick Archer: What’s that?
John Prendergast: Which is aliveness like you’re, there’s like this, I could feel, like, the central channel starting to light up
Rick Archer: Dinging!
John Prendergast: as you spoke of this. Yeah, exactly! And it kind of sits us up, and it, and enlivens our quality of life. And this is the, like, the unique expression, like the current of life, arising from the ground of being, and it just, it, on a subtle but very palpable level, it just illuminates the core of the body-mind and it gives us that sense of alignment and aliveness and creativity. And so, there’s a dynamic, enjoyable quality of life that is more felt. And this is, for me is, as important, this is as important as the discovery of the ground of being, is the living of it in this way.
Rick Archer: Oh, I totally agree. And as, I, with, associated with this group of the Association for Spiritual Integrity, Mariana Caplan and Jac O’Keeffe and Craig Holliday, and Miranda McPherson, but we’re all very, concerned with the phenomenon, which has been somewhat prevalent in the spiritual community where people emphasize the transcendent at, to the exclusion of, or without really attending to their individual integrity and their individual expressions.
John Prendergast: Yeah, this is very relevant, so everything is kind of erased on the personal level, and devalued, actually, and we’re not fully embodied. So this is part of the maturity in the conversation, I think, that’s evolved over decades in the West now, both in Europe and the US and North America and elsewhere is the, a more movement towards aligning, our individual lives with this transcendent understanding and looking at areas where there are gaps, and incongruencies. And this is where vulnerability and honesty is so important and often lacking among teachers and their students.
Rick Archer: Yeah, here’s something from your book that I wrote down, spiritual, regarding spiritual, bypassing. “Spiritual teachers,” this is a quote, “Spiritual teachers who are emotionally immature and lack empathy will fail to recognize important dimensions of their students’ hearts. This oversight can lead to teachings that are dry and abstract, cognitively brilliant, and profound, but emotionally disconnected or poorly attuned.”
John Prendergast: Mm hm, yeah. So you, that’s a fairly common phenomenon, where you have that more mental awakening. And people have that clarity and a sense of the infinite, that the heart has remained dormant, and, or dimensions of the heart remain dormant. And so there’s there can be an unkindness, a lack of real sensitivity and care. And it’s justified in various ways, as whatever crazy wisdom teachings, but in fact, it’s heartless teachings is what it is.
Rick Archer: Yeah, crude.
John Prendergast: So, yeah, it’s an important subject. And, this is, this is where really ethical behavior comes from. Not just kind of standards of the mind, but really an openness of the heart.
Rick Archer: Yeah, I think you would probably agree with, based upon what you said earlier about the tantric path, that spirituality should really mean a full blossoming of all facets of what makes us up, which is, so it’s not just taking refuge in the transcendent, it’s, integration of the transcendent into every nook and cranny of our individual body-mind and, emotions and everything.
John Prendergast: Mm hm yeah, this is interesting.
Rick Archer: I’m restating what I think you think.
John Prendergast: Well, that’s an accurate restatement. And that’s the theme of embodiment, really embodying the understanding. And often, I experienced it, I think of an experience as a waking down, a waking down and in, like, the transcendent, often, is contacted as above head, or above shoulder experience. And as there is a growing maturity of the realization, there’s a dropping down of attention, often in the heart area and into the hara, not necessarily in a linear way. But just a gradual movement, down and in, into the core of the body and into these areas that are less conscious, into emotional areas and instinctual areas. And so we get into, the challenging areas of relationship and power dynamics and sexuality and survival, which so many religious and spiritual traditions keep at arm’s length. And I think this is our challenge, and for me, it’s very open-ended. It’s like, we can recognize, kind of, the truth of our transcendent nature, and yet different facets of it continue to unfold and be embodied. And that’s certainly true for me. Feels like a very open-ended and dynamic process.
Rick Archer: Yeah. It’s a shame that some spiritual teachers and maybe that maybe this is less than it used to be 10 years ago, but, some of them would dismiss most of what we’re saying right now is just a concession with Maya, as a concession with a personal self, which they continually emphasize doesn’t even exist. So why are we talking about it? Yeah.
John Prendergast: Right. Yeah, that’s true, I think maybe 10 or 20 years ago that devaluation, that devaluative, dismissive approach would be more common, but that’s changing significantly, I think.
Rick Archer: I think it is, and I’ve been told by people who have hung out in those circles that there’s a tendency toward really being nihilistic and even doing all kinds of crazy stuff, and, excessive drinking and inappropriate behavior and all, and rationalizing it as: doesn’t matter, because there’s really no one doing it. To me, that’s such an unhelpful perspective.
John Prendergast: Yeah, unhelpful and unhealthy, I think. , it’s again, it’s transcendent and not imminent, in its accent. And both are important. , some people will kind of err in the other direction, I think, too, and they won’t fully value the importance of the no one and nothing. , they want to get to the everything, without going through, they want to get to the fullness without going through the emptiness. And there’s a, I think there needs to be an emptying out of these, this kind of, to a large extent, the personal identity, in order for this, genuine experience of imminence to flower as we’re speaking.
Rick Archer: Yeah, sometimes people are criticized for this being on a perpetual self-improvement treadmill,
John Prendergast: Exactly.
Rick Archer: without taking recourse to the deeper qualities of the self, which are, which are impersonal, which are, kind of, are universal. But I think what you’re saying there is really key, which is that “both-and.”, it doesn’t have to be it shouldn’t be “either-or.”
John Prendergast: Mm hm, they’re supportive. They’re different facets of reality, manifesting.
Rick Archer: Yeah. A question came in from someone named Michael Joseph in the UK, which will shift our gears a little bit. Michael says, “I find when I rest in stillness, my heart frequently, literally purrs, Shakti, like a cat. And this enters the head and quietens the mind. It’s not ecstatic, though, can you suggest how to intensify this heartfelt sense?”
John Prendergast: Mm. Well, no, I wouldn’t. Because I wouldn’t suggest trying to intensify it. And again, this is kind of the mind wanting to amplify an experience or speed up and experience. And I suppose that could be done, and , there are guides and teachers who will do that. But my experience is there’s a natural unfolding and pace of unfolding here. And actually, in the resting and stillness, there is this natural sense of contentment, that does arise, and it’s really, as I said, about letting it in, it’s just like receiving, the gift of grace that’s coming. And, because if we try to intensify or amplify an experience, we’re actually manipulating it. The mind is getting in, there’s some sense of will, and it rarely goes well. And often, and, or it maybe occasionally goes awry. So in my own experience, even though I have over many years, felt an unfolding sensitivity in these various levels, none of it has been consciously cultivated, I haven’t tried to, it’s actually been part of a spontaneous unfolding. And I think what’s most important is that we, that we love the truth, and that that’s the most important thing. And again and again we return to what it is that’s most important to us and use that as our guide.
Rick Archer: Yeah, and I think what you’re talking about here is not something flashy. I mean, some people like flashy experiences. They look for them, and maybe they take drugs to get them or whatever. But you’re talking about something subtle, something really, more and more and more gentle. And, yeah, and so “intensify” kind of, maybe that’s not how he meant it, but it sounds to me, like it’s, the opposite of what you’re talking about in a way, because what you’re talking about is increasingly refined, not amplified.
