Kiran Trace 1 Interview

Questions this interview answers

• Can a person experience spiritual awakening without prior spiritual practice?
• Is it necessary to heal trauma or psychological wounds before awakening?
• How can spiritual teachings become distorted by cultural or community filters?
• What is the difference between internal and external acceptance in spiritual practice?

Key takeaways

• Spontaneous awakening can occur without any prior spiritual background or practice.
• Deep trauma and psychological wounds do not prevent spiritual awakening.
• Cultural and community filters often distort the original intent of spiritual teachings.
• True acceptance is an internal process, not just outward compliance or behavior.
• Awakening brings access to a broader field of awareness beyond ordinary perception.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week is Kiran. Welcome, Kiran.

Kiran: Hi.

Rick: My first trivial question is: Kiran is a man’s name in India and how did you end up with the name Kiran?

Kiran: (laughs). Kiran is also a woman’s name in Sanskrit, so there’s a lot of KIRAN, KIRANA.

Rick: Okay.

Kiran: And it’s the first ray of light that hits in the dawn. So, just when it’s all dark, that first ray of light is a KIRANA in Sanskrit.

Rick: Oh, nice.

Kiran: So yeah. So it’s actually really, really, common in Fiji or any of the Indian countries. The way I spell it: K-I-R-A-N, is a female version.

Rick: Oh, okay.

Kiran: The male “Kieran” is an Irish Saint, or the Japanese Dragon. (laughing)

Rick: Huh.

Kiran: So there’s lots of versions of it, but mine … it’s a great story how my name came about – because when I first popped, my mind, my mind blew a fuse. And you read the book and we’ll talk about more of it … But it was so radical. It was such a spontaneous … I had no background, no orientation, and I was suddenly without any form, and navigating the world after a few months was so hard for my family, my friends, everybody. Because it was an entirely different human being, in front of them, like, radically different. Sudden, like now. So a friend, a really, really, good friend of mine, Christopher (who the book is dedicated to) said: “You know, sometimes people change their names; that’s what a name change is. It helps everybody clear out the identity and start again. Why don’t you change your name?” And I was like, “Oh, you know, that’s so flakey. That’s so new agey (laughing).

I’m not going to change my name”. And then I thought about it, and I thought, “Whatever helps, if anything helps”. So I had my first boyfriend; his name was the Irish “Kieran” and I loved the name. I’ve always loved the name. I thought, I’m going to name my kids Kiran or my dog Kiran. And so walking in the woods one day, I thought, “Maybe Kiran is my name, because I love it so much”. So I went to my sister and I said to my little sister, “What do you think about the name ‘Kiran’ for me?”, and she said, “I love it. I love it!” And I said, “Okay, how about you just call me Kiran and let’s just see how it goes”. Because I was really nervous about doing this sort of flakey, new agey thing. And my sister told my mom, and my mom called me, and was like, “I love it. I love that name! I’ve always hated your name. I love that name!

I’m going to call you that name.” So my friend Christopher, my mom and my sister, for six months, called me Kiran – and they were the only people. And they all loved it. And it fit. And it was a few days later I asked my sister, I said to my little sister, “How do we spell it? How should I spell it?”. My sister said, “

Phonetically: K-I-R-A-N, spell it just the way it sounds: Kiran.” And I was like, “Okay!” And then literally, maybe two and half years later, when I start to learn about spirituality and that people, you know, “Guru will give you a name”, to refer to this other thing, and usually it’s this sort of Sanskrit kind of a name. I type in: “K-I-R-A-N” to see what that is, and I find out it’s the Sanskrit word that means “The first ray of light that hits the dark” (laughing). So I called my sister and said, “You are my guru! You named me!”

Rick: (laughing) It’s good.

Kiran: “God named me!” (laughing)

So that’s where “Kiran” came from, yeah. But I think most people know me as the “Mystic Girl in the City”. I think that not a lot of people know that it’s “Kiran”. They just think of “Mystic Girl in the City”.

Rick: Well, now, now a lot more people going to know about it as “Kiran” because we just talked about it. (laughing)

Kiran: Yeah!

✨ The Spontaneous Awakening

Rick: Alright, so you had, you just alluded to, and in your little bio you sent me, you referred to what you called “a massive spontaneous awakening”. You “died of a massive spontaneous awakening into your true nature”. I found this most interesting. I read your book Tools for Sanity . It’s not a long book; I read it on a plane flight from Dallas to San Francisco, and what made it extraordinary was that most people who have, there are exceptions, but most people who have spiritual awakenings have done a certain amount of spiritual practice, sometimes years of it. And they kind of long and yearn for this thing, you know … and you’re just, you know, clueless about this stuff. You haven’t really focused on it at all in your life.

You were a dancer, and this and that, and all of a sudden, one day, out of the blue, “KA-BLAM!”, you had this incredible shift … and then you spent years trying to adjust to it and restructure your whole vehicle to accommodate it. So I’d like to explore that with you, in quite some detail.

So tell us the story, as you told it, in the book about your life prior to that. Not at great length, but as much as you feel is relevant and then what happened when you had this awakening.

Kiran: Yeah, well … As you mentioned, I was a professional artist. I had a fine arts degree in theater and dance. And I was an actor and dancer, and that was the practice of my whole life. I’d actually been dancing and acting since I was two, and professionally and semi-professionally through my teenagehood. I worked, you know, all over the U.S. and all over Europe, and I had a really deep identity as an artist. A lifetime career, you know?

So I guess in some ways, that was my spiritual practice … a deep practice of artistry and creativity. Um, maybe. (laughing) But yeah … and I also, which is really relevant to my story, and to myself as a teacher, I had a really challenging life with a tremendous amount of violence, and tremendous amount of trauma. Like, “off the charts” levels of trauma and violence.

Rick: You mean, like, domestic violence kind of thing? Your father or something?

Kiran: Yeah, yeah, my household, my … a truly mind-blowing amount of childhood abuse and … just cycles and cycles of unbelievable trauma at every level.

So, although I was so fortunate to have this successful artistic career, I actually lived it on the fringes of my life. And although I was very successful as an artist, the primary movement of my life was trying to survive and function in profound psychological, physical, and emotional damage that included very, very extreme Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from all the events and all of the trauma. And then also having survived that, I was recreating it in many ways in my life, in many areas of my life. There were levels of insanity and violence that were just on a perpetual cycle.

