Kurt Johnson Transcript

Kurt Johnson Interview

Summary: 

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

Kurt: You are welcome and I am welcome and here we are.

Rick: Yeah.

Kurt: In the heart of Manhattan. Kurt and I first met at the Science and Nonduality Conference two years ago and then he was there this last time and had to leave early because Hurricane Sandy was blowing in. He had to get home before the flights were all shut down. Kurt works across a number of fields, spirituality, science, literature and business. He was a Christian monastic for 14 years and he was then a professional scientist in evolutionary biology at major scientific institutions for 20 years, publishing widely in international scientific journals. Since 2001 he has balanced work in world religions, spirituality and science and retired from business administration in 2007. The reason we are having this interview today is that Kurt has just published a very interesting book called “The Coming Interspiritual Age”, in collaboration with David Robert Ord and it explores the themes of oneness, unity and diversity on a worldwide scale, forecasting a global shift towards spiritual consciousness. The authors unwrap an evolving makeup of religious communities to showcase how new forms of personal identity and scientific context in religion are creating collective interspirituality. Obviously I was reading that from our little prepared statement but I read the book and enjoyed it very much. In fact I converted it to audio and listened to it while I was riding my bike and stuff. As I was listening, it was funny, you trace the whole history of the universe from the Big Bang and the evolution of life on earth and all the various cultures and history and interwoven nicely with spirituality and I thought, “Wow, this is like going to the Natural History Museum in the Hayden Planetarium with Christ and Buddha and so on as my tour guides.” Because actually when I was a kid that’s what I did every year for my birthday. One year I’d go into the Natural History Museum, next year I’d go to the Hayden Planetarium and I’d alternate. Then I discovered in reading more about you that you were actually working for the Natural History Museum for about 30 years. I didn’t know that when I had that thought, so that was cool.

Kurt: That’s a great synchronicity.

Rick: Why don’t you lay it out for us. Tell us what this book is about.

Kurt: There’s a lot of ways, Rick, that one could look at this book. Let me just mention about three. The publisher is Namaste, which published Eckhart Tolle and one of his most well-known books is A New Earth. The question that was being asked, I think, by Namaste was, “If you took the theme of a new earth, which is this dream of a transformation where the planet would become a place concerned about the well-being of all and the potential of our species could really max out, is that just dreaming or do the data sets that are out there from science, from governance, from sociology, from brain-mind studies, consciousness studies, do these actually show that this is where things are trending?” That was kind of our mandate, was could we lay out the data sets that actually would show that we’re not in dream world here when we’re talking about the world moving toward a unity consciousness, but that that’s actually the trend. That would be one. The second is that, as you know from reading the book, there’s been this undercurrent within what was first the ecumenical movement and then the interfaith movement and now what’s called the interspiritual movement, which really, from you and my perspective, would be the understanding of non-duality or awakening through all the traditions and across the traditions and even down to the man on the street. This has been a convergence that’s been happening over the last decades. Particularly what our book was trying to do, and the statement you were reading before this was actually a statement from the Parliament of the World Religions, is that this direction has been going on across the traditions, at least in the last decades. That would be kind of perspective number two. Perspective number three would simply be if we looked at the entire world level, and that includes all of the secular world, all of the discoveries of modern science, particularly the new physics, M-theory, and all of these things. Science and that view of reality is also going toward a unified lens and a sense, as anybody in non-dual work would know, that everything is made of the same thing. This is all one seamless, interconnected dynamic. The question then is how our species, Homo sapiens, becomes a skilled organism as a part of this incredible, holonic, interconnected structure, interior, exterior, known as the universe. Here we are, sitting right in the middle of it.

Rick: What do you think is driving this? Why is this shift taking place? Is it through any efforts that we’re making, or is it some cosmic energy shift that we’re just riding the wave of?

Kurt: You could actually ask underneath what I’m about to say what’s causal there, but what we really discovered, if we have to ask, what would we lay our money on that’s really driving this? What we find is that when you study what’s going on in the studies of consciousness and brain-mind, that the direction of cognitive evolution in our species is moving out of the rational, dualistic, and into the non-dual and holistic. As we show in the book, and we start clear back at the Renaissance and before, and we’re really drawing from Julian James’ work, is that one of the huge shifts historically, which was Renaissance and post-Renaissance, was the arising of the analytical brain, which then started to say, “Hey, the individual has self-evident rights. The individual needs to be paid attention to.” That gestalt of the analytical, rational mind then really subsumed the magical, mythic lens of religion, but it went extremely dualistic. Not only did it go dualistic in science, what’s testable, what’s not testable, what’s seeable, what’s not seeable, but even theology went that way. As we point out, Karl Barth and almost all of Protestantism went toward God is radically other. We’re not really a part of that. It got very dualistic. What’s happening now, and for instance, the studies at Yale, the studies at NYU, Athabasca University, City University, show very clearly that even the person on the street is starting to see things now without boxes. The traditional boxes of Muslim, Jew, gay, straight, black, white, American, Russian, these are disappearing, and they’re moving toward views that are world-centric, trans-traditional, trans-cultural, trans-religious. This is what’s propelled the Arab Spring. It’s what’s propelled Occupy. It’s what’s propelling now what’s been called the Catholic Spring, and everything else on the world where this urgency of seeing things as a whole is arising. Again, what we would lay our money on is not what you and I could teach anybody about consciousness or non duality or spirituality, but that brain-mind is evolving this direction anyway, and this is what’s propelling the whole thing from underneath. That for me was tremendously good news, because otherwise it’s a race between how much can I convince somebody that a different gestalt is better, healthier, whatever words we want to use.

Rick: It’s obviously clear to anyone who’s in the least bit observant that vast changes have taken place in the world in the last hundred years. A hundred years ago we had these rickety little fledgling airplanes that could barely fly across the country with maybe ten refueling stops, and now we have the 787, although that’s having a few problems. Obviously there have been huge changes in every field technologically, and those must in some way be a reflection of an evolution of our capacities as human beings. If that is the case, then why shouldn’t we also expect there to be vast changes in our spiritual musculature, our ability to see things from a much deeper level? It seems like we don’t have to wait for the vast spans of time that usually characterize evolution in the Darwinian sense, that things can happen within a generation that are just mind-boggling.

Kurt: That’s because cognitive evolution does not require reproduction. Biological evolution has had to go generation by generation through reproduction, which also meant that so-called survival of the fittest was at least to some degree a principle or a law. If we get to cognitive evolution, and that’s a matter of what we can decide on as a species and a collective is true or serves us better, that can move very, very quickly. But there’s another caveat here that’s really, really important, and that is that it’s one thing to have the awareness that things may be changing or things may be moving toward a unity, but it’s another thing for the species to pick up the skill sets that allow that to be actually realized in the manifest world and the world that we actually build. One point that we make in the book, which is so crucial, is that evolution itself always moves ahead, if it’s actually successful, by the connection of an awareness to a skill set. If something only has the awareness but doesn’t pick up the skill sets to manifest that, it actually simply doesn’t manifest. For instance, as we point out, 70,000 years ago, there were three intelligent species on the planet, Homo sapiens, Homo neanderthalensis and Homo floresiensis, the little hobbit over in Indonesia. They got blown up by the supervolcano Toba. What’s really, really interesting, of course, the little one got blown up, so it wasn’t responsible, but Neanderthal, during the Ice Age, obviously knew that it was cold, knew that food was hard to find, but it wasn’t able to adapt to the skill sets that would allow it to live in that new environment. It actually then went extinct. I think you remember from the book we pointed out there’s this field of science called cognitive science of religion. It’s five fields of science, sociology, biology, I won’t mention all five of them, cognitive psychology, that are trying to look from a scientific point of view at what are the chances now that Homo sapiens can get through this bottleneck and make this big turn. The fear, actually, that that area of science has is that we might have the awareness that we need to move to a globalized society that works. For instance, a globalized spirituality that works and isn’t caught in exclusive claims of this messiah and only these people will go to heaven and all these things that divide people. The question is will we actually pick up the skill sets, particularly interpersonally and intersociologically between societies and across cultures that would actually allow us to manifest a world-centric, trans-traditional, trans-cultural world. We could have the awareness but not pick up the skill sets. That’s simply an adaptive question. Scientifically, if you’re walking through the halls of the American Museum of Natural History again, that would be called an anthropological threshold. Either we meet that anthropological threshold or we don’t, just like Neanderthal couldn’t meet it in the Ice Age and is no longer with us.

Rick: I have two questions out of that. The first is can you think of any contemporary or fairly recent examples in which we had an awareness of something and didn’t pick up the skill sets and therefore it fizzled out?

Kurt: We can certainly show how that is always trended. In the book we show that most revolutions at the beginning end up being hijacked by remnants of the former Gestalt. I’ll give the greatest simple example for all the Americans watching here is 9/11. So 9/11, after 9/11 came this amazing moment of unity, homogeneity, love, and dialogue among American people. Then it got hijacked by the neocon agenda that went back then to pointing out an enemy, saying, “Okay, we’ve got good guys and bad guys here.” The same thing happened in the French Revolution. The same thing happened in the Russian Revolution. The same thing happened in the Iranian Revolution. We point out a very famous book in French called Hope Betrayed, which is about the failure of the Iranian Revolution to actually reflect the values that the Iranian people desired. When you study spiral dynamics and integral, which as you know from reading the book, is a huge foundation of this book, and I’ve been in correspondence with Ken Wilber about this. Ken and I did a two-hour discussion that we recorded just about a month ago. You tend to see that the pattern of history is that there will always be a new awareness and even a revolution in a new direction, but then there’s a dicey period you go through, like the guillotine period in the French Revolution or between the Reds and the Whites in the Russian Revolution, where this has to shake itself out. One of the questions that we’re really asking, and boy, it’s a huge question in the thing of the trans-traditional relationship of religions, is like you just said, it’s one thing to say this, but to do this successfully is difficult because of what’s embedded in everybody. We actually tell people there will be a shaking out period, and we call that a period of experimentation in which people are going to have to try all kinds of experiments with what this gestalt looks like when it’s acted out in relationships and structures and organizations. That’s always the pattern. There’s always a turn upward and a turn downward, then a shaking out. The pattern always is that generally these trends, if you look at anything, women’s rights, slavery, any of these trends, they’ve always continued to move in that direction. Even Martin Luther King’s famous speech, which I think is at the monument in D.C., that the arc of history never questionably stops going these directions. It’s dicey all the way.

