Kate Gustin Interview

Summary

The discussion explores the idea of “no self” as freedom from identifying with thoughts and personal narratives, rather than losing the ability to function as an individual. It also examines how meditation, psychological health, and nondual awareness can support one another.

Questions This Interview Explores

• What does it mean to have no self without losing a healthy sense of individuality?
• How can meditation help people stop identifying with stressful thoughts and emotions?
• How can nondual awareness be applied in psychotherapy and everyday life?
• What is the difference between understanding selflessness intellectually and experiencing it directly?

Key takeaways

• No-self means loosening identification with mental stories, not eliminating functional personality.
• A healthy ego supports boundaries and daily life but is not the whole of who we are.
• Meditation can reveal awareness beyond the changing content of thought.
• Brief experiences of selflessness can permanently change how identity is understood.
• Freedom grows when thoughts arise without automatically being treated as truth.
• Psychological development and spiritual awakening can complement rather than oppose each other.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done over 500 of them by now, and if you’ve been watching regularly, you’ve heard that number increasing over the years. I can remember when I was saying, “I’ve done over 200 of them,” and I intend to keep on doing them.

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Rick: My guest today is Kate Gustin. Kate Gustin, PhD, is a clinical psychologist practicing in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her education from Princeton University and the University of California, Berkeley, and has worked in a variety of settings over the past 25 years as a mental health practitioner: outpatient psychiatry, community mental health clinics, a VA hospital, college counseling services, and currently in private practice.

Kate integrates the science of positive psychology into her psychotherapy, teaching, and consultation, and leads classes and trainings for students, patients, and health care professionals.

So, based on that introduction, you might be thinking that this is going to be a conversation about positive psychology or self-improvement or that kind of thing. But Kate has actually written a book called The No Self Help Book—as opposed to The Self Help Book—40 Reasons to Get Over Yourself and Find Peace of Mind. And that’s what we’re going to be talking about.

A number of people I’ve interviewed have said that there is ultimately no self, or that they’ve lost any sense of a personal self. I always argue that you couldn’t utterly lose any sense of a personal self, or you wouldn’t be able to function. But anyway, we’ll get into all that stuff. So, welcome, Kate.

Kate: Thank you. I’m glad to be here.

Rick: Before we actually get into the content of your book, tell us a little bit about yourself. We just heard about your education, which is a very good one. How about your spiritual education? When did you first get interested in spirituality, and what have been some of the main influences in that regard?

Kate: I first got interested in spirituality about 25 years ago, when I started my graduate studies at Berkeley. Through my own interest, I started attending the local Zen Center and sampling a number of different teachers who circulated through the Bay Area, different meditation retreats and sanghas. I remember one pivotal class that was offered by the faculty, called “The Clinical Applications of Eastern Thought.” It was offered by Professor Eleanor Rosch, and that was my first introduction to this overlap between psychology and Eastern wisdom traditions.

Since then, I’ve just been making the most of being in the Bay Area, where so many wonderful teachers come through and I’m able to participate in all sorts of venues.

Rick: I would say that other than Rishikesh, it’s probably the world’s biggest hotbed of spiritual teachers. Rishikesh, of course, is heavy on Hinduism, so in the Bay Area you have this eclectic mix of all kinds of things.

Kate: Ah, great, great.

Rick: That’s why the Science of Nonduality Conference is held out there. Half the people who come to it are already there.

Kate: Yeah, exactly.

Rick: Something in what you just said—“The Clinical Applications of Eastern Thought,” I think was the name of that course. Obviously, you probably feel that Eastern thought has clinical applications. It can, in other words, be beneficial for people’s mental health if applied properly, right?

Mindfulness in Behavioral Medicine

Kate: Right. These days, there have been many applications for stress management and pain regulation. Mindfulness practice has been integrated into behavioral medicine, but it can be a little bit of a watered-down version. It doesn’t necessarily carry over some of the theology, as it were, behind it.

Rick: Right. It’s just used as a way of helping people adjust better or feel better.

People do yoga classes at the local YMCA and all that without the theology. My friend Phil Goldberg wrote this great book called American Veda. It’s about the whole influx of Eastern wisdom since the time of the Founding Fathers, really. He traces a whole history of the sort of Vedic influence on the West and all the impacts that’s had.

Kate: Yes, and it’s really blossomed exponentially.

Rick: It continues to do so. Okay, so you obviously said that, like, 25 years ago you started getting involved in this stuff and going to Zen Center and sanghas and satsangs and so on. So, what influence has it had on you?

Kate: Personally, there have been a couple of different influences. One has been through the intellectual study—reading as many books as I can get my hands on—but that has been only one part of the immersion.

The other part has been more of a visceral sense of these teachings and, at times, being graced with a deeper understanding.

Rick: And we might also call that a deeper experience, right? Because I’m sure it’s not just an intellectual understanding.

Kate: Right. In fact, it really has nothing to do with thought processes at all. So, that for me has profoundly changed my life. It’s really altered my entire understanding of who I am, and I believe it’s made a difference in how I am as a healer, as a psychotherapist. And it’s certainly what’s led me to write a book like this.

It’s truly—I would never have envisioned writing a book on not having a self like that. I come from a very conventional background. This is not something that was my life’s ambition.

Rick: Do you have some kind of regular practice that you’ve settled into? Some daily routine of spiritual practice?

Kate: I had one a while back, but truly, writing this book became my spiritual practice. There was a certain kind of ritual of prayer that I needed to use as an entry point to write parts of the book, and so that was my focus for a while.

Rick: You mentioned Adyashanti and Rupert Spira and a few other teachers.

Kate: Yes.

Rick: Candice at Denver.

Kate: Denver. Right.

Rick: And they’ve had significant influences on you?

Kate: Yes. I’ve gone to many retreats, and I just find their teachings accessible. Each person has their own flavor, and my mind loves to kind of gnaw on what Rupert Spira has to say. As you know, there’s a deeper sort of embodiment of his teachings.

I find Adyashanti very accessible in terms of day-to-day life and how to apply his words. Candice is—everyone has their own unique personality as the vehicle through which they deliver their teachings, and so I’ve really enjoyed seeing how this can come across in so many different ways.

Rick: If you hadn’t heard these people speaking and you hadn’t read all the spiritual books, but had done the spiritual practice that you’ve done, would it have occurred to you that ultimately there is no self, or at least that the self is certainly not what we take it to be?

Kate: If I hadn’t read all these books?

Rick: In other words, to what extent did you glom onto that idea from things you heard and read, as opposed to what you yourself were actually experiencing?

Kate: There were several actual moments of grace in which my personal self kind of left the room.

Yes, dissipated. And those experiences are what have given the meat to this. My mind can sort of understand and really can articulate this, but those experiences are what have changed everything.

Rick: Did they leave a lasting flavor, or was it like a glimpse and then you lost it?

Kate: Both. There was a glimpse, and then the localized sense of self came back in. But sometimes you can have one penetrating experience of truth, and that can sort of shift everything.

I feel like my personal experience with this is what informed this particular kind of book, because I really do refer to the selfing process—to being able to identify with self-referential thought. That’s kind of the default, and then being able to pause and step back and not identify with it. So that really has been my process.

Rick: Paul Hederman is fond of using the word “selfing.” Have you ever listened to him?

Kate: No, I haven’t. Some people have mentioned him recently, so I look forward to looking him up.

