Justin Gold Interview

Summary

The discussion explores how spiritual teaching develops through lived experience, humility, and honest relationships rather than claims of authority. It also considers the role of worldly exploration, changing assumptions, and metaphors in a seeker’s movement toward deeper understanding.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can a spiritual teacher remain honest and avoid presenting false authority?
• Should spiritual seekers explore ordinary life before pursuing surrender and inner development?
• How can someone reexamine inherited beliefs and spiritual assumptions?
• Can stories and metaphors communicate truths that literal explanations cannot?

Key takeaways

• A teacher should acknowledge personal limitations and avoid claiming to be more advanced than they are.
• Spirituality can grow naturally from fuller, more refined engagement with human life.
• Outward exploration may prepare people for a later movement toward surrender and inwardness.
• No tradition or personal understanding should be treated as completely final.
• Metaphors and stories allow people to discover meaning according to their own capacity.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done over 500 of them now over the last nearly 10 years, and if this happens to be new to you and you’d like to check out some of the older ones, some of the 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. If you appreciate it and would like to support it, there’s a PayPal button on every page of the site.

My guest today is Justin Gold. Here’s a brief bio of Justin. Justin has been assisting people in their search for inner meaning for 35 years. He is currently living in the Sierra foothills of Northern California, where he works with several dozen seekers of truth. Over the years, he has deliberately resisted the trend to become a traveling guru with thousands of followers in favor of preserving an element that he considers precious: maintaining opportunities for developing a meaningful teacher-student relationship. He is available to anyone who seeks his guidance and asks for no payment in return.

Rick: So, Justin, have you had opportunities to become a traveling guru with thousands of followers, or did you just never put yourself in that position?

Justin: I both never put myself in that position, but certainly when a person reads and writes a book, those opportunities arise. The first book that I wrote was about 20 years ago, and a lot of those opportunities arose. I basically resisted them.

Rick: I think, as people learn as we get into this interview, you’ve been a serious spiritual practitioner, if you want to call it that, for many, many years, and you didn’t rush into teaching by any means. It’s something that sort of happened after you had really paid some dues, so to speak. I think that’s a good thing. A lot of times people have some kind of an awakening and they rush into teaching, and things don’t always go so well for them or for their students.

Justin: Teaching itself is a learning process, and I think that I would not have even entered the process had I not been told to do so at a time when I thought that it would be very unlikely for me to make that move.

I had just gotten comfortable with being with myself and being by myself, and then I was told by a mentor to go put my picture on some posters and stick them on the walls at the University of Oregon. I did that. It was uncomfortable and challenging, and I got by the first few months with a lot of marijuana. But sooner or later, I got the hang of it, and the only instructions I had were, “Don’t present yourself as being more than you are, and be honest and recognize that you have a ways to go as well, but you’re a few steps ahead of the people you’re running into.”

Rick: Yeah, it’s a good attitude. It’s kind of like that—I don’t know if that’s what they mean by it in Zen—but the beginner’s mind idea. Some spiritual teachers, to their credit, say something like, “It’s always good to have the attitude of a beginner. Don’t consider yourself to be some lofty person who’s far beyond the people who may come to you for tutelage.”

Justin: I had some interesting input at the time from an acquaintance, a friend of mine who was quite a well-known Tibetan Buddhist teacher. I was living on some land in Oregon near Eugene, and he called me and asked me if he could use the land for a ceremony he wanted to have. I don’t remember the name of the ceremony, but some visitors were coming from Tibet, and he wanted to put on a ceremony.

He had definitely adapted his methods, and they were not traditionally Tibetan anymore. There were a lot of additions that he made, and he was quite well-known. I asked him, “Why would you still involve yourself in a traditional ceremony? So much of what you do is different.”

He said, “Well, you can’t be sure.”

Rick: “Can’t be sure it’s different?”

Justin: “No, you can’t be sure that it’s not something you missed. You can’t be sure that something you left behind isn’t the something that you still need.”

I remember that. The whole idea that you have the complete idea of what needs to be done is just waiting for you to find out that you don’t. So, I took that to heart, and I still do.

Rick: Yeah, that’s a good point. I do talk to people sometimes who seem very sure of certain things, and sometimes they seem to have had some kind of genuine awakening, and their awakening actually seems to imbue them with even greater certainty. It kind of fuels a certain adamancy about whatever they happen to think. They become fundamentalists in a way, even though I think they’ve actually got something experientially.

Justin: Yeah. Well, if we made up the game, we could be sure of how it’s played, but we clearly didn’t make it up, so we clearly can’t be sure how it’s played.

Rick: Yeah. Do you still smoke marijuana?

Justin: Rarely, but from time to time. I have a great regard for it and for what its capacity is. I also recognize that it’s a little bit like dynamite. It can be used to create tunnels, which are great. It can be used to injure people, which is terrible.

With marijuana, there has to be a lot of understanding about its use. It can supply a forevision of what’s possible. But anything that can supply a forevision of what’s possible can also be an addictive way to lean on it for those perpetual forevisions. So I’m careful with it, but I do recognize that it has a certain value that is difficult to replace in our culture.

Rick: Yeah, I think it was Alan Watts who said, “When you get the message, hang up the phone.” I know my own experience with drugs in the ’60s was, okay, that was an eye-opener. I realized that there’s a lot more to life than meets the eye, and that everything depends upon your subjective perspective of it and so on.

But then I was also such a mess by the end of a year of that, and then I learned such an effective practice that was so wholesome and beneficial for me that I never looked back. I kind of felt like I would be muddying up the waters to ever try it again, so I wasn’t tempted.

Having said that, I just interviewed a couple of guys a couple of weeks ago, Michael Pollan and Christopher Bache, who are in various stages of what really became deep, serious experimentation. So I definitely have an open mind to the whole thing.

In your book, which is called Just in Time, which I guess was a phrase that kids teased you with—no, just, wait a minute.

Justin: Yes, that’s correct.

Rick: “Just in Time.” Kids used to tease you with that phrase when you were a kid sometimes?

Justin: They did.

Rick: Did they also say, “Just in Case?”

Justin: Sometimes they said that to me.

Credentials and direct experience

Rick: Anyway, in your book, which is a beautiful, interesting chronicle of a very adventurous life, you ask people in the beginning to wait until the end to read your so-called credentials. You want them to just read the book first and then get to the credentials.

But if you don’t mind, in this interview I’d like to do the credentials at the beginning and kind of lay a foundation for who you are and on what basis you are going to be saying the things that you’re going to be saying here.

Justin: I do recognize that in our culture, credentials have become important, and I don’t pretend like they’re not. I added them to this latest book after some resistance because, to some degree, although I am okay to go ahead and talk about whatever it is that I have going for me in that area, I think it’s not recognizing people’s ability to discern something for themselves.

We read reviews of movies and think of what we’re supposed to like and appreciate, and don’t lean enough on some innate capacity that we have to make those assessments. I like for those innate capacities to develop rather than to be artificially aided.

I also recognize that it would be infrequent that a person would see somebody talking on a street corner with two people listening to them and go over to listen. More likely, if there were a crowd, because our culture has that stigma, I’m going along with it. So, what do you want to know?

Rick: To add to the point you just made, these days there’s a lot of books out there, and there are a lot of YouTube videos and everything. A person can immerse themselves in that stuff and get pretty fluent with it, get fairly conversant with it. They can sound like they know what they’re talking about. They can sound like they’re a teacher or something; they can even go out and start teaching. But that could be deceptive.

Somebody could—I mean, there’s that movie with what’s his name, about the guy who posed as an airline pilot and as this and that—Leonardo DiCaprio. He just kind of bluffed his way into these situations. I think there are some spiritual teachers who sort of bluff their way into the so-called profession.

I always like to get a sense of people’s background and just what kind of track record and what sort of experiences they’ve gone through to get them to the point where they are now teaching, in whatever capacity or to whatever size crowds of people, small or large.

Justin: Okay.

Rick: I’ll ask you a leading question to get you going. You grew up in the Bronx, I guess, in the New York metropolitan area.

Justin: Bronx.

Rick: Bronx, sorry. That’s probably a faux pas to say Brooklyn, right?

Justin: Enormous.

Rick: Right. Near Yankee Stadium.

Justin: That would be the biggest point that you make on this.

Rick: It doesn’t get any worse than that. I’ll recollect a few things from your book. You were musical from a young age. You played the violin with a fair degree of competence. You grew up in a rather large, sort of extended family. It almost sounds like these Indian families where everybody lives under one roof—all the uncles and aunts and cousins and mothers and fathers and grandparents and all that stuff. Take it from there.

Justin: Right. Well, I did have some musical talent. I was committed to Vivaldi until I saw Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley. Then I quickly lost my commitment. Music was a big part of my childhood.

In these family situations, the words “Come play for us” were frequently in my ears, and I always hated it. So I grew up in a multireligious family, which was unusual.

The people who had come from Europe, from southern Russia near Georgia, near Mount Elbrus, lived in a village there, and they all escaped together. There were Christians, Jews, and Muslims all in this same village. They were secluded enough that they got along with each other and all made the escape together.

My family had elements of all these religions, so I was brought up having to visit each one of those churches and synagogues, which was unusual. I wasn’t really won over by any of them, but I certainly was forced to attend from time to time. I got a flavor of a lot of different ethnicities and things like that.

There was a lot of foreign language going on in my family and very little explanation about the essence of the religion. I could say probably none. If there was any, it was in a language I didn’t speak. So I didn’t really have a religious background or any feelings about that. I basically liked to play stickball.

🕊️ From ordinary life to spirituality

Rick: So, as you got older, how did you first get interested in spirituality? What led to that?

Justin: I had a family friend who lived in another country, in South America. I didn’t know what the connection to my family was, but he invited me to come down and visit him one summer when I was about 13. And I did. I went down to visit him and spent the summer with him.

It was interesting for me, not so much in a spiritual way, because I had never met anyone who had such different takes on so many different things and was so comfortable with himself. I had extended exposure to him, and it was probably 10 or eight years before I recognized that there was any spiritual element to his teaching or his involvement with me. I would say it was more human than spiritual.

And I see that for myself as well: I don’t distinguish that much, or maybe even at all, between spirituality and humanity. Spirituality is an extension of humanity that happens naturally when things get finer. So I’m pretty willing to start at the beginning, where things are pretty coarse, as I did, and hopefully some of that coarseness is left behind. Then we can start talking about spirituality.