Rick: Do you think that the big shift in awareness has already pretty much happened and that we’re now in a shaking out period, or haven’t we really shifted yet?

Kurt: I think that the general consensus, by that I mean, when people look at the book, they see there are about 50 spiritual leaders that endorse this book, and most of them think that we’re at the glimpsing period and the starting to understand period, where everyone’s starting to get it, to the point that we’ve identified it. In other words, even our conversation today, we’ve identified this trend. That’s actually what the book does, and when Cosmos did an article about the book, they say, “Well, it identifies these trends.” But you know from your Dharma work that everything moves from the formless to the world of form, from formlessness to the world of form. So we go through a glimpsing stage first, and we go through the manifestation part, which is even in the process of embodiment and spirituality or non-duality, comes after the original waking up. You have the waking up, then you have the embodiment. So I think we’re just at the noticing stage and at the glimpsing stage. The reason that I point that out, and Richard Rohr, for instance, the Roman Catholic writer on non-duality, this is really his principal point about this, is that from that glimpsing point, we have to actually just tell everybody, “Look, the next step is experimenting with structural change and new ways of doing things.” That just has to be the next step. Without that, the glimpsing won’t mean anything. Also, if we don’t build structures that reflect that, people will go away disappointed. The danger of going away disappointed is they doubt the validity of the glimpse. People get into non-duality sometimes, incremental experiences of non-duality, but when their life doesn’t start to manifest that, the nitty-gritty of the nuts and bolts of the day-to-day, they can fall back and say, “Oh, that was just some crazy experience at a retreat or with a guru,” and they start to doubt it.

Rick: I think that perhaps you’d agree that social change very often recapitulates individual change, especially when we’re talking about a spiritual transformation. I don’t know about you, but in my own experience and that of many people I’ve spoken with, when you first start out on a spiritual path, it can be such a huge relief, and you can have just tremendous joy and freedom and so on from having this immersion in the absolute for the first time in your life, but then the shit starts to hit the fan. Then you’ve really got to work out a lot of deeply-seated structures and stresses and boundaries and whatnot that that exposure to the absolute begins to loosen up. You can go through decades of this before the dust settles. I imagine that, and you can elaborate on this, that perhaps the same pattern will be seen and is being seen now in the world at large.

Kurt: Absolutely, and we simply need to point that out. One of the main things that Integral, a la Wilber and Beck, have done is say, “Look, there are states and then there are stages,” or call them platforms or structures, “and the two are yin and the yang. One proceeds from one to the other.” If we don’t realize that and isolate the one from the other, the work doesn’t get done. You’re absolutely right. It’s also important, and you know this from the awakening, that it be at the natural rhythm of the person and works for the person and is really right for their particular rhythm. There’s no particular time constraint per se. It works out naturally for the individual. But if it doesn’t move to that other level, usually then, as you just said, it doesn’t really become real.

Rick: Again, drawing parallels, the individual can become discouraged when they realize how much stuff they’ve got to work through once they’ve started out, and they can sort of revert back to, “I think I’ll just smoke grass again,” or they can just give up on this whole thing. In the same sense, as a society, those especially who are tuned into this kind of awakening that’s taking place, it can be easy to think, “Oh man, it’s impossible. The banks are in control of everything and global warming is going to kill us all, and it’s just hopeless.”

Kurt: Absolutely. Two things there. I was going to say that one of the things that you note, Sufi leader, Llewellyn Vaughn-Lee, and he was an old friend of Wayne Teasdale’s as well and has really been an advisor to me for much of my journey. One of the things he said here very recently is, “What’s important now is that we not fall short of the original goal.” In other words, that we not fall short or sell ourselves short of what’s actually possible. One thing we point out in the book, which you may remember, is that for people living at the time of the Renaissance when it was all about absolute power of kings and absolute power of popes and absolute power of a certain elite, people at the beginning of that paradigm shift where the idea of the individual and individual rights was arising, it had been very easy for them to say, “This structure that we live in can’t change. You’ve got to be freaking dreaming to think that this could ever change.” That is a really clear parallel to what you just said. Right now, the film of the musical Les Miserables is really huge. That theme also runs deep. When there are idealists at the beginning of any pattern that’s unfolding, very often the first generation will not succeed. Those people are going to get killed. They’re going to die. They’re going to never see this thing come into fruition. It ends up coming into fruition however that rolls out. The idea that the morass that we’re in now can’t change, we shouldn’t allow that to fool us. Any more than the person who’s had an awakening experience, and I think you know this yourself, is that the way the awakening experience itself propels toward manifestation or embodiment is that it happens naturally. If you go back to the mind and you say, “Oh, I’m going to micromanage this from the mind,” nothing’s going to happen. If you fall back into the authentic experience itself and allow that and that territory, which is totally new to you, to propel it, then that’s going to work.

Rick: Which gets me back to a question I asked earlier, which is, to what extent is this transformation something we can shepherd along through our own individual efforts, or to what extent is it some kind of cosmic wave that we’re just riding? How do you find the balance point between individual striving and just going with the flow and watching it unfold?

Kurt: I think the key to that, and here I’m speaking for an awful lot of Dharma teachers, is the very balance itself, that these two elements will always be in a dynamic yin and yang. The question is, how skillful are we in allowing that natural yin and yang to propel what’s really going on? For instance, we have to understand that Wayne used to call it “heart, head and hands.” What’s coming from that deep place inside of us, which is coming from that formless world, if we also don’t realize that, yes, that’s going to have to transfer over to skill sets and actual ways of doing things, and that will require the tools of the mind and tools of technology, the tools of the intellect, we have to then allow this to really become very seamless, and this yin and yang then to be dynamic, so the black and white, they spin into the gray. I think you know as well as I do, most awakened teachers that you admire or I admire, or awakened leaders that you admire or I admire, they have this simultaneity of this inner knowing and this suite of skill sets in the world that allow them both to be that in essence and that also in embodiment. Part of the message of the Dharma is that that capability, that potential, is actually not only in all of us, it is what we are, so if any of us are patient on this journey and we’re authentic on this journey, the whole apparatus, as one of my teachers said, the whole little motor of the whole thing is already inside of us. That then can just take over and propel us each in our unique way, so that’s kind of the genius of it all.

Rick: I know you’ve been very involved in the Occupy Movement and other social type movements. Just this morning I was listening to Drew Dellinger’s talk from the Science and Non-Duality Conference and he was mentioning all these great environmental organizations and so on. I interviewed David Loy when I was out there, who is a Zen teacher who also has a very ardent interest in ecological issues. When you speak of skill sets, rather than just abstract awareness, but translating that into skill sets that can really help to bring about change, I guess let’s get a little bit more specific on what we mean by skill sets. Maybe the examples I just mentioned and a million other things.

Kurt: I think two things. I think you know as well as I do that in the whole Dharma community, and I mean by that across Buddhism, Hinduism, contemporary Christianity, Sufism, all of this, in the last five to ten years there’s been this eruption of the embodiment movement. The eruption of the embodiment movement was a realization in people that, “Hey, our awakened awareness was not just some transcendent thing to awake and disengage or to awake and detach.” The deepest part of that message, and it’s in all the great traditions, particularly Tibetan Buddhism, is to awake and engage. Because this is one system and it’s a seamless, one cosmos, one unity, we’re no longer in this dualism anymore of thinking that even awakeness itself is just some transcendent experience by which then you’re not involved. But the message now, and it’s what the hearts call them really at the deepest level of urgency, is that that awakening, that intimacy that any of us feel in that awakened state, means that that is wanting to become embedded in everything that’s in the universe, in relationships, in structures, in technologies, in civilizations, in how a civilization could look on this planet or any other planet, that these are not divided anymore. Now when that realization arises, and for instance I’ve talked to some of my friends across all the traditions, one guy particularly in Zen, who talked about this realization arising in himself, he said it arose in himself before he even read about it. He just suddenly started to realize, “Oh my God, this is about everything, and I’ve been teaching it just in the transcendent, but actually it’s about everything, and now this means something for this world, right here and right now.” Well then, you end up then looking at an incredibly complex world, an incredibly screwed up world because of all the other things that have come and embedded the way the world has gone with competition and conflict and consumerism and grow, grow, grow, and no sense of the collective and no sense of mutuality, that you sit back and you go, “Whoa, we’ve got some major reverse engineering to do here to take this realization of the heart, which is also the same realization of consciousness, and understand that this is wanting to form a structure around it.” Now in our own lives, in the I space, in your world, and in your intimate we space, all of us naturally strive for a world that reflects those deep artistic ideals. We wouldn’t by choice pick circles of friends or pick where we live in a way that didn’t nurture this intimacy. It just doesn’t make sense. So the big step now that the world is trying to make, and this is really what is in Wilber and Beck as well, is to move from an awakeness in the I and an awakeness in the we to an awakeness in the it, in the institutional space of the world, which is now the part that is so not user-friendly. Governments, the financial system, all these things which just have no sense of their responsibility to the wider collective. So that’s really what’s erupting. That’s actually Arab Spring. That’s Occupy. What’s interesting is that it’s erupting at the deepest level of our gestalt in heart and consciousness, our zeitgeist, whatever you call it. It’s happening whether you’re a plumber or – it doesn’t matter what you are. This awareness that, my gosh, the collective means something and that responsibility in a collective means something. This is starting to erupt. But how to point out that this is where people like yourself or myself or all the people that we admire in this business. This is what we’re really trying to point out is that the awareness is one thing, but the skill set that’s real is where the challenge is at from here on out.

