Summary
The conversation explores inner guidance, spiritual awakening, and the movement from mental insight into embodied and relational transformation. It also examines fear, surrender, spiritual teachers, and the need for honest psychological integration alongside nondual realization.
Questions This Interview Explores
- How can I recognize and trust inner guidance when I do not know what comes next?
- What is the relationship between spiritual awakening and psychological healing?
- Why do fear and the need for control arise when surrendering to the unknown?
- How can spiritual seekers recognize and address blind spots in themselves and their teachers?
Key takeaways
- Not knowing can be a form of clarity, openness, and wisdom.
- Awakening is usually a process of embodiment, not a single final event.
- Deep transformation must include the mind, heart, body, and instinctual layers.
- Spiritual insight does not automatically resolve psychological conditioning.
- Honest self-examination should be compassionate rather than judgmental.
- Teachers can offer genuine wisdom while still carrying unresolved patterns.
- Following quiet movements of truth often requires repeated surrender into uncertainty.
Transcript
Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. If you’d like to check out the archive of over 280 of them and/or support our efforts, there’s a donate button on batgap.com. Please visit that site, batgap.com, and I’ll give you more details later in the show.
My guest today is John J. Prendergast, PhD. John is a retired professor of psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco and a psychotherapist in private practice. He spent many years studying with
Rick: Yeah, so you just cited survival, the survival instinct, as one of the reasons for that need to be in control. And how about fear also? Perhaps it’s closely related to survival. There’s this sort of fear like, “If I don’t do this, what’s going to happen? If I’m not in control, then what’s going to happen to my life?”
John: Well, that’s what it’s all about. It’s survival fear. It’s very interesting working with people, sitting with people, and they drop in and really get honest. There’s a terror of not surviving, and it may be physical terror, the loss of safety of the body, but also the terror of losing who we think we are. And they’re distinct, they’re related, but they’re actually distinct, and it’s quite interesting to tease those out.
Rick: You know how when a jet goes through the sound barrier, breaks the sound barrier, there’s this sort of envelope it has to pierce, and there’s a turbulence as it just about goes through. You know, Chuck Yeager, that whole book about him, The Right Stuff. But then once it breaks through, it’s smooth, and it’s going faster than the speed of sound.
Because I think that’s kind of a good analogy for this. There’s a sort of barrier of fear that one has to traverse. And I bet you there are all sorts of mythic stories about this too, crossing some barrier of fear and then, having crossed it, having taken that blind leap, as you said earlier in the interview, not knowing what’s on the other side, one finds it’s much nicer than the side on which one was desperately trying to maintain control.
John: Well, this is it. It’s not what the mind thinks. What the mind does is project all of its worst fears onto this openness, this unknown openness and emptiness. And so all the nightmares are projected onto it. And that’s the resistance barrier that we create. I mean, even the image of leaping off a cliff.
Rick: Carlos Castaneda.
John: Yeah, right.
Rick: Do you remember that?
John: I do, I do remember that. I read all those books, right? But even that is dramatizing what the letting go is about. And one of the curious things is that people, even though we may break that barrier of resistance sometimes with glimpses, doing meditation or whatever, and then the egoic structure recrystallizes, we find ourselves back on the other side of it again. Still, that fear remains, interestingly.
It’s sometimes attenuated, but often you have to go through it many times in order for the body-mind, really, to feel at ease with that transition into the unknown, into what feels profoundly ungrounding initially, and then ultimately very grounding.
Rick: Yeah, well, I don’t know what your practices have been like all these years. But I know with TM that was always the experience: You sink into an unbounded, transcendental state which is not gripped and controlled or anything. And you actually do so through a process which is totally effortless and without control, but then your ego, your individuality, kind of crystallizes again when you come out.
And then you remember the old cloth and dye analogy. You alternate that many, many times and eventually, in the dye, in the sun, in the dye, in the sun, the cloth becomes colorfast.
John: Yeah, it’s actually a beautiful metaphor. I’ve come back to that recently, that kind of letting the body-mind be saturated in being. And it does take time, that’s true.
It does take time to let the body-mind be saturated in being.
Rick: Yeah, so that’s a good thing to note, I think. Because a lot of times I think that the whole idea of awakening is oversimplified in the sense that a person says, “I’ve had an awakening,” or, “So-and-so has had an awakening,” and one assumes finality, that you’re done, you’re free and clear.
But then, as you’ve been saying here, the ego creeps back in, the individuality asserts itself, layer after layer after layer of conditioning. And it’s going to take some time to work that out.
John: It does, yeah. I mean, one can have—it’s a very subtle and interesting subject, that of awakening. And I think it’s more of a process than an event. And yet, there are certain markers along the process where there is a fundamental shift that happens as well.
So we can have glimpses and falling back, and then a kind of gravitational shift of identity. But nonetheless, in order for it to be thoroughgoing, one way I think about it is that it’s fairly easy to have a mental awakening, where we’re fundamentally disidentified from our thoughts and stories. That’s kind of the easy part.
But it’s that movement of awareness saturating all the way down through the body, through the emotional centers, through the instinctual centers. This is where our deepest identifications remain, and that’s why awakening really, I think, is a lifelong process.
Waking up and waking down
Rick: Sounds like Adya’s head-heart-gut structure.
John: You know, I think Adya’s really named it well: the head, the heart, and the hara. And that’s been my experience, that this kind of—I mean, Adya doesn’t speak about waking down; it’s a term Sanyal Bhandar uses, but one I find really quite beautiful.
There’s a waking-up process out of form and realizing oneself as infinite, open spaciousness, and then a waking down. It’s that same movement; it goes from the mind to the heart to the hara as well. And that, for me, I think takes many years.
Rick: Yeah, and wouldn’t you say, or would you say, that the waking-up process, infinite open spaciousness, seldom is going to go to 100 percent, and then from there the waking-down process is going to proceed?
It’s rather that both take place by steps.
John: This is very important.
Rick: Left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot.
John: Exactly. These are complementary processes; it’s not hierarchical. And as we have more experience with this, this is what we understand.
There can be—we can speak of it as a waking, an embodiment. But it’s like a deeper intimacy with our true nature and then the application of that into our daily life and our functionality. And the two support each other.
There’s a movement back and forth between being and doing, and in the doing we discover our reactivity and our identifications and fixations. And if we’re really honest and vulnerable and willing to experience those, they open up and we come back to our beingness again. And that becomes a stronger, more rooted experience.
So I agree, it’s very much a complementary process. And some people, interestingly, have done a lot of work on themselves psychologically. I would say they’re in touch with their bodies and their feelings and they’re psychologically mature, but they haven’t really touched the essence yet.
And other people have really gone for the essential, but they’re really not very familiar with their conditioning and their body-minds, and they’re awkward in relationships and uncomfortable as human beings. So one way or the other, we’ll have to include both.
Rick: Yeah, and in a way, I almost would consider the latter to be the more dangerous of the two. Because you get these people who have a ton of Shakti and great charisma and all, but who are really kind of screw-ups on the level of emotions and behavior, and end up using their charisma to take advantage of people. So they end up doing a lot more harm than somebody who’s done a lot of work on themselves and may not have had a nondual awakening yet.
John: Absolutely.
Rick: My opinion.
John: Yeah, I mean, the field is just full of stories of charismatic, brilliant teachers who are abusive to their students. And the abuse of a teacher to a student is really, I think, the worst kind, because a student really puts their deepest innocence and trust, their essential nature, in the hands of a teacher, trusting.
And if that trust is betrayed, the wound is terrible, greater than in impersonal relationships. So there’s a tremendous responsibility, I think, that comes with being a teacher.
Rick: There is, and I know people who have been kind of bitterly disillusioned about spirituality in general because of some violation by a trusted teacher.
John: Absolutely.
Rick: And it’s insidious because these trusted teachers start out well-intentioned and actually end up doing a lot of good in the world.
John: That’s true.
Rick: Yeah, and very often the shenanigans are concealed and people don’t even know that they’re going on.
John: That’s right, they’re in the shadows.
Rick: Yeah, so it’s not like a black-and-white situation.
John: It’s not. It’s a mixed bag, and the mind always wants to split and say, “All good or all bad.” And part of the maturity is to recognize exactly what you’re saying,
Rick: that it’s a mixed bag.
People—teachers—can do tremendous good and harm simultaneously because of their own unintegrated nature. We’re multidimensional, so we can really shine and be transparent on one level and very kind of dense and occluded on another. And both are radiating simultaneously.
Honesty and psychological integration
Rick: Yeah. I want to continue to dwell on this theme with you for a few minutes. But I just want to interject that those who are listening to the livestream, if you want to submit questions, you go to the “Upcoming Interviews” page on batgap.com, which I believe is under the Future Interviews menu. And then you scroll down a bit and you’ll see a form through which you can submit a question.