John Prendergast: Right, refined, and also to understand that this quest is actually to recognize what’s here already, regardless of our experience. So it’s not about creating an experience. And we, many of us have heard this teaching over the years, I certainly did for decades and didn’t fully appreciate what was being pointed to, but our true nature is as present, whether we’re experiencing pleasure or painful experience, and whether it’s intense or subtle, so to not be attached to subtle experience or to intense experiences, to pleasure or pain, and to recognize this which is always here. And so it is. It’s extraordinarily quiet, it’s, often we speak of it as a field, within which experience arises and passes. And I think it’s a good way to speak of it and think about it, to recognize we are this, already, the one who wants to intensify, experience or amplify it, is it, already. And it’s the recognition of this that’s most important.
Rick Archer: Sure. Now, when you say that it’s always already here. that is not to say that we’re always aware of it to the same degree.
John Prendergast: Yeah.
Rick Archer: Obviously not.
John Prendergast: No, very different.
Rick Archer: Yeah, that varies. And some people actually jump to the conclusion that they’re enlightened or something, because they have the thought that, “Oh, it’s always already here. And so now that I know this, I must be done.” But that’s not what you’re saying. I’m quite sure.
John Prendergast: You’re quite right. Yeah, keep going. Intellectual understanding is really the beginning
Rick Archer: Yeah.
John Prendergast: of this process, yeah.
Rick Archer: Yeah. It’s kind of like, let’s say we won the lottery. And there was a ticket in our sock drawer, and we forgotten all about it. We don’t know that we won, and we’re begging on the street. So yeah, you’re a millionaire, but it doesn’t do any good. Because you haven’t cashed in the ticket. So you kind of have to tune in and actually experience all this stuff we’re talking about.
John Prendergast: Right. That’s a good up-to-date metaphor. The old one is, the beggar is sitting on the box and, beneath, which is, a pile of gold. Right, exactly. So, yes, you’re, you are a rich man or woman, but you gotta lift up the box and discover it for yourself.
Rick Archer: A bunch of gold or something. Yeah. And that, even though everyone’s heard this idea, I think it bears repeating. Because there’s so many people in the world who, are addicted to opioids, or taking their own lives, or , doing things which clearly indicate that they haven’t discovered that they have this wealth of fulfillment, just waiting to be experienced. So I think, what you’re doing, and what we’re all doing is developing our own experience of it and telling others that it’s possible to do so.
John Prendergast: Yeah, and it seems to, the more we know it firsthand, the more it is spontaneously shared as well, in an appropriate way. So it kind of radiates out from the inside out in programs like this, in, our way to share that understanding. What’s interesting is there’s no, there’s no movement, I find, to proselytize in the sharing. It’s really, it’s really a matter of living it, and kind of intuitively sensing with whom and when and how to share it, if it feels appropriate. But it doesn’t need to be articulated, which is very interesting, and reminds me, it’s something that Jean Klein, my first foundational teacher said about the discovery of True Nature, which was that True Nature does not assert, it neither asserts nor denies itself. So if we’re asserting or denying, we’re in a basically egocentric position and understanding.
Rick Archer: Yeah, I mean, you and I, our profession is talking about this stuff and helping others to become more aware of it in one way or another, experientially and intellectually. So, but I think there’s a difference between that and proselytizing. We’re not trying to get anybody to believe anything necessarily, ’cause we, I think we both say that, that’s not going to do them much good. It’s more of like, oh, how would you say it? What are we doing?
John Prendergast: What are we doing here, Rick?
Rick Archer: As distinguished from, banging on people’s doors with pamphlets in hand?
John Prendergast: Well, this is it, . It’s not about adapting and adopting a new belief. , and it’s interesting, because we are talking about, or at least I’ve been using the word “truth,” right? Like finding one’s true nature or being, loving what’s most true, or the truth, and I had a real aversion to using that language for a while, just because of my kind of skeptical intellect, and my knowledge that so many religions and cults use the same language, to induce really thoughtless, kind of, followers, and naive followers to follow a particular dogma. But what’s really clear is that truth that we’re talking about and pointing to is prior to thought, and thus prior to any dogma or any belief and it’s not about, not about adopting a new belief, but actually examining our existing beliefs. And it’s not about learning something, it’s about unlearning. And so it’s a reversal in some way, the opposite of, trying to inculcate a belief. It’s really about invitation, I would say, to examine. And for those who are interested, yeah. We’re not pounding on doors, we’re actually living as an open door. And people who are interested can come, and share and inquire, and that feels very, there’s something mysterious about this process of how we come to this understanding and how it gets shared, which it seems to be personal in some way, and yet, on some other level, we can feel, a greater intelligence moving through us, not in the sense of being inflated about it. But just, you can feel when people, they hear something, maybe they hear, you speaking or someone on your program, and something lights up, there’s a, kind of, flame of recognition really brightens. And this is part of their own process of self recognition and self-discovery. So there’s something very, kind of, spontaneous, I think, in this movement of a deeper intelligence that’s working through everyone.
Rick Archer: Yeah. One way of contrasting the orientation to the word truth is that, in some cases, people feel like, okay, I’ve got the truth, and my group has the truth. And in some sense, that makes us better than other people. Were saved, they’re not. , that kind of thing. Whereas I think that what you’re talking about, would actually culture greater humility in a person. Because they realize it’s not something they can possess.
John Prendergast: That’s right.
Rick Archer: It’s something which they are in a very deep sense, but we all are. There’s some story about Ram Das, I believe his brother was in a mental hospital or something. And, he went to visit him. And he said to him, the reason that, “You think your God,” right, he said to his brother, because his brother was locked up in a mental hospital for thinking he was God. He said, the difference, “The reason you’re in there, and I’m out here is that, I also think I’m God, but I think everybody is.”
John Prendergast: Exactly!
Rick Archer: “In your case, you just say you are.”
John Prendergast: This is a famous Ram Das story. It’s a very good distinction.
Rick Archer: Yeah.
John Prendergast: Yeah. So there’s a , I love that, too, because it doesn’t, it doesn’t bring a sense of being special, and it doesn’t create division. It does the opposite. There’s a kind of melting of our specialness and melting of the “us” and the “them” as, something substantial. And the recognition, on a, really on a felt sense much more than intellectual, of our shared common ground, not just of humanity, not just of our interconnectedness, right, not just that we share, breathe the same air and eat the same food and are interconnected, economically and ecologically and politically and culturally, which is all true on a relative level. But deeper than that, really more essential than that, we share the very same ground of being, and that touches a whole different dimension, this recognition, than interconnectedness. And I find, I mention this, because I find these levels sometimes conflated, the sense of the undivided nature of being and our interconnectedness. I would say our interconnectedness is an expression on a relative level, all sorts of relative levels, of that underlying undivided nature. But when we touch that deepest level of that which is undivided, we come out of, really, our deepest level of separation, and, in that recognition of our, of our wholeness. So that’s something I, I’ve been emphasizing more in my teaching, too, because it is interesting, as an early meditator, I really felt like I was going into my own space, . I was going into an expanse of space, but it was still, on some level, personal, even though it was described, as whatever cosmic consciousness or God consciousness or unitive consciousness. I was going into a state, and it was somehow my state. And all of that falls away. There’s not a “my state” and it’s not a state and there’s a profound release that comes with that recognition. And a sense of awe too. As, I know, as this unfolded for me, it was, it was like this great open secret, revealing itself and , just touched me to the very core.
