Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week is Karen Richards. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because Karen and I had a talk last September, and when we were finished, we had stopped the recording and we kept talking about things. We thought, “Wait a minute, we should be recording this stuff. This is good stuff.” So we said, “Well, let’s do another one.” So we decided to. Since then, Karen has been to India and had all sorts of adventures, which we’ll talk about. So it’s great to have you back, Karen.
Karen: Thank you. Thank you for welcoming me back.
Rick: You’re welcome. No relation to Keith Richards, are you?
Karen: Who’s that? Is he from the Stones?
Rick: Yeah, the Rolling Stones.
Karen: I wish. (laughing)
Rick: I thought maybe he was your uncle and you could retire pretty soon.
Karen: No. (laughing)
Rick: I’m no relation to Jeremy Archer, so there you are. So, how was India?
Karen: It was very interesting, actually, this year, because I had a kind of health relapse in the winter here in England. After doing pretty well for maybe two, maybe three months, getting on for three months over the summer, I’m really thinking things are beginning to improve, because it’s been quite a long journey in terms of the physical challenges. The winter came and there seemed to be a correlation with lack of sunlight and lack of energy. So, part of the reason that I returned was actually, apart from the fact that that’s what was happening, a friend supported me in my trip this year, was for health. When I got there, after the first week, I was pretty challenged in every physical way, actually. I got sick and it was the first of about five episodes of food poisoning. So, if I hadn’t got one lot of food poisoning and was experiencing that and recovering, then the next one would come. And it was such an interesting experience to observe this happening because there seemed to be a motivation to go to get well, and actually the opposite happened.
Rick: Yeah. Most people don’t go to India to get well.
Karen: (laughing) Well, it’s a pretty nurturing place for me, being at Tiruvannamalai. Although that was the case, there was this apparent physical thing that was going on, and it wasn’t just to do with the food poisoning. I actually stepped on a bee during the time I was there as well; that was quite interesting. I also injured my foot on a mosquito coil, as well as getting injured by the mosquitoes themselves, constantly — they seemed to love me. And I also had a slight accident, and I injured my hand so badly I thought I’d need a skin graft, actually. And yeah, so that was interesting, not being able to use my right hand for a couple of weeks because it was all bandaged up. And I also was physically assaulted outside an ashram. (laughing)
Rick: Well, there’s a saying with regard to karma, “When the postman knows you’re going to move, he tries to deliver all your mail.”
Karen: (laughing) So it was really interesting to just relax into all of that. Seriously, and to not really care what was happening to the physical body. There was just a deeper and deeper relaxation. And I had this amazing experience while I was being ill for about the fourth or fifth time with food poisoning, because that time was pretty spectacular. I was very, very, very physically ill. And everybody was coming to the house, I had the Indian family that were living below me saying, “Don’t lock your door,” and coming in checking, bringing me food, and all these text messages from friends of mine. And I’d been ill in bed for two years, and there’d been virtually nobody. And so I get a little stomach upset, and then suddenly the whole world is checking on Karen. So it was actually an amazing reflection to just drop into all of that and just enjoy actually being sick.
Rick: It’s interesting, isn’t it? Yeah, it’s like sometimes the most trying circumstances make the contrast more obvious, you know what I mean? I mean if life is all sort of mellow and humdrum and ordinary, sometimes you don’t realize how deeply grounded you are in presence or being or the self or whatever, but then all hell breaks loose and you realize it’s still not touching you, and it’s interesting.
Karen: Yeah, life has never been pretty stable and kind of ordinary. I mean, yes, it’s been ordinary, but there’s been a lot of challenges along the way over the years. And this was one of the first times that I’ve really experienced some kind of extreme things to do with the body and still felt really deeply okay. I mean, there was that in terms of the physical illness for two or three years when I was really not able to do very much. And it’s amazing how that has deepened.
Rick: That’s great.
Karen: Because I could see there was this idea to get well, actually, and now there’s a sense of “Who cares? Who cares?” Who knows when it’s going to end? It may never end, I don’t know.
Rick: But I’ll bet you that alongside that “who cares” attitude was also the desire to get well. I mean, you know, on some level we don’t want to feel that way. It’s nicer to feel healthy on some level, you’ve got to admit that, right?
Karen: Well that’s what seems to have shifted. There’s been the recognition that actually there was this drive, there was this desire to get well. Even though there wasn’t kind of outward physical movement, there was this sense of wanting that to happen, and that’s been let go of.
Rick: Oh, I see, so you’re just sort of surrendering to the process. In other words, whatever …
Karen: It’s more deeply than I thought I was, because I thought that was already happening, actually.
Rick: But in the throes of it, you know, when you were at your sickest, or being attacked or stung or bitten, or all those other things, I mean, was it like, “Oh, hum, you know, this is cool,” or was there sort of like an innate biological tendency to want to improve the situation, despite the simultaneous acceptance of it?
Karen: There was a recognition that before that was the case, and so there was just a surrendering and letting go. And it wasn’t a kind of inert, “Okay, well there’s nothing I can do about it.” It was like, “Okay, well this is what’s happening, and it’s fine.”
Rick: Yeah, but kind of what I’m getting at is like, if you put your hand on a stove, you wouldn’t sort of have the attitude of, “This is just as good as having my hand off the hot stove.” You know, you would withdraw your hand. It was a natural tendency to kind of, you know, “We’re human beings, whatever else we may be.” And so, it’s not …
Karen: There was a recognition that ultimately there isn’t control in the way that we think we have control. And so there was a deepening, letting go into that which has ultimate control, which is the life that I am. The life that I am has ultimate control of what happens to the physicality. There is no ultimate control here as to whether there will be, for the life of this form, a lifetime of sickness, or whether there will be an improvement. There’s no sense of knowing what is going to happen as regards to that. And now there’s this sense of, “Well, whatever happens is absolutely fine.” There was a sense of it being fine anyway, but there’s a deeper sense of it being fine.
Rick: Yeah.
Karen: Sorry, the desire to actually get better, it’s gone. That doesn’t mean to say there’s going to be an eating of junk food, there’s going to be eating of all sorts of things that aren’t particularly good because it doesn’t matter. There’s still a taking care, you know, in a way the body is like a car. You know, it depends what you put into it. But ultimately, the control of what happens to the physicality isn’t dependent upon those things. There’s an underlying intelligence that is governing what takes place.
Rick: Yeah, very much. There’s a verse in the Gita, “You have control over action alone, never over its fruits.” So, you have a choice of whether you’re going to take a medicine for your food poisoning, whether you’re going to stay in bed, whether you’re going to eat more poison food. You have choices over that, but you don’t necessarily have a choice over the outcome of those things.
Karen: Right, all three things seem to be going on. Eating more poison food and not necessarily knowing that that was happening, so no matter how careful I was.
Rick: Yeah, I’ve been to India twice and I was sick half the time. I have a friend who went there with me and he said he went there expecting the bottom to fall out of his world and instead the world fell out of his bottom. [Laughter]
Karen: Are we somehow supposed to carry on this interview after you drop a line like that?
Rick: Yeah, we’ll manage. [Laughter]
Karen: I can relate. [Laughter]
Rick: So, on a brighter note, what were the more, I don’t know if you want to discriminate, but what were some of the more bright spots in your visit to India?
Karen: Just the openness, the receptivity and the love of the people that were gathered there this season. It was very, very deeply touching and I hadn’t gone to actually hold any meetings necessarily. I had just gone to experience being there and so many people were asking if I was actually going to hold meetings. In the end I gave in and I did probably about a dozen meetings. And it was just incredible, the receptivity and the love and the openness that people were exhibiting. And a real genuine inquiry and wanting to really look and actively investigate, which was deeply, deeply moving in so many ways.
Rick: You’re good at it. In preparation for this interview I listened to those satsangs you did down in Nashville, North Carolina, and I really enjoyed listening to them. I thought, “Wow, she really speaks very genuinely from a deep place.” You said you hadn’t read a lot of books or anything.
Karen: Not at all.
Rick: No, but you actually speak as someone who had. There’s a lot of wisdom and eloquence that must just be coming from your own intuitive understanding and experiential grounding in this.
Karen: Well that must be what is happening in a way, because there was an inability to read great reams of text, and still that is a problem sometimes. I can only manage a page or a page or two. And you sent me an article to read and it was very challenging actually. I opened it and I looked at it and I kind of skimmed right through. It’s like there is this sense of not being able to do certain things.
Rick: Because of the health challenges you’ve had?
Karen: I don’t know whether it’s that or whether there’s just this sense of, this feels-like-wordy-mind kind of stuff that doesn’t actually resonate anymore. And so there’s an inability to digest that kind of thing.
