Krishna Gauci Interview

Krishna Gauci Transcript: Core Wound, Nonduality, and Trusting Being

Questions this interview answers

• What is the 'core wound' in spiritual awakening and how does it relate to our experience of suffering?
• How can one reconcile the paradox of being both unlimited consciousness and a limited human being?
• Is it possible to fully transcend the sense of personal self, or is some sense of individuality necessary for functioning?
• How does awakening affect our ability to feel compassion and connect with the suffering of others?

Key takeaways

• The 'core wound' is the paradoxical experience of being both limitless consciousness and a limited human.
• Awakening involves embracing both our absolute nature and our human limitations simultaneously.
• True realization is not just intellectual understanding but a lived, embodied experience.
• After awakening, sensitivity and compassion for others often deepen rather than diminish.
• Fundamental well-being can coexist with the full experience of human pain and limitation.
• Spiritual maturity includes consciously feeling both the peace of awareness and the suffering of the world.

Transcript

Introduction and Background

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week is Krishna Gauci. And Krishna told me that he got that name from Papaji, who conferred Indian names on a lot of his students. Gangaji, Neelam, you know, who else? Arjuna Ardagh, and of course, Andrew.

Krishna: Not everybody. But I was thinking, you know, it’s pretty cool that he gave you that name because he was, as I understand it, a Krishna devotee. So it’s sort of an honor that he gave you the name Krishna.

Yeah.

Rick: Sweet.

Krishna: Yeah.

Rick: Krishna is a spiritual teacher of sorts and he’ll tell us more about himself as we go along. He lives out in Oregon and these days he is involved with Waking Down in Mutuality, which was started by Samuel Bonder. And you’re probably about the tenth person from Waking Down that I’ve interviewed. And I can think of at least one listener that’s smacking herself in the forehead and saying, “Oh God, not another Waking Down.”

Krishna: Not another one.

Waking Down and Individual Expression

Rick: What I find is that in talking to people who are involved in Waking Down, they’re not all cut from the same mold. Everyone seems to have their own fresh way of expressing things and their own angle on things. And that is actually explicitly encouraged and not at all restricted in that organization, if it’s an organization. And so it almost, if I didn’t mention Waking Down, it was some of these people who would almost not be apparent that that’s what they’re involved in.

Krishna: I hear you.

Rick: Yeah. So as I do for many of my interviews, I listened to a lot of your talks in preparation. In fact, you had about 44 YouTube videos up and I listened to all of them.

Krishna: Wow.

Rick: I don’t actually sit in front of my computer and watch them, but I download them all and then convert them to audio and have an automated way of doing that. And then I listen to the audio while I’m riding my bike or doing things. And one thing that kind of jumped out at me in listening to them is that you gave me a sort of a fresh appreciation of the term “core wound.” And in fact, you just sent me an article you wrote about that. That’s the term that’s used in Waking Down, and I don’t think I quite understood it before, at least not as clearly. But as I understand it now, and you’re welcome to clarify it further, it has to do with sort of the, you might say, the juxtaposition or the paradox between the absolute level of life, which we are, and the relative expression of our individuality, which we also are.

The Core Wound: Absolute and Relative

Krishna: Yeah.

Rick: So, maybe we could start by you kind of just riffing on that a little bit, and we can talk about that, and we’ll talk about other things.

Krishna: Sounds good.

Rick: Okay.

Krishna: Yeah, so, yeah, the core wound is just as you say, it’s the absolute nature and the relative nature. The fact that we’re both of those is unconscious in most of us, at least through most of our lives, we are identified with the relative nature, I mean, most people are, and the limits, the human.

Rick: That’s all we know.

Krishna: And that’s all we know, for a long, long time. And then if we’re really, really lucky, and either someone or some situation points us to the dimension of ourselves that is aware of the human, aware of the limits, aware of everything that’s definable about us. Then we discover that we’re actually also, or it appears that at first, for most of us, we’re actually only that which is free of limits, free of description, that’s aware of everything. And for a lot of us, that is enough, that is great grace right there to know yourself as that which is unfindable.

Unfindable, yes, that’s another way of saying it.

Rick: Unfindable, did you say?

Krishna: Unfindable, yes, that’s another way of saying it. There are so many ways of pointing to the dimension of ourselves that’s transcendent, you could say. At some point, for most of the folks that I know, for pretty much all the folks that I know who awake to themselves as consciousness itself, as that which is beyond form, there’s a kind of going back and forth, getting it and losing it for a while, until there’s a real recognition that this is what I am. I am the awareness of everything. But that still is a kind of subtle duality, because in all honesty over time, it’s apparent that we also are these limits.

And I think you mentioned in some of the other videos that you’ve done that it seems as though there’s a kind of a wave of teachers, either speaking of this even though they knew it before, they didn’t feel people were ready, so they didn’t speak about it much, or they’re discovering it for themselves or acknowledging it for themselves at some level, even if it’s not explicitly stated that way. You can see a difference in the teaching over the years of people who teach non-dual or awakening to consciousness itself. There’s a kind of a recognition that, yeah, also we are these limits, and yeah, you can say they’re a story, yeah, you can say they change, so therefore they’re not what you really are, but they keep showing up. One of the things that attracted me to waking down ten years ago, when I first got involved, actually it’s longer than that, ’98 is when I got involved.

I had been with Papaji in the early ’90s and I had been awake as consciousness and resting as being, and when stuff would come up, I would simply watch it, but wouldn’t identify with it. And in waking down, the conversation there was that you can awaken to a sense of yourself in which both of those are simultaneously embraced as who you are.

Non-Duality and Paradox

Rick: Well, a couple of things strike me from what you just said. One is that it seems that some teachers are exponents of so-called non-duality, are still very much beating the drum of, you know, “There is no person,” and drawing all kinds of conclusions from that. Because there is no person, then you don’t need to do this, that, or the other thing, because that only implies the existence of a person, it would only reinforce the notion of a person, and so on. Others kind of used to talk that way and have sort of evolved, if we want to use that word, into a more nuanced, paradoxical way of seeing things.

Krishna: Or fell from grace.

Rick: Well, that’s the point I was going to say, which is kind of amusing, in that you hear feedback from some of the people in the first camp, that these guys are like lost souls, you know, they’ve become schizophrenic, they’ve just really kind of maybe never had it in the first place. And it’s funny, there’s a website which is very popular, which I won’t name names, but the subtitle of the website is “There is no duality in non-duality.” And, you know, in interviewing like 80-some-odd people now …

Krishna: It’s really … you could just stop for a moment …

Rick: Yeah, sure, yeah, yeah.

Krishna: Let’s look at that. “There is no duality in non-duality.”

Rick: Right.

Krishna: Just read the word, it’s called “non-duality.” So there is duality in non-duality, obviously.

There is duality in non-duality, obviously.

Rick: Yeah. There’s a reason why it’s called “not two” rather than “one.”

Elaborate on that.

Krishna: Well, because duality is in it. In other words, it contains two, but it’s not two. The insistence on being logical rather than transcending logic, or realizing this is trans-rational rather than rational, is where the trap is.

Rick: Say that again, if you would.

Krishna: The insistence in being logical or rational when this realization is trans-rational, trans-logical, it’s beyond a simple linear … either it is or it isn’t.

Rick: Right.

Krishna: It’s just not the way that …

✨ Realization and Deepening

Rick: That’s interesting because, I mean, one thing I tussle with is, you know, whether the people who are speaking this way … I’m sure a great many of the people who speak about this are speaking from some genuine realization or genuine awakening, genuine experience. But I also get the sense that many people who speak about this are speaking primarily on the basis of an understanding of it, which seems more profound than other understandings because it’s right there in front of our nose. And you know, you could gain an intuitive understanding if you just put your attention on it, and it’s easy to mistake that intuitive understanding for the actual realization that it’s pointing to, and think that you’ve got it. And I don’t feel qualified to necessarily sort these people out, but I think there’s a lot of that going on.

Krishna: Yeah, yeah, I think that’s true. Also, my sense is that there is, in regards to … see, there’s a difference between the realization and our nature as consciousness.

Rick: Talk about that.

Krishna: So these often get confused. So if I were to say, “There’s a deepening in your realization,” how could there be a deepening? It’s just what it is. Consciousness is just what it is. There’s no deepening in consciousness. Consciousness is what’s aware of everything. But the realization doesn’t happen to consciousness. Consciousness doesn’t change. So the realization itself, which is what … and the understanding and the insight, it deepens.