Rick Archer: Yeah, the obvious biblical references to what you’re talking about would be, firstly, the golden role, rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” And the deeper meaning of it is that they are you. And vice versa. And then also, : “Whatsoever you do unto the least of these, you do unto me.” And , the deeper meaning of that, obviously, is that we’re, whatever you do, who was it? Amma has this saying that : acting hurtfully toward others is like holding a knife that doesn’t have a handle, and it’s sharp on both ends. , you’re, you might be hurting them, but you’re cutting yourself at the same time because, there is that underlying unity.
John Prendergast: I heard many years ago when Amma was first in the US, I went on tour with, her, and we traveled to Boston, this would have been like 1987, I think. Anyway, someone asked her about, there was a similar kind of question. And she said, “It’s like laying on your back and spitting up into the air.”
Rick Archer: That’s a good one.
John Prendergast: Like it all comes back. , just, makes a mess on yourself.
Rick Archer: Cool, she comes up with some pretty good metaphors.
John Prendergast: It’s a very earthy metaphor. That one stayed with me a third of a century later.
Rick Archer: Yeah. A question came in from Francis in Hampton, Virginia. Francis asks, “Having had a traumatic childhood, at times I try to work out those shadow aspects of myself. But knowing the limitations of analysis, I have a hard time knowing whether all I am doing is getting lost or reinforcing my story. Likewise, when doing self-inquiry, I see that my story is just a story. However, I question it. I’m attempting, I question if I’m attempting spiritual bypass. How can I tell the difference?”
John Prendergast: That’s an excellent question. And it’s a question many people have, about doing psychological work or self-inquiry, “Is the psychological work reinforcing psychological patterns? Is the self-inquiry, avoiding psychological material?” And it can be true in either case, actually. So, as some of your listeners know, I kind of move back and forth between those domains, depending really on where attention is being called, and what’s needed. So I think the most important thing is that when we, there’s a kind of a dynamic interaction between these different domains, of kind of, conditioned and unconditioned, and we will be called to attend to one domain over another at various times. And that’s an intuitive process. So it’s about inner listening. It’s like, “What do I need to pay attention to?” can be a question. And to let the question kind of fall into the heart and be quiet. And often, if we listen, just for a minute, we can there’ll be an inner guidance or heart wisdom will begin to guide us as to where attention needs to go. Then another question is, “How do we attend to our conditioning?” And it’s very, with psychotherapy, the tendency is to, in the most superficial form, is to talk about it and maybe identify, origins, in, our childhood, and then talk about those, and hopefully, through insight, they’ll be some resolution. That is a fairly superficial approach and rarely yields very much and in fact, can reinforce the pattern. We just developed kind of a more psychologically savvy identity, but we’re still at the effect of the conditioning. A deeper approach is actually to go into it, and actually explore it more experientially, being willing to feel and sense the impact of it and be with that more intimately. This is a more effective approach. But I think the most effective approach is, if we can begin from presence, and the more that we can begin our investigation into our conditioning, from a sense of presence, the less manipulative it will be, and the less we will be identifying with it, as well. So for those who have that kind of understanding that there is a presence available, whenever we’re, for instance, when I’m working with people who are in the awakening process and working with their psychological process, their material, I’ll say: Let’s take a minute, let’s close the eyes, take a few deep breaths, feel yourself held, in the chair, relax. Feel yourself held by something greater than the chair or the gravity, a field of awareness, feel the sense of space all around your body. Feel it within your body, notice it’s the same space within and without your body. And notice that this space is awake. And then notice yourself as this awake space. So this can happen, not necessarily in such a linear way that I just, walk people through, we may just say a few words that are kind of a reminder of that, but we source ourselves in and as presence. And then from that, it’s like, when a person often in two or three minutes has a sense of that presence, I’ll say, “Okay, let’s bring attention to the area that’s really asking for it.” Let’s say, there’s a contraction in the heart area, that has its origins in some childhood conditioning. Maybe we weren’t, we felt ignored or abused or dismissed in terms of our value. And there’s a sense of contraction. And there’s a sense of a belief that goes with that. “I’m unlovable.” And a feeling of shame. These are common aspects of conditioning. And I’ll say, just bring, welcome this, kind of, cluster of conditioning into the field of presence. And let them both be here. So in this way, we’re actually inviting, like the small human heart, the conditioned heart to rest in the heart of awareness. And I’ll say: Just let them both be here at the same time. Don’t try to make anything happen. Just notice. It’s very interesting. When we invite a conditioned aspect of our body-mind, let’s say this contraction in the heart area, and the thoughts and feelings that go with it, to be held in awareness, the heart of awareness is loving field of awareness, without trying to make something happen, and just notice what happens. And this provides an optimal field, for the conditioned body-mind to begin to tell its story, unfold, often there’s a sense of relief, and release, and a kind of melting. So in this way, we’re not avoiding anything, or evoking our true nature and, and welcoming our conditioned experience into it. And what’s happening is it’s like the, we’re welcoming confusion and ignorance into the light of awareness, and just letting that light awareness do its work, which is spontaneously transformative. So this is a kind of a quick overview. And there are other elements, that I, of course discuss in the book, about working with our experience. And with self-inquiry, coming back to the second part of the questioners question, often, the inquiry, if the inquiry is heartfelt, it’s more potent, which means if we bring attention to the heart area, and we can put our hands on the heart area and just take a few deep breaths, and then we’ll ask our question, like, “What is my deepest knowing?” This is a question that has emerged in my work over the years with people. “What is the truth?” Or “What is my deepest knowing about this?” And it could be a belief, for instance, that I’m unlovable, or I’m lacking, or I’m flawed, or I’m unworthy or endless variations on these core limiting beliefs. And then to let it go, just let the question go. And we don’t go to our mind for an answer. We’re just quiet. And what we’re doing, if we just like wait half a minute, something will begin to bubble up. A felt sense, maybe an image, maybe a direct knowing, that is related to this light of awareness, to our true nature. And so, this invites the infusion of heart wisdom into confusion, and the conditioned body mind. So this is a way that actually meditative inquiry can be used to work with our core limiting beliefs and our conditioning. We can, of course, use meditative inquiry to sit with an essential question. “Who are what am I?” “What is this?” “What is the true nature of my heart?” “What is the nature of the ground?” , these kind of questions, and this is complimentary to sitting in deep silence as well. So I think, I think there are ways that we can work psychologically, that don’t reinforce the patterns and the psychological identity. There’s ways to do meditative inquiry that don’t avoid or bypass our conditioning.