Rick: Interesting. When I first learned meditation it was back in the 60s. The students for a democratic society and all that was going on on campuses. I had the philosophy from my teacher, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, that water the root and enjoy the fruit. All you really needed to do was take care of the transcendent and everything else would take care of itself. I saw all these protesters and so on as being a little bit ridiculous and egotistical and violent. I thought, “If everyone would just meditate, all this would work itself out.” Then over the years, Maharishi himself became much more activist about things. He became a vociferous opponent of genetic engineering and very outspoken about war-mongering presidents. Let me just broaden the question a little bit. You have today the whole Arab Spring, as you mentioned, Occupy Wall Street, all kinds of people involved in various movements, environmental movements, Change.org, people trying to bring about economic justice, social justice, gay rights, and all these different things. Then of course you have the whole group of people which is vast and multifarious who are engaged in some form of spirituality. I’m wondering to what extent these overlap. To what extent you have people who really don’t give a hoot about spirituality and consider it impractical and are just out there on the streets. Then to what extent you have people who are really into spirituality and feel like, as I did when I was 18 years old, all this activism stuff is superficial. To what extent the two circles overlap and whether it’s in the overlapping section that we’re really going to see solutions.

Kurt: Yeah. Well, it’s all of the above because in the first place, ideally this is all one seamless dynamic in which this eruption is going on. But as this eruption is going on, and again, just like in a gene pool in evolution where you have the mean, it’s a bell curve, you have a mean and then you have the extremes on each side of the bell curve, whenever there’s a change going on in the gene pool, there’s a wide distribution of the individuality within that that’s making that up. So yeah, you have an activist who’s reactive and he’s against and he’s coming from his own hate or his own dislike or his own negativity. That’s a very different type of way of doing activism than coming from the heart or from the way Gandhi did it or Martin Luther King. You’re going to have everything. But the point is that, in our desire to kind of inform this giant bell curve about where it’s actually trying to go and what it’s trying to do, we have to realize that it’s seamless to begin with. What the heart’s going to demand is going to be all the way from what we experience transcendently to how we actually want to live. So then the question is how do we shake out in kind of a global gestalt or a global zeitgeist a way that this is understood that leaves plenty of room for people to add their particular take to this and be okay with how that process is going. Now that’s really what interspirituality is about. As Wayne Teasdale used that term, interspirituality, he was really saying we want to have everybody know that it’s okay, all the diversity is okay, all the uniqueness is okay, it’s absolutely necessary, it’s the way all holons and organs work and organisms work. But we also start to have the awareness now. Even in the individual awakened person, you start understanding that if you’re kind and nurturing to every part of yourself, every part of yourself steps forward. Even the shadows step forward and do the housecleaning that they need to do. So there’s this incredible kind of global thing. Yasuhiko Kimura talks about it as a global forgiveness, that there’s a global forgiveness that says, “Hey, we’ve all met well, we’re all okay, we’re at this level now of realizing this is all going somewhere, so let’s let everybody be as unique as they are, but let’s understand that this is churning in a direction that’s converging toward everyone’s well-being. From that we can have a vigilance about how to have the skill sets, the patience, giving people room to be who they are, nurturing this conversation, nurturing that conversation, drawing out of every conversation what the heart of it is. Then we’ve got an organism happening. Then we’ve got something that’s really coming from the heart. It’s making that welcoming space. I think that again is a gestalt that we all understand. When we have that welcoming space, stuff is invited in, and it’s happy to be invited in because it feels that it’s welcome. That gives the joy and the okayness to it all, but none of the direction is lost.

Rick: Good. So you’re saying that just as liver cells don’t have to do what brain cells do and vice versa, occupied people don’t all have to become non-dual spiritual dudes, and the non-dual spiritual crowd doesn’t all have to get out there with a placard and a megaphone or whatever, that we’re all cells in a larger organism and everyone’s doing their bit according to their dharma.

Kurt: And actually, if we look at ecosystems, that’s the way ecosystems work. If you look at ecosystems, the entities that make up ecosystems are not doing the same thing. They’re radically doing different things, but their relationship is organismic, just like in our own body it’s organismic. Now what happens, and it also happens with me, is when I start thinking this way and then I start asking, “Well, what would this mean for the real world and how human beings would live and work?” Do I go blank? Sure I go blank. The reason would be that we’re in this glimpsing stage, so we feel the urgency of the world as we’d like to see it, but we’re only starting to inch toward what the manifest structure would look like that nurture that. So it’s really interesting. Another guy that you know that I do some stuff with, introduced to him recently, David Korten.

Rick: Oh, yeah.

Kurt: He was author of “Agenda for a New Economy” and “The Great Turning” and “When Corporations Rule the World.” This is exactly what he’s saying, is that we’re just at this point of experimentation where even the people who are, say, the most gifted economists, the most gifted in this or that, are going to have to take their heart, go to the drawing board and say, “What would this look like in a structure if we really actually did this a different way?” This is a big challenge, actually for the cognitive apparatus of the species to step up with the consciousness and the heart apparatus in the species, so that the heart, at the end, like whatever’s happening in the world, that we’re not on the deck of the Titanic, all shedding tears together as the Titanic goes down. That’s one scenario. But the other one would be how to get that damn ship uprighted again, which would be a very different ending.

Rick: Yeah. I know in my own life it’s really hard for me, it would have been impossible for me, or at least I wasn’t able to, envision where I was going to be ten years hence. At any point you could take me back to the age of 20, 30, 40, and at every point I never would have imagined exactly what I would… or if I did imagine what actually ended up happening was very different. And yet I feel, looking back, that there’s been a divine hand guiding it and that I’m very pleased with the guidance that I’ve received. I hope that that same mechanics works on a global scale, that even though we individually may all be too short-sighted to envision exactly where this is going, although we all get glimpses of it in our own channels, there is a larger intelligence that has that vision and is helping us stumble along in that direction.

Kurt: I wanted to mention something here. You reminded me of it earlier and then I forgot, but it’s very important. A lot of my friends at Aurobindo Ashram in Auroville, from the Sri Aurobindo tradition, now, Sraddhalu Ranade, who is one of their main teachers now and a part of what’s called the Contemplative Alliance that I’m a part of, what he says now, coming from Aurobindo’s message, is that we’re at a crossroads of where what’s nurturing from the field or from the guiding hand or from that inner Satguru, God, whatever we call it, it’s at a crossroads now with the conscious choices of individual and collective human beings, That we’ve reached the point of evolution where that inner nurturing and that inner guiding now is converging with the conscious choices that we make. It’s the conscious choices that we make that can amp up not only the speed of this transformation but the skillfulness of the transformation. To hear him say that is very, very interesting because I think you know that in 1956, the mother, who was Aurobindo’s companion, announced that this energy that we’re talking about, this transformative energy to see this new world and build this new world, was now available on the planet, 1956. So as that’s continued to unroll, I just found it very interesting when I heard Sraddhalu say that, that they feel we’re right at this crossroads now where all of that inner nurturing from that deeper place you talked about at the beginning is at this crossroads now with the conscious choices that we make.

Rick: Can you come up with a concrete example of that?

Kurt: It would be, let’s say, in the individual life of the person who’s going through an awakening experience and they start to have a rise in them, this entire new way of being. Then, as you said earlier in the interview, they look around at the world that they’re in, their we space, their it space, and they say, “Oh my gosh, can I actually take this that is in me and can it actually contain all of that or is it just some isolated thing that I just have to kind of hide under a bushel?” There’s a huge existential moment, which I know you and many, many others I know have gone through, when they make the decision existentially that absolutely this new person who they are, this new being that they are, not only has the ability but is destined in that sense to actually take over the world of its larger life. Then one decides, “I am going to live this awakened life in every part of how I do things and I’m not going to compromise.” Again, Neelam, who I think you know, like she always said, there’s no 50/50 when it comes to that moment. It’s 100% where you have to say, “I am living this way and I am confident that it can have domain over not just my I space but this entire space.” I think that’s the most tangible example. Now, the other example of that, let’s say at the worldwide level, is when people would sit down together. There’s an amazing movie about the process in South Africa leading up to Mandela’s release and ceding the power to Mandela. I don’t remember it, but it’s the inner workings of the five or six people that made these agreements. They had this incredible existential moment where they realized that unless all six of them, and they represented six completely divided parts of South African civil society, unless all of them took a radical step together and a risk, a big risk, that they could never get to where their hearts were really asking them to go. The movie is extremely poignant in how it shows that they all kind of throw everything to the wind and they make this step. At the end, when they’re kind of embracing each other and this has all happened, they’re still not sure it will work, but they’ve got this feeling in their gut that they not only did the right thing, that they did something cosmically right. They do the tear thing and the movie does all of that. It’s huge because it shows that at a certain point globally, this species may have to existentially take those same risks that you took as an awakening person, or I took as an awakening person, or anybody listening to this interview takes as an awakening person.

Rick: If you think of the name of that movie, let me know. I’d like to watch it. I’ll send you an email.

Kurt: Liam Neeson is one of the people in it.

Rick: It’s just a matter of looking up Liam Neeson and then finding out what movies he’s done. So that way a hundred people don’t have to email me and ask me the name of that movie.

Kurt: Find out and we’ll post it. Well, it’s interesting. They were in no man’s land. Even when they’re sitting at the table, they’re in no man’s land. They don’t know how to get there.