Rick: Yeah, conscious is always … it is what it always has been, or there’s no past to it, but it is what it is. As Ramana Maharshi put it, “There are no levels of awareness, but there are levels of experience.”

Krishna: Right, there you are. So it’s possible to be like … in fact, it’s not only possible, it happens that when someone has a legitimate, real, honest-to-goodness, awakening realization, they cling to the realization rather than … and the description of reality in light of that realization, rather than to … well, they cling to it. That’s enough to say.

Personhood and Functioning

Rick: Yeah, it seems to me that a person could never be totally devoid of the sense of personhood, of their being … but I have a doubt about that because some people are adamant about it. They say, “No, all sense of personal self has vanished, has evaporated,” and I can’t dispute that if that’s their experience. But, you know, it seems to me there’s always going to be some sort of, at least a remnant, but perhaps more than a remnant, that is essential for functioning in life.

Krishna: Yeah, it depends what you mean by … you know, this is the thing. We all … I mean, the only thing we have to use, the only thing we have to use to communicate are words. And everyone’s throwing around words, and it’s definitely possible to speak about this in the abstract and to, you know, give it language or philosophy, and this is obviously even what we’re doing now. But really, my own sense is that in order to really penetrate these layers beyond just kind of an idea, it’s really one-on-one. I would ask the person, “What do they mean exactly by ‘person’? What do you mean by ‘personhood’? You, what do you mean?” Not like, “Oh, you know, like in the dictionary.” No, no. “What do you mean?”

Rick: Yeah.

Krishna: What’s your experience?

Rick: Well, if you ask me, you know, I would say that there’s always this, like you said, resting in presence, and, you know, that’s always there, whether life is peaceful and calm or whether it’s tumultuous. I mean, in fact, it’s even sometimes much more evident when life is tumultuous. Like today, I spent an hour in a Best Buy with all kinds of flashing televisions and noise and all that stuff. And I was thinking actually about your discussion of core wound because, you know, I was thinking how at one time in my life that would have been injurious in the sense that, you know, overwhelming and, you know, overshadowing and so on. But now I find it kind of delightful in a way. It’s almost like the paradox between absolute and relative creates bliss rather than creating pain.

Krishna: Yeah, I mean, the thing is, the whole thing is paradox. That’s really the thing to speak about. In a sense you weren’t at Best Buy and there was no you to be at Best Buy. And who was it that was at Best Buy? And isn’t Best Buy just a memory? Isn’t it just something in mind? So, all right, that’s how it is absolutely. And yet you went to Best Buy.

Rick: And even while at Best Buy, I mean, even while there, it’s like it’s clear in the experience that there’s a dimension in which, you know, there’s absolutely nothing happening, you know, there’s no individual person, there’s no Best Buy for that matter, it’s just pure silence. But then at the very same time, there’s a person talking to the sales guy and looking at computers and doing all this stuff.

Krishna: Exactly.

Rick: And the two get along quite nicely.

The Paradox of Freedom and Limitation

Krishna: Well, okay. I mean, just to get back to the core wound, if I may.

Rick: Sure, yeah, please.

Krishna: So, I mean, the premise in this whole idea about the core wound is that, like everyone says, you know, samsara or limited existence is unsatisfactory. I mean, that’s even the Buddha’s first noble truth.

Rick: Right, life is suffering.

Krishna: Life is suffering. Okay. But why? I mean, if it’s simply, if our nature is consciousness and it’s simply arising, and everything is just what it is, even from a human level, okay, it passes, it changes, why would you expect anything else? It’s all we’ve ever known, it’s all we’ve ever seen. And people say, “Okay, well, there’s grasping and there’s relating to things as if they’re going to always be there, or as if they exist in and of themselves, but why?” Well, then the answer is, ignorance is forever, eternally there. Ignorance is our nature. So there’s this mysterious ignorance that’s also eternal. So, waking down is just going a little bit further in saying that the reason that it’s experience is unsatisfactory is because there’s a subtle comparison, there’s always an intuition, even if it’s underneath awareness, that we are eternal, we don’t change.

The way I usually talk about this, at a very human level, is how many times have you been having an argument with your beloved, and you look in their eyes and say, “Why do we show up this way? I know we are love, I know we are peace. Why am I so worried about this? I know, ultimately, I am peace.” It’s this kind of a knowledge that we aren’t, at some level, what we appear to be. And yet, what we appear to be is exactly what we are, and what we feel ourselves to be. So even before any awakening, there’s a sense, an unconscious comparing between how we show up in our limited form, in our limited way. Are you there?

Rick: I’m there.

Krishna: How we show up in our limited way, and something that we intuit, that we may not be very clear about, we may have had childhood experiences of it, but there’s another way we are that we’re not showing up as, and it’s very frustrating, and very painful.

Rick: So you’re saying that the essential reason why life is maybe experienced as suffering is that we have this faint, intuitive sense that we are much more than we are living, and we’re unable to actualize that.

Krishna: Even that we are unconsciously, continuously comparing our present experience.

Rick: Yeah, like, “Okay, this sucks compared to what I know that it could be, or what I…”

Krishna: Or not even what it could be, what I actually am.

Rick: What I actually am, right. What I’m not showing up as.

Right, like you’re in a cage, and you know you’re a free bird, but you appear to be in this cage.

Krishna: Well yeah, you both are free and you’re not free. So there’s this, again, it’s paradoxical, it’s not linear, like I’m either free or I’m not free. We’re simultaneously free and not free, and we’re not quite aware of being free, of how we are free, because freedom is our very nature. It’s not something that we, you know, will have. Freedom is our nature. It’s just that it’s unconscious. We’re not conscious of the dimension we’re free in. But there’s an intuition, there’s a knowing at some level. And it usually ends up being something like, “It doesn’t have to be this way.” But why do you know it doesn’t have to be this way? It always looks this way, everybody’s dying and falling apart, and there’s lots of limits. But there’s an intuition, at least, if not a downright experience, of also not being that. And so, if we’re lucky, we become conscious as that.

The whole thing is paradox. That’s really the thing to speak about.

✨ Embodied Awakening and Compassion

Rick: Yeah, and I think perhaps it’s that intuition that we are that, that drives the seeker, that lights his fire and gets him going to look for it.

Krishna: Right. The thing is that after we become conscious as consciousness itself, as the unfindable, we then want to make believe that we’re not the very thing we left behind. Now certainly, the way in which we … in other words, in waking down, what we call the second birth, is a conscious re-identification with limits, after a form of realization of consciousness, or knowing that we are more than that. And it’s a return to limits. Now of course, the way that you end up being those limits is going to be different, because you cannot go back to being unconscious of your freedom. But now your freedom is happening right alongside with your bondage. And it’s all paradoxical. I mean, if you’re speaking from the dimension of freedom, there is no bondage, there is no chain, there’s no one to be chained.

And yet, a moment later, somebody kicks you in the leg, it’s very obvious that there’s pain there and there’s a leg that needs to be wrapped. And if you simply remain the watcher of the leg that needs to be wrapped, rather than identifying with it, you remain outside of the core wound, what we call the core wound, or that becomes the conscious wound after becoming conscious as it. And you remain disassociated, there’s a slight duality. Actually, it’s a huge duality.

Rick: Well, let me comment on that. Yeah, let me comment on that a little bit, or question you. It seems to me that once your conscious nature, or whatever we want to call it, has been realized, then limitation is no longer a problem. It’s only a problem if that’s the only component of life that’s lived, but once it has its foundation, then it can be a joy, it can be interesting. I mean, render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. You don’t expect your muscles to be unlimited, or your ability to earn money, or whatever else, because those are in the realm of limitation. But when counterbalanced by the unlimited realm, then everything seems to flow very smoothly and nicely.

Krishna: Yes and no. Let’s say it this way. The expectation that the limited will be anything but limited is released, so there’s great freedom that way, and a sense of well-being, most definitely, in terms of your seeking to remedy something, because the limits are limits, they are what they are.

