Karen: Intuition was as normal a sense as sight and taste and hearing. It’s just a refined survival instinct. There’s nothing amazing about it. It’s a sense that we have forgotten how to use. It’s easy to reactivate it. What’s hard is for people to believe that they can do it.
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. We’re in our 17th season now. My beard was brown when I started this. If you’re new to this, welcome. The entire collection is organized in various ways on batgap.com, which is a little bit easier to explore than the YouTube channel. So go there if you want to check out different ways of exploring the interviews. And you’ll also notice if you’re there that there’s a PayPal button on every page. That’s how we support this. If you appreciate it and feel like helping to support it, click on the PayPal button. My guest today is Karen Shanley. And rather than read her bio, we’re just going to start talking and let the biographical information come out as we talk. So welcome, Karen.
Karen: Thanks, Rick. Yeah, so my biological information is similar to my biographical information. I might be a little atypical from most of your guests in that my beginning is not rooted in trauma, no dark night of the soul story to share, but I was given an incredible gimme, what I call a gimme, when life just gives you gifts, and that is what I say is called born remembering. And what that means is I came in with the lights already on. I already knew that everything was connected, that there was energy around everything and through everything, and that there was this oneness. And even from my earliest memories, I knew that I was part of this oneness, even though there was, I even at that age understood there was no parts. It’s just all this oneness. And so I always had that knowing, which I think is a huge advantage, because I never had to go looking for it. And I never had to wrestle with the understanding of what is this and what does it mean. So what I did have to wrestle with is I quickly realized, I think my first memory of this at the age of four was, “Why doesn’t everybody else remember? Why can I know these things? and everybody else seems to be kind of living in the same but kind of a parallel world. And another thing that was really fortunate was that I had a really good family. My parents treated me as though I was completely normal. Everybody in our family was something. My older brother was generous, my older sister was kind, I was the one who spoke to dead people into the picture and my younger brother was funny. So we all had our, I mean, it was just normal. That’s who we were in the family. And it was a great gift to me because I was allowed to have this experience without somebody telling me I was wrong. It didn’t exist. We’re going to take, you know, you need to have your head examined. It was, “Okay. This is just, you’re just seeing more than we are. That’s okay.” It wasn’t really until I got into school that I realized that maybe I wasn’t as normal as they were trying to convince me. But the big change came when I was 11. We moved into a 350-year-old house on top of an aquifer, and it had the horsehair and plaster walls. So it was like being inside a huge orgone box.
Rick: 350 years old, did you say?
Karen: 1685, yep, one of the oldest houses in the country.
Rick: In New York State?
Karen: In Connecticut, yeah.
Rick: Wow, I didn’t realize they went back that far.
Karen: Yeah, yeah. So it was quite a trip because I always had a sense of what other people were feeling, but I wasn’t having like massive experiences. It was just sort of this undercurrent of I was aware. We moved here and all of a sudden it’s like, wow, I’m getting caught in time warps in multiple dimensions, I’m having daily experiences. So it was a lot.
Rick: So were the souls of all the inhabitants of that house kind of hanging around?
Karen: Yeah, lots of. And it got to be a lot because it’s not like there was a lot of people around telling me, this is what’s happening to you, this is why it’s happening to you, this is how you handle it. You’re only a kid but you’ll be okay, just hang in there. So eventually my father’s friend actually had gone to see a psychic and he told my father you should send her to talk to this guy he can help her. We’re talking very, very regular conservative people here. So I went to this person and he was really talented and he very much helped me understand what was happening to me and gave me some tools to deal with it. So it became more manageable. But at the same time, also realizing that life is not what it seems and the script that I was given, that we’re all given at birth, wasn’t really working for me. The whole cultural thing of who you are, what your story is, what your religion is, where you fit into society, what you should value, became very clear to me that was not what it was for me. And one of the first things that took a hit in my life, I was raised a strict Catholic, again, 11 years old, big year, told my father I’m not going to church anymore, which as a devout Catholic, wasn’t something he really wanted to hear. And I’m thinking, oh boy, I’m really important now. And his reaction really floored me. And he’s, you know, obviously kind of came out of left field for him. he said, “Okay, so tell me why.” So we had a really long conversation about my views, why it wasn’t working for me. The obvious one for an 11-year-old is how can somebody be punished for eternity for something they do wrong? Just, “Nope, that’s not a religion I want to belong to, not a God I can get behind.” And then he blew my mind at the end of it. He said, “Okay, you don’t have to go anymore.” And it was an amazing gift to give me that it was okay to question authority, it was okay to question his authority, and it was okay to think deeply about things, and that I should think deeply. So that was sort of the beginning of me asking big life questions. It’s also the time of my first awakening experience. I was sitting on my bed reading a book and all of a sudden the room disappears and I am flying through space at a velocity that’s indescribable. It’s so fast. I’m like, “Oh my God, I’m going to just blow apart.” I did blow apart into what I call the “no-thing place.” I called it that because there was nothing there, but it was everything. Obviously, to use language to describe something non-dual is always kind of a fool’s errand. But it was what I later came to learn is this idea of enlightenment, this feeling of peace and bliss and love. Even though I wasn’t there, there was all-knowing, there was all-understanding, there was all-joy, there was all peace. And I can’t describe it because there’s nothing there to describe. And when I came out of that, I remember being so depressed and sad. It was almost like a death experience, like, “No, I want to stay there.” And so that really set me on a path of, “I need to understand what this is. I need to understand what this no-thing thing is.” And it was also the time where what I call my inner teacher showed up. I’ve been a compulsive writer since I could write and I would start writing in my journal and I would hear this voice talk to me. And by this time I’m so used to weird things happening I don’t even think anything about it. Okay great. Here’s you know another voice. What was interesting about it to me was there was nothing distinguishable about it. No gender, no age, no accent. It wasn’t like I could say, “Ah, here’s Buddha, here’s Jesus, here’s nothing, no identifiable quality.” And yet it had this profound wisdom. And so it started communicating, and I would just write down what it was saying, and then I would say, “Oh, but what about this?” And it would answer. And we’d go on, “And what about this?” And it would answer. And so I have literally shelves full of notebooks full of those conversations from over the years, because it’s always stayed with me since then. And I think of it as the ground of consciousness. I don’t— having had that, the no-thing place thing, which to me is, enlightenment, awakening, whatever you want to call it. And then having access to this profound wisdom and knowing, I understood that that wasn’t it. That wasn’t permanent enlightenment. I visited the country but I didn’t have permanent residence yet. It was something I still got to work on. And from there it became something that I thought, “Okay, if this is something that I can share with other people so that they can begin having this experience, I’m interested in doing that.” So in my 20s I realized this was going to be my walk. This is what I wanted to do. We were talking about my start was kind of in with Transcendental Meditation. And by this time people kind of knew what my deal was. So all these people would come to me and want to know stuff. And I would tell them stuff. And they would tell more people and they would want to come and know stuff. And so it wound up being my profession. I wound up being an intuitive consultant for 25 years and booked 18 months out in advance. You know, did the whole 15 minutes of fame, cable TV, radio show. And I got to a point where I was driving down to one of my offices, I had an office in New York City, and I remember stopping the car and saying to myself, “I’m done. I can’t do this anymore.” So I called my secretary and said, “I canceled all my appointments. I’m done.” And I haven’t done a private session since then. And the catalyst for me was really seeing that people, I wasn’t helping people. They were using me as a cheat sheet. Everybody wants a quick answer without having to do the work. All it was doing was making people dependent on me. They weren’t learning how to do this for themselves. It put them in a weird waiting mode. They were waiting for whatever predictions I might have made. I don’t see time as a clock. I see it as distance. So for me, it’s like when I see something, it’s like, and you know this because you’re kind of in the plains, it’s like being in the plains driving up to the Grand Canyon. Tell me how far it is before you’re going to get there. Oh, a couple hours and you’re still driving two days later. So that’s often how it is with time for me. It’s a spatial thing. It’s not a clock thing. And then eventually they’d call back and if they’re happy, another appointment, if they’re not happy, I would get the complaint. They’re like, this is not, that’s not what I want for myself. And I took that time to really go inward and spend a lot of time in deep study and practice. And I found that silence was something that I craved intensely and that actually helped expand a lot of my understanding of things. And as life would have it, I have had an Indian friend who we would have these deep conversations and he’d tell me about his guru and I would be thinking, “I need to go to India. How am I going to get him to let me meet his guru? I know I have a standing appointment with this guy. I got to get over there.” And it took a while because it wasn’t something I wasn’t going to say to him, “I’m coming to India. When can you make room for me?” Although now I realize I could have done that. So eventually he invited me to go on a grand tour of India with him. And for anybody who knows Indians, this is normal for them. I have never met such generous people in my whole life. You wouldn’t let me pay for a thing. So I’m thinking, “This is great. India is amazing, but I really want to get to Mount Abu,” which is where his guru was. So we finally get there, and as soon as I walk in the room, I have this electric zap of “It took me my whole life to get here and you’re what I’ve been waiting for.” I still get emotional about it. And I was like, okay, we’re off to the races. I’m here. This is great. We’re going to get to do all of these things. And so the first question he asked me is, “What do you want?” Not, “What do you need? What brings you here?” All the little nice things. So like, very serious. This is a Shiva guy. Very intense. “What do you want?” And I’m thinking, I felt like I was a deer in the headlights. “Sorry. Do the usual, you know. I want what everybody wants I want the world to be a better place. I want to be a better person in it. So in his broken English He basically says, “You’re dismissed.” And it’s like, “Oh my god, I’ve come all this way I’ve spent my whole life to meet this man.” I was devastated. “How can you dismiss me?” And I truly was heartbroken. And so he says to a monk, “Tell her to come back tomorrow with the right answers.” Okay, so I spent the whole night figuring out what’s he looking for? What is the answer? What is the answer? And you’re gonna think it’s obvious when I tell you but for me it was like, “What am I supposed to want? What is everybody supposed to want?” And I’d fill up this notebook with what I thought I was supposed to want. No, that wasn’t it. I’d rip it out crumble it up. By the morning the whole floor was a rug of crumbled papers, but I had my answer. So I go back to meet him. “What do you want?” And I was, “I want enlightenment. I want permanent enlightenment. He said, “Good, we can begin.” So he sends me up to the mountains. Like okay, there’s no breather here. It’s like, “Okay, you passed that. Go up to the top of the mountain in the temple. I’m giving really brief notes of this because I was very involved. I want you to put your hands on the Shiva Linga in the temple and then I want you to go into my cave because he lived in a cave and I want you to light the two meditation candles and the incense. And then the monk’s thinking, first of all, nobody has ever been allowed to light these candles except him. So why? He was so shocked he actually called down to the bottom of the mountain to make sure Guruji really wanted me to do this. So I do that and you know I put my hands on the Linga and there’s this crazy experience, okay, kind of not unusual for me but really intense. Go into the cave, sit down to meditate, everybody’s getting settled, close their eyes. I see this thing start to move around the side of the cave and I have a cobra sitting in front of my face this far away with its hood extended. And I thought, “I guess I’ve come to India to die.” And it was that kind of, there was no fear. It was, anybody who’s had those kinds of intense experiences knows how time slows. And so it’s just me and this cobra face to face, and I almost feel hypnotized by it. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. so close I could count the scales on its head. And then somebody came in the cave. There’s a noise, and it’s gone. I’m thinking, “Okay, so all in a day’s work,” go back down to the mountain, think that we’re good, we’re done for the day. Nope, come back, here’s test number two. When you put your hands on the lingam, what happened? I told them what happened. Now I have no experience with Hinduism. I mean,
Rick: What did happen? You said it was some kind of fire thing, but are you gonna tell us?