🕊️ Challenging the Spiritual Narrative

Rick: It’s interesting because in most models of spiritual development, that would disqualify you from any kind of imminent awakening … One would assume that a great deal of repair work had to take place and purging of all these deep impressions before you could even get close to some kind of awakening.

Kiran: I’m so grateful that you’re seeing, that you point that out because that is a really, really, strong line in so many … Advaita, Buddhism, when you go into these indoctrinations, that is a really strong through-line there.

Rick: Yeah, they got all these vasanas, all these kleshas, and all these impressions in the nervous system and they’re deeply rooted, and they’re going to keep you bound and restricted until they’ve been gradually, gradually, worked out. That whole line.

Kiran: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, it’s not true.

Rick: In your case anyway.

Kiran: In my case, and in many, many others. Many, many others. You know, that the actual death of the self is irrelevant of the forms. One of the forms being your psyche. One of the forms being your mind. One of the forms being your body. That, “It all God, anyway!”

Rick: Yeah.

Kiran: You know, it don’t have to take a shape to know itself, you know.

“The actual death of the self is irrelevant of the forms. One of the forms being your psyche. One of the forms being your mind. One of the forms being your body. That, ‘It all God, anyway!’”

🧘 Spiritual Practice and Awakening

Rick: There’s a famous saying though, from some Zen guy, which is that enlightenment may be an accident but spiritual practice makes you accident prone, and I’ve often quoted that, and some people have taken exception with it and say, “Well, I’m not sure that there’s any evidence for that”, and kind of anecdotally, it seems like there is, because people who are engaged in spiritual practice seem to be more likely to have awakenings. But you were certainly the exception, and I wonder if some kind of really objective study were done, we might find that maybe, that all that spiritual practice accomplishes is easing the transition when the Awakening does happen … so you don’t have so much to work out afterwards.

Kiran: You know, it’s so interesting and it’s a really great point – and my opinion is more at the front end of that – people who are called to a spiritual practice already have a sense … there, it’s all reality, reality is already touching them. Which is why they’re called to go there. So having a calling to move to spirituality is the same calling that’s going to make you predisposed to awakening, possibly. I think a very soft, separate will, which is often, you know, ninety-eight percent of people in the spiritual house have found reality, found the forms, like the world so painful and there’s some kind of idea, or sense, or very direct experience of something else, of kind of a mystery, that moves.

And so, the person … this calling inside of people makes you accident prone, I would say … it’s not the practices, although the practices are beautiful and there are bazillions of them and the ones that call to you, that you undertake, always have some level of devotion or love that is guiding you towards that movement inside of you to begin with … that made you show up. So I think that’s true. I think that makes you accident prone, yeah.

✨ Discovering Spirituality After Awakening

Rick: Yeah, but you can go decades, most people do go decades, between first sensing that gentle voice inside, that calling, that there’s something more, and having the sort of … realization that you had just more or less out of the blue.

Kiran: Yeah. And I think that God … I think a lot of things about that, one of things about that, was my own personal experience: that when I eventually stumbled into the halls of spirituality, finding out that that’s where this is all being talked about, I was shocked, repulsed, and repelled because the distortion that I was hearing was so thick. I used to say to people all the time, when I first discovered spirituality – which is, you know, two years into being awake – it was the only place that God didn’t live.

Rick: Hm.

Kiran: There was only one place in the world where there was no God, and that was a spiritual house. (laughs)

Rick: Huh.

Kiran: And I used to – because I needed to be around sanity, I needed to be around clarity, and the teachers, all these different teachers were that voice of sanity and clarity – but in order for me to hear them, I would often have to sit outside the building.

Rick: Hm.

Kiran: Like, I couldn’t even be in, because as soon as I walked in the doors … it was like God being sucked right out of the whole essence, of the whole place.

📚 Distortion in Spiritual Teachings

Rick: How come? I mean, we could name teachers, but you probably don’t want to in this context, but I mean, everybody knows who all these well-known teachers are, especially that you might be likely to see in the Bay Area … You tell a story of going to see Adyashanti and getting up on the mic and more or less yelling at him for giving these people, for actually luring these people into this realization, which they actually had no inkling of the radicalness of it; like, “What are you trying to do to these people?”, “If these people had any idea what you were trying to get them into they’d run out the door”. Basically, that’s what you said.

Kiran: (Nodding) If they actually knew for real. You know, the actual teachers are … I think Adya is the most incredible teacher, I mean, he’s … I call him and my friend Eckhart … those are the big guns – I call them my “Big Guns”.

Rick: Eckhart Tolle?

Kiran: Yeah, they’re as clear as clear gets. And they’re fantastic teachers. And I’m so thrilled about their work. What I … the distortions that I was discovering were like the deep cultural storylines that were filtering the information the teacher was saying.

Now, I was only interfacing with these very contemporary, very modern, quite clear teachers – but it was inside of the home of Buddhism and, you know, quite honestly, I have found a lot of Buddhists that I love to death and I think are incredible teachers, but I have never found a Buddhist teaching I agreed with yet … I’m totally open! I’m totally open! But I … if you tell me about meta-practice, if you tell me about mindfulness. I can get into a rashy itch of irritation, because it is so full of distortion.

“The distortions that I was discovering were like the deep cultural storylines that were filtering the information the teacher was saying.”

📚 Externalizing Teachings vs. Inner Compass

Rick: (laughing) Okay, so let me see if I understand it correctly, so you’re saying, you’re not faulting, say, Adyashanti or Eckhart Tolle or Gangaji, or any other well-known teacher. What you’re saying is that by the time what comes out of their mouth goes into the ears and through the brain of the audience, it becomes something very different from what they’re actually saying … you’re saying things get muddled in the transmission. Is that what you’re saying?

Kiran: They get muddled in the deep cultural ground of these hallowed halls that are already saturated with a culture and a storyline that’s a distortion … Acceptance practice for instance: “Acceptance Practice, Acceptance Practice”. There’s this inside of it, it’s just kind of this; in the halls of spirituality, it’s known, it has Advaita versions and Buddhist versions, and all the different versions of it, and New Age versions and it’s saturated in the halls. And always, it’s pointed to external circumstance – “Just say yes”, you know, “a deep bow of whatever shows up”. But externally, I mean. And there’s the first distortion: externally is the mirror. That’s the illusion. There’s no power there. The power is internally. So, the acceptance practice is about internal acceptance, because that’s the only thing there is. That’s it. There’s no external anyway.