Rick: Yeah, I like your emphasis on refinement. I think along the same lines, as applied to a number of things, even the refinement of the nervous system. But you could almost think of spirituality as a progression from appreciation of merely the grosser value of life to subtler values of life.

And since the whole spectrum from gross to subtle would be present in everyone, even if they’re not aware of it, then everyone is potentially a great mystic. All they have to do is become aware of the deeper range of their own existence.

Justin: Right. Well, I was fortunate in my growing-up period, in my teens and early 20s, in that I was exposed to a lot of different worlds: living in the city, living in the country, being involved with gambling, being involved with business, and being involved with traveling.

So I learned a lot of languages, not so much in terms of French, Spanish, and Portuguese, but in terms of the language of all those different things: the language of cooking, the language of camping, and the language of hustling in a big city.

I find that has really made it possible for me to do what I do, because I deal with people from very different backgrounds. I’ve traveled a lot and lived in a lot of different places, and starting at the beginning really necessitates having that kind of exposure.

Rick: Yeah, I heard you say that in some of your other recordings that I listened to. You consider it very useful not only for a spiritual teacher, but even for a spiritual aspirant of some sort, to have had a lot of real-world experience. It perhaps makes them a more grounded or integrated individual, with the potential to be better able to relate to people from all sorts of backgrounds and walks of life.

Whereas if someone has been shielded and isolated, then they just can’t relate on a personal level to other people so well, right?

Justin: Yeah, I agree with that. I have a way of looking at things, which I wrote about a little bit in that book, but it’s very current with me—not so much as an idea, but as an understanding of how things may work and probably do work. It’s similar to seeing the seasons of nature: There are seasons of human life.

There is a going-out period that can’t be circumvented. In that going-out period, it’s necessary to explore. It’s necessary to try different things. It’s necessary to be brave and bold. It’s necessary to bullshit a little bit. It’s necessary to learn how to sell yourself a little bit. It’s necessary to become dexterous in several different circumstances, so that you’re not adhering to one situation as the only thing that is comfortable.

I see the necessity of that period. I also see that it’s unfortunate to be exposed to spirituality during that period, because if you start knowing or hearing too much, what happens is that your actions start to be censored.

I think this person who was my mentor and teacher was very careful not to inhibit me from being an explorer of ordinary life, whether it was business, gambling, cooking, or whatever I was doing. He encouraged me to go for it.

I see that period of life, which could be called going out, ramifying externally, or exploring externally, as a very necessary precursor to what might be called coming home. Also, the equipment for going out may be very different from the equipment for coming home. That presents every spiritual seeker, every aspirant at any stage, with the problem of how to sort through the equipment necessary to come home when all the equipment you’ve used is for going out. What do you think about that?

Rick: Well, I think that human beings are wired such that as we move from childhood into adolescence, we do tend to start exploring and going out and trying all kinds of things. It’s just typical of a teenager to do that. They go through this try-anything phase and have all kinds of wild experiences, and hopefully survive them.

I live in a town where thousands of people meditate—or used to, anyway. There has been an attempt over the years by parents to get their kids into meditation at a young age. There’s a school set up where everybody meditates, and so on.

Some of the kids have taken to it and have done extremely well, and the school wins all sorts of awards. But a lot of kids just felt like it was being crammed down their throats, and they rebelled against it, as kids will do. They didn’t want any part of it anymore after a while.

Some of those kids did well, as Irene is adding. So I think that, in any case, I wouldn’t make a blanket statement that a person shouldn’t get into spirituality at a young age. Shankara was about 12 when he was writing his commentaries on the Brahma Sutras and the Upanishads, according to legend.

But I would say that it really has to be one’s own inspiration. If it’s superimposed or if one is coerced into it, then naturally one is not going to take to it. It has to come from within.

👨‍👩‍👧 Going out and coming home

Justin: Right. So then what happens when a person has to reexamine the equipment they’ve developed and the support systems they’ve developed? When a person has to do that reexamination—to see how much of that equipment, and what kind of equipment, is needed for a more passive or relinquishing life, a more surrendered life rather than a more controlling life—how does a person make that assessment if they haven’t energetically pursued the equipment to go out?

Rick: And if they’ve somehow become complacent in the groupthink of an organization or a spiritual group, all sorts of assumptions and understandings can become so ingrained that you never question them. You take them for granted.

I know in my own case, when I finally left the TM organization that I had been in, there was a period of a lot of reevaluation of ingrained assumptions. I’ve observed that a lot of people, when they step away from something like that, end up having some kind of awakening because somehow the chick has hatched and left the incubator and begins to look around.

There’s a kind of liberating influence to that—looking at everything afresh and not taking your assumptions for granted.

Justin: Like somebody once said, “Everything feels like home for a while.”

Rick: Yeah, and then what?

Justin: And then you have to reexamine. You have to see where you’re at, because a lot of the effort that I encourage—well, I encourage two efforts. A lot of the people who come to me, or a lot of the people whom I encourage to come to me, have taken part in a going-out process that was relatively inhibited.

That teenage phase you may have gone through, or maybe I may have gone through, a lot of people haven’t gone through. They’ve basically been careful. So I have to encourage, inspire, or assist those people sometimes, even in their going-out process.

I’ve encouraged a lot of traveling and a lot of experimentation of different kinds, with social work, different businesses, building, and things like that, because a number of the people I’ve interacted with have not had a dynamic going-out period.

But some people have. For those people, there’s basically a reexamination period. It’s similar to living in the Northeast—say, Connecticut—and going to Miami in the winter, where I would go sometimes, mostly to play cards and gamble and lie on the beach.

If you spend all your time in the cold, you have all these cold-weather clothes, and you think they’re necessary all the time, so you take them to Florida. Then, in Florida, you’re wondering why you’re sweating all the time. Some reexamination of your wardrobe has to happen, and there’s a lot of wardrobe going on.

Rick: Okay, so stepping back from the metaphors for a second, you’re saying that it’s good not to let your boundaries and assumptions become calcified. It’s good to keep things fresh and alive. I’m putting it in my own words: Don’t take anything for granted.

Don’t believe something just because somebody says it. Even if I’ve said it, don’t believe it. Check it out through your own understanding and your own experience.

There’s a great quote from the Buddha who said, “Don’t believe something just because somebody says it.” He said, “Even if I’ve said it, don’t believe it. Check it out through your own understanding and your own experience.”

We don’t want to be cynical or skeptical about everything, but at the same time, we shouldn’t just swallow things because somebody says them. We should be open-minded and able to explore and investigate with what really is a scientific attitude.

Even scientists don’t always do that; they get entrenched. But if we can take everything as a hypothesis worthy of investigation, actually investigate it, and determine whether it works for us or not, I think that’s a healthy way to live.

Justin: Yeah. I kind of like the metaphor better.

Rick: You do? Did I do justice when I tried to make it literal? Did I do justice to it, or did I distort what you were trying to say?

Justin: I think you did exemplary work. But what I think about metaphors, and the value of metaphors and analogues, is this: Maybe I could tell a little story. I once had a telephone friendship with a mathematician.

Rick: Gödel. I just read that bit.

Justin: Yeah, interesting. He was somebody who was actually a compatriot of Einstein, but he never really became well known. I called him one time from Oregon. I had read something he wrote and was curious, and he picked up the phone, curiously enough, in Princeton, where he lived.

He developed something called the incompleteness theorem in mathematics and logic. The basis of one of his theories was that you can’t use system A to explore system A.

That’s my opinion about words: Words cannot clarify a system described in words. It’s better to use fairy tales, numbers, stories, or metaphors of any kind, because fairy tales allow a person to extract what they’re capable of extracting.

Literal explanations—which I’m certainly using right now—lead people to think that they understand things they don’t really understand, because they’ve become adept at putting words together. What do you think about that one?

Rick: That’s interesting, yeah. Whereas with a fairy tale or a fable or a metaphor or something, you can just sort of extract from it as much as you’re capable. And obviously, a lot of great teachers have used those. Jesus was full of parables and stories and metaphors and pearls before swine, and camels passing through the eyes of needles, and all kinds of things. It was obviously an effective way of teaching.

Justin: Yes. I think not only do I teach in that way, but you said you were a Hermann Hesse fan.

Rick: I was. Back in the day. And we also mentioned van der Post. If people haven’t ever heard of Laurens van der Post, check him out. A story like The Wind in a Far-Off Place.

Justin: Yes. I think that’s an excellent recommendation. But in terms of Hermann Hesse and his Glass Bead Game and his description of the Magister Ludi, there was a crossing of modalities of music into science, and science into geography, and geography into cooking. Seeing the bead game was some formula, which he never describes, by which people explained one modality through another. And I not only teach in that way, I do think in that way.

Rick: I’m glad you brought that up because I remember that. It’s been decades since I read that book. And of course, interdisciplinary studies are popular in certain schools and so on. But what it triggers for me is the notion that it would be good if we could find the kind of common denominator of various fields of knowledge, the source from which they all diverge.

And there are educational approaches which do that. And if that common denominator can be not just intellectual but experiential—if we can experience that field of consciousness or whatever from which everything emerges, and thereby from which all fields of knowledge emerge—that would be a great approach to education.

Justin: I totally agree. I think that would be the meaning of education, really. I suspect that the only realistic way to get at that middle of the onion, to use a heavily used metaphor, is to start from the outside. And so I have concentrated a good deal on starting from the outside and peeling that onion as it’s ready to be peeled.

Rather than starting from the inside, which is attractive, and certainly in this New Age day extremely attractive, it does foster huge amounts of imagination. And it has a way of fostering so much imagination and support system that all these other layers of the onion get ignored and imagined to be circumvented, but they seem to creep back in.

Rick: So, give us a concrete example of what you mean by starting from the outside versus starting from the inside, if you would.

Justin: Good question. Well, fear is clearly a denser vibration than love. And if we’re going toward love, or we’re going toward acceptance and okayness and inner calm, then starting from the outside would definitely have to be dealing with embarrassment, anxiety, and fear of different kinds.

Not so much of a cataclysmic kind, but the kind of difficulties that repeat themselves over and over again through the day. Competition. Feeling that winning is so far ahead of coming in second that coming in second is a disaster. We’ve all been inculcated with those ideas, and we need to become aware of them and see which ones will fall away just because of the awareness of them.