Karen: Yeah I have no knowledge of Hinduism, so I can say there were no preconceived ideas. Come to find out later, this is a big deal. A column of energy shot up into the sky and down to the center of the earth as far as—
Rick: Yeah, that’s the story.
Karen: Yeah, I didn’t know that. So and then, and I guess this is normal. And so he says, “What did it say to you?” And I think, “That’s really interesting, because everything talks to me. I’ve never had somebody ask me, ‘What did it say to you?'” The assumption that it said something to me, which it did. So I told him that, and that I can’t share. So then he talks about the cave, and I tell him about the cobra. And he says, “Did it have five heads or one?” And I’m thinking, “There’s a five-headed cobra?” The one I saw only had one head. “Only had one head.” And he said, “Ah, that’s my cobra.” “Okay, good.” And he said, “What did it say to you?” And I didn’t… This is actually… I spent several years with him from that point on, and this was a conversation that came in the next visit, because at the time, I was so taken aback. I wasn’t processing anything. I was just stopped in time. So when I went back the next time, he said, “What did the cobra say to you?” It’s like, “Okay, you remembered that. It’s been months, and that’s an interesting place to start. No “hello, how are you?” Any of that.” So I told him it gave me strength and took away my fear. And Umang was there, and Umang’s laughing. He says, “Yeah, it scared the fear right out of you.” I said, “It absolutely did. I have been fearless ever since.” And he said, “Good,” and he gave me Rudraksha beads, which apparently most of the time you got to wait seven years to get that. And he just said, “Okay, you have what it takes. Let’s get started.” And that began my relationship with him. And what was amazing about it is that he is from the Juna Akhara sect, which is a Tantra Shiva sect and it’s a really intense sect. It’s not particularly well known. And again, didn’t know any of this. And it didn’t matter. It’s not something that ever came up. And I never would have thought to ask him, “Oh, by the way, what lineage are you?” He would have laughed me right out of the cave. Like, “You’re a white girl. Don’t be asking about lineages.” But he was not a teacher in this sense. He didn’t have an ashram. He wasn’t teaching on a regular basis. Apparently he just, also I know it’s karmic, there was just a bond between the two of us, and we were just picking up where we left off. And so I—
Rick: In your past life.
Karen: Yeah. So for me, it was just, I had this glorious experience of spending hours upon hours alone with this man, with teaching through direct transmission and through mystical experiences. He would just sort of look at me like the cobra did and I would just know what he wanted me to do. And then he sent me up the mountain and I’m telling you, I got so fit. I’ve never been so fit my whole life. Here’s another experience: I go back down. He wants me to tell him what happened. And so this went on for years and—
Rick: Really? You mean you were actually there for years or you mean in installments back and forth?
Karen: It wasn’t, I didn’t live there for several years. I made 12 trips over six years, And I’d stay quite a while when I was there. But just the gift of getting to spend all that time alone with him. I didn’t know enough at the time and I’m glad I didn’t know enough at the time that any of this was unusual or how lucky I was. I mean, I knew I was lucky, but I didn’t know how lucky. I know now. So for me, it was like I’m going to see this being that I love with all my heart, that just fills me with so much joy. I get to learn. I get to have these experiences. I get to be fully seen by another being. And I think that’s one of the things for people who have unusual abilities is there can be a kind of loneliness that comes with it because not everybody else is having that experience. And so, he could do better and then some. No matter what I could come up with. His life experiences—and I’m actually working on a documentary about him now. Just an incredible, incredible life. He actually was the first-born son of the king of Nepal and this was at the turn of the 20th century. They gave him away to a monk who ran the Pashupatinath. I always say this wrong
Rick: Pashupatinath?
Karen:Thank you. to protect him because they were afraid for his life and so that was his, that’s how he started his path. And then he wound up in Mount Abu which is in Rajasthan in northern India Lived in a cave in silence for 17 years. Came down. He was told he had a saintess who would visit him. Finally said, “Okay, you’re done, go down. It’s time for you to share what you know.” So he went from where his cave was at the top of the mountain, lower down the top of the mountain. On the way down, was attacked by a tiger and he killed it with his bare hands.
Rick: Wow.
Karen: And this is not a big guy. If he’s five feet and a hundred pounds soaking wet, not a big guy. But he’d be happy to show you the scars on his legs and his hands. And to him, I’m thinking, “Oh my God, what a terrible thing.” And he’s like, “You don’t know.” He didn’t say these words, but in effect, this was the greatest gift. because for a Shiva guy, having a tiger skin to sit on was monumental and part of where he sees his power emanating from. And there’s another funny story where he sent me up the mountain and I knew it had something to do with a tiger. And I’m thinking, “Guruji, don’t send me a tiger because it will win. I will not be sitting on a tiger skin. It will be sitting on me.” And of course, I’m here, so that’s–
Rick: You’d be lunch, yeah!
Karen: Yeah, but just incredible story after story of his life experiences, who he was, what he knew, what his abilities were, how he looked at life. And he considered me, eventually, you know, he would tell everybody because, as you know, still, India is a fairly patriarchal society. And there were a lot of people who were not happy that he was spending this time with me. And he would just tell them, “She’s my daughter. Go away.” And I came to feel that way, that he was my adopted father. And not adopted, he’s my spiritual father. He’s my… But, you know, and this is also something I didn’t know. Nobody told me how to have a guru. It’s not part of Western culture. So I didn’t know there’s etiquette to this. I’m just being me, thinking like in the West, if you have a teacher, they want you to ask questions. They want you to engage in all of this. And so that was one of the things that he did kind of quickly put me in my place is that that’s kind of rude. You kind of don’t do that. But, so I remember one night, one evening we were sitting out looking out over the plains of Rajasthan and by this time I could speak pidgin Hindi and he was pretty good at pidgin English and I was complaining to him that he had it easier on his mountaintop and that I wanted to come and live on the mountaintop. I find the world I live in really overwhelming and he said, “Well, too bad for you. You don’t, the mountaintop is not your deal this lifetime. And I remember just feeling crushed. And so he talked to me about mountain dwellers, what he called mountain dwellers and plains dwellers, that it’s not that one is better than the other, it’s not hierarchical, they’re just different. And that’s what I was saying to him, “You get to do one thing. Everybody supports you. I know your life isn’t easy. I know you have challenges, but you have nothing else to do. You get to do this one job and I’m jealous. You know, I’m down in the plains with bombs going off everywhere, trying to remember and keep whatever threads of awareness I have.” And he said, “But that is also valuable. You know, that’s what you came to do this time.” And he explained that the challenge is not being a plains dweller. It’s that we attach suffering to being a plains dweller. I attach “It’s hard being a plains dweller.” And he says, “It’s only hard if you attach suffering to it. It’s just another experience.” And so it was a real reset for me in thinking about my life and what I’m doing here and that I had spent a really intense period of time thinking I want to be permanently in Mount Abu, which was not realistic. And then making peace with that—that that’s not my journey. But I found it interesting because a lot of what we kind of shared, talked, transmitted was this idea of one of the things that he hoped I would be able to do for him is that he felt that a lot of people from the West would go over there and they would want to have some experience or be given something or taught something and that they didn’t have the cultural background or the language to fully grasp what he was trying to share. You know, in India, spirituality is just baked in. Temples are everywhere, it’s part of their morning meditation and their whole life. And that’s not the case in the West. When you’re dealing with non-dual language for a Westerner, not only are you trying to understand a really difficult concept, you’re trying to understand it through another culture’s language, which complicates it even further. So he had a way of simplifying everything in how he would explain it. And one of the things that he kept saying to me is that there’s a prejudice against people who access spirituality through intuition. And these are his words, “It’s silliness. The doorway doesn’t matter. What matters is that you walk through it and that you keep walking.” He felt that one of the things he wanted me to do was share, help people remember their intuition to wake up so that they could use that as a doorway because only through direct experience can you really know. Trying to understand language for something so abstract, not a lot of people are going to make that leap. But if you give somebody that direct experience, which is really easy to do, it doesn’t take long, I’ve never had anybody not be able to do it, then they say, “Ah, the light bulb goes off. I understand now.” That doesn’t mean they get instant permanent enlightenment. I still don’t have instant permanent enlightenment, but it gives them a way in to grasp the language so that they can then begin to go deeper and explore those philosophies and those belief structures and continue to have those “aha experiences.” So that’s pretty much my work these days is writing and teaching and helping people to have these kinds of experiences.
Rick: Great.
Karen: So that’s me in a nutshell. In a very big nutshell.
Rick: Yeah, the coconut.
Karen: Yeah.
Rick: Okay, I have about nine or ten points I wrote down. You want to hear them all and then we’ll pick them apart one by one or you want me to just take them one by one?
Karen: Yeah. What do you want me to say?