And hopefully that form is going to work. I’ve been making some changes to the website. It would be a shame if it didn’t. Dan, why don’t you do a test question in there and make sure it’s working, and send me a message if it isn’t?
Okay, so on this theme, I just want to talk a little bit more about this kind of schizophrenia that sometimes occurs between people who are very awakened in their consciousness and yet have these kind of shadow things or blind spots that they haven’t worked out.
I had always, back from TM days, the teaching was that, “Well, water the root and enjoy the fruit.” If you take care of consciousness, then that’s just going to percolate or seep into every phase of your life and all those things will take care of themselves. You don’t have to worry about them.
But in practice, in reality, I don’t think it has worked out that way. Neither did it work out that way for Maharishi himself nor for all the people. And you don’t need to pick on the TM movement. It hasn’t worked out that way for anybody, in any movement or spiritual path.
John: Yeah, it’s just generally true. And I held that belief as well. There is some truth to it, and there is some falling away of conditioning and egoic patterning. But the fact is, it’s insufficient.
It really requires—this is where honesty comes in—that we get out of our ideal of how we think we should be or how it should work and get real. We have to really look at how we live our lives, really look at our reactivity, look at our functioning, and be very honest with ourselves.
In that honesty, this is where I would say the love of truth comes in—not just ultimate truth, but relative truth: looking at our own honesty or dishonesty. This aspect of authenticity, I think, is really important. And this is very much an inside job.
No one else can do it. People can support us in that, and we can have friends who share that ethic. But really, it’s a fundamental responsibility that each of us has to carefully and honestly examine our lives, and to do so with compassion also. Because as human beings, we’re deeply conditioned in ways that we’re not even aware of. So it’s not about being judgmental about it either.
It’s a quality of honesty and vulnerability and, I would say, affectionate attention to our experience when we approach difficult feelings and core beliefs. It’s like starting to get into the nitty-gritty of our conditioning, but doing so with an open heart and a clear mind, without an agenda to try to change. The mind is always trying to change and fix. So that’s, in a way, a polarity that we can get stuck in—a sort of endless self-improvement project as well.
Rick: Well, on the other hand, though, you say without an agenda to try to change. But if you’ve been a real schmuck in some respect, mistreating partners or cheating people in business deals or something like that, you want to change, don’t you? I mean, that’s what we’re talking about: not having such flawed behavior patterns.
John: That’s true, but not changing so much for egoic reasons. More because you want to be aligned with what really feels true for you, right? So it’s not about creating an image for others, not about turning from a bad person into a good person. It’s more about wholeness, coming into integrity, into alignment with oneself.
Rick: Yeah, so what you’re saying is you’re not trying to change just to make an impression on others or something. You’re trying to change because you’re a sincere seeker of truth and you don’t want to be half-baked. You want the whole enchilada. So that’s going to include both the transcendent and the more embodied things.
John: That’s right, yeah. You want to come into integrity and come out of your own suffering, and in so doing, to be of service to others as well.
Rick: Yeah, I mean, I have friends who have been meditating for decades and end up doing some scammy business deal and going to jail for five years. Stuff like that, or really mistreating women or something. So you’ve got to sort of work it all out on all these levels.
John: Right, and that requires a lot of maturity, a lot of courage, and a lot of humility as well.
Rick: And to what extent can you do this by yourself, or are we blind to our own…? What’s that poem by Burns or somebody: “To see ourselves as others see us”? To what extent can we do this by ourselves, or to what extent do we need either professional help? Or at least—I mean, a marriage is a good way to call you on your shit. You can get very idiosyncratic and self-absorbed if you’re just on your own. But it helps to have relationships.
John: Very much so. This is a critical point: relationships and the kind of mirroring in our lives. And this is where honesty is really important—not just to speak our own unarguable truth, but to hear it and welcome it from others.
We have all sorts of blind spots, and we can go a long way on our own, or at least a certain distance. But usually we need the help of others, at least in terms of honest reflections as well. And that’s where a partner can be helpful, or an honest friend, a true friend, right? Even a small group of friends or a community can really be helpful—the sangha or the satsang.
🏘️ Community, loyalty, and spiritual maturity
Rick: Yeah, you’ve been in various sanghas and satsangs. Have you noticed that in some, at least at a certain stage, there seems to be a sort of self-indulgent quality among the participants, or a narcissism or something? It’s like, “My spiritual evolution and damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead.” People just get very self-absorbed at a certain stage of their spiritual growth.
John: Yeah, this is the danger of spiritual communities too, as they become insular and enclosed and out of touch.
Rick: That’s another thing: our thing is the best thing. Everybody else out there has got it wrong.
John: Well, it’s an interesting thing to go through—to be very devoted to a particular teacher or teaching and have a loyalty to a certain organization, then step out of it, and then do it several times.
Rick: It’s actually a very healthy thing to do.
John: It is a healthy thing to do, and it’s a bit scary. But it’s part of the process of maturity. As valuable as a healthy community can be, ultimately, it is our own responsibility.
Rick: We’re not encouraging being a dilettante and bouncing from thing to thing. But that can happen—I mean, people do that. On the other hand, we’re suggesting that if you’re meant to move through several different things over the course of your spiritual practice, it can be really healthy to step out of one and reevaluate all the assumptions that have become ingrained.
John: Very much so, yeah. I think it’s part of maturity to be able to do that. And yet, you’re right: we don’t want to be dilettantes either; we don’t want to be uncommitted. So it’s a matter of exploring something deeply and seeing if it really resonates, and then sometimes we outgrow it. That was my experience.
Rick: This whole underlying theme is so fascinating: there’s this sort of paradoxical balancing act that shows up in so many different ways. We’ve alluded to several of these ways now. Another way that comes to mind that I’d like to explore with you is this: on the one hand, we start out in life and go through our teens and everything with a sense that we’re firmly in control. It’s us, you know—me, I’m doing this.
Then, as spirituality begins to blossom, there’s a sense that there’s a larger intelligence, which we were talking about earlier, and that seems to be in control. I want to surrender to that and let that guide my life. And yet, there’s still this “me” who’s in control. You kind of go through a period where you’re on the fence.
It reminds me of that Hamlet soliloquy: “Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them, to be or not to be.” It’s like, “Can I do this myself? Should I just be a little bit more passive and laid-back here and let the universe guide me?”
John: Right, the ego tends to see things paradoxically, in polarities, like “I’m in control or I’m out of control.” And you’re right, sometimes it feels like we’re letting go of over-responsibility. Then we may drift into a kind of passivity, and then we reorient again to taking a more active and dynamic stance.
What I find is that this isn’t so much an act of conscious choice. It’s a kind of spontaneous balancing that happens between over-asserting and becoming passive. And I think what’s true, though, is that as we start aligning and attuning with our deeper nature, we follow that guidance more clearly as a kind of subtle internal inclination.
Rick: Yeah, it’s true. For me, it’s been a process that’s been going on for decades, though, of just great… Well, I guess you’re saying it’s an open-ended, lifelong process. But the transition from the sort of ego-centered sense that I am the doer to a state in which one is not the doer, in which a much larger intelligence is the doer, has involved all sorts of things.
It’s kind of like riding a bicycle, I guess. You have to continue balancing. You never stop balancing, and you get better at it. I mean, you see these guys who jump their bicycles off brick walls and stuff.
John: Yeah, it’s a great metaphor. It really resonates for me, the balancing act. Early on, we have our training wheels on, right? Those are the rules and conventions of society and family, and maybe even our religious traditions.
But eventually, we kick those off and trust our own sense of balance. It doesn’t mean that we’re not going to fall sometimes, either. But the point is to get up and keep going and reestablish that sense of trust.
It’s very true. For me, it is an open-ended process. And I think even as human beings, we’re constantly adapting, balancing, learning, and refining. Once we let go of this idea of some final, ultimate, accomplished state, we can really ground into our daily and ordinary life. It’s very interesting, that exploration.
Rick: I think that’s important, because I think since… Well, firstly, let me ask you this: Do you think there is an ultimate, final, established state?
John: No.
Rick: Okay, good.
John: But what I do think is that we can become increasingly intimate with our true nature and live more and more in accord with it. But we’re deeply conditioned, and I think we’re always going to be working with our conditioning, regardless of how awake or enlightened we are.
For me, it’s a process; it’s kind of a spectrum, I would say. But to posit some ideal or ultimate completion, I think, is an invention of the mind.
Rick: Yeah. Well, would you agree with this? We’re always going to be working on our conditioning, and there’s never-ending refinement and so on. But at a certain stage, we become very comfortably settled in something which doesn’t change, which doesn’t seem to need improvement or perfection. It is perfect in and of itself, but our expression or reflection of that has no end of refinement.
John: I would agree completely with that. We become intimate and at ease with our being, that which is changeless and timeless. And that’s our beloved friend that’s with us.