Rick: How about the real pithy stuff? I mean if you read Ramana or you read Nisargadatta or something, does that resonate? Or even there it’s a little hard to buckle down and read it?
Karen: I’ve hardly read anything by Ramana, which sounds incredible, because if I have a teacher, he is it. You know, I have never had a physical teacher, but there was just a sense of heart transmission, if that makes any sense at all, and a deep resonance and a deep reverence, not to him but to what he symbolizes, which really is the life that I am. He symbolizes everything I know to be true, and so even with his teachings, even with the sense of connection, there is an inability to sit and read from cover to cover some kind of understanding of that, because what’s important is the life that I am and responding to that as my teacher, and using that as a way to constantly reflect, “Well, what’s being perceived here? What’s being believed here? Is there anything that’s being distorted?” Not in a kind of way that is obsessive, but just very naturally and curiously in each and every moment, there’s been that commitment, and that commitment’s been unwavering. You know, there is nothing else, there’s nothing else that matters here. This is what’s important.
Rick: Do you find that life never ceases to give you opportunities for that?
Karen: Hasn’t so far.
Rick: I mean, for instance, when you get into a more humdrum routine at home, just taking care of your cats and just getting along and so on, does it get a little bit mundane, or do you find that even in the most un-mundane circumstances there’s sort of rich opportunities for doing what you just said?
Karen: I think there’s always rich opportunities, but it’s interesting, coming back from India this time, there’s been a noticeable contrast in the experience here. The first thing I noticed when I got back is it’s so quiet!
Rick: Yeah, India is noisy.
Karen: And you can hear the birds in the garden from the house, that’s how quiet it is. For such a long time, the house that I’m in provided like a safe haven from the world, you know, it was like a cave actually. And the life that had been experienced before had become this living hell, and then although there was illness, physical illness, that was better than going back to the hell actually.
Rick: You mean the nursing job?
Karen: The nursing job, the relationships, the physical challenges of the health and having to try and function in a world where the physical body wasn’t supporting that, and trying to fit in, and all of those things. It was an escape from all of … not that there was a way of trying, “Okay, I’m going to escape.” There was no choice in the escape because there was physical incapacity, but it was like a nurturing environment where there was the escape from the hell and the integration and the real deepening of what had been recognized. But it’s almost, it’s funny, I’ve been reflecting on this since I got back, it’s almost as if this is no longer fitting, somehow. I don’t know, because physically there isn’t an abundance of health. It’s not like, “Woo-hoo, I’m ready to take on everything!” And it doesn’t feel that there’s a drive there in any way to do, necessarily. But yeah, it would be interesting to see what unfolds in respect of that.
Rick: It’s always interesting to see what unfolds.
Karen: Indeed, absolutely.
Rick: It’s funny because during your talks in North Carolina, you were saying at one point that it wasn’t necessary to be in an ashram or a monastery or something like that, it was just an escape. And I was thinking, “Well, no, it can be an escape, but it can also be totally appropriate for a certain type of person at a certain phase of their life.” It’s kind of good to, if necessary, if appropriate, it’s good to lay low and be sheltered from all the craziness. And it may not always be what that person is going to do, but it has its place for them, for a time. Maybe for some people for their entire life, for others for a couple of years, or whatever. Everything has its purpose.
Karen: Yeah, I guess so. I mean, the purpose as I see it is whatever is happening now.
Rick: Yeah, but if you had been forced somehow to continue in your nursing job with all the pressures and stuff that was going on, instead of having the opportunity to just sort of chill and be in a more settled situation, it would have continued to be hell. So, it’s like you joined a monastery or a nunnery for a couple of years there.
Karen: Yeah, and we can’t know whether it would have continued to be hell. Maybe if there was a physical capacity to have carried on undertaking that role, then it may have been experienced in a different way because of what had been realized. We’ll never know that because that wasn’t what unfolded.
Rick: Yeah, you simply had no choice in the matter.
Karen: No, no, not at all.
Rick: Yeah, so after the last interview, we put together some thoughts about what we’d talk about in this one, and one of the things you said was what you feel caused your illness and how there has been improvements, etc. Should we cover that? What do you feel caused your illness?
Karen: Well, it’s so difficult to pinpoint a cause, and relating any cause is down to the causality in a way. An individual who has an idea that they’re a separate self, and then relating that to decisions they supposedly made. So if we’re looking at it from that perspective, it was all the believed-in thoughts, the actions, and the consequences. And this stems from misperception of self, and so really it was a constant state of being in resistance to life as it is, to the point that that resistance had to collapse because there was no capacity for it to be sustained. There was so much energy and drive here that it was almost like I had enough energy for three people, working full-time, being overworked in the job, running a house, and having a social life. I was never still; there was never any stillness. It was like two modes, on or off. I was either asleep or I was doing something. There was no real sense of stillness or relaxation in any capacity. And so physically it was almost inevitable that there would be a burnout.
Rick: Sure, and that happens to a lot of people. I mean, in this day and age, people working two jobs, single moms, all kinds of situations, people get burned out. But are you saying that in your case, at least, you see it as a resistance to what is, that was the more fundamental issue there?
Karen: Yes.
Rick: I mean, in the midst of all that stuff, you’re being a nurse, you’re having a social life, in what way during all that were you resisting what is?
Karen: I was never happy. I was never happy with the way things were.
Rick: A lot of people aren’t happy with the way things are. Is that because they’re resisting what is?
Karen: If we’re looking at it in that way, I would say yes, and that there’s this deep dissatisfaction for something to complete us, and that’s what’s driving our action.
Rick: And so, I guess a two-part question here, what did you do about it and what can anybody do about it? I mean, because sometimes circumstances are quite binding. You know, what person is going to say, “What am I supposed to do? Give up my job and let my kids starve? Or should I just somehow change my mental attitude and like this shitty job that I hate?”
Karen: Well, that’s really interesting because there was no active spiritual search here, so there was no conscious awareness that that was going on. It was completely unconscious, it was completely automatic, to the point where it couldn’t be sustained and it was like hitting a brick wall, to the point it couldn’t be ignored anymore. And then there was this, “Oh, okay, well perhaps my idea of who I am isn’t what I thought,” because that was revealed to be something else. And then life was experienced in a different way. Experience didn’t change, but the way that experience was being experienced somehow was shifted somehow, we could say. We could say it was revealed to be not what I thought.
Rick: But it wasn’t through any great effort on your part, it was more like you just listened to that John Wheeler tape and somehow your perspective shifted quite spontaneously.
Karen: There was a lot of unconscious effort to get somewhere that I didn’t recognize. So, you know, it’s not strictly true to say there was no effort, because there was a drive, but I didn’t recognize what that drive was about. You know, everybody is seeking ultimately, whether they recognize that they are or not. You know, sometimes we just turn the whole thing into what’s called a spiritual search, but it’s still the same seeking, whether someone recognizes it as looking for something deeper, looking for the ultimate truth of who they are, or however you want to phrase that, or whether they are completely unaware of that and they think it’s found in the next holiday, or the next partner, or the next job, or the next big thing that’s going to really complete them.
Rick: No, I agree with that. I think that you could think of it, well you could use the analogy of electricity, which is just this basic same thing, but it can power so many different types of devices, and like that there is a fundamental drive which can manifest in so many different ways, whether the things you just said, like the next car, the next relationship, or which can manifest as a sort of a quest for spiritual realization. And some things seem to be more fruitful than others in terms of actually satisfying that fundamental urge, but perhaps one doesn’t have a choice and we just kind of graduate from one desire to the next, until we kind of, you know, one horizon to the next, until we…
Karen: Until all desires are exhausted.
Rick: Yeah, and they are not exhausted necessarily by fulfilling them individually, it’s more like they are exhausted by finding that which is the fulfillment of everything. You know, it’s like the rivers all eventually find the ocean, and then they become the ocean.
Karen: Right, while never not knowing the ocean at all, that’s the irony of it.
Rick: Yeah, uh-huh. Not knowing it as a river anyway, you know. So here I am, I am still a little river and now I know this ocean, you know. The river can’t really incorporate the ocean, it has to be the other way around. Okay, so, you know, it’s funny because there are a lot of people, well-known people, well-known examples of people who had various mental and physical crises that seemed to precipitate an awakening. In our last interview I mentioned St. Francis who got very sick after he came back from the Crusades and almost died, and then he woke up from that with a whole different perspective. And you know, Eckhart Tolle’s story is famous, he was virtually on the brink of suicide, and then he had that little question to himself, “Well, I can’t live with myself anymore,” and he thought, “Well, wait a minute, are there two of me? Who is this self with whom I can’t live?”