Rick: My sense in reading your book is that you’re not becoming—or advocating becoming—utterly devoid of a sense of personal identity, and I doubt whether that’s possible anyway. But it seems more that you’re encouraging people to stop believing false mental stories about themselves. Is that a fair assessment?

Choosing Whether to Identify with Mental Narratives

Kate: Absolutely. Even though the title of the book is “Get Over Yourself,” in a clever, dismissive way, this is really about just informed consent. When these narratives come to mind, what do you choose to identify with?

I really wanted to write this book as an accessible, entry-level kind of pop-nonduality book for people who aren’t necessarily thinking about spirituality, or who may not even be psychologically minded—just something that people can relate to based on their preoccupation with their own thoughts.

Rick: You go through a whole lot of points about how life goes if you are preoccupied, and then a whole lot of points about how life could go if you weren’t. So, I think we’re going to go through some of those.

Kate: All right.

Rick: It seems to me that one other key point about your book is that identification is the key factor in how seriously we take these thoughts and mental stories we tell ourselves. Of course, there’s that famous analogy of the movie screen. The movie is playing on the screen and overshadows the screen to the extent that you don’t even know the screen is there. You just get completely caught up in the movie: “Oh, there are monsters coming at me,” or whatever.

Whereas, if the screen could somehow get brighter, then you would see the screen and the movie. Perhaps the screen could get so bright that the movie would just be a sort of faint remnant of images, and the screen would be predominant.

Kate: It’s a question of where you want to rest the majority of your attention, or where your sense of presence or center of gravity resides. Most people don’t even know that there’s a choice in this. There’s some sort of thought, and then one’s sense of oneself is just instantaneously merged with that.

This book is really trying to create a little bit of a wedge, so that the thought or emotion—whatever the passing phenomenon of mind is—can come up, and there’s a “you” there that’s able to witness that and make a choice about how much you want to go with the storyline. Or maybe you can begin turning and inquiring, “Well, what is this part?” This is the part that gets left out by psychology. What is that witnessing presence?

This book is really trying to create a little bit of a wedge, so that the thought or emotion—whatever the passing phenomenon of mind is—can come up, and there’s a “you” there that’s able to witness that and make a choice about how much you want to go with the storyline. Or maybe you can begin turning and inquiring, “Well, what is this part?” This is the part that gets left out by psychology. What is that witnessing presence?

We’re really interested in the types of thoughts and behaviors, and how to make them more adaptive or more functional, but it only goes so far in terms of health.

What is that witnessing presence?

Rick: Plato’s allegory of the cave comes to mind, too, where the people are chained in the cave, and there’s a fire behind them casting shadows on a wall. They think that’s the only reality. It’s similar to the movie-screen analogy, but there’s a whole other world that they’re completely unaware of because they’ve always been chained, staring at that wall.

Kate: Our culture is very much about the projection in the movie, and it’s so entertaining and gripping, right? But it’s stressful, and it’s a fraction of what our wholeness is.

Rick: I wouldn’t say that it’s just our culture, either, because I think it’s worldwide; it’s universal. Everybody gets caught up in it. There are the same mechanics in which sensory input overshadows the Self, the true inner Self with a capital S. We take ourselves to be, or identify with, the sensory input as opposed to our essential nature.

Kate: These “earth suits,” if you will, are kind of hardwired in that way—to take it all at face value. That’s just the human condition.

Rick: One little doubt I had as I read your book was that it’s good what you said about creating a wedge that could drive a little wedge between people’s concept of themselves and what they actually are—or aren’t. But I think that’s a start: having the intellectual glimpse or understanding that there’s more to life than meets the eye, and that there’s a deeper aspect to what we are than we think ourselves to be.

Personally, I would advocate for some kind of regular practice. I’m big on practice—something that would actually make that a living reality and prevent it from just being a conceptual one. Conceptual ones are very tenuous.

Kate: Certainly meditation. Every group therapy session that I conducted at the Department of Psychiatry where I worked began with a meditation process. Even though it was applied for the benefit of relaxation or just a moment of mindfulness, it’s really about cultivating some identification with that abiding kind of presence—the field of awareness—and helping people come to know themselves as that, and not so much as the content of their thinking.

That’s really what the intention is, even if the language around it is different in a Department of Psychiatry.

Rick: Of course, people say—and I think you even say this in your book—“Well, we are that, so it shouldn’t be that difficult to relax into that or tune into that.” But that can be easier said than done if one’s life is intense and it’s really coming at you. You’ve got bills and problems and kids, you’re exhausted, and everything else. It’s just sort of a pipe dream to say, “Well, you are this deeper reality.”

Kate: It requires, like you say, the practice and prompts, and some kind of technology.

Rick: Something or other.

Kate: Yes, to quiet down the noise—or at least not to quiet down the noise, because really, we can’t control our thoughts so much—but to not invest as much credibility in them.

Rick: The Yoga Sutras, the second verse, says:

Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind.

And then, “The seer rests in the Self.” Those are the second and third verses. There are practices that will enable the mind to settle down, just the way an agitated ocean can settle down if the wind stops blowing. Then, just like the ocean, the sun can be reflected clearly once the agitation stops.

Kate: The image on the front of the book is a person sort of lying on the surface of the ocean, although I have to say that, in the rendering, the person looks a little rigor mortis-like. But essentially, it’s supposed to be a calm in the midst of the sea.

Rick: We’re saying these things because it’s good for people to understand that this is possible. Your book tells them that life could be so much better if that’s the way one experienced it. I’m just throwing in this stuff here about practice in order to make sure that you’re experiencing it and not just conceptualizing it.

Kate: Exactly. I think this book is really a very first step in introducing the notion that there’s something other than the commentary. If people want to dig deeper, there are plenty of great resources for that.

Rick: In the Vedic understanding, they have this self-concept broken down into various levels. The one that people are most familiar with is called asmita, and it means the selfish “me” that possesses things as mine: my body, my emotions, my thoughts, my possessions. This is a sort of identified ego driven by needs and desires. Actually, because of when it typically develops, we might call it the two-and-a-half-year-old self.

Kate: There needs to be that level of ego development. There needs to be some kind of initially coherent, stable sense of self, in a conventional psychological sense, in order to be able to disidentify and perhaps transcend that.

Much of my work as a psychologist is really addressing healthy ego development. I don’t pathologize that at all. For people to know themselves, to identify what their preferences are, to be able to advocate for them, and to have a sense of personal rights—that’s just healthy functioning. But it’s not where the story ends.

Rick: You make it clear in your book that you’re not going to lose all that stuff if you shift from the asmita level—the possessive, identified, attached sense of self—to a much more universal one. You’re still going to have those preferences and judgments and whatnot, as appropriate.

Kate: Exactly. Those things have been so overlearned. This sense of self really isn’t going anywhere. If you don’t want it to, it will reconfigure itself within a split second.

Rick: If it totally evaporated, I don’t know how a person would function. How do you know where to put the food in your mouth, or how to walk through the door? There has to be some sense of “Take your hand off the stove if it’s hot.”

Kate: Exactly. I really do feel that we are given this human form for the purpose of experiencing that play of separateness and unity. That unique manifestation needs to be part of the curriculum here.

Rick: We could say that the self is multidimensional, and most people are stuck in the most manifest, narrow dimension of it.

Kate: In terms of survival, evolutionarily, it’s about looking at what I have versus what the other person has—basically taking care of needs and making sure that there’s security, and then there’s contentment. These are important needs, but again, it’s not the whole of what people bring to the table.