Rick: Well, the thing you said about quoting Neelam about how can’t be 50/50, and Christ said, “I prefer that you’re hot or cold, not lukewarm.” I’ll spit you out or some such phrase if you’re just lukewarm. Sometimes you don’t know quite how to translate that into practical life, because there are many people who devoted themselves to spirituality and then find themselves in their 60s and their health is beginning to fail. They don’t have any money. They don’t own a house. They don’t have health insurance. They had dedicated themselves to that. So somehow you have to keep your act together. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to quit your job just because you want to be a gung-ho spiritual guy.

Kurt: Well, the skill sets again. See, if we did this right and we did it healthily, the person would never make the mistake of saying, “Hey, I don’t need to juggle both these worlds at once.” They’d have the wisdom. It’s really a matter of wisdom to say, “Yeah, I need to think about my bank account. Yeah, I need to think about how I make a living. Yeah, I need to think about having health insurance.” Those are skills. See, one of the things that the older dharma community tended to forget about, and you said it yourself, you’d get so gung-ho on the bells and whistles of the awakening experiments that you would forget, “Hey, wait a minute. I’ve also got some basic skill sets about how I drive this car down the road.” But that’s really what the embodiment movement has brought to the scene.

Rick: Yeah. Well, I’m glad to hear you articulate that thing about the embodiment movement. I’ve heard it alluded to, but I don’t know if anyone has expressed it in that term exactly. Because in interviewing all the people I have, I often come up against people who are quite not yet at the embodiment stage, who are just sort of saying, “There’s no person. There’s nothing to be done. Don’t bother doing a practice, yada, yada. Give up the search,” and so on. There’s really very little attention given to embodiment. Who is there to embody? Why should you embody if there’s no one? I always kind of debate them when that kind of point comes up. But it’s nice to know and hear that the non-dual world as a whole is shifting into this more embodiment mentality. Yeah, because think about it. The other view is dualistic. The other view is not oneness. It’s unified cosmos. It’s leaving things out. Richard Rohr’s book, Everything Belongs, that’s the point of the whole thing. That’s the whole realization now. Everything belongs. There’s nothing wrong with all of the skills. But the thing I want to point out, the statement that there’s no one here is absolutely true. The statement that there’s nothing to do is absolutely true. But those are statements from the absolute view of reality, which is experienced in the awakened state. One can enjoy that forever and ever. I think five years ago, six years ago now, I had a near-death experience. I was in a spleen rupture and was bleeding to death in ICU. My doctor kind of said, “It’s all over. You’d better call and make sure your affairs are in order, because I don’t think you’re going to be here tomorrow.” That was an interesting test of this whole non-dual experience that we have, because there was this awareness that, yeah, there’s nobody here. There’s just what’s unfolding. But there was also this awareness of the simultaneity of that world and the embodied world. Now, I think at least, I would say, my understanding of non-duality, and most the people that I admire the most, and I may be totally wrong, but are people who understand the simultaneity of this all, that simultaneity is maybe the key to the whole thing. For instance, it’s very basic in Dzogchen, simultaneity. Tibetan Buddhism is really, really good on this. Sufism is amazing on this. To understand that, yes, even my own experience – and it’s funny, because I was thinking yesterday, what if Rick asked me about the non-dual experience? What my experience is, I would say, it is that nobody’s here. But that is not the same question as the phenomenon of no one being here, being skillful in this embodiment as this character, Kurt Johnson, just as there’s this character, Rick Archer. Since that little subset of reality, we’ll say boxes within boxes, in the big box, nobody here, nothing happening, just like in the near-death experience, I’m along for the ride, no volition here, but in the little box, which is who you are, who I am, then why not be skilled?

Rick: Yeah, I mean, if there were truly nobody here, and that’s all there were to it, then I should say, “Hey, Kurt, go empty out your bank account and send it to me. I’d appreciate it, and it won’t matter to you since there’s nobody there.” I don’t know if you remember, but the first time I saw you speak at the S.A.N.D. conference, I commented on this, the whole non-dual to the exclusion of the relative is not non-duality, it’s partial, and real non-duality, as I understand it, is completely all-encompassing and inclusive of the whole package.

Kurt: Absolutely, and the wonderful thing about knowing that nobody’s here is you’ve got this amazing freedom every day to recreate your story, to recreate who you are, what you are, without the baggage of thinking that you were this or you were that. So it’s actually like having your cake and eat it, too. You’ve really got the whole thing. One other point I was going to make is that if you look at Vedic history, it was really Aurobindo, again, among all the Vedic sages, who, if we just look at it historically, kind of portrayed that coming of age Of the understanding that the transcendent experience also was simultaneous with the embodied experience. So everything that he and the Mother did, that he was a part of in the Indian Revolution, the British considered him the second most dangerous man behind Mahatma Gandhi, and he would have certainly ended up in prison if he hadn’t been able to go to the French colony and get asylum there, but he was totally engaged. And what’s really also interesting about Aurobindo is that, during the last decades of his life, where he really ceded the work of the ashram to the Mother and basically worked on his writing, he was writing books on the Eastern take of embodied non-duality that he knew would then be discovered by the Western developmentalists in the late 1900s, early 20th century, When they would come to understand that the Western understanding of developmentalism was not enough, that they also needed the Eastern understanding. Now, somebody’s going to ask, “Well, what’s the difference?” Here was his metaphor. He said, “Look at a necklace around your neck.” The West has the ability to look at every bead on the necklace and be an expert on every detail on every bead, but the Eastern gift is to understand the string that connects all the beads and that if transcendent understanding is going to move toward a transformed world, we’re going to need both of these abilities in this incredibly skillful simultaneity and dynamic. So it’s interesting just in our conversation how Aurobindo and even his relationship with the Mother, these are really icons of this change.

Rick: Nice. Lately I’ve been playing with a little kind of mind game that your book actually helped me to develop, which is like imagine yourself having a cosmic zoom lens, and you can zoom it out to the point where you’re seeing multiple galaxies and galaxies colliding, and this all taking place on vast time and distance scales, which is perfectly real and true reality. That perspective is as much the way it is as anything. And from that perspective all the events and the trillions of little lives in those galaxies seem rather insignificant. Then zoom it all the way down to the quantum level, and there you have nothing. There’s no one, there’s nothing, there’s no universe. But then zoom it back to the human level, and there you have a person to whom things matter and so on. Neither the quantum nor the intergalactic levels negate or devalue the human level. Each has its significance in its own realm.

Kurt: Right, and that’s the way ecosystems work. That’s the way the holonic universe works. That’s a holistic view that can serve all of humanity. In other words, when the average person on the street gets that, this is what really David Korten’s talking about in his cosmology that he’s trying to present to the street. If the average person got this, that would predict a very different world. Just like my friend Adam Bucko, who grew up in Poland, one of the leaders now in the new monastic movement. He said by the time the shift happened in Poland at the time of solidarity, it happened because the person on the street already saw reality in this other way. And the way that the socialist government of Poland had done it for all those other decades became irrelevant. And so that just turned it over. Now, I guess we’ll see. I may not live long enough to see how this works out.

Rick: Well, if you don’t rupture your spleen again, you might. I mean, because things seem to be moving pretty fast.

Kurt: The doctor said, “Quit breaking things.”

Rick: But on that note, it can again be discouraging when you watch the news, or even when you don’t watch the news, because they don’t report a lot of the important stuff. But when you dig deep into what’s happening with climate change, for instance, and how hopeless it seems to be, because everybody seems to be brain dead on the issue, who’s actually in a position to do anything about it, you can easily get pessimistic. I’m fascinated with that kind of information. I like to watch shows like that whenever I can, but somehow I don’t get pessimistic because I have enough of an infusion of this spiritual perspective to just give me hope and faith that somehow it’s all going to work out.

Kurt: But not airy-fairy hope and faith.

Rick: No, there’s a kind of deeper mechanics at work, which is not obvious, and which is why they don’t report it on the news, but which is nonetheless very real and which really seems to be calling the shots, ultimately.

Kurt: It’s interesting. I’m not going to name names, but a lot of the people that are on this transformative out on the circuit, when you talk to them confidentially, they say that it may be too late. On a number of these global levels of challenges, it may be too late. But we have to operate as if it’s not too late, because when we’re doing that, we’re listening to this deeper part of us that is saying, “Wait, we’re not going to settle for this crazy sleight of hand of Homo sapiens going extinct just because of its own stupidity.” It may be too late, but we have to operate from this deeper urgency.

Rick: In the big picture, among all the trillions or billions of planets that are inhabited in this galaxy alone, it could be a common occurrence for species to wipe themselves out, or even for asteroids to come in and crash into civilizations more evolved than ours and wipe them out. From that perspective, it’s not a done deal that we’re going to survive. We can’t get so new-agey that we think, “Oh, somehow it’s just going to work out.” But even if that happened, from the bigger perspective, we as entities don’t cease to exist, and our evolution won’t be thwarted. Somehow it will all continue on in the way it’s meant to.

Kurt: Steven Hawking, one of his favorite quotes, someone asked him, “Do you think that there is intelligent life on other planets?” “I think that there most likely has been intelligent life on other planets, but I also think that many of them wiped themselves out quite soon after E=mc2.”

Rick: He may be right. In this grand experiment that God seems to be conducting, I’m sure he’s tried all the possibilities.

Kurt: The other one I like is Paul Hawken, where he says, “If you still have hope for humanity, you haven’t seen the data. If you’ve lost hope for humanity, you don’t have a heart.” So that’s this tug of war.

Rick: Now, the title of your book is “The Coming Inter-Spiritual Age,” and we haven’t actually talked too much about that term “inter-spirituality.” So let’s get into that a little bit. Why don’t you give it a shot, and then I’ll certainly have questions.