Rick: Yeah. So, this point you just made—that if we’re expecting some ultimate, established state—I think it’s important to emphasize that we may settle into that thing we just referred to, in kind of a continuum of presence or our true nature, which is a very nice place to be resting in.
But if we’re expecting some kind of finality, we could be forever chasing the carrot, you know, because that’s just not the way life is structured. People can go on and on, having actually awoken to a very profound degree, but not accepting or realizing it because they’ve gotten so much in the habit of chasing the carrot.
John: Yeah, this is the… yeah, kind of staying in the mode of being a seeker. And it’s subtle but a very powerful movement. For me, I wasn’t even aware that what you’re describing was still going on after what I would call an initial mental awakening. But it was sort of deep in the heart. There was still this kind of seeking for something, a purity of light, and when I finally saw that the seeking was going on, I had to be very honest with myself.
I saw, first, that it was happening and, second, that it was futile. This was a big turning point for me, right? There was a big, subtle but palpable letting go of being the seeker, even though, of course, for years and years and years, for decades, I heard this teaching from various teachers.
To discover it firsthand, to see, “Here, this is what this mind is doing, and it’s absolutely futile. It will never achieve what it’s looking for”—that was really an important turning point, and it led to a deep peace and sense of fullness in the heart as well.
The seeker is what is being sought.
Rick: Yeah, because it essentially is what it’s looking for. You’re looking for your glasses, and they’re on your head.
John: This is it. You know, the necklace is always around our neck. And the seeker is what is being sought. This is Maharishi’s teaching and Ramana’s teaching, and it’s paradoxical to the mind. The mind can’t figure this out. But at some point, this insight comes in a very palpable and powerful way. And it’s tremendously liberating, deeply liberating.
Rick: Would you say that even though you would not any longer characterize yourself as a seeker, because the seeking energy has relaxed, you’re very much still an explorer and an adventurer—a discoverer of new…
John: Very much so. Yeah, that’s a beautiful distinction. It feels like the seeking has fallen away, but the sense of exploration has been enhanced. Because there’s an availability, there’s a real openness and availability to be here and to embrace life as it is, rather than chase some ideal, some subtle spiritual ideal.
Rick: Yeah, I concur. I mean, people would look at my life and think, “Every night I’m reading spiritual books, every moment in the day I’m listening to some spiritual thing on my iPod, every weekend I’m interviewing some spiritual person. God, are you obsessed? Could you just relax?”
But I feel like I’m just a kid in a candy shop, enjoying this wonderful abundance of riches that are available now. And it’s not like I’m waiting for something to happen before I feel a deep inner contentment. It’s a play that is just endlessly enjoyable to me.
John: There’s a deep joy. I feel your joy as you talk about this. It’s just straight from the heart, isn’t it? This is what you love.
Rick: I love it. Yeah, totally gaga over this.
John: You give yourself to it. It’s beautiful.
Rick: Yeah, well, thanks.
John: I love hearing you describe that. You know, it’s beautiful. I’ve sort of been the reluctant teacher. I’ve never been particularly interested in being a teacher. I’m more comfortable in the student role, I would say.
But part of the movement in the last few years has been to teach—not in a big way, but it feels like a spontaneous sharing—and that’s part of the exploration too. It’s interesting. In what you do, Rick, you’re really introducing these teachings to a broader listening audience as well. And there’s something beautiful in that sharing, isn’t there?
Rick: Yeah, I love doing it. I love being a… One time, I was on a course and I was made the course leader or something like that over in France. And it went to my head, and I started getting all kind of bossy and thought I deserved a better room than other people and stuff.
Maharishi got wind of it, and the message came back. He said, “You’re just a connector and a collector.” And, in fact, that was perfect. I love connecting people.
John: Yeah, networking.
Rick: It’s my role.
John: Yeah, it’s interesting. We find our dharma. You found your dharma, and it’s beautiful.
Rick: Yeah, and I mean, I was a teacher for 25 years. But now I don’t feel… I honestly don’t feel qualified. You know, I feel like there are people like Adyashanti and so many others who are light-years ahead of me at doing that. I found a dharma that I can do in my own simple way that is much more useful than if I were to try to pose as some kind of spiritual teacher.
John: Exactly, and that’s about being authentic, isn’t it? I mean, that’s one reason I left TM, actually. I didn’t feel like I fit the description of the siddha with the corona of light, with the photographs and all that. It’s like, that’s not my experience. That felt very inauthentic for me. And like you, Adya is one of my main teachers, and he’s a wonderful teacher. He’s head and shoulders above most as well.
Rick: And as a TM teacher, you were getting up and describing states of consciousness and so on that you yourself hadn’t experienced. So it’s like, how long can you do that?
John: Yeah, and there was a seeking in TM that I wasn’t aware of as well. It’s like the character of these higher states: if you meditate long enough, you’ll achieve them.
Rick: Oh, there is. I mean, in fact, one of the reasons I started this show is that, since I live in Fairfield, Iowa, I was running into people who had had genuine awakenings. They would tell a friend, and the friend would say, “Well, can you levitate? You just seem like Joe Schmo, like you’ve always seemed. How could you?”
So I decided I wanted to connect people who had had awakenings, to show people that their peers are actually undergoing significant awakenings. You don’t have to be Superman in order to have had a genuine awakening.
John: That’s true. It has nothing to do with extraordinary abilities. It’s actually the opposite. It’s so much a stripping away and a relaxing into something very simple and very open, yet very real and very connected.
📚 Teaching, empathy, and the heart
Rick: When I read your bio here, you said you were invited to share the Dharma by Dorothy Hunt in 2012. Is that a Buddhist thing where you have to sort of be ordained in a way to go, “Okay, you can go ahead and share the Dharma”? You wouldn’t just do it on your own?
John: Not really. You know, it kind of came as a surprise. I studied with Adya, and Adya is my teacher. Dorothy is a dear friend and colleague of mine—kind of an elder sister, I think of her. So it was a bit of a surprise that she asked me.
But there was something very touching in that too, something mysterious. I can’t even name what that is, but I feel a deep current of wisdom having spent time with Jean Klein and with Adya. These deep currents just come through this body-mind.
And I think it was interesting. Dorothy invited me to teach, but actually it was six months before that when there was an internal sense of readiness. I’ll share the story; it’s kind of an interesting one.
Dorothy and I co-teach retreats, and this was a few years ago—three years ago, around this time in the spring. We were teaching a retreat not far from here. I’m in Northern California, and the hills were green and beautiful. We were at a retreat center above Highway 101.
One morning, I went up and sat on the hill. I turned towards the freeway and all the noise and suffering, and my arms just opened spontaneously. I didn’t know what was happening. I stood up, and there was this sense of a full embrace happening—a full embrace of the complete human experience, especially the suffering and the most difficult areas of cruelty and fear.
There was something internally that just felt ready and open to embrace that. And when I came down from the meadow, I felt that something had shifted. There was a sense of, “Okay, I feel ready to teach.”
Rick: Sounded like Moses or something.
John: A little bit—down from the mountains. You know, there was no burning bush and there was no light.
Rick: You didn’t have any tablets.
John: No tablets, no truth to give. But what it was, was a sense of the willingness to fully embrace as it is. And this was very intuitive, and I didn’t do anything after that. I haven’t done much since then. But it was just some kind of internal readiness that happened.
Rick: Well, you say you haven’t done much. But you’ve been in private practice for years and you’ve had tens of thousands of sessions with people. So you may not have been speaking to big crowds, but if you collect all those people together, that’s a pretty big crowd that you’ve had a very profound impact on.
John: It’s true. I’ve met with many people for many years. And I was an academic teacher at CIS as well. So I trained students and supervised them, and I run inquiry groups. So, yeah, it’s true, there has been a sharing as well.
Rick: Yeah. On that note, let’s talk about empathy. You mentioned that after a certain stage of your awakening, a newfound capacity for empathy awoke. And that changed the nature of your professional practice as a therapist. So let’s talk about that.
John: Well, that goes back to that kind of awakening of the energy body—a dream that happened in 1980 when I was in India. I came back, and I was in my doctoral studies and internships, and I was sitting with people. Quite to my surprise, I was starting to feel what they were feeling before they were aware of it.
I could feel it both as a kind of energetic sensation, often in the energy body, somewhere in the torso—like a contraction in the heart area, for instance, or in the solar plexus or in the throat. Then someone would start talking about grief or anger.
So it was very interesting to feel this quality of attunement happening, and the level of my empathy really opened up at that point. And it continues to open. It seems also to be endless.
I think as my own heart has gone through my own defenses and become more vulnerable and open, my capacity to feel suffering has grown. And not only individual suffering, but collective suffering as well.
So these teachings that somehow, as you could say, when you awaken or recognize who you really are, the suffering goes away—that’s not my experience. The individual suffering does, but if anything, I feel more acutely sensitive to collective suffering.
The individual suffering does, but if anything, I feel more acutely sensitive to collective suffering.