Karen: Yes.
Rick: Went to bed, woke up in the morning and everything was different. Byron Katie was in a halfway house and a cockroach crawled across her foot, and she had this realization. So there are a lot of stories like that. I mean, even in my own case, I pretty much hit rock bottom before things kind of turned around. So maybe that’s just a principle that’s worth noting in passing here, that your illness may indeed have been a blessing.
Karen: Oh, it was a total blessing. It was the best thing that ever happened, seriously. Totally, it was the biggest gift I have ever received, and I am so, so grateful for it because it unmasked the ignorance. If somebody had said, “This is the best thing. You’re going to get really sick. You’re not going to be able to leave your house practically for two years. You’re not going to be able to really take care of yourself, and yet you’re going to lose your job, everything is going to fall apart, and yet it’s going to be the best thing ever,” I’d have probably wanted to shoot somebody. But it’s really true, and it’s often only in hindsight that we see what a gift things are. And so now there is total trust in whatever is happening, no matter how bad it appears to be, that it’s always just as it’s supposed to be.
Rick: Same thing happened to Adyashanti. He wanted to be a professional bicycle racer, and he was training and training, and then he got super sick and he was in bed for six months. And he had already had a spiritual awakening, but when he started getting better, he started using whatever energy he had to start riding his bicycle again and getting more and more in shape. And the next thing you know he was in this competitive mindset, and then wham! Nature knocked him flat on his back for another six months, and finally he kind of got the point. Not supposed to do that.
Karen: Yeah, here it was just like one big whammy, but then there had to be a committing to that and a surrendering with ever more fullness to that. It’s no good to just have an awakening and then continue on as if you could anyway, but if the realization is deep enough, as if you could go back to that. But there has to be a commitment to seeing it fresh and living it fresh. And in a way there’s a deconstruction. There appears to be this deconstruction process where there’s a revealing of the truth and then there is a melting into that truth more and more fully in each and every moment, where the unlearning of concepts, which does seem to be endless, just keeps deepening itself.
Rick: Well let’s talk about that for a while. In fact, reiterate what you just said, there’s a revealing of truth and then a deepening into truth and an unraveling of concepts. Let’s explore all that.
Karen: Yeah, there seemed to be a recognition which was unshakable, which was unquestionable. And so there was just this realization, “Well, what are you going to be committed to? Are you going to be committed to thoughts, emotions, who you think you are, that was revealed to be false? Or are you actually going to commit to seeing through these concepts more and more in each and every moment?” So it’s almost like the personality structure that is revealed to be false in the moment of awakening doesn’t completely deconstruct in that moment of awakening. There are still habitual patterns of behavior and ways of reacting to life that have been learned that don’t necessarily fall away in that moment of awakening. And so that’s really the commitment, as I see it, to the awakened life, to seeing through ever more clearly the veils of deception.
Rick: Well it seems to me that not all conditioning is ever going to fall away. So if you know how to ride a bicycle, you’re still going to know how to ride a bicycle. If you’re right-handed, you’re going to remain right-handed all of your life. So let’s distinguish between the kinds of conditioning that we would want to have fall away and the kinds that we need, that are perfectly innocuous and perhaps beneficial to our functioning.
Karen: Yeah, I mean certain aspects of conditioning, like language for example, is learned. And we could say that that is obviously conditioned, but the certain self-defeating patterns that arise from certain tendencies that cause suffering, basically, that invite difficulties, conflict, in terms of the way we react to life as it’s arising. Because on some level, the personality that has been seen through as false is feeling under threat. It’s an automatic response, like when the kettle is boiling and you put your hand in the steam, there’s an automatic translation of what the interpretation of the experience means. And so it’s seeing through these untruths with ever more clarity, with a deepening understanding that actually this isn’t true. And in order to experience that, it needs to be recognized, because otherwise it’s like a record that’s playing again and again. It’s what I call, it’s like when an airplane can’t land and it’s in a holding path. It’s like being in a holding path of certain experiences, which are fed through unconscious beliefs and behaviors.
Rick: Can you think of a specific example, even in terms of your own life, of something like that?
Karen: Well, certain experiences that recreate cycles of suffering. So, okay, let’s see. I mean, here in terms of the personal story, there was a lot of abuse as a child. There was a lot of abandonment.
Rick: By parents?
Karen: Yeah, and so it’s a difficult thing to talk about, when certain members of family may be watching the video, or, there are certain things you don’t want to cause unnecessary upset to people. But my father left when I was four years old and there was an abandonment there. There was abuse by a stepfather and there was no protection from that abuse, so in a way there was abandonment there too. You know, people that were supposed to be providing an area of safety for a child to grow up, that wasn’t happening. And so certain beliefs get formulated about the world in relation to that. There are all sorts of other things that I could go into as well, but it’s like, well, that leaves an imprint. And by the time probably a child is six or seven, that imprint is pretty much there. So unless we actually become conscious to this and we can see through this, it’s almost like closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. You know, there’s nothing really that can be done about it. It plays out then, however it plays out. So, it has an effect on the types of perhaps work situations we encounter. You know, there was bullying at school, there was bullying through work situations, because it’s familiar. We don’t recognize it, but we’re attracting those kinds of situations in relation to causality, because ultimately there’s no control over any of this. But there’s an attracting of these situations through unconscious thoughts, behaviors, attitudes, that seem to create it as a living, breathing experience. But it’s all to do with the imprint, the effect, the imprint of these tendencies has on the experience. And so, I actually am quite passionate about using psychotherapy after awakening for this reason, because unless we recognize the tendencies, we cannot recognize when the program is running, because it’s like breathing, we’re blind to it. It’s so familiar that it’s unnoticed. And so this is really where, in a way, the realization gets lived and no longer becomes just a nice idea about what this means.
Rick: So in your own case, did you participate in psychotherapy after your awakening to deal with some of these issues?
Karen: No. I investigated myself, shall we say, and through communications with friends that have this training. So I didn’t have formal psychotherapy — there was mirroring going on, we could say. And still this continues, because I feel it’s very, very essential to the ongoing process of integration, and there’s always something more to see, there’s always something that can be recognized and can be seen through. So there was not kind of a digging around, but a willingness to self-reflect on the personality that had been seen through as false. So really getting familiar, actually, with the constructs of Karen. What is it that makes up this idea called Karen? How is it she functions? How is it she sees the world? And through recognizing those traits, there was a deeper and deeper letting go of that, because it was almost like in order for them to dissolve, they needed to be recognized in the first place, because dysfunctional traits don’t necessarily operate in a bad way; they can operate in what can be deemed a good way, too. They can be seen as very successful, very charismatic traits sometimes, but they’re feeding a deep, unconscious need for love or recognition or approval, or whatever it is. And so there’s a balance to this; it isn’t necessarily something that is essentially bad.
Rick: Yeah, this is what my wife says about this interview show, that I do it for the attention. I must have not gotten enough attention when I was a kid or something.
Karen: Is that what she says to you?
Rick: Yeah, sometimes.
Karen: Well, I don’t know about that. I mean I think ultimately what it’s about, we can only lie to ourself, so this isn’t about anybody else’s opinion necessarily; this is about our own self, ruthless self-honesty, about any attempts to manipulate experiencing in some way.
Rick: So in terms of the specific problem you outlined, the abuse and the bullying and so on, can you maybe go more deeply into how you have actually gone about processing that? Perhaps it was totally spontaneous, but how has the working through of that particular impression proceeded since your awakening?
Karen: Well I recognize that actually that kind of imprint, I mean it could be many reasons, but there was this sense of being a people pleaser, and that was very evident in my choice of career. I gave my life in service as a nurse, and it was something that really I was very passionate about. So I actually went around nurturing everybody else and taking care of everybody else, because it was a symptom of my own lack of nurturing, my own lack of receiving love and affection.
Rick: Well that almost seems like an example of what you just said, that a minus can be turned into a plus. I mean it’s good to serve others and to help others and so on.
Karen: It was totally dysfunctional actually, Rick, to the point that it burnt me out. So that isn’t a healthy service. You know it can be seen as good in the eyes of the world, but actually it was coming from a deeply unconscious, deeply dysfunctional place.
Rick: I see what you mean. It was almost like you were tossing out money on the street to help people, but without much in your bank account.