Rick Archer: One thing that I picked up on what you just said there, I mean, there might be instances in which you specifically want to probe into a particular thing, but very often, if you just sit in presence, it’s like, nature has a wisdom of what to bring up, ? It’s like, sometimes I’ll be sitting in meditation, and some little experience I had in childhood will bubble up, or I’ll remember some dream I had 30 years ago or something. And it’s like, I never would have thought to sit down and experience that, but that’s what chooses, to come up at that particular time, presumably, because it’s ready to, or in, I have a a trust in the wisdom of the body to know how to purify itself of deep impressions.
John Prendergast: Exactly! This is it. These are deep impressions, and there is a deeper intelligence at work, when we avail ourselves to it. When we really open and listen, there’s a natural unwinding process that often feels like melting. This is very interesting metaphor, like, people again, and again, they say, whatever that contraction may be, that is related to that conditioning, they often relate it to, kind of, a sense of something cold or icy. And that as they just let it be held in the heart of awareness, there’s a sense of melting or softening. These are some of the commonest, descriptions that people account. That’s a very interesting description, like what’s happening there, what’s happening there, in the melting? And I think, the ice metaphor is a very interesting one, because I think egocentric identity is like ice, its fundamental nature is water. It’s fluid, right? But it’s crystallized, it’s hardened, it’s taken a shape that is malleable, in fact. And so it can be warmed, when it’s met with real warmth, which would equate with love and understanding, when there’s loving understanding, our conditioning tends to naturally melt. Like everything is waiting to be met with love and understanding, in terms of our conditioning.
Rick Archer: Yeah, I thought of a metaphor for the point we were just discussing, which is like, let’s say you eat really nutritious food, while your body knows how to metabolize those nutrients and where to send them, maybe you need some calcium here, and some potassium there and some iron there, and so on and so forth. So like that, I think if we can learn to sit in presence, the body will know how to, sounds funny to say “use,” but how to allow that presence to melt or soften in tight spots that are represented, that are the neurophysiological basis of that conditioning.
John Prendergast: Yeah, the metaphor of metabolizing is actually used a lot in psychological literature now.
Rick Archer: Oh, is it? Okay.
John Prendergast: It’s like, yeah, it’s like, to metabolize an experience means to digest it, . And for it to be integrated for the, for what’s valuable to be kept and what’s not to be eliminated. Right? And that’s true. It’s like we’re metabolizing experience all the time, more or less efficiently. And the more tapped in we are to presence, the more that metabolic process, psychological metabolic process, is enhanced and catalyzed.
Rick Archer: A couple of questions have come in from Sweden from two different people. One is from Hannah, I won’t try to pronounce the names of these Swedish cities. Hannah asks, “What does it mean when the body feels unbalanced? When one puts attention on it? It seems like there’s something really hurt deep inside when attention is put on the body.”
John Prendergast: Something feels really hurt inside?
Rick Archer: Yeah,
John Prendergast: Is what she said?
Rick Archer: the body feels
John Prendergast: Something out of balance.
Rick Archer: unbalanced when one its attention on it, and something feels really hurt. I guess that, the follow up question to that would be, well, I don’t want to put attention on it. Because it’s unpleasant. It, I feel like I’m just wallowing in some deep hurt.
John Prendergast: Well, this is interesting, because it circles back to your, one of your early questions, Rick, about resistance. Like, if this is so here all the time, why don’t we,
Rick Archer: Why don’t we just enjoy it? I interviewed someone who wrote a book called “What’s In the Way Is the Way”
John Prendergast: just access it more easily? Yeah, more people…And also a very interesting point that I’ve discovered in my work with people, that these areas of imbalance or tightness or pain, often are the best pathways, the best in terms of quickest and most direct pathways to our direct nature, to our true nature. So because we avoid pain, we turn away from it. But the pain is the signal, right, actually to pay attention. And as we grow in maturity, and particularly if I’m speaking of emotional pain, it continues to endure, we begin to pay attention and we begin to lean towards what we’ve been leaning away from. Especially we only understand that it’s a potential portal. So if we lean into our experience of being out of balance, if we lean into our experience of something that’s emotionally painful, particularly if we’re resourced from presence, and that’s an important, very important element, these will reveal themselves to be something other than what they initially seem to be. So if we feel into imbalance, we will find balance. If we feel into pain and emptiness and contraction, we will find release, we will find fullness, we will feel an ease of being. And this is very, very important, and this is again a kind of tantric principle, is that any experience can be a pathway to our essential nature, because it is an expression of that. Now, there’s a reason why this is, because these imbalances and these pains are because, I’m not speaking necessarily a physical illness, I’m speaking more of an interior subjective malaise, sense of malaise means that we’re not actually paying attention. We’ve overlooked something. And we’ve overlooked something important or essential. And beneath, and, beneath the contraction, we find essential qualities and our true nature. So it’s like in the tightest places, there’s space. And this has been so interesting for people to discover, what we’ve been running away from, reactive to, and begin to approach with, not to change, but to be intimate with, and this is a very important principle, are willing to be intimate and curious and affectionate with our experience, which are qualities really of presence, when we approach our experience with that, that’s what happens. A very natural kind of opening. And something else is revealed, right? That the contraction was an expression of.
Rick Archer: Her name was Mary, I can’t remember her last name at the moment. But if someone, if you search in the past interviews, no it wasn’t Mary Reed, it was a different Mary, maybe you can find it, Irene. If you search under past interviews, and I’ll say the name in case people would like to reference that.
John Prendergast: Mm hm, yes. It’s a great title. Yes.
Rick Archer: Yeah.
John Prendergast: And important, an important principle. That’s right. We turn towards that which appears to be – the apparent obstacle is the portal.
Rick Archer: Here’s, oh Mary O’Malley. Okay, good. Here’s another, our other question from Sweden. This is Sam, who asks, “Could you please elaborate a bit more on the concepts of the Self versus no-self. These terms make up the core of many spiritual traditions, and yet they seem to cause more confusion than clarity.”
John Prendergast: Yeah, well it’s very true. There’s a lot of, there are many definitions and, and no one definition. So I keep it pretty simple, myself. And when referring to ego, I’m referring, or that egoic self is referring to our self-story. And our self-image is. It’s our self-talk about who we are. And it’s our picture of who we are. And we don’t actually need that, we’ll probably always have a little bit of that. But we don’t need, certainly don’t need to believe in it. And that’s really the most important thing to recognize and to see through. Now, the self is much greater than our egoic story. And this kind of goes back to our conversation about individuation. So, the self in terms of all the body-mind functioning, and the depth of the conscious mind and the subconscious, all of that continues as it is. But as we see through this self-story, and self-image, there’s a feeling of great freedom. It’s tremendously liberating. We feel ourselves as unbounded awareness. And we feel the body-mind then, being in us. This is the interesting thing, our sense of localization changes. It’s like, even though there is a kind of a local center here, there’s also a sense of being unbounded within which the local center is appearing. So there’s a big shift when we recognize that no-self-ness. And similarly, when we really get that in a deep way, there’s another step of realizing that no-self is, or the “no one,” is also everyone or everything. So there’s a subtle localization, there’s an impersonal no-one, and then there’s the sense of communion with everyone and everything.