Rick: Do you feel, though, that that experience of collective suffering is buffered by the presence you’ve been talking about? So that it’s not like you don’t have any kind of foundation on which to rest and you’re just getting bombarded with the woes of the world?
John: Well, you know, I think what you say is very true. It would be the reason that we were unable to really open to it, because it is so overwhelming. So there’s a certain capacity of the heart, I think, that is required.
It’s like the heart just… I experience it as almost like the back of the heart opening up—the heart area. And there’s just a sense of this great or cosmic heart that’s actually much more than an individual can bear. So it’s not like I’m bearing it. But there’s something—this great heart is able to bear this collective suffering as well.
Rick: Yeah, I think of it like this: You take a glass of water and put even a teaspoon of mud in it, and it gets totally muddy. But if you take an ocean, you can throw whole shovelfuls or truckloads of mud into it, and the ocean… Well, we’re actually trashing the ocean as it is, but the ocean can take a lot more than a glass of water.
John: Yeah, it’s a good metaphor, and it’s apt. I agree.
Rick: Yeah, and so why is this happening to you, do you feel? Do you feel like you’re serving as some kind of washing machine for the collective karma or something?
John: I never thought of it that way. I don’t know. It’s just a spontaneous opening, and it’s not like I’m sitting with this awareness all the time. But what I notice is when I sit with people and we go deeply, it’s very interesting. It’s like we’ll go into individual suffering that you can trace to particular experiences, often in childhood, having to do with bonding or lack of bonding with significant caretakers, or maybe some trauma. And it’s very acute. These are difficult places for people to go on their own.
And so, to be able to sit with someone and really open to that suffering is deeply healing and touching, and allows them to bring the light of awareness and kindness to these areas that were intolerable. But sometimes people touch a suffering that they say, “I know my own suffering, and this is not my own suffering. This feels much bigger. This feels collective.” And then we sit together with that.
So in a way, it doesn’t come up so much on my own, but more when I’m sitting with people as they get in touch with it, and also just reading the news. There are so many examples of cruelty and suffering as well. It’s just something that’s spontaneously developed over time. And what’s the function of it? Probably something along the lines that you alluded to. There is a kind of transmuting or transformational process that goes on when love meets that which has been unloved, or the effects of that which has been unloved. And I think everything is waiting to be met by that loving wisdom in order to be liberated.
Rick: Yeah, it would seem that our individual suffering, karma, stress, whatever you want to call it, first priority would have to be to dissolve that, because if we haven’t dissolved it, then we can’t really dissolve anything in a larger context. But the same evolutionary tendency that causes us to want to dissolve that is not going to stop once that’s more or less dissolved.
John: It keeps going. I used to think, well, we have to entirely clear our own suffering before we can really be effective in helping others, and it’s just not like that. In fact, there are many people who are burdened with their own suffering and yet are open and helpful to others in a really genuine way.
So I think, again, it’s very complementary, the process. The clearer we get within ourselves, the more genuine service we can be to others. But we don’t have to wait for some deep awakening before we can move with love in the world and be of service.
Rick: No, as a matter of fact, it’s like you were saying before about how we don’t have to completely awaken to the utmost degree of clarity possible of the universal Self before we can begin to integrate that into our body. Same thing with this.
John: Yeah, absolutely. And so we begin to really look at those opportunities to be available, to extend our hearts, and to live with kindness and generosity as well. Those many small acts have an impact.
Rick: On ourselves as well, right? I mean, isn’t that… Seva is considered to be a spiritual practice.
John: Absolutely, yeah, on ourselves and others.
Rick: Seva just means selfless service, by the way.
John: Yeah, it’s a benefit to the whole, whether we’re working with others, or so-called others, or ourselves. It’s the same principle, isn’t it?
Rick: And so, one more point on empathy. Do you find that it… Well, first of all, let me just interject here. My voice is feeding back now for some reason when I speak. I hear my voice coming through your speakers a little bit. So maybe if you could just turn your speakers down a little bit or something, it might fix that. And Dan, if you could take note of this edit point.
Yeah, I think that helped. Yeah, that’s better. So what was I saying?
John: A final point on empathy?
Rick: Oh, about empathy. I just wanted to say: Do you find that your empathy, that sense of tuning into people and what they’re feeling, moderates itself appropriately so that you’re not walking through the mall and getting bombarded with everybody’s feelings, but when you’re sitting with a client, then it comes…
John: Exactly.
Rick: Yeah.
John: Yeah, it depends on the context and the openness of the person that I may be with. But it’s also true that I can be walking down the street, and I was in downtown San Francisco and walked by someone on the street who was suffering, and I could feel it. There’s something that just goes through me. I’m touched by it. I’m not overwhelmed by it, I’m not paralyzed by it, but I feel it.
So that sensitivity is general as well. But it is modulated, it’s true.
Rick: Well, imagine what the world would be like if everybody were empathic in that way, if everybody had this sort of delicate, gentle sensitivity to what others were experiencing and going through.
John: It would be a very, very different world. We have an empathy deficit. Actually, Barack Obama said that in his first campaign, and I thought, “That’s so true. That’s the greatest deficit, really.” So empathy is kind of an evolutionary arc, I think, that’s developing in the culture.
But we seem to be moving towards empathy because it supports survival, because we have to live together, and we have to understand, sense, and be with one another. But it’s a slow evolutionary arc, I would say.
Rick: For the entire seven or eight billion of us, it is. But maybe each of us can accelerate it and be outliers way ahead of the curve.
John: Exactly, we can. We can be exemplars of that, and spontaneously. That’s the interesting point. It’s not to do it in order to have an effect so much, but because of our love of truth and our willingness to actually live in deep integrity with our heart. The spontaneous effect of that is kindness and empathy.
Rick: Yeah, well, all this stuff has its own reward. I mean, it’s not like we’re just developing such qualities because we want to be good guys and have a nice effect on the world. We’re the prime beneficiaries, are we not?
John: We are, yeah. It feels true. In a way, it’s not an act of sacrifice. It’s an act of spontaneous upwelling and giving, which in itself is fulfilling. The giving is very fulfilling. We hear that again and again; it’s very true.
📚 Teachers and spiritual transmission
Rick: So, tell us a little bit about your time with Jean Klein. He seems to have been a fascinating character and turned out some really stellar students.
John: Well, the first time I met Jean was in the Bay Area in 1983. A friend of mine had told me that there was a teacher I might enjoy seeing. He was in Sausalito, and I walked into a room. It was an L-shaped room, so I couldn’t see him. But something really remarkable happened: My mind got quiet. It was just this profound silence, and that really caught my attention.
I sat down and I could… He has a very thick accent.
Rick: French accent?
John: Yeah, he’s Czechoslovakian originally, and was trained in Germany, and fled Berlin in 1936 to go to France. He has quite an interesting background. So he speaks a number of languages and has a heavy accent. I could not understand very much of what he said. It had a kind of philosophical turn to it. But I immediately sensed I’d met my teacher. It was interesting. There was just a knowing, kind of in my core: “This is it. This is who I’ve been looking for.”
I get emotional when I talk about this. So I went up after the talk and spoke to his assistant, who was his wife. And I said, “How do I become a student?” We arranged a meeting a week later in Berkeley, and it was just one of those mysterious things. There was just no doubt about it.
So I studied with Jean for 15 years and was in part organizing his events in the Bay Area and did a lot of retreats. I would say his teachings really helped clarify the mind. There was just such a crystal clarity in that. And then he had a beautiful presence about him. You know, sitting with him, the sense of presence was beautiful. And he was very sensitive, too. So he was very tuned in to his students and could find where there would be blind spots and fixations, and address them, usually very gently, but with great clarity.
And so I feel tremendous gratitude for Jean. It feels like he really helped attention drop into the heart and rest in not knowing. That was really one of his core teachings: Abide in the heart, not knowing. And I really got that from him. And then we’re available to be taken by grace.
So when Jean died, I thought I was done with teachers. A year later, I met Ajay, and I thought, “I’ll be darned. Here’s that same remarkable presence and clarity.” Very different presentation, radically different presentation: a young Californian, and a very different personality, but really the same teaching. So Ajay sort of picked up where Jean left off. And for that I’m very grateful as well. Jean was a wonderful teacher.
Rick: Yeah. And how about your time with Ajay? Give us some specifics. That was around 2000 or so that you met Ajay, wasn’t it?
John: Yeah, I met him in ’99 at a talk, and I felt that same kind of presence. We had a few brief conversations. In 2001, though, I was invited to attend a small private retreat that he gave in the Sierra Nevada, and that was quite profound.
I felt… It was interesting. I felt this deep loyalty to Jean, and so I was ambivalent about really opening to Ajay as a teacher. But something shifted. What I realized is that Jean had a second teacher as well. And when I realized that, I thought, “Oh, this is fine. This is a mental problem I am having.” When that released, there was just this flow or current with Ajay, and a very profound kind of deepening and opening happened being with him.