Rick: I’ll give you the overview.
Karen: Okay.
Rick: So I’m curious about this born awake thing. I want to talk more about that. Did you realize when you came out of the womb that you were awake or did you remember when you were eleven that you had been born awake? So we’ll get into that. Do you have any past-life memories about the inner teacher and the notion of dependency? I find that a lot of my most popular interviews are with channelers, psychics, and healers because everybody likes if somebody does something for them, you know? And they also like, I don’t even like to interview the neo-advaita people, but sometimes I’m encouraged to, but those are the people who say, “You’re already enlightened, you don’t need to do practices, you know, you just realize you’re already enlightened and go on with your life. And there is no life because there is no you and yada yada and
Karen: Yeah.
Rick: I think they like that because it’s sort of like…
Karen: If you’re not enlightened that’s just gobbledygook.
Rick: Yeah, right, It’s kind of McDonald’s version of enlightenment. Then another point I want to discuss with you is this guy was 120 years old and that’s pretty darn old. I wouldn’t mind getting that old myself. We’ll see how it goes. But I wonder if that’s verifiable or whatever although that’s kind of a minor point. And then you mentioned that “I’m not fully enlightened,” and I’m glad to hear that because I don’t think there is any such thing. We can talk about that. And let’s see what I got here. The mountains, plains thing, the idea of dharma. You probably know that Gita verse, “Because one can perform at one’s own dharma, though lesser in merit, better than the dharma of another.” You actually evolve more quickly in your own dharma than you would if you tried to be a mountain-dwelling monk or something like that. And then I’m just a little bit curious about, like, you know, your husband. Is he into all this stuff or does he just kind of give you plenty of slack like your parents did? So anyway, you want to pick any one of those or you want me to start walking through them?
Karen: I came in remembering. I never not remembered remembering.
Rick: But when you’re like a newborn, day one, you don’t have language, you’re kind of still really out there. I mean, do you actually recollect being a newborn and thinking to yourself, “Hey, here I am and I’m already awake”?
Karen: There is some part of me that has impressions that far back. And I think it’s that part of me that is connected to oneness. So, no, as a baby, I can’t say as soon as I popped out of the womb, “Oh, I remember.” But I have an awareness that has always been present. I don’t know anything different.
Rick: Yeah. You know my friend Harri Aalto, I’ve interviewed three times, he says a similar thing. He says around the age of four is his earliest memories, but there was never a time when he wasn’t awake. He was on some meditation course in his early twenties and everybody was going on about bliss and all this stuff and he said, “What is this? Am I experiencing that?” And he had an experience of losing it for 15 minutes. And then, “Oh my God, is this how people live all the time?” And then he snapped out of it. And you know, he’s been witnessing sleep for 60 years, hasn’t lost consciousness all that time. That kind of thing. So sometimes, you know, people come in really already cooked.
Karen: Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I think my deal is that everybody’s born remembering, but culture takes it away from us. We are taught out of it. We are taught to lose the connection.
Rick: I think you even said in something that I was reviewing that everyone’s born enlightened, and that kind of begs the question of what we mean by enlightenment, because by definition you’re not supposed to get born if you’re enlightened.
Karen: Right. But enlightenment is all there is, and we are within the all that is. And again, it’s so hard to use language because I’m using dual language to speak about non-dual stuff. So the way I talk about it is, what perspective are we talking about it from? Are we talking about it from the God perspective, the all that is perspective? Or are we talking about it from I’m a human being, me, mine, and I’m in a separate body? Those conversations are entirely different and they pretty much don’t really meet. So from that all that is perspective, and this is where the neo-advaitas drive people crazy is everybody’s enlightened. That’s true. Again, I’m going to say from that God perspective, don’t get hung up, please people don’t get hung up in the word God. From that all that is perspective, it’s true. But it doesn’t mean anything here. It’s like people asking me, “Well, do you believe in free will and destiny?” It’s like, “What, which side are you asking me from?” From the God perspective, there’s no free will. It’s a mathematical equation. It’s all, it’s running. It’s there. I could not know your future if there was free will. And people come back at me that, “Well, you don’t know everything.” Thank God. But from the human perspective, all we can do is act as though we have free will. It doesn’t matter whether we do or we don’t. We’re going to act as though we do.
Rick: Well, if you feel like you do, then you’re obligated to exercise it.
Karen: Absolutely.
Rick: Otherwise, it can become a weird thing where you do whatever you want and claim that it’s destiny or something.
Karen: Well, then that’s another thing. The whole thing about ethics and spirituality and people say, “Well, if you could, if there’s no self, then why do you do anything that you do? Why aren’t you robbing banks or hurting people?” And the answer is because I experience reality as them. If I am—
Rick: Yeah. Very good.
Karen: I’m hurting myself. So why would I do that? That’s stupid. So it becomes self-governing, the spirituality from the sense of wholeness rather than I’m going to get what I can get, and the heck with you, and that’s not how it works.
Rick: This thing you’re saying about, on some level we’re already enlightened. Yeah, on some level there’s no universe. I mean, you read the Ashtavakra Gita or the Mandukya Upanishad, they’re all talking like that. But go ahead and test that by stepping in front of a bus or something.
Karen: Absolutely. In this space, it doesn’t make sense to have that conversation. Because we are not living that— we are not consciously living that reality. So somebody could say that’s true, great, but how is that applicable here, which is to your point, it’s not.
Rick: You learned TM when you were in college. One of Maharishi’s favorite phrases was, “Knowledge is different in different states of consciousness.” Similarly, reality is different at different levels of creation. We live in a multidimensional universe. He would often say, speaking of tigers, he would often say, “You can’t shoot the tiger of the waking state with the gun of the dream state,” or vice versa. Yeah.
Karen: Right. Yeah, and I completely agree with that. And that’s why these conversations are always challenging, because we’re flipping back and forth between dual and non-dual, and I’m guilty of that all the time. And then somebody will say, “Well, okay, what side of your mouth are you talking out of now?” because it’s a different answer.
Rick: There’s a nice verse in, not a verse, a saying in India that when the mangoes are ripe, the branches bend down so that people can easily pick them. So, you know, you meet people at the level that is relevant to their experience.
Karen: Yeah, I feel like I’m teaching in a one-room schoolhouse and I’ve got to find a way to reach everybody in a way that is useful to them.
Rick: Yep. One more analogy and I’ll let you talk more, but you know, the analogy of a man standing on a mountaintop shouting about the description of what he sees on the mountaintop. It might be inspiring to people who haven’t climbed the mountain yet, but it’s not very useful because it doesn’t provide any instructions for getting to where he’s standing.
Karen: Right, and that’s my feeling. If I can’t show you how to do it, I’m wasting time talking about it.
Rick: Yeah. Good. Okay, so another one of my questions there that I rattled off was, do you have any clear memories of past lives?
Karen: Lots, yeah.
Rick: Lots, okay, which kind of are probably relevant to what you’ve been doing in this life, right? A lot of them are, a lot of them have to do with that. What I find interesting is often in traveling to places, I’ll remember I used to live there. So a lot of my past life memories pop up through travel. Some of them I just know because the thread has run through so many recent lives. It’s just part of my waking consciousness.
Rick: Yeah. And we talked about dependency, relying on psychics or healers or channelers or whatever, versus more self-sufficiency. Do you impart some kind of practice that a person can do on a regular basis to continue to progress?
Karen: There are lots of really available, accessible, simple ways that people can do all of this. It’s almost so simple that people say, “Ah, that can’t be it. That’s too simple.”
Rick: Right, give us some for-instances.
Karen: Sit outside for an hour every day. Because our senses are so clogged with modern noise and distraction, we don’t hear what we’re hearing, we don’t see what we’re seeing, we don’t smell what we’re smelling, and so on. So just sitting outside without any distraction, because you’re going to get bored, you’re going to start noticing things. You’re going to start looking around, you’re going to notice what birds are flying where, you’re going to notice weather patterns. One of the easiest senses to regain is the ability to tell weather without needing a weatherman. All of those kinds of things.
Rick: To quote Bob Dylan.
Karen: Yeah, yeah. To sit with an object. So, for example, a real simple one: right now I’m looking out a window to help people begin to see energy patterns, to begin to see that this energy is in and through around everything, all of us, all the time, that to begin moving towards this feeling of oneness, even if the oneness in the beginning is intellectual, is if you look out over if you can see a tree line and you sort of tilt your head back a little bit and squint your eyes and look over just over the top of the ridge of the tree lines, It won’t take long before you’ll see like a light around the tops of the trees, the energy of the trees. And then you’ll start seeing how that energy moves. And then the more you get used to seeing it. So you can almost say it’s like seeing auras, but often with trees there’s not color the way there is around people. But everything has that energy field around it and it is visible. You can see it with your physical eyes. This is not some special gift. It’s just training your eyes to do that.
Rick: What’s the benefit of doing that?
Karen: When you see, because then you’ll see everything’s connected. We see a tree and we think it’s a tree, but now we see it’s connected to this tree, connected to this, and so on. There’s no end to where that energy connects. It’s everywhere. And so it’s just a mental shift of, we think we’re separate, but we’re really not. There’s a glue that holds everything together and is in and through everything. From there, it’s a matter of sitting down again outside and picking an object. I remember the first time this happened to me, I don’t know why, but it was a blade of grass where I was just sort of sitting outside meditating and all of a sudden I was, as I say, a blade of grass, but I was photosynthesis because grass is photosynthesis. So by focusing on something, on wanting to experience what that is by seeing the energy around it and connecting those energies—and I know this sounds woo-woo—but truly, I can in classes, I can have people having this experience in 15 minutes with no previous experience with this. You will feel yourself being drawn into it. People say, “Well, that’s just your imagination.” It may start off as imagination. It may start off as you thinking, “I’m a piece of grass and this is what I think a piece of grass would be like.” But then when you have that full-blown experience, there’s no question about what that experience is. And any shift out of the physical body helps loosen the grip on “this is all there is” reality. And I feel like that’s important for people to begin understanding the non-dual perspective of this is all a movie screen.
Rick: And you teach classes online and maybe sometimes in person like in retreats or something?
Karen: Yeah, I have both.