Karen: Exactly, absolutely, to the point that there was nothing left, and it was completely self-defeating. And so it can be seen as good in the eyes of others, shall we say, of the world, but really it wasn’t good at all. It was deeply unconscious, and yet because it can be seen to be good, you know, that’s another distortion in actual fact. And so it’s really about getting to the truth of that and seeing through any attempts to manipulate. It’s really a movement away, it’s an attempt to get something which is being overlooked, which is what you truly are, which is already complete in its fullness anyway.
Rick: So how about now, what sort of processing of conditioned tendencies do you find yourself going through? And maybe it’s not even relevant to bring up specific ones, you know, “I’m processing this and I’m processing that,” but maybe even, well, if you wish you can, or maybe a more broad sort of sketch of how this process goes on a day-to-day basis.
Karen: Well just really looking at the example that I just gave you regarding serving others, there was really, how to explain this? Life was never my own, and I don’t really want to relate it to the sense of individuality, I don’t mean it in that way. But prior to the recognition, my life was never my own. It was always about what other people wanted, always trying to fit in with what other people either wanted me to be or what I thought would gain some kind of approval or sense of appreciation from someone. And that was just totally dysfunctional, and so that was seen through. And then there is this knowing, by being rooted ever more fully, ever more deeply in each and every moment in the truth, that right action doesn’t spring from there, it’s moment-specific. And if that means upsetting an apparent someone, it isn’t coming from wanting to upset them, it’s actually coming from, “Well this is what feels true in this moment, and if someone doesn’t like it, well then that’s very unfortunate.” But before that would be something that would never have even entertained, you know, there would have been soul-searching, a sense of not feeling happy about the fact that I supposedly upset someone else, and of course we’re not in control of any of that. So there is a really stepping into the life that is always here, and really moving as that life.
Rick: Well it’s interesting because your life has sort of transformed into one still of serving others, but it’s in a different capacity. I mean you’re doing this spiritual stuff, giving satsangs and teaching and so on.
Karen: I’m actually serving myself. I’m actually serving the One. I don’t see it as serving others. I see, you know, when there’s total alignment with the life that you are, there’s a meeting of that life in whatever way it seems to be appearing. And so it’s not a question of —Karen wants to help others. Of course there’s, you know, I don’t really know how to explain it. There’s not a sense of not wanting to help, I don’t mean it in that capacity, but there’s just a sense of responding appropriately to whatever is arising. And sometimes that can appear to be unhelpful, according to the other person’s perspective. You know, it might not appear that there’s always this sense of doership for others. There can be a sense of, “Well actually no, this isn’t … ” There can be a closing of a door perhaps, if you feel it’s in the best interest in the moment for that to happen.
Rick: Yeah.
Karen: If that makes sense to you.
Rick: No, it totally makes sense. I mean, if I could summarize what you’re saying in a phrase, it’s basically spontaneous right action. Just spontaneously arising … well, now it’s more than a phrase, but … spontaneously arising from being, really, from a deep intuitive level of functioning.
Karen: Beyond the mind.
Rick: Yeah, beyond the mind. I was just going to say, without a lot of intermediation by the mind or the intellect, or rationality and so on, it’s just trusting your impulses and having found that your impulses are trustworthy.
Karen: Right, exactly that. And so there’s no need to gain approval anymore from anyone.
Rick: And would you agree that this …
Karen: Because there’s no one here.
Rick: You can’t necessarily prescribe this. I mean, you can’t make a blanket prescription to everyone and say, “Just do whatever you feel like,” because it’s going to just be the right thing, because not everyone is necessarily functioning from that level of realization.
Karen: Yeah, and really the way I see it is there’s only me here. There’s only myself here. There’s only the Divine here. And so in each and every moment, when we are fully integrated with that, and really there’s no integration when that’s recognized, because it’s just full in its completeness already. Then there’s just life serving itself in every moment, in every way. And that doesn’t always look pretty. So there’s this idea that we have to be so nice and so spiritual, and so we never say another cross word. We never fall out with anyone. We never say a harsh word to anyone. But that might be entirely appropriate in that moment. And if it’s coming from a place of deep-knowing wisdom, love, that doesn’t mean that we have the right to be awful to people, I don’t mean it like that, but it could be taken that way, because it’s so open to misunderstanding.
Rick: Sometimes people have used that as a license for behaving that way.
Karen: Yes.
Rick: They behave really poorly and then they justify it by saying, “Oh, it’s not really me doing it, it’s just the one who happens to behave this way.” And I think you have to discriminate a bit and find where that’s a lot of BS and where it’s genuine.
Karen: We only can lie to ourselves, so ultimately if that is happening, there has to be a trade-off at some point, it can’t be sustained indefinitely. And that’s between you and the life that you are, which isn’t two things.
Rick: Do you ever have a sense of inner conflict or … let me phrase the question. Do you ever sort of have an impulse to do a certain thing and then a little voice in your head says, “Eh, but I’m afraid to do that,” or, “I better not do that,” or, “This might happen,” or is it really a smooth, uncomplicated, unmediated flow for you now?
Karen: It’s pretty good flow going on here, but it wasn’t always that way, not in the beginning. There was a lot of kind of tussling, I guess, between the old way and the conditioned way, because often what seems natural to choose is actually what is familiar, no matter how bad that is, rather than plunging into not knowing. That’s the trade-off. We go for something we know, even if it’s awful, or we actually just rest completely in not knowing and allow the life that we are to direct us in whatever way. And there comes a moment, and I don’t even know, I don’t want to even phrase it like that because it can be so misunderstood, but where it’s seen that there isn’t really any choice anyway in that. It’s just a natural movement that seems to take over.
Rick: My next question, which just occurred to me spontaneously, which I’ll actually edit out if you wish, but let me just ask it, and that is, since your awakening I know of one intimate romantic relationship that you got involved with. I don’t know if there have been others, you can say yes or no, but how has this realization kind of panned out in terms of that sort of thing? Because those sorts of things are often the most challenging.
Karen: Well, relationship is where we get to see all our stuff, actually, and so it can be tremendously beneficial on every level. And here there was this idea, in a way, of what it would be like to be in awakened relationship and what that meant, and my experience of that wasn’t that at all, actually. And, you know, I can’t speak for the other, but I saw things on both sides of the equation that were going on, and there wasn’t necessarily an openness or a receptivity to explore those things.
Rick: On both sides there wasn’t, or just on the other side?
Karen: I perceived it to be on the other side, and I was witnessing all sorts of stuff, and there was a real wanting to explore that, actually, and to really look at what was going on, but it’s very difficult to do that in a dynamic where — how can I phrase this? — it appeared that the other knew everything.
Rick: The other felt that he knew everything, or it appeared to whom that the other knew everything? Just what I just said?
Karen: When somebody seems to be teaching all the time, in every situation, when there’s nobody really to teach, you know, this can be extremely difficult, and I’m not necessarily sure this is appropriate for broadcasting, so we’ll have to see.
Rick: Well, we’re dancing around it, I don’t want to …
Karen: I don’t want to cause any issues.
Rick: Neither do I, and I’m very fond of the fellow we’re referring to, but it’s a legitimate concern, I think, and I think people will find it interesting, and I’m kind of trying to discuss this with total respect and appreciation for both parties, but it’s a fascinating topic, actually, relationships among awakened people, and how ideal or problematic they may be.
Karen: Well, first of all, there’s no awakened person as I see it. There’s only life expressing itself, however it’s expressing itself, and an opportunity to see all the ways that we’re deceiving ourselves. And in my last relationship there were so many blind spots that were seen here, and the way I see it is people don’t come together by accident. You know, they might not have the same tendencies operating, but those tendencies fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. And so, there was a waking up from certain blind spots that I was really willing to explore that didn’t seem to be, you know, a receptiveness to that exploration, and I was given an opportunity to express that, and that wasn’t met with any openness either. And so, because there appeared to be other agendas operating there, and, everybody’s fine, everybody’s doing what they need to be doing, but what was actually recognized here was also, for so long there was this need for an apparent other, for completeness. And so now, it’s really recognized that that has been let go of, actually, And anything that comes along — life will decide, the life that I am will decide that, and it potentially is the icing on the cake — I don’t need it for anything. I’m already full in my completeness. Every relationship is an expression with the One, the One life. And so, that’s it. And there’s just… Wasn’t that the case even during your last relationship? That it was based, I mean, that there was a completeness and a fullness? No! But that was post-awakening, so somehow the awakening hadn’t ripened into a maturity where, there was no sense of need. Not at that point, actually, no, if I’m being completely honest. You know, there was a lot of… because there had been so much struggle and so much suffering, I think, throughout the life of this particular expression, there was all sorts of things that had to unravel. And if we haven’t particularly suffered in our life, we haven’t got the capacity to be able to really understand that and to be able to meet that. And often there can be differences, of course, in experience, different levels of maturity, we could say, different levels of capacity to really go into this. There can be sometimes transcendence operating, what I call “hanging out in emptiness” and avoiding the human side of our experience because it gets so messy, and not wanting to meet certain things about ourselves. And so, I think I can be quite a challenging partner because I am wanting to, not necessarily as a vendetta, but to explore. And sometimes we want a safe option. We don’t want somebody who challenges us too much.