So there was a very strong and immediate connection on that retreat. Then I met with him privately a number of times when he was still doing that, and also attended a number of retreats over a five-year period. And then it felt like, quite to my surprise, that’s it. I wasn’t drawn to do any more retreats. It was confusing. But I’ve stayed in touch with Ajay over the years, and he’s very dear to me, a dear friend.
Rick: This thing about how you thought you were done, and then you were kind of surprised when Ajay came along, and the loyalty and all that… It’s like the Incredible String Band saying, “Light that is one, though the lamps be many,” you know?
John: Yes, that’s right.
Rick: And who knows? Maybe another one will come along.
John: Maybe another one will come along, absolutely. It’s good to keep an open mind.
Rick: And so, that actually brings up an interesting point, which is that some people are kind of anti-teacher. They feel like you can do it yourself. You don’t need a teacher, and that just sets up an unnecessarily authority disparity. What would you say to those who feel like they can just figure it all out without a teacher?
John: It’s possible. Ramana did.
Rick: True.
John: But it’s exceptional.
Rick: He had a mountain.
John: He had a mountain. It’s a wonderful mountain, by the way. I sat in Ramana’s cave some years ago, and it was extraordinary. So I didn’t understand it until I did that, how the mountain could be his teacher.
But I think for most of us, and certainly for myself, teachers are really important because this is such a delicate unfolding. To be in the presence of a genuine teacher and to have them guide us in our understanding is a tremendous blessing and catalyst.
Rick: Yeah. Well, as Amma puts it, “If a log is burning brightly, and you know, a hot-burning log, you put another log next to it, even if that log is kind of damp or something, it’s eventually going to dry out and start to burn.” So there is something to be said for proximity with someone who is awake.
John: It’s true. I spent some time with Amma also.
Rick: Oh, nice. Over in India or here?
John: Well, she actually came to my house twice.
Rick: Really? In the early days?
John: Early days, ’87, ’88. She gave darshan at my house. And then I spent some time with her in India also, in January of ’88.
Rick: Very nice. Those were the early days.
John: Yeah, I appreciate Amma very much. The Divine Mother aspect can be very healing for some of us.
Rick: Talk about … go ahead.
John: I agree. Eckhart Tolle uses that metaphor as well, in terms of the value of being in the presence of a teacher. And there’s something catalytic about that, just resting in that presence. It’s an attunement that happens as well.
Rick: I like that. I think you talked about that in your book, “Attunement versus Transmission.” Did you bring that up in your book?
John: I did, yeah. Basically, transmission is not … nothing is really given.
Rick: I know. It has the sense of something zapping you, going from A to B.
John: Right, right. And that can happen with Shakti, with charismatic teachers. There can be something given; you get a charge. But the real spiritual transmission happens by resonance, by attunement, and in the way that you just described. It’s inherent. This is all about recognizing the truth that’s inherent in all of us, and outer teachers point to the true inner teacher. That’s the value of an outer teacher. An outer teacher has realized that, realized their own inner teacher, and has some skill in pointing that out in a student.
But that’s really the function of a teacher. It’s not to get stuck on the teacher or worship the teacher, but to benefit from that presence and that pointing. And that happens, you know, on different levels. Part of it is intellectual, having clarity of mind, and part of it is just that kind of being in resonance, right? And that which is already inherent and implicit in us becomes explicit.
Rick: Yeah, there are various points I could use. I could follow up on that with … but I think we’ve covered it pretty well. Going through your book, I started taking notes, and then I just started highlighting passages. But a note that I took was, “Discovering inner resonance, recognizing inner knowing by listening carefully to your body.” Let’s talk about that a little bit more.
John: Yeah, this is something I think that’s not emphasized so much: our body actually has a sense of the truth. When it’s sufficiently cleared of conditioning, we have a natural sensitivity to authenticity and to truth. And so, as we learn to actually listen to our body, we can catch some of those signals.
I’ve noticed, working with people over three decades and tens of thousands of hours, that people notice certain characteristic, subtle somatic markers as they hone in on their truth, whether relative or absolute. And those markers are an open-heartedness, a sense of great spaciousness, a sense of alignment, verticality, and a sense of deep groundedness as well.
And so, that can help us. These are our body’s markers, I would say, showing that we’re on the right path to our truth and authenticity. And so, in a way, it’s an expression of our inner teacher, a bodily or somatic expression of that.
Rick: So, I realize there are many ways to do this. But the simple question would be, “Well, how do we hone in like that?” Especially if a person is buffeted by all the stresses and strains of modern life, long work hours and commutes, kids at home, and all kinds of stuff. How do we de-excite the nervous system, so to speak, so as to become more subtly attuned, as you’ve just described?
John: So, it’s always good to take a little quiet time, to take breaks in our busy life. And we can do that sitting in a car, and we can do it at home. Closing the door and turning off our phones, taking 15 minutes actually to sit upright, take a few deep breaths, feel our feet on the floor, remind ourselves that we don’t have to do anything or think anything, and let our attention just drop down.
Actually, because normally our attention localizes, because we’re busy thinking, more in the forehead, let attention just drop down, I would say, either to the heart center or to the hara, lower in the belly, and imagine that you’re just breathing there. This is just a gentle way of bringing attention to the torso and not trying to change anything.
And there’s just something naturally quieting about that. It’s like the breath, the relaxation response, the parasympathetic nervous system, all this stuff we know, right? There’s just a relaxation that happens. And then we start sensing into the interior of our body. And these areas—you probably can’t see them, but I’m touching my heart and my belly—these are the areas of our greatest sensitivity, I would say.
And just by bringing attention there, even for five or ten minutes, and just breathing, we’re starting to listen. Right? And it’s like tuning an instrument. Our bodies are like instruments, and they’re easily out of tune. And so, just by bringing this kind of quality of gentle attention to the interior of our body, we’re starting to tune our instrument, just by listening.
And we may notice different things, depending on our conditioning and our state, and we become curious about them. We let ourselves feel our feelings, and we let ourselves sense our sensations as well. And so we’re actually opening a channel of communication to the interior of our body. And this is a very lovely way to do it.
We can do it other ways as well, through movement or dance, or time in nature as well. But it’s a shift of attention down and in, primarily, with an understanding that our bodies have this implicit wisdom. And we may encounter psychological conditioning, and if we do, then there are ways to be with that as well.
Rick: Has it been your experience that a lot of people are averse to doing something like that because, the moment they begin to, they begin to experience stuff that is uncomfortable? And that’s why so many people in this world are running around like crazy, trying to distract themselves from having moments like that?
John: Exactly. And we stay very busy in order to avoid doing exactly what I just suggested. And this is where that kind of willingness to be authentic and intimate with our experience is so important.
Rick: So what would you say to someone who took your advice and decided to spend 15 minutes each morning or each day doing what you just described, but the moment they began to do so, things started bubbling up and they felt things they didn’t want to feel? Or even if they weren’t feeling much, their minds were racing with things they had to do and stuff like that. And they felt like, “I can’t do this, you know, it’s a waste of time, I shouldn’t be sitting here.”
John: Well, it’s not a waste of time. It’s probably the most valuable use of time as well. And so the mind will rationalize why one wouldn’t do it, and it’s important to know that that’s a kind of defense and also a habit. So just gently bring attention back to the heart or the hara area and continue breathing.
Now, if there’s an uncomfortable feeling—I mean, sometimes there’s no feeling there. That’s fine; you just stay with the breath and sensation. Maybe there’s an uncomfortable feeling. Lean into it. Be curious about it. What’s in the very core of this? What’s its shape? What’s its texture?
So you become curious and affectionate about what your experience is, without trying to change it. That’s a very important point. Because if you’re trying to change it, it will resist. Just as when someone’s trying to change you, you’ll resist as well. So you come in with a quality of innocent, affectionate attention. And that’s actually what it’s waiting for, like a child waiting to be heard and waiting to be received and understood.
Rick: And wouldn’t it be good to throw the word “effortless” in here? Because if you’re trying to change something, then you’re trying to do something. And what you’re advocating is not a doing; it’s more of an undoing, a kind of relaxing into a more natural state. So you really don’t have to make any sort of effort in what you’re describing.
John: That’s correct, I agree. It’s not effortful; it’s actually very gentle and nong goal-oriented. But it’s about being intimate with our experience and accepting it as it is. The mind has so many agendas about how things should or shouldn’t be.
Shadows as portals
Rick: Somebody just sent in a question, and I want to read it to you. Let me just lean over so I can see it. You mentioned …
Hi, John. You mentioned that the insight that “the seeker is the sought” and the subsequent letting go of the seeker resulted in a great sense of peace. And yet you also maintain that “there is no ultimate completion.” I understand that anything that the mind may call “ultimate completion” can’t be it, capital I-T, since IT is not a mental or phenomenal object. But to say that a non-phenomenal ultimate completion is no more than a myth doesn’t feel quite right either. Such a position would seem to imply that the awakening of, for instance, Ramana Maharshi or Shakyamuni Buddha, were only partial. That as great as these teachers were, their insight was still a work in progress. Can you please comment? Thank you.