Rick: The next level that David outlined is called ahamkara, and it’s defined as “the individuating principle.” This is usually translated as ego, and it results from the intellect recognizing “this” as different from “other.” It’s more subtle than asmita, the possessive self. It’s the sense of an individual self, and this begins with early separation from the mother and gradually develops into the teenage years, when the intellect becomes more prominent. Ahamkara continues post-awakening but is no longer seen as who I am.

Kate: In psychological terms, you might think of that also as theory of mind developing—the capacity to differentiate one’s own perspective from that of others. That comes online with the development of language. This self-referential capacity is very much language-driven.

How that evolves over time depends partly on the environment—not only on hardwired conditioning, but on the environment as well.

Rick: The next one is called aham, and it’s an even more subtle sense of “I am,” of being. It can arise only when the mind is quiet and a true sense of self can shine through.

It’s beyond all the mind associations that we’ve just mentioned—that’s asmita and ahamkara. The sense of “I am” fades as one shifts into Brahman consciousness. We don’t feel like we cease to be, only that what we are is inclusive of something even greater than being.

So we’re kind of shifting here, going from “I-ness” to “am-ness” to “is-ness.”

Kate: You can just feel the spaciousness of that as you describe it. There’s something that’s so liberating in that progression.

Rick: The more fundamental we become, the more universal we become. In other words, the deeper the level at which we appreciate what we truly are, the more universal we find that to be.

Kate: Yes, there really isn’t separation or difference.

Rick: People have often used the wave and ocean analogy. The waves might think they’re separate, but if they look to their roots, they find, oh, we’re all just part of the same—we’re all just the same ocean.

Kate: Exactly. I bring that metaphor in toward the end of the book in terms of, first of all, this choice: Do people even want to let go of the wave identification? Because that’s sort of where the action is. It’s what’s reflected back culturally, or perhaps universally.

From the ego’s point of view, or the self’s point of view, it may seem rather dull to be in the depths of this kind of stillness, or there may be a fear of losing one’s individuality—which isn’t really what has to go with it. But I think it’s seen as kind of foreign and potentially threatening.

Turning Attention Inward

Rick: The senses seem to have the natural function of drawing the attention outwards. That’s what they’re designed to do, right? We’re perceiving all these things outwardly, and they get habituated to doing that such that we kind of atrophy in our ability to appreciate the inward, because we’re always outer-directed.

So meditation of some sort should be designed to allow the senses to take a 180-degree turn and proceed inwardly.

Kate: Yes.

Rick: If we’re not accustomed to doing that, then it might seem dull, or we might feel like there’s nothing to find there. We’re used to getting our fulfillment from outer stimulation.

Kate: Except it’s really the deepest level of connection. I think that’s why this is really a whole paradigm shift. It’s a revolution in the literal sense: we’re revolving away from focusing out there and revolving toward within. Then we see that there really isn’t a division, but it’s an incredibly different orientation to the world.

Rick: All the ancient traditions say that there’s a tremendous prize to be found if we can take the attention inward. It’s a great reservoir of intelligence and happiness and all kinds of wonderful qualities that we can tap into.

Kate: I try to use a metaphor in the book of imagining a stockroom full of barrels of every capacity you can think of: peace and kindness and this and that, and barrels full of animosity or conflict. But it’s all accessible.

When you don’t identify with the patterning, the narrative of the self, you can sort of step back and see which barrel you would like to stock yourself from. But the supplies aren’t going anywhere, and whatever you draw from isn’t going to be the only thing defining you.

I can pull from this experience in this moment of anxiety and, in the next moment, pull from some other collective expression. There’s no conflict. It’s an abundance.

Rick: I would argue that the animosity, the conflict, and the negative stuff are not characteristic of our essential nature. They are the sort of crud that has developed over time through not being in touch with our essential nature. The whole process of spiritual evolution involves cleaning out that crud so that the essential nature can shine through and not be occluded or obscured by deeper impressions.

Kate: I appreciate that clarification, and I would agree with you. I think perhaps what that was drawing attention to was the selfing process. When people really step back and see that they have a choice in terms of what they identify with—what kind of thought or emotion comes through—those are the different barrels.

But when we step back and identify with who it is that’s making the choice, that is a very clean field of awareness. It doesn’t have all of these negative qualities.

Rick: The whole of part one is a section that you call “Selfhoods,” and there are all sorts of little titles, like “The Imposter Self,” “The Self That Slices and Dices,” “The Self Freezes,” and “The Dictator Self.” We won’t go through every single one of them—we wouldn’t have time—but perhaps you could pick out some of the ones that you think you might most like to talk about.

Kate: One of my favorites is “The Self Seeks Esteem.” I use the metaphor of a black hole. This process of having to build our self-esteem, try to prove our worth, and have enough accomplishments or enough accolades is kind of like a black hole.

To the extent that you keep achieving, it pulls in that much more of a need to keep proving. In other words, self-esteem is elusive. There’s no self-esteem organ or entity within us. It’s the same as the self, in fact.

We can engage in a process of trying to feel good about ourselves, but the language around this—how we have to cultivate enough self-esteem—really leads to a lot of problems. I’ve had a lot of clients get stuck with this: “Oh, I can’t pursue this goal or that until I have an adequate level of self-esteem.”

It’s a way of relating to oneself. It’s not a thing that you have in hand, very much like the self. The self, again, is a functioning. It’s an emergence; it’s a response to the environment. It’s not something that you need to reify and then keep referring back to, which keeps us stuck in the past and prevents us from having a fresh openness to what emerges in each moment.

There are a lot of implications for just how psychotherapy is done, or for psychology around this. These days, research has really looked into some of the harms associated with this endless pursuit of self-esteem. It sets people up for this self-help project that never ends.

The research shows that trying to tap into self-compassion is actually more healthful than trying to cultivate self-esteem, because you’re not basing a sense of presence or worth on some accomplishment.

With compassion, it’s part of what’s given with your humanity. There’s a warmth, an empathy, and an understanding that arise in the very nature of who and what you are, as opposed to self-esteem, where you’re trying to pull in this kind of prize, and that’s giving you permission to live as you would like to live. It’s a holding pattern.

Rick: I don’t think you’re saying that one shouldn’t aspire to do things and accomplish great things and so on, but that if that’s where you derive your sense of self or self-worth, then you’re going to be on very shaky ground. You’re going to be jumping out of skyscrapers if the stock market crashes or something.

Kate: It’s just an invitation to focus on the process, whatever it is you’re trying to achieve. How does it feel to be participating in the process of it? The spirit, the participation, rather than some final end result or outcome that you can have as a trophy, which then proves something about yourself. It’s really unnecessary.

Rick: What is it about shifting from the isolated-self perspective to the deeper, or no-self, perspective that would cure the disease of low self-esteem?

Kate: There’s nothing to prove. When you identify as a no-self—in other words, when you cease identifying with the story of who you are and come back to this wide, still field of awareness—what does esteem even have to do with that? It becomes sort of irrelevant. There’s a wholesome context to who you are, an emergent expression of life kind of living itself each moment. So to put some sort of yardstick on that, like, “Well, life better express itself this way in order to qualify for this gold standard,” it just doesn’t really apply.

And so there’s freedom in that. You can just be spontaneous; you don’t really have to be so self-conscious and evaluative, which is really constraining.