Rick: Yeah, you brought out a lot of good points there. And even the age and maturity point is germane to this particular discussion, because regardless of the dimension of awakening as a functioning entity, we have certain life experience, certain maturity, certain wisdom that accumulates regardless of awakening with age, with life experience. And there might be a disparity there between two people who have undergone an awakening.
Karen: Totally, totally. I mean, here there was, parents weren’t married when I was born and divorced by the time I was five. Step-parent abuse, children from other relationships in terms of my parents, you know, both having children in other partnerships. You know, in terms of my own career, witnessing death and dying from the age of 16, working in intensive care, so dealing with a lot of trauma, and people going to work and actually walking into someone’s personal crisis every single day. And I did that for the best part of 15, 16 years. And so, not everybody has exposure to those sorts of things, and dealing with buying property and all the things that go along with what most people deal with on a regular basis. I crammed a lot into my 38 years so far.
Rick: And there’s something to be said for that. I mean, it’s obviously, well, as you were saying earlier, challenging experiences can be a great blessing, and we do grow in wisdom through them. It’s not that they’re just sort of a drag and a stressful aspect of life that we would rather have done without.
Karen: No, and it’s been amazing to reflect, in terms of what you were saying, the tendencies on the types of partners that I attracted over the years. Not that there’s been that many, but there’s been big gaps in between, and because there was no kind of… one of the tendencies could be avoidance of relationships, because there’s been such a lot of pain there, in terms of my personal history as a child. And then we tend to choose partners who bring out those most painful dynamics, actually, to do with childhood abandonment, maybe mistrust, abuse, and all sorts of issues. Actually, that’s what relationships do. We tend to pick those that do bring up all those things in the dynamic. And so, relationship can be a very powerful opportunity to heal those misperceptions. And even if the other person isn’t open to that, there’s the self-reflection and the seeing through of certain relationship choices. And it’s been interesting because there’s been opportunity here, but the sorts of opportunities that I may have taken before are not an option anymore. So, it’s like being there, done that, got the t-shirt, and there’s nothing in it. There’s nothing in any experience, actually. And so, stepping into the familiar is not an option now, actually, not at all.
Rick: The bar has been raised.
Karen: Well, there’s no need for it, and if it comes, it’s going to enhance. I mean, I don’t mean there’s going to be something that’s going to get better, I don’t mean it like that, but often what we think is a recipe for happiness often turns out to be a recipe for suffering.
Rick: Oh yeah, and I mean, since we’re on this whole topic of relationships, it’s so obvious, looking at even celebrities in the news all the time, that so many people chase after relationships, expecting them to provide completion or fulfillment, and they’re just barking up the wrong tree.
Karen: They’re looking for love in the wrong place, when it’s here.
Rick: Yeah, like the song says.
Karen: Yeah, totally. So, really it’s always an invitation to see what is true and to recognize what is true, and it isn’t found in experience. It isn’t found in a specific thing that is going to complete us, and we get burned until we see that.
Rick: Yeah, well you used the term “icing on the cake” a little while ago. I mean, the cake in this case would be having become grounded in, we could say, inner fulfillment, you know, a foundation of fulfillment that’s not dependent upon changing circumstances, and then with that foundation, then, like you’ve just expressed, it sort of doesn’t matter whether a relationship manifests or not, but if it does, it’s going to be for completely different reasons than it would have been if there was emptiness inside and that lack of fulfillment.
Karen: Right, and who knows? I have no idea what life will bring, but whatever life brings is absolutely fine. You know, there’s nothing more. There’s nothing more than this. There’s nothing more than the life that you are, and so just enjoy, you know? Because even vomiting can be fun, I can vouch for that now.
Rick: Yeah, I can relate. Okay, let’s shift gears a little bit. You said, you mentioned that you were a medium, like a psychic, for five years prior to the awakening experience, and you hadn’t mentioned that in the first interview.
Karen: It didn’t come up, did it?
Rick: What was that all about?
Karen: Ever since I was a child I had a lot of psychic and mysterious experiences, actually, and there was some kind of leaning towards it in the family. I remember when I was 11 years old, my great-grandmother died, and I know that a lot of people perhaps wouldn’t know their great-grandmother, but I did. She was a wonderful woman, and I was very close to my mom’s mom, and it was actually my mom’s nan, my mom’s grandmother. So there was a real closeness with my nan and my great-nan, as I called her. And when she died at the age of 11, my nan was very distraught and there seemed to be really an interest in — not that she said she went to mediums or anything like that, but we talked loosely about some experiences that had happened and I could relate to it, things that I felt and not that I’d ever experienced hearing anything or seeing anything, but there was just this sense of, “Well, there’s got to be more to life than this.” When my nan died in 2000, my granddad, her husband, experienced all sorts of phenomena. He said he’d heard her voice and different things, and I’d sensed presence in my first property and I’d had — I can’t even think of what they were now, but certain psychic and mysterious experiences that were leading me to investigate. I think at the age of 16 I’d read certain books on life after death and that kind of thing. But really, what sort of clinched it was when he passed, when my maternal grandfather passed in 2003, and within days I heard his voice. I started seeing auras, actually, and there was then a real interest in psychic phenomena and development, and so I contacted my local spiritualist church and that kind of started the ball rolling, really. Because while I was seeing things — I remember being on the intensive care unit on a night shift and watching my colleagues walk around the intensive care unit, and I could see their auras. And you know, I was just absolutely fascinated with this. I’ve always been very practically minded and had my feet pretty firmly on the ground, and so I was kind of thinking, “Wow, this is amazing.”
Rick: Were the lights kind of dim in intensive care? Did that make it easier to see the auras?
Karen: At night they were, because obviously, yeah. And so it was like a dimly lit environment, you could still see the monitors, obviously, and everything, and ventilators. But it was like, I don’t know whether you’ve ever … we’ve got a cereal in the UK called “Ready Breck.”
Rick: What’s it called?
Karen: Have you heard of Ready Breck?
Rick: No.
Karen: Ready Breck is some kind of oat thing. Anyway, there was an advert for Ready Breck and it was like this glow around a person, a cartoon character with this glow around, and it was like that, it was like seeing that. Only two inches away from the physical form, there was this clear, yet well-defined outline that I could see. And then a few weeks later I started seeing colors as well, and feeling energies and hearing voices and having all sorts of experiences, which are probably too long to go into in this interview. But I had what I felt was actually overwhelming physical evidence that there was an alternative reality, and messages from my grandfather and seeing things.
Rick: When people died in intensive care, would you see their souls leave their bodies or anything like that?
Karen: The interesting thing was, after that experience, I never witnessed — oh, hang on, no, I didn’t actually — I would never see a soul leave a body like that. I can’t remember being around a death after that, actually.
Rick: Just coincidentally, it didn’t happen after you started seeing the auras?
Karen: I can’t recall, actually, a time when I was — or it was daylight and there’s a different kind of …
Rick: Yeah, a little harder to see.