John: Yeah, it’s a beautiful question. It’s a beautiful question. We kind of talked about that somewhat, didn’t we? Yeah, I think the distinction is that there can be completion on the non-phenomenal level, and on the phenomenal level it’s always a work in progress.
Rick: So you would say that Shakyamuni Buddha or Ramana Maharshi or whoever else—Amma, anybody like that—is still a work in progress on the phenomenal level?
John: I would say so, yeah. But I don’t know. How can I know what their experience is? I have to be humble about any conclusions about that.
Rick: Yeah, you can’t be adamant about it. But I’m with you on that. And I don’t consider it blasphemous to say so. As long as you’re alive, there is always some possibility of refinement of the instrument. You just referred to this as the instrument.
John: Yeah.
Rick: And, of course, we’re not just referring to the flesh-and-blood body. There’s all the various faculties, sensory and emotional and so on, that we have. Can you imagine there being any superlative, ultimate degree to which those can be refined?
John: To me, it’s open-ended.
Rick: Yeah, seems that way to me. But, you know, who knows for sure? So have we covered this point about inner resonance and listening carefully to your body, or is there more you’d like to say about that?
John: Well, there’s a lot to say about it, actually. One of the interesting things is when you really lean into your experience and become intimate, particularly with difficult experiences, they can serve as portals, I would say, as doors. We know the teaching of spaciousness as a door and silence as a door, but shadows can also be doors.
Very often, we discover the polarity of the quality that we’re first encountering. For instance, let’s say we’re exploring fear. If we really lean into our fear and open to our fear, we will eventually discover fearlessness. If we really open to our grief, for instance, and let ourselves go into the core of it, the heart opens and we feel a capacity for great joy. If we open to rage, we’ll find a tremendous sense of empowerment, for instance, and peacefulness as well.
So there are these essential qualities that are like buried treasure, I would say. And these are an important part of the process of human integration.
Rick: Leonard Cohen said, “There’s a crack, a crack in everything, and that’s how the light gets in.”
John: There you go. That’s a beautiful saying, one of my favorites from Leonard Cohen as well. So we all have these, and they show up in different ways. Some people, I notice, are more in touch with a kind of groundedness that unfolds, or an open-heartedness, or a sense of verticality and inner alignment. We’re all unique in our expression of that.
But these tend to show up, these markers, and they can serve as guideposts in a beautiful way.
Rick: So let’s try to think of a concrete example or two. You say when rage comes up, or anger, or grief, or something like this, you can lean into those and they become a portal or a catalyst for change or for growth. Can you think of a concrete example or two from, for instance, your counseling practice, where someone had something like that going on and you helped them do what you just described, and it was kind of transformative for them?
John: Well, I have endless examples of that. I’ll mention just one that I mention in my book as well. I was working with a woman. It was one of our first meetings, actually. She’d been on retreat with me and wanted to meet individually. She came in, and everything in her life was good in terms of her current experience, her children, her husband, and her work. It was very fulfilling and harmonious, but she carried a deep sadness about her. I could feel it sitting with her.
She felt ashamed of it and afraid of it. But I invited her to actually let herself lean into it and feel it. She did, feeling safe enough and trusting enough. She let herself burst out in tears, and there was deep sobbing for about a minute or so.
There was a feeling of shame about being like an out-of-control little girl—needy, ashamed to have the need to be loved. And it had to do with her mother, actually. What was interesting is that as she let herself have the full feeling and let her attention go very deeply into the heart, this beautiful radiance began to come shining out of her. She knew that she was lovable and loved, despite the fact that her mother was incapable of doing that.
So that would be—I run into this kind of example again and again as well. And that was a significant shift for her.
Rick: I feel like, in my own experience, things tend to get bottled up without my even knowing it. Over the years, there have been a couple of incidents where I have burst out in tears and just sobbed uncontrollably. One was at my sister’s wedding. People cry at weddings, but I really lost it. Another was, believe it or not, when I was watching It’s a Wonderful Life, in that scene at the end where everybody brings in money, the bell rings, and the angel’s got his wings. I just totally lost it, sobbing. People were looking at me like, “What’s with him?”
I almost wish I could do that every day. Because if there’s stuff bottled up, I just want to unbottle it. But it’s corked, you know? And I don’t seem to have…
John: It often takes a catalyst.
Rick: Yeah. And even though I spend hours a day in silence and meditation and so on, maybe I don’t feel like I’m a clear vessel. There must be stuff that’s there, and I would be happy to purge it, but I don’t see it. I guess it’ll happen when it happens. I don’t seem to have any ability to accelerate that.
John: Right, yeah. You’re not in control of the process. You or someone else may want to see if there are any beliefs about prohibiting the expression of feeling or the sharing of deep feeling.
But clearly, what you’re describing is an upwelling of love, a kind of opening, a cracking open of the heart at a wedding, or this beautiful outpouring of love that’s depicted in the film. Something in the heart is really touched. And if we have no prohibitions about feeling that, then it just upwells as well.
In your case, when you notice small upwellings of that, you might favor it. There’s a sense of love that you feel, or affection or gratitude, or just this deep poignancy that comes when you’re with others. Take the risk, actually, to share that and find out what happens, rather than having to do it alone. If you feel love toward someone, share that love openly.
Rick: That’s nice, yeah.
John: Share your gratitude that you feel. Let the deep upwelling of the heart come forth.
Rick: Yeah, that’s good. Kind of favor it if it’s there a little bit. Get the watering can and water it.
John: That’s right, yeah, exactly.
Rick: I know I’ve had a number of friends and so on who’ve had profound awakenings, after which they couldn’t go to public movie theaters and stuff because they would just make such a scene crying and releasing emotion. It was a phase. I mean, I don’t think that’s still going on. But there’s a kind of an open, innocent rawness or something that ensued after a profound awakening, when nothing could be bottled anymore.
John: Yeah, that’s true. It’s like that governor, that controller, really falls away. So very often, some people think there’s a flattening out of the feelings, and one can go through a phase of that, I suppose. But for me, it’s an enrichment, actually. And if things have been bottled up, then they come out.
But there’ll be a harmonization eventually, or an enrichment of the emotional field, I would say—a broadening and deepening, but eventual diminishment of drama as well.
Inner knowing and felt sensing
Rick: Yeah, okay. So let’s say we have about 20 or 25 minutes left in this interview. I want to make sure that we cover everything that you’d like to cover, to give people a sense of everything that you feel is really important. Do you want to use your book for a few minutes as sort of an outline of things we want to cover, even go at chapter titles and see if those become stimuli to bits of discussion?
John: Well, I can certainly speak about the book in a general way.
Rick: Yeah, why don’t you? Sure. And even flip through your table of contents if you want and see if there’s anything you covered in there that you’d really like to bring out in this talk.
John: Okay. The book is about the sense of inner knowing. It took me a while, actually, to get clear about how to talk about this. I wrote several introductory chapters and threw them away over the years. In a way, the theme had to be clear within me that it was really about inner knowing and the bodily sense of that.
This is something that’s not been addressed very much, very often, in nondual teachings and so on. There’s an appeal to inquiry and higher reason, but this is more of an approach of felt sensing. So maybe I should say a little bit about felt sensing, which is a term that was introduced by Eugene Gendlin, a psychologist and philosopher who worked with Carl Rogers in the 1960s.
He discovered that certain rare psychotherapy clients—it didn’t matter who the psychotherapist was or what their theoretical orientation was—could tune in to what was going on, to a kind of sense, not fully formed in the conscious mind, of what their experience was. And it could be about anything. It could be about their current situation or some problem that was looming.
But this is the origin of the term “felt sense,” and it corresponds to what physiologists call interoception, or to interocept—to perceive the interior of the body. That’s an objective description. Subjectively, we talk about felt sensing.
So it’s a native capacity, but most people aren’t in touch with it. They can be if they start paying attention. What was interesting to me is that this book really came out of my experience working with people. They would start lining up, lighting up, grounding, and opening up on a subtle somatic level when they got in touch with their truth. This was very empowering for them, to be able to recognize this in themselves.
So the core of the book is to present this to a wider audience: the fact that there is a wisdom of the body, and that the body is not what we think it is. I mean, nothing is what we think it is. That’s one of your mottos.
Rick: Yeah, well, I think it’s more than that.
John: It’s more than that, and less than that. It’s certainly not that. And it’s really true of the body as well. It’s not this kind of solid, dense object. It’s filled with energy and aliveness and space, and it’s a beautiful path to include, along with higher reason. I would say it’s a complementary path, to begin to listen to the body.