Rick Archer: Yeah, and I would think of them all is just different levels of a larger wholeness, . It’s like, we wouldn’t say, “Okay, there’s the ocean and then there’s the waves, and the waves are non-ocean as contrasted with the ocean.” We would say that they’re both part of the ocean in a bigger sense. The ocean isn’t just this, isn’t just the stuff that’s not rising up in waves. So there’s this level of life that we could, that is often referred to as the Self, which is, absolute, silent, vast, and unbounded and all that, and then there’s the individual expressions. But I think it’s more useful to think of them both as components of a larger whole, rather than as something we want to
John Prendergast: Right, separate.
Rick Archer: divide from one another. Yeah.
John Prendergast: It’s all water, it’s different expressions, right. And I actually use that metaphor, that’s one of the organizing metaphors, as you no doubt read in my book, where I, like the wave tip is are, kind of, the tip of the wave is our ordinary common-sense identity as a separate self. And, kind of, the base of the wave is more of that soul level that I was talking about when I was talking about the levels of the heart, and the ocean itself would be the great or universal heart. So those correspond, they map actually, very, very precisely in that way. And so the, the recognition of no-self is really “Oh, I’m not just a wave tip,” , “I am the wave and the ocean.” But it all continues, but it’s knowing the true nature of it. So we’re not eliminating anything, we’re actually illuminating the true nature of who we are.
Rick Archer: Here’s a quote that relates to that, from your book, “Until the deep heart awakens, we will believe and feel that we are a separate inside self in a separate outside world.” So there’s a , separation or fragmentation that happens when – You say, “Until the deep heart awakens.” I guess, since we’re using this ocean analogy a lot, we could we could think in terms of, our awareness just being restricted to the waves versus our awareness, kind of incorporating the full range of the ocean: waves, depth, and basis of it all. All that. And, the, yeah, enough said. It’s just a useful metaphor.
John Prendergast: And by the way, the phrase that you just read was one that Rupert Spira originated, as far as I know, so I put a little, I put a little footnote there, and, attributing it to him. I find it a particularly precise and useful formulation, the inside separate self, the outside separate world, because that is our ordinary experience. We’re in here somewhere, don’t ask me where exactly, and it, the world, is out there somewhere. But really, as we examine very deeply, as we inquire into who we’ve taken ourselves to be, and where we’ve taken ourselves to be, an inside or outside, when we’ve taken ourselves to be, past, future, or timeless, now, all of that begins to dissolve. And so to your listener, I’m responding in particular, this is where self-inquiry is really potent, to really question our common-sense experience and to unlearn what we’ve taken to be true about who we are. And the effect is really, the wave discovers its oceanic nature.
Rick Archer: Which completely changed or reorients its life as a wave. .
John Prendergast: It gives, it gives context.
Rick Archer: Very much so. I mean, otherwise, if the world is out there and separate, it’s, then it’s always a threat. It’s always scary.
John Prendergast: Always, always a threat, always a threat. And so we’re constant – and the result of that scariness is that we’ve pulled ourselves like that. There’s a core contraction. We have to be vigilant, we, we have to be protected. And when we, when we know that, really, it’s all the same, that the, what we call the world is my self, so to speak, there’s such a deep relaxation, and then when life brings whatever challenges it does, and it ultimately and always will. They’re not, they’re not received as something hostile. Right? We don’t go into that deep sense of divisive terror. So, and this is an interesting point, I just, I want to accent this. And I don’t remember if I did it in the last interview, but there is a very, kind of, visceral terror that we carry as a separate self. And often as we
Rick Archer: “All fear is born of duality,” the Upanishad says.
John Prendergast: That’s right, it’s right in the Upanishads. So to face that fear, really that level of fear or terror takes courage and really love, either because we’ve been suffering a lot and we really want to just pierce, the illusion because we’re suffering, or because we love truth so much, and often some combination of those, gives us the kind of impetus to question this deeply and not be, not turn away from our fear, but actually begin to turn towards it and feel into it. And this is one of the beauties, is when we turn towards our fear or turn towards our terror, and we’re willing to kind of walk through it, it becomes an amazing portal to fearlessness, and a sense of what’s undivided. And again, that takes a lot of integrity to be willing to do that.
Rick Archer: One thought that’s been in the back of my mind, as we’ve been talking is that it’s not enough to listen to interviews like this or read books like yours, or anybody’s, in my opinion. It’s really helpful if there’s some kind of a daily practice of some sort, that works for you, and that you will practice regularly because it works for you. And someone, someone asked that I forget who, what’s the best practice? And the answer was the one that you will do regularly. Because, what we’re talking about is experiential, and it necessitates a restructuring of the neurophysiology. , we’ve heard of brain plasticity. And that’s not just going to happen from listening to talks or reading books.
John Prendergast: Mm-mm, it won’t. And that’s why a certain phase of this investigation is active, and may require a certain degree of effort, at least at first. And so listening,
Rick Archer: Although effort has its onerous quality to it, and
John Prendergast: I know.
Rick Archer: It can be enjoyable if you, if a practice
John Prendergast: Absolutely.
Rick Archer: really works for you you look forward to it.
John Prendergast: Yeah, effort in just like, creating space.
Rick Archer: Yeah.
John Prendergast: , and setting a schedule of A gentle discipline, yeah, not an arduous one. And a regular or semi-regular practice can be very helpful. At some point, a formal practice begins to be or can be supplemented with informal practice. And then they, they blend and I mean, I, I had years of very regular disciplined practice. And now it’s more kind of intuitive and irregular. Because I think what I was looking for, was found, and that’s the main point of the practice is to facilitate that investigation.
Rick Archer: A certain gentle discipline. Yep. Once you’ve crossed the river, you may not want to stay in the boat.
John Prendergast: Right. Unless you want to do a little pleasure floating.
Rick Archer: Pleasure cruise.
John Prendergast: Right, exactly.
Rick Archer: I remember, a couple years ago at the SAND conference, I moderated a panel on the direct versus the progressive paths. And I remember you were in the audience, at least for the first hour of it, I think you
John Prendergast: That’s a good memory.
Rick Archer: left after the first hour.
John Prendergast: Yes, I went home.
Rick Archer: And anyway, maybe we can talk about that a little bit. Here’s a paragraph from your book, “The direct path accents, the clear and immediate recognition of one’s true nature by directly inquiring and sensing into who or what we really are. The greatest danger of following the direct approach is remaining on an intellectual level. People can fool themselves into thinking that they have fully realized something that they haven’t and become stuck in an arrogant mental view as the Deep Heart remains dormant.” And then I didn’t really copy down anything you said about the progressive path there. But my sense is that it’s, again, one of these things, it’s not an either-or proposition. That the path can be both direct and progressive, that there can be direct, access to presence, as we’ve been calling it. And that the regularity of that direct access leads to progressive development. So what would you say to all that?
John Prendergast: Yeah. I would agree. It’s the recognition of who we are is direct. It’s in a way timeless, outside of space and time. The transposition of that, to the body-mind, is progressive. Gradual. Yeah.
Rick Archer: Yeah.