Rick: Maybe we could say you kind of rest in a sense of confidence and contentment and imperturbability and self-sufficiency, and qualities like that. You’re not grasping at straws, trying to cultivate those qualities through this or that little achievement or attainment.

Kate: There’s just something very complete—not in an egotistical kind of way, but just in a way of, you know, what you bring to the table is valid. There can still be a cultivation of different interests or different expressions, but your worth is not going to be conditional, or conditioned, on that.

There’s nothing to prove.

✨ Selfhood, society, and service

Rick: Your true nature is oceanic. It’s a fullness, and it’s kind of like if you’re a multimillionaire, gaining ten dollars here or losing ten dollars there doesn’t make any difference. But if you have twenty bucks to your name and you’re living on the street, gaining or losing ten dollars is a huge deal. Being settled in that pure awareness or pure nature means it doesn’t matter much what happens on the ripples of the ocean. You are the ocean.

Kate: Even just from a psychology perspective, a lot of positive psychology has found these days that money—after a certain basic income to take care of basic needs—doesn’t lead to that much more contentment or happiness. These landmark studies of people who’ve won the lottery show that they tend to quickly go back to whatever pre-existing baseline of contentment or discontent they had prior to winning. So there’s something else here rather than the money or the accomplishment in terms of our quality of life. Those things are part of the picture, but they are not the be-all and end-all they’re culturally made out to be.

Rick: It’s good that you’re popularizing this notion, because the culture really does need to shift. There’s so much inequity in the culture between the haves and have-nots, and so much injury inflicted on people and the environment due to the craving, grasping nature of mass psychology and the economic systems that arise from it.

Kate: I feel like this is an important paradigm shift at all levels, not just for personal growth—which I’m making the point is really not personal; this is part of consciousness evolving—but this is important also for sustainability issues and environmental issues. There’s broad application here.

Rick: You make that point in your book, and I think it’s an important one. If we hear or read articles about climate change or economic issues, usually the mentality of the people who are having these kinds of influences is not the first priority, the first thing we would make sure is taken care of in order to make sure the problem doesn’t continue.

Taking care of oneself is taking care of others. I’m just trying to expand the sense of self so that it’s not my individual body-mind—that’s where my self’s needs end. For me to take care of the environment and to take care of other people is taking care of myself in the largest sense. And it’s good for individual psychology as well.

Kate: Taking care of oneself is taking care of others. I’m just trying to expand the sense of self so that it’s not my individual body-mind—that’s where my self’s needs end. For me to take care of the environment and to take care of other people is taking care of myself in the largest sense. And it’s good for individual psychology as well.

Rick: When I first started meditating, people said, “Well, it’s selfish. You’re just going into a room and closing your eyes and being self-indulgent. How about being engaged with other people?” But that’s like saying, “Go shopping without first going to the bank and getting some money out.” You can’t really—you don’t have anything to spend.

Kate: This is a reciprocal, synergistic kind of effect. When you know who your largest sense of self is, then you’re more likely to spontaneously serve that largest sense of self. If we’re caught in the illusion that this storyline of who I am is separate, and I still buy into that, then what’s going to be the motivation for even caring about humanity beyond my immediate family?

Rick: If you want to get a job as a lifeguard, you’d better know how to swim.

Kate: Exactly.

Rick: What are some other little chapters in your selfhood section that might be fun to talk about?

Kate: “The Self Erodes.” That’s kind of an interesting one.

Rick: Erodes like soil erodes, that kind of erosion?

Kate: Exactly. I kind of relate this to some of the work I do with clients. People come in at times of transition in their lives, when they’re entering retirement or, let’s say, because of some personal injury, they’re not able to have the same roles or responsibilities. These are difficult adjustments, and there’s a lot of grieving and a lot of support to be given around these changes.

But the point here is that the sense of self likes to be this stable, continuous thing, and it identifies heavily with its roles. “I am a self who is a professional or a wage earner,” whatever that is. The self really binds to it, and yet our capacities, roles, and stages of life change. So that’s what I mean by an erosion to the form that we’re given, of course, and then how, in this form, we’re able to interact with our environment. There’s just a natural erosion to that.

The self really protests that. There’s a lot of resistance. People can get stuck trying to override these natural changes or just go into denial, and there’s an extra level of suffering layered on top of whatever initial grief or adjustment needs to happen.

Rick: Life shakes it up. Let’s say you ask somebody who they are, and they say, “Oh, well, I’m a lawyer.” And you say, “No, that’s your job. Who else—who are you?” “Well, I’m a father and a husband.” No, those are some relationships, and the things we just mentioned could be lost.

And so then what would you be? “Well, I have a body. I’m this body.” But wait—that could be lost. It could get sick, or it will definitely age. And so then who? “Well, I’m this mind.” Yeah, but you could become senile, or something; that could be lost. So what are you that can’t be lost?

Kate: I actually do this exercise. When I led some groups back at a medical center, it was a class on anxieties. We would have people break into dyadic pairs, and one person would simply ask the other, “Who are you?” The other would give a one-word answer, and they would repeat it over and over again, probably for as long as they could tolerate it, but about ten minutes.

Rick: Really? Give us an example. What kind of one-word answers?

Kate: I would ask you, “Who are you?” You would say, “I’m Rick.” Then I’d ask it again, and you’d say, “I’m a man,” and I would just keep asking the question.

Rick: Oh, so you go deeper and deeper, kind of?

Kate: Deeper and deeper. People didn’t even realize there were so many answers to give. At that level, it’s very helpful, because when people are going through depression or anxiety, or whatever the issue was that brought them to the medical center, that took up most of their self-definition, at least at that point in time.

For them to see, “Oh, well, actually, I am all these features and all these roles and all these capacities,” before we even got to what’s underneath all that—which, in a medical setting, we didn’t always get to—it really helps people come into the expansiveness of who they are.

Rick: One thing that comes to mind is the element of fear. If you identify yourself as all these temporary, changing things, it seems to me that there would be a sort of abiding fear, because all those things are always in jeopardy.

Kate: I think the self is kind of a fear-based myth of an entity, really. If we’re going to personify it for a moment, we could say here’s this mythical entity that’s afraid of being seen through, of being seen as what it is, which is that there’s no there there. It has to go through this whole charade of, “Well, I really am enduring. Here are all my beliefs, and they’re not going to change. Here’s my physicality, and it’s not going to change,” even though you know life doesn’t operate that way.

But there’s such a bravado to it because it has to work that hard to create something out of nothing, essentially.

Rick: That sounds exhausting. There must be a constant expenditure of energy to try to cling to, buttress, and reinforce things that tend to continue slipping away from us.

Kate: Thus we have psychological defenses. Many of our defenses are a protection of self. We buy into this illusion that the self is an entity, and a fragile one at that. So we’re always having to defend ourselves against being rejected, being condescended to, or what have you. It’s a lot of psychic energy that could be used elsewhere.

Rick: One thing people often say when they have an awakening is that they feel a tremendous sense of relief because there had been this subtle effort, and maybe even not-so-subtle effort, going on for who knows how long. Finally, they’re able to just relax out of that, and somehow nature goes on autopilot, or one’s whole makeup goes on autopilot and is guided or conducted by some larger intelligence. You can just sit back and enjoy the ride rather than try to be in the driver’s seat.

Kate: I had an experience of that sort—not in terms of the self dissolving, but in terms of an actual traffic accident happening right in front of me. In that moment, when I realized, “Oh, this whole illusion of me just trying to keep myself alive or protect myself, or just that I’m in control”—that just got shattered. The experience in that moment was such a relief: “Oh, I don’t have to keep pretending that I can really control this.”