I think it’s particularly important because of this waking-down process, the embodiment of this understanding. To me, this seems like the next phase, I would say, and the emergent phase is really: How does this awake awareness move in ordinary life? How does it transform our individual lives and our collective lives?
So we have to include the body, I think, one way or another, eventually, in the conditioning of the body. I have a chapter on the science of attunement, the neuroscience of attunement, and this is very interesting. I won’t go into it now, given the time constraints, but there are some researchers who are looking into the phenomena of attunement with self and other, and they’re finding all sorts of interesting neurological correlates to that.
So we know we’re not in fantasy about the phenomena of attunement. And we know that the body has this remarkable capacity for sensing. We also know that we’re very conditioned as human beings. So we have somatic contractions, emotional reactions, and core beliefs that create a lot of static in the system.
This is one of the metaphors that I use: The body is like a musical instrument. As we reduce the noise in the system, we can hear a signal or a sound. It’s a process of deep listening and of letting go of our core beliefs and entering into intimate experience.
As we do so, in our ordinary life, a kind of inner guidance of the body appears. And it’s pointing us, I think, to our true nature, interestingly—to the recognition of our true nature as open, awake awareness, and to its expression as loving awareness in our relationships and in our lives.
So that’s a brief overview of what the book is about.
Rick: Well, you know, the body is a sensing instrument. Isn’t that what you were helping people discover through that advice to take 15 minutes, settle down, and tune in?
John: Absolutely. Yeah, so it’s becoming intimate with our experience. A point I haven’t accented very much is the power of beliefs—all the shoulds and shouldn’ts that we have, and stories about ourselves and others. These create significant noise in the system. So being able to identify what our core limiting beliefs are and inquire into their truth, I think, is very important as well.
These somatic contractions, emotional reactions, and cognitive beliefs are complex. You can work from any direction, sensing sensations and feeling feelings, but questioning core beliefs is very important as well.
Rick: So when you say “noise in the system,” do you mean actual mental agitation and its physiological counterpart? Like there might be certain blood chemistry and brain waves and stuff that would correlate with that mental agitation?
John: Probably, yeah.
Rick: So how do beliefs do that? How do they create noise?
John: Well, I mean—
Rick: Let’s say I believe in certain rigid fundamentalist religious stuff. Look at the popular religious fundamentalist preachers. They’re up there shouting their heads off on stage, and the audience is all whooping and hollering. It seems like a kind of noisy, excited thing. It doesn’t seem like a real subtle, introspective scene.
John: Right, but I’m thinking of more personal fundamentalism. Very often we have a conscious or semiconscious belief that we’re flawed or not enough, that there’s a sense of lack. This is actually a fundamental egoic view. So you’ll find it pretty universal, one or both of those: “I’m not enough,” “I’m lacking,” or “What I am—something’s wrong with it. I’m deeply flawed.”
And there’s a corresponding worldview that goes with that as well. So if I’m flawed or if I’m empty, then the world may expose me. I may feel threatened, or what I’m seeking is out there and I have to fulfill myself by finding it somewhere or in someone. I look to someone else to complete me in some kind of fundamental way.
So these are drivers at very deep levels. If you just have the thought, “Something is deeply flawed,” notice what you feel. Something’s really missing.
Rick: Some emptiness, some lack of fulfillment or something.
John: Notice what happens in the body, for instance, in the way of feeling. There’s always going to be a contraction that accompanies that belief. Sometimes we’ll have those knots and contractions and we don’t even know what the belief is. But if we open to the contraction and let ourselves feel it, and let ourselves ask, “What’s the belief that goes with it?” they’ll pop up as well.
Even rationalizing to ourselves, “I know that’s not true,” is insufficient. It can help a little bit, but often these subconscious beliefs are formed in childhood, and they have tremendous power.
So there’s a way to inquire by bringing attention to the heart area, isolating very clearly what the belief is, and then just asking, “What is my deepest knowing about this? What’s the truth I really want to know? Am I deficient? Am I deeply flawed?” Then just be quiet, right, and notice what comes.
This is a way of contacting our inner knowing. What will happen is that we get in touch with the truth. There will be a release, a relief, an openness. We’ll tap into something that feels essential.
Rick: I imagine if you asked most people to make a list of their top ten core subconscious beliefs, they wouldn’t be able to because they’re subconscious.
John: Although it’s interesting—you would think so. But they’re not fully subconscious, and there are different ways to identify them. One is just to ask yourself, “What do I think is wrong with me?” Make a list and feel the one that has the most juice. That’s sort of the direct approach. You’ll be surprised. I’ve been. People kind of know what it is. So it’s not fully out of awareness; it’s just kind of in the corner somewhere.
We can also encounter our core negative beliefs by noticing our chronic somatic contractions, like a clenching in the heart or the gut, for instance, and begin to feel into those. Then do the inquiry.
Another way, and a really clear way to do it, is through our projections of our judgments onto others. If there’s something we just cannot stand about other people, guess what? It’s something that we can’t face in ourselves. And there’s a related core belief that goes with that.
Rick: Yeah, I was just talking yesterday with a friend about another friend. He and this other guy had been living together in a house in Detroit. The one guy had this habit of walking around the house with his toothbrush for about fifteen minutes, brushing his teeth while he was doing other things. For some reason, that totally pissed off the other guy. He couldn’t stand it; he was tearing his hair out. “What a stupid habit.”
Taking that as an example of a silly projection that we find critical of another person, how would you use that as a teaching point?
John: Okay, so what is it about that behavior that’s so annoying? That’s what one would ask oneself.
Rick: Yeah, why should I care?
John: Yeah, it’s like, “Okay, that really bothers me. What is it about it that really bothers me? Is it that he needs attention?” In which case, maybe I need attention. Is it that he’s doing something that’s humiliating and foolish? Then, “Oh, I’m afraid of being humiliated and appearing foolish.”
For me, my big projection was that I didn’t like people who were angry.
Rick: Yeah, I can see that because you’re a gentle person. I’m kind of that way too. I feel like it’s sort of a problem that’s inexcusable, in a way. So how did you come to terms with that?
John: Oh, I realized I had a lot of anger—not a lot of anger, but there was anger in me, and in fact, rage. I became friends with it, and then guess what? Other people’s anger just didn’t become a problem.
Rick: So in becoming friends with it, did you go through a phase where you were venting a lot of anger yourself, or was it more of a quiet resolution?
John: Yeah, it was a quiet resolution, just a recognition that it was in me as well.
Rick: Yeah, that’s an interesting point: it’s in you as well. Can we generalize this to say that if we find ourselves critical of anything in anyone, it probably indicates that that thing is in us to some degree?
John: It’s all in us, right. It’s all in us. No matter what we see around us—the worst things—that tendency is in us as well. We may not act on it, but we’ll see it in a dream. We may have it briefly in a thought. Those tendencies, all those human tendencies, are in us.
Rick: So let’s say we hate racism or homophobia or something like that, and there’s a gut reaction to those things rather than just a forgiving recognition of them. You’re talking about not approving of those tendencies—we’re not going to approve of racism or homophobia. But if we’re reacting in a highly emotionally charged way, you’re saying that that’s indicative of there being seeds of those tendencies within us. Whereas if we have a more equanimous, balanced, forgiving, compassionate way, then maybe that means those seeds don’t exist in us anymore. Is that an example?
John: Yeah, that would be an example. We hate people who are judgmental. We hate people who hate people.
Rick: That’s a good one. So, inner knowing—there’s a beautiful line from your book that I like so much I had to write it down. It was:
Inner knowing turns us into a humble servant of something that is unimaginably greater than our separate self.
Love that.
John: Yeah, it is humbling. That’s my experience. The conscious mind is not running the show. There is a deeper intelligence at work here, and we surrender to it. We surrender to it, and there’s a beauty. There’s a loving nature to this, which is not only extremely intelligent and clear, but deeply loving as well.
Rick: You also said in your book:
We feel our way through life rather than think our way. Insights arise as needed.
And something about taking the next obvious step becomes—You probably read Suzanne Siegel’s book since you were a Jean Klein disciple and so was she, but—
John: Yeah, we were friends.
Rick: Yeah, one of her key themes was doing the next obvious thing.
John: Absolutely, yeah, it’s a beautiful teaching. It’s just the next step; that’s enough. Actually, if we don’t know what the step is, then we wait.
Rick: Another question just came in. Someone said, “Hello, John. I can’t stand people being unfair. People can be unfair in all sorts of ways, both subtle and gross. How do I come to terms with this? I think very carefully to be as fair as possible in everything I do. Do you have any advice?”
John: Fairness is a concept, right? Fairness is a concept. It would be interesting to let go of that concept of fairness. As human beings, we do have a rough sense of what’s fair, I would say. But this is a very deep kind of argument with reality, I would say—the fairness argument. Life is not fair, right? People are unfair.