So there’s these slight … you end up walking around with a bunch of ideas: that my job is to just say to “yes” as my neighbor comes up to me and say, “Can I borrow the tractor?” And, “I’m a good spiritual person and I’m into acceptance, so I say yes”. And then he says, “Can I have your lawn mower?” And I say, “Yes”, and I just say, “Yes.” And then … (laughs). There’s no freedom in that, you know, versus the internal.

My neighbor comes up and asks for the lawn mower, and I feel what arises inside of me. And what arises inside of me is total irritation. Because this fucker breaks everything he ever borrowed.

Rick: (laughing)

Kiran: I never want to lend him anything and my new lawn mower cost me $1500, that’s what arises, and you know what? That’s compliments of the mystery. Like, that’s not … people think they have to get through “all that” and move into some profound position of surrender. The position of the surrender is to honor that internal movement and surrender to that, and then find, ideally, a very gracious way to express a real boundary that’s coming up, which is, “I understand it would be great, I’m actually not lending out my tractor. I noticed the last thing I lent you was broken, and I haven’t got a replacement yet. But I’d be happy to accept that.” (laughs)

Rick: That’s a good example. So what you’re saying is that, without really discovering and fine tuning their inner compass, people externalize these teachings – that being a case in point, and in this case, become kind of sheepishly cooperative with whatever presents itself. But that’s not what was intended by the original teaching of whoever espoused it.

Kiran: And so many … We’re in a really interesting spot in the world and in the planet right now, because so many … How do I say this? You know, Ken Wilber has a thing about this … people are more awake now than they used to be. So the Buddha has the same freedom that I have, but it’s more awake here, because I live it, by paying a mortgage and having relationships and having community. Like, I’m actually living this awakening in so many layers of matrix. I’m not sitting outside of society in a role of “teacher” that excludes me from real relationships – equal-powered relationships, and under-powered, and over … I’m not sort of taking the crown that says, “I am the Buddha”, “Nobody question me”, and a lot of yes men, and I walk around just speaking. I’m not assuming that was Buddha’s life.

But that’s the way his teachings – five hundred years later – get written down as, and all these distortions get filtered in, and filtered in … and all of the interpretations of Jesus’s teachings … and they’re so distorted.

The Mind as a Filter

Rick: (laughing) There’s a saying, “Knowledge crumbles on the hard rocks of ignorance”. So you would walk in those halls and there’s just a sort of almost esoteric antenna pick up of the operant mindset in the hall, that would freak you out so much it would … because maybe, usually it’s just the teacher speaking and everybody sitting there passively listening, but it somehow just went against the grain for you the moment you walked in there, because you somehow picked up on where the audience was at, versus what the teacher was saying?

Kiran: Well yeah. And more specifically, and because you’ve read the book, I go into this little bit … what happened for me is that when my mind blew a fuse, I no longer had access to my mind. And without the mind … uh, the mind is a tool. So I know very directly what mind is, because my mind blew a fuse – when it’s gone, you sure the heck know what’s missing, you know. So my mind … when it blew …

Rick: Let’s back up. Hang on a second. We kind of skipped ahead … Let’s really get into it … Yeah let’s really get into that right now. Tell your story about when your mind blew and all that, and then we’ll kind of pick this up again in terms of …

Kiran: Okay. Sure, that’s great. So we had been talking before, I had this beautiful artistic career, quite successful and very full, but the primary movement of my life was trying to heal and survive from this, you know, from my trauma, and most disturbingly, the post-traumatic stress disorder which made my world entirely small; very, very hard to function – because of that particular trauma. What you see in movies – with like, people come back for more and stuff; what post-traumatic stress disorder just sort of looks like; it’s highly dysfunctional. You can’t really function. So that was the majority of my life. So the point and the reason why I think that’s so important both from my story, and my story as a teacher is that the journey of healing for me was that I always needed to find truth in a situation. So for me it wasn’t a kind of a spiritual thing.

It was like: two people are talking, and I am not safe, because I’m never safe. I’m always on alert and I’m always about to be harmed brutally somewhere, whether most of the time that wasn’t true, but in my head it was. And so I have to find out what’s true here – what’s true here, what’s true here, what’s true here. So, so many years of digging for what’s true. I think that’s what predisposes someone to awakening, and I think that’s what brings people into the spiritual house … that they have this sense that there’s something else here, that all of this going on isn’t necessarily true. And it’s painful on so many levels. So I think in that case, I am the same, but mine looked at … mine came across from needing to do it through healing. Through healing. Through healing my psyche.

But I had actually gotten to a point in my life … this is the part that’s unique: I had actually gotten to a point in my life, just after my thirty-second birthday … a very functional … unbelievable levels of functionality, given my history. So tremendous peace. Tremendous ability to search, to just live life not so on the fringes; I was actually healing. And just, you know, skipping along living my life. I was in Vancouver, Canada, at the time; I was an actor – working in my career had led me to mostly film and TV at that point.

And it was just … I was having this great life, you know. I lived in that girl in … you know, like that girl’s house. I had a little great apartment in the city and my great friend, and the blossoming, exciting career … and one day after going for lunch with my mom and her twin sister, I just came home to change shoes to go out and meet a friend … And as I was putting my shoes on and tying my shoes up, I noticed that my body, my hands were just made of light. And it was really, it was sort of inconsequential, in the same way that you would be grabbing your keys and wallet, out the door – you don’t really look at your keys and wallet. It was in the same way.

I wasn’t really looking at my hands, I just was like, sort of in the background was, “Wow, they’re just “golden light” … and then this sort of off-thought of, “Wow, you know, my whole, our whole bodies are just so beautiful (laughing) … our whole bodies are so beautiful, they’re just golden light”.

And then I think I caught that thought and actually stopped, and when I looked … I kind of looked at the wall – there was no wall. There was no room. There was no me. Nothing was here – I blew a fuse … the filter that takes energy and creates it into a wall was gone. It left, and it never did come back. It was just one hundred percent done. So, all there was … was basically seeing the quantum field – and that was all I could see … this sort of wave of energy, and even as I say that, it’s so … because we so consistently have minds that filter information. It’s not like I could see the wave. I could just … when I lost the mind, I suddenly had access to about a thousand percent more than seeing. It was like vast and vast fields and fields and fields of information were suddenly accessible to me, that before were inaccessible because my mind was filtering it, and just creating “wall”.

Living Without Filters

Rick: What kind of information?

Kiran: Well, everything. Everything. You know. Choice.