So, basically, negative emotions, difficulties, anxieties, and tensions are all representatives of densities. I don’t think anyone would disagree that meditation is a pursuit—at least the experience of meditation, maybe not so much the practice, which can be challenging. The experience is an attempt or a surrender into something that’s very natural and a very fine vibration.

Moving from coarse emotional patterns to finer awareness

To try to assimilate that fine vibration, starting with something as coarse as anxiety, competition, and reactivity of different kinds, would be unrealistic without dealing with going from coarse to fine in increments rather than in imagination.

Rick: So, you’re saying that if someone is wired to be competitive and if they have a lot of fears and anxieties and this and that, then it’s not going to be so productive for them to just try to dive into meditation straight away. They somehow have to clear away some of that stuff before they can be fit to meditate deeply or something. Is that what you’re saying?

Justin: That is what I’m saying. I think that there are elements of discord that do get sorted out with the practice of meditation, but I don’t think meditation has the capacity, in our culture at least—maybe for the farmer in the fields a thousand years ago—but with the complexity of our culture, I don’t think meditation for us has the capacity to erase the densities that you say we’re wired for.

I don’t know. I have not met anybody who is not wired to some kind of discord.

Rick: Sure. Yeah. I think I would have to agree with you and disagree, just from my own experience. When I learned to meditate back when I was 18, I was what they call a hot mess these days. I was just a pretty messed-up kid, having dropped out of high school and gotten arrested a couple of times and stuff. Psychologically, I was pretty confused.

But I got such immediate results, and my life changed so dramatically and so quickly. I stuck with it without fail for all these 50 years, and it somehow cleared me through a lot of the stuff that had been predominating in my life. I don’t know if I would have been able to clear through all that stuff so successfully otherwise.

On the other hand, I don’t claim to have cleared through it all. And I know people who kind of do what they call “spiritual bypassing,” which is a popular term these days. They try to do an end run around their stuff, and they perhaps even achieve some fairly profound degree of realization, but they’re really still kind of messed up in various ways, and that can linger for decades.

On the other hand, I don’t claim to have cleared through it all. And I know people who kind of do what they call “spiritual bypassing,” which is a popular term these days. They try to do an end run around their stuff, and they perhaps even achieve some fairly profound degree of realization, but they’re really still kind of messed up in various ways, and that can linger for decades.

I mean, Ken Wilber talks about lines of development and how you can become quite advanced along certain lines and very stunted still along other lines. Perhaps some attention is going to be needed for each line. Specifically, you can’t expect development in one area to drag all the rest along. They’re going to retard it if you expect to do that.

Justin: So, has your experience been that you’ve met people who have had the success that you’ve had, starting in the way that you’ve started?

Rick: Yes, quite a few.

Justin: I like that word “bypassing.” I’m definitely going to adopt it into my vocabulary. I had not heard it before.

Rick: Yeah, there have even been people who have written books about so-called “spiritual bypassing.” It’s kind of a popular term because there’s been so much of it in contemporary spiritual circles.

A lot of times, people bypass in a way where they just obsess over an intellectual understanding of what Ramana Maharshi or some book or something is saying, to the point where they feel like they kind of know it and experience it. But really, they’ve just gotten engaged in an intellectual understanding. They’re mistaking that for experiential realization.

Justin: I think my take on the situation is that dealing with trauma and dealing with a crisis is less than fruitful because it takes so much energy, and it ignores the fact that many crises are happening moment to moment.

And so I break down the difficulty, or the densities that people experience, into the microcosm and deal with those more in the moment to moment. I think I use the phrase in some of my books, and I’ve said that embarrassment is a little death.

Everyone has experienced, to some degree, doing something clumsy and looking around to see if you were caught or anybody saw you. Embarrassment is a very big element in our development. We try to control our image, and we do whatever we can to control that image, even seeking people who will reassure us that the image is what it is.

And so I have seen that every difficulty can be broken down into its microcosmic particle—things that happen numerous times a day. We don’t really have to examine the past or be psychoanalyzed about our dreams, but pay attention to the present. And shit happens.

Rick: So, when you say difficulty, do you mean habit patterns that cause people to create difficulties in their own life over and over and over again? Or do you mean external circumstances, like you live fairly near those fires that were taking place in Paradise, California? That was a difficulty for those people. Are you talking about external or internal difficulties?

Justin: I’m talking about internal reactions to external difficulties.

Rick: Okay, so let’s say the fires. Take that as—

Justin: No, I’d say something smaller, like somebody moved your chair.

Rick: I can live with that.

Justin: And the mini-difficulty a person has when they go into the kitchen and they had reserved something in the refrigerator, and somebody came in and chomped on it. That mini-negative emotion that a person has many, many, many times during the day, without even being aware that it’s happening, creates density.

Using meditation for freedom rather than self-calming

Being free of those multitudinous events is a lightening experience, and meditation requires some lightening. If you use meditation to alleviate heaviness, similar to using drugs to alleviate situations, that probably will be the ultimate of what you use it for. It seems to happen—not in every case, and maybe not in your case—but in the years I’ve been around, I’ve seen misuse of methods to, you might call it, self-calm: to feel better rather than to get free.

Being free of those multitudinous events is a lightening experience, and meditation requires some lightening. If you use meditation to alleviate heaviness, similar to using drugs to alleviate situations, that probably will be the ultimate of what you use it for. It seems to happen—not in every case, and maybe not in your case—but in the years I’ve been around, I’ve seen misuse of methods to, you might call it, self-calm: to feel better rather than to get free.

Rick: Yeah, well, I’ve heard humility defined as the quality of not insisting that things happen any particular way. That came to mind when you said getting upset if someone moves your chair or eats your ice cream or something.

So, there’s a certain tendency, hopefully, to be able to take things as they come and to roll with the way things unfold, without freaking out if things don’t go the way you want them to.

And then I’ve also heard you say that humility is a prerequisite to meditation, and that, in turn, meditation is the portal to freedom or enlightenment. So, let’s talk about humility a little bit in this context. It seems to me it would be a valuable quality in terms of being able to take the little things that might otherwise push your buttons and just let them roll off your back like drops on a duck.

Justin: What I think is that a lot of the qualities that we aspire to are innate and natural and were there in the beginning. I don’t think there is an arrogant child being born at that moment. I think that we have within us the capacity for humility, and it’s not an attribute; it’s a subtraction of false confidence and arrogance.

And as I said, in terms of the going out, these are qualities that we’ve had to develop. So, when we go to a job interview and somebody says, “So, how are you at coding? How are you at typing?” we say, “I’m good at it.” We say, “No, not so good.” Then we don’t get the job. So, we know we have to be self-confident, and self-confidence is sometimes false confidence, and false confidence leads to arrogance.

In the going-out period, it may very well be necessary to have that. But in the coming-home process, it seems to become an obstacle. So, my picture of humility is that it is there and it can be uncovered.

A picture I have that maybe I’ve described in my writings and maybe not is an ant wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase. That would be something that, if it were a cartoon, we would laugh at. But, of course, in something that I read—actually, something that you said—how would it look from 50,000 light-years away? It would look like we’re ants carrying briefcases and wearing suits.

So, I think the natural perspective can be rediscovered. If we let some of the add-ons fall away, we come to the natural humility that was there in the beginning.

Rick: Hmm. I often have used that as a sort of thought experiment. Even just flying in an airplane and seeing a city as you fly over it and thinking about all the little dramas that are taking place in people’s lives in that city, and how important they must seem and how big. Or, you know, I’m the mayor of this town, and the town is really just this little splotch on the map.

And then, if you resort to astronomy, which you just alluded to, and start thinking about how many stars there are in the galaxy and how many galaxies there are in the universe and all. I remember there’s this quote from Carl Sagan, who commented on that first picture of the Earth from some satellite far away, where it’s just this barely discernible little dot. There was some comment about all the wars that have been fought over this little tiny dot that you can basically hardly even see.

And all that seems to me a kind of hubris. It’s a failure to see the big picture and an attempt to make something that’s really very tiny into something that’s big and important, which ultimately it’s not.

Justin: Yeah, I think that question can definitely be explored, and I think the exploration of that question can be fascinating. I’m thinking of a place in, I think, Utah, in the desert, and it’s called Old Woman Rock. When you drive at it from the west, it looks like an old woman. When you pass it and look back, it looks like a Chevrolet. But it’s called Old Woman Rock, totally from our perspective.

If we start examining the things that we see in relation to our perspective rather than what we think is, I think that some of that humility can be uncovered.

I also think something like an eclipse is an interesting phenomenon, because people were very excited about the eclipse that happened a year or two ago and even traveled great distances to be there. But, of course, there is no such thing as an eclipse. An eclipse is something that happens from our point of view. If you were on the moon, the eclipse would not exist, or other things would be eclipsed.

So, much of our life and our perspective comes from our perspective, from our point of view. And if we recognize that it’s only our point of view, and it’s nothing to be confident or pedantic about, then I think that exploration allows humility to come in. We begin to study more of our conclusions and see that they’re more drastic and less elastic.

So, much of our life and our perspective comes from our perspective, from our point of view. And if we recognize that it’s only our point of view, and it’s nothing to be confident or pedantic about, then I think that exploration allows humility to come in. We begin to study more of our conclusions and see that they’re more drastic and less elastic.

Rick: Yeah. That point about point of view—

Justin: Bob Dylan.

Rick: What did he say?

Justin: I think the elastic and the drastic—I think I stole that.

Rick: Ah. Yeah. There’s a theme here which I think is interesting, which is that, as an individual human being, our point of view is necessarily going to be rather tiny by comparison to the whole cosmos or something. We’re focused on specific little things.

But you’ve been talking about refinement and our deeper nature and all. Is it sort of in keeping with your understanding and the traditions you’ve studied that our deeper nature, if we go deep enough, is cosmic, vast, universal, unbounded, and that we need to rediscover that?

If we do rediscover it, and if it gets integrated into our experience such that we live in that unboundedness all the while, even though we’re focusing on specific things like driving a car or cooking dinner, then we end up benefiting from the value of focus, which is necessary in order to accomplish things, while at the same time benefiting from the freedom that unboundedness affords.