John Prendergast: That’s how I would formulate it. And progressive practices have their value, like specifically sitting, and whatever kind of practice appeals to us. Maybe it’s not sitting, maybe it’s moving, or writing or whatever it may be, that deepens our self-intimacy. So, I do see them as complimentary. And often people, they get attached to their view, right? They get attached to, “Okay, I have to practice, practice, practice, practice forever, and maybe in some future lifetime”, “I will realize something.” And you do hear that in some, some schools. And then you have others that say, “You are completely reinforcing the sense of being a separate seeker”, “if you do any practice,” and “really just recognize who you are now and abide in and as that.” But in truth, I think they are complimentary and it’s important not to, get attached to one or the other.
Rick Archer: Yeah. I mean, people hear the direct path. They think, “Oh, yeah, that’s what I want. I just want it directly. I don’t wanna screw around with some big, long, multi-year project.” But I can honestly say that I don’t think I’ve ever encountered an example of anyone who, on day one, had some kind of direct and full and complete realization and was thereby done.
John Prendergast: Yeah, I mean, you think of the, maybe the greatest exemplar of that would be Ramana Maharshi. So, when he’s 16, his uncle has died, he wants to know what death is like, he asks, he does a meditative inquiry, lays on the floor, asks, “Who dies?” and awakens to his true nature. And then he goes and sits for many years at a Shiva temple and, at Arunachala.
Rick Archer: And then up in the cave on the mountain.
John Prendergast: And then up, yeah, and then two caves on the mountain for decades. And there’s a deepening and a maturation of that understanding that unfolds over time.
Rick Archer: Yeah. So I guess the synopsis of this point would be that, again, you can directly access presence on day one of your practice, if it’s an effective practice, but you can also continue to embody and unfold that for decades thereafter. And it’s not like, it’s not like you wait for something to happen.
John Prendergast: I would say endlessly.
Rick Archer: Endlessly. Yeah, yeah.
John Prendergast: Yeah, there’s a, I mean, this is my, my experience is it just keeps refining and deepening.
Rick Archer: Yeah.
John Prendergast: I don’t I don’t see any end to the transposition of this understanding.
Rick Archer: I don’t either. And so it’s not like you’re waiting for something to happen, and you’re just going on and on for years with no reward, so to speak. I mean, the reward is all along the way. It’s like you’re following the breadcrumbs. And you’re nourishing yourself on those breadcrumbs as you go.
John Prendergast: And then you discover you’re the bread.
Rick Archer: Yeah.
John Prendergast: Yeah. Yeah, it’s like, yeah, we become increasingly, there’s more and more evidence, of our true nature. And we discover the source, of those essential qualities.
Rick Archer: Yeah. We’ve mentioned Ramana, we’ve, mentioned Vedanta a bit. And we’ve also mentioned Tantra, and there could be a whole books written about the distinction between them. But some people I’ve heard lately saying that they feel that Vedanta is dry or something, because it, because it’s, its, it emphasizes the transcendent so much to the exclusion of the relative world. The relative world as regarded as Maya, and therefore, worthless or inferior in some way, whereas Tantra sees the relative world as more infused with, imbued with the divine as much, part of the whole package as the Transcendent is. Do you feel like, that’s a fair characterization, and we want to discuss that a little bit?
John Prendergast: Well, I think this, I think it’s evolving. I think, probably traditional Advaita Vedanta has, historically and traditionally a strong, strongly accents the transcendent, and is a more, has been a more renunciant path. And whereas, Tantra more, the householder. But, there’s householding Vedantists, and certainly throughout history, and some that are more oriented towards worldly expression. I think what’s interesting though, is if we take the example of my teacher, Jean Klein, he studied with an Advaita Vedanta teacher in Bangalore, who was a Sanskrit scholar as well in the local college, and really that, as well as with Atmananda Krishna Menon in the south, but he also studied with a Kashmiri Yogi that he met on a bus in Bangalore. And that the Kashmiri, he was introduced to the Kashmiri tradition, and to Vishnana Bhairava, which is one of their key experiential texts, and Abhinavagupta and Kshemaraja, and so, in that lineage, and, that really had an impact on his body sensing and his appreciation for this unfolding awareness. So Jean, for instance, was a lover of beauty, and of art, and of life. And so he had a very, it wouldn’t be traditional in his kind of Vedanta. He was not dry, in that sense. And that was what I was introduced to, that was my introduction to kind of a blended, Tantric, Vedantic approach. And I think that’s becoming more common. I think people who were, have kind of come through the door of Vedanta or Advaita Vedanta are increasingly are inclusive of this, of the immanent and expressive. And so I think there’s some evolution in these teachings.
Rick Archer: Yeah, and I think there needs to be because, the vast majority of people who would be listening to a show like this, or who are interested in spirituality, aren’t going to be running off and living in a cave. And so the teaching needs to be appropriate for them. And they kind of more, and, we can derive great inspiration from Ramana, but we’re not going to live like he did. And,
John Prendergast: Few of us will. I have a friend who tried in a desert in Southern California, but yeah, not many of us.
Rick Archer: Well I have friends who live in ashrams in the Himalayas, and, but a lot of them aren’t so integrated? And I
John Prendergast: No!
Rick Archer: I used to be with them, and I’m glad that I am, I no longer am. I feel like my life is much more developed than it would have been.
John Prendergast: Well, this is interesting
Rick Archer: At least for me.
John Prendergast: because, yeah, there was I think, when you and I were first getting engaged in TM, there was an idealized image, of what a sage would be, and what spiritual realization would be. And there’s been an unfolding, more inclusive understanding over the years and, and we also see the limitations of a more monastic and renunciate approach, is people cut off and deny very important parts of their humanity, and then when they come out of the cave, they really have difficulty in relationships and with their students, right?
Rick Archer: Yeah.
John Prendergast: It’s endless reports of scandals, in Hindu, Buddhist, many Hindu and Buddhist teachers who were schooled, who were old school, and don’t really have that interior maturity that goes with it. So it’s an evolving, understanding and conversation.
Rick Archer: All right, well, we’re getting on towards the end of our talk, we have maybe 15 more minutes, if we want to take it. I was just, are there’s some things that you feel are important, that we haven’t had a chance to talk about?
John Prendergast: Well we haven’t, I think I’m going to talk a little bit, kind of contextualize the work of the heart, as well. So even though the book itself really accents these different dimensions of the heart and ways of recognizing and working with them, it’s part of a much greater system as well, as I suggested at the beginning, at the top of our conversation, Rick. And so it’s really important that we have mental clarity and wakefulness. And that means that we really see the limitation of thought, and the, this compulsion to try to know things that we can’t, in order to control, in order to survive and to get increasingly comfortable with not knowing. So, when we let go of our conventional grasping to know, and are willing to not know, then, spontaneously, we’re open to a different kind of knowing. And this is really where the heart wisdom arises. So people often get hijacked, we talk about the heart, but they’re not really mentally clear. There’s not sufficient wakefulness on the level of the mind. So we’re hijacked by our beliefs and our thoughts and the tendency of the mind to try to, envision possibilities and solve problems and decode. So that clarity, I think, is really important in order for attention to really drop into the heart in a more sustained and deep way. So here’s how the mind and the heart work. And also, we carry these core limiting beliefs. And as this is an important part of my work with people. Even though the thought, those thoughts may localize in the mind, they have a very deep effect on the heart area. So if we’re holding the belief that I am unlovable, unworthy, lacking, or flawed, it creates a frozen place in the heart area. And this is where, a very, a kind of, heartfelt meditative inquiry is very helpful in both freeing the mind and the heart. But a theme we haven’t talked so much about is the theme of safety and the opening of the heart.