Then, pretty quickly, that went away and fear came right in: “Oh my gosh, I’m really not in control now.” But I believe there is that initial sort of release of realizing that we don’t have the reins of the horse here. Pretending to have them is just a lot of unnecessary effort.

Rick: There are all kinds of verses in the Bhagavad Gita about how you’re mistaken if you think that you are really the actor, or that you are in control. Nature is doing it, and it gives you all these descriptions of how the sage realizes, “I do not act at all.” It’s all being conducted by the forces of nature.

Kate: The self does not want to concede control. One of the other chapters is “The Self Steals Credit.” The idea is that whatever it is that you do, there’s this little mythical self-entity saying, “Well, I made you do that.” Here we are, gifted with whatever sort of creative or intellectual expressions we have, and yet this collection of thoughts in our heads is trying to take credit for life manifesting itself. It’s kind of absurd.

Rick: The Gita actually refers to such people as thieves. It says that if you appropriate that which does not belong to you—namely, the authorship of action—then you are a thief.

Kate: That’s the little funny introduction I have to this book. There has been an identity theft on a mass level here. The seat of our thoughts has sort of robbed our sense of identity, and these culprits should be called out.

Rick: We don’t want to sound accusatory, because everybody’s born this way, and it’s a universal human condition. It’s not anybody’s fault. I think what you’re doing is pointing out that there’s a better way and that we ought to seek it. But nobody’s to blame.

Kate: I really tried to take a humorous tone. It’s like, here we are in this together, and isn’t it a bit odd and paradoxical that, whether it’s evolutionarily or just whatever it is that has put in place this sort of adherence to a sense of self, we’ve been given this sort of abiding ground of being, and yet we see ourselves as so small?

How is it that we do that? It’s just sort of trying to walk hand in hand through this very absurd kind of drama and look at it with some curiosity, while finding a way to take it down a notch so that we’re not suffering as a result of it.

There’s no joy in smallness.

Rick: Your essential nature is to be vast and unbounded. If the whole ocean has been squeezed into a drop and you think you’re just a drop, and not the ocean that you actually are, there’s a perpetual sort of pinch.

Kate: Our longing—whatever this core sense of inadequacy or loneliness is that I’ve seen in every client I’ve worked with, and within myself and everyone—is, I think, the driving force of that. We have mistaken ourselves as the drop, and that is a pretty constrained way of mistaking ourselves.

Rick: There’s this sort of universal, innate longing. A lot of times the longing is missed and misinterpreted or misunderstood. People say, “I really need that Mercedes,” or “I really need that relationship,” or “I really need that amount of money, and then I’ll be fulfilled.” But the longing that they’re actually hoping to fulfill with those different things is the longing for the Self—for, when I say self, I mean capital-S Self—for Self-realization. All these other things are inadequate substitutes.

Kate: That’s why they don’t really have much lasting power and why it puts us on the treadmill of constantly trying to accumulate more. We’re trying to fill something in that we already are; we’re just not recognizing that we are that.

Rick: This deeper realization does not deprive you of ordinary wants and aspirations. Those things just become more like icing on the cake. At least you have the cake.

Kate: Exactly. You want the cake first and foremost, right? Icing gets a little sickening. This is the addictions, the obsessions, where we’re really trying to pull something out of these substances or experiences that they’re not equipped to give us. They’re not going to fill an inner thirst.

Rick: Jesus said, “Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven, and all else should be added unto thee.” So that’s the priority there.

Kate: Icing on the cake is delicious, but let’s just make sure we’re not forgetting the cake.

Conditioning, trauma, and freedom

“The Self Freezes” is one I kind of like. That talks a little bit more about the process of identifying with thoughts. We’ve got these ephemeral symbols or representations that go through our mind, and we give a great deal of meaning to them, even though there are tens of thousands of thoughts that pass through.

We take a particular thought that’s got an emotional charge to it, and it kind of freezes it. We put it in our memory museum, so to speak, and then we keep revisiting that thought as if it holds some kind of essential truth about who we are and what’s possible.

This is how the sense of self gets constructed. They could be images, too.

Rick: Can you give us a concrete example, a specific example?

Kate: Well—

Rick: Are you saying, for instance, let’s say your girlfriend broke up with you, or your boyfriend broke up with you, 20 years ago, and you keep dwelling on or obsessing over that? You’re frozen in something that happened two decades ago. What good is that doing you?

Kate: Exactly. Those are the kinds of thoughts that tend to stick, because they have personal meaning. Whatever sort of pain was experienced at that breakup gets frozen into semantic and also nonverbal memory. We hold pain cellularly in the body, and we keep revisiting it.

It becomes a way of knowing ourselves: “I’m the person who was broken up with,” or “I’m the person who can’t sustain a relationship.” These labels and this storyline about ourselves become the self that we’re constructing, and it’s so outdated.

It may be that we went through these experiences and had a certain emotion or a certain conclusion about them, but why are we posting them on the wall of the museum and revisiting them as if they represent something about our current-day, current-moment experience?

Rick: Our doing that certainly influences our current experience and our current behavior. We carry all this baggage that has accumulated over the years, and it definitely influences how the journey is going now.

Kate: It really can get in the way. Five minutes before this interview, my selfing function was alive and well. In the midst of feeling a little nervous about the interview, it was bringing up certain past experiences of social blunders and making mistakes.

If I chose to go with that and review that particular wing of the museum, let’s say, it would really bias my whole nervous system toward a different kind of experience right now. I’m just trying to invite people to make a choice.

Rick: There’s a sort of action-impression-desire cycle that happens where we perform an action or have an experience, and it creates an impression in the nervous system which gets lodged there and may stay there for decades. Then that impression in the nervous system gives rise to impulses or our desires, which spur us to further action, and the whole cycle can repeat itself.

Obviously, to take an extreme example with addiction, it can become very compelling and very hard to escape from. But it happens with smaller things too, and there’s probably a countless number of impressions in there. One effective spiritual practice is to root out these impressions—they’re called samskaras in Sanskrit—and as they get rooted out, they’re said to be like burnt seeds that can no longer germinate and have weeds springing up. There’s no longer any impetus to action based upon the conditioning. Instead, the impetus to action is this more cosmic intelligence that’s much more appropriate to the circumstances and not based on some old, past thing.

Kate: I love the burnt seeds. Essentially, that process is what psychotherapy attempts to do. A lot of that kind of conditioning happens to us early in life.

Rick: Sure, especially if it’s traumatic or something.

Kate: It really happens during a time of development in which things have quite an impact on basic ego functioning. It can really disrupt a person’s autonomic nervous system, and so people become hardwired to be vigilant and to believe that people are untrustworthy, that circumstances are unsafe, or that there’s something fundamentally wrong with themselves. That really does need to be uprooted.

Rick: During intense spiritual practice, when these impressions start to get released, you can kind of relive a lot of the experiences that had been lodged there. But it’s a sort of brief reliving that you’re capable of handling at that point, and then you’re done with them. Probably something similar happens in therapy sometimes, right?

Kate: Absolutely. There are some techniques, such as EMDR—eye movement desensitization and reprocessing—which really help the mind-body discharge that kind of frozen belief system or frozen fear response. It’s not about reliving or re-exposing oneself; that’s not where the healing happens. But you do feel some of those same impressions once you discharge them. It’s not a fun process to go through, but it really does truly liberate a person from these very early conditionings.