Kurt: Again, let’s take three different perspectives. The simplest way that you would understand it, or anybody watching this would understand it, is that it’s awakened awareness. In other words, inter-spirituality is a view from consciousness and the heart in which it’s impossible to feel separate. When you come to that understanding of reality in your existential day-to-day life, then there is no other. Everything is a part of yourself. That has radical implications. So at the level of contemplative awakenness across any tradition, and that experience is in all the traditions, it’s even in humanism and in the secular experience. You don’t need to believe in God or be religious to wake up. It’s about reality. It’s not about spirituality. So that would be one take on it. The other take is that inter-spirituality, within all the traditions of the world, at least as Wayne was saying it, is this urgency that all of the deepest people across all the traditions realize, “Hey, our job is not to be in conflict and competition about theologies and creeds and end-time scenarios and messianic scenarios. Our job is what our founders taught, and what our founders taught was about love and kindness and behavior and well-being and goodness.” Just a secondary shoot-off of that came dogmas and creeds when people wanted something to say “amen” to or to sing to or whatever they have to be. So that understanding within the world’s religions is what the inter-spiritual movement is. It’s saying, “Let’s go beyond ecumenical. Let’s go beyond interfaith. Let’s go to the world of the heart where nothing is separating us, and we all have that experience, and let’s make that what we talk about to the world.” Basically what Wayne was saying when he named inter-spirituality in 1999 in a book called The Mystic Heart, discovering the universal spirituality in the world’s religions, that that universal spirituality in the world’s religions is the lens of the heart. He was just saying the only viable spirituality for the third millennium, the only viable religion for the third millennium is the spirituality of the heart, which we would understand also as awakened consciousness. In other words, in awakened consciousness the heart would be there automatically. Even if a person is not awake-awake, they could be taught about the heart, so they could have those values. Again, that’s another way to look at it. But then you have to ask, “What is inter-spirituality then for the secular world, the atheistic world, the scientific world?” It is then synonymous with what Ken Wilber calls the inter-subjective discussion. In other words, let’s talk in science and in all the other fields about what human beings are experiencing subjectively about reality. Aside from any idea of spirituality, religion, or God, what does the average human being existentially and from their heart want for the daily life that they live. Now what’s interesting there is you come up with what’s coming out of the Arab Spring, which came out of the fall of the Iron Curtain, and Occupy. It’s saying, “Look, most people want the same thing.” It goes back to the Declaration of Independence. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The fundamental rights to have an environment in which you can pursue who you are as a subjective being on the planet. Then the only thing that we add to that, as you see, is that we say that the new self-evident truth that’s arising now in the inter-spiritual age. The inter-spiritual age would be the age in which the planet becomes aware of everything we just talked about. In other words, if we took this interview and we looked at what it’s valuing, we would say that’s what the inter-spiritual age is valuing. That’s what it’s saying is of concern to all human beings. The thing that we add to it is that the new self-evident truth that’s arising now is the arising understanding of “we.” Again, at the basis of Occupy, Arab Spring, Catholic Spring, is the realization that a collective owes something to the members of that collective. Just like an ecosystem takes care of its members, the organism of our bodies takes care of its members. The liver, the thumb, the eyes, it’s all one organism. We’re starting to realize that nothing is separate, and that has implications. At a level of then societies, it has massive implications of access to resources, equanimity of opportunity, freedom of pursuit of happiness and your own uniqueness. The implications are huge. That’s really inter-spirituality in a giant nutshell. It’s not new. It’s not any newer than the same dream that anybody you and I would talk to on a day-to-day basis would share that dream. It’s just that Wayne happened to call that inter-spirituality.

Rick: Here’s the way I’ve tended to see it over the years, and maybe you can comment on this. That is that ultimately everyone is rooted or grounded in the same fundamental underlying reality. Not only every person, but every cat, every tree, every rock. Physics could comment on that in terms of the quantum field or whatever. As various spiritual teachers have told us, access with that, there’s a saying in the Upanishads someplace, “Contact with Brahman is infinite joy.” Access to that is what everyone ultimately wants, whether they know it or not. Of course, most efforts at happiness are directed in all sorts of directions. There’s that saying in the Gita, “Endlessly diverse are the intellects of the irresolute, but the resolute intellect is one-pointed.” Most people are scattered every which way looking for happiness. Religions, as they come along, are usually founded by someone who is a living example of complete, abiding contact with that ground state of all life, the field of pure consciousness or whatever we want to call it. Then, of course, they teach, they talk about it, and their listeners aren’t so grounded. So they formulate it into what we call a religion, which usually involves believing in something that you’re not fully experiencing. When you do that, it’s easy to differ among yourselves or with other religions as to what that reality is and how it should be approached. It’s kind of like a bunch of people sitting outside a restaurant arguing about what the food tastes like rather than actually eating together and tasting it. So we’ve had all sorts of, obviously, millions of people killed in religious wars, and even today people are blowing up buildings and bombing each other over religious differences. While, ironically, their apparently divisive and conflicting traditions are actually talking about the same thing. So to me, inter-spirituality means a coming together of all these different traditions, and the only thing which could actually accomplish that would be upwelling of the experience which was there at the founding of those religions. That’s kind of how we started this whole discussion, that there’s something percolating in the world that’s bubbling up. We’ve kind of been talking about it largely in terms of politics and ecology and so on, but that’s really what religion is all about, even though you can barely see it sometimes when you look at different religions, but that’s what it’s about. Because it’s percolating up, it is kind of bringing about a unification of all the differences. Not that all religions are going to become the same, just as all the plants in the forest aren’t all going to become the same if the ground becomes more nutritious for them, but they’re all going to thrive and yet coexist more harmoniously.

Kurt: No, you just said it. You just wrote the book. It’s the point of the whole book. It was the point of Wayne’s work. To me, what that reflects is that this understanding is bubbling up at a universal level. There’s nothing that’s titanically new here. It’s just the dots are getting more and more connected among more and more people, and they’re also saying, “Hey, wait, this implies something.” That’s exactly what you just said. You said the message, and you said this implies something, which is what the Heart Sutra does. It says, “Here’s the truth,” and then the second part of the Heart Sutra is what it implies, which is about skillful means. So you just did it. I could not do better.

Rick: Well, you did better. You wrote that book. I couldn’t write that book.

Kurt: It’s a piece of paper which I kind of preserved as one source for a long time.

Rick: Yeah. So we’ve covered a lot of ground. Do you sort of feel like there’s any gaps? I mean, sure there are. There’s so many things we could talk about. Every chapter in your book could be a topic of discussion, but what have we left out that would be interesting for people?

Kurt: Well, one thing that we might mention that is in the book, and that is that there’s a lot of exploration of the human experience of the spiritual realms and the spirit world, and trying to understand across all the traditions, understandings of the spirit worlds, the Akashic Record, the astral planes, the Buddhic plane, the non-dual plane, the shamanic plane, all of these things. Is there a holistic kind of user-friendly understanding of all this, which is possible for everybody and which there’s room for all of the experiences, where you could really know what it means to say that everyone’s right – everyone’s right because everyone has had their own existential experience. Now, what Wayne was really saying, and we use his metaphor of a tree, that all of the experiences spiritually for our species through all of history,  from the perspective you and I are talking about, all of that, a Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, these have been one existential experience. They’re not different experiences. They appear as different experiences. Just like in non-duality, we know that everything plays in appearances as different, but the subjective experience of Homo sapiens has been one experience, and it’s one experience that’s driving this realization and this urgency toward what our potential might be on this planet as an incredible spiritual being on what could potentially be an incredible planet. This has a convergent meaning, and that nothing needs to be left out, or it doesn’t have to be valued as more or less, or right or wrong. For instance, if you look back at your path, or I look at mine, or anyone listening to this interview, if you look at your own spiritual path, it’s chapter after chapter after chapter, all very different, all one leading to the next, which have made what you are now, what you are now. All you’re asking right now is to fully be who and what you are now. That’s actually what’s being asked of the world’s religious experience in inner spirituality. In that comes a profound understanding of the spiritual world. I think you remember we pretty much say that the spiritual world out there operates quite like the spiritual world in here, in the brain, where we have this experience of going inward, but then we have this experience of going outward when we’re exploring externally. This is actually one seamless quantum field, and in that, just like in our brain, are recorded every experience we’ve ever had, when we dream, when we go back and look at, “Who was your first girlfriend? Who did you kiss on prom night?” Up comes the quantum wave in your brain, if we look at it by Roger Penrose’s model. Up comes the quantum wave in your brain, which then deciphers that as information. Up comes the memory, even the feeling of that kiss, the feeling in that moment. Everything is retrievable. We’re saying that that’s actually a model for probably how the entire quantum field is put together at the cosmic level, and why, yes, people talk to Jesus. Yes, people talk to the Virgin Mary. Yes, people like Ramana talked with other great ones. This is all one retrievable, interconnected universe. There’s nothing that’s left out of this deeper understanding of reality as one whole system. I think that’s just worth throwing out there.

Rick: Yeah, it’s nice.

Kurt: We did this chapter. I wasn’t sure whether that was doable. I didn’t write this book and shop it around. Namaste came to me and said, “Could you get a shot at doing this?” When it came to doing the spirit world, I actually wasn’t sure that it was doable. What was interesting is when you looked into it deeply, and I’m so lucky. I’ve been very lucky in this spiritual work to know so many spiritual leaders and teachers from different traditions, and many at the personal level, that I could even ask them. I could send them an email. I could call them on the phone, and we could talk this through and ask, “Is there a way that this can actually be understood in one holistic field?” I was actually surprised. The conclusion we come to, as you see, is that the spirit world, wherever that is, is already interspiritual. It has all these places where everybody already is. The Buddhists are doing their thing, and the little Christian group that thinks it’s the only group that’s having, it’s got those thought forms out there, and they’re having a heck of a good time probably as well. All of this is there. I guess that’s kind of a stand-up-and-cheer moment, go out and get some popcorn or whatever.