Rick: Okay, good. We can talk about that more later. So how do you define the word “enlightenment”? If you even like to use that word, I tend to avoid it myself.
Karen: I do avoid it, yeah. I use it as a signal, but it’s…
Rick: Like I presume this 120-year-old guy, you would say, “Oh yeah, he was definitely enlightened.”
Karen: He was, yeah.
Rick: Right. And so what was it about him, aside from the things you’ve told us, that convinced you of that? And do you think that he, I mean, I often quote St. Teresa as having said that it appears that God Himself is on the journey. So I feel like everybody is a work in progress no matter how highly evolved they are, because there’s always a higher strata in this creation. And I guess you’re agreeing with that. And let me put it this way, and this will give you something to work from, and that is, do you think there’s a danger in assuming one is enlightened in some kind of final way, and both to oneself and to one’s students, if one has students? What are the potential harms of that assumption?
Karen: If somebody is fully enlightened, they have no issue. They’re not full of questions. They’re not guessing. It is their full experience. They’re an embodiment of what enlightenment is. And again, I hate all these words because they don’t do it justice. If it’s coming from an ego place and somebody says, “I’m enlightened because I had an enlightenment experience.” To me it’s important to differentiate those two things. Lots of people can have awakening experiences or enlightenment experiences, and they can—it can come through long preparation through meditation and practices and so on. It can be a spontaneous event. What typically happens is that people are going to fall back out of them because it’s a top-heavy spiritual place. They don’t have the deep roots yet to completely have it permanently. And I know you like Swami Sarvapriyananda and if he’s not claiming enlightenment yet, I don’t think anybody deserves to claim it. It’s amazing.
Rick: Yeah. I mean I’ve heard him say, “I wouldn’t tell you if I were.” He just won’t say it.
Karen: You know, and that’s something that I find interesting too, is that enlightened people protect that and are not, very few are willing to say, “Yep, over here, queue up, let me show you how to get there.” You know, very few people have come with that task, to say, “Yes, I’m claiming this and I’m going to share this wealth of knowledge around Krishna and the people that are considered enlightened. I just feel like there’s a lot of ego stuff around it that gets in the way of… it’s not a competition. I know there’s a deep hunger. I know serious spiritual people, what else do they want? That’s it. But I feel like the more grasping towards it, the more we chase it away. So I, and I lost the original question, but…
Rick: Well, we’re playing with what enlightenment actually is. And I mean, I can, I can think of a number of famous gurus who don’t try to disabuse anyone of the notion that they are enlightened. They project that image and there’s a whole facade. And very often when you get to know more about them, you realize that there’s kind of like, the Wizard of Oz: there’s a guy behind the curtain that’s different from the great Oz on the screen.
Karen: Yeah.
Rick: And so that’s one of the things I was alluding to with the question about the dangers of proclaiming oneself to be enlightened or trying to project that aura. And it can also be very dangerous for the students because they kind of relinquish their own discernment, assuming that this guy or woman or whatever knows the truth, and if he’s saying something weird, I better doubt myself before I doubt him.
Karen: That’s one of the criticisms about intuition too, is that anything where somebody has experiences and from those experiences decides that they have it all or know it all without having the proper foundation and it’s coming from a place of ego has to do more harm than not because the impetus for sharing, and I’m just going to say it, I’m not going to pick my words, is wrong. I mean that’s the wrong reason to share.
Rick: Wrong motivation, yeah.
Karen: Thank you, wrong motivation. But if somebody has a hungry ego, it’s a huge motivation. So they’re gonna do everything they can to protect that and perpetuate that and create a closed system so that you need me, don’t listen to anybody else, I’m the only one who can save you, and all the things that that type of personality might get snagged into.
Rick: Yeah, and you wonder whether they even doubt themselves. They get so into the whole trip that, what do they think in their quiet moments when they’re doing things very often behind the scenes that are so at odds with the public persona?
Karen: I’m gonna say it’s one of two things: Either they’re fully delusional and they believe it, or in their quiet moments, they know, I hope I don’t get caught.
Rick: Yeah, maybe sometimes some of each. Anyway, so it’s one of those head-scratchers that I’ve been working on for.
Karen: Yeah, yeah. I mean my definition of, and everybody has to decide for themselves, if they are a good teacher. Do they have integrity? Are they living their beliefs? Do you feel stronger after spending time in their presence? Are they encouraging you to keep autonomy? And this is one of the things with Guruji. He would never tell you to stay, but he would also never tell you to go. “You’re here, you’re here. Get what you want, go when you want.” He wasn’t into, “I’m gonna do something for you.” It was the flow and I think that’s a good teacher. They’re not trying to collect students.
Rick: When you, well, you still I’m sure have your intuition that you’ve had all your life. Do you ever have doubts or is it always clear as a bell?
Karen: If it’s something that affects a loved one or myself personally, I always doubt it, because then it’s mixed with my own personal hopes and wants and wishes. And it depends. There are some times where it drops out of the sky in my head with a bang and then it’s like, “Oh, okay, that one’s set.” And other times it’s kind of not as strong a signal. It’s like, “Okay, maybe that one’s not.” Either I don’t fully see it yet or it isn’t fully set in this reality yet. But you know, people ask me that, and I’ve learned over the years. I can’t even say things casually to my friends because they take everything I say as serious, like I’m making a prediction. So I try to say nothing anymore. But people say, “Make a prediction.” And I say, “I’ll make you two predictions you can take to the bank right now: One—good things will happen. Two—bad things will happen.” We can’t live our lives based on what’s coming down the pike. Are we in this crazy moment in time where it looks really dark? Absolutely. Is it game over? Who knows? Or I’m not going to say. But the point is, I try to live my life as though this moment is my last moment. There is no next. For me, it’s presence, being in the present. And I find if I can, as much as I can do that, I’m a happier, healthier person. When I was younger, I didn’t have the maturity yet, and I would want to try to control things, and I would want to try to control my future, and all it did was make me worry and anxious, and now I don’t anymore. Whatever shows up, great. If it doesn’t show up, okay. Something else will show up. There’s always something here in this present, and that’s what I’m interested in, because that gives me the most information. That’s where my senses are awake. That’s where reality is happening. I have students and clients from years ago still begging me to do readings. I just won’t. Because for me, it’s like at some point you have to take the training wheels off the bike. Guys, you have to go live your life. This is hurting you. All you’re doing is creating a waiting. You’re waiting for something to happen rather than living your life as though it’s full of possibilities. And I feel like that’s damaging.
Rick: Yeah. Do you tend to see life as like a play of the divine and that there’s just this vast intelligence orchestrating everything and so you can just kind of, like you say, live in the moment and just watch with fascination as things unfold and you play your part in this grand play?
Karen: You asked me about my husband and that’s how he lives his life.
Rick: That’s pretty cool.
Karen: Yeah, it’s amazing. And we actually met, I was talking at a conference and he was a reporter covering the conference and he drew the straw for my session. So he is not typical in that. He said the reason why I married him is because he’s the only person who treats me like I’m normal and doesn’t care that I have these wild and crazy experiences. He loves hearing about them, he’s very interested, he’s deeply spiritual in his own way, and he is very much somebody who’s always had the ability to live in the present. That’s something I’ve struggled with on and off throughout my life because, again, one of the things that is true of most intuitive people—if somebody has a really active intuition, I’m going to say it’s because there’s some part of them that doesn’t feel safe in their environment and they’re on hyper red alert. They have a need to know because what triggers intuition is the need to know. Yeah, sometimes it drops out of the sky on your head and you know. But more often than not there’s a hyper vigilance that goes along with it because that person is a worrier and they’re trying to—
Rick: But you have an active intuition? Are you describing yourself here?
Karen: When I was younger, yeah.
Rick: Oh when you were younger okay. Even now, though, you probably have an active intuition.
Karen: Yeah I do, but it’s just there now. It’s just there. It’s not something I’m looking for. It’s not something that I have a need to know. And I always laugh when people say, “Well, you can turn it off.” I say, “Great, show me how.” I’ve been trying my whole life, nothing’s worked so far. But I do have a personality and I know you have dogs. We have dogs. My husband is a Cavalier King Charles and I’m an Australian Shepherd. My job is to protect everybody and keep everybody safe. So that part when I was younger was the part that needed to know, plan ahead, see around corners and all that kind of stuff.
Rick: Okay, regarding your intuition I know you don’t want to dwell on that too much, psychic stuff, but just out of curiosity do you ever or have you ever had situations where you’re like going through a supermarket checkout line and you think, “Ooh This lady has cancer and she doesn’t know it,” or she’s gonna have a car accident or something like that and then what do you do with that?
Karen: Nothing.
Rick: Nothing, it’s not your place to intervene?
Karen: I’m trying to think, did I ever say something to a stranger?
Rick: Yeah, like, “Buckle your seatbelt,” or you know whatever.
Karen: I did say something once and I lied about it. It was a mother with a child that had an illness and I knew what the illness was. I said, “Oh don’t mind me but you know I’m an EMT and I just noticed this about your kid you might want to take him to a doctor and get him checked out.” I think that’s the only time I’ve done it.
Rick: Well that was a good lie to tell because you can’t say, “I’m a psychic and I saw this.”
Karen: Well I actually am a trained EMT.
Rick: Oh, there you go.
Karen: That wasn’t why I was telling you. But yeah, no, I couldn’t live if I felt it was my responsibility to tell everybody.
Rick: Yeah. My last interview guest was a guy named Jonathan Ashford, and he had had a profound near-death experience and came back completely changed in all kinds of intuitive gifts. And he says he often foresees things, like the LA wildfires. He knew those were going to happen and other things. And he’s reluctant to talk about most of them, but he kind of sees things that might happen to the society in general over the next year or years. Do you see stuff like that? And if so, I presume you don’t want to talk about it either? But if you did, it would be cool.
Karen: I know. I think all it would do is—it goes back to the two predictions: good things will happen and bad things will happen. What I would say to people is, and again I’m going to say this comes from my EMT training, is be prepared. Have some reserve food, have some basic first aid, have some water, have a plan. If anything were to happen, where would you go? If you want family to meet up, where would you meet up? And hope you never need it.
Rick: Yeah, I was with a spiritual teacher one time and people were talking about the “phase transition” that society might be facing in the coming years and it was getting a little scary and someone said, “Well, how can we survive this?” and he said, “Hold on to the self.”