Karen: Yeah, but I remember being with a patient, actually, and this was pretty unusual to have a patient who was able to just kind of walk around on intensive care, but there was no bed for her on the ward. I remember taking her to the visitors’ room for a shower, and suddenly she started talking to me about this experience she had of watching her mother’s death. She said that her mother was sitting in the chair and when her mother died, she saw this light leave the body and go through the ceiling. She looked at her mother and she said it was like a snake shedding its skin, and she felt like, “You can just get rid of that now because my mother is gone.” And I could really relate to the energy, the way she described the light was what I was seeing in terms of the auric field, so this was really fascinating. But yeah, I mean, this whole discarnate, there seemed to be irrefutable proof to me at that time that there was an alternate realm in which people went when they died. I remember being away one weekend on some kind of mediumship retreat, and it was only about six months after I’d been kind of actively pursuing this, and my mentor, who had been a medium for like twenty or thirty years, was there, and I remember saying to her, well, one evening they were having groups, and “What group should I go into?” And she was like, “Oh, you should go into the trance group,” and I was like, “Okay,” and she was doing something else. So I remember sitting in this room full of maybe sixteen, twenty other people, and I was quite close to the medium who was demonstrating at the front, and it was pretty dimly lit, but I was close enough to be able to have a good view. She was saying, “We’re going to do some trance work, is everybody okay with that?” And people were nodding, and I hadn’t got a clue what this was. She also said, “We’re going to do some transfiguration, is everybody okay with that?” And people were kind of raising their eyebrows and looking at each other, and they said, “Yes.” And of course, I didn’t know what that was either. And you know, it sounds totally freaky, crazy to say this, but I watched her face change twice. I watched it change into a Japanese man, and I watched it change into a woman, and she spoke in a different voice on both occasions. And I was close enough to see that there was no way it could be faked; it was like a smoke came over her, like a mist came over her face and it transformed it. And if I hadn’t seen that with my own eyes, I would think it was totally crazy. You know, so consciousness, as I now know, can mold itself to anything and will mold itself to whatever beliefs are operating to kind of create this reality bubble. That’s how I now view what was going on. But yeah, it was a pretty incredible time, and actually when the awakening appeared to happen, because I thought I’d discovered all my deceased relatives again, the ones that I was very, very close to, particularly my nan, my grandfather, and my great-nan, it was like a personal crisis, actually. It was like losing everything, even though I knew everything was fine because everything is complete in its fullness. In terms of the personal, it was like being abandoned, actually, and knowing that really there is nobody there, there’s nobody here, including me — I’m not here either!
Rick: So you’re saying that when the awakening happened, all this psychic stuff went away? Is that what you’re saying? You stopped seeing auras. You stopped hearing voices, all that?
Karen: No, no. Not necessarily — it still happens now. I still see auras and things like that, but there’s not the focus of the attention, and it isn’t experienced in the same way as such because it’s seen to be experienced now. It’s not given a meaning as an alternative reality; it’s simply experiencing, and life experiences itself in every conceivable way possible.
Rick: Right, so it lost the gravity that it had, the significance, the meaningfulness. It became more of a — what’s the word? — miasma, phantasmagoria. It lost its center point in your orientation, your sense of priorities, is that what you’re saying?
Karen: Right, right. So, weird things — we could define them as weird, or just experience, things have happened since the awakening. You know, I’ve seen — oh, I don’t often speak about this, and here I am talking about it on an interview.
Rick: Again, you talk about all kinds of things.
Karen: You know, I saw Ramana moving in a picture in a silent meditation room in the ashram, two years running, I’ve seen him moving. Not this year, I didn’t actually go in there this year. And that could have been turned into all sorts of things, you know, “Oh, aren’t I special is the story around my connection with Ramana,” all of that, and it was just a nice experience. That’s how it is now. You know, I have many, many visions of Ramana, and I haven’t really spoken about it in an interview. But I don’t actually have a teacher as such, but after the awakening I was on a meditation course and somebody gave me a book with his face on the cover, and there was just this heart connection, this opening — I can’t explain that. And that started me going to Tiruvannamalai, and I’ve been going there every year since then. But there’s no sense of specialness about it. There’s just this sense of, “Well, this is it. This is how it is.”
Rick: Yeah, well you know, sometimes in modern spirituality the notion of awakening or enlightenment, or whatever terminology we’re comfortable with, is dumbed down a bit. And if you actually read the Vedic literature, or the autobiography of a yogi for that matter, I mean, there’s all kinds of wild stuff that enlightened people … I hesitate to use that word because some people are uncomfortable with it, but you know what I’m trying to say. There’s all kinds of wild stuff that has gone on throughout history. I mean, take Jesus as an example, look at some of the stuff he did.
Karen: Apparently did, I don’t know.
Rick: Yeah, reportedly did, or if you listen to Tim Freak, he didn’t even exist.
Karen: Where is he now, you know?
Rick: Yeah, well, he could be. I’ve interviewed half a dozen people who say Ramana came to them before they even knew who Ramana was, and before they’d even seen his picture or heard of him or thought about this kind of stuff, he appeared. Pamela Wilson said he appeared sitting on her bed in the middle of the night, she threw a pillow at him. So it could very well be that a highly enlightened being like that hangs around and does stuff after the body drops. I’m just suggesting that life is a vast field of all possibilities and mysterious, wonderful things and it’s not necessarily the complete story to boil it down to a simple, plain vanilla, you know, “This is all there is and there’s nothing more,” kind of perspective. It’s good to keep an open mind.
Karen: Well it is whatever it is, that’s how I see it.
Rick: Yeah, and a lot of this stuff can become a distraction too, I mean, if that’s where the focus ends up primarily, you can get lost in all kinds of …
Karen: Well that’s the interesting thing about mediumship, because I was lost in it for five years. I did believe at that time that there is this separate reality — there’s the physical realm and there’s the discarnate realm and there is somewhere we go to when we die — and actually, you know, people have said to me, “Would you continue to do your work as a medium? Doesn’t it help people?” And actually it doesn’t help people at all. It continues the belief in separation; it actually prolongs that idea, and so it isn’t actually helpful. You know, all there is is experiencing, and whatever form that experiencing takes, and it’s interpreted according to how it’s interpreted until it’s not anymore.
Rick: Well that leads to that article that I tried to get you to read, which is that the point of the article was that it’s not that … well, the article sketched three levels of reality, one being the conventional level at which there’s right and wrong and good and bad and fast and slow and hot and cold and suffering and non-suffering and people starving and people rich and people poor, and all the usual stuff that we see as life. And then there’s a subtler level, which we could say the Divine level, at which everything is just Divinely orchestrated and perfect exactly as it is, no need to change anything. And then there’s a level at which there’s nothing existing, nothing ever happened, the whole apparent world is nothing but a dream. And the point of the article was that maybe those first two levels are ultimately not so real as the more fundamental one, but we can’t utterly dismiss them as unreal either. The quantum physicist can’t say Newtonian physics is nonsense because at the quantum mechanical level there’s nothing happening and therefore I can just step off the edge of this building and it’s not going to influence me, he’ll splat on the sidewalk. So there may very well be a place, in fact I very well suspect there is a place where people go after they die. Is that ultimately real? No, because ultimately it’s all just oneness. But on a relative level it’s as real as the fact that you’ve got a heart beating in your chest, a brain in your skull.
Karen: You know, what feels true is when the relative and the absolute collapse into one another and there is just this. We can talk about it in relative and absolute terms and they serve a point to break apparent identification with form, and that’s it. You know, Raman has said, “The world is illusion; only Brahman is real; the world is Brahman.” And so really this completes the non-dual understanding, all there is is this. Where is the illusion when we don’t think about it, actually? There is no illusion, there’s only this, there’s only life as it is, as it’s happening. It’s not happening to anybody, there’s simply experiencing happening, and this physical form is experience. You know, we could label anything in terms of a conceptual idea about what it is, what we’ve learned it to mean, but actually when it boils down to it, all there is is the intimacy of knowing experience. And you know, we could use the word “awareness” to describe the knowing, and we could use the word “experience” to describe that which is known, but ultimately they’re not two things. There isn’t this knowingness and this experience, because when we really investigate, when we really look, there is not two things. Awareness and experience are actually the same thingless thing, that there is just simply this. And we can place all sorts of conceptual frameworks in an attempt to understand, and that is generally what the thinking mind does. It’s always trying to translate and understand what is happening, when really this is beyond our comprehension, this is beyond being able to understand it. But it’s kind of fun to have a conversation and see whether we can actually get somewhere with it, but of course we can’t get anywhere with it, because all there is is this. And there appears to be all manner of experiences which can be given the interpretation of levels. But in truth that’s just a thought, that’s just an interpretation, that’s just trying to put into a framework something that’s, you know, when we actually stop and recognize, blows all frameworks to smithereens.
Rick: It does, but at the same time it doesn’t. And the word “Brahman,” and actually that three-part saying was coined by Shankara and is often attributed to Ramana, but the word “Brahman” means “totality” or “great,” from a Sanskrit word meaning “great,” and what it’s understood to mean in that context is that it’s not just the Absolute, but it’s a synergistic or symbiotic, it’s something that’s more than the sum of its parts. It’s the Absolute and the Relative, and yet more than both. It contains the totality, and the totality includes the Relative. And even though the Relative can be in the same breath dismissed and reduced down to the Absolute, you can take this cup and take it down through the molecular and atomic and subatomic levels, down to the quantum mechanical, and there is no cup, there’s no manifest thing here, at the same time there’s a cup, which can be understood chemically and through all sorts of laws of nature, gravity and so on. And yet again, in the same breath you can go right back down to — there is no gravity, the gravitational field collapses into the unified field and there are no laws of nature, there is no manifest universe. So you can almost swing back and forth with infinite frequency between these perspectives.