On the other hand, if you’re not standing back, but allowing yourself also to be those limits, our limited nature, or our human nature, once the conscious principle has been awakened, and there’s a conscious leaning forward into feeling sensation, feeling sensation now awakens in itself, so that it begins to feel, and all of us feel this to some degree or another, and have little previews of it in our life, even way before awakening, but in this kind of embodied awakening, where you lean into the sensations of the human arising, there is an awakening that happens in the energy field of that body, such that you begin to feel others as well.

Rick: Other people.

Krishna: Other people, all sentient beings. You begin to feel everyone who’s in your field, and that feeling affects your body. You’re not guarded from the consequence of somebody who’s suffering. And so, it’s not all great or smooth, it’s quite difficult. There can be great compassion that comes out of feeling very difficult feelings. So there’s a … well, let me just … it sounds like you want to …

Rick: Yeah, I was just going to say, yes, I acknowledge and wasn’t suggesting that things are necessarily going to look smooth and rosy.

Krishna: Or feel that way.

Rick: Or even feel that way, to either yourself or to an outside observer. But it seems to me that after a certain point, there’s always going to be a dimension, in spite of the most horrendous situation, that’s unperturbed. I’ll give you a couple of examples. Ten years ago, I fell off my bicycle, and I’ve used this example before in interviews, and hit my head. I had a helmet on, but I scraped my arm. It was quite painful. But through the experience of it, even in the midst of it, I was quite aware of that unperturbed quality, and I was almost bemused by the fact that it wasn’t scraping or paining. A couple of months ago, I got sick and I was vomiting a lot. Same thing, you know, going through this intense experience. But there’s always this …

Krishna: Fundamental well-being.

Rick: Yeah, which nothing seems to be able to perturb. And would you say, in light of what you were saying in the last few minutes, that that means that I somehow haven’t gotten into my experience enough or something? Or is that your case as well?

Krishna: Well, both of them. I don’t know. I’m not prepared to say what you should or shouldn’t be doing.

Rick: Well, it’s just that I’m not trying to do anything. It’s just the way it is.

Krishna: Yeah, that’s the way it is. That’s perfect.

You know, most definitely the fundamental well-being is there.

Rick: And it’s not even a physical well-being. I mean, your physiology can be traumatized. It’s a consciousness well-being.

Krishna: Right. And yet, the more the fundamental well-being is there, the more capacity there is to feel. Well, you could say, I mean, what ends up happening actually is there’s, what I describe as the core wound is sort of like this juxtaposition of what is arising and what is changing and what is limited, you know, married to what is unchanging and unlimited. And all this language is by nature dualistic because language is. There’s no way to really speak a word and have this precise, but pointing to certain assumptions so that people will question them is the whole purpose. But that wound becomes more and more conscious. You could say there’s a rub, and it’s not like they’re rubbing. It’s just like there’s an uncomfortable feeling that is inherent in letting yourself feel what it is to be this body. And the fundamental wellness does not alleviate. It changes.

In other words, you have this fundamental well-being, and you also have the capacity to feel what it is to be human here, what it is to be sentient here, never mind human.

There is an awakening that happens in the energy field of that body, such that you begin to feel others as well.

The Paradox of Sensitivity and Compassion

Rick: To feel more acutely, with greater sensitivity, you’re saying, as if our senses and our feeling capacities are dulled or repressed or muted or something.

Krishna: They become more and more overtime.

Rick: They wake up.

Krishna: Right, they become more and more over time desensitized. And what that equals, well, you know, there’s an image from Tibetan Buddhism that I like, or from Mahayana Buddhism, where Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of compassion, who is in that mythology a being who is at the highest level of realization that’s possible, also known as Quan Yin in the female form that’s worshipped throughout China, or was. And the story is that from the tenth level at which he/she exists, this being, one of her faces, there’s two faces, one of her faces is facing emptiness and is at perfect peace, absolute equanimity, just solid, oceanic peace. And the other face looks out upon all of existence, all of sentient beings, hearing their cries, and is herself crying 24/7, always, never stops weeping. That’s the core wound, that’s the conscious wound.

So the idea that I could be really fundamentally at home, yes, but the idea that I’m now, everything’s fine, knowing I live in a universe where children can be raped, not possible, not even desirable.

Rick: Yeah, no, I’m not…

Krishna: This is just a point to make, I’m not suggesting that you were saying everything’s groovy, but speaking in such a dramatic way, points to the value of this concept of the conscious wound, that it’s a conscious wound of love when it awakens. It’s that you want to be in touch with this human dimension, or your awakening to consciousness can become a kind of numbing agent, a way to go to sleep from the suffering of the world, so you can have peace and say everything’s peaceful, knowing that there are sentient beings who are suffering.

It’s a conscious wound of love when it awakens.

Individual and Universal Core Wound

Rick: I don’t know if it could always be that way, I think maybe eventually you get kicked out of that phase, but…

Krishna: Yeah, I would tend to agree with that.

Rick: But I think it can be that way for quite a long time perhaps. I’m reminded of Tim Freke’s, one of his favorite sayings, which is that “Love is how oneness feels.”

Krishna: Yeah.

Rick: Yeah, love that guy. I interviewed him last year sometime. You know, one thing that struck me as you were describing that goddess, that Kuan Yin with the two faces, was that when you really think about it, when you really get right down to it, I mean, what are we? If you distill everything down to its ultimate essence, the way I understand and intuit things is you get right down to the level of God, pure intelligence, and we’re just individual expressions of that, as if sense organs of the infinite. And as a sense organ of the infinite, we are in a way, I hate to use the word “channel,” but we are like channels through which that intelligence, which also has love as very much part of its nature, can express itself more effectively in the world, especially an awakened individual becomes capable of being that sort of tool.

Perhaps that’s something along the lines of what you’re suggesting, maybe not.

Krishna: It is. I mean, there’s a lot of ways to talk about this level, because this is where we move into the realm of the poetic, because poetry points there better than logic. Yeah, my own sense is that what we are, if we’re going to speak about what we are as individuals, is the unmanifest has infinite potential to manifest in an infinite variety of ways, but the only way that it can do that is to arise as a subject and object.

Rick: yes

Krishna: So, what we are in our fullness as a unique soul, you can say, as a jiva, as a unique soul, arising in something that’s beyond unique or multiplicity, as our individual, unique being, we are a subject-object, we are a unique universe that we see that’s continuously changing, and a unique set of sense organs to be aware of that unique universe. So, I guess it was Nrsigadatta Maharaj who said that when you go to sleep at night, your universe goes to sleep with you, and when you wake up in the morning, it wakes up with you, because everybody is absolutely unique, and the world that they see is absolutely unique. So, even if there were a group of people in this room, and they all looked at me from different angles in the room, they’d see a different Krishna, and they’d hear my voice through their own ears.

Rick: Sure, because as seeing and hearing instruments, we are not perfect. I mean, if they had eyes to see, if they weren’t blind, they’d all see that screen behind you with the slats of wood, and they’d all see the couch you’re sitting on. If they weren’t colorblind, they’d all perhaps agree on the same color. So, there’s sort of like a, it seems to me, a structure that is universally agreed. And if somebody who had never seen you walked into the room, he could describe the very same things. So, there’s something that transcends or is broader than our, just, it’s not like we create our own individual universe to the extent that we’re all living in completely unrelated worlds that can’t function together.

Krishna: Yeah, well, it gets very paradoxical. I mean, in a way, you can only describe one slice of reality at a time, right?

Rick: Yeah, right. And what I’m pointing to is that people are so individual that, look, all perception is a form of limitation. I mean, basically, our eyes are able to see things because they don’t see the whole spectrum. They only see a particular spectrum of light.

And if they could, we’d be in big trouble.

Krishna: Yeah, if we could see all the spectrum of light, we couldn’t see anything.

Rick: I think there was that chapter 11 in the Gita where Krishna showed Arjuna his true form and he took all the limitations away, and after a few verses Arjuna said, “I can’t take it, it’s too much, put me back in my little…”

Krishna: And I would even say that form, that universal form, is still something that can be seen, and so it’s a limitation. You could say the transpersonal, unknowable, not-object that is the ultimate formless form in which Arjuna and Krishna dissolve into their true nature, the true nature. So any particular form, any particular vision, is by definition a limit, but that’s the way that the unlimited, infinite, gets to see all of its potential. Potential is not seen except through buffering out or removing a bunch of stuff so you could see something in particular.

Rick: Some slice of it.