Justin: Yeah, I agree with that. I think that we have some considerable obstacles that are peculiar to the culture that we live in, and especially in the U.S., because we have been presented with such a large territory in a relatively homogeneous territory. We use the same money everywhere, and we have the same language everywhere, except Spanish has become more prevalent. At one time, it wasn’t really considered the language that Americans spoke.

Whereas people in a country that I just came from, visiting Georgia—which is a very small country, and a lot of people don’t even know where it is—within 50 miles of any given city, there are people who speak Russian, people who speak Armenian, people who speak Georgian, and people who speak Farsi, or Persian.

So, any word that’s used is not—you can’t explain something by saying the word is the thing, because the word is clearly not the thing. If I hold up these reading glasses—can you see this? If I’m holding up these reading glasses and I say, “This is an apple,” or I say, “These are reading glasses,” there are no more reading glasses than there are apples. They are what they are.

But in our culture, they are reading glasses. “Reading glasses” is not a term we use to describe them. They are reading glasses. Whereas for this Georgian person, the Georgian person can’t hang on to language so much.

And I think the result of that is that we’ve become more explainers than we’ve become explorers, because we can explain with language, or at least we imagine that we can explain with language. And when one explains and comes to an explanation that is viable, and people agree with that explanation—or even if people disagree with that explanation—then exploration is very difficult.

So, one of the things I teach is that language is for exploration. It’s not for explanation. Let’s try to use language for what it’s for. It’s a representative medium. We put letters and words to things so that we can explore the nature of those things.

Now, certainly, when you’re cooking and you say, “This needs more oregano,” there’s an understanding of what oregano is and what “more” is. But a lot of the more sophisticated communication, and certainly spiritual communication, is reduced to terminology in equations that have maybe three or four or even five variables. Anybody who’s studied even junior high school math knows that the more variables you include, the more challenging the equation becomes. Does that make sense?

Rick: It does, and it’s a point that I’ve thought about quite a bit and even gave a talk on one time at the SAND Conference. Our cultural, collective understanding of the spiritual territory is somewhat akin to what Lewis and Clark understood about American geography when they set out on their expedition.

All these terms are thrown around in popular spiritual parlance, which I don’t think there’s a really clear agreement on or common understanding of. You have to have a common understanding of words if you’re going to use them for their intended purpose, which is to communicate. But it’s hard to communicate about things that you haven’t experienced.

You mentioned the reading glasses. Everyone’s experienced that, and so everyone has a picture of what they are. But if you talk about samadhi, or Brahman consciousness, or various other terms—nonduality, for instance—that are used in spirituality, there seem to be a lot of interpretations as to what those might actually mean.

So, getting back to the Lewis and Clark metaphor, I would like to see—it would be interesting to see—our culture evolve to the point where our understanding of geography is where we have satellite technologies that map out every square foot, and we really understood the whole territory that the spiritual quest is supposed to enable us to traverse. Does that relate to what you said? Did I go off the mark on that?

Justin: No, I followed.

Rick: Good. A question came in from someone that relates to some of the things we’ve been saying and to what you were saying earlier. This is from Barry Cahill O’Brien in Spokane, Washington.

He mentioned that I have sometimes previously spoken of Eastern mystics who sometimes fall into greater temptations when they come to the West. And he asks you, Justin, do you think this approach of going out prior to spiritual development would help shield people from temptations when spiritual development is later obtained?

Justin: I think that’s an interesting question. I did meet a Catholic—was he a monk or a priest?—who had been initiated into the priesthood when he was maybe 19 years old and had a very reclusive and secluded life. He became disillusioned through the process he took part in. When he was finally freed of the restrictions of the order he was part of, he went wild.

And I see that the idea of, especially in our culture where so much is dangled in front of us—you can do what’s never been done, you can win what’s never been won—would be very difficult to avoid when growing up with television and having some of those aspirations of being a superhero of some kind.

If a person doesn’t exercise those muscles to some degree, they are going to remain there. And it doesn’t matter what you’ve done; they are going to remain. So, in response to his question, if I’m clear about what he’s asking, I do think that anything that you do on the way out—and I’m not saying doing things that hurt other people or are aggressively harmful or out of the middle of the road in any way—but anything that you do to explore life, to be bold, to take chances, and to live out the parts of you that have reasonable desires, the less weight you’ll be carrying into the spiritual pursuit.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, speaking of your Catholic friend, think of all the scandals in the Catholic Church from these people who are living a lifestyle that perhaps is not natural to them, suppressing natural urges, and behaving very inappropriately as a result.

On the other hand, when I look back at my youth, I kind of wish I could have been a more disciplined person and a better student and things like that instead of such a goof-off. I wouldn’t have minded getting a much better education and so on. But I feel like I did things that actually harmed me and took some years to repair. So, there’s—

Justin: It seems like you caught up.

Rick: Yeah, I’ve been working on it. It’s been a project. But you know, you look at some of these whiz kids, then again, I mean, we’re getting a little off topic perhaps, but you know, they’re kids that are just—they have these helicopter parents, as they call them, and they’re loaded with pressures to do so well, to get into the best colleges and everything else, and they never get a chance to be kids or to breathe. And the stress ends up resulting in all kinds of problems for them.

Then, you know, I mean, if you could somehow—I mean, my whole understanding of meditation has always been that it’s something that can be integrated into an active life with all kinds of responsibilities and accomplishments. It can help to relieve the pressure and give you a respite, a way of releasing stress and becoming more relaxed physiologically as well as psychologically, so that you can plunge in and do a lot without getting burned out. In fact, it’s being used in police forces and with soldiers who have PTSD and stuff like that, to great benefit.

Justin: Yeah, it should be used on the soldiers before they go.

Rick: Good idea. Yeah.

Justin: Yeah, I agree with— I basically agree with what you’re saying. I have maintained—the school that I maintained is based on activity, and we take care of a lot of land and we travel together. We have had some considerable social work projects, which we started about maybe 20 or so years ago, and a lot of interaction. We’re not secluded and not protected at all.

And I think that’s really important. It’s also possible—I agree with you—it is possible to combine the introspective parts of life and the surrendered parts of life with external activity, and I find no problem in that whatsoever.

Rick: Yeah, balance, perhaps. I mean, even the Buddha talked about balance, the Middle Way; the Gita talks about balance. You know, just sort of everything—Ecclesiastes, “To everything there is a season, turn, turn, turn.” So, everything has its place.

And I just think spiritual practice can be part of a balanced, integrated life, or it can be taken to extremes, to the exclusion of things which you should actually be putting attention on and you’re not.

📚 Living teachers and living traditions

Justin: Can I ask you a question?

Rick: Please.

Justin: Yeah. I noticed that a lot of your references come from scripture and from a good deal in the past. I have written in one of my little blurbs, or maybe more extensively than that, that in order for a person to be a viable spiritual teacher, they have to be able to do two things. They have to be able to pass the salt to you, and they have to be able to mail a letter for you. And that would eliminate everyone who has ever lived before.

So, it would mean a person would be a more viable spiritual teacher that you met on the street corner who happens to be alive and you could conceivably learn something from, rather than someone who’s lived hundreds or even thousands of years ago because their works or their sayings have been made public. What do you think about all that?

Rick: Well, let’s say you want to be a physicist, but unfortunately Albert Einstein is dead, and Niels Bohr and, you know, what’s his name, Pauli and all those guys are dead. Does that mean you can’t study their works and their writings and their knowledge?

But, you know, you also need a living physics teacher if you really want to be a good physicist. You need a PhD advisor and so on. I just think it’s important to have a living teacher. As someone once put it, “Dead gurus don’t kick butt,” but at the same time I think there’s a value in traditional knowledge, and perhaps again the word balance comes in.

You can derive—I’ve also heard you quote this line, you know, “You take what you need and you leave the rest.” So, I think value can be derived from ancient teachings, but a living teacher and a living practice are also necessary. You can’t just sort of dwell on stuff that happened a couple thousand years ago and expect to get really far.

Justin: Okay.

Rick: That’s my—you know, and anything I say, of course, is subject—it’s just my opinion, and it may be wrong. But that’s what comes to mind in response to your question.

Justin: It would only be relevant, and I call a lot of those stories—the biblical stories—the farmer-in-the-field stories. And although very few of us are farmers in the field, I happen to live with some farmers in the field, but they’re growing things that I don’t think they grew back in the Bible.

Lived understanding as contemporary scripture

What I do think is that if those stories have not been updated, then those ancient scriptural stories are important. But if they have been updated, if they have been made more current, if some of these people that you’ve interviewed, of these 500 people you’ve interviewed, have understood and said things that are updated versions because it comes from their personal, lived understanding, I would see those as the current scripture that we have, and I would value those because they’re the product of our time.

Not to dismiss the ones that happened before, but if they can be replaced, I think they should be replaced.

Rick: Yeah, you know, as you know, I was a student of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and he used to say something that he called “three Eurekas.” He said that there are three criteria by which our experience can be judged. It should be able to concur with the ancient teachings, but it should also concur with modern science, and it should also actually be our experience and not just some imagination.

And he said all three of those things can be corroborating evidence, so to speak, for the legitimacy of something. He also said only a new seed can yield a new crop, and he felt that ancient teachings had eroded and deteriorated to a great extent and had lost their original potency, and that there needed to be a sort of fresh infusion of knowledge for our contemporary age.

Justin: It’s definitely a challenge, sorting through all the seeds to find that seed.

Rick: Yeah, and there’s so much that was lost in translation, and it got corrupted and distorted over the passage of time. Also, you can glean little tidbits from all this ancient stuff, but don’t take it as gospel truth, I would say, because who knows what was originally said or written.

Retreats, solitude, and learning to be alone

So, let’s learn a little bit more about you, if we may. You’ve had all kinds of adventures, and people can read about that in your book, but in terms of your spiritual practice, you did some pretty significant stuff over in Iran and Afghanistan and South America. I think it would be interesting for people to hear about that, if you don’t mind telling us.

Justin: Well, I would have, but since I wrote about it, I’ve got to talk about it.

Rick: Yeah, right.

Justin: I described this relationship I had with this man in South America, and he basically pointed me in all the directions. Everything that I had done as a young person, I had done at his recommendation—things I wouldn’t have otherwise done. So they weren’t necessarily personal preferences, but he was connected.

He lived in South America. He had a school of a few people, or a following of a few people, there, and people came from Europe to visit him and spend time with him. He had a history—he was actually the son of an Indian diplomat, so a Pakistani diplomat. That Pakistani diplomat married someone from South America, so he grew up there, but he was very worldly and had a connection to a school in Afghanistan, where he sent me to go. I went there on a few occasions for a few months at a time.