Rick: Like radio stations? I mean, what were you picking up on? (laughing)

Kiran: I mean … pretty much … kind of a much more … deeper than that… um, much more. Like, well … as it exists for me now. You know, this morning, Rick, I knew what time you woke up.

Rick: Huh.

Kiran: (laughing) And started to research today. So … I’m asleep, for three hours, in a different time zone. There’s a part of me that’s always awake.

Rick: What time did I wake up?

Kiran: For me it was about … I think it was about six or six thirty your time, for me it was a little earlier.

Rick: Well. First I woke up around 4:15 because the cat woke me up and then I lay in bed for a while and decided, “I’m not gettin’ back to sleep”. So I went in the other room and started meditating, and I meditated for a little bit and then I lay down and slept some more and then I woke up again, at … I don’t know. It might have been after seven, a little after seven or something.

Kiran: It would have been that first time, when you woke up and meditated in that space.

Rick: So that would have been like … two thirty in the morning your time, or something.

Kiran: Yeah it was a quite … it was the middle of the night, my time. I didn’t look at the clock, but I was like, “Oh, Rick’s awake.”

Rick: And so was this one of … one of many little tidbits, all over the planet, all over the world?

Kiran: Many, many, many.

Streams all over the planet. All over the world. Movements going all the time. Absolutely.

Rick: Do they seem irrelevant, or is there a reason that you’re picking up all these things? Are you actually … are they actually enhancing your experience or enabling you to function better, or are you actually helping facilitate these different things that you’re picking up on?

Kiran: It’s just what happens when you don’t have a mind.

Rick: (laughs)

Kiran: I just don’t have the filter. So this is, I think it’s just the actuality … and this is very, very, very rare. This is totally rare. This is like, you know, when I sit down with Adya or Ben or any of these people – you know, they’re always quizzing me about this. It’s a very rare form of it. It’s a very specific … it’s not the case for everybody.

Rick: You see angels? Subtle beings?

Kiran: You know, I’m very, very uninterested, not as a stand, but literally completely uninterested in those alternate claims of reality movie. It’s like …

Rick: So you’re picking up stuff on this plane, but stuff that we shouldn’t ordinarily be able to know – mainly on this level. This plane of existence.

Kiran: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, on an ordinary plane of existence.

Yeah. I’m just … it’s basically in order to feel or see you … the way I describe it to people is that I’m actually seeing the coding of your being and reading that coding to see brown shirts. You know, to see … I always point back to the movie “The Matrix”, because it’s so good – it was, in so many ways, the way it is. So in the way that they write code to see. You know. The world. So in reality, we don’t actually live in a ship that’s gray. And you know, in reality we live in total, we are total bliss. Total light. Total fabulousness. And then all the rest of it’s coded, and I see code. And over time my systems learned to read the code, but in the first few days of awakening, I couldn’t.

Rick: Yeah, you were like …

Kiran: It was like … overwhelmed with information. But unbelievably … awesome at navigating, because the mystery is moving. There’s not, there’s no separate identity, separate mind moving. It’s just this mystery totally moving … But it certainly took a while to … to navigate that dance.

Rick: Yeah.

Kiran: (laughing)

That is not for everybody. I had, for many, many years, I had a lot of people around me, sort of have this little prayer they would say every night, “Please don’t make me wake up. Please don’t. (garbled)

Rick: (garbled) … they didn’t wanna be like you.

Kiran: They didn’t want to have to do what I was doing. And then, you have to want to go through this. It was like, “Oh my God! Scratch any request for me to EVER … NEVER, like, never let this happen to me, please, never.”

Rick &

Kiran: (laughs)

🩺 Effortlessness, Healing, and the Four Steps

Rick: Yeah, well that’s interesting. You know, I mean, in high school science class, when you learn about the electromagnetic field and all the different frequencies that exist and how visual light is just a small percentage of that, they tell you, “You wouldn’t want to see it all, you know, there’d be too much.” So they teach you, even in high school, that we’re kind of like filters, which our senses can pick up a certain sliver of the full range of possibilities of. And same with large and small, you know, we’re kind of at a scale where we’re not seeing the very large or the very small, we’re just kind of tuned in to a certain level of perception. So what you’re saying is … There’s also the gross and subtle thing. I just was chatting with a friend, who has been a friend for quite some time, and he just happened to tell me he sees angels all the time. I never knew that.

And then I started asking him every little thing, like, “Are they here? Or here?” … we were …

Kiran: Yeah, yeah, yeah!

Rick: …in an airport elevator and I said, “Are any of them here in the elevator?”, and he just kind of smiled, and afterwards he said, “So they just told me, ‘Don’t point us out to people; if they’re meant to see us, they’ll see us’.” So I guess you’re meant to see what you’re seeing, and it’s not necessarily the celestial fields, the angelic fields. You’ve just somehow lost your filters, in terms of perceiving all kinds of things that people ordinarily can’t perceive.

Kiran: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah.

Kiran: Luckily, the dominant theme of what I’m accessing is up against … So I call, I have a couple of layers, and one of the layers is just that, authentic impulses, moment to moment, that are moving. So in some ways we have to keep using words. They’re a little too big, but we’ll try. For me, it’s like in Oneness. They’re just these authentic movements in Oneness. But how it’s perceived, is like … for you or for me, like … you woke up at whatever time in the morning. I don’t … the first level of perception is just this unique essence that, and we haven’t actually met, but I read your essence … to read, just even in hearing your voice. It’s an essence I’m reading. And so it’s just the Oneness has this essence moving. It’s just an essence moving. And it’s me reading it to go, “That’s Rick, and Rick’s awake.”

Rick: What state were you in at that time of two thirty in the morning, your time, where you were what people would conventionally call “asleep”, and you were aware during sleep and therefore having these experiences?

Kiran: Yeah. I have a funny relationship with sleep. It’s sometimes like this, but not always. Sometimes I sleep like a normal person sleeps, and I quite love it and it’s wonderful when that happens. And it happens and it’s great. But lots of times it goes like this: say you’re with somebody sleeping and they ask you, “Are you asleep yet?” You know, that little moment. Like, “Have you fallen asleep yet?”. And I have to look … at what’s going on, and I think, “You know, I don’t think I always drive this car, and I don’t always talk to these people. So I think I must be dreaming.” So, I’ll say, “Yes, I’m asleep”. You know, so I have … I’m always awake.

Rick: Yeah.

Kiran: And so I’m awake inside of a dream, or I’m awake inside of THIS dream. (laughs)

Rick: And even when you are not dreaming, you are awake inside of deep sleep.