Krishna: Exactly, and that’s what each of us is. We’re seeing a particular potential of God, if you want to use that language. We’re seeing a particular form of God, I think it’s the Koran that said, “I was a hidden treasure, and I created man so I could be seen.”

We are like channels through which that intelligence, which also has love as very much part of its nature, can express itself more effectively in the world.

❤️ Unique Relationship with the Divine

Rick: Beautiful.

Krishna: Yeah, and so this is what we are, we’re subject-object, and you know, all kinds of qualities get drawn out emotionally and visually in this human form through interaction with the unique universe that we’re each in, and that’s also potential that’s in the unmanifest that wants to be experienced. So the unique universe that we’re aware of is ultimately nothing but our own self, it’s God’s form for us, and becoming more and more conscious that the unique universe we’re in is living us. Synchronicities, noticing, “Oh wow, outside and inside are not separate,” is the kind of communion that someone like Rumi spoke of. We’re kind of tracking this hidden beloved in circumstances and in life, and falling in love with that one. That’s to fall in love with the unique manifestation that comes to each of us uniquely.

I mean, each of us actually is in a certain way in relationship to God absolutely uniquely. So you’ve seen this image of Krishna and Radha, I don’t know, some people have anyway, it’s a very Indian image, it’s all over the place there, of Krishna and Radha in the middle of a dance circle. There’s gopis, or you know…

Rick: The rasa dance.

Krishna: Right, so there’s gopis surrounding Krishna and Radha, and they’re each with a different Krishna, because Krishna has all these lovers who are like the souls of humanity, and Krishna multiplies himself, and each lover, each gopi has a different preference. One likes quick dancing, another one likes slow dancing, one likes a rascal kind of guy, another one likes a sweet, soft guy. So each of those Krishnas is unique for that one particular soul. So each of us has a unique universe and a unique relationship to God, the God that appears to you, the God that you’re following. And I don’t mean a particular name or form, because that one can use any name or form, although you could give it any name or form, or you could fall in love with a particular form.

But in any case, it’s the one that’s been leading you in your life to discover and uncover what you needed to know next, that one that you’ve been tracking your whole life, that you’ve been paying attention to, even if you weren’t conscious that you were, the one who’s been leading you, has been leading you differently than it’s leading me, because each person is being led by, you could say, a different form, or you could say it’s all one form with different hands, however you want to speak about it. Then you get into the poetic, you get into this fantastic imagery.

📚 Roles, Teachers, and Fundamentalism

Rick: I was chatting with somebody the other day, and she was commenting on someone I had interviewed, and she was saying, “Well, why does he teach? What makes him think he has to teach?” I said, “Well, that’s his role.” And she said, “Well, I know plenty of awakened people who don’t teach,” and I said, “Well, that’s their role.” And one thing that this kind of attitude has helped me come to terms with is that, fine, if the so-called neo-Advaita guys that are hammering a particular emphasis of the whole thing, that’s their role, and that’s their niche, they attract a certain group that resonates with that sort of teaching, and it’s fine for them. Then over here you have the Hare Krishna people, and they’re chanting Hare Krishna, great. And then there’s the religious fundamentalists, and then there’s the atheists.

It’s like a great big entertainment, in a way, and people just sort of naturally gravitate toward the thing that they resonate with. And if you kind of remind yourself of that, it really is a good antidote to one’s own tendency toward fundamentalism, which I’m not immune to by any means. I just kind of keep reminding myself to step back, take God’s perspective. Big universe, many souls, many paths.

Krishna: Sure, why not?

Rick: Yeah. And speaking of that, actually when I heard you talking about core wound, it struck me that there is kind of a cosmic core wound too, it’s not just an individual. Maybe we locate it within ourselves as an individual, but it’s happening on a universal level.

Krishna: Yeah, there is no individual core wound, really. I mean, the concept of core wound is distinctly non-personal. It’s actually about the nature of, it’s existential. It isn’t, so that’s the problem with the language. The language, you know, you could argue about whether we should have used different, and believe me, in the Waking Down community, we have. And this is, the language we are using is core wound. I sometimes call it essential sensitivity or essential rawness, but it isn’t personal, it isn’t because of some event that happened in your life. It’s the nature of being a sentient being, and that’s it.

Rick: And you’re just kind of, you know, you as a sentient being are sort of tapping into a recognition of that universal situation.

Krishna: Exactly. Yeah, we have different language in the Waking Down path, there’s different language for those personal wounds, which are like core issues. And, you know, even there, core issues, they’re personal, and it’s almost as though prior to becoming aware of the personal issues, there’s a feeling of offness or a feeling of unsatisfactoriness that’s there, that’s universal, and that’s, you could say, in being a sentient being, being an incarnate being.

And because that’s there, when someone abuses us or neglects us, or something happens, we now have an explanation. “Oh, it’s because I wasn’t loved, that’s why I feel this offness.” But as many of us have found, you can become very conscious of those issues, which is really a good thing to do. I mean, I’m really, you know, I think it’s great to become conscious of your traumas and your wounds, I mean, it can be very healing to a certain degree, but it never does the whole job, because the whole job isn’t really personal. It’s prior to all of those personal issues, the feeling of offness, because it’s this unconscious core wound.

The more conscious you make that wound or that situation, the more you see it is, just the situation of being a sentient being, is that we are still connected in and part of this network of limits and limitation, and all beings are, and it’s appropriate to feel that. And it actually becomes much more bearable and feelable when we awaken to our non-finite or infinite nature or our unfindable nature. There’s room to actually hold all that feeling. And so, Kuan Yin can only cry 24/7 because her other face is facing emptiness. Yeah, many years ago when I had been meditating for just a year or so, I was confronted by a rather upsetting situation. I went to my meditation teacher and described it to her, and she said, “Be an ocean.”

Be an ocean.

🎵 Suffering for Others and the Heart

Krishna: Well, you know, I spent quite a bit of time, well depending, it’s all relative. I spent time with Poonjaji, with Papaji. And I remember him saying, “What else is there to do but suffer for others after you’re through suffering for yourself?” I mean, this is part of what it is to be in the heart, to have heart.

Rick: Yeah, it’s almost like we’ve become washing machines or something for a larger batch of laundry.

Krishna: Yes, most definitely.

Rick: And a lot of people, a number of people I’ve interviewed have described that too. Pamela Wilson, most recently, I think we were talking about that, and she was saying that she was feeling this sort of, I can’t quite do justice to the way she put it, but we touched on the idea. And who was it also, Leslie Temple Thurston, whom I interviewed last fall. She sort of feels like she’s specifically kind of processing particular situations, like there might be something in the Middle East, and she can kind of feel it, and feel herself kind of helping to resolve it, just within her own physiology.

Krishna: Yeah, I don’t tend to track why I’m feeling …

Rick: Where it’s coming from.

Krishna: Exactly, but I certainly do feel … You know, and this goes back to, are we persons or not, or whatever. It all depends on your definition of these words. I no longer feel myself confined to my own local address, but I do feel myself having a local address, but I certainly don’t feel myself, feeling-wise, confined to this local address. I feel myself so much larger than that. In some way, I’ve released the sense of being a localized person, and I’m a larger person, that may contain this local person and many other local persons. But I don’t think about that.

Rick: But on some level, that’s the reality of your life. You can articulate it if asked to do so, but you don’t go around thinking about it all day.

Krishna: Exactly, and so the whole thing about, “Well, if you think that way, then there’s still a person,” I don’t think that way. But if somebody asks me, looks in this direction, and speaks, and says, “Then I can describe this, and I can say ‘I’,” and you know, this is never… I remember, again, with Papaji, he was this paradox of… and I’m not saying that he was doing “Waking Down” or anything, but there’s a spectrum around this. In other words, different schools, different people are on this spectrum of embodiment differently. And I remember the time I spent with him, I was struck by how, when he wasn’t giving satsang, he was a no-nonsense, down-to-earth guy. So, you know, in satsang, if I sat in front of him and he said, “Who’s there?” and I said, “There is no one here to answer the question, there’s no question.” It was very good, beautiful, or it was wonderful.

And then if I had just come from America and walked into his house, which sometimes I was lucky enough to go right in there and go into his dining room table and sit down with him, if he asked me how the trip on the train was, coming over, and I said, “Oh, there’s no one to have a trip on a train,” he would not have been pleased, I can tell you right now! He was quite…you know, just give you a little look and…come on! So the capacity to be real at every level is really what we’re talking about.