Karen: Yeah, and you know what?
Rick: That’s the ultimate preparation.
Karen: If you don’t survive it, you don’t…
Rick: Yeah, you’ll be fine wherever you end up.
Karen: Yeah, you get to go to the “all that is.” It’s not a bad move perhaps. And I guess that’s the other thing that I can thank Guruji for is he completely removed the fear of death from me. And not that I ever had a great fear of it, but it’s completely gone because whatever we’re going to is a great place. And I’ve had a near-death experience, so I know aside from what he said, it’s a great place. And again, I’m going to use dual language. It’s a great place. I don’t know. Yeah, people are afraid of dying because they’re afraid of the unknown. But that’s it. They’re really afraid of the unknown and losing what’s here.
Rick: Yeah. One thing you said about your guru is that your association with him completely shattered your assumptions about what spirituality actually is. What had you thought it was? And what do you now think it is compared with that, because of your interactions with him?
Karen: This might sound a little funny. I just need to think about a minute, or I’ll just say it and then you can help me clean up the mess after. I thought it was more intellectual and more hierarchical, and maybe that comes from my Catholic background is nobody has—you need an intermediary, that you can’t get there on your own. You can’t talk—“Who do you think you are talking to?”
Rick: I see. Because they drill that into you in the Catholic Church, yeah, right?
Karen: Right, and so I felt more—it took some of my agency away where I felt like I didn’t have a right or I hadn’t paid my dues or, why did I get to have these experiences I have. I haven’t done anything for them. And so it became that sort of Christian guilt thing. And Guruji knocked that right out of me too. You know, that’s ridiculous. There are many reasons why somebody is ready or not ready. And it’s not a judgment. It’s, we get into this measurement of who’s better, who’s higher, who’s— all of those things and that’s that’s the ego thing and his thing was it’s like we tell ourselves stories about who we are. We get attached to that story and we string all these stories together on a beaded necklace and “Here, this is who I am.” And his feeling is, “No, cut the necklace. Let the beads fall. Don’t pick them up again. Be in the experience. It’s not about who you are, it’s about what is the experience.” So for me, he took the hierarchy out of it. Obviously, I had deep respect for him, but we sat together and this is the other thing, this is not a guy who typically hangs out with women in private for a long period of time, so that was really not typical for him. So he broke so many rules of his sect by what he did with me, that in itself was a teaching of, those are guardrails. Yeah, you wanna pay attention to ’em, but if something else comes along that’s outside of that guardrail and that’s there for you, then that’s what you do, and that’s what he did. He held nothing back from me. So, I don’t know if I answered the question or not, but.
Rick: No, I think you did. Of course, he had the advantage of being 120 years old and not 30, so… (laughs)
Karen: Yeah, I actually tried to find his age because that was my thought. As much as I felt an immediate connection to him, India loves to tell a good story. So it’s like I need to do some of my own checking here to see what’s what and there you can’t find anything. There is no history.
Rick: with this guy, you mean.
Karen: Yeah, and Umang says it is because his mother destroyed all the records. They would leave no records because if there were any records left, somebody would find them and they would find Guruji and that would be the end of Guruji. So there are no records.
Rick: Because he would have been the successor to the throne or something, right? And so they didn’t want him around.
Karen: Right.
Rick: Okay.
Karen: Yeah. So they took him off the map. But according to him, that’s from the horse’s mouth. These are his own words. He has memories of his mother coming to the temple to see him when he was little and she would always give him a coin. And he asked his, I’m trying to think, I can’t think of his guru’s name. But he would ask his guru who that woman was, why would she keep coming to see him. And he told him, “That’s your mother.”
Rick: One of your themes is why Eastern spirituality is often a struggle for Westerners, the cultural mismatch, the pitfalls of importing practices wholesale, and maybe we can consider that and what a more effective bridge between cultures might be. Go ahead. I’ll elaborate on the question, but I think you got it.
Karen: Yeah, I do. And I’m as guilty of this as anybody who’s deeply interested in the spiritual is, as a Westerner, I knew that the East knew. And so I thought, “Well, I’m just gonna jump to the front of the line because they know, so that’s where I’m gonna go and then it will be bestowed upon me.” And then I got there and it was, you know, I’ve done a lot of traveling in my life, so it’s not like it was shocking per se, but there were significant cultural differences that I never would have guessed if I hadn’t spent all that time that I spent there. And this is something where we read spiritual books, Eastern spiritual books, whether it’s Buddhism or some other forms, and often those books, I mean those books are written by highly knowledgeable people, often sharing this knowledge with other highly knowledgeable people, and they’re like the PhD monks or whatever. As though we’re going to be able to digest and understand that level of depth of their knowledge without training. They get taken from A to Z, and then we’re trying to jump in like L-M-N-O-P and think that we’re going to have enough to fully grasp what they’re talking about. So I know from my students who will use me as a translator and say, “I read this book and he’s saying this and I don’t understand it.” And some of it is, I try not to use Hindi or Sanskrit language when I speak because I know, I can know what that word means, but it’s not going to mean anything to somebody who doesn’t have that connection. So I want to translate into English to the best of my understanding what that means and use English frameworks. So it’s like somebody who’s having an intuitive experience comes to me and they feel, “Wow, I’m having all these experiences and does that mean I’m special?” And my answer is, “Think of it as though you found a lost sock under your bed. Would you be thinking, “I found my very special sock. I’m a very special person for having a very special sock.” Or would you think,”I found the match for that other single. I can wear this again.” So it becomes, it’s not about being special, it’s about functionality. “I found it again. Good, let’s keep going.” So it has more to do with that kind of practicality and groundedness. It’s this idea that, again, not letting ego get wrapped up in it that somehow makes me special, when it’s an ability that we’re all born with, but we are, again, it’s taught out of us. Culture teaches it out of us. Religion teaches it out of us. We go back a few hundred years, several hundred years, even at the beginning of time, intuition was as normal a sense as sight and taste and hearing. It’s just a refined survival instinct. There’s nothing amazing about it. It’s a sense that we have forgotten how to use. It’s easy to reactivate it. What’s hard is for people to believe that they can do it.
Rick: Yeah. I mean, there’s a certain cultural norm in terms of the common level of people’s abilities. I mean, another thing is telepathy. There might be cultures in the future on other planets which are totally telepathic. You don’t even, you evolve out of even having vocal cords because you don’t need them anymore.
Karen: Yeah. And I think at the beginning of civilization that would have been more true, that ability to have telepathic communication.
Rick: They say that Kalahari Bushmen and people can, like, telepathically communicate with each other across distances and know where the animals are and that kind of thing.
Karen: Absolutely. So I think it’s just something that we have accepted that we don’t have that ability. And it’s like, “Okay, who told you that? Why do you think you don’t have that ability? Have you ever tried to use it?” But there’s so much misunderstanding about it that it gets in the way that it’s seen as weird or bad or you know only special people can do it.
Rick: I mean back when you and I learned to meditate in the 70s even learning to meditate was a weird thing.
Karen: Yeah.
Rick: Or practicing yoga or whatever you know.
Karen: Yeah, I was not admitting to my friends that I was meditating. It was not cool yet.
Rick: And that’s become kind of a cultural norm. So yeah, so okay, so that covers that point. I’ll have more questions along those lines, but a question came in from someone here: Prachi Dixit in Torrance, California. Do you feel people that are open and sensitive to the super information system, she calls it, are looked at with doubtful eyes? I am Indian-born and brought up first 22 years in India, yet I’m afraid to open up the discussion in public. This is just what we’re talking about right now.
Karen: Yeah, there is still a stigma in this country that I completely understand why she would think twice about opening up. I think if you can find, rather like my—this is what’s great about the internet and podcasts like yours is we all get to kind of find each other. We know we’re coming from all over the world who are having shared experiences that are quote-unquote not normal in the larger culture and yet we know we’re not crazy. So we come together and find other like-minded people, and hopefully this gives her a sense of she’s okay, there’s nothing wrong with her. The question is, what does she want to do with that information? Is she comfortable with that information?
Rick: Yeah. She lives in Torrance, California. I’m sure there are plenty of kindred spirits out there.
Karen: Yeah.
Rick: You can go to the Hindu temple or go to meditation groups and you find your tribe. That’s it, your tribe.
Karen: Yeah.
Rick: Okay, so we’re kind of talking about these spiritual concepts and how the Indian and Buddhist cultures are kind of like the Inuit with their 30 words for snow. They have all these fine nuanced delineations between different qualities of consciousness and all. They have specific words for all those things and they’ve been talking about them for 5,000 years. Here in the West, it’s really rather primitive by comparison, but it’s still not…
Karen: That’s a great analogy.
Rick: Yeah, and you can use any words, Sanskrit words or English words, if you’re going to use them, you have to make sure that the people who you’re interacting with have the same definition as you do, otherwise you’re just talking past each other. So, words like “enlightenment” and so on, if you’re going to use it, you really have to define it. And there are lots of handy words in the Indian lexicon, Brahman and Atman and Purusha and all these different things, but you really have to define them. So maybe some of those words have corollaries in the English language or maybe these days we use a lot of them anyway, like karma or even guru, your golf guru and so on.
Karen: Yeah.
Rick: So Phil Goldberg, my friend Phil Goldberg, wrote a cool book called “American Veda” about the influx of Indian wisdom into Western culture over the course of the past several centuries, actually.
Karen: Yeah, and I think how fortunate for us that they’ve done this. And I also know that the beginning path for a lot of people can be confusing and overwhelming. And all I can say is if you stick with it, and as you’re saying, Rick, you know, find groups, find your tribe where you can have these conversations. My feeling is I feel like we’re all on this walk together. We’re all on this walk through time. And some parts are steeper and rockier than others and some are great. And wherever you are too, my feeling is I don’t know it all. I know what my experiences are. I try to share as openly and honestly and accurately as I can. So I’m going to stick a hand out to the person behind me and say, “Here, come. Come on up, go ahead of me.” And the person up ahead is gonna stick a hand back and pull that person up ahead again. So I feel like we’re all trying to find our way through this walk through time.
Rick: Yep, you’re kind of echoing Ram Dass here. “We’re all walking each other home.”