Rick: What did you do there? Can you tell us what kind of practice or lifestyle or whatever?

Justin: Well, the lifestyle was communal, and there were maybe 100 people there at any time, maybe 80. It was out in the middle of nowhere, and it was an arduous journey to get there, northeast of Kabul, and a good way out in the nowhere.

Rick: Was it a Sufi school?

Justin: I’m going to stay away from that.

Rick: Really? Why?

Justin: As I said, language can only be misunderstood. It can’t be misunderstood. So I would say it was a school for exploring obstacles, and there were exercises and things that I took part in, and things that I didn’t take part in.

It was interesting to me. A lot of it took place in English because they do speak English in that part of the world, because the Brits spent so much time there, but a lot of it wasn’t in English. So I learned a little language, and it was mostly the exposure to people who were disciplined, and me going there at a time when I was not disciplined, which was interesting and definitely instructive to me.

But the particular things that I did there, I’m sure they had a value, but I would find it difficult to quantify that value, other than it was an exotic part of my résumé.

What I did see that was definitely of value is that a few years after that—and I did spend some time in South America, probably a total of, if I were to add up the months and like that, about three years I spent with him in South America—he suggested that I go, and he set up this retreat for me where I basically lived.

I was taken in a truck out to the middle of nowhere, in a desert in Iran, central Iran, and they left me there with plenty of stuff to do. It was an extraordinary exploration for me because I started off anxious about what I’d do, and I ended up feeling like I could stay there longer. When the truck came to pick me up, which was the only other time three months later, I was not anxious to leave.

Rick: You slashed the tires.

Justin: I didn’t slash the tires. I did go back because that’s what I was supposed to be doing: 100 days. But it was a wonderful development of meditation experience for me and passivity for me, and lack of content, which is, for any Westerner, a crisis, because content is so much of our lives—activity and stimulus.

And probably the greatest stimulus I had was about 15 miles out, because I was above the plain and on an outcropping of rocks. Every once—maybe every four or five days—a caravan came by of horses and camels and people. I had binoculars, and I could see them through my binoculars. That was my entertainment for the week.

Rick: Wow. And you had food and water and all that?

Justin: Yes, I definitely had plenty of water and plenty of food—not the food I would have ordinarily eaten, but I learned to eat raisins and dates and nuts and stuff like that.

Rick: Oh, they have good raisins. I’ve spent three months in Iran myself. They have great pistachios and grapes and stuff.

Justin: Yeah.

Rick: And so you were just spending your days in some little hut or something, meditating?

Justin: I was in a cave, which was a lot more than a cave because it had been used for that purpose before. So it was very comfortable, and I was comfortable. It was not challenging in a physical way at all, because I had been used to camping and living out and hiking in much more arduous circumstances.

But sometime, if we ever get together, I’d like to hear and share Iran experiences, because the only people that I run into who are from Iran are poker players, because I play from time to time. And there are people who have escaped and have a lot of animosity toward the current regime, which is understandable.

Rick: Yeah. Well, I’ll just tell you in a nutshell. As I said, I was in the TM movement, and at one point, Maharishi had this theory that if groups of people are together meditating, then they will sort of create a subtle influence which will radiate throughout the environment and hopefully improve things there, especially if there’s some kind of war or something going on.

At one point, I guess it was around 1979, groups of us went to Central America, Nicaragua, where there was trouble, and to the Israel-Palestine area. I don’t know, maybe South Africa, because there was trouble down there, and Iran. My group went to Iran. I spent three months in Tehran, in a hotel, meditating most of the time, and left about two days before the Shah did.

Researchers got involved and looked at various social indicators of economics, war deaths, and other kinds of things, and claimed that there was a correlation between our presence and changes in these indicators. I don’t know how objective the researchers were, but some of their research got published in peer-reviewed journals and all. So, that was my adventure there. It was interesting. Things started to really fall apart toward the end. I remember standing on the rooftop of our hotel watching banks, liquor stores, and movie theaters all go up in flames, and it was good to get out of there.

Justin: It’s a really beautiful country, really similar to California. It has a lot of natural beauty, and the people are extraordinary. I put some effort into learning the language afterward because I stayed around for a while. It’s really too bad that it’s out of the range of our travel capacity.

Rick: Yeah, and I hope we don’t go to war with it.

Justin: And that, too.

Rick: Yeah. Then you spent quite some time—well, before we get onto that, I’ve been on long meditation courses, and very often, when I come off a long course, I feel like I went in with a rusty old Volkswagen and came out with a nice new Mercedes. I feel like there’s been a nice change over a number of months of intense practice. So, did you notice anything like that from your whole experience of being in that cave?

Justin: Well, I eventually came back to Oregon—and is that where I was living? No, maybe it was the woods somewhere near Santa Cruz in California. I felt very much like I was okay being alone, which I hadn’t experienced before. I was definitely habituated to being around activity and people.

I had a very different feeling about being alone and being around decreased stimulus. It was a wonderful feeling, not feeling I had to do things to be okay. Unfortunately, or fortunately, maybe a month into my honeymoon of feeling those feelings, I got the message that I should start moving toward passing on what I understood, which was very surprising to me because I thought I was going in the other direction. I thought I was becoming a hermit.

Uncovering rather than creating

Rick: Well, let’s talk more about what you understand and what you’ve been passing on. If you were to give us some main points, we could spend an hour, if you like, going through various points that you consider most important, that you like to work on with people. I don’t want to say it’s just a part, because I’m sure that it’s not just a sort of—that’s too up here, you know? I’m sure you’re hoping to touch people much more deeply and have a more transformational influence with them.

Justin: I think that it’s important to understand, from my perspective, that spiritual unfolding is an uncovering process. No creation is really necessary, not creation in either an external or an internal way. In other words, we’ve been presented with human life. We’ve been presented with tremendous diversity, tremendous opportunities, different colors, different sounds, and different aspects of nature.

We don’t really have to create a school. A school called human life has been created for us. So, I put minimal energy into creating circumstances. I put a lot of energy into learning how to maximize the circumstances we’ve been given. Because if we can maximize that school we’ve been given, which is human life, then all the things that we see we need to leave behind will become obvious to us.

So, I have developed tools and methods, which I have refined over the years that I’ve been doing this, basically for the purpose of exploring these obstacles that need to be removed: defining them, noticing them, recognizing them, and developing the ability to see them without reacting negatively.

It’s about developing the impartiality to see that the human condition is not our fault, that we have nothing to blame ourselves for, and that we didn’t do anything bad. But we did assimilate some destructive tendencies during the coming-home process, which may have been useful for us to accumulate the things we needed to accumulate to feel grounded, as you say.

It’s an exciting process for some people. It’s a depressing process for other people. It’s a challenging process for some people, to the degree that they don’t want to do that exploration because it seems too eroding to the foundation they’ve created.

But some people are excited and interested, although not many. Those are the people that I’ve stayed with and who have stayed with me. New people come from time to time, but not many. We involve ourselves in all the things that people do in life. We do a little business, a little cooking, and a little traveling.

In the last twenty or so years, not from my initiative, because I was not a social-worker kind of guy, but from somebody else’s input—someone who happened to be in my circle of influence—we took on some international children through organizations that advertised on TV: fifteen dollars a month and you can save a life, and things like that.

So, we took on a whole bunch of those kids, and then we ended up visiting them. Then we ended up staying for a year and being involved. Before that time, all my explorations, and I’ve done quite a bit of adventure traveling, had been adventure traveling. But since that time, all the trips that I’ve taken have either been focused around that, not only to do good because there are people who are hurting and can use some very basic help, but because it has been enriching, informative, and helpful in developing perspective and humility for the people who have gone with me to these places, whether it be Cambodia, Thailand, Syria, or different places where people have trouble.

So, that has become part of it. That’s part of what our world supplies. We haven’t had to create it. That has become part of the program here, even so much so that, if I’m not going on too long about it, this last trip we took was to this little country, Georgia. It’s a country that’s trying to move very quickly into Western consciousness and be part of Western Europe, but it’s a very ancient culture with some very ancient religion and very ancient buildings.

In traveling through there and seeing some of it, we tripped over a group of people, a community called the Doukhobors. I had heard the word before, but I didn’t know anything about them. They were originally Christian people who developed in Russia and were expelled from Russia and developed their culture elsewhere.

They have some very unique ideas: no church, no ministers, everyone has God within them, no Jesus, and things like that. It was a very interesting development. So, we went to visit them. All their young people, of course, have left, and mostly it’s the remnants of the old religion.

We spent some time finding out what they needed and put some money into helping them out, not so much because we’re good and kind, but because it’s there. They’re there, we’re there, and it’s there. It helps them, and it helps us.

Rick: Yeah, absolutely. You’ve probably heard the word seva, right?

Justin: I have.

Rick: Yeah, and so what you’re doing is a form of seva, which just means selfless service, probably a good translation of it. Even though it’s selfless, you’re not doing it to aggrandize yourself in any way. It’s conducive to developing more selflessness. It attenuates the ego somehow, I would say, to be focused on the welfare of someone else rather than on your own welfare. I think that’s probably why some spiritual teachers emphasize it so much. It’s actually a spiritual practice.

Justin: I think my experience has been that it’s so enriching to travel and to give, rather than to travel and pick the cream of the crop of the sights and the foods and things like that. I think anybody who would involve themselves in it, whether it’s a spiritual pursuit or not, would find it hard to go back to surface-type traveling.

Rick: Yeah, it must cultivate the heart a lot, right?

Justin: Yes.

Rick: Yeah. Okay.

Justin: Saying a little more about what you asked me about, the program here is very much focused on identifying obstacles of the nature of the kind that we talked about and seeing if they’ll fall away just by recognizing that they’re there. Numerous ones do.

I’ve seen that there are a lot of obstacles to lightness, freedom, and a finer vibration that do dissipate from noticing them and calling them what they are.

I’ve given the example: if you step in dog shit and you see that the dog shit is there, you’re not going to do it again. If you call it mud, you might do it again. If you call it chocolate, you might do it again. But if you call it dog shit and see it as it is, and call it what it is, you’re probably not going to do it again, and you’re going to avoid it.