Rick Archer: Before we get into that, so hold that thought, the thing about not knowing. Can you give a specific example of that? And I’ll give you one, why don’t you tell me if this is the kind of thing you’re talking about. But for instance, I have this friend, and we were talking about climate change. And he was saying, “Well, I don’t really know.” And I said, “Well, the scientists who’ve been studying it seem to know” and he said, “Yeah, but I, there’s so many things that scientists say that turned out not to be true.” And I said, “Okay, well, how about the moon landing? Some people think that was faked” and he said, “Yeah, I don’t really know about that.” I said, “Okay, how about the Earth is flat? I mean, there’s a whole Flat Earth Society these days, and a shockingly large percentage of the population buys into it,” large meaning six, seven percent. And he said, “Well, I don’t know for sure,” I said, “Come on, man.” So, obviously, there are things we can know with a high degree of certainty, even if we haven’t experienced them personally. But maybe this has nothing to do with the kind of knowing or not knowing that you were
John Prendergast: Correct.
Rick Archer: Referring to.
John Prendergast: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that kind of not knowing is ignorance.
Rick Archer: Yeah!
John Prendergast: We’re ignoring the facts. It’s not about ignoring facts, right. But it’s about seeing the limits of the mind.
Rick Archer: Yeah.
John Prendergast: And so the mind is really good at analyzing phenomena. But the mind cannot grasp its true nature, its source, because it’s not an object.
Rick Archer: I see.
John Prendergast: And this is really important for the mind to see its own limitations. It’s like, it needs, I mean, first of all, there’s a lot that it doesn’t know just in terms of what’s going to happen next, . Not only the weather, we kind more, we’re knowing more about that, but we don’t know our time of death, although there are certain probabilities for that. That’s on a relative level. But in terms of knowing our true nature, the mind can know that it cannot grasp it, that it’s the servant and not the master. That’s really what I’m referring to. It’s like, I can’t go there. And I don’t need to know, this is really another really important point. It’s like, I can’t know, and I don’t need to know. And with that comes a relaxation. Right? We don’t have a false sense of control. Right? We have a discerning sense of control. And so I don’t need to know, I can’t know, I don’t need to know, something in us just relaxes and it allows attention, then, we come out of our hyper-vigilant state and our grasping state, attention drops down into the heart area. So that’s what I’m referring to. And then, and this is very surprising for people, a different kind of knowing emerges, that’s more direct, more intuitive, and more appropriate in terms of our internal guidance system, as well.
Rick Archer: Okay.
John Prendergast: Okay?
Rick Archer: Yeah. There’s something also about knowing or not knowing, even with certain relative things, that if one is adamant about certain ideas, or insisting that things happen any particular way, in some particular way, there’s a kind of egotism to that, and humility to its opposite, just,
John Prendergast: That’s right.
Rick Archer: Yeah.
John Prendergast: Yeah. Yeah, it’s like, well, yeah, it’s, like climate change, for instance, we don’t know how quickly it’s unfolding, and what the effects will be. We’re getting more and more evidence, and this is that it’s accelerating faster, actually, than the most extreme anticipated results have been in the past.
Rick Archer: Right.
John Prendergast: And, and so we’re seeing more and more articles, about what the potential impacts might be, and having to rethink more and more quickly. So we’re very much into, not knowing and being humble about that, and being open, to learning and discovery. And so there is a natural humility, and the best scientists have that. Our best scientists are not arrogant at all? So it’s that quality of humility that’s natural, important. But I’m going to get back to the point of safety if I can, because,
Rick Archer: Yes, go ahead.
John Prendergast: we’re coming to the last. And this is, on a practical level, if we don’t feel a deep sense of safety within ourself, it’s very hard to keep our hearts open. That’s just true on a human level. And it’s very interesting just to notice that, in terms of our contact with people, whether we feel safe with them or not, whether we’re trusting of them or not. And so, this is important because we’re talking, this is the domain of the hara, and this
Rick Archer: Explain a little bit about what hara is.
John Prendergast: Hara in Japanese means “belly,” and it’s the, it’s really the abdomen, and it ranges from the area up to the diaphragm, all the way to the tailbone, and energetically encompasses the lower three chakras, the base of the spine, and below the navel and the genital area, and the solar plexus. So it’s an area that governs a sense of inner stability and our inner feeling of ground. And whether our ground feels open, spacious, and stable or not, and whether we feel connected, really, with a sense of the ground. So part of the sustained opening of the heart requires a certain degree of a felt sense of stability within ourselves as well. So that’s a deep inquiry, “What is safety?” Right? “What is our ground? What is it that we apparently stand on and who’s standing?” And it’s also subtle as the heart is, and in some ways, more difficult to sense into because it’s instinctual and unconscious. And yet, as human beings, a very important part of our experience, and one that supports the opening and awakening of the heart.
Rick Archer: Yeah I’m just reminded of that verse in The Gita, “None can work the destruction of this immutable being.” Now, if you knew yourself as that immutable being that would bring with it a certain degree of safety and security,
John Prendergast: Exactly.
Rick Archer: but obviously, if you think you’re just this little flesh and blood thing, then whoa! It’s very vulnerable.
John Prendergast: Well, this is it. And so, it’s our identification with the body. This particular body is very strong, right, and very compelling. And this is an important part of the inquiry process as we go into the hara, is the identification with the body, and with the will, being the doer. Right? So this is a whole nother kind of range of issues and questions that are existentially relevant to the heart.
Rick Archer: Yeah, a question just came in, which hasn’t been sent to me yet, but I just saw some little discussion on the site about it. So we’ll see when that comes in, whether we have time to ask it. But I guess, I think you’ve kind of touched upon this, but let’s, let’s hit it one more time, which is that, what would you recommend that people do on a regular basis, or an irregular basis or whatever it takes to, use the heart as a portal to, to presence, to the transcendent to, as an evolutionary mechanism? What can they do routinely, if it takes routine, to really make some progress through the use of the heart?