Karen: Yeah, yeah, I love that.
Rick: Yeah, and it is a lifelong endeavor. I think it’s important for people to understand that. You’re not gonna take some ayahuasca journey this weekend and be done with it. And in fact, if you take them every weekend, you’re gonna be regressing. But I think of it as just not even a lifelong journey, a lifelong, multiple lifelong journey. But that’s not a problem. It’s not like there’s some kind of goal that you’re gonna be miserable until you reach. The goal is all along the path.
Karen: That’s because you’ve been spending your life—
Rick: doing this.
Karen: But for somebody starting out who is still very much in that pain state, whose motivator is to remove the pain, not an acceptance of this as a lifetime’s journey. Their catalyst has an urgency that maybe yours and mine doesn’t have anymore in the same way.
Rick: Well, but we did have, you know.
Karen: We did have, sure. And so for that person, that’s where it gets tricky and where there’s more of a danger of grasping of this looks shiny and new, or this looks good, or this teacher’s promising me that, and there isn’t the experience yet to discern, to know what’s gonna help you and maybe what’s gonna hurt you. And so that’s where I would say, somewhat go by feelings if you’ve done a lot of work and you’re clear on your feelings, but to really find those people, whether it’s through the internet or wherever, who are doing good work, they’ve been around forever, there’s no bad reviews about them, there’s no scandals. Those are the people that you wanna be following.
Rick: Yeah, that’s really important, yeah. There’s some nice quotes about this. I mean, Jesus said, “Seek and you shall find. Knock and the door shall be opened.” And the Gita says, “No effort is lost and no obstacle exists. Even a little of this dharma removes great fear.” So you take a step, and if it’s a step in the right direction, there’s probably gonna be some positive feedback, so take another step, you know?
Karen: I’m sure you know the story of the Chinese farmer.
Rick: Do you want to tell it?
Karen:Yeah. So, there’s a Chinese farmer and his horse runs off and the neighbors say, “What bad luck.” And he says, “Perhaps.” You know, every version is a little bit different. And then the next day the horse comes back with a herd and the people say, “What good luck.” And he says, “Perhaps.” And then the son rides one of the horses and falls and breaks his arm and the neighbors say, “Terrible luck.” And then the army comes and the son doesn’t have to go to war because he’s got a broken arm. Great luck! So I look at life this way, perhaps. It’s all leading, it all is, and it’s all teaching us, and we’re growing from all of it. And if we can get away from this is good or this is bad, this terrible thing happened to me, people who get attached to all of their pain and suffering, or people who define themselves by certain cultural norms today that really is not the way either. It all just is. So for a person starting out who is feeling impatient, is in pain, is grasping, vulnerable, to that person I say take three deep breaths, do your research, talk to other people. Don’t dive in head first. You could be diving in the shallow end and crack your skull open. Because it is such a broad subject, and it’s like going to the supermarket, it’s all there. A lot of it’s good, but some of it’s spoiled. So just do your due diligence before you jump in.
Rick: Yeah, it’s a good warning. You probably heard about the Association for Spiritual Integrity that I helped to establish.
Karen: I love that work, yeah.
Rick: It was established out of the motivation to help people cultivate a greater sense of discernment regarding spiritual teachers, whether they meet certain criteria. Because a lot of people just don’t have that, they haven’t been around the block enough times. they might see a certain type of behavior in a teacher and think, “Well, I don’t know about that. “Maybe that’s normal.” But there are certain things many teachers have done and are doing that aren’t normal and they should be a red flag. I mean, you should hightail out of there if you see those things.
Karen: Absolutely. And that’s also a question I get a lot is, “Do I need a teacher to reach enlightenment?” And the answer, to quote Sarvapriyananda, is yes and no. No, you can have an enlightenment experience without a teacher. And yes, you need a teacher for full enlightenment. Whether that teacher is a book, a person you meet on the road, a formal teacher. In order to have stabilized enlightenment, my belief is it requires a teacher. Just having experiences is great, but to make it a permanent way of being, I believe, requires a teacher.
Rick: Yeah, I don’t know if that’s an absolute, maybe it is.
Karen: Yeah, it may not be. But I think in the way I mean it, in that, teacher—not in the traditional sense that it could be anything. But there’s something that happens that shows that student, that person, something that opens up the floodgates.
Rick: It could also be a regular practice. There’s a verse in the Yoga Sutras about the importance of long-sustained regular practice in order to really reach this stuff in an abiding way. And again, I get emails from people saying, “Well, I went to this workshop,” or “I had this insight and it was great, but it didn’t last.” And so it’s like anything. I mean, being a great violinist or tennis player or anything, you gotta stick to it and it rewires your neurophysiology, neuroplasticity, and becomes second nature after a while.
Karen: Yeah.
Rick: But—
Karen: Yeah, and then that’s the other thing with people, the story I know you’re also familiar with is, if you wanna hit water, you gotta dig a deep well. Go shopping around everywhere: oh, let me try a little bit of this, oh, Zen is the flavor this week, and something else is the flavor next week. You’ll get a lot of interesting knowledge, but in terms of spiritual depth, if you’re serious about moving towards awakening, you’ve got to dig a deep well.
Rick: Yeah, and my variation on that story is sometimes you could use a number of tools to dig one well.
Karen: Yes, very true.
Rick: You know, because you can get locked into something that you might be enriched by having a little bit more variety.
Karen: Well, it’s like this saying, if you’re stuck, if you’re so focused on something that you get stuck and you can’t move past that. If you’re working on trying to solve a problem, sometimes going away from the problem gives all of a sudden you spontaneously get the answer. Sometimes, visiting another way can open up this, as you say, tool—can give you the tool to unlock something deeper where you are. I think where the difference for me is if somebody’s going to be a water bug, you’ll have lots of interesting knowledge, but in terms of going deep, skimming across the surface, I don’t feel, is enough to really get there.
Rick: Yeah, I know you don’t like Sanskrit terms much, but something I learned from Swami Sarvapriyananda, which is traditional Advaita knowledge, is that there are three main components on the spiritual path. There’s shravana, manana, and nididhyasana. And shravana is, do you know these? You can talk about this if you know the terms. Otherwise I can do it.
Karen: I’m like blank at the moment.
Rick: Okay, so shravana is like, just like listening to this interview right now, people are doing shravana. They’re hearing some interesting ideas. Manana is like really pondering those ideas over time, not just kind of, you don’t get it in one flash, just really dwelling and contemplating what it really means—not only our conversation but a profound book, the Bible or the Upanishads or whatever. Then nididhyasana is doing some kind of practice that makes those ideas experiential and not just conceptual.
Karen: Yeah, and that’s, I very much also think those three components are needed to really set it in the body so it becomes experiential. And also setting up a lifestyle that supports all of this so that you’re not off… I’m not going to come up with an example because I don’t want to be insulting to anyone.
Rick: You’re not out at the disco every night until midnight.
Karen: Yeah, you’re not out at the disco every night until midnight.
Rick: Disco is probably a 90s thing, I don’t know. Whatever they do these days.
Karen: But I want to go back to something that you said about people doing ayahuasca or drugs. I guess ketamine is the big thing now and DMT and all of these other things. And I get the attraction to them. And I do, I can’t say from experience, but when I was in college back when drugs were a thing, I had the experience where people would give me drugs and I didn’t know they they were giving me drugs and they’re waiting for me to start tripping out and I’m like, okay, and I’m not tripping out and they’re losing their minds.
Rick: Kind of like Neem Karoli Baba.
Karen: Yeah, and that’s what it was for me: this is my normal reality. This doesn’t look any different to me. So it’s not doing anything to me. The point is that I think everybody’s looking for a way to speed up the experience and That’s where I worry that the speeded-up experience gives you the top-heavy spirituality, but it doesn’t give you the deep roots. And so I don’t know that there’s a shortcut that I could say to somebody, do this and you’re set. I think in terms of drugs or some experience, I think it has to be a lifetime of…
Rick: Yeah. Alan Watts, regarding drugs, said, “When you get the message, hang up the phone.” And Carlos Castaneda’s teacher, if he even existed, Castaneda may have just fabricated the whole story. But it’s like, okay, I’m going to give you this to just sort of break a hole in the wall, but long-term they’ll do damage. But I have a friend actually who I spoke with the other day who used to behave very unpleasantly. I don’t want to go into specifics, but he obviously had an alcohol problem. And at a certain point, he changed so much. Irene said, “Wow, what happened to him? He’s like a night and day difference.” So I had a conversation with him the other day and he said, “Yeah, yeah, I was drinking all day long.” And then I did a guided high-dose psilocybin trip, completely changed me. I just snapped right out of that behavior and I don’t do that anymore. So sometimes it can be a really useful tool, like that. But obviously every weekend, bad idea.
Karen: I shouldn’t make generalizations, but, yes, I do know that having those types of experiences, whether drug-induced or otherwise, can change our behavior, help us realize something we didn’t know before, where we begin living and behaving differently. So it can. But I think in terms of thinking, I’m thinking of one person in particular who’s all over YouTube proclaiming the values of DMT. It’s like, okay, great, you’re having all these experiences and you’re saying blah, blah, blah, but what is it really doing for you other than the phenomenological experience? So that’s where I think the issue is. For somebody who does mushrooms or something where it unlocks something in them that gives them a deeper spiritual understanding and that informs their life. Wow, good on you. But somebody who’s just in it for the thrill and excitement, I think it’s eventually going to catch up with them.
Rick: Yep, yep. And it can damage the subtle body according to some authorities. There was a story about Papaji coming to Ramana Maharshi and telling Ramana Maharshi about, Well, you know, he was playing with Krishna and dancing with Krishna and stuff, and Ramana Maharshi said, “Is he here now?” So, I’m full of Gita verses, but there’s one that says, “The unreal has no being, the real never ceases to be.” So, intermittent experiences can be fun, but they aren’t the ultimate enchilada.
Karen: I think if I think about what is the draw to that, is that people want something to break them out of the normal reality because they don’t know how else to get out of it. And so it can seem adventure seeking, but I really feel like there’s a spiritual desperation under it. I know there’s got to be something more than this. I know there’s something more than this. I just don’t know what it is. And having a breakthrough experience can give them proof, can give them peace of mind of, this isn’t all there is. And I think for some people that’s incredibly important.