I’ve seen that there are a lot of obstacles to lightness, freedom, and a finer vibration that do dissipate from noticing them and calling them what they are. Of course, there are some that are more ingrained, and they take more recognition and more internal, let’s call it, intention to leave those behind because we recognize they’re self-destructive.

But I recognize the importance of not saying that it’s not okay with me as a teacher for you to manifest that way. It has to become not okay with you, because I never noticed a child or a teenager change their behavior sincerely because it wasn’t okay with their parents.

Justin: Right.

Once it becomes not okay with you—I never did.

Rick: And often it would increase that sort of behavior.

Justin: Sometimes.

Rick: Just to get their goat.

Justin: So, very much part of the program is to give people the tools, the equipment, and the reflections so that they can explore and examine and come to their own conclusions. I’m very adamant about not telling people what to do.

Rick: Mm-hmm, that’s good. So, you’re up there in Northern California, and people are—right now, there are about 160 people watching this, and there will be thousands who watch it later, and they’re all over the world. I presume that if somebody wants to work with you, they kind of have to be in your area. They have to come to Northern California, right? You don’t do anything long-distance.

Justin: I’m a 25-mile guru.

Rick: Yeah, right. Well, that’s about all Jesus was, you know, how much he could cover walking around in his sandals.

Justin: I’ll stick with being a 25-mile guru for now.

🏘️ Community, work, and practical spirituality

Rick: Yeah. Let’s say someone decides to come there and actually comes for a month, maybe stays in an Airbnb, and then they like it and decide to move to the area so they can work with you. There you are in a group of 20 or 30 people or something, and you have this process you’ve just described of helping to sort through things. How do you do that with people? What steps do you take to enable them to…

Justin: Interesting. Actually, there’s someone in that category right now who’s probably watching this broadcast. They came to visit somebody else who happened to be a friend of a friend and stayed for a while. And we’re pretty open with people coming around. We have a lot of land and a lot of houses and are fairly flexible.

He stayed in one of the houses for a while and decided he really was interested in what was happening. So he came back a month later and stayed for a few more days or a week, and then went home to his life, which was 3,000 miles away. He heard that we were going down to North Carolina to give some help to the flood victims there and came down to help us.

He didn’t have really any of the preparation that all the other people who had been around me for years had, but it was worth trying to see what happened. He came down and became enamored of the dynamic and the humor, and of the fact that we play music a lot. We love to play music. We play music together. We play rock and roll and other stuff.

So he got to like our dynamic. Now he has decided to evolve his life from what it was, and he’s coming out here, I think, next week or the week after that, and could give it a try on a more permanent basis.

People do communicate with me by email, and I’m fine with that. I respond, and I try to respond positively and encouragingly in whatever way I can. People can read my books or listen to the stuff on the website, but I’m really not soliciting. I’m not looking for the money or the exposure.

I see that a lot of people have come and gone. Certainly more people have come and gone than have stayed. So I am realistic about that formula, and I am okay with that. If somebody comes around whom I don’t really think I can help, I’ll tell them that I don’t really think I can help them.

Sometimes that even happens with people who have been around for a while. I see that it’s necessary for them to move on to have a different experience, and I tell them that. I’m not looking to create longevity in that regard.

Rick: So how does the whole thing get supported? You said you have a lot of land and a lot of houses that cost money, especially in California. What funds it?

Justin: Well, to a degree, I do. Some years ago, I invented the pieces of paper that you put on the toilet seat in public toilets—you know what I’m referring to.

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

Justin: Yeah. I invented those, and I have the design pattern for those patterns.

Rick: Pattern?

Justin: Patent and pattern for that.

Rick: Yeah.

Justin: Patent and pattern for that.

Rick: Right.

Justin: I sold it to a big paper company, and I still get royalties. They’re very small, but I still get royalties. So I’ve asked people, instead of donating money, just, when you go into a public toilet, double up.

Rick: That’s great. What a funny story. It’s amazing how you can invent some little thing like that and be supported for life, more or less.

Justin: Yes, I made up that story.

Rick: Oh, you did?

Justin: None of that happened.

Rick: None of that happened.

Justin: None of that happened.

Rick: I believed it.

Justin: It’s a good story. It’s a good story. It could have happened. But it’s a fun thing to say, because the actuality is much less believable than that story. So I’ve said that story. But I always tell people I make up the story because I’m not trying to create some illusion of something that we work together. We work together.

We have a construction company. We have a company that does derivatives from CBD. We have different phases of things that we’ve done to make money. And we have gotten really generous contributions from people who have lived there or have valued what we do. It seems to work out okay.

We don’t have mortgages on the property. We bought them all and built our own houses because we have the capacity to do that. So we own a lot of real estate. We get some contributions, and we work together. We pool cars, food, and housing. It seems to work out really well.

Rick: Right. So it’s like this little communal group. If someone were to join it or get involved in it, do they have to take all their savings and throw it into the kitty? Or can they still retain their own possessions and stuff?

Justin: I don’t see the idea of having requirements for participation as being viable. I see that it could be attractive to somebody. But I have a curious view on that: it really should be my responsibility to take care of the people who come here, because I know why they’re here. They are just finding out why they’re here.

So I make no requirements of any kind whatsoever. No dos. No requirements. If you like to cook, you can cook. If you don’t like to cook, you don’t have to cook. I have no requirements whatsoever.

Naturally, a person has to be copacetic with cooperation to some degree. But there are no requirements for giving up anything, surrendering anything, or letting other people use your car until you’re at a point where you really feel that that’s what you want to do.

That story is almost hard to believe, because I know how difficult it is to have cooperatives and communities try to develop what is that term where everybody agrees to something? Whatever that term is.

Rick: Consensus.

Justin: Consensus, yes. Consensus in democracy is really an ideal—a very unrealistic ideal—but it’s an interesting idea. We don’t deal with consensus.

I do practice, when I feel it’s necessary—which is infrequently—that authority position of a tiebreaker. It’s infrequent that I have to do that, but I do do that. I did do that in this case, in what I wanted to be behind me when we had this interview.

Other people said, “Well, you should have a picture of Hanuman,” or whatever it is. I said, “No, I want to have the fireplace.”

Rick: Yeah, well, it looks nice. You got your guitar back there. Are there families there with kids, or is it mostly single people or people without kids?

Justin: There are kids here. In Oregon, I had a predominance of kids, which happened during that time, years ago in the 1970s. I had more kids than adults. We ended up starting a daycare school just because we were losing the focus in our daycare attempts.

Here, there are kids, and some of those kids are older now. They’re in high school, and some of them are in college. One of them went away to Korea to go to college. One of them is in Santa Cruz and went to college.

We have had kids, and it’s an interesting dynamic. It certainly is what I consider—if you don’t have kids, I don’t know if you personally have kids, but if you don’t have kids, you have to find some way to have kids.

That doesn’t mean you have to have children or get children. You have to have something that you take care of to that degree, that you leave yourself behind. That is part of my teaching as well.

There is no way to circumvent the self-importance and self-absorption that Western culture has fostered without having something to which you are surrendered to taking care. I know pets can do it for some people.

Rick: Oh, yeah. We’ve had cats and dogs ever since we’ve been married, for over 30 years. For eight years, my wife ran the dog adoption program at the local animal shelter, and we’ve had all kinds of adventures taking care of dogs that have been abandoned and all kinds of stuff like that. So that’s been part of our seva.

🩺 Thoughts, healing, and spiritual bypassing

There are a couple of questions people sent in. Let me ask you these, and then there are some more things I want to talk to you about, but I want to make sure to get to these.

One is from Sybil Buckwalter from Randallstown, Maryland, and she asks, “How can we use the power of our thoughts to create our individual and world reality, as in affirmations or positive thinking? Can we use our thoughts to heal ourselves physically?”

Justin: Well, that’s a good question. Theoretically, yes. Practically, I think no. Our thoughts are so unoriginal and so subject to the influences that we’ve had on us that, to say that this is a good influence and this is not a good influence, all the influences that we’ve had go into a common pot.

If you could see my hands, within this really minimal space, thoughts of everything in this head are all swimming together. Then we’re supposed to be able to sort through these thoughts and think which ones are constructive and which ones are destructive.

As I talked about in Gödel’s theorem, using our thoughts to sort through our thoughts has been proven to be unrealistic. I’d say that much more realistic would be to stop a total stranger on the street and say, “What do you think about what I’m doing?” than it would be for you to say to yourself, “What do I think about what I’m doing?”

This is a fairly radical statement. But if a person hasn’t gone through a considerable amount of sorting through their own thoughts and seen how many are limiting and self-destructive, and derived the humility that comes from that confrontation and seeing that, then I’m not serious when I say that you’re better off asking a total stranger for reasonableness than asking yourself.

Separating constructive and destructive intentions within the self

Of course, if you have gone through that considerable exploration, and you can sort through because you have moved aside from all that you might call the selves in you that have disparate and desperate intentions for themselves, and you have been able to separate them from each other by moving aside from them to some impartial place where you would actually be able to look back at that and see which are constructive and which are destructive, then it may be possible.

If you haven’t gone through that training, then I stick to what I’m saying. If you have gone through that training, then, with a support system of people who can tell you when you’re slightly going off course, I think you can use your thoughts and the exploration of the thinking process.

The thinking process, as it’s properly used for exploration, is an incredible gift—an incredible gift and an incredible tragedy that we haven’t been able to use it for that incredible gift.

In my opinion, the thinking process, as it’s properly used for exploration, is an incredible gift—an incredible gift and an incredible tragedy that we haven’t been able to use it for that incredible gift.

Rick: Yeah, that thing you say about trying to use your thoughts to sort out your thoughts reminds me of that quote attributed to Einstein about trying to solve problems at the same level of consciousness at which they were created—his definition of insanity or futility, or some such thing. The whole thing has to be approached from a different level than the level at which the problem has been entrenched or established.

Justin: Yeah. I like a lot of his explorations because they came through mathematics, and I think mathematics is an interesting language because it tends to limit distortion. It doesn’t eliminate distortion; it tends to minimize distortion.

Interestingly enough, during the time that I had that exposure to Kurt Gödel, he recommended—I have very little, to clarify, very little school training in mathematics. Any school training I had was really superficial. I did study physics and algebra, et cetera, and calculus, but very superficially, and not as a willing participant—as someone who wanted to get into a good college.