Rick: What you just said made me think that if we take it down to the deepest level, we’re all one person, one cosmic being, and that which we’ve referred to as you and I and all seven billion of us on the planet and who knows how many in the universe, we’re all sense organs of that cosmic being. Each sense organ has its different function. The eyes don’t do what the nose does. Obviously, if you look at nature, that cosmic intelligence loves diversity. There’s this huge diversity, not only in nature but in sentient beings in terms of what they experience. That’s one part of it. You have the Christian fundamentalists and you have the atheists and you have all the different religious people from different traditions, and they’re all feeling different parts of the elephant. That’s completely in keeping with the way nature seems to function, from infinite diversity and creativity. Then the other thing you said about the spirit world, if you think about it, when maybe the first explorers came to North America and they came back and they drew really crude maps of what the continent looked like and what they thought was there. We had some vague conception of it. These days, every car has a GPS and it tells you where you are within about a foot and exactly how fast you’re going and the whole thing is mapped out in complete detail. Like that, these subtler realities which various people have explored, they haven’t become mainstream knowledge the way the geography of North America has. We get little snippets, these ayahuasca people are seeing that, and this shaman is seeing that, and this channeler is seeing that, and so on. Theoretically, that kind of capability could become widespread enough that we would have a much more shared, common understanding of the topography of the subtler realms of reality. Then it wouldn’t all be so mysterious and hypothetical.

Kurt: And as Wayne said and then Ken Wilk says this too, if we could just relax, we could just relax and understand that there’s all of this experience that we don’t have to choose from one thing over another. The really welcoming human family could be one that can relax. You have your experience, I’ll have my experience. You like your food, I like my food. I’ll tell my story, you tell your story. Llewellyn Vaughn-Lee uses the metaphor of the tents in the valley. The valley is our true nature and there’s room for everything and it welcomes everything. That’s where all the resources are, the river and everything that enriches the valley. But in that valley, there’s room for every tent, every color of tent, every dance, every kind of food, every trip imaginable that would happen subjectively or psychically. They’re all welcome. But if we would relax, then we wouldn’t have the competition that leads to conflict. Anthropologically, if we look at this just as a scientific book or a scientific thesis, we’re saying that anthropologically, hopefully, Homo sapiens is moving into a gestalt that gets out of its head, where from that head comes the Muslim way, the Christian way, the guns and the bombs, but starts to come out of the head and into the heart and consciousness where it says, “Hey, where I want to live is in this way where I know that the other is me.” Actually, any other way of living is absurd. That would be the real potential of where the species could get to. Now, whether we’ll get there or not, who the heck knows, but here we are talking about it.

Rick: Yeah, that metaphor of the valley with all the tents reminded me of that phrase from the Bible, “In my father’s house there are many mansions.” There are so many different dimensions and facets of reality, and if you kind of lock yourself into one to the exclusion of all the others, then you’re again like the blind man feeling the tail of the elephant, saying that’s what the elephant is, just a rope. My whole philosophy in doing this show, I don’t interview everybody under the sun, but I just have this fairly eclectic view of spirituality, and I’m not averse to interviewing somebody who is channeling or who is into various things. Maybe I’ll do an ayahuasca person at some point or something. There are non-dual fundamentalists, of course, just as there are Christian fundamentalists or Muslim fundamentalists who feel that any diversion from that is a dilution or a distraction from the pure truth.

Kurt: Yeah, and of course what that is, as you know, is that when someone is, let’s say, fully awake or fully free, there’s no need to be identified as this or that. Now a more immature experience of that, even if it’s had an authentic, incremental experience of non-dualism, will tend then to identify it as this or that. That’s even what Ramana said. The person will have this experience. Some people will say, “Oh, then it’s this and then it’s that,” instead of taking it all the way to source and only source and the emptiness and purity and the complete malleability of source. Yeah, absolutely, and I think when you look at your own path, I certainly look at mine. I’m 11 years into this now in the sense of my shift 11 years ago. I see, again, I was very much in bells and whistles at the beginning and very much in the head, and as time goes along, the essentials, the ordinary becomes so important. The essentials of just the ordinary world of being here and not having something be more phantasmagoric than something else, not choosing one experience over the other. So there’s this kind of mellowing that happens over time, and that just takes time. I look at my own friends across the so-called non-dual landscape of friendships, and they’ve all gone through the same thing, too. There’s this settling out process, this mellowing process, dying down.

Rick: Yeah, I suppose there’s different ways of explaining that. The whole “my way is the only way” or “the best way” thing can be seen as either a spiritual immaturity or a developmental immaturity or a sort of a clinging, kind of an intuitive knowledge that there is an absolute, but I haven’t quite gotten to it, so I think I’ll make my relative perspective absolute as a sort of a stopgap, tide me over kind of thing.

Kurt: It’s reality, too, that they tend to teach from their own karma, and that’s actually fine. If you look at the soul groups of sanghas and teachers, usually the people that go to a certain teacher Are people whose path, in the sense of all the shadow work they had to do, everything that had to be discarded, was a certain karma, whatever you’d call it. And so the people who are in that same soul group go there. But I think what I really admire is teachers who are free to teach from their own path but also know simultaneously that that’s just their skill set, that’s what they’re gifted at, and they’re totally wide open to every other experience. I know that some of the deepest friendships that I have are with people that might not, by this or that other person, seem all that skilled or all that gifted, but there’s something in their vibes, I always use the term, there’s something in their feel, I just call it so clean, so pure, so innocent, so there, that I will value hours with that kind of a person more than somebody with ideas and with knowledge and with all of these claims to this and that. Because just that level of simplicity, just that love and recognition, being there with a person who’s in that innocence, you’re just like, “Oh, gosh, wow, I can stay here for two or three days, so there’s room for all that.”

Rick: Nice, I like that point about the different teachers and soul groups, as you put it. There’s so many of them these days and people naturally gravitate toward that with which or he with whom they resonate until they don’t, and then maybe it’s time to move on to something else. But you don’t necessarily regret what you’ve been through, that was an important stepping stone.

Kurt: Totally, yeah.

Rick: So you mentioned your shift 11 years ago, we haven’t talked about that, what happened 11 years ago?

Kurt: Oh, you know, that’s, yeah, well this is an interesting thing, because there’s the edited version and the non-edited version, or whether it’s even interesting to tell about.

Rick: Oh, people like to hear this stuff, believe me.

Kurt: I would just say, I had a cataclysmic shift. Obviously in the time that I was a Christian monastic and a contemplative, all the dots with regard to non-duality, I’d experienced the unconnected dots of it, glimpses, but I had never had the cataclysmic thing happen where all of a sudden, so my experience was very close, very much like Eckhart’s experience, in the sense that it was like all at once, and then it stuck, it really tended to stick. I had to do a lot of maturing, and I had, well, like my main mentor at the time said, you know what happens is that with a cataclysmic shift, the house has shifted 180 degrees on its foundation, but the wiring and the plumbing is still all in backwards. So, you know, one has that homework to do afterwards, but the understanding of what it was, fortunately, and a lot like with Eckhart, Bernadette Roberts, other people that had something cataclysmic happen, but it also stuck. So that evidently was probably there for a purpose. My friends tell me that there was certain work that I needed to do, and that was one of the steps toward that. But the story behind it was, in the sense of just the narrative, is that I actually, about two weeks before the shift, I had a dream about Pamela Wilson, actually, who at that time I didn’t know she existed, I didn’t know who she was, I didn’t know who Ramana Maharshi was, I didn’t know any of that. I just had this dream, and I remember telling my wife, I said, “I had this dream of this person who is the dearest friend I’ve ever had in my entire life. The baggage on this dream is huge, and I have no clue who this person is. I have no clue who this person is.” So long story short, what happened was then, within two weeks, I had this shift. Very much like with Eckhart Tolle’s story, after the shift I went to sleep, but when I woke up the next morning, I knew that everything was different. I’d never seen reality this way before. I just had never seen it. No separation, clean, it was just incredible. But it was also totally ordinary. So I said, “Well, I guess I’m supposed to go to work, so I’ll go to work.” So here’s the odd part, is I go to work, and there was an email in my email bin from Pamela. Now, I had never heard from her before, never heard of her before, and here was this email from her telling me what had happened. It’s like one paragraph saying that this is what’s happened, and we need to meet.

Rick: Had you told a mutual friend or anything?

Kurt: The connection may have been that there was a person at the law firm that I was at who knew her, and I had been talking to this person just generally about what was going on. And the possibility is that

Rick: He told her

Kurt: I’ve asked Pamela about it, and she very circumspectly says, “Maybe I was out skulking about.” But these things are weird.

Rick: And at that point, did you know that this was the person in your dream, or that came later on?

Kurt: Absolutely. I knew it was the person in the dream because then when all this connected up, I saw a picture of her that this other person had, and I realized, “Oh my gosh, that’s the person that I dreamed about.” So then it all made sense. But it’s interesting since then that a lot of my friends in Dzogchen and other places have said, “Well, a lot of these things are…” Well, usually what they say is Charles Genoud. I think you know he wrote ‘Gestures of Awareness.’ He’s a Dzogchen teacher and Brazilian shaman. He said, “When something’s given, something’s also asked for.” And I think that, to be honest, it was within a year that I met Brother Wayne. And when I met Brother Wayne, we realized we both had the same experience. We’d both been Christian contemplatives. Then that had gone to Advaita. I think people who don’t know Wayne’s work was he was a Christian whose contemplative Christian mentor was Father Keating of the Cistercian Order.

Rick: Whom I’m going to interview next week, by the way.