Karen: We can when we’re trying to understand it. But when we’re not trying to understand it, there’s simply what is here, there’s simply this, there’s simply just experience and the intimacy of knowing.
Rick: But without a brain in your head there is no experience or intimacy of knowing. I mean, there’s a relative mechanism. If you had a severe stroke there would be no experience or intimacy of knowing.
Karen: How do we know that? We never thought about it.
Rick: Well, you were a critical care nurse.
Karen: But all I know is my own experience. All I know is that when there’s no thought there is a knowing of that, and so it’s not dependent upon any phenomena that may appear or disappear, because it’s the knowing, it’s the intimacy of knowing that actually knows nothingness. We could say nothingness is an experience. Without the knowing of nothingness, that isn’t even possible.
Rick: And so what knows nothingness?
Karen: I don’t know, but something. There is something that isn’t a thing that has the capacity to know.
Rick: To know itself.
Karen: To know itself intimately, and it is knowing itself in every moment. This marvelous display of experiencing is a celebration of that, is confirmation of that.
Rick: And how does it know itself? You see, you don’t know. Through what instrumentality does it know itself?
Karen: It just knows itself. You know, there is the nothingness, the knowing, the knowing, the intimacy, and the experience. And can we separate the two when we’re using descriptions like that — knowing and experience? Can we separate them, or are they actually one and the same? There is just simply the intimacy of knowing, which is its own confirmation.
Rick: I would say that they are simultaneously and paradoxically two and one, or even three and one, you could say, because there is the knower, there is the known, and there is the objects, and there is the mechanics of knowing, and yet at the very same time those three collapse into just oneness, where there is no three.
Karen: What if there isn’t even oneness?
Rick: Then what is there?
Karen: I don’t know, there’s just people not knowing. What if even the concept of one is simply an interpretation? What if we can just let go of all of that? Does the existence disappear if we let go of the idea of that?
Rick: Is that a trick question?
Karen: I don’t know.
Rick: Does it?
Karen: Does it? Is it dependent upon any interpretation, any belief to be itself?
Rick: No, I would have to say no. But at the same time, if we are going to talk about it, if we are going to actually function in the world in some way, then there is naturally a relative structure of understanding and words and concepts and so on that we use to conduct an interview or to catch a bus.
Karen: Is it what’s happening? And it isn’t needing a framework as such, it’s simply what is happening.
Rick: Yeah, but what does that mean exactly?
Karen: I don’t know.
Rick: Well, I know you said it though, so you must imbue it with a meaning if you said it.
Karen: What if there is no meaning? What if there is just simply what is happening? The simple intimacy of knowing, experiencing, and the knowing and experiencing are not two. We could use the word “awareness,” we could use the word “experience.” Can we separate awareness and experience, or are they actually the same thingless thing?
Rick: I would say they can be separated but ultimately they are actually the same thingless thing. And I think the whole point I started out on here was just that we can’t apply one level of life to another necessarily. We can’t extrapolate from the ultimate reality that it’s all one thingless thing, as you just put it, and then draw conclusions from that to say that, “Well, there’s no karma or there’s no soul or there’s no place you go when you die,” or anything like that. There may very well be all those things. The fact that all those things are separate …
Karen: Only in thought, only in thought, because there’s only this.
Rick: Then in thought there’s also only cats in thought and trees in thought and stars and galaxies in thought.
Karen: Yeah, that’s right. There is simply what is happening and it’s interpreted according to whatever concepts are being applied, but that is also what is happening, that is also experiencing, that is also simply life as it is, here and now. You know, it gets very, very simple when we boil it down to this. We can apply all sorts of conceptualized frameworks to try and make sense of something which simply is beyond understanding. There’s no way to understand this. There’s no way to try and apply it. It’s like trying to pin the donkey’s tail on an invisible donkey, you know, we’re never going to be able to do it. So what this is about and what I’ve noticed here is just there is a sinking ever more deeply into that, and then there is a moving, a natural moving, which is happening anyway, that isn’t based in any conceptual framework, it’s moment-specific, and actually there’s a deconstruction more and more of all the ideas that seem to be limiting how experience is experienced. And then there is this freedom, experiential freedom, which just opens up more and more, more and more. There’s no end to the capacity to open up to what is already open, actually, infinitely open, and yeah, it just gets better and better.
Rick: Yeah, no argument with that. But something you just said made it sound as though the external world, the so-called external world and the laws of nature that we see functioning in it, are subservient to our subjective perspective. Like you say, “Okay, well there are no galaxies or stars or birds or whatever except as thoughts,” but obviously before there was anyone to think a thought — or maybe not obviously, maybe I’m wrong — there was a universe that was evolving and expanding according to certain principles, and there was helium becoming more diverse in terms of other chemical compounds, and so on and so forth, to the point where evolved life forms came about, which could begin to talk about all this stuff. So it’s like our little teeny-weeny-beeny individual structures, with their limited capacity to understand and to conceptualize and all, do not necessarily call the shots as far as how the universe functions; it’s the other way around.
Karen: Well it’s simply experiencing, however we label what is here, that’s it. There’s simply experiencing happening and a knowing of the experiencing, which actually aren’t two things at all. They collapse into one another, we could say like the relative and the absolute descriptions — just collapse completely, and there’s just simply this, there’s not even oneness or two-ness, there’s simply what is happening beyond all labels, beyond all descriptions, beyond any capacity, beyond any need to actually understand. And there can be complete relaxation into that, to the point that there is nothing else.
Rick: Yeah. Okay, good. Enough of that. So, one of the things you said in your notes that we’re considering talking about in this interview was that you gravitate towards the more traditional approach rather than the so-called neo-Advaita. What do you mean by that?
Karen: Well, what I’ve realized is that there is this integration which is necessary, apparently necessary, despite all I’ve just said. But what I mean by that is a deconstruction of our ideas. So we can apply frameworks, like the conversation just seemed to be manifesting in terms of talking about frameworks, but really the way I see this deconstruction is a letting go of those frameworks more and more, letting go of the need to understand more and more. And so, it isn’t to say, to take the mental viewpoint that there’s nobody here, there’s nobody doing anything, because really the way I see that, that’s just a personality pretending to be nobody, which doesn’t actually serve any apparent purpose, other than, pretend there’s nobody here. And often there can be all sorts of dysfunctional tendencies that are operating there.
Rick: Reminds me of a joke, I think we need a joke.
Karen: Oh God!
Rick: So the rabbi and the cantor are in the church and the rabbi is saying, “Oh, I am nothing, I am nothing, I am nothing,” and the cantor hears him saying that and he starts getting into it, “Oh, I am nothing, I am nothing,” and then the janitor who is sweeping the floor hears those two guys saying that and he begins to sweep the floor, “I am nothing, I am nothing,” and so the rabbi says to the cantor, “Ha, look who thinks he is nothing.” Anyway it’s dangerous to interrupt you because you’re not going to remember what you were saying.
Karen: I’m learning, I’m learning. What was I saying?
Rick: I don’t know. We were sort of getting into the traditional approach as compared with the so-called neo-Advaita and you were beginning to talk about how it’s one thing to say you’re nothing, which reminded me of the joke, but then there’s the practical yada-yada you were starting to say, so please continue.
Karen: Yeah, so it’s really about sinking ever more deeply into not knowing, actually, into just pure being, and we can’t learn how to be this, so it doesn’t matter how many books we read or how many teachers we go to or how much we try and investigate this in terms of intellectual understanding. Really what this is about is sinking ever more deeply into the life that we are and letting all of our needs and wants to understand things go.
Rick: And then they have what they call “don’t know mind,” which is exactly what you’re saying. So how would that pertain to the traditional versus neo-Advaita issue?
Karen: Well, my understanding of neo-Advaita is that there is just this kind of absolute standpoint almost that’s taken, and that there’s nobody here and there’s nobody doing anything, which of course is, we could say, absolutely true, but in terms of the experiential human integration doesn’t really address many of the dysfunctional patterns that are actually causing suffering. So you could have someone who’s taking this standpoint and actually still suffering quite a lot in their experience of life, and so what we get to learn is actually how we lie to ourselves more and more about that, and that isn’t sustainable — it might be sustainable for a while, but it isn’t sustainable indefinitely. And so, if there’s an authentic willingness, that can be let go of, that can be seen as simply an idea, and there can be an embracing more and more fully of the life that you are, and a willingness to see through all the ways in which experiencing is attempted to be manipulated for the idea of self, and reactions can be let go of more and more fully until there is a responding, a conscious responding rather than a reacting, and so responding becomes more and more conscious from the heart of being, we could say. We could describe it like that. So it’s not coming from a conventional sense of right and wrong; it’s moment-specific action that’s inspired by being rooted in clarity.