Levels of Reality and Communication

Rick: I think the word “level” is operant here, and I think that very often there’s a confusion of levels that takes place in the way people talk and perhaps in the way they experience. You know, if you go into a restaurant and the waitress comes up and says, “May I take your order?” you don’t say, “There is no me, there is no you, in fact, there is no restaurant.” I mean, she’ll call the police. So on some level that’s true, but it’s not appropriate to talk that way. At the level of the restaurant and ordering your food, it would be insane to talk that way. Well, even to say, “Well, this body would like this,” which is what… I remember when I first went to India, it was like 92, 93, we all came back talking that way. Many of us did.

Well, it must have been nauseating.

Krishna: well…

Rick: There are some who talk that way, I mean, Anandamayi Ma was said to always talk that way. And I’ll cut her some slack, I mean, she was pretty special and pretty out there. So, did you just find after a while that you got sick of talking that way?

Krishna: Well, yeah, and that actually happened before waking down. There was a maturation process going back and forth to see Papaji and spending time with him. I mean, the initial thing of having consciousness pointed to and recognizing that, and basking in that, then coming back and actually seeing him interacting with people, and not doing that always. Sometimes, you know, we were talking about levels, speaking in different levels, opened up a lot for me. Actually, the more time I spent with him, the more I had a sense that the human was very much a part of this, and that there was no problem speaking in terms of souls, and in terms of all kinds of other, you know…

Rick: Reincarnation, stuff like that even?

Krishna: Sure, and you know, he would give different answers to different people. He didn’t answer the question, he always answered the person.

Rick: According to their level of experience and understanding.

Krishna: Yeah, I mean, that’s what we would say. All I know is that spontaneously, he seemed to be addressing people where they were, even if they didn’t realize that. And then they would realize it, and you know, wow. I mean, a few people didn’t realize it, but you know, one person, they come and they start talking about God, and you say, “What do you know about God? Who are you?” And it could be two people later, somebody comes in talking about God, and you’re like…

I remember one person actually being there, and one person saying, “I feel very, very sad because I was in so-and-so’s satsang,” somebody who was a Papaji teacher, Papaji devotee, “and I told him that my heart is with Jesus, and I’m totally in love with God, and he told me this is just a projection, and I don’t know how to do this right, I don’t know what to do here.” And Papaji looked at her and said, “You keep loving God, and you keep loving Jesus. You just keep right ahead doing that. That person doesn’t…” And he said his name, and he happened to be there in the audience. He said, “Don’t listen to that, his advice is bad.” It really depended on the person, and he didn’t have… What I found often is, I mean, we’re all doing the best we can, and we’re all, as you said, we’re all playing our part.

With Papaji, what I found so wonderful, that I actually didn’t find very much when I attended satsangs in the West, and the people there were very close to my heart, so I’m saying nothing against those who were giving satsang in the West at all, really.

Rick: You’re giving satsang in the West yourself?

Krishna: Yeah, there you go. What’s extraordinary about Papaji was that he did not sound the same all the time. He did not give the same formula all the time. He’s known as an Advaita teacher, because so many of the teachers who went were teaching Advaita, and indeed he was, but he was also a great devotional teacher.

Rick: As were Nisargadatta, Ramana, Shankara, all these guys actually.

Krishna: I don’t know that.

Rick: I’ve read things about them, and… k Yeah, yeah.

Shankara, the main…

Krishna: Shankara for sure.

Rick: Granddaddy of Advaita, you know, and he was also a great devotee of God, wrote beautiful devotional poetry, and him…

Krishna: Absolutely, absolutely. Re-established worship of the Hindu gods all throughout India, absolutely.

And Ramana was a great devotee of the mountain. I don’t really know about Nisargadatta in terms of devotion.

Rick: I have a friend that stayed with him quite a bit, and he said whenever he would go away, he would go to these rousing bhajan sessions, and he would do pujas at the altar, and all kinds of devotional stuff.

Krishna: I didn’t know that. That’s great. I mean, with Poonjaji, he would say things on occasion that were shocking, and he would say things like, “If it was up to me, I would stay a devotee for as many lives as I could. I would rather do that than dissolve into nothing. I prefer to taste chocolate than to be chocolate.”

I prefer to taste chocolate than to be chocolate.

Paradox of Devotion and Non-Duality

Rick: Nice. Yeah, that’s an age-old thing.

Krishna: And it totally just blew the mind, because you didn’t have any place to stand anymore. Because if you’re standing in the Advaita place, and here’s this guy just saying all kinds of things that can’t be… I mean, even Ramana Maharshi, he wakes up at 17, why in the world go to the mountain? Why? The house that he’s in is the self, his uncle is the self, everybody is the self. Why? Because it’s not that simple. Because at some individual nature level, he was called to that mountain, and that mountain was his teacher, his beloved. So it doesn’t make sense from an Advaitic perspective, because, I mean, we’re going to be logical about this, everything is the self. Who is there to go and say, “Well, it all just happened by itself.” But why did it happen that way? Why did he not just stay in his uncle’s house? Wasn’t his life a demonstration that everything is the self?

Rick: Well, but here we’re sort of hypothetically trying to apply human logic to a situation in which he wasn’t governed by logic, he was governed by, I’m sure, a deep, realized, intuitive impulse to just go there and stay there.

Krishna: Yeah, impulse to go there and stay there, and to write love poetry to a mountain. In other words, when we use the human version of Advaita where it’s all, “Oh yes, obviously there’s nobody home, and therefore everything is equally the self, and there’s no difference,” that’s true, and …

Rick: Yeah, we’re trying to fit realization into a much smaller box, into the box of intellect.

Krishna: So devotion to a mountain that is obviously his own self, why does he have to go there? Well, you know, it’s all there as well.

Rick: Yours is not to reason why.

Krishna: Well, it’s a rhetorical question because I want to draw the point that folks can be in a devotional relationship actually to any particular deity or non-specified deity, and actually move throughout life with intention or with impulse. Maybe intention is not even the right word. Following deep impulses in being, and that’s listening to something apparently outside of you that’s pulling you. This is all like the kind of language that’s, “Oh, no, no, no, it’s nothing outside of you.”

Rick: I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily outside of you. Whatever was pulling Ramana to the mountain, I wouldn’t necessarily …

Krishna: Well, it wasn’t …

Rick: We don’t have to conclude that it was outside of him.

Krishna: There’s no way to put this in language that works, so let …

Rick: Because what was he really. He was that.

Krishna: Why did the body move from there to the mountain?

Rick: Well, I have on my little paper in front of me a little phrase I wrote down for when I was listening to one of your satsangs. You said, “We’re being lived.”

We’re being lived.

Krishna: Exactly.

Rick: And I think that’s the answer.

Krishna: Well, yeah, and the way that he expressed it in love poetry was that this was his guru and he was moving toward it. And he was already fully realized. So, I’m just speaking about paradox, speaking about the capacity to actually say, fully awakened, to say, “I have to go there, not here, there, and I’m moving this body there because I’m in love with that over there.” All of that, all of the language of from here to there and moving and all of that. And yeah, all along the way he would say, “Ramana, Arunachala is my heart, but Arunachala is my heart and I have to be there.” So, this kind of paradox, non-solvable, not even having to be solved, but embrace of the story and the drama of Divine Love.

✨ Devotion and Non-Dual Realization

Rick: Well, you know what, you just quoted Papaji and said, “I’d rather eat chocolate than be chocolate, rather taste chocolate than be chocolate.” There’s, I think, a sweetness and even an ecstasy in the devotional experience, which renders pure, non-dual oneness a little bit flat by comparison.

Krishna: Yes

Rick: And I think that’s why so many of these sages and saints created situations spontaneously or however, in which they could taste that nectar of love and devotion.

Krishna: Yeah, or that which was living them created the situation for them to awaken both to non-duality and devotion.

Rick: Yeah.

Krishna: I mean, there’s …

Rick: What was it, that Rumi quote or was it Muhammad or somebody you quoted as having said that, how did you put it, that God created man so he could realize himself or some such thing?

Krishna: I was a hidden treasure and I created man so that I could be

Rick: found

Krishna: revealed.