It would be very interesting to inquire, “How would I be? How would I function, really, without the idea of fairness?” That’s an inquiry I would recommend. See what happens with that.
Rick: Well, putting myself in that questioner’s mode of thinking for a moment, I might come back at you and say, “Yeah, but are you condoning unfairness?”
John: Not at all.
Rick: Unfairness is a terrible thing. And don’t we need to take measures to rectify it? If people are mistreating animals or children, or cheating people, don’t we need to take action and correct them?
John: Yeah, I think we can act without being married to the principle of fairness as well.
Rick: Perhaps there’s something about self-righteousness in here if we’re finding ourselves reacting strongly to injustices that we see in the world.
John: Yeah, there can be self-righteousness. I’m not hearing that in the questioner’s question. It’s a beautiful question as well, but that could arise. “How could they do that?” Someone who has a victim identity often feels that life is unfair and that wrongs need to be righted as well.
Rick: Yeah. Well, let’s take Gandhi or Martin Luther King as examples. They dedicated their lives to remedying unfairness. I’ll let you just take it from here. How did they serve as examples of an enlightened way of doing this?
John: Well, as we know with Martin Luther King, for him it needed to come from love, and that was what was extraordinary. Of course, he was inspired by Gandhi. Gandhi was inspired by Tolstoy, and Tolstoy by the teachings of Jesus, right? And Jesus by divine nature as well, so by love.
We know that when we act from love, it has a very different effect than when we act from some principle of the mind. And it’s much more appropriate, too. So we get out of being reactive and really act from love. I think King and Gandhi are exemplars of that in the modern era.
And it takes a lot of maturity, right, and a lot of discipline—loving discipline—to do that.
Rick: Yeah, here’s a passage from your book. You said:
As long as we think that getting others to change will make us happy, we will continue to judge and blame them. When we discover that our happiness comes from self-acceptance and self-knowledge, we stop reflexively trying to manipulate others. No one else can make us happy or unhappy.
It’s somewhat related to the point we’re making here.
John: It is. It’s very related, yeah, because we’re looking—we think our unhappiness can be resolved by making others change. And this is particularly true in relationships and the kind of subtle warfare that we engage in with partners and friends, and maybe acquaintances as well, with a kind of subliminal belief that if they change, I’ll be happy.
I work with couples, and that gets uncovered very quickly. If my partner would change in this way and that way, then I would be happy. And it’s just not true. Most of the change in couples really comes around acceptance of self and other. To accept the other requires, really, self-acceptance. So it comes back to that core understanding and discovery of self-love and self-acceptance.
And it is—I write this, and it’s true for me—just remarkable how our judgment of others falls away as our self-acceptance grows. They’re directly related; there’s an absolutely direct relationship to that. People are fine as they are.
Now, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t significant social and environmental issues that need to be addressed. But how we address them, where it comes from, is very important, I think, in order for real transformation to happen.
🎵 The great heart and human intimacy
Rick: Yeah, that’s a good point. Here’s a passage in your book that I particularly liked. I just spent a few minutes flipping through the pages and finding it, because I remember thinking, “I want to read this passage. It’s so beautiful.” You said:
As our attention deepens into the heart, subtler dimensions unfold. The deepest dimension of the human heart, sometimes called the soul, feels like a sacred temple. It is here we experience the greatest human intimacy, love, compassion, and joy. The human heart opens into a nonlocalized great heart, capital G-H, that is capable of embracing the suffering of humanity. Discovering and consciously living from both the great heart and the soulful depths of the human heart brings the deepest happiness as human beings.
Nice passage.
John: Well, thank you. Yeah, that’s what I find—I found it working with people and in my own experience. Sometimes in the nondual teachings, we’ll jump to the cause, kind of the universal awareness. And this deep level of the heart, though, can be skipped over.
To have that quality of intimacy, of deep sharing, of gratitude, and love on a human level is very fulfilling. And it’s an important component in addition to recognizing our deepest nature as awake awareness.
Rick: Well, it kind of gets us back to a theme from the beginning of this discussion, which is that, in a way, awakening to our true nature is the first step. It’s kind of like establishing a foundation upon which all kinds of things can be built.
We have all these faculties, which may not have developed much at all at the point where we become aware of our true nature. The heart may be relatively stunted, the senses relatively crude, and the behavior relatively inappropriate, or whatever. And so there’s tremendous possibility for unfoldment and refinement once that sort of foundation has been established.
John: Very true. It is foundational. It’s the most important thing, right? Understanding the core essence of who we are as this open, awake awareness. And from that freedom, so much can unfold, and so much more easily.
It can unfold anyway, but it unfolds without the egoic resistance, without the judgment, without the need to change. And in that spontaneity, with honesty and vulnerability as well, that unfolding is accelerated, I would say.
Rick: “Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven, and all else shall be added unto thee.”
John: There you go.
Rick: Yeah, these aren’t new teachings, really—not in the core. It’s interesting to interpret old verses like that in light of these sorts of ideas, though.
John: It is, it is. To apply it—there is something in the application to our experience now that’s very important, the updating of the teaching.
In Touch and the next obvious step
Rick: Okay, well, this is enjoyable. We could probably continue on, but let’s think in terms of concluding. What would you like to say by way of conclusion and kind of an overall summation of what you’ve been talking about, or things you haven’t talked about, or things you’re going to be doing that people can plug into, and so on?
John: That’s a big question.
Rick: Three questions.
John: Three questions. I’ve already forgotten what they are.
Rick: Oh, well, just, you know, things you…
John: Let’s see, I’ll riff.
Rick: Yeah, you riff, and we’ll see what happens.
John: So, yes, I have a new book out, and it’s available on Sounds True and can be ordered online.
Rick: It’s called In Touch.
John:In Touch, and it’s been a joy to write and to share. For me, it’s about the sharing. So I invite listeners to, if you’re interested, read the book and be in touch. And above all, not just in touch with me, but in touch with yourself.
This is the great experiment, as I wrote, to really be intimate with ourself as multidimensional beings, with our true nature and its expression as body-mind. It’s as important to wake up as it is to creatively, joyfully, and lovingly express ourselves as human beings.
This, to me, is a balanced approach to life that honors both transcendence and immanence. And it requires devotion, honesty, and vulnerability. It’s, to me, the most important thing in life. And I’ve really enjoyed this conversation.
Rick: Oh, me too.
John: I really love the nuances, subtlety, and depth of it as well.
Rick: Well, I knew I would enjoy it. I always enjoy hearing you speak at the Science and Non-Duality Conference, where we’ll both be again this October.
John: That’s right.
Rick: Nice, I put in a little plug for that. And I guess you don’t have too much on YouTube, I’ve noticed. But there are a couple of things one can find.
John: Yeah, a few things.
Rick: Yeah, but anyway, I really appreciate what you’re doing and the contribution you’re making, for what my appreciation is worth. But I think a lot of people—a lot more people—will appreciate it as a result of this interview.
John: Well, thank you for having me on.
Rick: Yeah, let me make a few general wrap-up points. So I’ve been speaking with John Prendergast, and he’s written a book, as you know. I’ll be linking to his webpage and to his book on Sounds True from his page on www.batgap.com.
If you are listening to this interview and you haven’t listened to my other interviews, you can go to that website, www.batgap.com. You’ll see them all archived and categorized in about five different ways under the “Past Interviews” menu. You’ll see a place where you can sign up to be notified of new interviews by email about once a week, each time a new one is posted.
There’s the “Donate” button, as I mentioned in the beginning, which makes it possible for me to devote as much time as I do to this, which is a lot of time, and my wife as well. She spends as much time at it as I do.
Then there is an audio podcast of the show, which almost as many people listen to as watch the video. There’s an obvious place to subscribe to that on various devices, and a bunch of other things if you poke around the menus.
Incidentally, some people have said, “When you started this show, you were just interviewing relatively unknown people who didn’t have any kind of public role or professional role and who hadn’t written books. And now it’s all about people who are famous or have written books, and so on.”
Just for kicks, in the next month or so, we’ve scheduled a couple of people who are completely unknown, who are just sort of regular Joes who wrote to us and said that they weren’t even interested in spirituality. One of the guys said, “I didn’t care about this at all, and all of a sudden this huge thing happened to me.”
So we thought it might be fun to have a conversation with a couple of people like that. So you’ll see that upcoming.
Also, I want to mention that if you look at the “Future Interviews” menu, you’ll see a thing about upcoming interviews. It shows you at what actual time each interview will be conducted, so you can tune into the live streaming if you wish and post questions during the interview.
So check all that out, and thanks for listening or watching. The next interview will be with Ellen Emmett, who is Rupert Spira’s wife, although that is not her claim to fame. She’s an eloquent teacher in her own right, and so I look forward to having that conversation.
So thanks a lot. Thank you again, John.
John: You’re very welcome.
Rick: And we’ll see you all next week.
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