Kiran: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So there’s a level that’s always awake.

Rick: Yeah.

Kiran: It’s always, that’s always awake here. Yeah exactly, and the thing that turns, the thing that filters information and turns off, blew for me. So, I don’t have it – so it’s always, I’m always open. You know, like it’s always … I’m just one. I’m just the oneness, you know, the form is quite separate …

Rick: Yeah, well. What would happen to the universe when that slept?

Kiran: (laughs) Well, it doesn’t. It doesn’t. It’s reality, because reality is awake.

Rick: Right. Right. Yeah.

✨ Defining Awakening and Enlightenment

I’m kind of interested in litmus tests of awakening, in a way, because there’s such a cheap word these days, where everyone says, “Oh, I had my awakening”, and you know, it’s a word.

Kiran: That’s a cheap word.

Rick: Yeah.

Kiran: I agree.

Rick: I feel like the culture, the spiritual culture, could use greater clarity of definition in terms of what we really mean by “awakening” and a number of other such terms … So that they just might have another …

Kiran: Oh my brother, brother from another mother… (both laugh) … (garbled). Yes. It would help, it would help people to have that. Because I don’t align to a hierarchy, which is all in my books and all in my blogs. I don’t give a flying fuck if you’re awake or not. It doesn’t particularly matter. I’m sorry, I have gutter mouth. Does this all have to be edited? (laughing)

Rick: No, it doesn’t.

Kiran: (laughing) But I don’t actually care if you’re awake or not. But … And I think that all these people are extraordinary teachers whether they’re awake, whether … There’s extraordinary teaching, but if there’s some kind of clarity about what the teaching is, it’s so helpful. And so I couldn’t agree with you more, that these are very general terms that define … for me, it’s a very narrow …. you know, what I define as awake is very, very, very narrow. But you know, for instance, my buddy Adya has a much wider one, and other people have much, much bigger, much more wider categories.

“I don’t give a flying fuck if you’re awake or not. It doesn’t particularly matter.”

Hierarchy, Suffering, and the Human Experience

Rick: Mhm … Well, it’s kind of like the word “education”: someone asks, “Are you educated?” And you know, maybe you’ve graduated from high school, is that educated? Or is it a college degree that’s educated? Or graduate school? I mean, at what point do you say you’re educated?

Kiran: Or a PhD.

Rick: Or a PhD.

Kiran: Exactly.

Rick: Yeah. And so it’s kind like that with awakening and … (garbled)

Kiran: Unless you’re on the other side. Like from this point through, it’s very, very, clear where identity begins or where no identity ever begins. If nobody’s home at all but you have to be … It’s a kind of a sense that … it’s a kind of a sense organ that only opens the other side, after you die.

Rick: Right.

Kiran: You know, like death being enlightenment or the awakening, awakening into your true self. It’s like when you’re fully awakened to your true nature, you have this unbelievable amount of sense organ, and part of that sense organ is very aware of when there’s identity with form, and when there’s not. And it’s … Although I know people like to think they can sense it, and likely they can. It’s like blaringly obvious, on the other side.

Rick: So, mostly like people are wearing a sign or something.

Kiran: Yeah, yeah. It’s like they’re actually reaching out and touching you. You know … it’s like someone … like this was awake (slapping on cheek), so that when it not … But it’s so … the reason I think it’s so hard to talk about, it’s almost sacrilege for you and I to have this conversation, is because of the ingrained idea of hierarchy – that somehow being awake is like the ultimate thing to do. I mean, it’s a huge part of that cultural saturation that I talked about, that’s such a distortion. That this is the ultimate thing for a human being to do, is to, you know, fall into their true nature. And I totally understand why some people talk about that, and some teachers. But it’s a very clear pointer, in a specific way, but all of these pointers are a …

As I keep saying, again and again: they aren’t a platitude you can write on a sign and hang outside and use it for all occasions – they’re alive. These pointers are very alive … they only have relevance in a moment, and then they fall apart again. And so … Because that’s not true. (laughs)

You can be totally be awesome and that was … we were talking about that: totally awesome, totally amazing, totally a brilliant teacher, incredible contributor, incredible human being, with tons of clarity, tons of sensitivity. Tons of life and beauty. And you … you’re not only into your true nature. You can live a gorgeous life. You can have total fulfillment and total peace. It’s not a prerequisite. And in fact, it’s a big can of whoop ass. Like it’s, it’s an unbelievable roller coaster ride that you don’t get to get off …

Rick: Well, hang on a second … So, the kind of things you just alluded to: totally awesome, totally incredible. I mean, we can pick out great people, like Einstein or Nelson Mandela or some like that. Those who are just these amazing wonderful personalities who contributed so much to the world. That doesn’t imply that they’re awake to their true nature, and I think most people understand that. It does … just being amazing in a relative sense doesn’t mean you’re awake to your true nature and being awake to your true nature doesn’t mean you’re going to be a stand-out in a relative sense, you might be quite, you know, nondescript.

Kiran: Yeah. I mean … Yeah. Exactly. Because I think the call to awaken to a true nature has this, some kind of recognition of specialness, which is actually true: you are incredibly special. You’re the One. You’re, you couldn’t be more special in your life as it is right now. And being awakened to your true nature doesn’t make you more special than before you were awake.

Rick: And you’re not special in some way that the world is necessarily going to applaud or recognize.

Kiran: No. No.

Rick: So we got that.

Kiran: Yeah, and you … And I think that the other reason that people are sort of gunning in this direction is because they live with a lot of suffering, and the idea is that in that place there’s no more suffering, which is true – but it doesn’t mean there’s no more pain.

Rick: Sure.

Kiran: Pain is the human form. That’s what happens. And you can … but you can actually have quite a suffering-free dream and not be awake to your true nature. You can live with ease, you can live with fulfillment, and you can live with peace. And that has a lot to do with healing, knowing how to heal the traumas in your system. So you can have a free, fulfilled, still, peaceful life at some level along the continuum. And all of this isn’t to say, “Give up the dream of enlightenment”, by any means. All of it is to say … that every step in the journey, move as you are called, and ultimately at each of those steps, you have equal access to peace – because it’s your true nature, whether you are awake or not. To fulfillment, to love, and to awesomeness. (laughs)

“Every one of us are so incredibly unique, with so much to offer, as we are. And to just not miss that … heading on a quick train to get somewhere.”