Rick: Revealed, yeah, and perhaps by the same token, that hidden treasure of pure intelligence not only creates man but then creates a situation in the life of a realized man so that bliss of devotion can be experienced in human form.

Krishna: Well yeah, and what I’m saying is that one doesn’t … they’re not contradictory, they’re simultaneous. And the dryness that sometimes happens in Adaita, my sense is that it’s because someone’s only clinging to that position. In other words, like you said earlier, there’s a … the only difference I would say is that you said that some people realize it and then some people have an intuition of it and an intellectual understanding.

Rick: Which they may mistake for the realization.

Krishna: Right, and my sense is that you can actually have a realization of it and then after the realization of it, the concepts arise and then you cling to that out of thinking that, ok, I have a correct understanding now. So I’m actually saying that it’s possible for people to actually be realized and get stuck and land somewhere, and the particular position that brought them to their realization is usually the most attractive.

Rick: Yeah, and I think in light of that comment, I would say that we need to kind of nuance the word “realization.” It’s not necessarily a static, end-of-the-line kind of thing. There could be many gradations of it, many degrees of maturation of it, and sometimes preliminary ones can be mistaken for final or more advanced ones.

Krishna: Yeah, I don’t know about final.

Rick: Yeah, I don’t either. I don’t think there are any final, personally, but I haven’t gotten there yet, so who knows.

Krishna: But I do hear you, I do hear you. I think these concepts of “once you’re awakened, there’s nothing afterwards” that come out of statements of people who are describing some aspect of the truth.

Rick: Yeah, and it very much seems that way to them.

Krishna: Well, I think it’s true at some level.

Rick: At some level, yes.

Krishna: Yeah, and at another level it’s not, and again, applying what someone says about “there’s no further to go, there’s no more seeking, there’s nothing else to do.” This happened with Papaji so many times. People would be introduced to their nature as consciousness, and Papaji would say, “There’s nothing else to do.” And of course that’s true, and then right after that he’d say, “And remember vigilance.”

Rick: Yeah, “Do this.”

Krishna: And so, resting in your conscious nature, there really is nothing to do but rest in your conscious nature, and desires arise ready to pull you out of your conscious nature. So the whole idea that there’s nothing else to do has more to it than meets the eye.

Rick: And there’s another way in which we can look at that, which is that you and I are having this conversation, and as such, this is a very focused form of seeking. We’re seeking to clarify our understanding, to deepen our experience perhaps, to communicate something to whomever may be listening, and so on. There’s this sort of motivation to it, otherwise we wouldn’t do it. And yet, at the very same time, there’s some level to the whole thing, which is just resting in presence and content, and not needing to have anything added to it.

Krishna: Right. And this is again the paradox, yeah.

Rick: Yeah, can’t say that word too many times.

Krishna: Really?

Rick: Yeah. Another thing that you said during your YouTube videos that I watched, which I liked, you sort of got into this God versus Advaita thing, which we’ve kind of been talking about now, maybe we’ve really wrapped it up, but it’s almost like God is a dirty word in some circles.

God, Neo-Advaita, and the West

Krishna: And that’s Neo-Advaita in particular, Western Neo-Advaita. I mean, that is not Shankara, that is not Ramana Maharshi, and it’s certainly not Babaji. But my own feeling is that in the West, we have right now, I mean, Nietzsche is right, fundamentally underneath it all, the West is kind of scientific materialist and atheist, or at least heavily agnostic. And we take that position as the way it is, as first, and then we decide whether we are believers or not. It’s like, we’ll add that on top.

Rick: Is that what Nietzsche said?

Krishna: Well, Nietzsche said God is dead, in the West. And when he said God is dead, he said we killed him. And we did, we killed him by the scientific method, really, by kind of separating ourselves out from reality. And initially it was done in the church, to try to give a more logical explanation of why there is a God. But as soon as you do this kind of separating yourself out from reality, and take this kind of objective, scientific objective perspective, eventually God just becomes unnecessary.

Rick: Yeah, that always amazes me actually, that a scientist could actually not appreciate God. I mean, how can an astronomer look at a galaxy and not see God? Or how could a biologist look at a cell, more complex than a major American city, and it’s a tiny little thing, and not see this vast intelligence functioning there?

Krishna: It’s the idea of separating from feeling, so you can be scientifically objective, and that’s actually ingrained in our society. So when we came into contact with the Advaita teachings, which also use this language of, in order to become clear about the nature of reality, separate out, we kind of conflated these two levels. And it’s sort of like, “Oh yeah, Advaita, that makes sense, I actually want to be objective anyway.”

Rick: Interesting. So you’re saying that Neo-Advaita has no place for much discussion of God because of the impact of Western scientific culture on the Eastern teaching that came here.

Krishna: Right, and I don’t want to make a blanket statement, I’m saying this is a tendency, because there are definitely many Advaita teachers who talk about God, but it’s there underlying it, you know, devotion is like a…

Rick: It’s dual, it seems dual.

Krishna: And it’s like a poor cousin, it’s like, you don’t really, yeah, that’s kind of part of the tradition.

Rick: It’s kid stuff.

Krishna: Exactly, that’s a good preparation, it opens your heart, that’s nice. Whereas right now for me, devotion is inseparable from non-dual realization. I don’t make any distinction anymore, really. I mean, this is just me personally, I can’t speak for anyone else, any other waking down teachers or anything. But for myself, it’s come full circle. I am in a non-dual relationship with everything that arises, and everything that arises is arising in… You know, it gets so hard to talk about this stuff.

Rick: You’re doing a pretty good job.

Krishna: You know, I’m in God. I’m in God, and you know, personness is… So, I used to say, well, God is impersonal, and what that meant, I think because of the Western background, is God is like a thing, you know, like, “Oh, I’m fine with God being this kind of vast energy, or vast emptiness,” because somehow, you know, there’s a combination. There’s a scientific, materialist point of view, and there’s the kind of abuse that’s gone on in the name of religion in the West for so long, and the power abuse, and all kinds of terrible things. So, it’s almost like we’ve been traumatized by even the God word, and the idea of God.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, the way we use the word is probably not the way the man on the street would think of God, and you know, yeah.

Krishna: Absolutely, absolutely, but the thing is that the personalness of the unmanifest, you could say. I mean, the unmanifest manifested everything that’s here, so every loving relationship you’ve ever had, every deep feeling, and the feeling of at-homeness, the feeling of rest, all the, you know, “I’m so glad to know you, my friend. I’m so close to you,” or “I’m so glad that I have these people who I love in my life who are there for me.” That kind of love, that came out of the infinite. The infinite is not less than that, and to really be in love with my wife, to be in love with my beloved, she’s got to be a person. If she’s just blood, and pus, and all that stuff going around, and thought forms, and all that, that’s all you’re left with, is stuff. And yeah, you can do that if you stand apart from your experience. Then you go, “Oh yes, it’s all objective, I can see it.”

Rick: You can analyze it.

Krishna: Exactly. All you have left is logic; you don’t have love anymore. But when you are honoring your direct experience, that love, that personness, that’s arising in the unmanifest. So the unmanifest has that times a billion. So, to speak of God, I like to say “person-ness,” because as soon as you say “person,” you think, “Oh yeah, this solid thing, separate from me.” But God is person-ness for me. God is love, and I’m not – intelligence, yes, intelligence. Not unintelligent, not like a rock, impersonal. Not like, “Oh yeah, I’m more comfortable with energy because God sounds like something scary, but I’m okay with a God who is just a big field of energy.” But you know, energy, you turn on the lights and it goes off and on, that’s still not enough. God is the beloved, God is heart, God is capable of love times a thousand, or is love times a thousand.

Whatever loving relationship you’ve had, times a billion. We’re living in a field of caring, of compassion, of love, that is permeating everything and everything arises in. And it’s that one that I’m in devotion with.

We’re living in a field of caring, of compassion, of love, that is permeating everything and everything arises in.

❤️ Personal Love and Universal Love

Rick: Beautiful. Maharshi Mahesh Yogi wrote this nice poem years ago called “Love,” actually. And one phrase from it was, “Personal love is concentrated universal love.”

Krishna: Beautiful, yeah.

Rick: And the next line of the poem was, “Ah, my heart flows when I say personal love is concentrated universal love.” It’s nice. So when you were hanging around Papaji, it sounds like you spent about five years there or something.