But in my conversations with him, he recognized some ability that I had, I guess, because he perpetuated, as did I, the relationship. He suggested I teach a theoretical mathematics course at the University of Oregon, where I was having my meetings. It sounded ridiculous to me, but he suggested it, and he recommended me.

I wasn’t pursuing it, but I got a call from the head of the mathematics department. Kurt Gödel, who he knew, or of course knew of, had communicated to him that I should teach a mathematics course. So he was soliciting me to teach a course in theoretical mathematics at the University of Oregon.

I did, for one semester. It was one of the most fascinating six months I spent, because we were using this language of numbers and formulas to explore all kinds of things that the students were not expecting to be part of their course, but we did it.

I did learn from that that if you can reduce the complexity of your issues into some metaphor that is less complex than the issue, you have a better chance of figuring them out than if you try to do as you described that Einstein said.

Einstein also said, if I can get this quote right, in a conversation he had with a married friend—I don’t think I’m going to get this right—that he was jealous, or envious, of his friend, who spent a lifetime with one woman, whereas he had failed twice to spend a lifetime with one woman.

Rick: That’s the whole quote? Yeah.

Justin: Yeah, I didn’t get it quite right.

Rick: Yeah, Einstein was a bit of a ladies’ man there. I watched a bio of him recently on TV, a series.

Justin: Interesting.

Rick: Another cool thing about Einstein, which I think relates to our discussion about breaking out of the box in terms of thinking—not being sort of in the same groove all the time—is that he would do these thought experiments and just come up with things, and other physicists’ jaws would drop. They would say, “How did he get that? Where did that come from?”

He would take a thing like being in an elevator and having it accelerate, and ask whether you would know if it was gravity or whether it was actually accelerating. He realized that you couldn’t actually tell the difference. He came up with one of his theories of relativity based upon that thought experiment.

So he would have this imaginative way of looking at ordinary things from a new angle and coming up with whole new realizations about the way the universe works.

Justin: I have a tremendous appreciation for that capacity and have definitely tried to emulate, study, explore, and manifest it. I have had some success, but in my opinion, it is the creative capacity that human beings have to explore in that way.

✨ The self, existence, and the unknown

Rick: Yeah. Here’s another question. This one came in from Kyle Hilding in Minneapolis: “Is there a difference between the meaning or purpose of my regular self and the totality of existence itself? What is it, if there is a difference?” And then there’s a follow-up question, but go for that one first.

Justin: Okay, yeah. This question was put to me in an email by this fellow.

Rick: Okay.

Justin: Recently, he didn’t know what the dynamic was, and he wanted to make sure he addressed the question. So I’m going to give it my best shot and maybe not answer his question, but answer the question that I think might be helpful for him to hear, because I do recognize the sincerity of his effort in getting in touch with me and then getting in touch with you to try to ask the question.

It seems to me that esoteric questions of that nature can foster long discussions, but the accuracy and the conclusions reached from those discussions, although sometimes satisfying, are more like—I’m not going to say Chinese food, because I’m a big Chinese food fan—which they say leaves you hungry a little while afterward.

Rick: Not necessarily so.

Justin: The amount of Chinese food I eat, I’m not hungry afterward.

Rick: Right.

Justin: So, but you get the analogy. I think that it’s not the best way to go about answering those questions. I think the best way to go about answering those questions is to break them down into some microcosmic particles, or at least manageable particles, that reflect the ideas he’s talking about.

So he’s talking about—say the question again?

Rick: He said, “Is there a difference between the meaning or purpose of my regular self and the totality of existence itself?”

Justin: Yes. The ideas of totality, regular self, and existence are all such variables and can be interpreted in very different ways. In fact, the whole idea of the self and selves has been understood in so many different ways. The idea of totality definitely is a subjective concept.

So I would say that if he could find some way to find in his life some reflection of his understanding of that question, then he would be much more likely to be able to get an answer that would further him to the next step.

Because in my opinion, as I said, anything that I would say would be an explanation of that phenomenon. And in my opinion, the best way to deal with that phenomenon, or the question that he asked, is to use it to open doors to something on the other side of it, which would be another unknown, and another unknown, and another unknown, until there are so many unknowns that a person feels comfortable with being in the realm of the unknown.

We’re basically in the realm of the unknown. We’re never the creator; we’re always the created.

Because we are basically in the realm of the unknown. We’re never the creator; we’re always the created. We’re never the creator; we’re always the created.

Because we can throw a pot and build a building, we can imagine that we’re the creator. But even then, we’re given the energy to do that. So we’re always the created.

That feeling of humility that comes from always being an explorer and never finding the final answer is, in my opinion, a tremendous opening to growth and possibility.

So I know that doesn’t answer his question directly, but I do know that a person who’s trying to get an explanation for that phenomenon is much better served by seeing the size of that phenomenon and trying not to reduce it to words, but to reduce it to experiences. That’s the best I can give.

Rick: I would say that if we regard our regular self, to use his phrase, as being confined to this corporeal frame, then keep exploring, because the totality of existence, to use another of his phrases, is actually what the self is.

If the ocean has been squeezed into a drop, it’s going to feel very confined as a drop because it’s really the ocean.

If the ocean has been squeezed into a drop, it’s going to feel very confined as a drop because it’s really the ocean, and it needs to awaken to its birthright, or to its true nature as the ocean. That’s the way I’d put it.

Justin: I like the ocean part.

Rick: Yeah. He had a follow-up question. Let me just see if we can extract something from this. He said, “Once one has spiritual knowledge regarding the meaning of the universe, how does one connect that meaning in one’s personal life as a regular self with karma, suffering, triumphs, imperfections, et cetera?”

So I guess he’s saying, if you actually gain deeper spiritual insight or cognition of the subtle mechanics of the universe, how does that percolate into or translate into the practicalities of mundane life?

Justin: I think it happens very naturally. It certainly has happened naturally for me. I have an interesting history, maybe a unique history for a spiritual seeker. I was a professional gambler for a while, and I did well.

Rick: There’s a guy on Jeopardy! right now who’s up to, like, pushing three million dollars. He’s a professional sports gambler when he’s not on Jeopardy!.

Justin: He’s a Vegas guy. In my youth, I organized and ran poker games in New York City, similar to the movie that came out depicting that, and also horses and racetracks and things like that. So I have that history, and really everything that goes along with it, including the connections to people that you make who are less than—

Rick: Unsavory.

Justin: Yeah, unsavory is a good word. Thank you.

And so I have that background. I also have been involved in sports and boxing and being in that sport.

Rick: As a boxer or as somewhere on the fringes of training?

Justin: Training with boxers, but I never boxed. I never enjoyed being hit in the head that much.

Rick: Yeah, I could agree.

Justin: But I did practice and had some good experiences with that. And so I have lived—I grew up in New York City, and I grew up in the Bronx. Speaking of the Yankees, from the roof of my building, which was about three blocks from Yankee Stadium, I could see into Yankee Stadium. The superintendent of our building would sell tickets for the World Series for people to come up to the roof. Of course, we lived there, so we didn’t have to pay.

So I grew up in New York City, and New York City is—it’s difficult to grow up in New York City and not develop a certain amount of cynicism, which I did. A lot of that has changed. I’d say all of it has changed.

The idea of kindness, the idea of sharing, the idea of goodwill, all the feelings that go with that—the actual manifestation of those things—seem to come from me, and I never really sought out to get them. I want to be kind. I want to be giving.

I think it’s a byproduct of the fineness that comes from leaving the denser obstacles behind. I think it’s part of the natural spiritual progression of things, that people find themselves doing things less selfishly and having a broader view of the world, a more accepting view of the world, and a more open view of the world.

I think all those are products. I’ll give you an interesting example. I don’t know how you’ll relate to this one, but last year—I think it was two years ago, whenever the last big Olympics happened—I wrote an article about the Olympics and submitted it to a couple of magazines that I knew, either because I’d written articles for them before or because they liked articles. I had a very, very negative response to the article I wrote.

I’ll give you a thumbnail sketch of the article. It was: “Why is it so fantastic that we are competing and excelling, priding ourselves, and holding people up to their accomplishments in excelling at things that leopards do better in terms of running and monkeys do better in terms of climbing? Where are the Olympics, other than perhaps Jeopardy!, where our depth of feeling is held up on a pedestal, or our ability to think creatively is put on a pedestal?”

I wrote in that article that what has happened is that our culture has been—and I think this is the phrase they used in there—that we’re competing with animals.

Rick: I thought about that article and thought, “Yeah, but show me an animal that can ski like Lindsey Vonn, or ice-skate like Kristi Yamaguchi, or even hit a baseball like Mickey Mantle.” But I get your point. Obviously, they’re human attributes.

Justin: Let’s stick with the point.

Rick:(Laughter)

Justin: Because I am in awe of the ice skaters, especially, because I’ve done that a little bit, and of how they do that. I’ve been on a cruise ship where there’s an ice-skating rink, and while the cruise ship is moving, they’re putting on an ice show.

Rick: Wow. So you’re skating on moving ice.

Justin: They’re skating on moving ice, and it is phenomenal to watch. No one can say it’s not a phenomenal accomplishment.

Rick: Yeah.

Justin: But how about those other accomplishments?

Rick: Sure. Yeah. And actually, in a way, there’s no Olympics for it, but the people who are the gold medalists of the intellect or of the heart or of the pen and so on end up becoming prominent in their own right. I mean, you know?

Justin: Maybe on your show, but I don’t think so. The ones that discover and become famous do, but how about all those undiscovered ones?

Rick: Sure. I’m sure there are all kinds of unsung heroes. But then we have people like Shakespeare and Beethoven and all who will always be remembered for their greatness because of just what they achieved, which, you know, obviously.

Justin: And Buddy Holly.

Rick: And Buddy Holly, of course, who died here in Iowa after playing at the, I believe it was called the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake. I think it was called the Surf Ballroom.

Now, there’s an interesting chapter in your life, which I hope you’ll talk about a little bit, which is that you were sent as sort of a stealth agent to see what Guru Maharaj-ji was up to because, through intermediaries, he instructed thousands with minimal preparation into the same meditation that was historically presented under very strict circumstances in, I guess, the school that you had studied.