Free will and the end of personal control

Rick: A couple of questions came in. Here’s one from Bartholomew in Melbourne, Australia. He asks, “So if I am not the doer, how can I have free will, if there is free will?”

Kate: That is a great question. Honestly, there are different research studies that say different things about this. There were a whole set of studies that showed that decision-making was done even before decisions arrived at the level of the frontal lobes, before you were aware that you were doing that executive functioning. So it was thought, “Oh, there is no free will.” But then other studies have shown that, actually, it’s a much more integrated process.

Rick: I’ve often heard people cite that study, saying that the impulse to move your arm happens a second before you actually are aware of it or anything like that. But I’ve also heard that it was debunked, or that, as you say, it’s more complicated or nuanced than that.

Kate: That was Libet’s study, and some of the methodology was called into question. But I think it’s both-and. Personally, I think this second level of self-referencing really can influence our decisions. But even before that comes online, there is an impulse, an expression that comes through, even before my mind makes a comment about what I am doing.

Once that self-referential capacity does come up, that can be part of what determines the behavior. So you’ve got kind of both.

Rick: A question came in from Ranjit in Irvine, California. He says, “How does spiritual realization about the lack of personal will change how you operate in the day-to-day world?” Presuming, of course, that we have realized there is no personal will, which I think is still debatable. But go ahead and see what you think about that.

Kate: It certainly first humbles oneself. The self—if we’re going to personify the self—does not like this. The self wants to be in charge, and there might be a bit of a rebellious flaring up of the self to prove that it’s that much more in charge.

But essentially, this is relaxing. Like you were saying, when you break free of that illusion that everything is under your control, there’s a relaxing. Then there continues to be an arising of experience, of expression. I don’t need my self-referencing capacity to be online in order for me to do anything. It could be part of the conversation, but there’s a sort of trust that comes about—a trust that life is, in fact, living itself.

If we just stop listening to the selfing voice long enough, we can do that as our own experiment and see: Is there just a lack of movement or a lack of thought? No, there is still a vibrancy that comes through. We’re just not claiming it as our handiwork.

Rick: The idea of intuition comes to mind. Life is living itself, and we’re an instrument through which it’s living, right?

Kate: It’s certainly been my own experience in writing this book. My ego, myself, was pretty ambivalent about writing this book, to tell you the truth. I’m really a private person. This is the first time I’m coming out as a kind of nondualist in a public forum, and I’m from a conventional background, so this is out-there stuff.

But this compulsion to write this, and some of the wisdom that came with that, truly was not from myself. I can assure you of that. There was something larger at work here. I think there’s something intriguing in that mystery. It doesn’t have to be a threat to my personal sense of self. Both things can coexist and just be kind of glad for each other.

Rick: A lot of spiritual teachers have spoken about surrender and about service, and the will of God—being in tune with the will of God, being a servant to the divine, and so on. If you get out of the way, then the divine can use you; you can be, as St. Francis said, “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.”

Kate: There’s something just so graceful in that if the self is willing to surrender a little and not get in the way.

Rick: He still said, “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.” So there’s a sense of a “me,” a sense of this body-mind that functions, but I want it to function in service of something profound.

Kate: We all have our individual personalities and our individual capacities, and those get to be put in the service of life serving itself. There is something beyond what our minds can really conceptualize.

Maybe just to say something about the part where the self dies. When I write about that, I’m not talking about the body’s death. That’s kind of a given, although plenty of us are still in denial about that. I’m talking about the self-referencing narrative that we have. That part goes on and offline all the time.

When we’re watching a movie and really absorbed in it, we’re not coming back to the self-storyline and referencing ourselves. The self is fading into the backdrop. We’re not identifying with it, and that’s harmless. There’s nothing to dread or fear.

I just wanted to make a point of that because it’s very counter to that first impulse, which is, “Oh, this sense of myself has to be continuous and it has to be on the front burner, or else something’s going to be lost.” It’s just not true. It fades into the backdrop all the time, and we’re no worse for that. In fact, we’re probably better.

Rick: Some great athletes talk about being in the zone. When they are, they’re really at the top of their game, but they’re almost like a silent witness to what they’re doing.

Kate: The same with musicians and dancers as well. If the self needs to take credit, then yes, there is the athlete’s training and whatever choices were made about the course of instruction or the way of applying one’s body-mind. But in the moment, there is a mastery. You can trust that life will show itself in some sort of effective or purposeful way.

Rick: A lot of great artists and writers speak of that, too. There’s the idea of a muse, and a lot of great composers say that they know their symphonies. Mozart said sometimes a symphony would just come to him in a flash; he’d have the whole thing, and it was just a matter of writing it down.

There does seem to be some higher intelligence, which we don’t need to think is separate from ourselves. I think that’s ultimately what we are, but that only gets impeded by individual monkeying around—interference, really.

Kate: A lot of writers describe this tortured experience with their writing, and I’m certainly no different from that. But the tortured experience is not the transmission from the muse; the tortured experience is the self stepping in absolutely with its second-guessing and its whatever garden-variety neurotic dance it wants to do. It’s a real practice to try to detach from that.

Rick: It’s often said that artists—great artists—suffer, and some have said, “Well, you have to suffer to be a great artist.” But maybe what’s really going on is that something profound is trying to come through, and a lot of suffering is experienced if there’s garbage in the way.

The willfulness versus the willingness. Is the self trying to willfully manipulate what is coming through? That’s the recipe for suffering. Or can we take a stance of some willingness, some humility, surrender, and just allowance to be the conduit, without it having to take away whatever appropriate pride there is in the accomplishment? That pride could still stand, but just allowing this truth to express itself—it doesn’t have to be tortured.

Kate: The willfulness versus the willingness. Is the self trying to willfully manipulate what is coming through? That’s the recipe for suffering. Or can we take a stance of some willingness, some humility, surrender, and just allowance to be the conduit, without it having to take away whatever appropriate pride there is in the accomplishment? That pride could still stand, but just allowing this truth to express itself—it doesn’t have to be tortured.

Rick: That’s an important point, because I think that’s a popular assumption—that there’s a correlation between creativity and suffering. I think that’s something that should be put to rest. It really doesn’t have to be that way.

Kate: Or just the way some people have assumed that you have to go through tremendous, even suicidal, suffering to have a spiritual awakening. We know that that’s just not true.

Rick: A lot of times people create a lot of suffering if they’re on a spiritual path by being fanatical about it and by being far more effortful than they should be, as opposed to taking a more natural approach and just relaxing and allowing nature to conduct the process.

Kate: I don’t think the self trying, again, to will something—to manipulate something into awakening—is probably going to be productive.

Rick: A good example is the Yoga Sutras: yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind. Let’s say you have a pan full of water and it has ripples in it, and you want the water to become still and clear. You don’t start pushing on the ripples, because you’re only going to create more ripples. You just allow the pan to settle down.

Kate: That’s great. I’m going to bring that into my clinical practice. It’s just so true.

Judgment, beliefs, and conflict

Rick: Part two of your book is a nice collection of how one might function as no-self. Again, sometimes it’s confusing because sometimes we refer to no-self, anatta in Buddhism, or sometimes in Hinduism it’s called Self with a capital S. But I think we’re talking about the same thing here.

Kate: A helpful one is “no-self, no judgment.” One of the fears people have is, “If I don’t identify with my thoughts and my opinions and my preferences, I’m going to be this bland wash of passivity. I’m not going to have any kind of direction or any angle to who I am.” And that’s not true.