Krishna: Well, not … Back and forth, back and forth. Every spare moment I had I’d be there, but for five years.

Rick: A lot of plane flights. Did he sort of anoint people over there, say, “Okay, you are realized, go out and teach.” I mean, can people who are out teaching and referring to him as their sort of authority, based upon which they are teaching, are they doing that legitimately? I mean, from his side, did he ever set up an arrangement like that?

Krishna: Rick, you’re trying to get me into trouble here, aren’t you?

Rick: Just curious. I mean, because I know there has been some little controversies, and this teacher is saying, “No, that teacher is not legit. I’m the legitimate one,” and yada, yada. And I’m just wondering what the actual situation was over there.

Krishna: Well, I can’t pretend to know the actual situation. I can tell you what I saw. And that is that Papaji freely pointed everyone who he came across to their conscious nature, to who they are, ultimately. And he was very generous in telling people to tell anyone they wanted to. I’m aware of one teacher who is very well-known, who somebody said, “So-and-so wants to know if it’s okay for her to give satsang.” And he said, “Who’s so-and-so?” So he didn’t know this person’s name before that. And, “Yeah, yeah, okay,” and they did it. So that’s the level of …

Rick: So it was very informal.

Krishna: Very informal.

Rick: Yeah, there was no official stamp of approval kind of deal.

Krishna: No, no. Somehow I get the impression that there were at times that he did do that, but it wasn’t implied that other people couldn’t do that. And people asked him and he said, “Sure.” I think in particular there were people who he said, “You should go out and give satsang.” And there were other people who asked him and he said, “Sure.” And there were other people who didn’t, and he’d find out, and no problem.

Rick: Yeah, so it sounds … And you know, I think on the whole, the whole impact that he’s had …

Krishna: There’s no lineage.

Rick: no, no official lineage.

Krishna: There’s no official lineage, and that really has to … that’s the one piece …

Rick: Nor is there a lineage going in the next step back to Ramana Maharshi. I mean, the whole thing is very …

Krishna: Exactly.

Rick: … sort of unofficial.

Krishna: That has to be said, because sometimes that language is used. In India in particular, that’s really not true, because in India that word “lineage” has a particular meaning.

Rick: It’s very formal.

Krishna: It’s very formal.

Rick: Yeah.

Krishna: It means that the teacher recognized your realization, and then of all the people who … our students said, “You come with me, I train you, and now you’re empowered when I’m gone to be the teacher.” I mean, this is the kind of … this is what lineage means. That’s not what happened with Ramana Maharshi. He had no lineage. He never told anybody that. Papaji never said, “I’m in the lineage of Ramana Maharshi.”

Rick: Yeah, he’s just doing his own thing.

Krishna: Well …

Rick: More or less.

Krishna: I wouldn’t even say that. I would just say he never said he was in the lineage of Ramana Maharshi. He always had a picture of Ramana Maharshi behind him. He always held Ramana Maharshi as his guru. Somebody said to him, “I’m honored to be in the presence of someone who used to be a disciple of Ramana Maharshi.” I think that’s what the language was. And he got outraged. “You changed that. I am not used to be a disciple. I am a disciple of Ramana Maharshi.”

Rick: Right. Present tense.

Krishna: So it wasn’t a question of, “I’m doing my own thing. I’m not related.” That’s not it. It’s that Ramana never said, “You’re it,” to anybody, and Papaji was not claiming that he said, “You’re it. You’re the next one in the lineage.” And Papaji didn’t do that with anybody that I … I couldn’t see him do that with anyone. In fact, he claimed, “I’m not a teacher.” So how are you going to have a lineage if you’re not a teacher? I mean, you know, he basically said, “I’m just a person who’s here. I’m speaking. I’m the self, you’re the self, we’re having a conversation, that’s it.” And I always felt that way with him too. He was very informal, in a way, non-traditional.

🧘 Preparation, Practice, and Realization

Rick: Yeah. Okay, that’s good to know. It might be good for some people to hear that. There’s another thing I’d like to touch upon, if you have time.

Krishna: Sure.

Rick: In one of your talks, you were talking about Patanjali’s eight limbs of yoga, and I think you were talking about them as being sequential, you know, this leads to this, this leads to this, this leads to this, and …

Krishna: Maybe so, yeah.

Rick: … eventually Samadhi, but correct me if I’m wrong. And there’s a whole interesting can of worms we could get into with regard to that, and with regard to whether all the sort of virtues of doing the right thing, not doing the wrong thing, and all the other stuff, kind of grow in tandem with the growth of pure awareness, or whether there’s sort of a need for preparation. First you clean up your act in this way, then you learn to do that, and then A, B, C, and eventually then you’ll be qualified for realization.

Krishna: Oh, now I remember when I said that, yeah. Yeah, traditionally that’s how it was. There’s this understanding that before the highest teachings are given, or before pure awareness teachings are given, or non-dual teachings are given, there should be preparation, and that was pretty consistent. I don’t think this is … I think the overwhelming majority of times, it was just a given, that you needed to … I mean there was a whole bunch, there were moral things that you had in order.

Rick: Yeah, the yamas and the niyamas.

Krishna: Exactly, so what to cultivate and what to get rid of. And you know, this is a way to create equanimity in your life. If you remove circumstances and you get into the habit of removing circumstances, that will create trouble. And the masters knew what created trouble, not us. We say, “Oh, I’ll just make it quieter around here.” They say, “No, you’ve got to get rid of your greed.” It was more like, “We know what creates trouble.” So, all of these kind of moral injunctions. And then, you know, cultivate these, because if trouble happens, you’ll be way better off, smooth, you won’t get entangled. If you’re just loving and you give away something to a thief, that’s much easier, you can get on with your meditation now, or whatever. So there was kind of a cultivation of generosity and really positive things.

Rick: Qualities.

Krishna: Right, yeah. And then the ability to rest your mind on some place, in the Buddhist tradition it’s calm-abiding, or samatha meditation, and in Dharana, right? And then it leads to union with your object, or dhyana. And then in Buddhism, penetrating insight of apasana. So there’s a way in which you are cultivating moral stuff and states of mind so that you can rest your mind. And then the instructions to certain people, to chosen people, really, you get the higher teachings, which were like Dzogchen in Tibet, or Mahamudra in Tibet, or pure Advaita Vedanta would be given then. That was so that when you actually were given those instructions, you were somebody who would actually not only awaken to your conscious nature, but you’d be able to abide there because your attention was not going toward, it would go where you wanted it to be. You were able to do that.

So a lot of what happens now is people awaken to consciousness and desires, and aversions, things that you’re attached to, things that you’re attracted to, things that you’re repulsed by, they’re much too powerful. And so you get a glimpse of it, and sometimes a very strong realization of it, but then trouble starts happening.

Rick: Well you guys have the “wake down, shake down,” or whatever you call it.

Krishna: So in waking down, this is built right into the thing. There’s a recognition that that’s what happens later. And so, put it this way, in the past, people would not even be exposed to consciousness teachings until they were ready. They know about them, they were common knowledge, but you wouldn’t have a master pointing you there. Then in the 20th century, probably, or maybe even a little bit before that, but I’d say mostly 20th century, Ramana Maharshi was exceptional that way. He would point people right away, directly. And some of his disciples complained about it. They said, “Look, this villager just came in and you had him doing self-inquiry, why don’t you give him a mantra?” I guess it was Ganapati Muni who was asking him this. And Ramana said, “Well, this is the way I woke, this is what I know.” Besides, sooner or later it’s going to come down to self-inquiry. But there’s reasons.

In other words, when there was a different time and a different place, when the world wasn’t so chaotic, people actually would go through all the practices and then be ready. It’s less and less likely that that’s going to be the case.

Rick: Unless you go off to a monastery or something and study.

Krishna: Exactly, and most of us aren’t. So I actually feel like it’s an experiment, giving out the caviar to the peasants. It’s this new thing that’s happening, and it’s probably the necessity of the times. But it’s extraordinary, and I think it’s important for us to recognize that our stomachs might not be used to caviar yet, and so we should eat it, go “Oh, wow!” And it may be that you get sick for a little while eating the caviar. And just to recognize that all of your desires, all of your stuff, will come up after realization is an entirely strange notion, because it’s not in the traditional literature. But the traditional literature would never allow such a one as us to be doing such high teachings.