❤️ Metaphysics and the Force of Love

Rick: No, I agree with that. But a minute ago you said that you don’t necessarily buy into the notion that falling into your true nature of self-realization is the ultimate goal post of human life. I must admit that, that’s kind of been my model all long that, you know, people might be awesome in various ways, going through all kinds of experiences and so on and so forth, but there’s this kind of evolutionary stream in the universe that tends toward self-recognition, and that forms of our nervous systems are evolved to be more and more sophisticated, more and more complex, so as to be capable of that self-recognition. But a stone isn’t going to accomplish it very well, or, you know, an aardvark or something. But that, with this human nervous system, we have that possibility.

Kiran: I would agree in some of what you’re saying, and not agree in others. So … I think … I mean, obviously I’m living proof of the correctness of that, you know, that ultimately, regardless of what kind of pains in the system, or whether you’re even aware or not, your true nature’s going to find you.

Rick: Yeah, and if we regard the universe as being orchestrated by some vast intelligence which wants … wants your true, wants to find its true nature in that place.

Kiran: See, that’s where I would disagree.

Rick: Okay.

Kiran: It doesn’t need to find itself. It’s itself. And a rock is as valid and essential, and the world would be less without a rock.

Rick: Oh. I agree with that.

Kiran: So that doesn’t … Rocks don’t need to wake up.

Rick: No, and rocks can’t wake up … you know, because …

Kiran: Well, this is it. There are actually some rocks that are awake. There are some mountains that are awake.

Rick: Oh true. (garbled)

Kiran: Big Sur, big chunk of Big Sur is very awake. So yeah, no, rocks can wake up, but not all have the need to. And it’s not, it’s not important to rock nature, and Oneness loves being rock.

Rick: Yeah.

Kiran: It doesn’t want to be awake. It wants to be rock, it wants to be Rick, it wants to be Kiran, it wants to be … it is what it is, it’s not looking for itself. That’s not God doing that.

🎵 The Creative Force of the Universe

Rick: Okay, so let’s keep chewing on this metaphysics for a minute. Do you see, do you see there being a kind of a …? I mean, we’re trying to filter this through human understanding here, which might be totally inadequate, might not be possible, but …

Kiran: Well, we’ll give a try. We’ll do our best. Please forgive us the errors.

(both laugh)

Rick: Do you see there being … Andrew Cohen always talks about “evolutionary enlightenment”, and he … I guess the basic principle was that there’s a sort of an evolutionary momentum or purpose to the universe. That it’s kind of evolving in order to sort of … And we start with, you know, the big bang, and then we get stars – and the stars eventually explode and that causes, creates heavy elements. Heavy elements can create bodies and, to make a long story short, those bodies can have a conversation, like you and I can, so … awakening can take place, through the instrumentality of a body, as was your experience. So, do you see that as kind of, part of some cosmic game that, that everyone is playing and that has certain kind of stages?

Kiran: No. That’s what I see as, that’s the mental mind interpreting reality. It starts to tell the story. Minds start to tell stories. Minds need an “A”, “B”, a “C” equals something. So it’s putting that filter on, really, beautiful, glorious, creative movements that are fulfilled in themselves. They don’t need a better purpose. They are the purpose. It’s just the joy of creativity that’s moving. So to filter it and say, “Well, the Big Bang was in order to get to where we are today”, that’s a mental filter on a creative movement. And you know, sure, what the heck, throw that filter on, but it isn’t necessarily reality’s filter, because reality doesn’t need to be filtered. It’s already said it. It’s said it. It said, “Big Bang”.

Rick: So. Today so we have laws. We have laws of nature, right. We have gravity and we have the speed of light and we have, you know, all kinds of things that govern our physical universe. And would … as illusory as though they may be on some ultimate level, they certainly function well on relative levels. Now, would you say that – and this is just to belabor this point we’re already discussing – would you say that there’s a force of evolution that’s like a law of nature, that is some kind of driving tendency, that on some deep level motivates things in some way?

Kiran: Yes. Absolutely.

Rick: Elaborate on that.

Kiran: I would. Absolutely. What I see, when I’m reading the code, when I’m watching that, there is a movement. There is a momentum of creativity. So, at the level of energy, for instance, the electron is actually magnetically attracted to the proton, and it moves. That’s what makes it move …

Rick: Yeah.

Kiran: … so there’s an elementary form, that movement. The reason it’s magnetically attracted is before it is that electron, before it’s quarks, before it’s fractals, it is Love. The very first form. So the universe itself, you, right now – are looking out your eyes talking to me, listening to me, being here together. This is One. Just One. And it is a vast, still, unbelievably silent thing, and that’s what we are, very literally, in this moment, right now to each other, with each other. Just this; but this, although we use the word “silence” or “stillness”, it’s not the right word, because it actually has movement, and that movement is love. And that love is the first form of the universe, and that form, that love has movement.

And it comes into forms, which then become fractals and quarks and electrons and protons, so that magnetic movement of an electron, constantly attracted to a proton, is Love! Magnetically attracted, right; Love! And that’s what’s moving, and propelling form, and we have creativity, rocks have creativity. Animals have creativity. Because we are one, it is one. And it’s that creativity, that creates. And that’s the momentum. And what happens in our life, so much more practically, in my body, in your body, in everybody’s body: we have authentic joy; that when we are in embodied in our joy … you know our joy, it’s just something that happens. You know, I’m having this awesome time right now on this interview, it’s super fun to be with you and have this level of conversation and connection, and that “Me” embodying this is creative. It’s going to create more of these opportunities.

You know, it did for you, if it birthed Buddha at the Gas Pump as an actual series, as an ongoing series. And just before we went live, you had this beautiful creative juiciness that, isn’t it so fun to have … imagine if I was doing this every morning … that’s creation. That’s momentum.

Kiran: We also have inside of us unconsciously moving pain. Trauma, trapped in the system, and partly, because it’s unconscious, it’s an incredibly powerful Creator, and it is basically filtering the way we see things. So, we’re seeing, we just see that filter, right? So if I have a pain body that’s about rejection, and I’m afraid that what I’m saying to you might be rejected, I’m just grabbing something that comes along, so every time I interface this conversation with you, I’m going to see rejection, because this is the pain. Rejection, rejection. It filters it, and then creates it. I’m going to have a lot more experiences of rejection, in the same way, when I … because I’m standing in rejection and I’m embodying it, and it creates. So that’s my two-and-a-half-minute conversation.

Rick: Alright.

Kiran: Attempt.