There is a personality; there are preferences that emerge while abiding as this sort of clean slate of consciousness. It just means that you don’t have to have some kind of agenda. You don’t have to judge good or bad. You can still have preferences; there’s still a certain kind of inclination toward action. But judgment about other people, or what’s right or wrong—those things can soften.

Again, it frees people up to be much more willing participants, a kind of willing interface with life on its own terms, rather than trying to impose one’s judgment and one’s manipulation.

Rick: If one is attached to one’s opinions and tries to make absolutes of them, then those absolutes are going to clash with everybody else’s opinions. Opinions are not absolute; they’re relative. But if you make them absolute, they can conflict with everything else.

Kate: The more attached you are to these thoughts, and the more you elevate them to the rank of ideas, beliefs, or universal truths, then the more conflict there is.

But stepping away from that doesn’t make us brainless zombies. We still can have our opinions. I’ll still champion a certain cause and maybe not another cause, but it doesn’t mean I have to be in opposition. I see this all as the play of form—a whole array of different kinds of views. I’m not going to judge one as God’s will and something else as not that. That would be so presumptuous.

Rick: If you define yourself as what you believe, then anybody who disagrees with your beliefs is a threat to you. They’re not exactly a threat to your belief; they’re a threat to you, because you think you are your beliefs.

Kate: That’s why this is so revolutionary for people: to disidentify from their beliefs. Suddenly, there’s some breathing room. There can be some sort of negotiation and some genuine respect for others’ beliefs, knowing that they are all of the same thought substance.

We can still feel strongly and be impassioned, but it really doesn’t have to be an annihilation of selves in the process.

Rick: You can see how what you’re advocating in this book would be of tremendous practical significance—in politics, where there’s such polarization that nobody can talk to each other and nobody can accomplish anything, or in debates about abortion or gun laws and gun rights.

Kate: You can see that in some of the work that’s been done, like Fred Luskin’s work around forgiveness. The methodology he uses brings together people from different sides of a conflict—from Rwanda or Northern Ireland, for example—people who have lost loved ones in the same room with those from the opposition.

He takes them through a process of forgiveness that’s about helping people detach from their own stressful thoughts, not holding on to the grievance story because it’s so toxic to the one who holds that story.

Forgiveness has nothing to do with whether you got an appropriate apology or whether amends were made. That can contribute to reconciliation, but within one’s heart, forgiveness and healing come from letting go of the self’s attachment to the story of having been wronged.

The fact is that these harms have been done, so it’s not a minimizing or condoning of that at all. It’s about the self’s attachment to that story as a way of holding the grievance. People can do that inner work and then come together, so you’re not needing to extract something from someone else for your own healing. It’s remarkable.

Rick: More fundamentally, we need to infuse into collective consciousness more of this unified value of the no-self, as you call it, or universal consciousness, or whatever. As that gets more and more enlivened in collective consciousness, then quite spontaneously many differences will kind of melt away or become harmonized.

Kate: Given that we can’t necessarily speed the pace of that, writing these books and having these dialogues and forums hopefully is helping. But simultaneously, let’s just have all approaches at once. I’m feeling a bit of a sense of urgency around what’s happening at the global level here. So I appreciate everybody contributing as they can.

Rick: I don’t think it has to be either-or, but it needs to be all. If you try to just do the meetings, with or without the deeper spiritual exploration that needs to be much more widespread, or if you just do the spiritual exploration but don’t take steps to promote alternative energy or whatever the relative thing is, then it’s just not a complete solution.

Kate: This fundamental myth of self, and buying into some separation, is at the root of most of these problems. We can keep cultivating the garden, but if we’re not really pulling out some of these weeds at the root, it’s going to continue complicating things.

Rick: If you can somehow make the ground of a forest more nutrient-rich, then all the plants will thrive, not necessarily in competition with one another. They’ll all just thrive because they’re all deriving more nutrients from their roots.

Kate: When people can tap into this rich kind of ground of what they are, it doesn’t activate the individual, evolutionarily built-up survival mechanism. That feeling of competing for resources or scarcity, or “my needs versus your needs”—if people really can tap into this rich, fertile kind of foundation, then that can ease up, and we can bring our higher-level faculties to the problem-solving table.

Rick: It becomes a matter of your needs are my needs because we’re all one, essentially.

Kate: Exactly.

Rick: “Whatsoever you do unto the least of these, you do unto me.”

Kate: Yes.

I talk about “no self, no aging.” That’s the counterpoint to the “self dies” part—the sense that this field of consciousness that we are, this awareness, is primordial. Unlike the self, it doesn’t come online or not. It’s not like a hardwired kind of capacity in the brain that gets activated with certain neuronal activity.

The whole premise of this book is that consciousness is not an emergent quality or feature of the material brain. Consciousness is the fundamental context, source, and substance, and everything emerges out of that.

Rick: The brain is an emergent property of consciousness. That’s actually the way it is.

Kate: From that understanding, there is no aging or death. From the self’s view, the storyline, and from the body-mind’s view, death is part of the curriculum. It’s kind of what you get.

Rick: When I first started getting into spirituality, I was a teenager, and teenagers don’t think they’re going to die anyway. I don’t ever remember having a time in my life when I feared death, because once I got into spirituality, it began to tune me into something that can’t die.

I’ve interviewed a number of near-death-experience people and also read books by others whom I haven’t interviewed. Almost universally, they say, “No worries.” Actually, I don’t have a death wish, but I look forward to dying because it’s so beautiful on the other side.

Kate: Our brains are designed to scan for signals—any subtle signals that show some potential threat about annihilation—and the mind will go to those much faster than to any other kind of mental content.

Evolution has designed us to be on the lookout for this because we are survival-focused. It’s adaptive to put your energy toward living rather than toward understanding the ending. But unless people have had some true experiential no-self kind of moment, it just feels too conceptual to say that we’re not going to die.

Rick: The main point is that there is a level of what we are that never dies.

Kate: That has certainly been my personal experience as well. If I didn’t have a personal taste of that, I would feel like I’m just playing around with a concept. In this book, especially if this is a person who isn’t well versed in these ideas, the hardest part to engage with will be the parts about “no self, no aging.” I tried my best to explain that, but it’s a little hard without being able to give a person the experiential component.

Rick: Unless you can dip into that, all these things are just a lot of words. I would recommend that people explore what sort of practice or approach works for them to enliven that experience, because it’s definitely possible. Anyone can have it; no one is incapable.

Kate: My hope with this book is that for folks who weren’t really spiritually oriented, it allows them to come into contact with something that’s true about themselves. There’s down-to-earth language around it, so it doesn’t have to seem so esoteric, off-putting, or out there.

Rick: There’s a third section in your book entitled “To Self or Not to Self: That Is the Question”—“Whether ’tis nobler in the mind.” Take us into a little bit of that. What are you talking about there?

Kate: My intention is not to proselytize, even though, of course, the book is set up with having no self appear as the better option. I really do want to invite readers to contemplate for themselves what is in their best interest. If they find that attaching firmly to a storyline their mind generates about who they are works for them, they probably would not even be reading this kind of book, but go for it. Nothing is going to be taken away. There is no absolute right or wrong here.

It is really about helping people evaluate how they would even determine whether selfing has been useful or not. There are different kinds of questions, such as, how much peace does the self really afford you? Or how much does the self even like itself? Just basic questions in terms of day-to-day life: when you keep this story of yourself, how is that working for you?