Rick: And this reminds me of what I was getting argumentative about for the last 15 minutes, which is that …
Karen: You won’t be able to argue with me, you can try!
Rick: I know, because you can always just say it’s a concept, but …
Karen: It would be too much to argue with you, Rick!
Rick: Good, keep that in mind. But the point that the absolute view doesn’t negate the relative considerations, and I guess that’s what you’re saying that Neo-Advaita tends to do, is to glom onto an absolute view that there’s no one here, no choice, nothing to do, no one to do it, and to neglect or ignore relative stuff that really ought to be dealt with, either through therapy or through whatever means.
Karen: Yeah, it’s a way of avoiding, actually, the way I see it. It’s like hanging out in emptiness and a way of avoiding dealing with all the things that actually have been causing problems, experientially, in relationships, in life experience. And we can avoid this until the cows come home, but eventually it will actually have to be caught up with and dealt with somehow. And life kind of ramps it up, that’s the way I see it. Life ramps up experience until it can’t be avoided any longer. And if we think we’re done, dusted, complete, often life is creating or manufacturing the exact experience that’s required in order for all of those arrogant ideas to be seen through more and more fully. And there’s a commitment here that anything that does not know itself to be love, I want to see it. And so it’s been pretty intense. The fires got pretty hot, I have to say, but I don’t regret any of it. It’s humbling and it’s totally awe-inspiring, really, how specific it is. And there comes a point where every little thing is just instantaneous, every little kind of sensation or thought, it just is instantaneously seen, and there’s no end to the depth of that seeing. And our self-deception, just our ability to self-deceive gets increasingly difficult.
Rick: Yeah, I’m taking a little online course with Adyashanti right now, I’m about halfway through it, one lesson a week. He’s talking about seasons of awakening, using a metaphor of spring, summer, winter, fall, winter, and he’s saying that the spring season is sort of like the initial awakening where the absolute view is seen and it’s such a relief and such a liberation, and that a trap or a hang-up can be getting stuck in that and then denying the relevancy, kind of the neo-Advaita buzzwords that we’ve just talked about, denying the significance and relevancy of working through relative things by dismissing them as non-existent. So anyway …
Karen: And saying they’re self-resolving, that’s another one that I hear bandied around quite a lot. They’re self-resolving.
Rick: What do you mean? Are they going to work themselves out without you having to?
Karen: Well, they just instantly disappear the moment they arise, they instantly disappear. They will keep reappearing, the same cycles of dysfunctional patterns will keep reappearing until they’re addressed, because we can’t deceive ourselves indefinitely, we can’t lie to ourselves. And so whatever way experience is being manipulated in terms of our identifications will have to be addressed at some point in the experience.
Rick: That brings a larger point, which is that it seems that there’s this evolutionary force in the universe which doesn’t let us rest on our laurels, you know? There’s always going to be an impetus to move along even though we might get stuck from time to time. Something’s going to hit us over the head with greater and greater frequency and force until we realize, until we deal with the situation.
Karen: Yeah, the way I see it, it’s like a deepening emptiness. You know, we’re chucking out things that we’ve held onto that actually don’t serve us. You know, the way we learn to see and experience life is based on all sorts of things that we learn and we take to be true. And so it’s like taking off dysfunctional pairs of glasses until we can really see much more clearly and in the light of pure seeing, which of course doesn’t enable anything to go unseen, ultimately.
Rick: Beautiful. Somebody wrote in a question, which I read to you before we started this interview and you thought, “What? What did he say?” But maybe we’ll take a crack at it again and we can pick it apart sentence by sentence, if necessary. He said, I don’t know if it was a he or a she, but the person wrote, “You and Karen mentioned a sort of uncertainty that has been discussed.” Stop me if you’re ready to respond to any of this. “I wonder if this can become an obstacle or an unnecessary source of confusion for those who have experienced the fundamental awakening yet do not comprehend the simplicity of it.” In other words …
Karen: I don’t understand the question. Go on.
Rick: Well there’s another words here, maybe it’ll … So in other words, “Their hidden mind is experiencing a lingering doubt even though the identity has shifted.” Is this what you’re talking about in that interchange? I think what the person is maybe saying is the word “uncertainty” has a negative connotation sometimes. You know, we don’t want to be uncertain, we want to be certain. And this person is interpreting the word “uncertainty” as some sort of lingering doubt, whereas I think you use the word “uncertainty,” or at least I would use it with a positive connotation, which is what you’ve been saying repeatedly about not knowing. You know, we tend to think of security as lying and being certain about things, “I am absolutely sure, therefore I can sort of be secure and tight in my certainty.” But what you’re saying is that we fall more and more and more and more into a not-knowing state where everything is just sort of unfolding from a deep place and we’re not pulling the strings.
Karen: Yes, and in a way I think I’ve used this phrase before. It’s like complete certainty in uncertainty. There’s a complete relaxation into not knowing, into not being sure of anything, and that is clarity, and from that place of clarity moves right action. And there is a letting go of the need to understand and interpret.
Rick: I think it might have been Jean Klein, maybe somebody else who said, “The bad news is that you’re in free fall forever. The good news is that there’s no ground. In other words, you’re not going to hit.”
Karen: Right, and that’s how it is really. The map is getting rewritten all the time. How can we possibly know where this is going, how it’s going to unfold? There’s simply a doing, because this is what seems to need to be done here and now, not for a goal, not for any particular reason other than this is what seems to need to be done right now. And that’s how life is experienced here. There’s simply a moving with whatever, or not moving, with whatever seems to need to be required in that moment, without any sense of, “Well, I’m doing it for this or I’m doing it for that,” it’s simply, “Well, this is what’s unfolding.”
Rick: Okay, great, well this has been a good discussion. I think we’ve covered a lot of bases. Is there anything else you’d like to throw in there before we wrap it up?
Karen: Just that I’m available, I’m doing one-to-one sessions if people are interested in getting in touch and exploring with me, then I’m very open to that with people. And also I’m open to invitations, both locally in the UK and maybe Europe. I’m open to going a bit further afield, but obviously you need to commit more time to doing that – but, some weekend retreats in Europe is potential if people are interested in hosting me for that.
Rick: Yeah, you’re going to Poland next weekend, right?
Karen: I am going to Poland next weekend and really looking forward to that. Some of the people that are going to be there are in India, so it would be nice to catch up with them. I’m really passionate about exploring with people that are keen to look, and so this seems to be how life is unfolding here and I’m really enjoying it.
Rick: And your website is www.Karen-Richards.com?
Karen: That’s right, that’s right.
Rick: So I’ll be linking to that from www.BackApp.com, and there’s contact information for you there.
Karen: There is.
Rick: And a donate button and all kinds of things here – testimonials and poems and audio and video and whatnot.
Karen: Yeah, there’s some free audios and videos there, and yeah, just if you feel inspired to get in touch, if you resonate on some level with the way I’m expressing things and you’d like to explore things more personally, then I’m open to doing some one-to-one sessions. So yeah, it’s been a delight, again, thank you Rick.
Rick: You’re welcome. Let me make a couple of quick wrap-up points. Those who have been watching or listening have been listening to an interview in an ongoing series. A new one is recorded each week. We’ve been speaking with Karen Richards from the UK, and next week I’ll be speaking with Gina Lake, which I think will be a delight. I don’t know if you know Gina, Karen, but she’s really neat. And if you would like to be notified every time a new interview is posted, you can either subscribe on YouTube or you can go to www.BatGap.com and you can sign up for the email notification thing there. We get a lot of emails but one goes out every time a new interview is posted. There’s also several discussion groups. There’s one there on www.BatGap.com which gets quite lively around each interview. There’s one on YouTube. It’s not as well set up as that. And then there’s also a Yahoo group which is quite lively and a little bit less known than the other two, so there’s a link to that on www.BatGap.com. This is also available as a podcast for those who like to listen to just the audio while they’re commuting or something. And that just about covers it. I also have a “Donate” button there which you’re free to click if you like, and there’s also a little page which explains why donations are solicited and what is done with the money. So thanks Karen.
Karen: Thank you Rick.
Rick: I hope to meet you one of these days in person.
Karen: I have a feeling it will happen at some point, we’ll see.
Rick: Yeah, once we’re world famous.
Karen: Hopefully that will never happen, just be ordinary about everything.
Rick: All right, so thank you and thank everyone for listening or watching and we’ll see you next time.
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