Rick: Let me try to …

Kiran: The movement of the force inside of the one that’s creating.

Rick: Let me try to restate what you said, to make sure I understand it, and you can correct me if I’m wrong. So, what you’re saying is that there’s a fundamental force that creates the universe, really, and that’s love. And that it’s responsible for everything from the microscopic, subatomic particles going around to the macroscopic, probably you would say, has to do with the interaction of the galaxies, and is just this.

Kiran: Yeah, the magnetic attraction of planets.

Rick: Yeah … you have different forces. Sometimes it’s gravity and sometimes the weak force and the strong force and all that, but what you’re saying though is that this pure force gets filtered or thwarted by some filters that get structured into our relative apparatus. In the case, you mention the pain body and that … And so, then, when filtered, this creative force of love kind of still expresses, but it can express itself in a distorted way, because of those filters. So you’re …

Kiran: Yes.

Rick: The abuse that you suffered as a child, for instance, physical abuse and so-on …

Kiran: Distortion.

Rick: Endured one that was pure love, distorted through the filters of whoever was the abuser.

Kiran: That’s so beautifully Yes! Yes, because I mean ultimately that’s the foundation of me as a teacher and my teaching. The first form of the universe is love, and love is effortless. We know it. When you fall in love, it’s effortless. When you think of your loved one … you love to think of the people you love because it’s just that effortless quality of love. And it gets distorted and distorted and distorted. And the absolute end level of distortion is basically … we call it “pain”. We call it “pain”, because we’re actually labeling the effort, there’s so much effort. That at that point, it has been so distorted away from effortlessness, it’s so full of effort, it’s pain. It’s totally, wildly, distorted. And my entire work, as a spiritual teacher, is to show people how to take that pain and unwind it back to effortlessness.

“The first form of the universe is love, and love is effortless. We know it. When you fall in love, it’s effortless.”

Practical Tools for Sanity

Rick: Nice.

Kiran: That everything that we can, that we have … We have equal ability – awake or not awake to your true nature – to embody effortless peace. It’s your, it’s who you are. It’s literally, you’re not just your birthright. It’s hearing these words. It’s looking out of your eyes, identified as a person, or not – it doesn’t make a difference. It’s who you are. And it’s what you are, what you’re able to do. So my work as a teacher is to show you how to do that. To take that and make it effortless.

Rick: Isn’t it easier if you’re awake to your true nature to do it? To function, in an effortless way, because you’re kind of … if you’re not awake to your true to nature, aren’t you sort of caught up on one level over another, or you’re estranged from … ? I mean, nature itself functions according to the principle of least effort. If you throw a ball, it takes the most efficient possible path through the air, given all the forces and influences that are acting upon it.

Kiran: Yes. Yes. Which is so beautiful. I love that thing that you’re saying. ‘Cause that’s a great point, but actually, I would say in theory? Yes. Yeah. In actuality, no. I mean, we know a lot, we hear about all the time very clear, awake, teachers who just, they just, they still have their DNA – they’re still humans. Their DNA is still moving in effort, they still have sexual addictions running, power addictions running, you know – delusion. And I mean, our world, this planet and most of the people listening to this conversation have been harmed by some level of delusion, through a spiritual practice or spiritual teacher. So in practice, no. And all of us know people … and you know, for me with that, my first boyfriend – he was a totally peaceful, effortless, very, very, clear human. He had a very karmically clear pathway inside of him. He had very little suffering.

I mean, my beautiful friend Adyashanti, although he experiences pain, was a very clear, karmic being before he woke up. There wasn’t much trauma, there wasn’t much pain.

Rick: So you know, even after he began to wake up or had several stages of awakening … Nature put him through a lot of difficulties and health problems and everything … because that’s the way …

Kiran: After awake! (garbled)

Rick: Yeah, yeah, you know. Because he kept trying to ride bicycles and … And nature kept, if we wanna further this with nature, kept saying, “No buddy, that’s not what you’re meant to do, so stay in bed for six months until you get the point.”

Kiran: Yeah. And that is one awake dude … Adya, my brother, is so clear – crystal, crystal, clear. And that guy got Bell’s Palsy, a few years back … it doesn’t stop pain from happening. It doesn’t stop. But how he lived with it, was effortless.

Rick: Yeah.

Kiran: That’s how he embodied it. So, theoretically, yeah. But in actuality, no. We have equal access to it; we just need to know how. Whether it’s unwinding severe trauma … In my offerings, I have a, I work one-on-one with people, or I do classes with people, or I work in person with people … In those different offerings, I work with people who have severe, severe trauma. Like the ritual abuse layer, or just insurmountable, if you were actually working with a mind or psyche. They couldn’t unwind that level of trauma. So I work with that, all the way down to people who have quite normal functioning, you know, normal dysfunction, just quite nice lives, but they’re moving inside of the insane culture and they just don’t … I have a class coming up through the holiday season, and it’s my first year doing it, but I think it’s going to be annual.

I’m just focusing on food and I think in the future it’s going to be food, booze, sex, and drugs, or something like that (laughing) because the holidays are when it brings it all up. You know, this tough time.

So it’s living in the insanity of our culture and not knowing how to be effortless, just in relationship with people or in … so I have this class coming up on food and how do you have an effortless relationship with food, because we, every one of us, have such a management program with food. We’re just constantly managing it, for the good, the bad, whatever. But there’s an effort. All this effort. Or dating, or financially, or whatever, with this external management – which is stealing the peace. Stealing that effortless peace of every moment. So that’s my work as a teacher; is the “how”. How to do it. From severe trauma in your system, it becomes hard to figure out how to be effortless, to know trauma in the system.

That we’re living in a pretty crazy world that’s built on a lot of ridiculous assumptions, and I don’t know how to date or eat dinner or whatever effortlessly, without some level of management.

The Four Steps to Sanity

Rick: Hm. So there are a lot of levels to what you’re saying. And it actually sort of weaves back to your own story, in which you have a profound awakening. Really radical, but that wasn’t the end of it. Because then ensued years of what we might call house cleaning and complete restructuring and refabrication of your whole …

Kiran: Everything.

Rick: From the DNA on up.

Kiran: From the DNA and up, exactly.

Rick: Yeah.