Rick: Your book points out pretty well, especially in the first part, that it does not work for people very well. It shows examples that most people can relate to of why it does not work, so I think you make the case.

Kate: In this last section, I am also trying to give examples of what smart selfing is: this action of choosing to shift out of self-identification and into no-self. Or, at least, disidentification with the self is a shift. Even if people are thinking, “What is this ground of being?” it is okay. It is enough to set down the story of oneself. There is benefit just in doing that.

I go through different examples during the day. When you wake up in the morning, what is an example of selfing versus an example of coming back to no-self? Or when you are eating a meal? I try to make it a little bit more tangible. Essentially, it is about people selfing judiciously and allowing buy-in to their thoughts when it actually serves them, versus functioning on autopilot, with reactivity and emotion driving them.

Rick: This whole discussion we are having, and simply reading your book, can enable people to take a step back and not be so convinced by their ordinary way of functioning, not be so invested in it, and recognize a vision of possibilities—that there is another way of functioning.

Kate: That is why I do not use any words about awakening or enlightenment.

Rick: It is not supposed to be the Brahma Sutras or some kind of ultimate teaching. It is an introduction to the idea that there is another way of being, and that you are more than you think you are—or less than you think you are, however you want to put it.

Kate: This is primarily a psychological kind of book. Psychology only goes so far, so I am trying to bring in another kind of truth about who and what we are. But it is primarily through the workings of our mind.

🕊️ Spiritual bypassing and acting as if

Rick: There have been instances in which people have taken these kinds of understandings and it has brought about some kind of dissociation or spiritual bypassing, and a sort of disingenuousness where they mistake understanding for actual realization and then behave more unnaturally. Have you run into that?

Kate: I have. People are real spiritual seekers, and what goes with that is the risk of some spiritual materialism and a certain kind of pretense about how to be. You can feel it when you encounter it. Everybody is just making their best attempt at trying to apply these truths, but sometimes it is not from the inside out. Sometimes it is from the ego, and it is a little hard to be around.

Rick: J. P. Sears has this whole “ultra-spiritual” thing where he lampoons that tendency to try to affect spirituality without having it be genuine development.

Kate: I love his ultra-spirituality thing. It helps us laugh at ourselves, right? Sometimes the self does like to capitalize on this. If we are going to personify the self, it sees that its days are numbered, so to speak. It is going to join in with the spiritualizing of itself in order to hunker down, and it just complicates things.

Rick: We are talking about something that should ideally liberate one from the confines of smallness, from an obsessiveness with individuality, but it can actually be used to reinforce that and just put more decorations on it.

Kate: This is not yet the next accomplishment in the way of proving that the self has worth. That is not what this is in service of. But the self will appropriate what it will.

Rick: Is there any other point in that section that you want to highlight, “To Self or Not to Self”?

Kate: I bring up the acting-as-if method. Truthfully, I was really trying to address what I think is the challenge with a lot of teachings: how do you offer people an entry into something that, in some sense, is grace-given?

With acting as if, what do you lose? If I were to go through my life assuming that I am the same consciousness as the person I am looking at, I do not lose anything by that, even if it does not seem like the true visceral experience I am having. It is a bridge, a way to help me be more open to that knowing.

I bring it up as a tool, but with some reservations. In psychotherapy, if a person is struggling with social anxiety, assigning them the task of acting as if they are confident is a bit of a manipulation, clearly. But to the extent that they are then able to get in touch with a genuine sense of presence, that is real, and it can be built upon. Some of the means are not as good as I would hope they could be.

Rick: I am reminded of that song from The King and I: “Whenever I feel afraid, I hold my head erect and whistle a happy tune, and no one will suspect I’m afraid.”

Kate: This is where positive psychology gets a bad name. People feel like we are just fluffing over things, and that is not really true. But sometimes, if you have gone through a lot of hardship and a lot of conditioning of the self, it is a little bit hard to just smart-self and then shift into no-self. There has to be something more gradual.

Rick: It is a progressive development. You are not going to turn on a dime. There is a lot of conditioning, and it is going to take a while to work that out.

But that acting-as-if idea has merit. If nothing else, it might make us more empathetic. We realize that the other person is ultimately me. It is the same ultimate self seeing through different eyes. If we can cultivate that awareness, it might make us more compassionate or more sensitive, and less likely to hurt others in any way.

Kate: Empathy is tied up with all sorts of good, beneficial things—the oxytocin and hormones. When we access empathy, there is such a reward in how we feel, so it does become reinforcing.

The point of this is not necessarily for the individual’s gain. It is just about being able to access the truth. But it is good for people to know that there is something that can be good for them as they entertain the possibility of all this.

Rick: They say it is more blessed to give than to receive, but I think that, actually—when you give, you do receive more than when you do not give. This would probably mean giving in any sense, so it does benefit the giver.

Kate: All the studies on giving show that people are happier when they give money than when they receive the same amount of money. Volunteers benefit, too. Obviously, the people who receive help from volunteers benefit, but the greatest benefit comes to the volunteers themselves. It actually prolongs a person’s lifespan to give in that way.

Rick: Seva is definitely a spiritual tradition: selfless service. It is said to be a powerful spiritual practice because it attenuates the ego. It diminishes the me-focus when we are focused on benefiting others.

Kate: It just feels really good. They’ve even done research that looked at the neuronal firing when we’re attending to other people versus attending to ourselves. There’s much more activation of our reward systems when we’re focused on others than when we’re focused on ourselves. We’re designed this way.

Closing reflections

Rick: You just mentioned that you’re kind of a science nerd. In the final section of your book, you have a whole thing called—what do you call it?

Kate: “Me-search,” instead of research.

Rick: It’s a whole lot of references to different types of research that have been done, which support the conclusions that you draw in the book. For those who have that bent, you’ll find all kinds of references in there. It’s sort of a buttress for the arguments you make throughout the book.

Kate: It was kind of fun to scan through that research and see what’s out there.

Rick: You’re in the Bay Area in Northern California, and you have a clinical practice; you work with people. Do you do that just in the office, or do you do it over Skype also?

Kate: Right now, it’s just in person, but soon it’ll be over Skype.

Rick: So people listening to this—and this will be up for years—they could always just get in touch with you and see if you’re doing things over Skype if they don’t live in the Bay Area.

Kate: There are some workshops that are in the process of being created now, sort of no-self-help workshops. I’m not exactly sure what the venues will be, but I’ll be posting that on the noself-help.com website as it gets figured out.

Rick: I will post links to that and to your other website on your page on batgap.com, and I’ll post a link to your book.

Kate: Thank you so much. Gosh, it’s such a pleasure to talk with you.

Rick: Thanks, Kate. I really enjoyed the whole thing.

I’ve just been speaking with Kate Gustin. If you would like to find out more about her, just go to her page on batgap.com, which will be linked to. If you’re just watching this on YouTube, there will be a link to it in the description underneath the video. From there, you can jump to her websites.

We also have a Facebook page where, every time I do an interview, I set up a post so people can discuss that particular interview. It’s more manageable than having a discussion on YouTube, which gets kind of out of hand. If you’d like to discuss this, go to batgap.com, to Kate’s page, and then link from there to the Facebook discussion group about this particular interview.

Thanks for listening and watching, everybody, and thank you again, Kate.

Kate: Thank you.

Rick: We’ll see you all next week.