John Prendergast: Okay, yeah, so we come back to the question of practice, it can be helpful to begin simply by bringing attention to the heart area. And this is, my book has a series of practices in it that potential readers may be interested in, and by the way, I’m planning to, and in the process of videotaping them and putting them on YouTube as practices. But the first practice is actually to learn to bring attention to the heart area. And we can put our hand on our heart, and we can imagine that we’re breathing into and out from the heart area. And each time we breathe to let our attention fall more deeply into the heart. So in some ways, this is like a mindfulness practice, just using the breath as an anchor. Sometimes I suggest, to students that they use their Hara, or an area, the Dantian below the navel. But in terms of the heart, to focus in and breathe, and I would say to, a good preliminary practice, is to think of someone or something that you feel grateful or loving toward, and that evokes a sense of love and gratitude. And then to let go of that object, that person or place or thing, and just focus on the sense of gratitude and love. And feel yourself falling back into and as that, and rest in and as, that. This is a way of just enlivening the heart area as well. So it’s a good preliminary practice. There’s a related practice, which is one of self-inquiry, which is with your attention kind of resting in the heart area, to repeat the thought sub-vocally “I am” until you get a sense of what that is, the sense of I Am, and then follow it back to its source. So in one case, we’re following the sense of love back to its source, love and gratitude, and the other we’re following the sense of I Am, and they all take us to the same source, which is the capital H Heart. There are a lot of complementary practices that can go with that in terms of meditative self-inquiry. But those would be two preliminary practices I could recommend.
Rick Archer: And you have a bunch of these things in your book actually,
John Prendergast: Um hm, yeah.
Rick Archer: various little practices one can try. Um, a question came in that’s quite unrelated to what we’ve been talking about, but I can really relate to this guy. It’s Martin from Freiburg, Germany, or Freiburg?
John Prendergast: Fridburg.
Rick Archer: Freiburg. Because what he describes was very true of my mother, also. My mother was in and out of mental hospitals from when I was about 13 through when I was about in my early 20s, and several suicide attempts and all, and I couldn’t deal with it until I actually learned to meditate. And then I had the energy and clarity to start, trying to visit her regularly and help her and all that stuff. And she eventually learned to meditate and underwent a huge change. She came over to Switzerland and stayed with Maharishi for nine months and, boy, it was a big, huge relief. But in any case, let’s see what we can do for Martin here. He says “My mom has dementia and got locked up against her will in a nursing home by her narcissistic husband (not my dad) who has the health care proxy. Although he tries to sue me and stop me from seeing her since five months, I visit her every day for six to nine hours and try to relax her and ease her suffering and her terror of the sickness. I feel the responsibility to try to get her out legally, but I feel so tired and discouraged. Any tips how to approach this from a higher perspective?”
John Prendergast: Well, first time touched by, the situation, the suffering, Martin, by the difficulty of seeing your mom institutionalized, and also the difficulty of being someone who is experiencing Alzheimer’s, which my mother did, and I spent five years with her, often nearby as she went through that illness. And it’s a heart-rending experience. So I think something that’s important is actually to be able to open to your own suffering, that is to say, the pain that you carry in your own heart with some tenderness and some gentleness. To hold it, to hold your own heart, let your own heart be held in presence, as you witness this difficult situation. And to feel yourself held by something greater. Right? It’s not all up to you. There is a greater loving awareness that holds all of us, including your mother, and to feel into that. And as you do, you’ll feel more at peace in yourself and more grounded in yourself, and you’ll be able to be with her actually in a more attuned way, in a less fearful or anxious way. And what that means practically, I’m not sure. But just by being more released, feeling yourself more released and held, you can do the same for your mom.
Rick Archer: Yeah, I would echo what you just said, which is that make sure you charge your own batteries, Martin. Because if you go in there – you said you feel tired and discouraged – if you go in there and that condition, it’s, you’re not going to be helping her as much as if you somehow can rejuvenate and refresh yourself and go in there with, fully charged inner batteries, so to speak. And as I mentioned, meditation did that for me. If you have a practice, and even just getting a good night’s sleep and making sure you’re getting enough exercise and stuff just so that you’re kind of strong and healthy, it’ll better – ’cause I know the atmosphere and those places can be, can really drag you down. Even if it’s
John Prendergast: And it’s
Rick Archer: Yeah go ahead.
John Prendergast: And it’s important not to merge with your mom. And this can happen kind of unconsciously where we get pulled into the other’s experience, a kind of dark vortex, and that’s exhausting also. I mean it’s exhausting to spend six or nine hours a day most days to do it, but it’s also exhausting to get pulled into someone else’s emotional and energetic field. So kind of building on your point as well, it’s important to keep kind of a clear boundary on a personal level and don’t burn out, take care of yourself, and above all the greatest resources to tap into your being.
Rick Archer: Yeah. But I really respect you Martin for doing that, I mean having, based upon my own experience for having gone through something like that, and having not been able to even do it for many years until finally, I was able to do it. So the fact that you’re so dedicated to your mother, I really honor that and hope it works out for you.
John Prendergast: Mh hm, yeah. We wish you well.
Rick Archer: Yeah. It’s really an honorable thing. Okay, well, it’s a little bit of a downer note to end on. But it’s a poignant one as well.
John Prendergast: It’s on a poignant note though.
Rick Archer: Pardon?
John Prendergast: It’s very poignant.
Rick Archer: It is. Yeah.
John Prendergast: Yeah. It’s heart-oriented.
Rick Archer: It is. I mean, I really felt it touched my heart more than anything we’ve talked about today.
John Prendergast: Well there you go, your human experience.
Rick Archer: Yeah, I just really feel for what he’s going through. Um, okay, well, how, let’s say people have heard this and they, obviously they can read your books. And what else? How do you interact with people? Do you have time to deal with more people than you’re already dealing with?
John Prendergast: Yeah let me say a little bit about that. I mean, first of all, the book, the book comes out December 10th, but, can be ordered now. I do have my website listeningfromsilence.com, and a public events page and, in which, listing of various online and in person events that I’m involved with, including residential retreats, mostly on the West Coast, but also East Coast and in Europe is beginning to unfold as well, Amsterdam, in spring. So that would be the best source. And in terms of individual meetings, I really, I really have no availability Well let me,
Rick Archer: Go ahead. Okay
John Prendergast: anymore. So I, yeah, I just have a ridiculously long waiting list. And I’m reducing my practice as it is, so yeah, I’m not really available for one-on-one work anymore.
Rick Archer: Okay, but you do have retreats, and I’ll be linking to your website and to your books from your page on batgap.com. And, so if people are just driving in the car, while they’re listening to this, you don’t have to stop and write it down or anything, you can just check the website and you can, follow the links to John’s site and his books. Okay, well, thanks, John. This has been really nice spending time with you. I always enjoy
John Prendergast: You too.
Rick Archer: Running into you at the SAND conference, you always have this gentle presence about you that I find soothing. Especially out there I need all the soothing I can get.
John Prendergast: Ah, well I’m glad.
Rick Archer: The conference is so intense.
John Prendergast: You’re a busy guy at those conferences. But yeah, pleasure, pleasure to see you there and to be with you today. I enjoyed it very much.
Rick Archer: Thanks. Thanks to those who have been listening or watching. This is an ongoing series, as most of. So if you’d like to be notified of upcoming ones, you can either sign up for the email list on batgap.com, or you can subscribe to the YouTube channel or both. And one thing I discovered about subscribing is once you subscribe, then this little bell appears to the right of the subscribe button. And if you click that, it tells YouTube that you want to be notified every time this channel posts a new video, which in our case is once a week. So if that’s what you want, click the little bell. So thanks for listening or watching and we will see you for the next one. Thanks again, John.
John Prendergast: You’re very welcome. My pleasure.