Kiran: And in fact, even this Christmas last year … So last year, for nearly three months my whole pelvis just went offline, and it was literally to change the cell structure, the bone structure, everything just spontaneously redesigned itself. (laughing)

Rick: Yeah. Let me throw out a quick thing about effortlessness and then get back to this point. It seems to me that you can give people tools for being effortless with regard to food or this situation or that situation, but ultimately don’t we want to arrive at a state in which we’re spontaneously effortless the way nature itself functions, because we’re functioning from the level at which nature functions? And I mean, that’s where we have our stand and therefore everything that our relative personality, and body, and everything to do are so attuned to that, that we kind of display the qualities of nature itself in our relative life, and yet effortless …

Kiran: Yes.

Rick: In this being one of those qualities.

Kiran: Yes. Absolutely. And if I can jump in, because I feel like it’s where you’re headed … And yes, one of the ways to ideally and theoretically possible get there, is to awaken into your true nature. However, why don’t you start that, that direction right now? (laughs)

Rick: Yeah.

Kiran: It’s not the only way to do it, there’s other ways to do it and you could start heading in that direction, right now, and just have a much more peaceful, much more easy right now.

Rick: Yeah.

Kiran: And if you just guide, moment to moment, like that – ultimately, you may end up awakening into your true nature. Just … it may just happen, or it would be irrelevant because you’re having this effortless, peaceful taste of yourself, in life.

Rick: Yeah. Well, two metaphors come to mind: one is if you want to make a tree more healthy, you can do things to the leaves and branches, but probably the most, you’re going to get the most bang for the buck if you are the root that’s going to help the whole tree flourish. Another is that … I’ve used these analogies many times in these interviews …

Kiran: I know, exactly. It’s the best we can do, because words don’t really fit; yeah, it’s great if we call into poetry, I love analogy, go there.

Rick: Yeah. And another would be a table or a chair has four legs. And you can get the whole table to move by pulling any one of the legs, and the other legs and the whole table are going to come along. So there are a number of different kinds of ways that you can approach this thing, and whichever angle you take, it’s going to kind of move the whole thing. Although perhaps to stretch the analogy a bit, there might, you might do more with less effort by pulling a particular leg. In other words, you can muck around on the surface levels for the rest of your life and never affect a really fundamental change, but if you can somehow get to a more root level, more radical level, then all the other things can come along as a consequence of that.

Kiran: Yeah. It’s a beautiful analogy. Sometimes I like to wander in and just be a little more precise, because distortion and delusion are so easy, in this field. So yeah, I would totally agree, it’s a beautiful analogy, the source, the quickest access to source in any moment, for you, is internally. Just move inside. You know … it isn’t enlightenment that’s the source or, you know, some deep owie, deep traumatic piece in your system … you don’t have to journey far to the source.

Rick: Right.

Kiran: The source is just what’s arising internally, in this moment, for you. And the effortless approach is a very warm welcome of whatever is arising.

Rick: Yeah.

Kiran: It’s that simple. It’s that, right now.

Rick: And that is not to say …

Kiran: But that’s hard to get to, it’s very hard for people to get to. They would rather get on a treadmill that says, “One day, enlightenment”, than to in this moment, right now, warmly welcome themselves, what’s arising. Sometimes that’s Herculean.

Rick: Yeah. And would you agree that, in doing that, you’re not, that doesn’t imply that you’re going to kind of click into the level of clarity that you clicked into, in your big Aha moment, or that someone like Adya lives as a kind of a matter of course throughout his life. But at least there’s some, you’re moving in the right direction, there’s some taste of that. And the reason I want to say that is that if you give people the expectation that just accepting the moment, turning within in the moment is the full enchilada, it’s going to create doubts in their minds. Because they’re going to feel like, “Well, I know there’s more than this. This is good. It’s good that I’m doing this, but I know there’s more.”

Kiran: Well, this is why they buy the book; the book is awesome: Tools for Sanity. It’s on Amazon, just type in “Tools for Sanity”. It’s a short book, like you said. It’s simple, and there are four steps, and that’s just one of them.

Rick: Okay.

Kiran: But there are four steps to take. And, to not belittle feeling good; feeling good in this moment allows for creativity of more feeling good.

Rick: Yeah.

Kiran: And that more, like that moment where you’re saying, “I am stopping here, and this actually feels good.” Let’s let it linger, in that, the value of that. You know, if everybody on the planet had just one moment, right now, of just feeling welcome, this internal warm welcome, just as you are, with nothing needing to change at all, it becomes this one spot on the planet where peace lives in this moment.

Rick: Mhm.

Kiran: And if we were all doing that, that’s a lot of peace.

Rick: Reminds me of Bob Marley, remember that? You know, “One world …” (sings)

Kiran: “One love …”

(Singing together) “Let’s get together and feel all right.”

Kiran: That’s a powerful song. We like that song. ‘Cause there’s power in that, without slipping into a kind of cheesy, new agey oversimplification, but to actually resonate in … The only place any of us are really broken is not knowing how incredibly loved and welcomed we are, in every movement of us, every movement. When we can just touch into that ourselves …

Rick: So you’re saying that a state of greater well-being exists within us and is accessible, to some degree, at any moment, and that the more we access it, the more perhaps we are able to access it. And that it is a kind of a positive feedback loop, and … it’s like a barometer or an indicator that we’re moving in the right direction when we tap into it, to some degree. And we can acquire the kind of automatic ability to tap in. The more we tap into it, the better we get at tapping into it.

Kiran: Yes. And what we’re talking about – tapping in – isn’t, because this is a delusion or a distortion that can happen a lot … activating a feeling state in myself where I just feel good. That’s not what I’m talking about.

Rick: No.

Kiran: That’s an external efforting to manage. What I’m talking about is …

Rick: Drugs might do that temporarily.

Kiran: Drugs. Exactly. Drugs can do that. A thousand affirmations a day can do that … Just some external processing where you’re going to walk into the room, and even if something’s crappy, you’re going to find the silver lining anyway. You know, you’re going to look for the good in every situation – there must be a reason for something. There must be a reason: what is it? All of that mechanism, all of that, that’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is cultivating a state of profound love and welcome and compassion, for all of you that arises in a moment. So, this very warm, compassionate embrace – because that’s the piece that’s missing, not a “constant state of joy”, what’s actually missing is that deep loving and welcome – because that’s our true, that’s your true nature. What the heck is true nature if it’s not that? You have it in this moment. Don’t think.

Don’t take the trip I did – it’s too long, it’s too hard. It’s too awful. (laughing)

Rick: You still haven’t talked about your trip as much as we’re going to. (both laughing)

Kiran: We have two hours. (laughing)

Rick: I know. (laughing)

Kiran: We’ve just begun.