Kurt: And then his other spiritual father was Bede Griffiths, who was also known as Swami Dayananda in India and one of the founders of the Christian ashram movement. So he was an Advaitic. So Wayne had had the Christian contemplative experience and the Advaitic experience. So when Wayne and I met, which was within a year of my so-called shift, whatever that is, then he and I just hit it off. I krew at that moment, because he was actually dying of cancer at the time, and he died two years later after we did a presentation on interspirituality at the Parliament of World Religions. I just knew that my job, my work assignment, was to further explicate as much as I could the vision that Wayne had. So actually the coming interspiritual age is really an explication of his interspiritual age. Because in the mystic heart, discovering the universe and the world’s religions, the interspiritual gestalt will arise in the coming interspiritual age. So he actually made the prediction. Now I don’t get into that in a New Age way, like woo-woo, this is predestined and all that, because all of this is a dynamic. But let’s say I knew, and then it also made a lot of sense, to be honest, Rick, of my scientific background. I had done 25 years of solid science, and I’m a good scientist. I have a solid reputation of publications and all of that. I did my homework there. So then I really understood it. If you look at the material in this book, what was that 30 years of just doing hard science all about? Well, to whatever extent I had some skill sets to then put these together in a dialogue that’s in some ways pretty skillful, then that made sense. I really then thought, “Okay, this makes sense.” I’ll be really, really honest too. When I finished this book, because all of these things are spiritual experiences, I had this feeling that what I’d done in my life was over and I could just move on. I had this incredible existential experience that what I’d been asked to do was done, and I could actually move on. I went to see my doctor, actually, who checks on everything here that’s scarred back together in my gut. He did some tests and he said, “I hate to tell you, but it looks like you may be here for a while.” So things like that are odd. I’m just being really honest because, like I said, I didn’t write this book and shop it around. People asked me to do it. I gave it a shot. We didn’t even have a contract, to be honest. I asked Connie Kellough and David Ord, my co-author at Namaste, who brought the world Eckhart and Michael Brown and other books that have really been helpful. I said, “Look, let’s just try to do a good book. Let’s not even do a contract. Let’s see if we get something that we like. If we get something that I like and you like, then let’s talk about what we do with it.” That process took about a year. They liked what we had. I liked what we had. So there it is. Cool.

Rick: Now it’s among Amazon’s top ten releases of religious or spiritual books.

Kurt: Yeah, which is odd. That shocked me, to be honest. It shocked me. I’m like everybody else. I just live my little life, go to the grocery store, do my laundry.

Rick: Yeah, but this shift you had 11 years ago, which was radical, and I’m sure you’ve become totally accustomed to living in this shifted state, but it was pretty much irreversible, right? You didn’t go back to being the old schmo that you used to be, perhaps. Your whole life is on a new foundation and you’ve just grown accustomed to that.

Kurt: Yeah, though I will say that friends who knew me said that you were stable to begin with, so then when you shifted you remained stable. Now obviously there are people who shift that aren’t that stable, and they have a different type of homework to do. I was very, very lucky because of my time in monasticism. That’s another thing worth mentioning. Father Keating and I were talking about this in June, is that people who’ve had the monastic experience, and particularly for a long time, let’s say at least a decade or so, they’ve already kind of done the non-egoic thing. They’ve realized from the monastic realm that things are pretty simple, and they don’t have really, let’s say, as many crazy shadows that might have to really be worked out. Obviously everybody still has shadows, but there’s a stability there in most monastic people, which is a real gift, and I was very grateful for that. So I think the thing with me was I didn’t overly read into what had happened. I didn’t even start doing any form of teaching for five years. I started later, was asked by Pamela’s Sangha to start teaching, and even then I don’t do vertical teaching. I do horizontal satsang where everybody’s in a dialogue, and hopefully the satguru in everyone shows up. So that again is supposedly about we and not about I. Wayne emphasized that. That was really the modality that he was interested in. So yeah, I would say at this point I feel very lucky. I feel very lucky that I’ve experienced what I have. I feel very lucky that I’ve had opportunities to do things with that that appear to be helpful to other folk, and that’s really about it.

Rick: Well, aside from the changes in your outer life in the last 11 years, writing a book and doing this and doing that, do you feel there’s been a maturation or a deepening or an enriching of the inner experience that occurred when the shift happened? The whole thing’s getting subtler or more profound in some way?

Kurt: Yeah, I can’t remember. Oh, it’s Nisargadatta who said, “The truth never changes from the moment you first see it. It just becomes infinitely more refined.” I’ve always loved that line.

Rick: I love that.

Kurt: “The truth changes from the moment you first see it. It just becomes infinitely more refined.” I think that’s just it. I think anybody out there, all the people you’ve interviewed, I know a lot of these folk, many of them are my friends, that’s what they would say as well. I mean, something else takes you over, and if you allow it to take over, then that doer is the right doer. You don’t have to be pooping around in who the doer used to be. It runs itself. I’ll be honest, the near-death experience years ago was a great opportunity. It was a test. I remember I was telling Katherine Ingram about that. She asked me, and I said, “Boy, you really ask.” When your doctor comes in and says, “Look, make some calls, because I can’t guarantee you’ll be here tomorrow,” then you’re really asked, “Well, how much bullshit is in your dharma and how much real reality is in your dharma?” You’re asked how much of this non-dual stuff is for real. But when you have the experience then of not being invested in the outcome and knowing that that’s okay, and the simultaneity of not being cavalier. I mean, I certainly wasn’t pulling out all the tubes. I wasn’t being careful about what the doctors said. This might help you live. But I had that experience of totally not being invested in the outcome, but curious. That was the other thing. This was interesting, too. I could be curious about the outcome but not invested in it. That was interesting in the sense of whatever mode of consciousness that is. When I was in ICU, if I had to say a metaphor, I was on a blackboard in which everything about my story had been erased. You could see where the eraser had erased everything, like on a chalkboard. There were just a few sentences that were left. The experience was laying there, waiting to see whether the eraser was going to come down and erase the rest of it, and being uninvested in that except curious. That I found interesting, still be curious, but I was not invested.

Rick: Nice. Didn’t Christ say something like, “Die before you die so that you may live,” or something like that? I think anybody who has really undergone a major spiritual shift or has really done the work has died in that sense. Then when actual death is confronted, there’s going to be a whole different orientation to it than if you still think you’re just this little entity that’s going to end when the body dies.

Kurt: Also, as everyone will attest to, nothing unique on this, this is not something any of us do. This is something that happens. In other words, it’s not that one does some incredible thing, like dying to oneself or waking up. Bullshit. This just happens. Then you find that actor looking at the shore, “How did I get here?” I think that’s quite universal in the whole non-dual phenomenon, is that you see from the other side and you go, “Oh my gosh, how did I get here?” You realize it’s not anything that you did. You can emphasize that in a way that says then there’s nothing to do, because that’s true. It’s not anything you did. But that can be misunderstood as saying that you’re not then called to be a skilled person. I think that’s the difference. You said it very, very well earlier.

Rick: It can also be misunderstood as meaning that you don’t need to join a monastery for 14 years or do this practice or sit with this teacher or whatever. But ultimately all those things can be very valuable according to your inclination. I think maybe the sense in which you’re not doing it is just that you have to be a willing participant. But you couldn’t possibly work out all the complexities of the actual transformation that is coming about with your human intelligence. You’re just making yourself available and then the rest is in God’s hands.

Kurt: But you also get to the point of what else would you want. There’s a certain point where this relationship of oneness is so intoxicating. What else would you want? It’s like Jesus said, “After you’ve drunk the clear water, you’re not going to go back to the dirty water.” You’re just not going to. So there’s something natural in that where you say, “God, what else would I want here?” I think it’s fairly universal with people that I’ve talked to. Let’s be honest. If this experience is available for every human being, and certainly the Dharma would say that this experience is what every human being is, we’re not talking about something unique here or something that’s like some big deal. We’re talking about what’s actually available to every person. Now that doesn’t mean that they can instantly go out and just dial it up because everybody’s got all their veils and their baggage and all of that, and it’s embedded in very hidden ways. Just the assurance that this is available because it’s what we are to begin with, I think that’s the fundamental message in all the Dharma as well.

Rick: That’s a good one. We’re all fish swimming in the same ocean. One thing I wanted to end with, and it wouldn’t necessarily be a quick ending. We might want to go on for a few minutes about it, is kind of your vision for the future. We don’t have to put a time span on it, whether it will happen within our lifetimes or whatever. But if it’s a coming inter-spiritual age, that implies that it’s not here yet, and so when it’s fully here, and not only inter-spiritual age, but whatever the ideal that the world could possibly attain has been attained, if it is attained, how would you envision that? What would you envision that being?