I was familiar with him at the time because I was setting up TM courses on my college campus, and a bunch of people were into Guru Maharaj-ji. More recently, someone had been encouraging me to interview him because he’s still around, flying jets all over the world. Somehow he’s become very successful and likes to fly jets. But that was an interesting chapter. I mean, do you have anything you could share about that whole thing that people would—

Justin: It was definitely an interesting chapter for me, and I was instructed to do that. The history is that this mentor of mine from South America had connections in Afghanistan through a generation with his father, with Maharaj-ji’s father. And so they had some connection in learning meditation and being subject to some of the same features.

Part of this mentor of mine, whose name is Raya, his attitude was that, as much as he knows or I know or somebody knows, the possibility for the, let’s call it the creator or the creative energy or whatever we’re talking about maintaining this whole thing isn’t restricted from throwing a new element into the mix.

Now, certainly in football, the rules were set, and when the game starts, people don’t throw new things into the mix. But the commissioner of football in the league, over the years, has changed the rules. They have licensed—not during the game—to change the rules, but in the off-season they change the rules and say, “Forward passes are like this,” or, “You’ve got to protect the quarterback,” or things of that kind.

So, in my mentor’s teacher’s opinion, it wasn’t impossible that the creator threw a new element into that. There could be a finger-snapping that happened, or an instantaneous enlightenment that happened, where a person could be introduced to meditation with no preliminary preparation, purpose, or process whatsoever.

Somebody was saying it was happening. In fact, there were people who were perhaps hitchhiking with somebody else and going to one of these knowledge-revealing sessions or meditation-revealing sessions. They would wait outside for their hitchhiker or their ride to finish, happen to come inside, and get initiated also.

If that were possible, it would mean that the creative force had thrown a new element into things, because that didn’t make sense. So he asked me to explore this question.

Since then, I have seen other reasons that he could have asked me. For my own process, I certainly learned a lot from being part of that process in terms of humility and exposure to people to whom I would never otherwise have been exposed.

That’s what happened. He said, “I had started a group a year or two years before, and I had been meeting with people in Oregon when he told me that I should do this.” So I had to suspend my group, which was a challenge for me because I was really getting into teaching. I was starting to feel more comfortable about it.

He said, “Take some time, a year or two, and present yourself as an aspirant, with no special qualifications and no saying that you’re on any different level than anybody else.” Even though I had been practicing the identical meditation, or more or less the identical meditation, that they had been presenting in two minutes, it took me four years to get it.

So I did that, and I became a premi, which is what the devotees are called. I got involved in all different parts of the process. I worked on the major festival that they had in the Astrodome, and I became fully involved in that. I restricted myself from bringing up anything like, “Well, that’s interesting,” which is not part of the program.

Although thoughts and observations came to me, I was fairly well disciplined. Every once in a while, though, I couldn’t keep myself from bringing up the understandings that I had, because it very much is not a path of understanding. It’s a path of devotion and love, and really following.

So I did that for a while, and I got personal exposure to Maharaj-ji. I got the evidence that I needed and asked if it was okay—“Am I done now?” I got the word that I was done, and so I stopped doing that.

Rick: Just in case people were wondering, he was the guy—many people listening to this won’t even have been born then—but back in the early ’70s, he was famous as the 14-year-old perfect guru, and he made a bit of a splash back then.

Justin: Yeah, he was 16 at the time I got involved.

Rick: Uh-huh. Okay. So, I mean, did you feel like it was a legitimate thing that was being presented and that people were benefiting from it, or do you think it was a pearls-before-swine kind of arrangement, where people, due to lack of preparation, couldn’t really benefit from what was being thrown out to such large numbers?

Justin: Since then, my understanding is that his program has come to involve a lot more preparation and a lot less dissemination in numbers.

I can’t say—I would restrict myself from saying that I don’t believe in his awesome sincerity, his awesome energy, his goodwill, and his history. Anybody who’s going to put themselves in that position, I find it very remote to be critical of, even though I may disagree. Probably a number of the people that you’ve interviewed, if I listened to what they had to say, I would disagree with them.

But it’s the life of trying to put forth what you understand and have people follow it in the way that you understand it. It ain’t no honeymoon. So anybody who’s doing that, I have respect for, and I’m not going to be critical about it.

📚 Teachers, communities, and imperfect human beings

Rick: I kind of feel that way too, which is sort of an underlying premise of this show. I don’t necessarily feel that anybody has all the answers, but all these people are contributing what they can, and—

Justin: I’m trying my best.

Rick: Yeah, and people naturally have an affinity.

Justin: I’m trying my best for you to make an exception in my case.

Rick: Okay, so you have all the answers, right?

Justin: I didn’t say that.

Rick: I know, I’m just joking. But people have natural affinities with different people, and one size does not fit all. It seems to be the case these days that there’s just this proliferation of teachers around the world, for whatever reason.

If we assume that that’s not some kind of mistake, then perhaps the reason is that, rather than a one-to-the-masses arrangement, maybe there’s some benefit to much smaller configurations where people can work more closely with teachers, find the teacher who is a good fit for them, and benefit from that relationship in a more intimate way.

So anyway, that’s what seems to—who was it? Thich Nhat Hanh said, “Perhaps the next Buddha will be the Sangha.” In other words, not some Superman figure that’s just going to enlighten the whole world, but lots of little groups that will serve that function for people who resonate with that group.

Justin: I think that’s an interesting formula because it’s a challenging formula for people in our culture. We’re so much—if you look at a rock concert, that’s very much in our culture. We like to look up. We like to look way up.

I’m around a lot of musicians, and we’re all mediocre musicians. We play well enough to have fun together, and we do have fun together. But if somebody came to hear us play, they would certainly hear defects. We have played out—we’ve played in a few bars and for a few events and things like that.

If somebody listened to us, certainly we’re not a band compared to a band of people who have dedicated their lives to that venture. We’re very much programmed to look at something called perfection in an area where perfection is so subjective, but is recognized as somebody who doesn’t make mistakes, somebody who doesn’t come in second, somebody who has mastered whatever they’ve done, and everybody else is kind of not quite there.

But in actuality, if you want to learn something—if you want to learn about car mechanics—you just need somebody who knows more than you do. You don’t need the master car mechanic of all time.

Since our pride is so much a factor, and our programming is such a factor about that—we can only learn from the perfect one—it really limits us and causes us to see defects in people. There’s no need to see the defect in our car mechanic instructor because their family situation is not what it could be. We’re trying to learn something from them that we recognize we need to learn, and we recognize that they know more than we do.

So I like that formulation that you just described from Thich Nhat Hanh.

Rick: Yeah, and what you just said also inclines some people to gravitate toward teachers who proclaim themselves as being perfect or ultimate or the best, or some such thing. That can be a tricky situation because you want to hitch your wagon to a star, but then it turns out to be a falling star instead of an ascending star. People can get dragged quite far afield by a teacher who goes off the rails while all the while proclaiming himself perfect, impeccable, irrefutable, or whatever.

Justin: Or the teacher may not have even claimed that. Near our community is the Ananda community, which was started—in fact, the original Ananda community is about five miles from where our place is. It was started by Yogananda, clearly a remarkable person, and continued by some of his disciples.

It’s very possible, although I don’t know the subtleties of the history, that some of the people from there—one in particular lives here with us now and has told us some of the subtleties of the history—were more projected into that position of presenting themselves in that way than they chose to present themselves in that way.

Rick: Yogananda or the person who set up Ananda?

Justin: No, the descendant.

Rick: Yeah, yeah, okay.

Justin: And that’s unfortunate when that happens, because if everyone’s looking at you like you are perfect, you may very well feel the necessity to project that image, and that’s very tricky.

I think that it’s more realistic, and my situation has a very strong fail-safe on it because I have dealt with the same people and similar people, and even the new people who have come around. I live with them, I work with them, I cook with them, I fix cars with them, I do carpentry with them, I mow hay with them, and we do our stuff together.

If there are any defects or shortcomings that they’re going to see, they’re going to see them.

Rick: That’s good. It’s a good model. It’s like being married.

Justin: It’s very much like being married, except there are some limitations that I have to maintain.

🎵 Music, Georgia, and closing reflections

Rick: Yeah, right. Good point. Alrighty, well, if I ever come out there, I hope you have a drum set because I used to be a drummer. I’m 50 years out of practice, but I’m sure I can still play them.

Justin: Not only do we have a drum set, but we have a music studio that we’ve set up, and we go in there and we play and we rock out and we write some of our own stuff, which is fun.

When we were in Georgia, we adapted one of our songs in Georgia, the country, to sing for them, and they’re a singing culture. And what we did was, when we presented ourselves to them to hear their singing and their ritual, we sang our song, which we had adapted to their language and their places, and they loved it.

Rick: Cool. You could have sung “Back in the USSR.” That song mentions Georgia.

Yeah, it does, but the USSR…

I know, it’s disbanded, right?

Justin: A little bit. Not in such good terms anymore.

Rick: Oh, I see, right. Well, there is no USSR. Georgia used to be part of it. Now there’s just Russia and all the other things that have broken up.

Justin: And Russia has taken some big chunks, big bites out of Georgia.

Rick: Yeah, and Ukraine.

Justin: And Ukraine as well, yeah.

Rick: Anyway, we’re getting into politics, so we better wrap it up. So it’s been great talking to you, Justin.

Justin: I’ve enjoyed it as well.

Rick: Yeah, me too. I will set up a page on batgap.com where your interview will be and your bio and your photo and links to your book on Amazon and a link to your website. And so people can go to that page and then follow up on all that stuff. And they can get in touch with you if they’re interested in getting more involved. And I’m sure there’s some kind of contact form or something on your website, right?

Justin: Yeah, there is.

Rick: And let’s see. It just about covers it. So those who are familiar with this show, I don’t need to hear all this, but those to whom it may be new, I just want to mention there’s an audio podcast of it if you’d like to listen to and subscribe to that and listen to just the audio. There’s an email thing where you can be notified of each new interview once it’s posted. And a number of other things if you just poke around through the menus on batgap.com, you’ll find them. So thanks for listening or watching, and thank you again very much, Justin. It’s been wonderful spending some time with you.

Justin: I’ve appreciated it. I’ve learned some things, and I hope you have too.

Rick: Oh, definitely. Always learning. As Jeremy said in The Yellow Submarine, “So little time, so much to know.”

Justin: Yeah.

Rick: Alright, thanks. Thanks to those of you listening or watching. Next week I’ll be speaking with a young woman named Leah Cox from the UK. [Music]