Rick: Interesting, yeah. And I mean, it’s almost the exception to find a teacher who hasn’t been embroiled in some sort of scandal. But there’s so many situations like that, and you wonder, well … I mean, I originally was taught, and it was my understanding, that there’s a tight correlation between development of consciousness and development of moral values, and things like that. But I eventually had to conclude that it’s a lot looser. It’s like maybe one of those big rubber bands that can stretch every which way. There’s still some correlation, but it’s loose. It’s a different correlation than that, but there’s still some correlation. I mean, this kind of goes toward whether your realization is disassociated or not. It’s as if the more feeling of others actually happens, the more accountable you have to become, because you end up feeling the results of what you do.

But if you’re going to have a disassociated realization, like, “Okay, I’m consciousness itself, I’m not any of this stuff,” well then this stuff can do anything, and it will.

Accountability, Ethics, and Mutuality

Yeah, and then there are teachers who are very charismatic and who rationalize that as crazy wisdom or something, and do all kinds of strange things, and their disciples look at it and think, “Well, it’s crazy wisdom, he’s enlightened, it must be okay.” And in a way I feel that’s very unfortunate, and on the other hand, it is what it is, and maybe that’s their niche. I mean, Sanyal Bhandar is a case in point, he came out okay, I think, from a situation like that. But the last decade or so …

Krishna: You mean having been with a guru that was known for …

Rick: For rather decadent behavior, and yet was blazing consciousness, powerful darshan.

Krishna: Yeah, but he didn’t have his realization when he was with Adi Da at all.

Rick: No, I know, but the fact that Adi Da …

Krishna: I’ll be really clear about that.

Rick: Oh, I realize that. But the fact that Adi Da was, you know, apparently, really had something. On the other hand, there was a list of things that he did that would probably put him in jail if it were publicly known.

Krishna: Or if it happened in the States.

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

Krishna: Well, I guess, anyway.

Rick: Yeah, you know what I mean. So, it’s interesting, because all this talk we’ve been engaging in about the Divine nature, and the fact that it sort of motivates a person who has realized it to move this way and move that way. You wonder how someone who has realized it with such apparent fullness can be moved to do such crazy stuff, apparently harmful stuff.

Krishna: I can say, again, if we’re going to go back to further times, it’s not as though abuse never happened, but in the past, to be part of a lineage or a school meant being accountable to that school and that lineage. And you had many other teachers than just your main teacher who were part of that school and lineage, and people kept each other in check.

Rick: Yeah, there was a discipline and a molding of the person.

Krishna: And it was a time when towns were smaller. I mean, I got this even just being in India and seeing the way, at least in the ’90s – India’s changing so fast, I don’t know, I’m sure it’s true in the villages – but the way people knew each other. In the same shop, you’d have families working. So, if a woman came in to buy something and the young man was talking to her a little bit too long, the uncle came over and said, “a-hem, okay.” And it just was not a word spoken, just “Next,” you just moved right along. And this is not a situation we’re in in the 21st century, where people are really … I mean, many of the gurus are really not accountable to other teachers. And so, in Waking Down, we’re really accountable to each other.

And this notion of mutuality is because we know we’re in the 21st century, and these are different times, we’re in the West, we don’t have all that kind of structure in place that was in the traditional East. And so, we hold each other accountable here, and we have ethics policies. I mean, again, in the Waking Down path, we have very clear ethics policies regarding sexuality in particular, but also other forms of possible exploitation.

Rick: Yeah, money, and this and that, and the other thing.

Krishna: Exactly. And we all hold each other accountable. And there’s a direct teaching in waking down that acknowledges what everybody knows if they think about it anyway, but just explicitly states it, that we are existentially equal, teacher and student. As sentient beings here, there is no difference between us. We are functionally in a hierarchy. So I function as a teacher, and they function as a student, and in that sense there’s a hierarchy, but existentially, no difference. And that’s really important, because if a teacher is doing something that doesn’t feel appropriate for a student, the student gets to question the teacher and other teachers, and says, “Hey, this doesn’t feel right. What’s going on here?” And the teacher, if it’s not something over the top, just something small, they get to go, “Whoops, sorry, I didn’t realize I wasn’t respecting you there.”

Rick: Yeah.

Krishna: I’m really sorry.

Rick: That’s great, that’s very healthy. And when there isn’t a check and balance system like that, I’ve seen, I can think of several examples, where it almost seems like the ego becomes punch-drunk with the shakti or something. There’s this realization and the ego somehow appropriates it, and instead of the greatness of Brahman, it’s more like, “I am great.”

Krishna: Yes.

Rick: And obviously that’s a pitfall for the teacher himself, which will have to come to terms with that at some point, but it can be a pitfall for those who align themselves with him.

Krishna: Absolutely, and there’s actually a phenomena that happens in the field of being an awakened being and being related to his teacher, which is that there’s the guru principle, which functions whenever somebody is a teacher, creates a kind of a field in which if somebody is a student there, no matter what happens, there can be a learning.

Rick: For the teacher, you mean?

Krishna: For the student. Yeah no matter what happens, no matter what the teacher does. So that’s functional in the energy. What happens is an exploitation of that fact. So in waking down, we’re very conscious that that’s the case.

Rick: So you’re saying that if a teacher … OK, go ahead

Krishna: We’re very conscious that that’s the case, but it’s never, ever, ever to be used as an excuse for abusive behavior.

Rick: Right.

Krishna: So, yeah, when something does happen, and scandals happen everywhere, scandals have happened in Waking Down, when that did happen, and the teacher is disciplined, and often they’re no longer a teacher. And there’s an actual protocol for what to do, and meetings held, and everything. It’s obvious sometimes that the student actually learned a lot through the whole thing. Sometimes they had an awakening from it.

Rick: Interesting.

Krishna: Don’t care. The teacher is out. So it’s like you’re accountable at the human level, and the divine level is taking care of itself. So rather than saying, “Well, at the human level it doesn’t really matter, because divinely, look, they got the lesson.” No, it doesn’t work that way.

Rick: Right. And in the larger context of the world, perhaps karmically on some level, the people starving in Somalia are learning some kind of lesson, who knows? But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do everything we can to feed them.

Krishna: Sure.

Rick: So, same principle, really, just different context.

Krishna: I never thought of it that way, but sure, that sounds right to me.

Closing Thoughts

Rick: Yeah, interesting. Well, this is fascinating. The way I am, I could go on like this all night, just asking questions and thinking of more things to talk about, but at a certain point you say, “All right, well maybe we’ve covered it.” Do you feel like there’s anything you’d like to leave people with, anything we haven’t discussed that you’d like to bring up?

Krishna: No, I think the biggest takeaway for me in terms of the whole shebang is that you can trust being, that you can trust your own being, you can trust your own life at the deepest level, not necessarily your mind, but you can trust the life that is living through you.

You can trust your own being, you can trust your own life at the deepest level.

Rick: Nice.

Krishna: And I guess that’s what I’d like to leave you with.

Rick: Yeah, you were saying a little while ago how it’s as if you’re in an ocean of God or an ocean of love or something, and just sort of flowing in that, like cradled in the mother’s arms sort of image came to mind when you mentioned that.

Krishna: Mm-hmm, good.

Rick: Beautiful. Well, I didn’t want to have the last word.

Krishna: That’s a good last word.

Conclusion and Resources

Rick: Okay, great. Well, thanks Krishna, I really have enjoyed this conversation. Let me just make a few concluding remarks. I’ve been speaking with Krishna Gauci, whose website I will link to from the Buddha at the Gas Pump website, so that people can get in touch with him if they like. My website is www.batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P. If you go there, you can see all the interviews that have been done and will be done. I do about one a week. And you can sign up to be notified by email when new ones become available. There’s a little discussion group that builds up around each interview. It’s a WordPress blog, so people can enter comments. Sometimes hundreds of comments end up coming on a particular interview. People get into a real discussion about things. So if you like that sort of thing, feel free to participate. Thank you for watching or listening.

Oh, I should also mention that this is available as a podcast, and you’ll see links there for that if you like to listen to things on your iPod while you’re commuting or whatever. So thanks for watching or listening, and we will see you next time. My next guest will be Florian Schlosser. I’ll be speaking to him from the sunny island of Majorca. He’ll be speaking to me from there. So talk to you then. Good night. Good night.

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