Rick: Yeah, I mean that’s what I got out of drugs. If I got one valuable thing out of it during my— when I was 17, 18 years old, it was, there’s a lot more to the world than meets the eye. And you really have to change your perspective rather than just trying to change the world. And that kind of got me going.
Karen: That’s interesting, you bringing up teenagers, because I feel like we have, there’s moments throughout our lives where we’re given opportunities to, again, remember, wake up. And I feel like our teenage years, I feel like we grew up knowing something’s missing, that we’re being sold a bill of goods that isn’t really it. Culture wants us to want these things, but there’s some part of us that’s saying, yeah, I don’t think so. And I think those teenage years, the so-called rebellion years, is really the first spiritual awakening that we’re given. There’s something more, I don’t know what it is, I know it’s not this. And so the seeking begins. And for those who are going to wind up realizing that the seeking is about a spiritual seeking, it’s not about experiences or whatever, that’s where the seed gets planted. And it’s what I call the seeker’s seed. Once you get that seeker’s seed, you’re done for. You are, you can never not be on the spiritual path. It takes on a life of its own.
Rick: It’s true, you can’t forget it. You get— Which is good.
Karen: Yeah.
Rick: Yeah.
Rick: I was just on this point about doing ayahuasca or something or other to get a kick in the pants. It can serve that purpose. It can also be perhaps a mixed blessing, a little risky. But another thing, I’ve talked to a number of people who went on some spiritual retreat where they were just meditating more and had a big breakthrough, which never faded again. And it was like, that was their breakthrough thing. But then on the other hand, those can also be dangerous. A lot of times people get thrown into some Vipassana retreat where they’re going from zero to 14 hours of meditation a day, and they have psychotic breaks. So all this stuff has to be kind of like taken with a safety-first attitude.
Karen: Yeah, definitely. What’s interesting too, and I know this from listening to many of your guests and from my students, when somebody has an experience like that, it doesn’t matter how many years ago, when you see them talking about it, they are right back there living that experience in that moment. There’s an intensity and crispness about it that never fades, and that’s the thing about breakthrough experiences. The thing that’s so amazing is there is this hyper-reality, there is this other reality, there is this expanded reality, and once you touch that, it leaves a permanent imprint on you.
Rick: Yeah, you can never forget it. Well, you can, but it’s gonna poke its little head up again sooner or later. You were saying earlier, I said, what about some kind of practice and you said, go sit outside and look at the trees for an hour. I could hear half the audience saying, “I don’t have time to go sit and look at the trees for an hour. What should I do that could fit into my routine?”
Karen: What can fit in? I find that interesting. The resistance and the “I don’t have time for that.” How much time do you spend scrolling on your phone? How much time do you spend watching TV? How much time do you spend on the Internet? So I feel that it’s about the choices we’re willing to make and how important it is. And I think some of it is too, I know this, I think people are so used to going from their box houses to their box cars to their box offices to their box phones that people don’t know what to do when they’re not in a box anymore. It feels almost, there could be almost a weird kind of anxiety because it doesn’t feel normal or right because we’re so out of tune with nature. And it’s not like I’m tiptoeing through the tulips every day or running barefoot everywhere. But I feel that it’s important. It’s vitally important. I’m not going to underplay it. To me, it is vitally important for clearing senses. Are there other ways to do it? Yeah, you can spend a ton of time in meditation. You could go to retreats and have somebody create that structure for you.
Rick: Even 20 minutes of meditation.
Karen: Yeah, it doesn’t have to be extreme. But I think from a more practical level, do what you’re doing while you’re doing it. When you’re eating, eat. When you’re sleeping, sleep. Don’t have your phone with you. Whatever practice you’re doing, do that without multitasking. I think if we could get away from multitasking, that would be—
Rick: I am so guilty. I am always listening to something while I wash the dishes.
Karen: I also know you’re a big person for listening to stuff when you’re out walking in the woods.
Rick: Yeah, I do that for like an hour and a half every morning, listening to stuff or talking to people.
Karen: Yeah! So is that good enough? Yeah, that’s good enough. Because even though you’re listening, you’re taking something in, you’re also seeing nature, you’re also breathing in fresh air, you’re also experiencing all the benefits that nature and the vibration of standing on the earth have.
Rick: Getting a good workout.
Karen: I mean, I’ve gotten, you don’t have to be extreme. Sometimes I speak as though extreme is the only way to do it. And I think for—go at the pace that works for you.
Rick: Yeah.
Karen: What works, what I’m willing to do, may not be what somebody else feels able to do. As you said, give me something that I could do. And it can be as simple as a simple breath meditation. It could be spend—read positive material. Read a chapter in a book a day. Take a class. Do anything that surrounds your life energy with this thing that you are saying is important to you.
Rick: Yeah, that to which you give your attention grows stronger in your life. I think it might have been Gandhi or it might have been somebody else who said, “I knew I had a really busy day coming up today so I meditated two hours this morning instead of one hour.”
Karen: Yeah, I’m a firm believer in that, that the more grounded you can be before you start the day, the chances of being rattled are much smaller.
Rick: Yeah, if you’re going to shoot an arrow, you got to pull it back on the bow first before letting go. Don’t just drop it.
Karen: Exactly. Yeah, yeah. And the other thing is to hang out with other like-minded people. I think it’s really valuable to have that support. I married my best friend who completely supports what I do and my kids and all the rest of it. So I have that support system and it’s huge. So if you don’t have that, seek it out. That really matters.
Rick: It is really important. And it actually says that in all the scriptures. It says, you got to hang out with spiritual people if you want to be a spiritual person.
Karen: Yeah. And the other thing about what I love about hanging out with spiritual people is if you don’t feel like talking, they’re not going to misinterpret silence as you’re mad at them or you don’t like them. They’re going to say, “Oh, she doesn’t feel like talking today.” So there’s a baseline understanding where you can fully be yourself and not feel like you have to explain yourself all the time, and that’s a relief too.
Rick: Yeah. And of course, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t go hang out with your family at Thanksgiving or whatever, even though they’re not in the least bit interested in this stuff. You can, “When in Rome, do as the Romans,” or whatever.
Karen: Exactly. You can make a stand internally and I think that’s important, but you don’t have to beat other people over the head with it.
Rick: Yeah, this is all pretty common sense stuff we’re saying here, but a lot of times people get tripped up by not doing the things we’re saying. It’s worth repeating maybe.
Karen: One, and this is something that’s come up more recently with my students along these same lines that I just wanted to touch on, is the whole transgender thing and a feeling of it’s hard to find that community and how does that tie into spirituality, and does it? And I have a lot of parents who are reaching out to me concerned about their kids and older people who are going through that process and they know in themselves what they need to do and then again our culture is not really set up to allow that. I really do see it as the beginning of, I think, I’d be interested to know if you feel this way too. I feel most spiritual people don’t identify as a gender. They’re just a person. There’s not necessarily a strong “I’m a he or I’m a she.” It’s more of “I’m a person.” And I feel that, on a spiritual level, the deeper into spirituality we go, I’m not going to say it’s gender neutralizing. It’s just a gender non-issue. It just doesn’t matter. And I don’t mean that in a way at all that is dismissive. But I feel that transgender, some transgender people are going through that experience, maybe without the language for it. That it’s not so much about sexuality as it is about spiritually progressing to a point where you have a physical body but that’s not your identity. And so whatever gender that body is, is not your identity. And if it’s not your identity, if you don’t have that spiritual underpinning, then what is your identity? Because our culture says, “Well, you’re either this or you’re that.” And I feel that this spiritual work can help some of those people understand that progression towards “the body isn’t it.”
Rick: Yeah. My experience is kind of multidimensional. I feel like more predominantly and fundamentally, I’m not a body of any gender. When this body dies, it’s not going to be the end to my true nature. And as a body, I have a male body, and I don’t feel like this opening into universal consciousness makes me gender fluid, although it might do for some people. But it’s a very different orientation than just being locked into the feeling or experience that this is me. And it has a certain gender and it has a certain lifespan and when it dies that’s the end of me. I mean, that’s a very scary way to live your life.
Karen: Yeah, and that’s how most of the world lives. So I feel that’s something that happens naturally on someone on a spiritual path. And that’s my point where maybe I differ a little bit from some practices is I don’t feel that you necessarily want to use deprivation because it’s a rebound effect with that.
Rick: You mean like celibacy or what kind of deprivation?
Karen: It’s much kinder and more permanent to grow through: “I don’t need this anymore. I’ve experienced it. I’m done with it. I don’t need it. I’ve moved on.” So when I was younger, it was my identity. Well, no, that’s not true. I never identified with it. My body was always just to carry my consciousness around. But an awareness at that time that that was my gender, and the longer I move forward, it’s like you. Just not—I don’t identify at all with it on any level. So I feel that when we are given the time and the kindness to grow through rather than to give up. Giving up sometimes can accelerate the process. But for the average person to say, “When I’m done with this, I’m going to be done with it. I don’t need to fight it. I don’t need to reject it. I can just let myself go through it.”
Rick: Yeah. Well, you know the Buddha talked about the middle way, and I’m not an expert in Buddhism, but my understanding of that is to live a balanced life, not go to either extreme, and he tried that before he mellowed out and became the Buddha. But if you deprive yourself of something very beyond the natural ability to do so, you’re probably going to have a rubber band effect where you snap back in the other direction. I’ve seen it happen many times. I went through a whole fasting phase at one point, thinking that that was going to purify my body quickly. And I had a lot of real strong food urges for a long time when I finished that phase. And on the other hand, indulging in things without any restraint whatsoever can be very unhealthy and can just deepen impressions and attachments and desires. So I think there’s, in fact, again, a Gita verse, it says, “This yoga is not for him who eats too much or too little, sleeps too much or too little, is too active or too inactive.” It’s like balance, you know, balance in life.
Karen: Yeah, and I completely agree with that. I think what I’m speaking to more is the person who beats himself up because they can’t do something yet. So it becomes a form of self-punishment. It’s like that defeats the purpose. It’s just let it go and try again now. And if it comes up again, try again, now again. So more of just, and we all just be a little kinder to ourselves.