Kurt: This is an interesting question because I think it will look very much like former patterns have unfolded on the planet, if indeed it does unfold and we don’t snuff ourselves out. What’s fair about that is that we’re going to go now through a period of experimentation where people are going to get this gestalt, they’re going to get this urgent feeling at the glimpsing level in the heart and in consciousness. But there’s going to have to be at least decades of experimentation with what this looks like and how people live, and particularly the structures that people build. Now that’s not unique. After the Renaissance, when the new values of the Renaissance were centered on the individual and the participation of the individual, both in economies and in governments, replaced monarchy and church-state totalitarianism, there were 300 years of experimentation even before the political revolution in the 1700s in Europe and then in the United States. So it took that gestalt 300 years to change structures. Now I think we could hope with the cyber world and everything else that the period of experimentation here might be decades instead of centuries, but I think you know as well as I do, I mean Homo sapiens is quite an intransient species. We’ve got tons of stuff embedded in us. Like if you look at developmental history, either in this book or in Wilber and Don Beck, you’ll see that we come to understand how deeply embedded these bad habits are within us. It’s one thing to identify them. How to work them out is quite another. So I think what we would imagine is the gestalt becoming more and more that which is the vision of the person on the street. This is what David Korten is saying as well. And then the question will be how can we actually make structures that reflect this. Well, you’re going to get an incredible pushback from the people who are afraid, the people who are the parochial this, the parochial that. I mean let’s not be naive. This is going to cause some real clunking together between people who are holistic and people because of fear cannot go to wholism. This is going to get really, really dicey. Now how that’s going to be worked out in the sense of those of us, let’s say, in the more holistic gestalt, how can we lay out a welcoming environment in which the people who are compelled by fear, “Oh, I have to be a Republican. I have to be only a Muslim.” This is going to last quite a while. I mean one thing, as you know, as we said within the book, interspirituality can happen within the traditional religions. It can happen outside the religions. The way it happens inside any of the religions is simply that interspirituality is synonymous with the full maturity of spirituality in any tradition. If you were the most mystical and loving Jew, the most mystical and loving Christian, the most mystical and loving Muslim, you’re becoming an interspiritual person. That work can be done within any tradition because actually it means achieving the very goals of that tradition itself in the most ideal sense. But we also say that along with that will become experiments with what interspirituality can look like in new structures, in new forms, in entrepreneurial settings, and in whole new ways of doing things. Then we have to ask, “Okay, well then how would – if spirituality became the religion of the third millennium, reflecting already 35 to 40% of people who say they’re spiritual but not religious, that’s a part of this trend, so then how would that then start to affect civil society? How would that start to affect – what can you bring to the workplace? How much of your heart can you bring to the workplace? How much of your honest self can you bring to the schoolhouse? Right now reality is divided up. Everybody’s got stuff in boxes. This is only appropriate at home. This is not appropriate at school. This is not appropriate in the workplace. What is the holistic human being going to demand that this new world would look like? If we actually trend that way, I think we’re talking about decades for sure. If we survive, those decades would morph into centuries, and we’d have to ask then, “What will this world look like going back to the sea change of this gestalt change?” We could put it at 2012. In other words, really the meaning of 2012 cosmically, Mayan calendar and all of this, nothing new here, many people are saying this, is this global shift to this new gestalt. What will that look like 200, 300 years from now if we survive? Just like we can now look back on the pre-Renaissance and say, “Oh my God, we know what we had before the Renaissance. We had church-state totalitarianism, and we even had a gestalt in the average individual that did not argue with that.” If you go back to the way the average person in the middle age thought, he thought of himself as an appendage of the church-state totalitarianism, not as an individual. It’s amazing how the church did this. The church started universities, and it was in the universities that this new thought arose that I can have a thought of my own. By the time the Renaissance started to shift structures, there were 150 universities in Europe that the church had started, and yet they were the hotbeds of that revolution. All of this, I think, we’re talking about a really interesting process here. But then the question I think the Dharma community would have to ask itself, and by that let’s say the whole spiritual community, is what kind of leadership do they add to this, particularly at the local and sangha level? How do we start to be that leaven, which is very different than how you explained religion? You said something in the last 20, 30 minutes about the difference between religion and spirituality, and you said it very, very well. So how does the spiritual side of that natural dichotomy come and start to then shift religion over into spirituality? That would be a huge process. You could name all the organized religions. They’re tremendously invested financially, ecclesiastically, and power-base-wise with not having the system change. We don’t even know how spiritual some of those people are. Maybe they’re just great politicians of their own religion.

Rick: I wouldn’t be able to answer your question specifically, but I like to think in terms of spirituality and its essence as a kind of an elixir, which, if infused into any system, religious or otherwise, is going to bring about the kind of change that needs to happen, without actually trying to specify what that might be. You provide nourishment to a plant, and the rose blooms into a rose, or an apple tree into an apple tree. It needs that essential nutrient, and that’s what I think of when I think of spirituality. It’s a fundamental, essential, ultimate nutrient, which if there really is an upwelling of it in the world today, is invincible. It’s really going to cause all the institutions to either topple or change or do whatever they need to do. It’s not within my conceptual capability to say specifically what that will be.

Kurt: That, I think, just reflects what we said earlier, that we’re at that glimpsing stage. Everyone remembers this in their own awakening process. There’s this inner way of knowing how you know, but it hasn’t yet moved into the wider world of other skill sets. Now, what’s interesting is that the Mother, in 1956, when she announced this new energy, a part of that two or three paragraphs, which is in the book, says exactly what you just said. She said, “This is young, it’s fragile, it’s barely known, it’s even denied by the majority, yet its destiny is sure.” It’s amazing. “Its destiny is sure.” Now, she could say that because of the energy she experienced. When you experience that energy, you’re like, “Whoa! We’re not talking about any ordinary energy here. We’re talking about something that is at the heart of awakening. It’s that alpha, omega, it is unextinguishable, that which has always been.” I wanted to mention that some of the Aurobindo people, they actually say that that is the singularity before the Big Bang, is actually synonymous with the true nature, and that all organisms hold within them, within the quantum field, the singularity before the Big Bang, and everything that’s unfolded since the Big Bang, all of this is in us. I love that metaphor.

Rick: I think the Vedas say that in their own language, and I think that physicists like John Hagelin and Menas Kafatos are all trying to say that and tie the whole thing together. Absolutely. We’re at the cusp of a big experiment here, and actually tossing out something that’s quite a challenge for humanity.

Rick: One thing I like to do is just play a little mind game with myself, and again, not getting into specifics, but imagine that there are planets out there which have gone through travails like we’re going through, and survived them, and then have gone on through millions of years of subsequent evolution, and whose developmental quality is just beyond our ability to imagine. Holding that up as a vague, but possibly very real ideal. I can’t exactly explain why, but just thinking like that fascinates me, and broadens my perspective, and puts our current situation into a much broader context.

Kurt: It’s interesting you say that, something telepathic in what you said, because from the scientific side, Michio Kaku, at The City University.

Rick: Oh yeah, that Japanese guy. I like him.

Kurt: There are thousands of years ahead of us, there are millions of years ahead of us. So for them to go through wormholes, and to travel around as light bodies, and all of this, let’s not underestimate what might be possible. But on the spiritual side, the Mother in her journals recorded visitations from a perfected group of beings, and she actually raises the question, “Are these from another place that made it?” And they’re visiting, because their message was, “Keep doing what you’re doing. Don’t give up the belief in the reality of what’s unfolding.” Or, she said, “Are they maybe us from the future, coming back and saying, “Keep going.”? I don’t know if you knew that, but that’s interesting.

Rick: Or again, since ultimately there’s only one of us, it’s kind of God giving himself a leg up, “Keep this planet alive.” That Occam’s Razor would say that’s the simplest explanation, so it’s the best one.

Rick: Yeah. Good. Well, that’s a good note to end on. This has really been a fascinating discussion.

Kurt: I agree. It’s good. And I’ll tell everybody, the reason I seem like I’m sweating so much, I’m in Manhattan, the room is warm, and I have these lights on me, so part of me is shining from perspiration.

Rick: It’s ojas coming out on your skin. So, to wrap up, I’ve been speaking with Kurt Johnson, and Kurt has written a beautiful book called “The Coming Interspiritual Age.” There will be a page on batgap.com summarizing a little bit about Kurt and also providing a link to the Amazon page where you can buy that book. This interview is one, and also of course a link to Kurt’s website or websites, and he holds satsangs in the New York area and so on, so if you’re in that area you can participate. This interview is one in an ongoing series. I do a new one each week. As I mentioned earlier, next week will be Father Thomas Keating, who is an associate of Kurt’s. What were you going to say, Kurt?

Kurt: I was saying, yeah, Father Thomas Keating is one of the spiritual pioneers of interspirituality. Father Wayne had two mentors. Father Keating was one, Bede Griffiths was the other. So, an amazing synchronicity that you’ll be talking to him. He has the book. I talked to him about it in detail in June. He and Wayne were really close.

Rick: Great. Well, it is a synchronicity because I had another thing scheduled, but it was going to be a multi-person conference, and the technology isn’t quite up to it yet to do that, so I had to cancel that. Then, just as I was thinking of canceling it, this fellow who is a close associate of Father Keating got in touch with me and said, “Hey, how would you like to interview him?” I said, “Yeah, great. I have an opening coming up. Let’s do it.” I wanted it to follow yours because it’s kind of a one-two punch on this theme. So, people, I encourage you to listen to both interviews.

Kurt: If in fact he hasn’t gotten some of his mail in the last week, he may or may not know – he may have not seen the book because I just mailed it to him a week ago. But sometimes he’s on the road, sometimes in a – so his level of knowledge of where this is at now might be slightly different given circumstance. Because he has two assistants and they pretty much – he’s 90 years old now.

Rick: I know. It’s impressive that he’s going as strong as he is.

Kurt: Amazing. But he has two assistants who pretty much feed him everything. So, kind of what he knows is depending – because he also is maintaining his monastic round every day. So, just throwing in that caveat of where he may be at on the page.

Rick: Sure. Okay. So, let me just say in closing also that if those listening would like to be notified of new interviews as I post them, there’s a tab on batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P.com, which you can click and just put in your name and email address and you’ll receive an email whenever I post a new interview. There’s also a discussion group there that crops up around each interview, which you’re welcome to participate in. There’s also a link to an audio podcast of this series in case you prefer to just listen in audio, which many do. And there’s also a donate button and I appreciate people clicking that if they feel able in helping to support this effort. So, I think that’s it for this week. It’s been really a joy talking to you, Kurt. And we’ll see you in the fall probably at that Science and Nonduality Conference.

Kurt: I’ll find you. Looks like Father Keating saying mass.

Rick: It’s actually a picture of Amma, the hugging saint.

Kurt: With the pants off and the green around the neck?

Rick: Yeah. Well, my wife put a little crystal necklace around her head, but it’s this little stand-up cut-out thing called…

Kurt: It’s a blur, but that’s wonderful, wonderful blur.

Rick: Great.

Kurt: Yeah, great.

Rick: Great. So, thanks to everyone for listening or watching and we’ll see you next week.