Rick: Yeah.
Karen: Be a good thing.
Rick: Yeah. Okay. Shifting gears slightly here. In my notes, I have something here about the “it’s all an illusion, let it go” problem and why it doesn’t land for most Westerners. And I bring that up because I do run into it fairly often of people again getting caught up in neo-Advaita and dismissing the world as illusory and actually losing interest in things, becoming nihilistic and perhaps losing interest in family and employment and so on because they’ve drilled it into their heads that the world is an illusion. There’s a lady I interviewed a few years ago named Jessica Eve who kind of focuses on this topic. I think her website is called The Glorious Both/And. So is there anything you would like to comment about that?
Karen: Yeah, I’m a both/and-er too. I think this is again where big concepts don’t translate. Yes, this is all an illusion from the God perspective. From the human perspective, this is my reality. I live this every day. How can you see the screen when the movie is playing? So this is where I feel there is a real challenge for people on this side of the pond. I’m in the middle of the movie. So you can tell me all you want about the screen. I’m not seeing any screen. I hear you use the word screen. I know you know what you mean. But it doesn’t compute. So I feel there’s got to be a way to break it down, and they do break it down really well. So it’s—I’m generalizing here, of course. But the whole idea of trying to get a Western mind to really wrap its brain around that is kind of mild torture, I think.
Rick: Yeah, I think it might be. I think there’s a couple ways of dealing with this concept of things are an illusion. Maybe the monk’s way is, “Yeah, the world is totally illusion, and you want to be a monk, so just don’t get interested in it at all. Stay in your cave, if that’s your dharma, if that’s how you’re wired.” But for the majority of us, I think a useful way of applying that concept is that there’s a lot more to the world than meets the eye. So as we see it now, it is kind of an illusion because we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg. We’re only seeing a superficial representation of what’s actually going on. And like you were saying with the trees and seeing the aura of the trees and all, you could expand your perceptual capabilities to see a much richer, fuller, more divine reality of what appears to be the mundane world.
Karen: I guess that’s what it is for me, because I feel like if you can give somebody an experience rather than more words, that helps them get it faster.
Rick: Yeah.
Karen: An intellectual understanding, I can nod my head and say, “Yeah, I understand those words.” That computes. But in terms of a body experience, I have no idea what you’re talking about. So by giving somebody a direct experience, now I know, it’s like your friend with the ashwagandha, “Ha, now I know.” So I’m always looking for: how do I give somebody a direct experience? And then there’s no need for more words, because they get it.
Rick: Yeah, I think that’s the key to it all. It comes back to the same theme we’ve touched upon a number of times: you gotta find something that will give you a direct experience and hopefully an abiding one. Again, not just a flash in the pan, and in a healthy way because if you take psychedelics every weekend or something, you’re gonna have an experience, but it’s going, in the long run, you’re going to set yourself back, I think.
Karen: I agree. And I think what’s key that we haven’t really touched on yet is along with the spiritual path, the best favor we can do for ourselves is to get mentally healthy. Yeah. Because then we’re not dealing with ego. Then we’re not dealing with other stuck places. And when we have an experience, we’re more likely to put it in the right context, and rather than use it to define us, we use it as a way of greater and deeper understanding. So along with spiritual growth, we got to really clean up our emotional and mental selves to be able to sustain anything over time.
Rick: Yeah, and on this point, I sometimes ponder, are nutty people attracted to spirituality or does spirituality make you nutty? So maybe it’s a little bit of both because it can destabilize you—intense spiritual practice. I’ve certainly gone through such phases. But also I think a lot of times people are sort of desperate nutty people are attracted to it in the hope of some kind of salvation. So how would you recommend becoming more mentally healthy, whatever condition you may be in at the moment?
Karen: When I was in a psych ward I was like the Pied Piper, everybody flocked to me because they could all know that I could see what they were experiencing. That I knew they weren’t crazy in the way they were being labeled crazy, that they were just in a splintered, multi-dimensional state, and so it became like a hall of mirrors. They didn’t know how to get out of where they were or describe where they were or deal with where they were. And so that was something that was easy for me to see, to say, “Okay, take a left here, go down that hallway, go through that cracked glass and you’ll be out.” And I’m grossly simplifying it, but just an idea that, yes, psychotic people can be drawn to this for that reason because they know what they know. They don’t understand what they know, but they know what they know. And so they’re looking for somebody to help them understand what’s happening to them. And sometimes it’s a metabolic thing or whatever it is. I mean, there are millions of reasons that cause somebody to be like that. And so can spirituality help heal that? And I think it can. I think it’s like you’re saying: tools to dig a deep well. I don’t think there’s one tool. I think we’ve got to have a whole toolbox and use the right tool for the right job. And then it all makes sense and comes together.
Rick: Yeah. I mean, a number of topics that we’re touching on here could be the focus of a two-hour conversation in and of themselves. There’s a new friend of mine named Mark Vicente who’s making a documentary called “The Narcissist Playbook,” I think that’s what he’s calling it. And it’s about how prevalent narcissism is in spiritual circles and how narcissistic personalities are often drawn to step into the role of spiritual teacher because it really gratifies that flaw in their personality and exacerbates it because of all the attention they get. So that’s a whole topic. And his hope in making this film is to make spiritual seekers in general more aware of this syndrome so that they don’t fall prey to the wiles of a narcissistic teacher.
Karen: Yeah, there’s landmines everywhere. But with due diligence and your friend writing books like that, which are important, Really, what I look at is, I’m actually not even looking at the teacher. You know what I’m looking at? Who else is in the room?
Rick: Students, right?
Karen: Yeah, students. But are they nutty? Are they kind of whole and healthy and living vital lives?
Rick: Oh, you mean the people around the teacher? In other words, the milieu or the atmosphere.
Karen: The people who are attracted to this teacher. Are they living healthy, full lives, relatively speaking? If they are, okay, I might stick around. Are they claiming to be the second coming or backbiting or whatever goes on when you put a group of people together, maybe I’ll keep looking. So it’s not just looking at the teacher, it’s looking at who the teacher attracts.
Rick: Very good.
Karen: A healthy person isn’t going to stay long with a narcissist. They just won’t have patience for that nonsense.
Rick: Yeah, good. Okay, well we’ve covered a lot and it’s really fun talking to you. We could probably keep on going. I’m sure we could. But is there anything we haven’t touched upon that you want to bring up or at least you want to say in closing because it would be a good message to leave people with?
Karen: I think if people are—two thoughts. If people are having intuitive experiences and they don’t have anybody around them in their immediate environment that can help them understand it, it’s incredibly valuable to find someone, a teacher, someone who can help you navigate what you’re going through. I talk about the “holy shit” phase of spirituality where you start having all these experiences and they can be really wild and some of them can be scary if you don’t know what’s happening or why or you’re just starting to open up intuitively and all of a sudden you hear voices talking to you. And you don’t know if you’re losing your mind. Or you turn around a corner and there’s a person there but there’s nobody there and so all of these things by finding somebody who can help you understand what those experiences are can help ground you in that ability so that the ability doesn’t become a detractor or a distraction to your spiritual path but can become an accelerant which is what it’s meant to be. And then to your point of—
Rick: And you are one such somebody, right? I mean, you do stuff, you could actually help a person in the way you’re describing.
Karen: Yeah, if I did private sessions, which I don’t anymore.
Rick: Well, even in groups, I bet you could.
Karen: Yes, in groups, absolutely. Absolutely. But, and to your point of, finding a practice that you can sustain and you break it down into bite-sized pieces so that you want to stay with it. The worst thing somebody can do is decide they’re going to run a marathon when they can’t even jog a quarter of a mile.
Rick: Yeah.
Karen: Start where you are. Make it realistic. Get the support you need. Grow strongly, grow deep roots. And then when you start getting a big canopy tree over top, you’re not going to topple over because you don’t have a root system to sustain it. So for me, it’s all about the, as you were saying, the entire journey, the lifetime’s journey, and how can we support that so that we can do it in a healthy, sustainable way.
Rick: Yeah, I’m remembering that one spiritual teacher was asked, “What is the best spiritual practice for me?” And she answered, “The one you’ll do regularly.”
Karen: Absolutely. I completely agree. Because it’s not the same for everybody. My husband is not a visual person, so for me to teach him intuition to see visually, I’ve been with him forever and he still can’t do it. It’s not his thing. He is a very verbal person, so for him it’s words. So wherever your strength is, dig in there, make headway there, and don’t try to be what you’re not. If you’re, I’m not a natural musician, so maybe I’m not going to pick up an instrument and say that’s going to be my way through. I am a natural artist, so maybe that’s gonna be my way. Pick where you, pick your innate abilities. Use your innate abilities to your strength and walk through the door that way. Once you get in, there’s all kinds of things along the way to help keep you going. The point is to just find your way through, find your way through the doorway and then it’s gravy from there, I think.
Rick: Great. All right, well, tell us what you offer. Do you have Zoom meetings? Do you have retreats and et cetera?
Karen: I do. I do retreats. I have a monthly Zoom talk where everything is fair game. It’s Q&A. I start with a topic just because if people don’t know what they want to talk about, I’m never at a loss. And yeah, and then just through my writing on my website at the moment.
Rick: Okay, good. And so I will link to your website from your page on BatGap, and I presume that on your website it has all the information about the meetings and everything. And probably you have some email list that people can get on to be notified of things and they can find that on your website.
Karen: Yes.
Rick: Good. Well, thanks, Karen I’ve really enjoyed this. You know, I didn’t prepare for this interview as much as I do for many of them just because I kind of checked you out a little bit and I thought I’m not gonna have a problem with this lady. We’re just gonna have—it’s good we’re gonna have a very easy conversation.
Karen: Yeah yeah me too. So thank you very much for having me.
Rick: You’re welcome and thanks to those who have been listening or watching and we’ll see you for the next one. If you want to know what the next one is there’s an upcoming interviews page on batgap.com where you can see what we’ve got scheduled and it has a link to the live stream version of that particular interview and also it’s handy if you subscribe to the channel because then YouTube will kind of give you little notifications when something new is going on. And in fact, when there is a live stream thing, you can click a little thing on YouTube to be sure to be notified of it when the time comes. So anyway, see you all next time.
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
YouTube
